Tags: Bitcoin, Blockchain, WEF, Graphene, Taxes, Totalitarian, Beast System, CRYPTOCURRENCY, Digital Currency, SYNTHS, Holograms, NFT, Slavery, Hitler
Here is another aspect of the Graphene. Also, another aspect of TOTAL CONTROL.
Here are all the posts in this series:
G.O.- GRAPENE OXIDE
G.O. – GRAPHENE OXIDE Part 2
G.O. – GRAPHENE OXIDE PART 3
What you don’t know… WILL KILL YOU!
Crisper’s Progression – GOD HELP US
In the Mesh
IS THE FUTURE OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT A SMART CONTRACT?
“blockchain is going to empower all of humanity,” declared Jeffrey Berns to eager applause at the launch of Blockchains LLC early this month. Behind him, the jumbo video backdrop alternated between animated blocks of neon code and a star map of the universe. His audience had already seen reports that he’d spent close to $200 million in cash on 67,000 acres in northern Nevada, but in case there was any doubt about the scale of his ambitions, he was also joined on stage by a hologram, which seemed to serve partly as prompter (“I’m not much of an entertainer,” he admitted).
This summer, as news began to leak of Berns’s land purchases, blockchain enthusiasts could only imagine what might be coming. Berns told the audience that Blockchains would be the largest-ever sandbox for blockchain play, an incubator for projects in what he called the “life-changing technologies” of artificial intelligence, nanotechnolgoy, and 3D printing. The incubator campus alone will be 1,000 acres, dwarfing Apple’s new HQ and even Tesla’s neighboring Gigafactory. Berns also promises schools, residential spaces, and the nation’s first arena dedicated to e-sports. All Blockchains LLC projects will take a stake in the overall distributed organization, of which Berns will retain 10%, and, he says, “Every asset will eventually be digitized – even a work week.”
For some blockchain evangelists, Berns is something of a messiah and the city he’s building in the desert their promise of paradise. Several startups have taken to describing their blockchain platforms as “entire new ecosystems” – but none has gone nearly this far. In one of its teaser videos, Blockchains LLC preaches to its choir, promising that “we can create a world that makes everything we do work better.” The line is given to the same 12-year-old actress that appeared holographically onstage with Berns, but here she is stern, roaming the sands of the Nevada desert dressed all in black, easily taken for the heroine of a young adult dystopian film and not a corporate spokesperson. It was a good casting decision since youthful enthusiasm is the sort of energy required to sustain the belief that the smart city Berns imagines will “change the way we live.”
The way we live is still often conceived in terms of the social contract, that we make some implicit commitment to the whole and are protected by the commitments of our fellow community members. The law can be seen as these commitments made explicit, the language of the social contract. Berns and other fans of the Ethereum blockchain network see vast potential for its smart contracts to do away with arbiters and lawmakers altogether, to encode the social contract. The primary use of smart contracts today is simply the exchange of cryptocurrencies. Covering the domain of individual and organizational agreements in their volume and complexity may be a futile effort. But a network unmediated by government was the initial promise of Bitcoin, the first smart contract, and it’s Berns’s mantra: “Trust the math. Trust the blockchain.”
In The Social Contract, Rousseau took the firm stance that anything less than direct democracy amounts to our enslavement to government. “The moment a people allows itself to be represented, it stops being free,” he wrote. Our elected representatives are intermediaries, so it’s no surprise that blockchain devotees agree with with Rousseau here. Governments are already using blockchain voting apps, perhaps paving the way for citizens of Berns’s smart city to vote directly on every municipal matter – cutting out the middleman of government altogether. What else could the young protagonist of the promotional videos mean when she writes giant ones and zeros in the sand, ushering in the new land where “your vote is your vote”?
One of the most significant innovations in the history of the social contract may be money itself. Ancient governments are known to have taxed their subjects even before systems of stored value, and the redistribution of resources is not new to modern tax systems. But the widespread use of modern forms of money has made taxation a foundation of public policy and taxes are one way our commitments as part of the social contract are enforced. On the other hand, cryptocurrencies were built on an ethos of radical libertarianism, not social welfare, and engineered for privacy and anonymity to circumvent governmental oversight. The idea was that the IRS would never even see the digital coins of Berns and other crypto billionaires.
But you can’t go around spending a quarter-billion dollars on desert land and underground vaults without being noticed, and Berns told the audience at the launch that he now fully expects to be audited. Blockchains LLC may be the passion project he says, but there’s no question that it’s also very convenient for his tax situation. The tax law passed last year included a provision for Opportunity Zones, areas of the country that have not historically seen much investment. The program, earlier versions of which had bipartisan support but which was only passed as a part of the overall GOP plan, allows investors to defer and eventually forego all taxes on capital gains that are invested into a qualifying zone. Berns’s smart city falls in one of these zones, meaning he can write off the entire cost to build it. “We have investors chomping at the bit for tax-free money,” Berns told his audience to whooping cheers, reminding them also that Nevada has no state income tax.
Outgoing Governor Brian Sandoval warmly welcomed Berns’s idea and formally, if not very originally, named the land Berns bought Innovation Park. As with the recent municipal contest for Amazon’s new sites, public officials are known to go to great lengths for what they call a boon to economic development and employment. Millions of dollars in tax abatements are offered, even as evidence suggests the jobs created are not the kind needed most. In the case of Blockchains LLC, Berns has promised to bring over 1,000 jobs to its campus by 2021, but the AI and decentralized autonomous organizations that will take root there are expected to have cataclysmic effects on wages and job automation everywhere.
Blockchains LLC is hardly up and running so it’s too soon to tell whether it’s just a tax haven, or whether its grandiose vision will crumble like the sandcastles in its promos. It’s ironic that a governor would show so much trust for Berns, whose main objective is to obviate the need for trust in the government to begin with – or for trust in anything other than the public ledger for that matter. Before leaving his audience Berns told them, “I vow to you: my heart is in the right place.” But surely he doesn’t mean for us to trust him.
THE BEAST COMETH…
Part II: Breaking Down the Blockchains Launch
William Mountfort’s Zelmane, 1705
This originates from John Dryden around 1697, in The works of Virgil:
“When from the Goal they start, The Youthful Charioteers with beating Heart, Rush to the Race.”
As the world swoons with breathless excitement visualizing the power of the Creator God in their very hands, pause for a moment and reflect what this really means to you and for humanity. In one brief breath, utterance concentrates all the hopes, the doubts, the anxious fears of passionate armoury are launched at the head of the audacious entity whose lips, unhallowed by sacred relationship, dared to breathe those precious words, “It’s our turn to change the world.”
It, the beast has a heart and soul. At its core is a soul of wickedness, perversity, and evil. Jeffrey Berns of BlockChains LLC, spent half an hour baring his soul to hundreds of people at the launch of the beast system. His soul is the size of 67,000 acres plus 1000 acres campus for a total of 68,000. People are divided, not knowing whether to herald the BlockChains launch as a miracle or a mirage.
BREAKING IT DOWN
At long last the mysteries confined to the Dark Arks, forbidden knowledge are being revealed and the world is being broken down into its elemental form, and so too, my friends we need break down their understanding and how it applies to our lives. Everything that has been presented so far is highly symbolic within ether of the mystery schools using Black Magic.
Jeffrey Berns proclaimed that he wanted to empower humanity, in other words provide to humanity power it never had, in fact, was forbidden to have under penalty of death. That power has been transmitted from the fallen angels who communicated it to the mystery school and it now at this pinnacle of history is implementing a Luciferian world. Berns further proclaims his vision of the world is going to exchange value. He wants you to “just trust the math.” As a lawyer he is very concerned about your identity and so he is creating a link between your virtual and physical you. The system being built will hack your veins for a singular identity solution for the problem of custody but we will discuss that matter in the next article.
SHOWCASING THE TRUE POWER OF BLOCKCHAINS
There is a frontier type excitement promulgated around artificial intelligence. The new Ethereum City dubbed Innovation Park City in Graphene Valley has been unveiled. What does this mean to you?
We need to define a couple simple terms:
Innovation according to is the process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value or for which customers will pay. This is called value-added. God’s creation is a gift and hence free. When you hear the word innovation you need to think that some people are taking God’s free gift and tweaking it so that it can be patented as man’s intellectual property and you then have to pay to use it. This could even be your own cells in your body! Simply God’s gift made valued for exploitable profit. During this shift, you will begin to see things that in God’s world had value become valueless as people shift their investments into things coming out of thin air.
Graphene is rearranged carbon rearranged on a hexagonal arrangement making it appear miraculous or magical. It is one of the strongest materials in the known universe, thin, flexible, transparent, highly conductive, and seemingly impermeable to most gases and liquids. It will be a superconductor not only in technology but also necessary for societal upheaval.
Ethereum City has deep occultic roots perfectly situated in the Uncanny Valley near the Black Rock Desert that is bridging robotics and animation to life. The ‘Synths’ that Dr. Suzanne Gilbert pronounced would be deployed in September are human replicas, what appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings. They bypass our normal sensory feelings but impart an eeriness and revulsion.
Aesthetically, the Uncanny Valley is a relationship between the degree of an object’s resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object. The concept of the uncanny valley suggests humanoid objects which appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit uncanny, or strangely familiar, feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers. Valley denotes a dip in the human observer’s affinity for the replica, a relation that otherwise increases with the replica’s human likeness.
Ethereum City in the Graphene Uncanny Valley will be populated with Synths, and for a time humans, amidst surreal Star Wars collection of robotics, 3D computer animations, holography, reanimated fallen angels and giants, and lifelike dolls, which is, why I believe this defiant tween holographic ‘doll’ was used in the BlockChains launch.
These entities and their environment will share a graphene foundation, rather than carbon base, will soon make obsolete silicon embodiment predecessors. Inhabitants of Ethereum City will engage in interdimensional virtual experiences, enhanced haptic (sensory) feedback that would seduce them back into reality. In fact, sensation (haptic) may arise when the human brain begins to consider an artificial figure as a possible human.
“If you look humanlike but your motion is jerky or you can’t make proper eye contact, those are the things that make them uncanny,” Saygin told InnovationNewsDaily. “I think the key is that when you make appearances humanlike, you raise expectations for the brain. When those expectations are not met, then you have the problem in the brain.”
SYNTHS AND 3D HOLOGRAMS
A new laser system renders full-color 3-D images in thin air, researchers report in the Jan. 25 Nature. This technology will make futuristic, free-floating visuals for everything from air traffic control to surgical planning including the Image of the Beast in Revelation.
Holograms are images on flat surfaces that only appear three-dimensional because of how the light bounces off the material whereas the engineered images actually take up 3-D space. Two-dimensional images of virtual performers can also be made to appear 3-D through medical tricks using projectors and reflective surfaces, but these 3-D images can only be viewed from certain angles. The new technique creates 3-D images that can be seen from almost any direction.
This system works by trapping a particle that’s mere micrometers across in a beam of nearly invisible laser light. That laser repeatedly moves the particle along a specific path through the air. At each point on the particle’s path, other lasers illuminate it with red, green or blue light, which the particle scatters in all directions. This creates a single image pixel that can be viewed from all sides. It moves so fast that it blurs together like the tip of a waved sparkler giving the image of an image floating in air.
As they say, “the sky’s the limit,” of where this technology could lead.
Image: Nature, Daniel Smalley, Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah
I just took an Exponential Medicine (AI in medicine) continuing education course demonstrating 44 hours of the most mind-blowing technologies you have never seen, in practice today. Free-floating images are helping doctors practice surgery. This technology is used for physical therapy and athletic performance and then you can access the data on 3-D displays to carefully study your motion.
Imagine a world of pop up images including the image of the beast, dragons, fallen angels, giants, evil spirits, or long dead pharaohs.
MAGICAL GRAPHENE
Maybe you wondered at BlockChains launch why Berns exuded such hubris at the indestructibility, strength, emphasizing two existing underground bunkers, 100,000-square-foot Swiss mountain hideaway inside a mountain with six-foot-thick steel doors and is, according to Berns, “more secure than Fort Knox,” an underground lair unbreachable vault for digital assets. I humbly submit to you the answer can be found in graphene. I am going to go into some depth on graphene because I truly believe that frequency is going to play a huge role in activating nanoparticles embedded within our bodies. I have discussed this in other articles although this is almost an open vision with the Lord providing information on the battle to His children as our adversary moves forward and into position.
Graphene is enjoying positive publicity even in its nascence. Graphene is a form of carbon consisting of planar sheets with the atoms arranged in a honeycomb-shaped lattice, that is two-dimensional, one atom thick, and 300 times stronger than steel.
Utilizing a 3-D printer which Berns said was a pillar of Ethereum City, it will be possible to print graphene circuitry instantly upgrade a component in a device or build a component from scratch. It can create a perfectly balanced speaker diaphragm without any optimization or special design, in other words it intrinsically picks up frequencies. As your read about the special qualities remember Revelation 13 and how the power of speech seems according to the biblical narrative as amplified.
Image Access: http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/graphene-diaphragm-diagram.jpg” v:shapes=”_x0000_i1030
A loudspeaker, earphone or headphone works by vibrating a paper diaphragm, otherwise known as a cone, creating pressure waves in the air around the listener. Different sounds are created based on the frequency of these pressure waves. Human ears can usually hear frequencies between 20 Hz and 20 KHz. The quality of a speaker depends on how well it produces sounds equally within this scale.
This Berkeley graphene earphone is made from a 30nm-thick, 7mm-wide sheet of graphene. This diaphragm is then sandwiched between two silicon electrodes, which are coated with silicon dioxide to prevent any shorting should the diaphragm be driven too hard. By applying power to the electrodes, an electrostatic force is created, which causes the graphene diaphragm to vibrate, creating sound. By oscillating the electricity, different sounds are created.
Most diaphragms must be damped to avoid objectionable frequency responses. A graphene diaphragm requires no damping, because graphene is so strong. The lack of damping demonstrates that the graphene diaphragm is very energy efficient.
A speaker diaphragm is essentially a simple harmonic oscillator with an inherent mass and restoring force that determines the way it vibrates at different frequencies. Most diaphragms need to be damped to broaden the range of frequencies over which they perform. Damping quickly becomes a complex and expensive procedure and produces power inefficiencies.
To avoid damping engineering, the diaphragm needs to be very thin and light with a small spring constant so that the air itself damps its motion. This is tricky given how weak and fragile most materials become when they are thin. Graphene is the ideal contender because it is electrically conductive, has an extremely small mass density, and can be configured to have very small effective spring constant.
Unlike conventional speakers that require mechanical moving parts to compress air and generate sound waves, thermoacoustic speakers work by rapid heating and cooling of a conductor that causes expansions and contractions of the air which, in turn, generates sound. The concept of a thermoacoustic speaker has been around for a long time, but progress was delayed because we did not have suitable materials or fabrication methods.
Image Access: “http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/sites/default/files/upload/graphene-speakers_300.jpg” v:shapes=”_x0000_i1031″
Graphene has shown to be the solution due to its high thermal conductivity, very low heat capacity and its ability to form free-standing membranes. It has been shown that single and multiple layers of graphene can generate thermoacoustic sound on a range of substrates.
A graphene-based system can work on flexible substrates and by changing the overall shape of a flexible substrate, the thermoacoustic graphene speaker can focus sound in interesting ways, bringing about interesting applications in medical ultrasound, where acoustic emitters with complex geometries can be realized to focus sound waves.
Graphene has extremely low mass density and high mechanical strength, which are significant qualities for efficient wide-frequency-response electrostatic audio speaker design. Low mass ensures good high frequency response, while high strength allows for relatively large free-standing diaphragms necessary for effective low frequency response.
The graphene-based electrostatic audio speaker is straightforward in design and operation and has excellent frequency response across the entire audio frequency range (20 Hz ~ 20 kHz), with performance matching or surpassing commercially available audio earphones. A direct recording of the song “Sound of Silence” by Simon&Garfunkel played through the graphene loudspeaker can be found here by The University of Nebraska Engineering Mad Man.
Graphene could be made using 3-D printers by using a technique known as vapor deposition to leave a thin film of the graphite-based conductor on sheets of PVDF (poly vinylidene fluoride). By sandwiching the PVDF between graphene electrodes and applying a current from a sound source, researchers are able to create a flat and transparent loudspeaker that could be integrated into windows or screens; but don’t expect this low-power sound source to replace your hi-fi, as it relies on the distortion-prone piezoelectric effect, and it probably won’t sound much better than the earpiece on your cell phone.
Image Accessed: “http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/07/7-11-2011graphene-speaker-system.jpg”
In other news regarding graphene, Samsung announced its developing “a breakthrough synthesis method” that will speed up the commercialization of graphene. Samsung, which developed the new process at its Advanced Institute of Technology in partnership with Sungkyunkwan University, says the new method is “one of the most significant breakthroughs in graphene research in history.” What does this mean for consumers exactly? Samsung says graphene’s flexibility, high heat conductibility, and durability make it a perfect option for small devices like wearables and devices with flexible displays.
Image Accessed: “http://9to5google.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/flexible-graphene-phone.jpg?w=704″ v:shapes=”_x0000_i1034”>
The Samsung team is the first to grow a large-scale, impurity-free sheet of graphene that maintained its electric properties. The process involved growing the graphene in multiple places on a specially treated layer of Germanium, the smaller pieces of graphene would then merge together to form the large sheet.
Another aspect of graphene is that it is self-healing. Remember that the beast has a head that is healed. Imagine a holographic, interdimensional entity, such as the manifestation of Satan, with a graphene skin. It could appear anywhere, and anytime. It could feel you, and you could feel it. You could interact with it in any dimension.
In the study, scientists put graphene with various flaws like pre-existing gaps and obtuse cracks under pressure until they fractured. Oddly enough, as soon as the load was pulled back, the graphene began to heal and the self-healing prolonged, no matter the nature of pre-existing defects in the graphene sheet. Regardless of what length of the crack, they all healed, given that the crack opening distance was within 0.3 to 0.5 nanometres for both a flawless sheet and a sheet with flaw.
ROBOTS IN ANCIENT GREECE & THE CHURCH
Homer’s Iliad, which is over 3,000 years old describe a primitive robot.
Thetis goes to Hephaestus to ask him to make a replacement set of armor for her son Achilles, and finds him ‘hard at work and sweating as he bustled about at the bellows in his forge.’ Now, putting considerations of heel protection aside, Hephaestus sounds like a pretty decent metalworker.
He was making a set of 20 tripods to stand round the walls of his well-built hall. He had fitted golden wheels to all their feet so that they could run off to a meeting of the gods and return home again, all self-propelled—an amazing sight.
Homer then describes robotic women:
Waiting-women hurried along to help their master. They were made of gold but looked like real girls and could not only speak and use their limbs, but were also endowed with intelligence and had learned their skills from the immortal gods. While they scurried round to support their lord, Hephaestus moved unsteadily to where Thetis was seated.
Meanwhile, churches over the centuries have used mechanical images to evoke a response of dedication from their congregants.
The uncanny valley describes the dip in emotional response when we encounter something that appears to be human but isn’t quite ‘right’. The more we encounter the Synth in something that isn’t human, the stranger we find it. So take a peek at the Uncanny Valley animated:
Image Accessed: https://blog.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk
I mention this because mankind has a predisposition for idolatry. We almost demand something that we can see and touch to worship. If nothing like an idol of wood or stone is present we will worship the seat or place of something. This occurs within the church and certainly in the pagan world.
TOUCH SOMEONE WITH HAPTICS TODAY
Haptics technology promises feeling and touch for devices and images in the air. Now that is certainly interesting. This technology was talked about allot at the Exponential Medicine Conference this week.
Engineers and researchers are working diligently on new haptic systems are trying to give us the best of interdimensional communication and feel.
We are in the stone age of haptics—they can intelligently vibrate to communicate different things to the user. The next generation of haptics will be more nuanced and useful to interacting with ethereal entities and dimensions.
It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that Disney Research has a new algorithm that’s able to translate 3D information in an image or video directly into tactile sensations on a special haptic display. The display itself stays perfectly smooth and tricks your fingertips into feeling like there’s texture under them.
Ultrahaptics is a new type of haptic feedback that does away with tactile displays entirely, and brings touch interaction into the air. The University of Bristol’s Interaction and Graphics research group, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever felt before!
To make this work, a transducer array projects carefully calculated waves of ultrasonic sound into the air, which your sensory system cannot sense. At certain points, however, the waves come into focus and intensify substantially, displacing the air at those points and creating a pressure difference that you can feel. The system can create multiple pressure points in different locations at the same time, and can even endow individual points with distinct tactile properties. A similar technique has been used by AIST to create true 3D displays, using focused lasers to plasmify the air itself.
UltraHaptics is potentially quite relevant as mid-air gesture-based computer interaction technologies are becoming available to consumers. The most obvious one might be Microsoft’s Kinect sensor, but we’ve also got things like Edge3 and Leap Motion showing up in peripherals and laptops from HP and Asus, among others. And soon, all you’ll need is a webcam. Apple is even rumored to be working on 3D gesture control for iPads, and it makes a lot of sense for cellphones as well, where touchscreen real estate is limited.
If the UltraHaptics system can somehow shrink that transducer array into a form factor it can integrate with the virtual fantasy world in your device of the air. It sounds crazy, but all of the technology exists right now, it just needs to get small enough (and cheap enough) to make it ubiquitous.
As the mostly youthful charioteers with beating hearts race, we too have such a cloud of witnesses cheering us on to the finish line, where we will hear those words we have long awaited, “Well done good and faithful servant.”
This weekend, in Part III, we will look at Digital Identities and Custody of Digital Assets, and hot and cold storage. Until then, may each of you be blessed and reflect upon the lovingkindess of Jesus.
Part I: Breaking Down the Ethereum Launch:
Terminated in a Dark Electronic Concentration Camp by Guillotine
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Graphene
A protocol for efficiently relaying blocks across a blockchain’s network.
Graphene uses a fraction the bandwidth of current approaches to relay blocks. It is applicable to any blockchain, whether proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, or DAG based. Currently, it is deployed as a dev-only protocol in Bitcoin Unlimited‘s client for Bitcoin Cash (BCH). On these pages, you can find an explanation of Graphene’s approach, answers to frequently asked questions, write-ups, and links to deployments and source code.
Graphene Explained
Blocks in a blockchain are generally made up of a header and a set of validated transactions that spend coin or otherwise change the state of the system. Relaying blocks across the peer-to-peer (P2P) network using the least amount of bandwidth and latency has a number of advantages for the operation of any cryptocurrency. Blocks that can be relayed using less bandwidth propagate more quickly, which can increase synchronization among peers and reduce forks in the chain. Using less bandwidth to relay a block also allows greater participation by peers who are behind limited-bandwidth links and routes. Finally, an efficient mechanism for relaying blocks can allow maximum block size to increase, sustaining a larger number of transactions per second overall.
As a base comparison, consider that one option for relaying a block is to send the first 8 bytes of each transaction ID. If our block contains n=2000 transactions, then the total cost is 16,000 bytes. Let’s see if we can do better
Bloom Filters
Bloom filters are an incredibly useful probabilistic data structure for determining whether items are members of a given set. In this case, our set is all transactions in the sender’s block (actually, the set of transaction IDs); and the items are the transactions IDs in the receiver’s mempool. A Bloom filter has two special characteristics. First, it has no false negatives. That is, if a Bloom filter tells us that a transaction ID is not in the set, then it definitely is not in the set. Second, a Bloom filters does have false positives. That is, if a Bloom filter tells us that a transaction ID is in the set, then it might not be in the set. Bloom filters are useful because we can set the false positive rate (FPR) to whatever we like. There is an important trade-off though: if the FPR is low, and the Bloom filter is therefore accurate, then it will also be larger in terms of bytes. If we don’t mind some wrong answers about what transaction IDs are in the block, then the Bloom filter will be smaller.
What if we were to relay blocks using only Bloom filters? For example, we could set the FPR of the Bloom Filter to f=1/m. In that case, when the receiverchecks each of the m transaction IDs in her mempoool, we can expect that the Bloom filter will wrongly state that f*m=(1/m)*m=1 transaction is in the block on average. To make matters worse, we won’t know which transaction is the wrong one; as a result of the extra transaction, the Merkle root won’t validate. We can try to fix this problem by lowering the FPR of the filter. For example, if we set the FPR to f=1/(144m), then we can expect that the filter will permit a wrong answer only about once every 144 blocks relayed (i.e., only about once a day). But keep in mind, this accuracy will cost us in bytes. The size of a Bloom filter with n items inserted and a false positive rate of f=1/144m is well known to be -n*ln(f)/ln2(2) = n*ln(1/(144m))/(8ln2(2)) bytes. For example, for a block with n=2000 transactions and a mempool of m=6000 transactions total, the Bloom filter will be about 7,113 bytes.
Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables
IBLTs are another useful probabilistic data structure. They are designed to allow us to discover the symmetric difference between two sets of items. For example, we can create an IBLT of all transactions IDs that are in the sender’s block, and then create another IBLT of the transactions in the receiver’s mempool. A subtraction [3] of the first IBLT from the second will tell us exactly which transactions in the mempool are not in the block. Given this functionality, it’s tempting to use IBLTs alone to relay the block from sender to receiver, but unfortunately it is not an efficient approach. The size in bytes of an IBLT increases linearly with the size of the symmetric difference recovered from it. An IBLT uses about 12 bytes per transaction ID that is part of the symmetric difference, and the overhead of an IBLT (in bytes) is about 140%. And so if the mempool is 2000 transactions larger than the block (i.e., the symmetric difference is 2000), then the sender’s IBLT will be about (1.4*2000)*12=33,840 bytes. Not a great choice.
Graphene
The best solution is a combination of both data structures, which is Graphene’s solution. First, we pass all transactions in the receiver’s mempool through a Bloom filter of the sender’s block; however, we allow a good number of false positives, which results in a small Bloom filter. We clean up any mistakes made by the Bloom filter with an IBLT also sent by the sender. The symmetric difference is now quite small: it’s equal to number of false positives that were produced by our Bloom filter. There is a trade-off: we can make the Bloom filter larger (more accurate), which results in a smaller IBLT; or we can make the IBLT larger (able to correct more mistakes), which results in a smaller Bloom filter. Graphene picks the parameters of both data structures together so that the summed size is optimally small. For example, for n=2000 and m=6000, a sender computes that an IBLT that can recover a=27 items and a Bloom filter of n items with a FPR of f=0.00675 is minimal. In our test implementation, this results in 3,316 byte total based on a 715-byte IBLT and a 2601-byte Bloom filter, which is about 1/5 the size of sending 8-bytes per transaction. If a canonical transaction order is not defined, an expression of the transaction ordering must also be sent, which increases the total by 2,750 bytes to 6,066 bytes (i.e., 38% of the cost of sending 8-bytes per transaction). The IBLT will fail to decode about once every 240 blocks.
Graphene maintains this size advantage as block size grows. For example, for a block of n=10,000 transactions, listing 8-bytes of each transaction ID would be 80,000 bytes. With a mempool of m=30,000 transactions, Graphene’s cost is 14,482 bytes (or 31,091 bytes without a canonical transaction ordering).
Comparison to related approaches
A simple comparison of Graphene to related work is as follows. A block holds n=2000 transactions, which the receiver holds in its mempool along with 4000 other transactions; in other words m=2000+4000=6000.
Using Graphene, the sender sends an INV, and the receiver responds with a GETDATA and the value of m. The sender computes that an IBLT that can recover a=27 items and a Bloom filter of n items with a FPR of f=a/(m-n)=27/(6000-2000)=0.00675 is minimal. In our test implementation, this results in 3,316 byte total based a 715-byte IBLT and a 2601-byte Bloom filter. Without a canonical transaction order, an expression of the transaction ordering must also be sent, increasing the total by 2,750 bytes to 6,066 bytes. (The receiver’s IBLT is not sent over the network.)
Tschipper’s XTreme Thin Blocks has the receiver start by sending a 3956-byte Bloom Filter of the mempool with an FPR of f=1/m=1/2000=0.0005 and 8-bytes for each of the n=2000 transactions. The total is therefore 3956+8*2000= 19,956.
Corallo’s Compact Blocks would send over just the 8-bytes for each of the n=2000 transactions, for a total of 8*2000= 16,000.
Graphene grows linearly with block size, but very slowly compared to the other two methods. As the example shows, Graphene would benefit significantly from a standardized, canonical ordering of transactions in blocks.
Are 8 bytes sufficient to avoid collison?
An 8-byte (64-bit) transaction ID results in a very low probability of collision. Let b be the size in bits of the shortened transaction IDs. The probability of collision in this “Birthday Attack” scenario is well-known to be approximated by 1-exp(-m(m-1)/2**(b+1)). For example, for a mempool of m=10,000,000 transactions, the probability of collision using b=64 bits is approximately 0.00000271050.
It’s a colossal pump-and-dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen.
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This is a contributed post by Bill Harris, former CEO of Intuit and founding CEO of PayPal and Personal Capital.
I’m tired of saying, “Be careful, it’s speculative.” Then, “Be careful, it’s gambling.” Then, “Be careful, it’s a bubble.” Okay, I’ll say it: Bitcoin is a scam.
In my opinion, it’s a colossal pump-and-dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen. In a pump-and-dump game, promoters “pump” up the price of a security creating a speculative frenzy, then “dump” some of their holdings at artificially high prices. And some cryptocurrencies are pure frauds. Ernst & Young estimates that 10 percent of the money raised for initial coin offerings has been stolen.
The losers are ill-informed buyers caught up in the spiral of greed. The result is a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary families to internet promoters. And “massive” is a massive understatement — 1,500 different cryptocurrencies now register over $300 billion of “value.”
It helps to understand that a bitcoin has no value at all.
Promoters claim cryptocurrency is valuable as (1) a means of payment, (2) a store of value and/or (3) a thing in itself. None of these claims are true.
1. Means of Payment. Bitcoins are accepted almost nowhere, and some cryptocurrencies nowhere at all. Even where accepted, a currency whose value can swing 10 percent or more in a single day is useless as a means of payment.
2. Store of Value. Extreme price volatility also makes bitcoin undesirable as a store of value. And the storehouses — the cryptocurrency trading exchanges — are far less reliable and trustworthy than ordinary banks and brokers.
3. Thing in Itself. A bitcoin has no intrinsic value. It only has value if people think other people will buy it for a higher price — the Greater Fool theory.
Some cryptocurrencies, like Sweatcoin, which is redeemable for workout gear, are the equivalent of online coupons or frequent flier points — a purpose better served by simple promo codes than complex encryption.
Indeed, for the vast majority of uses, bitcoin has no role. Dollars, pounds, euros, yen and renminbi are better means of payment, stores of value and things in themselves.
Cryptocurrency is best-suited for one use: Criminal activity. Because transactions can be anonymous — law enforcement cannot easily trace who buys and sells — its use is dominated by illegal endeavors.
Most heavy users of bitcoin are criminals, such as Silk Road and WannaCry ransomware. Too many bitcoin exchanges have experienced spectacular heists, such as NiceHash and Coincheck, or outright fraud, such as Mt. Gox and Bitfunder. Way too many Initial Coin Offerings are scams — 418 of the 902 ICOs in 2017 have already failed.
Hackers are getting into the act. It’s estimated that 90 percent of all remote hacking is now focused on bitcoin theft by commandeering other people’s computers to mine coins.
Even ordinary buyers are flouting the law. Tax law requires that every sale of cryptocurrency be recorded as a capital gain or loss and, of course, most bitcoin sellers fail to do so. The IRS recently ordered one major exchange to produce records of every significant transaction.
And yet, a prominent Silicon Valley promoter of bitcoin proclaims that “Bitcoin is going to transform society … Bitcoin’s been very resilient. It stayed alive during a very difficult time when there was the Silk Road mess, when Mt. Gox stole all that Bitcoin …” He argues the criminal activity shows that bitcoin is strong. I’d say it shows that bitcoin is used for criminal activity.
Bitcoin transactions are sometimes promoted as instant and nearly free, but they’re often relatively slow and expensive. It takes about an hour for a bitcoin transaction to be confirmed, and the bitcoin system is limited to five transactions per second. MasterCard can process 38,000 per second. Transferring $100 from one person to another costs about $6 using a cryptocurrency exchange, and well less than $1 using an electronic check.
Bitcoin is absurdly wasteful of natural resources. Because it is so compute-intensive, it takes as much electricity to create a single bitcoin — a process called “mining” — as it does to power an average American household for two years. If bitcoin were used for a large portion of the world’s commerce (which won’t happen), it would consume a very large portion of the world’s electricity, diverting scarce power from useful purposes.
In what rational universe could someone simply issue electronic scrip — or just announce that they intend to — and create, out of the blue, billions of dollars of value? It makes no sense.
All of this would be a comic sideshow if innocent people weren’t at risk. But ordinary people are investing some of their life savings in cryptocurrency. One stock brokerage is encouraging its customers to purchase bitcoin for their retirement accounts!
It’s the job of the SEC and other regulators to protect ordinary investors from misleading and fraudulent schemes. It’s time we gave them the legislative authority to do their job.
Article written by Leah Zitter
On August 11, 2016, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released a 300-page report entitled “The future of financial infrastructure: An ambitious look at how blockchain can reshape financial services,” exploring how the financial sector “could overcome current-state pain points through distributed ledger technology (DLT).”
The WEF has been one of the most vociferous advocates for the potential of the blockchain technology. Bitcoin Magazine reported that in 2015 the WEF predicted that blockchain technology was one of the 21 changes in technological transformations and that the tipping point for its adoption would be in 2025.
A year later, World Economic Forum repeated that “virtual currencies and their underlying technologies can provide faster and cheaper financial services and can become a powerful tool for deepening financial inclusion in the developing world.”
In this latest report, the WEF concluded that blockchain technology could have impressive ramifications but would need the collaboration of government and technological experts to succeed.
It took a year for the World Economic Forum (WEF) to research how blockchain technology could help nine financial sectors, which included global payment and foreign trading. More than 200 innovators, subject matter experts and executives from prominent institutions, such as JPMorgan Chase, Visa and MasterCard, contributed their opinions. The results was assembled in this latest report. These are some ifs most significant conclusions:
Blockchain helps by being transparent and effective
“Distributed ledger technology (blockchain) has the potential to drive simplicity and efficiency by establishing new financial services infrastructure and processes” (p.19).
The blockchain ledger can be proven enormously useful to banks and financial institutions by providing them with an unprecedented layer of transparency and trust. The operational transparency of DLT will cut down, if not eliminate, the number of disputes, minimize frauds and ensure that obligations and settlements are met. The ledger could also give companies a more secure, effective way of moving money and tracking transactions. Regulators could employ real-time monitoring of transactions, while operations could better source liquidity of assets and move money between accounts.
Blockchain merges with other transformative technologies
“Distributed ledger technology will form the foundation of next generation financial services infrastructure in conjunction with other existing and emerging technologies” (p.20)
Over the last 50 years, a number of emerging technologies have merged to transform the financial services industry of the future. These include biometrics, cloud computing, cognitive computing, quantum analytics, predictive analytics and robotics. Distributed ledger technology is one of these but the WEF cautions that blockchain should be seen as “part of the toolbox” rather than a panacea. Each industry, too, would use DLT in its own ways and for its own means, so for instance, the trading sector will likely use the ledger for real-time tracking and efficacy while payers that deal with global payments will use DLT for, among other reasons, preventing friction.
Blockchain is revolutionary
“Similar to technological advances in the past, new financial services infrastructure will transform and question traditional orthodoxies in today’s business models” (p.24)
Blockchain upends all aspects of the traditional financial services sector from standard accounting habits to lending practices. Blockchain provides its own distributed, transparent record-keeping, leverages real-time trust among market participants and balances the information flow between lenders and borrowers. It also boosts dispute resolution since it provides regulators and regulated entities with a common transparent ledger. Finally, DLT reduces the need for intermediaries because of its shared and trusted environment.
Blockchain needs collaboration to succeed
“The most impactful distributed ledger technology applications will require deep collaboration between incumbents, innovators and regulators, adding complexity and delaying implementation” (p.23)
The World Economic Forum cautions that “updating financial infrastructure through DLT will require significant time and investment.” The three imperatives are: Resolving security issues, aligning competing interests and imposing a legal, regulatory and governance framework. This sounds easier than stated since divergent company interests are involved. If, and once achieved, this would provide DLT with a standardized system and superior efficacy that would boost the financial success of all nine sectors.
Looking ahead
To date, more than 24 countries and 90 corporations use blockchain technology with many more expressing interest. The WEF notes that large banks around the world, including more than 90 central banks, have developed blockchain groups that hail its potential impact and study how to harness its technology. In fact, the report predicted that a full 80% of these banks could launch their own blockchains by 2017. Blockchain technology has “captured the imagination and wallets of the financial services ecosystem” but the WEF concluded that DLT has to resolve critical issues moving forward. These include: How to develop a roadmap to achieve market collaboration and standardized regulation, how to structure a regulated tax framework and how to implement a cost-benefit analysis to determine the financial viability of distributed ledger technology.
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