Godfrey Bloom is a member of the British Parliament. His in-your-face style of educating and shocking his peers has made him a controversial politician. He has occasionally been escorted out of the assembled parliament because of his rowdy rhetoric.
Consider the video below. Bloom offers a critical, but simple and clear explanation of the Fractional Reserve banking system used in the US and Europe. This gets to the heart of the matter! [continue below video]…
Conclusion (mine, and not Mr. Bloom’s): It is in the interest of governments to use a form of money that they cannot manipulate, print, spend, hide or lend without first earning, taxing or legitimately borrowing — and then balancing the books, openly.
Bitcoin is such a currency. Any country that adopts an open source, permissionless, and completely transparent monetary instrument will demonstrate to citizens and taxpayers that they respect their constituents and that they commit to balance their books like any state, corporation, NGO or household.
Would an ethical government surrender control of its own monetary policy? H*ll, yes! This is how a government avoids rampant inflation and the burden of non-consensual debt to future generations. It is also how a government makes taxation, redistribution and spending transparent and accountable. It is how a government restores trust.
We have been raised with centuries of dogma that teach us to accept inflation, and a constantly escalating public debt. Sometimes, the path forward is not immediately obvious. But history doesn’t lie. When trusted nations with large economies manipulate interest rates, borrow without a lender, or inflate a nation out of a crisis (what the US calls “quantitative easing”), the long term effect is certain to be no different than Argentina, Zimbabwe, Venezuela or Germany between the wars. It is a recipe for disaster. It places every citizen and their future children into debt-bondage.
Moving away from the Gold Standard in the 1970s was a risky maneuver. The risk was not abandoning a precious metal with intrinsic value—but rather it placed the full faith and credit of our economy in the hands of transient politicians, rather than in a capped commodity with certain and immutable properties.
Bitcoin is the new gold. It is capped, transparent, open-source, vetted and without a mechanism for quick or covert manipulation (the US calls this “raising the debt ceiling” and they do it every few months!). We may not move to an economy based on Bitcoin today or tomorrow, but that day is coming. Thankfully, it’s coming!
Philip Raymond co-chairs CRYPSA, publishes A Wild Duck and hosts the New York Bitcoin Event. He was speaker at Cryptocurrency Conferences in Dubai, South Africa and India. Click Here to inquire about a presentation.
Networks that harness entanglement and teleportation could enable leaps in security, computing and science.
Puerto Rico 09:15 A History of Virtual Currency and Digital Payments Rod Garratt UCSB 09:30 Transparency and the Transformative Nature of Blockchain Technology Gerardo Trevino Paybook 10:00 Living on the Ledger And The Coming Licensing Revolution Matt Clemenson Lottery.com Scott Picken WealthMigrate.com 10:30 Coffee Break 11:00 New Money, New Internet, New World Alena Vranova Satoshi Labs 11:15 Crypto Trading Panel Jared Geata Blockchain Industries, Inc.
Will the benefits of making data more widely available outweigh such risks? The signs are that they will. Plenty of countries are now opening up their medical records, but few have gone as far as Sweden. It aims to give all its citizens electronic access to their medical records by 2020; over a third of Swedes have already set up accounts. Studies show that patients with such access have a better understanding of their illnesses, and that their treatment is more successful. Trials in America and Canada have produced not just happier patients but lower costs, as clinicians fielded fewer inquiries. That should be no surprise. No one has a greater interest in your health than you do. Trust in Doctor You.
NO WONDER they are called “patients”. When people enter the health-care systems of rich countries today, they know what they will get: prodding doctors, endless tests, baffling jargon, rising costs and, above all, long waits. Some stoicism will always be needed, because health care is complex and diligence matters. But frustration is boiling over. This week three of the biggest names in American business—Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase—announced a new venture to provide better, cheaper health care for their employees. A fundamental problem with today’s system is that patients lack knowledge and control. Access to data can bestow both.
The internet already enables patients to seek online consultations when and where it suits them. You can take over-the-counter tests to analyse your blood, sequence your genome and check on the bacteria in your gut. Yet radical change demands a shift in emphasis, from providers to patients and from doctors to data. That shift is happening. Technologies such as the smartphone allow people to monitor their own health. The possibilities multiply when you add the crucial missing ingredients—access to your own medical records and the ability easily to share information with those you trust. That allows you to reduce inefficiencies in your own treatment and also to provide data to help train medical algorithms. You can enhance your own care and everyone else’s, too.
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Many of the previously dumb devices in our homes are getting smarter with the advent of internet-connected lights, thermostats, and more. Surely the windows can’t be smart, can they? A team of engineers from the German Friedrich-Schiller University Jena have created just that — a smart window that can alter its opacity and harvest energy from the sun’s rays.
There have been a number of “smart” electrochromatic window designs over the years, but these are mostly aimed at changing tint or opacity only. The windows designed by Friedrich-Schiller University researchers are vastly more functional. The so-called Large-Area Fluidic Windows (LaWin) design uses a fluid suspension of iron particles. This fluid is contained within the window in a series of long vertical channels. These “functional fluids” allow the window to change opacity, but also absorb and distribute heat.
The iron-infused fluid remains diffused until you switch the window on — the nanoparticles cloud up the channels and block light. When you flip the switch, magnets drag the nanoparticles out of the liquid to make the window fully transparent. When the magnet is switched off, the nanoparticles are resuspended to darken the panel. In general, the more nanoparticles you add, the darker the window becomes. You can even completely black it out with enough iron.
