Curating the Internet: Business, leadership, and management micro-summaries for September 25, 2019

remlaps-lite (76)in #rsslog • 5 years ago (edited)

Bitcoin price nosedives to 3 month low; Tesla launching in China, but maybe the timing could've been better; Many Tor users are giving away their anonymity by using bitcoin; The relationship between national secrets and innovation; and photos and videos of a new pair of crypto calves

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Bitcoin’s Price Slides $1,000 in 30 Minutes After Margin Calls at Bitmex - Bitcoin tumbled to a three month low of $8,600 on Tuesday afternoon (and even fell near $8,400 according to data from coinmarketcap). At the time of this writing, it has clawed its way back to $8700. An anonymous trader said the fall may have been triggered by margin calls at the Bitmex exchange. Apparently caught up in the action, Steem fell to $0.1265 before struggling above $0.13 again.

Elon Musk is doubling down on China as car sales plummet and electric-vehicle subsidies are slashed - Tesla is building a factory in China and plans to start manufacturing vehicles there by the end of the year. This will enable the company to cut prices and attract consumers by reducing shipping costs, but the move comes at a time when China is reducing subsidies for electric cars and overall auto sales are declining for the first time in nearly 30 years. In June, UBS noted that sales in China were declining more than anticipated. Tesla has only had 4 profitable quarters in its 16 year lifetime, so lower costs may help it achieve long term profitability, but the company is facing strong "head winds".

Bitcoin Is Not Anonymous and Tor Users Are Forgetting This - A research paper from Qatar reports that bitcoin can be used to deanonymize TOR users. The researchers report that they were able to use bitcoin addresses to link many users of Twitter and Bitcoin Talk to hidden services including Wikileaks, Silk Road, and the Pirate Bay. With great care, Tor can be an anonymous service. Bitcoin, however, is only pseudonymous. So when a Tor user uses a bitcoin address, the user becomes identifiable. A darknet researcher, Caleb, reports that it is almost trivial for law enforcement and blockchain analysts to connect crypto transactions to specific wallets. Another paper even proposes a way to link bitcoin addresses to physical locations by analyzing the times of transactions and linking them to particular time zones.

Do National Security Secrets Hold Back National Innovation? - Harvard's Daniel Gross looks to the secrets from WWII for insights about innovation. During WWII, 11,000 patent filings were ordered to be kept secret for national security. In 1945, those secrecy orders were abruptly lifted. By comparing before and after, Gross was able to gain some insights. According to Gross, it appears that there was a chilling effect, where some inventions were delayed of lost forever, but innovation continued at a high speed, so secrecy was likely not a major impediment to innovation. The article concludes with this summary: "But when the state of the art is kept hidden on a broad scale, it has a ripple effect about which firms and IP experts should be concerned, Gross says. 'Everybody in the system benefits from being able to access information about the cutting edge.'

STEEM Delivering and Naming The First "Crypto" Calves at the County Fair - (First Steps Video Included) - @justineh named the first crypto calves at her local county fair. Click through for pictures and video of Bitcoin (Lil Bit) and STEEM (Steemie). This follows closely after the appearance of "steemit" in online and print editions of a local newspaper. Maybe this is what guerrilla marketing looks like? (A 10% beneficiary has been applied to this post for @justineh.)

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