Connect with us

Uncategorized

‘I don’t own Bitcoin, but I should’ — Legendary investor Druckenmiller

Veteran investor Stanley Druckenmiller praised Bitcoin for establishing its own “brand” during an interview with hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones.
…

Published

22 mins ago

on

Veteran investor Stanley Druckenmiller praised Bitcoin for establishing its own “brand” during an interview with hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones.

Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller praised Bitcoin (BTC) for establishing a “brand” over the last decade and a half, admitting that while he doesn’t own any Bitcoin, he ought to.

The billionaire shared his latest thoughts on Bitcoin in an Oct. 30 interview with hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones, where he made comparisons between Bitcoin and gold as a store of value.

“I’m 70 years old. I own gold. I was surprised that Bitcoin got going, but you know, it’s clear that the young people look at it as a store of value because it’s a lot easier to do stuff with. 17 years, to me, it’s a brand. I like gold because it’s a 5,000-year-old brand.” He added:

“So, I like them both. I don’t own any Bitcoin, to be frank, but I should.”

Druckenmiller previously held Bitcoin. However, in a September 2022 interview, he revealed he had sold it in light of central banks imposing tightening measures.

He did, however, say the digital asset sector would flourish in the event that people lose faith in the central banking system, making an example of the Bank of England after the British pound plummeted in mid-2022.

“I could see cryptocurrency having a big role in a Renaissance because people just aren’t going to trust the central banks.”

Druckenmiller founded Duquesne Capital Management in 1981 and closed the fund in 2010. During that time, he achieved an average annual return of 30% and never experienced a down year.

His investment philosophy revolved around holding a group of stocks long, a group of stocks short and using leverage to trade futures in times of rising and falling markets.

He’s also praised blockchain technology, predicting that a ledger-based system could replace the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency in the future.

In 2021, Druckenmiller said Ethereum is like “Myspace before Facebook” and predicted that Ether (ETH) would eventually flip BTC.

Related: ‘Bitcoin is an international asset' — BlackRock CEO’s bullish remarks

Sentiment toward Bitcoin among Wall Street firms has warmed up over the last year, most notably evidenced by a wave of proposed Bitcoin exchange-traded fund filings from major financial firms.

The cryptocurrency industry still has its fair share of critics, though.

Well-known veteran investors Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have long referred to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as “rat poison” and an asset class that produces no value.

Magazine: Gary Gensler’s job at risk, BlackRock’s first spot Bitcoin ETF and other news: Hodler’s Digest, June 11–17

Read More

Related Topics:
Continue Reading

Uncategorized

US judge deals blow to artists in copyright suit over AI generated art

A judge mostly sided with Midjourney, DeviantArt and Stability AI’s bid to dismiss the artists’ class action lawsuit that accused the firms of copyright…

Published

52 mins ago

on

October 31, 2023

By

A judge mostly sided with Midjourney, DeviantArt and Stability AI’s bid to dismiss the artists’ class action lawsuit that accused the firms of copyright infringement.

Artists have been dealt a setback in their copyright fight against generative AI firms after a class-action lawsuit against several of the firms was dismissed by a United States judge, citing a lack of evidence.

In an Oct. 30 order, California District Court Judge William Orrick said the copyright infringement suit against generative AI image service Midjourney, art platform DeviantArt and AI firm Stability AI was “defective in numerous respects,” granting earlier dismissal bids from the firms.

Judge Orrick however allowed a copyright infringement claim from one class action member against Stability to go ahead and allowed the class 30 days to attempt to submit an amended suit with more proof.

“Even Stability recognizes that determination of the truth of these allegations — whether copying in violation of the Copyright Act occurred in the context of training Stable Diffusion or occurs when Stable Diffusion is run — cannot be resolved at this juncture,” Orrick wrote.

Highlighted excerpt of Orrick’s conclusive order. Source: CourtListener

The lawsuit was first filed in mid-January and claimed Stability’s AI model Stable Diffusion scraped billions of copyrighted images without permission — including those of the artists — to train the software.

DeviantArt also incorporated Stable Diffusion on its site, possibly copying millions of images from there without a license and violating its own terms of service, the suit alleged.

Related: Biden administration issues executive order for new AI safety standards

Orrick said the AI-generated images likely don’t infringe the artists’ copyright as it’s “not plausible” they’re derived from copyrighted images. He added he’s “not convinced” unless the class can show the generated images are similar to the artists’ work.

Copyright claims from some class members were dismissed as their images weren’t registered with the Copyright Office — needed for bringing a copyright infringement suit.

Copyright infringement allegations are central to similar legal actions taken against AI firms such as the Author’s Guild’s class action against OpenAI, Universal Music Group’s suit against Anthropic and Getty Images suits against Stability AI in the U.S. and United Kingdom.

Magazine: AI Eye: Real uses for AI in crypto, Google’s GPT-4 rival, AI edge for bad employees

Read More

Continue Reading

Uncategorized

Hong Kong advances CBDC pilot, bringing e-HKD trials to Phase 2

e-HKD Phase 1 trial was dedicated to full-fledged payments, programmable payments, offline payments, tokenized deposits, settlement of Web3 transactions…

Published

52 mins ago

on

October 31, 2023

By

e-HKD Phase 1 trial was dedicated to full-fledged payments, programmable payments, offline payments, tokenized deposits, settlement of Web3 transactions and settlement of tokenized assets.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) is gearing up for the second phase of the e-HKD (e-Hong Kong dollar) pilot program as it announced the successful completion of the Phase 1 trial of its in-house central bank digital currency (CBDC). 

The HKMA launched the e-HKD pilot program in November 2022 to evaluate the commercial viability of an in-house CBDC as part of its “Fintech 2025” strategy. Phase 1 was dedicated to studying e-HKD in six areas, which include full-fledged payments, programmable payments, offline payments, tokenized deposits, settlement of Web3 transactions and settlement of tokenized assets.

Summary of pilots by category and participants. Source: hkma.gov.hk

Detailing the findings of the e-HKD phase 1 trial, the HKMA report highlighted programmability, tokenization and atomic settlement as three key areas where Hong Kong’s CBDC could benefit consumers and businesses.

e-HKD specimens issued by three note-issuing banks. Source: hkma.gov.hk

The report read:

“The next phase of the e-HKD pilot program will build on the success of Phase 1 and consider exploring new use cases for an e-HKD.”

HKMA plans to “delve deeper” into some use cases that showed promising CBDC applications in the phase 1 trial. Technical considerations show an inclination toward using distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based design considering its interoperability and scalability capabilities.

Three-rail approach for the potential implementation of an e-KHD. Source: hkma.gov.hk

As shown above, Hong Kong’s CBDC program consists of a three-rail approach — foundation layer development, industry pilots and iterative enhancements and full launch. Currently, at its second rail, the e-HKD program trial is supported by public and private organizations to ensure commercial viability for both parties.

HKMA said it will also continue to work on rail 1 initiatives such as laying the legal and technical foundations for e-HKD.

Related: Hong Kong lawmaker wants to turn CBDC into stablecoin featuring DeFi

Alongside localized efforts for CBDCs, numerous central and commercial banks joined hands under Project mBrigde to explore solutions for faster, cheaper, more transparent cross-border payments.

On Sept. 25, HKMA CEO Eddie Yue revealed that mBridge will expand and be commercialized as it welcomed new banking members from China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the UAE.

“We are expecting to welcome more fellow central banks to join this open platform. And very soon, we will launch what we call a minimum viable product, with the aim of paving the way for the gradual commercialization of mBridge,” Yue added.

Magazine: Ethereum restaking: Blockchain innovation or dangerous house of cards?

Read More

Continue Reading

Uncategorized

Bitcoin white paper turns 15 as Satoshi Nakamoto’s legacy lives on

“I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” Satoshi said in an Oct. 31 email in…

Published

2 hours ago

on

October 31, 2023

By

“I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” Satoshi said in an Oct. 31 email in 2008.

Today marks 15 years since the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, shared the Bitcoin (BTC) white paper to a mailing list of cryptographers on Oct. 31, 2008 — a date also annually celebrated as Halloween.

“I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” Satoshi famously said in the opening sentence before linking the document titled: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”

Satoshi’s email notifying other cypherpunks about his release of the Bitcoin Whitepaper. Source: Satoshi Nakamoto Institute

The whitepaper proposed a decentralized system that could facilitate peer-to-peer transactions which could solve the “double spending” problem often associated with digital currency. 

It proposed to achieve this via a network of nodes to validate and record transactions through a proof-of-work consensus mechanism, launching just two months later on Jan. 3, 2009.

How Bitcoin was brought to life

Satoshi’s computer science breakthrough came on the back of other impressive developments in the cryptography and e-money space.

The first reference cited in the Bitcoin whitepaper is Wei Dai’s invention of b-money, an electronic peer-to-peer cash system which never launched but nonetheless played a key role in Satoshi’s plans for Bitcoin.

Like Bitcoin, b-money proposed that participants of the system maintain a database of account balances, which keep track of the ownership of money. Transactions would be initiated and completed by a broadcast message to all participants, which would update the account balances of those involved in a specific transaction.

In many ways, it could be seen as a precursor to the nodes of Bitcoin’s protocol which keep a record of the constantly growing blockchain.

This process is one which requires proof-of-work — a form of cryptographic proof in which one party proves to others that a certain amount of a specific computational effort has been expended.

Satoshi implemented this into Bitcoin, citing Adam Back’s invention of Hashcash in 1997 which incorporated proof-of-work to limit e-mail spam and denial-of-service attacks.

Timestamps are another core property of Bitcoin which was successfully implemented by Satoshi.

Bitcoin’s timestamp server works by taking a hash — akin to a unique serial number — of a block of transactions and timestamping it towhen the block is added to Bitcoin’s blockchain.

The hashes cryptographically link one block to the next, ensuring integrity of Bitcoin data. Timestamps also prevent double spending on Bitcoin, making the network tamper-proof and immutable.

Satoshi cited work from Henri Massias, Scott Stornetta, Stuart Haber and Dave Bayer in implementing timestamping into Bitcoin’s protocol.

Meanwhile,Merkle trees were implemented into Bitcoin to verify transaction data through digital signatures. Satoshi cited Ralph Merkle’s work on developing public key cryptosystems.

Bitcoin advocate and cyperphunk Jameson Lopp previously told Cointelegraph that credit should be given to the preliminary projects which paved the way for Bitcoin.

However the genius in Satoshi was the puzzling of all these pieces into a fully functional system, said Lopp:

“There's no single piece of the puzzle that I think is more important than the others. Nakamoto's genius was not any of the individual components of Bitcoin, but rather the intricate way in which they fit together to breathe life into the system.”

What Bitcoin did

Bitcoin was at the time, one of the first inventions to use cryptography to successfully separate money from state. Satoshi’s invention enabled users to effectively bypass banks and financial institutions to transact with others, all around the world.

The first real-world transaction paid for in Bitcoin came from Laszlo Hanyecz in May 2010, who bought two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin.

Mainstream media highlighted Bitcoin’s increased use by criminals to launder funds, among other things in the early days, but that narrative has continued to change.

Ithas become an increasingly adopted around the globe. It was made legal tender in El Salvador in September 2021.

Financial institutions have also recently applied to offer spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States, while others have launched their own Bitcoin ETFs in Europe.

Several developments have been implemented to help Bitcoin scale and bring more use cases to the network.

The Lightning network was launched in 2018 to increase Bitcoin’s transaction speed by taking computation off-chain.

Related: BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF: How it works, its benefits and opportunities

Nonfungible token-like Ordinals were launched on Bitcoin in January, which was made possible by the Taproot soft fork in November 2021.

Bitcoin’s price has also been taken on a wild ride.

Starting out as cheap as a penny in 2009, BTC has endured several bull and bust cycles with its price volatility swinging as large as 88% in some instances.

Bitcoin’s price since April 2013. Source: CoinGecko.

BTC is currently priced at $34,350, down 50% from its all-time high price of $69,000 on Nov. 10, 2021.

Magazine: Gary Gensler’s job at risk, BlackRock’s first spot Bitcoin ETF and other news: Hodler’s Digest, June 11-17

Read More

Continue Reading

Trending