BITCOIN
The Bitcoin Network
The beautiful ascent of the Bitcoin Network – Tuur Demeester
Volatility
There was no bitcoin 5 years ago and now you complain about volatility. It’s quite silly. – Jeffrey Tucker
Central Planning
The US federal gov employs thousands of people in ‘monetary policy’. It’s all bullshit. – Jeffrey Tucker
Institutional Investment
“Thought leading” institutional investors will have put money in bitcoin within the next year. Some university endowments have already expressed interest. – Dan Morehead, Pantera Capital
Wallet Growth
If you are wondering why USD/BTC is depressed, here is our internal projection of wallets thru EOY 2014… pic.twitter.com/Fh23kFBolw
In January, Palihapitiya, who is one of the largest individual owners of bitcoin, had predicted 11.5 million wallet downloads, but after the bitcoin price stabilised below $500 in the first quarter of the year, he has readjusted his forecast to 7.3 million.
On March 29th, there were 3.9 million wallet downloads for the year, as per the Source+Capital graph tweeted out by Palihapitiya. – Roop Gill
Venture Capital Legend Fred Wilson
With Bitcoin and the blockchain, I found something that got me excited again.
The thing that was always amazing about the Internet is that anybody could put a Web server on the Internet and then anybody anywhere in the world could open up their browser and connect to that Web server and nothing else had to happen. That was the only thing that had to happen. Bitcoin’s kind of the same way. It’s a completely open system. Nobody controls it. It’s not owned by a company. It just is. It’s Bitcoin. I think this architecture is really, really important. That’s what got me excited about it.
Let’s go back and revisit the big innovations on the commercial Internet over the past twenty years. TCP/IP, HTTP, The Browser, Search, Social, Mobile, Blockchains.
Each one of those innovations drove an investment cycle.
* Our 2004 fund was built during social.
* Our 2008 fund was built during social and the emergence of mobile.
* Our 2014 fund will be built during the blockchain cycle. I am looking forward to it. – Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures
ALTCOINS
Government Digital Currencies
MintChip is a Canadian government initiative in electronic currency – Why has it failed, you cry.
Bitcoin has thousands wanting change, Mintchip had a few trying to control change
How can a government project, run by a government agency, tied to the existing government currency, based on a physical chip, limited to one country and relying on governmental software, not have generated the excitement of bitcoin?
What bitcoin and chums have that the Royal Canadian Mint does not isn’t some sort of philosophical purity or magic, God-given genius. It has reddit, Github, blogs and open code.- John Law
EQUITIES
If even a small part of what Silicon Valley currently believes about Google (GOOG) is true, it’s significantly undervalued today.
The company everyone believes is the General Electric of the 21st century: 2014 P/E ex-cash of 19.4 – Marc Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz
The Mother of All Financial Bubbles is About to Crack
Next week we will be told by Wall Street stock peddlers that what are just having a healthy correction and that it will soon be time to “buy the dip”. Don’t believe them.
We are perched precariously at the top of one of the greatest financial bubbles ever because it is global—-the handiwork of world-wide central bank driven credit expansion and drastic interest rate repression.
* At the turn of the century, the US had about $25 trillion of credit market debt outstanding; now it is pushing $60 trillion.
* About 14 years ago, China had debt of $1 trillion; now its nearly $25 trillion. And similar credit explosions occurred in much of the rest of the world.
It was all central bank enabled, and it caused world wide investment booms and asset inflations which defy every law of sound money and economics, and which cannot be sustained indefinitely. – David Stockman
COMPANIES
Smart Food Companies
Smart food 2.0 companies like Hampton Creek and Soylent will likely make heavy use of quantified self. Personalized nutrition through data. – Balaji S. Srinivasan, Andreessen Horowitz
Terrafugia
Aerospace company Terrafugia is working on the concept of a flying electric car.
Boston based Terrafugia announced last May it had started working on the concept of TF-X, a four-seat, plug-in hybrid electric car that can do vertical take-offs and landings.
The TF-X concept is not Terrafugia’s first attempt to take to the skies. Founded in 2006, the company made headlines in recent years with Transition, a street legal airplane that can be flown in and out of general aviation airports.
Terrafugia has been flying prototypes of Transition since 2009 and is now very close to getting it to the market.
“We have over 100 orders for Transition,” says Dietrich, adding that Transition costs $279,000. “We are expecting to ship the first products to customers in the second quarter of 2016.”
So, how far away are we from our first ever TF-X air cruise?
“It’s hard to say exactly, but we estimate eight to 12 years,”- Teo Kermeliotis
INTERNET / PRIVACY
We have reached the golden age of surveillance.
You get weird situations where Syrian dissidents use Facebook to organize, and the Government uses Facebook to arrest its citizens.
I think this is the issue by which we will be judged when our grandchildren read the history of the early days of the internet. – Bruce Schneier
THE SINGULARITY
Violent Decline in Solar Pricing.
It’s now a question of how and where, not if, solar becomes a dominant force in energy markets.
The cost of solar on a real-dollars-per-million-BTU equivalent basis has, in many instances, come to match that of conventional fuels.
The solar industry has been waiting 60 years for this to happen – and it finally just did. – Rob Wile
Virtual Reality
Just as a smartphone isn’t a PC, only smaller, VR isn’t going to be a smartphone, only attached to your face. It’s going to be something new and different, where immersiveness leads to entirely new ways of interacting.
It’s not hard to conceive of ways in which you could use an Oculus Rift for visualizing data and information in new and more efficient ways than we can do currently on a computer screen. – Peter Rojas
David Attenborough documentary to be first Oculus film
In terms of the creative challenge, we look at this as being comparable to the beginning of the film industry – John Morris, Atlantic Productions
Siri
Use it. Really, the more we use it the more it understands. It anticipates. That’s exactly what I’m beginning to find.
Why isn’t this technology used more frequently? Could it be that it’s just not advanced enough yet?
I put it more down to human nature. Our own procrastination if you like. We’re not taught to simply pick up Siri. So it’s people.
In what way can we expect to see the technology advance next?
I think when it can actually start to reason with you. Let’s say you’re debating an appointment. Which one is most important? And it can actually debate that with you and give you a hypothesis as it were — why one could be preferred over the other.
The future of productivity lies in Artificial Intelligence (A.I.).- Laura Montini & Colin Lewis
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