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The untimely deaths of crypto enthusiasts and entrepreneurs have sparked speculation about the fate of their cryptocurrency holdings. Without access to their private keys, these fortunes may be lost forever,

From Bitcoin Millionaire and Crypto Founder Found Dead with Gunshot Wound | by Crypto Beat | Coinmonks | Jun, 2023 | Medium:

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Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and, lo and behold, it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease.

From (4) Render Unto the Machine – by L. M. Sacasas:

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Between Saltburn and Ravenscar the cliffs bear the scars of a strange, malodorous industry with human urine at its heart – the legacy of 250 years of quarrying alum, used in dyeing textiles.

From The strange story of why human urine was transported to quarries in Yorkshire | Yorkshire Post:

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The second of these will result in account issuers becoming more cautious about opening (or maintaining) marginal accounts because of concerns that they may have to accept 50% of the costs of any APP fraud. As a result, they will be less likely to open accounts for low income, disadvantaged, technologically challenged, older or vulnerable consumers, or close their accounts to limit exposure to this new level of liability. This is counter to our society’sobjectives of including more vulnerable consumers in our financial system.

From POV: Unintended consequences of new policies to reduce APP fraud scams:

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Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Stability AI, has a provocative prediction as artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly transforms our world: “There will be no programmers in five years.” Indeed, the futuristic CEO seems to envision a near-future shaped by the capabilities of AI.

From Stability AI CEO: There Will Be No (Human) Programmers in Five Years – Decrypt:

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A flaw in Revolut’s payment system in the US allowed criminals to steal more than $20mn of its funds over several months last year before the company could close the loophole, according to multiple people with knowledge of the episode.

From Revolut’s US payment flaws allowed thieves to steal $20mn | Financial Times:

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“If these AI [chatbots] can’t even do something as basic as put a Star Wars movie in order one after the other, I don’t think you can trust it to [report] any kind of accurate information.”

From Gizmodo used AI to write a Star Wars story. It was filled with errors. – The Washington Post:

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To start, they built the first 8-variable optical computer of its kind. The computer uses different intensities of light to compute at the same location where the information is stored. The researchers called the device they built AIM, for Analog Iterative Machine.

“It is always the case that if you make some technological advancement, typically in the beginning it will not be clear how to use it in practice,” says Christos Gkantsidis, one of the three principal researchers on the project. He was recalling how they originally hoped to use AIM as a tool to accelerate machine learning. “There is a bit of research figuring out which practical problems are more of a natural fit for them.”

AIM, the Analog Iterative Machine, is built of existing components, like micro-LED lights and the kind of sensor you find in your smartphone camera. Photo by Chris Welsch for Microsoft.
About three years ago, they tried using AIM to solve a particularly vexing but important type of math problem – optimization. They quickly realized this new device had the potential to greatly surpass the speed and capacity of the binary systems used in typical computers in solving these optimization problems.

“Basically, optimization runs the world as we know it,” says Gkantsidis. Optimization problems underlie many of society’s most important structures – among them: banks and finance, healthcare, logistics and manufacturing.

The promise of this new computer has led to a one-year research agreement with Barclays Bank PLC to investigate the potential of using it to solve a real-world problem – how batches of transactions are settled at the clearing houses used by most banks. The number of transactions goes into the hundreds of thousands daily. Like most optimization problems, it’s the sheer scale that foils the capacity of binary computers to solve it.

“Effectively, it would take the lifetime of the universe to evaluate all the possible options,” says Lee Braine, managing director and distinguished engineer in the chief technology office at Barclays. Currently, he says, a variety of computing and mathematical shortcuts are used to make a sophisticated estimation of the most effective way to settle batches of tens of thousands of transactions.

The AIM team had already run what they call a “toy version” of the transaction settlement problem posed by Braine, and the optical computer solved it with 100% accuracy every time.

From Building a computer that solves practical problems at the speed of light – Source.

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Here he seems to be conflating bitcoin and “crypto” – they are very much not the same thing at all.

From (3) WEEKLY, July 8, 2023 – by Noelle Acheson.

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The U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has just published some fascinating (and detailed) findings about the cryptocurrency investment decisions and motives of American households relative to other financial assets. Cryptocurrency holders tend to be young, white, male and more libertarian relative to non-crypto holders. They expect much higher rates of returns for crypto and perceive it as relatively safer than do other households. They also view it as a better hedge against inflation. For those holding cryptocurrencies, changes in Bitcoin prices translate into their purchases of durable goods. Finally, exogenously-provided information about historical returns of cryptocurrencies leads individuals to increase their desired crypto holdings and makes them more likely to actually purchase cryptocurrency subsequently.

 

We compare these views and behaviors to those of households toward other financial assets and argue that cryptocurrency is unique in many of these respects.

Those holding cryptocurrencies are different from the average population: disproportionately male with higher incomes, Libertarian or otherwise politically independent, less likely to be white, and most important quantitatively, young. 

 

While most individuals owning crypto currencies report that these holdings are a small fraction of their financial wealth, almost 20% report that cryptocurrency accounts for at least 50% of their financial holdings. Furthermore, the vast majority of crypto- holders are either happy with their crypto-holdings or would like to hold more crypto as a share of their wealth.

 

Crypto-holders most commonly justify their decision through the high expected returns of cryptocurrency

 

Is cryptocurrency unique in these respects or, as quipped by Colbert, is it like any other asset but just targeted more toward certain types of young people? In many respects, we find that cryptocurrency is in fact quite different. First, it is unique in the extent to which most individuals are uninformed about it: