What does it mean for something to be alive? Or for it to be intelligent? Can Information Theory shed some light?

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How long can a computer last?

There’s a few extant working examples from the dawn of the computer age, say the 1940s. And while not currently very old, there’s a working model of (part of) Babbage’s difference engine (a mechanical computer) that looks like it could last a while (but also looks pretty hard to fix if something breaks).

The Antikythera Mechanism is in rough shape, but a modern copy, made out of tougher materials, could probably last a while – but it isn’t a general purpose computer either.

The desktop or laptop computer (or phone) that you’re using probably won’t last ten years (15 or 20 if you’re lucky). Good luck replacing old motherboards (or even memory chips). Even better luck replacing that old pre-IDE non-standard hard drive controller.

In case you haven’t heard, Facebook is launching a “cryptocurrency”.

There’s quite a bit of hype, and an equal amount of criticism (particularly vis-a-vis Facebook’s poor reputation for privacy). It isn’t quite clear to me though whether anyone has actually read the technical documentation.

There is a white paper here, and some technical documentation here. Probably worth a read in both cases. It’s really important to note though (discussed elsewhere on the web, but not here) that they’re actually really early in the development game. It isn’t clear whether any actual code has been written yet. Editorial correction: there’s a bit of code here. It’s very early in the dev process, and only a few commits have been made so far.

The first thing that drew my attention was a tweet that was linked from another article. Key phrase “Blockchain without proof of work or value volatility“. Now, there’s a lot of different kinds of blockchains out there, but that still sounds a bit odd. I also saw the word “smart contract” mentioned all over the place, but there’s absolutely nothing in the technical documentation about those at all – and those are difficult, difficult things to implement properly.

The past few years I’ve received fewer spam phone calls on my cellphone than in the past, but I’ve noticed an uptick recently. It’s an irritant for me, but a severe problem for others – most of those calls are scams rather than ads, and vulnerable people do fall for them. Do Not Call registries only help to a certain extent, particularly as it is hard to enforce illicit calls when the call is done via VOIP and is coming from another country.

A potential solution to this could look something like SSL for websites. SSL (secure socket layers) is used when you access a website via “https” rather than “http”. Most modern browsers show an indicator next to the url that lets you know whether or not the website is “secure” (at least in the sense that there’s some verification of who owns the site, as well as an encrypted connection between your browser and the web server that is difficult for a third party to read).

The Earth is getting hotter.

I don’t feel like having a heated (pun intended) argument over anthropomorphic climate change, so let’s just say for the sake of argument that in thirty year’s time a super-intelligent AI pops its metaphorical head out of a lab in Silicon Valley and turns the entire planet into a layered shell of computational material. Or that the price of Bitcoin goes to the moon, and humans do pretty much the same thing to our poor planet all on our own. Whatever: all of these things radiate a vast amount of heat, and the world will get hotter (especially if there’s a few extra gigatons of CO2 involved).

What do people usually do with things that generate a lot of heat? Well here’s an example, from a computer:

The following is, I suspect, an important point, and one that I haven’t heard anyone make so far.

Bitcoin is currently (and this changes regularly, so will be out of date shortly after this is written) hovering around the $10,000 mark, with a total market cap of around $170 billion.

The volatility of Bitcoin – both daily and intra-day – has not decreased as the price has increased. There are still 10%+ intraday moves, and 3 – 5% daily moves aren’t uncommon at all.

Let’s assume that the BTC bulls are correct, and the price goes to a million dollars in a couple of years (or “to the moon”, in BTC parlance). That implies a total market cap in the region of $10 trillion, which would be a size-able piece of the entire world economy (by comparison, global GDP is somewhere north of $100 trillion).

Let’s also assume, barring changes that nobody is even talking about yet, that BTC remains highly volatile, even at that stratospheric price. I’ve heard people claim over the years that eventually things will settle down, but I’ve seen no evidence of this so far.

What does that do economically? What’s the ramification of a large percentage of the economy having dramatic volatility of this nature?

The major global currencies seldom move more than a percentage point or two on any given day. The rapid appreciation of the Swiss Franc in 2015 caused serious problems in a number of countries, and required various countries to backstop their mortgage industries (some people had hedged by taking out mortgages in Francs, instead of their local currency or Euros). That was a one-time event though, and primarily limited to Europe. What would happen if this sort of move (in both directions, with little advance warning) occurred several times per month, on a much larger basis, and on a global scale?

None of this is insurmountable (although precisely how one might go about tamping down the vol of a distributed blockchain is beyond me), but people need to start thinking about this before it causes economic havoc. Because it absolutely will.

The economist, Robin Hanson, proposed a solution to the Fermi Paradox about 20 years ago. Commonly referred to as the Great Filter, Hanson theorized a set of potential barriers to intelligent life in the universe, with the implication that at passing through at least one of the steps must be improbable, the result being that technological species are rare.

I recently read an essay by Neil deGrasse Tyson that quoted an estimate: that in the history of life on Earth, there have been around ten billion species. I’ve looked for a source for this; the estimates that I’ve found range over several orders of magnitude, but ten billion is a nice round number, and it works for the sake of the argument that I want to make (feel free to substitute your own number instead). Continue reading →

There’s a lot of talk in the Bitcoin community about the possibility of a hard fork in the blockchain at some point.

The underlying issue has to do with the size limit of transaction blocks, which result in limits to the time it takes to process a Bitcoin transaction. There’s a good article on the philosophy of the two sides on QZ (link), which is worth reading if you need a primer.

Essentially, one side wants to double the size of a block from 1mb to 2mb, and the other side wants blocks to be unlimited in size. Both options have drawbacks (both technical and philosophical) that I won’t get into here.

I’d like to propose a compromise between the two options. Continue reading →

I’m not sure if this is an original idea, but sharing just in case.

Many modern cars have push-button starters that do not require a key to start the ignition. Usually, the proximity of the owner’s fob is sufficient to start the car. The problem, of course, is that the code to open the car is the same, and (by design) it needs to work from a distance. This provides ample opportunity for hackers to intercept the code (and either open, or steal the car), even with various techniques that try to obscure the code.

It occurs to me that the process of opening and of starting the car do not need to be combined.

The fob could contain two transmitters, with different coding schemes. One of them would be used for remote entry, as in current designs. The other, which would be extremely low-powered, and only operate from a range of two or three feet, would be used to enable the ignition.