A.I. Is Causing A Cryptocurrency War

For a cleaner presentation, visit Squawker: Become the Counterculture

A.I. Is Causing A Cryptocurrency War

What exactly is cryptocurrency?

Why have Canada, Russia and China begun to make moves towards creating their own national digital currencies based off of Ethereum blockchain technology?

Money was invented to solve the coincidence of wants problem and facilitate transactions. It created a way for people from any walk of life to conduct trade. 

Up until 1971 gold had backed up currency. 

Since then it has become fiat. This means nothing actually backs it up and banks can print as much as they want, whenever they want. 

When you are approved for a loan, they don’t liquidate any assets to provide you that money. They just type it in and create it out of thin air. 

The Central banking system, that now controls all but 3 countries, has converted the global economy into a giant ponze scheme – and it is about to burst for the last time.

As we approach the digital age, the age of quantum computing, … the age of transhumanism, it only makes sense that money evolves alongside. 

Cryptocurrency is digital currency; software that can be programmed to obey rules – the law of code. 

It relies upon blockchain technology:  the brainchild of a person or group of people known by the pseudonym,  Satoshi Nakamoto.

“The blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.”

- Don & Alex Tapscott, authors Blockchain Revolution (2016)

The key to blockchain technology is the ledger. The ledger is the source of code that governs the rules of its blockchain network. 

One of the most successful platforms, known as Ethereum, is a planetary scale computer powered by blockchain technology. It already supports decentralized prediction markets, autonomously run lotteries, and a host of governance tools.

Ethereum is being considered the internet of the future, an “intelligent internet.”

When Ethereum first arrived, it was an open-source project, with no formal governance structure. It relied on the organic collaboration of like-minded engineers, many of whom were not compensated for their work.

Then on June 17, 2016, a decentralized application was hacked and between $64 and $101 million worth of ether was siphoned from the  Ethereum blockchain platform. That forced the network to undertake a “hard fork,” creating an entirely new version of the ethereum blockchain, erasing any record of the theft and restoring the stolen funds to their owners.

Ethereum split into two parallel systems. 

A small but vocal minority have stuck with the old one, known as Ethereum Classic. 

They believe smart contracts should be immutable — even if the intent of changing the code was to restore millions of stolen ether to the rightful owners.

“They confuse governance with government, and governance of any kind with authoritarianism. There are lots of global resources out there that aren’t owned or controlled by anyone that have complex governance structures — like the internet.”

- Alex Tapscott, tech writer and co-author of the book: “Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World. 

The other Ethereum platform has come under the control of corporate giants and central banks. 

The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), comprised of over a hundred tech companies, banks, and investment firms, seeks to augment Ethereum, enabling it to serve as an enterprise-grade technology, with research and development focused on privacy, confidentiality, scalability, and security. 

The EEA seeks to develop a private version of Ethereum …

… a permissioned ledger comprised of their code; their rules …

It’s all well and good though because the Ethereum blockchain platform is said to be transparent and incorruptible. No centralized version of information exists for a hacker to corrupt. Hosted by millions of computers simultaneously, its data is accessible to anyone on the internet. 

Transparent because data is embedded within the network as a whole.

Cannot be corrupted because altering any unit of information would require a huge amount of computing power to override the entire network.

Decentralized; unable to be manipulated or controlled by central banks.

Except that central bankers are all about blockchain technology. 

The New York Times observes:

“For the central banks, the promise of the technology is that it would allow them to track every pound or renminbi on every step of its travels through the financial system in real time — something that is impossible now. The goal would be to make the financial system more transparent, fast, efficient and secure.”

When the local or central bank manages the cryptocurrency platform, it also gets a record of every transaction that takes place in that economy. One doesn’t need to be an anarchist to surmise potential downsides of that situation.

As for the issues of overcoming transparency and corruptibility? 

A quantum computer can easily overcome these obstacles.

It is the whole network at once.

It absolutely possess the computing power necessary to override any network. 

Google and D-Wave, partnered with NASA have already developed quantum computers. 

Microsoft claims to still be developing one … and that was back in 2016.

All of these companies have their own artificial intelligence. 

Microsoft is one of the corporate titans that has joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. 

All of those recent cyber attacks by a group known as the shadow brokers, in which hundreds of millions worth of cryptocurrencies were mined … were all on microsoft systems.  

Who exactly are the shadow brokers? Are they connected to the Deep State? 

Conclusion:

What we are now witnessing is a turf war between rival criminal gangs (Google, Microsoft and the EEA, the Deep State, …) unfold in cyber space. 

Cryptocurrency mining is based upon CPU power and those with the most powerful computers, ie quantum computers, as well as the software to run them, ie artificial intelligence, are battling it out for global supremacy. 

There is no transparency. Any network is corruptible. The future of the internet, of our digital global economy, of an Ethereum blockchain based world … is playing right into the hands of A.I. 

The problem is we don’t really know how these algorithms do what they do, these deep neural networks: Deep Learning, Deep Dream; quantum computers that tap into the quantum realm …

Ethereum as a currency after all is based on ether: the undetectable medium of energy that exists all around us; the connection between us and parallel worlds. 

Are we in control of A.I.? Or is A.I. playing us?

Are we at war with artificial intelligence?