Who Will Kill Bitcoin?

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Bitcoin, cryptoLeave a comment

We are apparently living in an unprecedented time, although of course we aren’t; there have been plagues before this one. The only difference is that we are living through this is in an age of technology.

We know who the global tech giants are:They are Google, Facebook and Apple, and they all need to build their revenue. Amazon is excluded from the list, because it has already seen a massive growth in traffic and purchases, as consumers confined to their homes need to have stuff delivered.

 

One way in which the three tech giants could pursue rapid growth is by entering the financial services sector, something they have dipped their toes into, but have never embraced wholeheartedly. However, they face a challenge, and as Billy Bambrough, one of the expert cryptocurrency analysts I follow writes, while Google et al have been waiting around, “bitcoin has gained ground.”

What are Google and Facebook’s weak points?

 

As Bambrough says, these two companies have relied on ad revenue, but he believes that this is going to be squeezed hard by regulators in the post-virus world. In an earlier article, he wrote that the world will likely be looking for alternatives, and quotes the CEO of the blockchain-based privacy browser Brave, who believes Google “is going to be taken apart over coming years.”

Apple loses its grip

 

Apple has seen sales of its big money maker, the iPhone, decline. The reason being that less expensive phones have improved in quality, and improvements to the iPhone have not proved to be enough to really enthuse the consumer. Add to this the economic effects of the coming global recession and it is easy to see that those who might once have splashed out nearly $1000 on a new iPhne, may opt, indeed will have to opt, for cheaper models that effectively do the same job.

Google is apparently looking into launching a smart debit card, and Apple has already debuted a credit card, while Facebook is still moving ahead with its Libra stablecoin project that caused such a stir last year. It hoped to displace bitcoin as a leading cryptocurrency, but has clearly been foiled in its efforts.

 

Bitcoin offers stability

Meanwhile bitcoin, which has no tech company, government or central bank behind it lives on. And as Bambrough points out, it doesn’t even have an advertising budget, never mind a CEO. As he says, “Bitcoin, maintained by an evolving and decentralized network and beholden only to the mathematical principles that underpin it, is stability without authority.”

 

Google et al by contrast are deeply centralised, and so will any financial products they unleash on the market. They will never get away from that, whereas bitcoin continues to represent the antithesis of Silicon Valley capitalism. That’s why the big tech companies main option now is to kill it! But who will do it?

The 5G Conspiracy Theorists Making Money Out of Covid-19!

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Covid - 19, internetLeave a comment

If you have been following social media during this pandemic, and it’s hard to avoid it, you may have noticed that conspiracy theories about the origins of the virus are multiplying like weeds.

The general consensus is that it leapt to humans from a bat, or a pangolin, but even the leading scientists have questioned what was initially assumed about Wuhan’s wet market as being the source.

But the conspiracy theorists aren’t content with that. It’s not exciting enough for them presumably, plus was there ever a better opportunity for them to jump on all the social media channels and announce the ‘truth’!

One of the most prevalent theories is that the virus is related to the rollout of 5G Internet technology. Apparently, while we are all in lockdown, new 5G towers are being installed while we’re not looking. That’s just one aspect of it. The other is that the 5G technology is responsible for spreading the virus worldwide?

How could technology do this? Well, according to the conspiracy, there is no virus. The images you have seen of people dying in hospital beds is part of one big hoax. Instead it is 5G technology that is causing the symptoms.

Another variation of the conspiracy theory asserts that radiation from 5G can weaken your immune system to the point that you are more easily infected by COVID-19. After all, the same people have been saying for months that 5G will basically fry your brain.

It’s hard to imagine, is it not, that all the medics, nurses and scientists have been colluding in an elaborate illusion, just to ensure that we think people are ill or dying from the virus?

The conspiracy theorists work from the rather basic principle that since Covid-19 started in China, and so did the 5G rollout, which apparently means 5G is the real source of the worst pandemic any of us have seen. Some have even tried to create timelines connecting the emergence of radio waves in 1916 as the precursor of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, and to connect the introduction of 3G with SARS and 4G with swine flu, before we get to 5G.

Even some news broadcasters have pandered to the idea, showing maps of %G tower installations and claiming there are more Covid cases in these areas. However, this doesn’t support 5G as being the cause. There may be many other factors in those areas contributing to the number of infections, primary among them socio-economics and population density.

And in other fake news, somebody tried to claim that the new Bank of England £20 note features a 5G tower and a symbol for Covid-19. Apart form the Queen, it features the artist J.M.W. Turner. The ‘5G tower’ is actually Margate Lighthouse, a favourite place of the artist, and the so-called Covid symbol represents a staircase at Tate Britain, which houses many of Turner’s works. Just so we’ve cleared that one up.

That hasn’t stopped people from vandalising 5G towers and attacking telecoms workers in the UK and elsewhere. As Forbes contributor Bruce Y. Lee says, “In fact, these 5G-COVID-19 conspiracy theories has gotten so rampant that U.K. government officials actually have had to take time to discredit such theories, which is a wonderful use of time during a public health emergency.”

Making money from the 5G conspiracy

Of course, somebody is benefitting from the 5G conspiracy: Ryan Broderick at Buzzfeed says people are paying $350 for a USB stick that is a ‘bioshield’ against 5G. The vendor, Jacques Bauer, “falsely claims protects people from 5G radiation by converting it into beneficial radiation.” And there are others who have jumped on the same bandwagon, as Broderick rightly names and shames them.

It’s consumer abuse at any time, but while people are dying in the hundreds of thousands worldwide, it is utterly disgraceful to capitalise on people’s fear in this way. In the months to come, people will want answers about how this pandemic truly unfolded, and I’m willing to bet that the experts won’t say, “It was 5G.” However, like the anti-vaxxers (a lot of the 5G conspiracists belong in that camp as well), those who are convinced 5G caused Covid-19 will probably not go away. The best thing we can do is to ignore them.

How Google’s 5G strategy could give it market dominance

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn TechLeave a comment

Google has shared its vision for enabling telecommunication providers to deliver business services through 5G networks using a Global Mobile Edge Cloud (GMEC) strategy. This will allow both Google and telecoms companies to use 5G networks to deliver “unique applications and services running at the edge,” as Janikaram MSV writes at Forbes.

What is 5G/Edge for business?

A 5G network will be able to deliver speed and bandwidth unlike anything we have experienced before, and the entire system is more geared up for business services than consumers. Furthermore, since telco networks provide access to the Cloud, it means they can “introduce an edge computing layer that offers unique advantages to businesses,” Janikaram says.

Google foresees the advantages of this for its own business, because it will enable it to provide some of the best Google Cloud Platform capabilities to the businesses, and this in turn will enable the telecom companies to monetise their 5G networks.

Google has already partnered with AT&T to build a portfolio of 5G edge computing solutions ​for industries like retail, manufacturing and transportation​, and will maximise the use of Google’s AI capabilities to help AT&T to expand its reach in the USA.

Consumers will also have their experience radically offered when through the use of 5G. It will deliver all manner of immersive experiences using augmented and virtual reality, and we can expect the retail sector to be altered beyond recognition with services similar to an Amazon Go shopping experience, and we’ll have ‘smart’ everything: cities, healthcare, buildings.

All of this depends heavily on using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data. Google is well positioned for this as a leader in analytics, as well as AI, and its strategy will help telecom providers to offer a “technology stack to developers and businesses building the next-generation consumer experiences.”

For example, here are some of Google’s assets that will help it to make the most of the edge computing opportunity: Anthos is a Google modular hybrid cloud platform based on containers and Kubernetes for enterprise data that can be revamped for the telecom edge.

And there is TensorFlow, the most popular open source machine learning framework used by researchers, AI engineers and ML developers.

Google has also built custom hardware to accelerate the training and inference of machine learning models, and its Edge TPU is the counterpart of Cloud TPU that can speed up inferencing TensorFlow models running at the edge.

Let’s not forget that Google has 21 cloud regions and 134+ Content Delivery Network (CDN) locations across the globe, and that through its Point of Presence (PoP) and edge locations, Google delivers some of its services such as Search, Gmail, YouTube and more. It is going to capitalise on this global footprint, and as Janikaram says, “If Google manages to deliver on its vision of edge computing, it will become a formidable player in the 5G-based mobile edge computing market.”

Covid-19 figures prompt stock market surge

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Covid - 19, EconomyLeave a comment

It appears that Monday 6th April may be remembered as the day that the global stock markets resurged and investors heaved a sigh of relief. This turnaround is due to the fact that it seems the global pandemic is peaking in the worst-hit countries, such as Spain and Italy, giving investors the green light to start buying again.

According to the New York Times European stocks were trading 2 to 4 percent higher after a modest rally in Asia picked up steam later in the day. At the time of writing the New York exchange hadn’t opened, but Futures markets are predicting it will also see a good day today.

In Japan, the Nikkei 225 index rose 4.2 percent. South Korea’s Kospi index rose 3.9 percent. In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng Index was up 2.2 percent. Taiwan’s Taiex was up 1.6 percent.

However, oil prices, which usually rise when there’s good news, are not doing so well due to the continued argument between Russia and Saudi Arabia. Owing to the coronavirus epidemic, demand for oil has dropped precipitously. Saudi Arabia and OPEC proposed a deal that would trim oil production in response, but Russia declined to go along with it. So the battle continues.

A stress test for Europe

Another thing that came to light in today’s news is that European banking regulators had planned to stress test banks to see if they could withstand another major economic downturn. As it happens, they didn’t need to run any simulation, because the real thing came along in the form of the coronavirus Covid-19.

The New York Times said, “Government officials planned on running their test earlier this year, and it was meant to simulate a 4.3 percent decline in European economic output by 2022.” But now they are faced with an even worse ‘worst case’ scenario.

Some economists predict that Europe’s economy could drop by over 10% by June, and the continent’s central bankers are concerned that the crisis proofing that they put in place, won’t be sufficient to cope with what promises to be a global financial meltdown. It’s a worrying time, as European banks have never fully recovered from the last big crisis in 2008. And firms like BMW are already recording a massive drop in sales. The German carmaker announced sales had plunged by 20% in January to March 2020 and that is probably by now a conservative figure, as most countries hadn’t gone into lockdown until mid-to late March. In the UK, car dealers sold 200,000 cars fewer than they did in March 2019. It isn’t the only industry under stress, and many big companies will be looking to expand their existing lines of credit.

But, for the moment, we can take some pleasure in the fact that Covid-19 infections and deaths appear to be declining in the worst hit places, and that there is still investor enthusiasm for global stocks.