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The Sandman Producers Already Have Someone in Mind To Play Morpheus’ Son – ComicBook.com

August 28, 2022 | Author: admin

Netflix has officially released all episodes of their live-action adaptation of DC Comics and Vertigo's The Sandman comics. The Sandman features an all-star cast such as Tom Sturridge as Morpheus / Dream and even Gwendolyn Christie as Lucifer. The first season of the series hasn't even begun to dive deep into Sandman lore, but the producers behind the series already have an idea of where to go next. Executive Producer Alan Heinberg, recently revealed that he and Neil Gaiman already know who they'd like to play Morpheus and Calliope's son, Orpheus.

"I don't know if I'm allowed to say it, but we've talked about someone that we feel very strongly about," Heinberg revealed to Variety. "And we have had those conversations and if we get a second season, we would love to be able to cast that person. We are conceiving of the whole season with this person in mind."

Recently, Gaiman revealed while talking with Entertainment Weekly why he refused to come aboard previous Sandman projects.

"I had refused to get involved," Gaiman said of previous adaptations, most recently one with Joseph Gordon-Levitt attached to both direct and star in. "I'd refused to write them; I refused to be the executive producer. I wouldn't do it because I knew that if I did, I would lose the only power that I had, which was to be able to speak out against a bad Sandman movie. Fortunately, Sandman was just too expensive for anybody to justify making. And if you're trying to make a Sandman movie, the first question is, what do you throw out? Because Sandman, by the time it was finished, is 3,000 pages of comic. So what is your movie then?"

Gaiman went on to recall some of the bad adaptations that almost happened, including a version from Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary that was over as soon as he pitched it to the heads of Warner Bros. He also spoke about a version from producer Jon Peters (of Kevin Smith's Superman movie with a giant spider fame), adding: "There was a version of the script, and I'll never forget the first line: 'A-ha, foolish mortals! As if your puny weapons could hurt me, the mighty Lord of Dreams, the Sandman!' And it got worse from there."

Tom Sturridge leads the all-star cast for the series playing the titular character and Lord of Dreams. He stars alongside Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer, Charles Dance as Roderick Burgess, Asim Chaudhry as Abel, Sanjeev Bhaskar as Cain, Jenna Coleman as Johanna Constantine, Joely Richardson as Ethel Cripps, David Thewlis as John Dee, Boyd Holbrook as The Corinthian, Stephen Fry as Gilbert, Patton Oswalt as the voice of Dream's raven Matthew, .and as Dream's siblings, Mason Alexander Park as Desire and Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death. The first season of the series is now streaming onNetflix.

What do you think about The Sandman? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below or byhitting our writer up @NateBrail on Twitter!

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Will Google’s AI replace 90% of journalists by… – The American Bazaar

August 28, 2022 | Author: admin

Google says AI is intended to help reporters focus on stories requiring creative insight, analysis and ethical judgment

By Kiran N. Kumar

For over a decade, the newsrooms are facing a daunting challenge to reduce costs to survive in a highly competitive global environment. From smartphone journalism to data journalism to reporting the news on Twitter and TikTok, news outlets without using new technology is unimaginable.

With artificial intelligence (AI) entering every avenue of life, both smaller and big newsrooms are vying to employ the new tool and some predictions say by 2025, nearly 90% of news will be written by AI.

In content writing, AI is already employed in transcription software, involving recognition and generation of words from an audio file. Currently, several data-based stories are making use of AI, though employing human supervision at the final stage.

Read: Transfer of knowledge: Robot turns tutor to apprentice ants (August 10, 2022)

Stories tailored to extract patterns from data, predicting future events and adapting performance based corrections from past mistakes fit in here aptly. The fact-checking process has become the poster boy of many AI programs in the last five years.

JournalismAI tool of GoogleIn 2019, Google partnered with Polis, a media think tank of the London School of Economics under its Google News Initiative to create the JournalismAI tool that can take over repetitive, simple or data-intensive work, defending typically that its not meant to replace journalists per se but to help reporters focus on stories requiring creative insight, analysis and ethical judgment.

Mattia Peretti, the lead manager of the initiative says plenty of useful AI-based projects were completed and are available online. The following year the process was formalized to create the fellowship program focusing on educating journalists unfamiliar with AI and fostering the skills of journalists already using AI technology. In total, 46 journalists from 16 countries were selected under the initiative.

Our idea was that if we bring in people who are representative of major populations around the world, they could recognize the kind of biases that exist in current data sets, said Lakshmi Sivadas, manager of the Fellowships program.

Then, in the systems that they are building or developing right now with the fellowship, they would be able to figure out where bias enters the development process, and mitigate that as well.

Read: Will robots replace doctors in surgery rooms?(July 19, 2022)

Unlike OpenAI or Googles DeepMind, whose research focuses on creating artificial general intelligence that functions as an independent human brain, JournalismAIs project seeks to design tools that require human inputs as well as supervision, she explains.

Accordingly, these projects focused on gathering information, producing content and distributing it to an audience. From identifying trends, issues or events, and monitoring source information, the AI helped newsrooms by collecting and citing articles from various news outlets pushing out stories on the same subject, which Google News aggregator has been doing for more than a decade.

Then news production AIs, focusing on content creation, are rewriting in bullet-points what these news stories are saying by reformatting them to different audiences in a fraction of the time it would take for a human journalist to do so.

Next, the news distribution AIs take over to monitor what impact these news reports are making on consumers, besides tracking readers behavior and personalizing newsflow to them or confining them to see what theyre most interested in.

There is not one single journalism student that decided to take this career path because they were dying to sift through several PDF documents day after day, said Peretti. Thats something machine learning does very well, and I think we should be excited that we can have the support of software doing all these things for us.

Read: Future Shock: Automatic restaurants and robotic kitchens await you(May 11, 2022)

Attack Detector to ParrotThe program roped in subject matter experts from the field of journalism from BBC to Knight Foundation to mentor fellows based on their needs.

One such program is Attack Detector, which seeks to identify hate speech aimed at feeding journalists and environmental activists in Spanish and Portuguese or another program called Parrot, which identifies and measures the spread of state-manufactured media.

The results will be showcased in December at the JournalismAI festival, said Peretti and insisted that they are made with ethical AI use in mind and none of them are meant to run without human supervision.

However, she is silent on the time frame to make it work under Supervision and then going independent, the natural course of any such AI program. Since it would be extremely dangerous to allow for unsupervised use of Journalism AI programs at this point of time, Paretti stresses the word responsible repeatedly.

Im encouraged by what Im seeing in the industry and I want to presume that a little bit of that is due to the work we do. But we need to continue to stress [responsible use of AI] if we really want AI to be a force of good for journalism.

Future erosion of journalismFor journalists who witnessed the erosion of print journalism in the last decade due to omnipresent, often erratic and unexplainable Google News algorithms, the next decade under the JournalismAI will make journalists sheer museum pieces in newsrooms. As Lakshmi Sivadas unequivocally said AI will overtake global newsrooms and soon it will be inescapable so will it be.

Ethics apart, whether fact checking or community-centric news or event-specific news, all will be churned out by AI managers instantly replacing reporters in newsrooms.

As social media driven no-ethics barred journalism is in vogue already, the journalism as a profession is steered to extinction after two centuries of the human and ethical element imbibed in it.

Read: New initiative pushes for artificial intelligence innovation in newsrooms (August 19, 2022)

At a time of surmounting reports of racial and gender biases creeping in racially profiling people of color that rattled medical and linguistic arenas of AI, journalism will not be far behind to fall prey to similar bias.

With JournalismAI employed in every newsroom, despite all the benefits associated with it, journalists per se will soon be replaced by managers to make decisions on how this tool should be used for business. Perhaps, the time is ripe for even digital journalists of today to rush into management roles.

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Bitcoin has crashed 68% from its peak but one bull says the latest crypto winter is a ‘warm winter’ – CNBC

August 26, 2022 | Author: admin

A crypto winter is here but it's going to be a "warm winter," according to one crypto bull.

Bitcoin may have fallen by more than half from record levels, but "there's so much more than that," said Edith Yeung, a general partner at Race Capital.

"In some sense, the 'warm winter' is basically going to push out everybody who really [wants to be] there for short-term gain," she told CNBC's Street Signs Asia last week, highlighting that cryptocurrency is a long-term play.

The term crypto winter refers to a prolonged period of depressed digital coin prices in the market.

Cryptocurrencies have lost around $1.9 trillion in value since the height of a massive rally in 2021.

Bitcoin, the world's biggest digital coin, is about 68% off its all-time high of nearly $69,000 in November.

Yeung said she remains bullish long-term on digital tokens because its appeal lies in the fact that "crypto is really about Web3."

Web3 has become a buzzword among those in the crypto industry. Proponents say it's the next generation of the internet, one that is "decentralized" and not owned by a few big technology giants.

Advocates suggest that crypto and blockchain technology could be a big part of that. For example, a Web3 service may run on a particular blockchain such as ethereum or solana. Users may be required to hold tokens associated with those blockchains in order to use a particular service or even have ownership in that app or company.

"I think there's a whole generation of internet [users who] really believe that 'you cannot monetize my data anymore ... the internet should be owned by us,'" Yeung told CNBC.

"That's why there's such a push with crypto because the ownership of ethereum or solana is really the user owning that piece of token, which is only a piece of that internet."

Even though Yeung suggested it would be a "warm winter" for the crypto market, the troubles for the industry have so far been unprecedented.

The nearly $2 trillion plunge in the value of cryptocurrencies was sparked by the sudden collapse of an algorithmic stablecoin called terraUSD which saw its sister token luna become worthless. Several crypto firms, including the now-bankrupt hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, had a large exposure to terraUSD.

Meanwhile, lending firms like Celsius, which took on risky trading bets, faced liquidity issues and also filed for bankruptcy.

These issues have led to contagion across the cryptocurrency industry.

James Butterfill, head of research at CoinShares, is one skeptic of the term "warm winter." The crypto winter has been "brutal," he said, citing the fall of Three Arrows and the drastic drop in bitcoin prices.

"Bitcoin prices have fallen by 74% peak to trough at one point this closely matches the 83% decline seen in 2018 and must be taken in the context that the market is significantly bigger and has a much broader investor base now than it had back in 2018," Butterfill told CNBC in an email on Monday.

The biggest challenge right now for crypto lies in the uncertainty surrounding the Fed's monetary policy and if the central bank will slow the pace of interest rate hikes, said Yuya Hasegawa, crypto market analyst at Japanese crypto exchange Bitbank.

Markets are anticipating Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell's speech on the Fed's next policy move at the Jackson Hole summit on Friday. Any slowdown in the pace of rate hikes could be positive for crypto markets, Hasegawa said.

"I think the Fed will gradually have to face and address some signs of economic slowdown soon, so my mid-term outlook is somewhat optimistic," Hasegawa said.

Meanwhile, Butterfill pointed out that predicting the Fed is challenging as the economic picture remains mixed.

"A move to become less hawkish could be very supportive of Bitcoin prices. As hawkish Fed policy initiated this bear market in December/January, so could a dovish stance prompt it to break out of its $20,000$25,000 trading range," he said.

Ether, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency after bitcoin, is thetokennative to theethereum blockchain. Sol is the native cryptocurrency of solana, a public blockchain that supports decentralized finance apps that aim torecreate traditional financial systems, like banks and exchanges.

Asked if ethereum has stronger underlying fundamentals than bitcoin, Yeung from Race Capital said the two cryptocurrencies are "very different."

"Bitcoin is a digital gold," she pointed out, saying that ethereum and solana are similar to "decentralized cloud services" where applications are built on the blockchain network but run by "many, many people."

Ethereum and solana are blockchains that position themselves as a platform developers can build apps on top of. Bitcoin meanwhile was set up to be a payments service and so is different to Ethereum and Solana.

Ether has so far massively outperformed bitcoin since both digital coins bottomed in June due to a highly-anticipated ethereum network upgrade.

CNBC's Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.

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Bitcoin Depot to list in the U.S. through $885 mln SPAC deal – Reuters

August 26, 2022 | Author: admin

Representations of cryptocurrency Bitcoin are seen in this illustration, August 10, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

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Aug 25 (Reuters) - Fintech Bitcoin Depot plans to list in the United States by merging with blank check company GSR II Meteora Acquisition Corp in a deal valued at $885 million, the companies said on Thursday.

The transaction will raise up to $321 million of cash held in GSRM's trust account and will be used to support Bitcoin Depot's working capital, complete acquisitions and scale its platform and suite of products.

Assuming no redemptions, the combined company will be valued at $755 million, including debt, with an equity value of $885 million and up to $170 million in cash proceeds from the deal, according to a statement.

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Bitcoin Depot, founded in 2016, is a bitcoin ATM operator in North America that enables users to convert their cash into bitcoin, ethereum and litecoin at more than 7,000 kiosk locations in 47 U.S. states and nine Canadian provinces.

Special purpose acquisition company GSRM, which raised $316 million in an initial public offering in March this year, is pushing ahead with the deal at a time when few are. https://bwnews.pr/3CxbAfY

A SPAC is a listed firm with no business operations but a pool of capital that it uses to merge with a private company. The deal then takes the private company public.

High rates of shareholder redemptions and regulatory concerns have dissuaded companies seeking to go public through the SPAC route stifling dealmaking in the sector which took wall Street by storm in the past two years.

Among companies that have recently scrapped their agreements to go public via SPACs include telecom services firm Syniverse Technologies, 3D printing firm Essentium Inc and travel technology platform HotelPlanner. read more

The deal, expected to close by the first quarter of next year, is being advised by Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. The combined company will list on Nasdaq under the symbol 'BTM'.

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Reporting by Mehnaz Yasmin in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Wen moon? Probably not soon: Why Bitcoin traders should make friends with the trend – Cointelegraph

August 26, 2022 | Author: admin

The impact of Federal Reserve policy and Bitcoins higher timeframe market structure suggest that BTC price is not yet ready for a trend reversal.

Bitcoin (BTC) price continues to chop below the $22,000 level and the wider narrative among traders and the mainstream media suggests that a risk-off sentiment is a dominant perspective ahead of this weeks Jackson Hole summit.

Over the three-day symposium, the Federal Reserve is expected to clarify its perspective on inflation, interest rate hikes and the overall health of the United States economy.

In the meantime, traders on Crypto Twitter continue to fantisize about a Fed pivot where interest hikes will be curtailed below 0.25 basis points and some form of monetary easing re-emerges, but the likelihood of the Fed adopting a dovish point-of-view in the short-term seems unrealistic, given the central banks 2% inflation target.

Regarding Bitcoins most recent price action, an old saying among traders is:

From a birds-eye-view, BTC price is in a clear downtrend with a four-month long stretch of recurring bear flags that continue to see continuation.

Sure, the on-chain data hints that maybe price is at a bottom.

Of course, aggregate volumes and certain on-chain data looking at whale and shrimp BTC addresses may point toward accumulation.

Yeah, the open interest in BTC and Ether continues to reach record highs and this adds fuel to the bullish ETH Merge and ETH proof-of-work hard fork tokens narrative triggering a juicy short squeeze on BTC and ETH.

Any of those things can happen, but beware the narrator of those hopium-infused dreams and remember that the trend is always a good friend that a trader can lean on.

As unpleasant as it might sound, the trend is down. Bitcoin continues to meet resistance at its long-term descending trendline and the price has failed to secure resistance at key moving averages like the 20, 50 and 200-day MA.

Each price drop is simply creating a flag-pole, and the ensuing consolidation creates the flag of the bear flag continuation pattern. As the pink boxes on the daily chart shows, BTC price simply trades within a defined range before breaking below it into underlying liquidity shown by the volume profile visible range and liquidity maps.

Essentially, theres nothing to see here until price paints a few daily candles that reflect higher highs, i.e., BTC needs to clear $25,000 and close that volume profile gap in the $25,000 to $29,000 zone.

From there, one would either want to see consolidation within that new higher range, or continuation of a trend reversal where the 20-MA and 50-MA function as support. As mentioned earlier, of course there are a ton of other data points that make a strong case for why the current price range is a buy zone, but what may be true for one trader is not necessarily the case for all.

Some investors can afford to open swing longs here and lower and ride it out because they are flush and thats part of their plan. Others have a smaller purse and cant afford the lost opportunity cost of being locked into a red position for months on end. Traders are always encouraged to do their own research, make their own thesis and manage risk in a way that is best for their situation.

Jackson Hole is coming up and the Fed needs to continue rate hikes until inflation and other metrics are under control. Equities markets remain tightly correlated with Bitcoin price, so the tell will be whether or not SPX and DJI continue to steamroll higher, or if future actions from the Federal Reserve begin to put a damper on the recent bullish momentum.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.

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Can Bitcoins Lightning Network Overcome The Price Of Anarchy? – Bitcoin Magazine

August 26, 2022 | Author: admin

This is an opinion editorial by Shinobi, a self-taught educator in the Bitcoin space and tech-oriented Bitcoin podcast host.

The Lightning Network as a payment routing network has many similarities with the internet itself. You must be connected to the network, payments are routed from one source node on the network to a destination node just like data packets on the internet and it requires an unbroken connection from the source to destination. It also has one massive difference the requirement for liquidity. On the internet, as long as bandwidth is available (i.e., the pipes are not "clogged"), you can pass an infinite amount of information along a route as long as you have enough time to wait for it to get through. Lightning channels, however, can be depleted, as they require actually moving money from one side of a channel to another in order to route a payment, and eventually they will run out of money on one side and push all of it to the other.

This creates a necessary balancing act between the use of the network in the present to forward payments for individual users and the health of the network in the future regarding its capability of forwarding payments for other users. Each time someone routes a payment through a specific channel, they increase the likelihood that the channel they used will not be able to process payments in the same direction for other users in the future.

In essence, users attempting to adopt strategies en masse to benefit themselves in terms of guaranteeing the delivery of their payment can have negative effects on the overall liquidity distribution of the network and actually lower the likelihood of individual users' payments arriving successfully at the destination. Essentially, whatever strategy is dominantly used by end users to select routes for their payments is going to have systemic effects on the entire network. In the negative sense, i.e., how individual behaviors have degrading effects on the system as a whole this dynamic is known as the price of anarchy.

Rene Pickhardt has been engaging in a line of research to develop heuristics useful for improving the reliability of payment delivery across the Lightning Network. One strategy to achieve the goal that has come out of this research is referred to as Pickhardt payments. Currently the most frequently used strategy across the network is to prioritize route selection based on the lowest fee. This works rather well for small payments, but not so much for larger amounts. Intuitively, the reason should be obvious: such low fee routes are widely used which tends to push liquidity in one direction, leaving less available. The effect this has for other small payments taking the same route is small until approaching depletion, but for larger amounts, the odds of success become lower.

Pickhardt payments work by prioritizing reliability over cheapness, making educated guesses on the probability of a payment succeeding over different potential paths it could take. Just like the dominant, low-fee prioritizing strategy, over time as a node attempts to make payments and sees some fail it will update its assumptions on the probability of payment success and over time refine its accuracy. This should help prevent nodes in swarms always depleting the same channels, because their view of the network in terms of reliability will evolve uniquely over time.

An important part of path selection is considering which direction liquidity is flowing in a channel. Is it balanced both ways? Is it predominantly one direction? In his most recent research looking at the dynamic of the price of anarchy, Pickhardt noted his realization that, based on public gossip data, it may be possible to estimate the rate of drain in channels, how balanced or unbalanced the flow through it is and further improve the reliability of estimations on payment success or failure along certain routes. Estimating this correctly allows you to look at a channel and guess which direction has a high probability of completing a payment and which direction has a low probability.

Another aspect to Pickhardt payments is to optimize for both reliability and low fees. In modeling things to study the price of anarchy dynamics of the Lightning Network, it was discovered that optimizing for both reliability and fees lead to one of the worst externality costs for the network or the highest price of anarchy. This seems to create the greatest rate of channel depletions across the network out of all path selection strategies.

Now these effects don't exist in a vacuum or without counter balances. Routing nodes on the network are also actors that have tools at their disposal and can adopt strategies to optimize the flow control and counterbalance this. Routing nodes can alter fees to disincentivize pushing liquidity to one side of a channel, i.e., if most payments are flowing one direction they can charge higher fees for that and lower fees for going the other way. Nodes can open or close channels, creating new connections to meet higher demand. Nodes can also rebalance channels, pushing liquidity from one channel of theirs out into the network and back into another channel of theirs to alter the liquidity distribution in that channel. Nodes sending payments can also select and utilize different path selection strategies when they observe the current one is leading to frequent payment failures.

I'm sure people reading right now are thinking something along the lines of, "Who cares, the market will sort it out, Lightning is a market-driven system." Lightning is an almost entirely market-driven system, but it's not that simple when analyzing dynamics like the price of anarchy. Users of the network are not going to be analyzing routing algorithms manually, picking and choosing what to use with each payment; They are going to be using tools and software that automates all of this and hides it in the background. This makes this kind of research important to the overall health of the network. A way needs to be found to enable end users to engage with the network selfishly, prioritizing their own interests, without degrading the performance of the network as a whole.

Modeling how these two dynamics interact, the strategies for sending nodes and mitigation strategies for routing nodes is incredibly important for developing strategies for both classes of users to balance and optimize the overall health of the network and the reliability of payments for individual users. Routing data between different devices is a long-solved problem in computer science, which the Lightning Network builds heavily on but the dynamic of liquidity constraints adds a new facet to the entire field of research around reliably routing information.

The Lightning Network has been a huge success so far in improving the speed and scalability of payments using Bitcoin, but to continue that success at larger scales and a larger load from more users, the interaction of these two different dynamics needs to be thoroughly understood and accounted for. In order for users of the network to adopt successful strategies, those strategies must first be developed, understood and verified.

This is a guest post by Shinobi. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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$1,000,000,000 Crypto Fund Moving Into Bitcoin and Two Ethereum Rivals as One Major Risk Emerges, Says CIO – The Daily Hodl

August 26, 2022 | Author: admin

The chief investment officer of Valkyrie Investments says that the crypto asset manager is turning to flight-to-safety assets such as Bitcoin (BTC) as The Merge approaches.

In a new interview with Bloomberg Technology, Valkyrie CIO Steve McClurg says that as Ethereum (ETH) prepares to transition to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism in September, the crypto asset manager is exiting all of its positions in the second-largest digital asset.

McClurg says Valkyrie, which has about $1 billion in assets under its management, is moving its funds to Bitcoin and other smart contract blockchains such as Avalanche (AVAX) and Zilliqa (ZIL).

Right now Bitcoin is really the flight to safety for a lot of our fundssome of the more established proof-of-stake protocols are also a great place to be. Places like Avalanche and Zilliqa

So were really moving out of anything that has too much exposure to ETH right now until we see this merge sometime in [the] middle [of] September and into some of the safer larger crypto protocols.

McClurg says that Ethereums upgrade to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism comes with tradeoffs that could pose major risks to investors.

I dont necessarily think a move to proof-of-stake is a great thing for Ethereum in the short run. In the long run, it might actually work out.

But the Ethereum network is actually more secure as proof-of-work. What really makes Bitcoin the most secure network is a long period of time through proof-of-work where, essentially, you have computers or validators, that are validating transactions all over the world in a decentralized manner. When you move to proof-of-stake, that really falls in the hands of a few.

The CIO also says that Ethereums security after The Merge will have to prove itself before investors holding large amounts of funds on the network can feel safe.

But in terms of [how] Ethereum goes, the security will need to be seen, how thats going to work out. Because we really think that if youre holding a million-dollar-plus NFT and youre relying on the Ethereum network and its changing right now, that may not be a great place to be right now.

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Bitcoin and the banking system: Slammed doors and legacy flaws – Cointelegraph

August 26, 2022 | Author: admin

Despite Bitcoins (BTC) promise of a peer-to-peer world, building a Bitcoin-first business in 2022 still requires third-party intermediaries. Whether its startup capital, using fiat money or simply exploiting fiat payment rails, Bitcoin business means interaction with the legacy financial system.

For the vast majority of Bitcoin-based businesses, this means that they probably need a bank.

Cointelegraph spoke to Bitcoin-only businesses about their experiences working with banks, given that ultimately, Bitcoin gets a lot of bad press in mainstream media. Plus, some of the banking industrys biggest supporters love to bash Bitcoin. Ben Price, founder of the Bitcoin Company, recently shared that the company had lost dozens of dozens of banking partnership opportunities simply because were a Bitcoin company.

Price was a product manager at Visa for years before founding the Bitcoin Company. He told Cointelegraph that the Bitcoin Companys goal is to bring Bitcoin to the whole world because its a real catalyst for improvement in our civilization.

Price grew frustrated while working at Visa not because he was a hardcore Bitcoin maxi but due to slow progress. According to him, projects relating to payments, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), noncustodial wallets and more were regularly shuttered or mothballed. Plus, the legacy finance systems inner workings came into question. Carman told Cointelegraph:

The Bitcoin Company is part of a new range of Bitcoin neobanks banks that treat Bitcoin as native currency alongside fiat. From The Bitcoin Company in the United States to Xapo in Gibraltar anCoinCorner in the United Kingdom, Bitcoin neobanks are flexing their financial muscles. In short, theyre allowing people to live on a Bitcoin standard and easily interact with the legacy financial system.

Carman explains that Bitcoin neobanks derive from a desire to hyperbitcoinize i.e., spur Bitcoin mass adoption while conceding that only a smaller group of people will adopt Bitcoin as the cypherpunks originally intended. He splits Bitcoin users into two pools: the cypherpunks who prioritize privacy, bury their seed phrases in the yard, mix their coins and run Bitcoin nodes;and the other 95% of people such as his mom and sister, he explains who will likely need access to a Bitcoin neobank. According to Carma

However, why cant banks integrate Bitcoin and capitalize on the new technology and profit from Bitcoins success? Christian Ander, founder of the Swedish Bitcoin exchange BTCX, told Cointelegraph, Many banks have a policy not to engage with or onboard Bitcoin and crypto companies. It doesnt matter if the company complies with regulations or not.

Danny Brewster, CEO of Bitcoin trading platform FastBitcoins, told Cointelegraph that banking Bitcoin-only companies, such as FastBitcoins, have persisted since 2013. However, banks initially didnt want to do Bitcoin business due to a lack of understanding, Brewster told Cointelegraph.

Fast forward to 2022, and Despite regulatory clarification and increased scrutiny, the wider crypto market is a mess with the likes of LUNA, 3AC, etc. Brewster explained that due to the Terra implosion and the subsequent crypto contagion, banks are even more risk averse. He said:

Brewster stated that crypto scams, wash trading and the darker side of crypto tarnish Bitcoins reputation: In one case at a bank, 90%+ of all payment fraud cases touched crypto at some point in the flow, it is obvious why as the resulting transaction gives the criminal irreversible funds at the end of the transaction. The constant recurrence is likely to color ones opinion of Bitcoin, he explaine, as Bitcoin and crypto are considered one and the same:

Anders explained that there are many reasons behind banks reticence to onboard Bitcoin businesses, from incompetent Anti-Money Laundering staff and routines regarding Bitcoin and crypto assets to the old money vs. new [money] debate. However, he suggested that its wrong to think that Bitcoin is a threat to bankings core business model. In fact, its not, but central bank digital currency is.

Brewster argued that CBDCs will go the way of every shitcoin partnership that gets announced, suggesting their eventual demise. But if CBDCs are successful, then commercial banks may face some competition from an unlikely source.

Related: Banking uses 56 times more energy than Bitcoin: Valuechain report

Finally, Hal Finney, the first person to mine Bitcoin after Satoshi Nakamoto, predicted the existence of Bitcoin-backed banks in 2010. Finney highlighted scalability issues as the reason for such banks, although the Lightning Network has evolved to allow Bitcoin to process infinitely more transactions. In the meantime, although workarounds exist, Bitcoin-first businesses may be forced to continue partnering with banks.

Plus, Carman conceded that while partnering with banks is a headache, A lot of merchant partners refuse to work with us (i.e., let us sell their gift cards) because we allow users to buy with Bitcoin. [...] So its not all on the banking side. Indeed, while there are some hopeful signs of Bitcoin merchant payment adoption, fiat is king while FUD reigns almighty.

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Bitcoin and the banking system: Slammed doors and legacy flaws - Cointelegraph

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Bitcoin is the ‘next big thing’ but will crash like the dot-com bubble – Economist H. Dent – Finbold – Finance in Bold

August 26, 2022 | Author: admin

With the ongoing crypto market volatility, there is uncertainty regarding the sectors future; several analysts maintain that the 2022 crash is expected, terming it part of the growth trajectory.

Economist and founder of HS Dent Publishing, Harry Dent, has maintained that crypto is the next big thing but the markets growth will mirror the dot-com bubble that saw stocks like Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) crash before rallying to record highs, he said during a Rich Dad Radio Show appearance on August 24.

According to Dent, the Bitcoin (BTC) crash might be interpreted as the end of the crypto market, but the economist stressed that would not be the case.

I compare the cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin just like the Amazon of it, the new dot-com retailers that were the rave only the last part of the 90s bubble, and were the epitome of it. Amazon led that bubble and crashed 95% before it went to 3,500 in the next boom, he said.

Furthermore, Dent shared how he got into crypto after initially failing to understand the concept. The economist declared:

I didnt get it myself, until at my own conference a guy defined crypto as the digitization of all financial assets and money. And Im like, whats bigger than GDP six, seven times, all the financial assets in the world? And Im like, oh! This is a big deal. This is the next big thing.

Notably, the crypto markets host thousands of cryptocurrencies, and there is a general consensus that once the sector matures, established assets like Bitcoin will stand out, similar to Amazon and the dot-com companies. At the same time, there is a belief that cryptocurrencies with no utility will be wiped out.

Previously, Dent had projected that there would be a historical market crash in 2022 amid rising inflation and the Federal Reserves tapering measures characterized by interest rate hikes.

However, he pointed out that the crash doesnt need a trigger, just like the tech bubble burst in 2000 that occurred in an environment without a recession and economic slowdown.

Interestingly, the economist also noted that Bitcoin would be the worst-hit asset while projecting that the crypto will correct to about $7,000.

It is worth mentioning that Bitcoin and the equities markets have struggled in 2022, with the flagship cryptocurrency struggling to stay above the $20,000 level.

In this line, Bitcoins struggles were highlighted during the second quarter when it registered the worst quarterly returns at -56%. By press time, the asset was trading at $21,700, gaining almost 2% in the last 24 hours.

Disclaimer:The content on this site should not be considered investment advice. Investing is speculative. When investing, your capital is at risk.

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Bitcoin is the 'next big thing' but will crash like the dot-com bubble - Economist H. Dent - Finbold - Finance in Bold

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Hammerspace’s full coverage in its market positioning radar diagram Blocks and Files – Blocks and Files

August 26, 2022 | Author: admin

Hammerspace is making progress selling its Global DataEnvironment file data location, management and sharing services because it provides more functionality than either enterprise and cloud storage players, or data management and protection suppliers.

This is part two of our look at Hammerspaces technology positioning, market positioning and business progress. Its laid out a radar screen-type diagram with 12 dimensions of storage infrastructure functionality and plotted out the screen occupancy of vendors in the enterprise and cloud storage, data management and protection areas.

Founder and CEO David Flynn said in a briefing: In the world of data and storage, there are many different capabilities which matter: having the right file system protocols and semantics, being able to talk to Windows as well as Linux, being able to talk legacy.

Theres really important data services, like snapshots and clones, all of this stuff that has made Data ONTAP the gold standard for manageability of data, your security of making sure that youre not vulnerable to theft, or or somebody encrypting your data, compliance to legal regulation.

Talking about Hammerspaces 12-dimension radar diagram, he said: In this diagram, they all have an equal amount of real estate. But some things are more important. And I would say performance and scale and data protection are some of the bigger ones.

The radar screen diagram indicates a suppliers strength on any on dimension or axis by giving it a score from 0 percent at the center out to 100 percent at the periphery. Hammerspace has plotted its view of the radar screen diagram coverage of the enterprise and cloud storage vendors, with Dell EMC (Isilon/PowerScale), NetApp, Pure Storage, Qumulo and VAST Data highlighted as example enterprise storage vendors:

The enterprise storage suppliers (orange outline) are strongly positioned in a section of the chart from the top right round to the lower left. This area includes file protocols and semantics, data services, security, compliance and performance, and indicates they have less strong coverage in the scalability, data protection and disaster recovery areas. They have low coverage of the cloud-native, metadata workflow and remote access dimensions.

The cloud storage suppliers AWS, Azure and Google have strengths in the cloud-native area (unsurprisingly) and disaster recovery and scalability areas (again unsurprisingly). Hammerspace marks them down a tad in their coverage of other areas functionality: file semantics and protocols round to performance.

A second radar diagram looks at the data management and protection area with three groups of suppliers:

These three groups have more limited domain expertise and applicability. Hammerspace would say that, like the enterprise and cloud storage suppliers, they are all excellent at what they do. What it supplies on top, so to speak is additional functionality that they dont have, because it has taken the file system layer out of the storage system layer in an applications data access stack. We discussed its view of this in our part one story.

Here is the radar screen diagram with all five sets of vendors shown plus Hammerspaces view of its own positioning:

Hammerspaces technology provides an abstraction layer of services that the other players can use. This suggests there are partnering opportunities between the other suppliers and Hammerspace. Put another way, though, this diagram suggests that customers can integrate things like data orchestration and metadata-driven workflows, provided by Hammerspace, into the other suppliers offerings to get a more complete file-based data services capability.

Why should they do this? Because they will find their IT operations more efficient and less expensive. Well discuss Hammerspaces view of this and take a look at its business progress in the third part of this series of articles. In other words, well find out if customers are responding to Hammerspaces view of the data universe and whether operating that way is beneficial for them.

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Hammerspace's full coverage in its market positioning radar diagram Blocks and Files - Blocks and Files

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