Tag: Covid – 19

The Covid-19 Crypto Craze

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Bitcoin, Covid - 19, cryptoLeave a comment

You might have noticed when you checked the price of Bitcoin (BTC) on 27th July that it had tipped over the $10,000 point and is continuing to rise. It was pretty unusual for a Monday, as there is usually a dip after a weekend. Not so in July..

Ron Shevlin is just one of the fintech writers and Snark Tank analyst who saw this shift as ‘The Coronavirus Crypto Craze’. He asked, “Where is this Coronavirus-fueled trading volume coming from and who will drive the future growth?” It was, and still is, a good question.

According to Cornerstone Advisors, 15% of Americans now own crypto in some form, and just over half of these people invested in cryptocurrency for the first time during the first six months of 2020. Furthermore, these new investors obtained roughly $67.5 billion in cryptocurrencies, averaging out at around $4,000 per person. 

This new penetration in the USA brings it into the Top 10 countries when it comes to crypto ownership, although it still has surpass Turkey (20%) Brazil and Colombia (18%), Argentina and South Africa (16%).

Who is buying crypto?

But what we all want to know is this: who has been on a BTC buying binge during the months when the pandemic forced people to stay at home across the world. Although, of course, if you’re at home, that’s the perfect place form which to buy crypto.

High-income men with postgraduate degrees account for eight in 10 buyers, and have an annual salary of around $130,000. Then there are the Millenials and Gen Xers. Millennials (26 to 40 years old) comprised 57% of the consumers buying cryptocurrency in 2020 with Gen Xers (41 to 55 years old) accounting for 30%. Baby Boomers hardly feature accounting for only 3% of crypto consumers, and Gen Zers are similarly thin on the ground at 7%.

Significantly, the majority of buyers are customers of traditional banks rather than the new digital challengers, which is surprising. Shevlin reports, “Of the consumers buying cryptocurrencies during the Bitcoin binge, almost half—47%—are customers of Bank of America.” By contrast only 6% of the 2020 BTC buyers use a digital bank as their primary bank.

Financial health and first time buyers

Another interesting revelation from the study is, “44% of Americans who have already invested in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies said that their financial health is “much better” since the beginning of the Covid crisis,” whereas only 5% of all other US consumers agreed with this statement.

The first time investors are an interesting group. In some ways similar to established crypto owners, they differ in one respect: they’re changing up the financial institutions they do business with.

Half of the first timers switched their primary banking relationship in the past six months—one-third did so in the past three months alone.

The key takeaway from all this is, as Shevlin says: “

 All banks—in particular, community banks and credit unions—should look at opportunities to provide Bitcoin wallets and other cryptocurrency trading services as a way to differentiate their services.”

The Ugly Exploitation of 5G Fears

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Covid - 19, FintechLeave a comment

The Covid-19 pandemic has proved to be a fertile breeding ground that has brought together disparate groups, including anti-vaxxers and the anti-5G movement, on any platform they can find to share their conspiracy-based views. One of the most prominent claims is that 5G technology spread the coronovirus, even though 5G is not available ‘everywhere’.

Before that became a widely shared theory, we already knew that those who don’t want to see 5G launched had been pushing out information about the alleged dangers of 5G. We were all about to be ‘wi-fried’ by it, and children would be particularly vulnerable. I’m not here to debate the claims of the anti-5G movement, but I would like to alert people to one of the dangers that this kind of scaremongering can produce: the opportunity to be scared into buying into a health scam.

A Forbes story by John Koetsier illustrates it perfectly. It concerns a ‘5G Bioshield’ that is being sold for $350 per unit. The USB stick boasts features such as “quantum oscillation” and “restoring coherence of atoms” as well as “emitting life force frequencies.”

This is what the company selling it claims on its the website:

“Through a process of quantum oscillation the 5G BioShield USB Key balances and reharmonizes the disturbing frequencies arising from the electric fog induced by devices, such as laptops, cordless phones, wifi, tablets, etc., The 5G BioShield USB Key restores the coherence of the geometry of the atoms, which allows a perfect induction for life forces, by (re-)creating a cardiac coherence, via plasmic support and interactivity.”

It sounds like the answer to all those fears about the health damage that 5G is purported to inflict. It must be a very special USB stick to do all the above, must it not? You’d like to think so for $350.

The expert analysis

But when Pen Test Partners reviewed the stick’s properties, it “revealed nothing more that what you’d expect from a regular 128MB USB key,” states its blog. And they went on to say: “Usually with USB devices, one can look at the properties and it will list the manufacturer and extra information about the device. However, we found that all the default values remained. This is often an indication of cheap, unbranded devices.”

So, basically it is a $6 USB stick being sold for $350. Furthermore, the founders of the 5G Bioshield don’t appear to exist. Koetsier says, “A search for “Dr. Ilija Lakicevic,” listed on the website as one of the founders of the company, turns up nothing on LinkedIn. A search for him on the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, where the 5G BioShield website says he worked, also turns up no results.”

Have they sold any? Yes. To the city of Glastonbury in the UK, which issued a statement saying, ““We use this device and find it helpful.” It is also worth mentioning that other health protection used in Glastonbury include Shungite, a mineral which is said to have healing powers that one “healing crystal” company says “span the board from purity to protection.”

Whether you agree with the theory that 5G is a health danger or not, I expect you can agree that paying $350 for a $6 product is quite simply — exploitation!

Elon Musk hogs the headlines again!

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Bitcoin, Covid - 19Leave a comment

Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur, is making headlines again. Over the last week, we’ve had the controversy over the naming of his latest offspring, his nmother-in-law condemning his ‘red pill’ tweets, and now, unable to stay out of the press, he has slammed the Federal Reserve’s coronavirus stimulus package.

Musk claims that US fiscal policy has become “detached from reality,” and that it should be viewed in sharp contrast with “bitcoin’s looming supply squeeze,” as reported by Billy Bambrough. Now, Musk has gone a step further, according to Bambrough in Forbes, where he quotes the entrepreneur as saying “the central bank currency issuance” is making cryptocurrency bitcoin look “solid by comparison.”

Harry Potter and the Bitcoin Blockchain

Rather bizarrely, Musk’s latest statements came in response to a query from Harry Potter author, J.K. Rowling about how bitcoin works. The two are prolific Twitter users, and this is where the conversation took place on 15th May.

Rowling tweeted, “People are now explaining Bitcoin to me, and honestly, it’s blah blah blah collectibles (My Little Pony?) blah blah blah computers (got one of those) blah blah blah crypto (sounds creepy) blah blah blah understand the risk (I don’t, though.)

In reply, Musk told her Bitcoin looked solid by comparison with the currency issued by central banks, and said that he still owns 0.25 BTC. Cointelegraph stepped into the fray, and tweeted, “I think wveryone is just waiting for you to send them to the moon Elon,” which resulted in some comic responses in the form of Buzz Lightyear memes.

However, it seems nobody was able to convince Rowling about bitcoin, as she later tweeted, “I’m just about able to grasp a barter system. Talk of collectibles, tokenomics and blockchains and my brain just takes a walk.”

Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum then stepped up to provide the creator of wizards with his explanation, and Neeraj Agrawal, of Washington-based cryptocurrency policy think tank Coincenter, really tried to get Rowling to understand it by saying it was “magical Internet money.” Tyler Winklevoss objected to this, replying bitcoin was not ‘magical’, it was the US dollar that could be described that way.

J.K. Rowling may not have been convinced by the responses of the various cryptocurrency heavyweights, but as Bitcoin Magazine tweeted,

“Dear Diary, Today was a wild ride for #BitcoinTwitter.”

AI and the Disruption of Big Pharma

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Blockchain, Covid - 19Leave a comment

Right now there is a lot of focus on Big Pharma for obvious reasons, so it was with interest that I read an article in Forbes by Alex Zhavoronkov about the pharmaceutical industry’s rather slow approach to using artificial intelligence (AI) when it is already very much a facet of less life-and-death services, such as Netflix movie suggestions.

Significantly, Zhavoronkov says, “Experts suggest that the pharmaceutical industry remains one of the most inefficient industries, a last holdout against technological disruption.” It’s curious is it not, that a sector that is all about scientific advancement should be so behind the times?

According to the article, “the efficiency of the industry has been on the decline since the 1950s. Just as an example, it now costs over $2.6 Billion to bring a drug — or a New Molecular Entity (NME) — to the market.” It’s a high cost, and then there are the costs related to the failed drug trials to factor in as well. Eventually, you and I pay for it all.

But AI has potential to perform a role in small molecule drug discovery, and we need to understand its potential and its limitations, especially in relation to the way that the pharma giants have traditionally gone about finding new drugs.

Zhavoronkov comments: “The process of small molecule drug discovery includes several steps: the scientists form a disease hypothesis, identify a target, design a molecule and then conduct pre-clinical studies takes on average five years and may cost hundreds of millions of dollars.” Then it takes another five years of clinical development and testing phases, which mean more expenditure.

AI might look like the perfect solution to reduce costs, and with all the Big Data available, surely it can help pinpoint marketable drugs. But, Zhavoronkov says:“Despite the many advances in technology that have led to major disruptions including mobile and personal computing, the Internet, and genome sequencing, the cost to develop a drug is steadily increasing.”

The pharma sector apparently remains sceptical about its uses: “they prefer to incrementally develop internal capabilities across the entire spectrum of the drug discovery process instead of making big bets on specific enabling technologies.”

Zhavoronkov remains optimistic about the future of AI in pharmaceuticals, and identifies the key to its success as “a massive integration of the systems used to identify biological targets, systems that help design novel molecules, and systems that personalize the treatments, and predict the clinical trials outcomes.” As he concluded that “The recent COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the impotence of today’s traditional and AI-powered approaches, as seen when attempts to repurpose other drugs to treat Covid-19 did not really produce any promising candidates, and a “lot more work needs to be done in AI and laboratory automation to significantly accelerate drug discovery.”