Life After Google
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Chapter 12: Finding Satoshi
1. Think of this as a proposed screenplay for a historic docudrama on Satoshi. It is based entirely on recorded posts by Satoshi, interlarded with pleasantries and other expedients characteristic of historical fictions.
Satoshi Nakamoto’s famous whitepaper is “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (2008).
The most authoritative exposition of the details is Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Media, 2015).
2. Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives, https://p2pfoundation.net.
3. Craig Wright, “Shinseiki Evangerion,” nChain: The Future of Bitcoin, Arnhem, July 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdJexAYjrDw&t=49s.
Chapter 13: Battle of the Blockchains
1. Andrew O’Hagan, “The Satoshi Affair,” London Review of Books, Vol. 38, number 13, June 30, 2016; see also The Secret Life: Three True Stories of the Digital Age (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2017).
2. Craig Wright, “Future of Bitcoin Talk,” Arnhem, The Netherlands, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdJexAYjrDw.
3. http://gavinandresen.ninja/satoshi (May 2, 2016).
4. Swirlds is a platform for distributed applications based on the “hashgraph” consensus algorithm. https://www.swirlds.com/. IOTA is an open-source distributed ledger that does not use a blockchain. Its quantum-proof protocol is known as the “Tangle.” https://blog.iota.org/the-tangle-an-illustrated-introduction-4d5eae6fe8d4.
5. Saifedean Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard (New York: Wiley, 2018).
6. Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar, Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor’s Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2018), 178–79.
Chapter 14: Blockstack
1. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1992).
2. Stephenson, Snow Crash, 27. “The monorail is a free piece of public utility software that enables users to change their location on the Street rapidly and smoothly . . . ” (Ibid).
3. Muneeb Ali, “Trust-to-Trust Design of a New Internet,” (doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, June 2017), https://muneebali.com/thesis.
4. Tedx, New York, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtOIh93Hvuw&t=28s.
5. Muneeb Ali, “Things Engineers Do to Move to the US,” Medium, April 26, 2015. https://medium.com/@muneeb/living-on-one-mcfish-a-day-for-the-american-dream-592ed97c1bab.
6. Andy Oram, ed., Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly & Associates, 2001). This book is a trove of the 1990s research in distributed systems and cryptography that flowered in the cryptocurrency eruption of our time. “Mojo,” one of the first proposed crypto tokens, and eCash, are precursor cryptocurrencies discussed by Michael Freedman and others throughout. Freedman worked on micropayments, “zero-knowledge proofs,” digital cash, mathematical hashes, and other relevant pursuits at MIT and Princeton. In Peer-to-Peer, he contributed to a chapter on “Free Haven” (an anonymous storage system wherein the publishers of documents determine the lifetime of the document), 159–187. His chapter “Accountability” (271–340) addresses micropayments, “hash cash,” reputation systems, double-spending, proof-of-work, and other issues familiar on the blockchain. Co-author with Freedman on both papers were Roger Dingledine, student of Ron Rivest, one of the eponymous inventors of RSA security and an enthusiast with Adi Shamir of digital cash, and David Molnar, a prominent crypto-elite from Berkeley, Harvard, and Microsoft. Any of these guys was probably competent to be Satoshi.
7. Muneeb Ali, “Trust-to-Trust,” 60.
8. Berners-Lee on the Charlie Rose show: https://charlierose.com/videos/29038.
Chapter 15: Taking Back the Net
1. Muneeb Ali, “Trust-to-Trust,” 31.
2. Jude Nelson et al, “Extending Existing Blockchains with Virtualchain,” Workshop on Distributed Cryptocurrencies and Consensus Ledgers, Chicago, IL, July 2016.
Chapter 16: Brave Return of Brendan Eich
1. Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape Our Future (New York: Penguin, 2017), 229.
2. 2 Ibid., 229.
Chapter 17: Yuanfen
1. Peter Thiel, with Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 75.
2. Alexander Mordvintsev, Christopher Olah, and Mike Tyka, “Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks,” Google Research Blog, June 17, 2015, https://research.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html.
3. Steven Levy, “Inside Deep Dreams: How Google Made Its Computers Go Crazy,” Wired, December 11, 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/12/inside-deep-dreams-how-google-made-its-computers-go-crazy/.
4. “Here’s How To Make Your Own Dreamscope A.I. Images” by “burnersxxx,” July 16, 2015, https://burners.me/tag/dreamscope/.
Chapter 18: The Rise of Sky Computing
1. Urs Hölzle, keynote at Optical Fiber Conference, Los Angeles, April 11, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9zEiGyvJ-A.
2. Ibid.
3. SWNS, “Americans Check Their Phones 80 Times a Day: Study,” New York Post, November 8, 2017, https://nypost.com/2017/11/08/americans-check-their-phones-80-times-a-day-study/.
4. Muneeb Ali, “The Next Wave of Computing,” August 2017, https://medium.com/@muneeb/latest.
5. Ivan Liljeqvist, Ivan on Tech, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEDKGyeF6fw.
6. OTOY, RenderToken White Paper, August 17, 2017, https://rendertoken.com/pdf/1.7RenderTokenWhitepaper.pdf.
7. Ibid.
8. Brendan Eich, “The Render Token,” September 25, 2017, https://brendaneich.com/.
Chapter 19: A Global Insurrection
1. “The World’s Most Dangerous Cities,” The Economist, March 31, 2017, https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/03/daily-chart-23.
2. Francisco Pérez de Antón, In Praise of Francisco Marroquín (Guatemala: Universidad Francisco Marroquín, 1999).
3. Manuel F. Ayau, Philosophy Statement and Inaugural Address, Universidad Francisco Marroquín, 1972.
4. Marla Dickerson, “Leftist Thinking Left Off Syllabus,” Los Angeles Times, June 6, 2008, http://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fi-guatemala6-2008jun06-story.html.
5. Carlos Sabino, Wayne Leighton, Privatization of Telecommunications in Guatemala: A Tale Worth Telling, Case Study (The Antigua Forum, 2013); Rocio Cara Labrador and Danielle Renwick, “Central America’s Violent Northern Triangle,” Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder, January 18, 2018, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/central-americas-violent-northern-triangle. Giancarlo Ibárgüen on the War on Drugs: “I blame the war on drugs in the United States for what is happening here in Guatemala.” “The Drug War in Guatemala: A Conversation with Giancarlo Ibárgüen,” October 21, 2011, Reason.tv, produced by Paul Feine and Alex Manning, http://reason.com/blog/2011/10/21/reasontv-the-drug-war-in-guate. more Guatemala facts (including standout infant mortality rate): Guatemala country profile, BBC News, page last updated 3 July 2012 11:42 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/country_profiles/1215758.stm#facts Guatemala’s infant mortality rate in 2017 was 21 deaths per 1,000 live births. Haiti (46.8) and Bolivia (35.3) are the only worse places in the Western Hemisphere for newborns. COUNTRY COMPARISON: INFANT MORTALITY RATE, Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook, 2017 estimates: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2091rank.html Highest Infant Mortality in the Western Hemisphere: 1. Haiti (#36), 2. Bolivia (#52), 3. Guatemala (#78)—in parentheses is the country’s place on the list of 225 countries in the world.
6. The Top 50 Places to Study Classical Economics, https://thebestschools.org/features/top-places-to-study-classical-economics/.
Chapter 20: Neutering the Network
1. “10 US Telecom Policy Myths,” http:
//www.danielberninger.com/10myths.html.
2. Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires revised paperback edition (New York: Vintage Books, 2011). See also, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside our Heads (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), where (in a footnote!), Wu acknowledges that diverging from a network-neutral business strategy was what caused AOL’s downfall: “For the walled garden ultimately was a weaker offering than the full variety offered on the Internet.” As he concludes, the pursuit of the advertising riches of TV on a non-broadcast medium controlled by customers could never work. Wu gives us the delicious quote from AOL CEO Steve Case: “What really bothers me,” he said, “is the ads are in a place where members will see them.”
3. As I conclude in Telecosm: The World After Bandwidth Abundance (New York: Simon &Schuster, Touchstone paperback edition, 2000), 163. “Smart radios suggest not a beach but the endless waves of the ocean itself . . . In general, the FCC should not be in the business of licensing spectrum. It should instead issue driver’s licenses for radios [all electromagnetic transmitters]. A heavy burden of proof should fall on any service providers with blind or high-powered systems, who maintain that they cannot operate without an exclusive license, who want to build on the beach and keep everyone else out of the surf.”
4. Perianne Boring, “Protecting Blockchain from Mad Hatter,” The Hill, November 21, 2017.
Chapter 21: The Empire Strikes Back
1. Kai Stinchcombe, “Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain,” Medium, December 22, 2017, https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100.
Chapter 22: The Bitcoin Flaw
1. George Gilder, “What Bitcoin can Teach,” in The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2016), 69–76.
2. Nathan K. Lewis, “The Gold Standard and the Myth about Money Growth,” Forbes.com, February 16, 2012. Also much of the same data are in Gold: The Final Standard (New Berlin, NY: Canyon Maple Publishing, 2017), 3.
3. Saifedean Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard (New York: Wiley, 2018).
4. Ibid., 40.
5. Friedrich Hayek, “Toward a Free Market Monetary System,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 3 no. 1: 1–8.
6. Cameron Harwick, “Cryptocurrency and the Problem of Intermediation,” The Independent Review (Spring 2016): 581.
7. Ammous., 16.
8. Summing up this position against Ammous is learned gold exponent Ralph Benko. See “Why Bitcoin Never Was, Is Not, And Will Never Be the New Gold Standard,” Coin, February 7, 2018, https://www.gcoin.com/blog/2018/2/7/why-bitcoin-never-was-is-not-and-will-never-be-the-new-gold-standard.
9. Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York: Harmony Books, 1980), foreword by Andrew Tobias.
Chapter 23: The Great Unbundling
1. Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016), 92–93, 142.
2. Clayton Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2003), 126–143.
3. Binyamin Appelbaum, “Is Bitcoin a Waste of Electricity, or Something Worse?” New York Times, February 28, 2018.
4. The error of GDP accounting that renders invisible the most creative parts of the economy is rectified by economist Mark Skousen’s new concept of Gross Output (GO) or gross domestic expenditures. Adopted by the Federal Bureau of Economic Analysis in December 2013, GO includes intermediate spending on capital goods and commodities, not just final sales registered in GDP. Because GO includes savings and capital formation—entrepreneurial creativity in crypto, for example—Skousen’s index correlates much better with subsequent growth than does GDP, which rises anomalously with government debt and transfer payments. While economists disparage GO for double-counting the sale of components of the car and the car itself, GDP double-counts food, medicine, and other supports for human labor. The economy is a manifold of overlapping goods and services being constantly transformed. Any measurement of it incurs the double-counting problem.
5. Tapscott and Tapscott, 95.
6. Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017),153. Tegmark points out that an artificial intelligence working at a rate of one operation a nanosecond (working, that is, at the gigahertz clock rates of current computers) would feel like an operation every four months to us.
7. Nick Tredennick and Paul Wu, Transaction Security, Cryptochain, and Chip Level Identity (Cupertino: Jonetix, 2018). See also Tredennick and Wu, “Transaction Security Begins With Chip Level Identity,” Int’l Conference on Internet Computing and Internet of Things, ICOMP, 2017.
8. Leemon Baird, “The Swirlds Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm: Fair, Fast, Byzantine Fault Tolerance,” Swirlds Tech Report, May 31, 2016, revised February 16, 2018.
9. Leemon Baird, Mance Harmon, and Paul Madsen, “Hedera: A Governing Council & Public Hashgraph Network: The Trust Layer of the Internet,” white paper V1.0, March 13, 2018, 22.
10. Ibid., 19.
Epilogue: The New System of the World
1. Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything (New York: Henry Holt, 2017), 2. Introduction.
2. Nick Paumgarten, “Mikaela Shiffrin, the Best Slalom Skier in the World,” New Yorker, November 27, 2017.
3. Lanier, ibid., eleventh and twelfth VR definitions.
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