Author Archives: Jeremy Lichtman

About Jeremy Lichtman

CEO of Lichtman Consulting. Formerly CTO of MIT Consulting. Serial entrepreneur, software and web developer.

Direct magnetic drive

Technology Uncategorized No Comments

I’ve been thinking about alternative power-trains lately. I believe I’ve come up with something that is at least partially novel, and that might have applications for nanotechnology (I don’t think it scales up, unfortunately).

The basic idea is a modification of a standard electric motor (linear or rotary – I’ll show examples with use-cases below). The thought I had was whether it was possible to make the “fuel” for the motor directly power it, rather than using electromagnets powered by electricity. Continue reading →

Pricing signals and deflationary economics

Business No Comments

Just a quick thought about deflationary economics, pricing signals, and BitCoin stock markets.

If you own an asset (let’s say shares in a publicly traded company, for the sake of simplicity) and its price goes down, there could be several reasons – perhaps the company isn’t doing so well, or the overall market (or market segment) is moving downwards, or the currency of the country that the company is in is moving relative to your currency. Typically you can figure out the reason though, and make some assumptions about what to do about it (i.e. sell, hold, or double down).

There’s an issue with recognizing these kinds of signals in an extremely deflationary environment though, and it might have implications for some new markets that trade shares in companies that are denominated in BitCoins.

There are currently nearly 12 million BTC in existence, and the total that will ever be created is capped at 21 million. Looking at existing markets, the total value of available shares is likely well over 1 million BTC already (although only a fraction of those shares trade on any given day). It would be easy for the total value to exceed the total number of BTC that are actually available, particularly if we include futures contracts on those shares. All it would take is for one of the existing companies that are traded on those markets to have a successful quarter, and for their share price to rise rapidly.

The problem is that the available BitCoins that can be used to make purchases is limited (but highly, highly subdivisible). So if the volume of trade increases, the available BTC to make those trades becomes more limited over time. This generally will drive prices down (and conversely the value of a single BTC up). This doesn’t matter too much when it comes to buying, say, a book online. The vendor would simply price the item in BTC based on a conversion into their own currency, so the value of the item in fiat currency remains the same.

The problem arises with assets that are denominated in BTC, but which are held for lengthy periods of time. Let’s say you buy one share in company BTCco for one BTC, when a single BTC is valued at $100 USD. If the value of a BTC goes up to $200 BTC, all things being equal the share will go down in value to 0.5 BTC. If you’d just left your BitCoins sitting in your wallet though, you’d still have one BTC.

To make things worse, it makes it extremely hard to tell why the price of a given asset is going down. Is it due to deflation, or is it due to a problem in the underlying asset? The signal gets completely confused.

This didn’t matter so much when these markets were tiny hobby websites, but some of them now have significant trading volume. Whenever I see orders for tens of thousands of dollars worth of BTC-denominated assets fly by, I wonder if the people making those trades understand the underlying risk.

Partial automation of self-driving vehicles

Uncategorized No Comments

Take a look at the scene below, and imagine it from the perspective of a self-driving car.

Street scene 1
Linked to original image on Flickr.

There’s a lot going on.

  • There’s the outlines of the road (i.e. potential paths, some of them legal routes for the vehicle to take);
  • there are traffic lights and other signs, all of which need to be identified (and then also checked for context – i.e. “does this sign apply to me?”);
  • there are other cars on the road and pedestrians (each of which may suddenly change direction);
  • as well as innumerable other non-traffic-related distractions (trees, shops);
  • and (perhaps most importantly) the desired destination of the passengers, which may also change rapidly (“hey, there’s a sale on in that store”, “you just missed a parking spot!” etc).

Continue reading →

Inflection Points, Driverless Cars and “Soft” AI

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Earlier this week, Nissan announced that it would have several models of driver-less cars on the market by 2020. Now GM and Honda have made several similar announcements. This could be an inflection point, where the driver-less car becomes somewhat inevitable (barring legislative ramifications, or a particularly gruesome accident). Continue reading →

Microsoft after Ballmer

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The New York Times, commenting on Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s retirement, stated their belief that his replacement should be a catch-up artist, in order to allow Microsoft to somehow “get back in the game”.

I disagree. Playing catch-up is a fool’s game, a form of fighting the last battle. Continue reading →

Indoor vertical food walls

Uncategorized 4 Comments

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about a few topics in the past few years – distributed systems, lowering humanity’s environmental footprint, and also food. None of what I’m about to write is particularly original, nor is it going to change the world – the potential product I’m describing is more oriented towards first-world apartment dwellers. I’m hoping that the idea will start other people thinking about the problem though.

The underlying issue is that our food supply is extremely fragile, and (while affordable in first-world terms) costly. There has been much research into reducing bottlenecks in the food supply chain, as well as well-known programs to encourage people to consume locally produced food.

One solution that has evolved is the idea of a food wall. They’re a form of vertical high density gardening. You can see examples here and here. Some examples are really impressive, and can generate vast amounts of food in a relatively small area. Most of the ones I’ve seen are intended for outdoor use though, and are still labor intensive. Continue reading →

What is the Hyperloop?

Business Strategy Technology 2 Comments

As usual, Elon Musk is keeping everyone guessing. At some point in August, he has said that he is going to reveal exactly what he has in mind for this high speed transit system. There have been a number of guesses about the precise nature of the hyperloop, at least one of them supposedly coming close.

The basic idea has been around since the 60’s – build something like a train, but running inside of a tube, allowing for tight control over the environment that it moves in (and therefore permitting higher velocity). Some of the variations involve a vacuum tube, or pressure differentials to move the vehicles, or magnetic propulsion of different kinds. All of them were ultimately discarded as being unfeasible.

Instead of speculating about the technology (since so many others are doing so already), I just want to share a few thoughts that came to mind about how he might be planning on implementing the hyperloop from a business standpoint.

  • Railroad companies tend to trade at a relatively low P/E these days. A railroad already owns significant rights-of-way. In theory, buying such a company could be an excellent starting point. The new hyperloop tubes could be built on elevating columns, above the existing railway lines.
  • Safety is going to be a huge factor. How quickly can the vehicles inside the tube be decelerated in case of emergency? How will the system prevent vehicles from piling into each other at huge velocity, if something goes wrong? How will it deal with things like earthquakes?
  • My best guess is as follows: this system is wasted on human passengers. Personally, I’d rather take a plane if I’m in a hurry to get somewhere.
  • However: this would be an amazing way to deliver cargo quickly – think same-day delivery. Combined with other light-weight distribution systems (i.e. a network of small local delivery vehicles), a trans-continental hyperloop network would allow a small number of warehouses to provide same-day coverage for the whole of North America. Think of Amazon’s grocery experiment in San Francisco, scaled up big-time. Using a large volume of tiny vehicles, with automatic routing, the hyperloop would allow for exceptionally agile logistics, and would enable business models that are currently unfeasible.

I guess we’ll just have to stay tuned for now…

Yahoo! buys Tumblr

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A few people have asked for my opinion about the Yahoo! purchase of Tumblr.

Short version: this is a “bet the farm” deal. Y! has (at last report) $1.2 billion in cash on hand, and this is an all-cash $1.1 billion deal. If anything goes wrong elsewhere, they’ll need to raise cash in a hurry, which would be costly. Continue reading →

How to compete with Glass

Business Technology No Comments

Google Glass is coming, and with it (I’ll bet) any number of similar me-too products from other manufacturers.

Glass is a sophisticated piece of technology, packing many features into a tiny package. It is an expensive gizmo though, even assuming that the actual price point will be significantly lower than the $1500 demo units. And users still need to connect it to a cellphone for best use (i.e. data package), although it can also connect to WiFi directly, where available.

The question I have is that if the user is still going to need a cellphone anyway, why not remove a big chunk of the functionality from the glasses, and rely on the phone instead? In doing so, a competing product could have identical (or at least very similar) functionality at a far lower price point.

All that’s required is a camera, a small microphone, a tiny LCD display, and some method of connecting to the phone (could even be a lightweight fiber-optic cable for high bandwidth and improved privacy). These are relatively cheap components, compared to having a separate device with its own WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS capabilities (not to mention a CPU of its own and fairly substantial amount of RAM – there’s a nice list of Glass’ features on Wikipedia, here).

Where things will really get interesting, of course, are the next generation of devices after…

The Fed Should Buy BitCoins

Business 9 Comments

Editorial note: I know I said I was going to write about other things, but the following point just occurred to me.

The Fed is currently committed to purchasing $88 billion USD per month in assets.

Regardless of whether you agree with their policy, they should set aside a million dollars per month from that amount (which is so small that it couldn’t be represented in the error bars of their purchase) and use it to purchase BitCoins, on a cost-averaged basis, at whatever the exchange rate happens to be on that day. There’s basically no risk for them at all at that small volume, even if those BitCoins wind up being worthless.

Why, you might ask.

Sounds like a silly (even childish) endeavour for so serious an institution as the US Federal Reserve Bank. After all, the entire BitCoin economy is only a billion and a half dollars.

Here’s the thing: at least some BitCoin enthusiasts believe fervently that BTC is going to be a multi-trillion dollar economy some time soon, and will in the process displace fiat currencies. I would be overjoyed if that were to be the case, but I’ll reserve judgement for now.

At the very least, BTC is a very interesting beasty, and it has some exceedingly useful properties in terms of what the Fed claims to be trying to accomplish.

Here’s why:

  1. It would provide a floor for the BitCoin market, in addition to lots of liquidity.
  2. It would ipso facto allow BitCoin to grow into what it theoretically can become. With major involvement, other big parties would feel more comfortable jumping in, more eyes would be on the markets (theoretically driving out the crooked players), and there would be impetus to build scalable exchanges (and to regulate away the pump and dump nonsense)
  3. Key issue, from the Fed’s perspective: It would provide a highly effective trickle down effect to places the current stimulus doesn’t reach – many ordinary people on the street mine BitCoin, which would be made more valuable by the purchase; this would also trickle up to a wide variety of hardware manufacturers (some of them niche) as well.
  4. If (or when) BitCoin finally does become a global reserve currency of sorts, the Fed would have enough of a stake in the market to allow the US economy to still be relevant.

A similar argument applies to all other world economies.