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(Below 10nm our integrated circuits experience interesting quantum effects, not necessarily in a good way, due to electron tunnelling.) At this point we're well into the realm of. Today's Intel Westermere Xeon server cpu has on the order of 5 million transistors per square millimetre (on a 512mm 2 die) using a 32nm production process; my BOTE calculation suggests 80 million transistors per mm 2 is likely by the time we get to 5-6nm resolution, giving full-sized chips with up to 40 billion transistors. What applications are going to hit mass consumer adoption in the wake of us reaching a point where a first-rank CPU of some 40 billion transistors (equal to, say, 16 x 10 core i7's) cost US $250, and low power CPUs (an n'th generation ARM descendant with, say, 2.6 billion transistors -- a thousand times the component count of today's Cortex A-9 ARM architecture) can deliver the clout of a 10 core i7 on a TDP of around 10mW for a component cost of around $1-2? Years ago, a couple of eminent computer scientists (if I remember the story correctly one of them was Danny Hillis; I forget who the other way) were discussing trends in chip production around 1980, and one of them objected to the other's extrapolation with, 'but there's no market for such cheap chips! What are you going to do, embed them in door handles?' And five years later, checking into a hotel, he suddenly realized that he was using a magstripe card to open his hotel room door because there was indeed a microprocessor in the door handle. But it doesn't take much in the way of embedded logic to operate a magstripe reader and a deadbolt. So what are the doorhandle applications that become practical when low-cost embedded devices are as powerful as today's high end servers? One trivial possibility is widespread adoption of biometric authentication based on mixed parameters that take quite a lot of processing: for example, that hypothetical hotel room door might open for you by recognizing your facial bone structure and gait pattern as you approach. Again, your car won't have a key; it will 'simply' recognize you, both by your face and your voice and more subtle cues such as your pressure distribution as you sit in the driver's seat. But that's a gimmick. By which I mean yes, it's convenient, but it's not a game-changer: we already have ways of achieving these objectives (hotel room keys — or magstripe cards — and car keys with immobilizer chips). It doesn't fundamentally change the way we live the way that, say, mobile phones or lifeloggers would bring about basic behavioural changes. What are the consequences of powerful microprocessors getting really ridiculously cheap — applications that just aren't practical today? Things like the library digitizer from Vernor Vinge's 'Rainbows End' (which I shall not describe, because it's both a spoiler for the book and a thing of horror to bibliophiles), or cameras, or giving your lifelogger real-time ubiquitous text recognition (as in, everything textual in your field of vision is scanned, digitized, and indexed immediately). What am I missing that isn't possible today and doesn't substitute for an existing process or technique? Alternative formation: if are artefacts which are the physical instantiation of an entity with a trackable history on the internet, what happens when spimes acquire enough on-board processing power to act as the container for their own virtual existence? 2: Food tracking - where did that orange really come from? Was it sprayed with something that will give you a third nipple in ten years time? Was that chicken really humanely raised and slaughtered? Just how many food miles did that avocado clock up on its journey from the Occupied Territories? Ad serving in newspapers, a bit like Negroponte's 'The Daily Me', but dynamic. It monitors your interaction with the paper (perhaps even using eye tracking) - what are you spending time looking? Is it the financial news in which case have you thought about investing your money in Bolivian llama farms; is it the possibly underage girl on page three - in which case you're going to love our.xxx domains, or are you stuck on the crossword - buy our dictionaries or even treat yourself to the English degree you promised yourself all those years ago. 3: Realtime language translation, done rather well. It can already be done acceptably on Tablets, but leaving a lot to be desired. Similarly, texting will go the way of the dinosaurs and be sneered at by all teenagers living in the year 2020. Replaced by either accurate speech to text, or via subvocalization pickups on the skin of the neck Iris scan as a logon for all portable machines A cheap, small and decent headup display/monocle to replace screens on phones/tablets/laptops (long overdue IMHO) Accurate eye tracking to replace the mouse, possibly coupled with EEG pickups (doubtful) BTW, Moore's Law will not end in 2020. The number of transistors will continue to increase as wafer scale electronics is finally needed, and later printing onto graphene sheets. How much could you get on 10m^2 graphene sheet? Also, the cost is going to drop drastically as lithographic tools do not have to constantly push for ever smaller features. 5: Of course, to me the more interesting question is energy and resource-cheap and non-toxic processors, not just tiny ones. That adds more to ubiquity than tiny processors. One of the really interesting ideas isn't just processing power, it's etching nanolabs onto chips. There are a lot of interesting uses if you can quickly determine the chemistry of a small sample. One example: landfill and sewage recycling. Currently landfills are such a heterogeneous mix of garbage that they're hell to recycle. Even the gas coming off a landfill is such a mix that it's generally cheaper to vent it (if it's not too toxic) than it is to get the methane out for fuel. Ditto with sewage--all it takes is one jackass pitching his car battery (or any other toxic waste) into a sewer to make all the sewage unfit as fertilizer. Cheap, fast, smart chemical analysis could change the cost equation substantially, simply because they could sort and filter things on a small enough scale that their output might actually be recyclable. Think of these as a form of Maxwell's Demon in the recycling stream. 6: In a move to gratify the (possibly spinning in their graves) soul of old-time conspiracy theorists, the phrase 'smart money' takes on a whole new meaning. Whether you do your transactions electronically or in cash, they're closely monitored. Biometric identification of who handles the cash, maybe drug and explosive detection processes by on-chip ELISA or similar becomes the security forces' wet dream. And slightly more off-piste - we finally have machines that can extract precious metals from water and similar. We find the price of gold falls (although not hugely necessarily) and if we're really unlucky we also find that one of the scrubbed metals is a vital sub-micro-nutrient that we've suddenly lost. 9: In a move to gratify the (possibly spinning in their graves) soul of old-time conspiracy theorists, the phrase 'smart money' takes on a whole new meaning. This gets really interesting, and it allows for some really weird stuff. For example, we currently have a certain cycle that money follows; created by a government, (or a loan) distributed to a bank, loaned to a business, paid to an employee, used to pay the rent, sent back to a bank, used to purchase some groceries, used by the grocer to purchase stock in IBM, etc. Obviously some of these paths are more efficient than others, by which I mean better for the economy, or better for the average human being. So what if money gained and lost value depending on what it is being used for as a vehicle to encourage savings, encourage purchases, etc. For example, used to purchase a beer, that dollar might be worth 90 cents. Used to purchase a home, that dollar might be worth $1.10. Smart money might also be able to tell if it was being used illegally, or if it was attached to something of questionable value, such as a mortage run through the MERs system. The really interesting thing is who gets to define what are the 'good' and 'poor' uses of money. I imagine S&P being put in charge of programming our smart money, and the thought makes me shudder. But that's OK, because there's always some dodgy type hanging around the bar who will root your cash for a small fee. 11: I was afraid you'd say that. Then extrapolate all the way down to large insect/small bird sized UAVs with a single-shot disposable shaped charge or projectile weapon and enough smarts to hunt down their own prey. Possibly with encrypted mesh networking so they can hunt in swarms -- like killer hornets. It'll revolutionize warfare, and not in a pleasant way. (Want to clear insurgents out of an area? Sent in a cruise missile with a warhead consisting of a hive of 10,000 of these hornets, primed to hunt down and kill anyone with explosive traces on their hands. Of course, the first order response of your typical insurgent group will be to press-gang pre-teens and toddlers to carry their bomb-making equipment. It goes downhill from there, fast.). 13: GATTACA is one outcome. I think Charlie proposed some useful countermeasures in Halting State, and I think they're already being used by criminals. More to the point, microsatellite analysis (genetic ID) is notoriously sensitive to contamination, because much of the data is in numbers of repeats of short sequences, not just a straight sequence with mutations. Stuttering repeats can be hard to amplify well, for the same reason that stutters tend to identify people. Also, if PCR is involved, it's not that fast (hours, not seconds). Certainly an advanced reader would need less amplified DNA to sequence, but in PCR, each cycle doubles the amount of DNA. Cutting off two cycles won't shorten the process all that much. As anaother example, current DNA chips take hours, because you have to attach the fluorescent molecules to your DNA. You can get titanic masses of data from such a process, but I'm not sure you can speed up the process substantially, at least without a different technique. Additionally, it's already possible to spoof a DNA sample. Currently, crooks pick up random cigarette butts from somewhere (for example, at the local cops' hangout, a head shop, or a bus station) and leave them at the scene of the crime. In the future, I'm sure spoofing will get more sophisticated. For example, if you've got cheap, fast, DNA analysis, you may well have cheap, fast DNA synthesis, and a crook could use such a synthesizer to drown out his traces at a crime scene. 18: I think, though I'm not certain, that the most recent (experimental) DNA sequencing methods don't use PCR to amplify things, but just analyze continual strings of DNA. Something about using electrical charge to feed it through a hole so small that it has to go through as a single strand. I *would* guess that this implies they unzip the strands, but whether first or during the process I don't know. I also don't know whether this makes it easier or harder to count the number of identical codons. However, thinking that future sequencing will depend on the rapidly varying segments is probably wrong. Sequencing of a full chromosome is getting cheaper rapidly, so they'll probably just do a complete sequence of everything. This will come up with a REALLY unique id, as even identical twins tend to differ in small ways. (For that matter, even the cells within one body tend to have small differences.stumbles during the copying that result in either duping or deletion of a codon.) Spoofing is a different problem. And it may be hard to beat the dust collected off a bus, or from the corridors of a hospital, or office. But consider taking a bit of a corpse and finely dicing it. (Really finely. You don't want this to be obvious.) If they start separating our by strength of signal, that could produce a much louder one than whatever you left by accident. 19: Computers that are not just ubiquitous, but imperceptible. Microscopic processors like bacteria scattered everywhere, including all over your body. Powered by ambient rf fields, thermal gradients, photovoltaics, whatever; and forming a massive global network (as in Vernor Vinge's 'A Deepness in the Sky'). Processors that need no power when not active, but that still preserve their state (like HP's memristor concepts.) User interfaces so natural to use, that you don't need to think about them at all. Not just understanding natural language, but reading voice stress, muscular tension, heartrate and other subconcious physical cues. Want to know what the weather forecast is? Just ask the question to the air. Or subvocalise. Or just look up at the sky. The response is whispered into your ear, or projected into your field of view, or a weather map appears as if tattooed onto the back of your hand. 21: Really good VR, to the point that 'facetime' will be virtual (bandwidth will still be expensive, so you send a 3d model of your head and facial movements at the beginning of a conversation, and rather less when you talk). In fact, let's extend that to virtual vacations. Fahrenheit 451 style individually-tailored TV programs. Let's extend that - on-demand modification of books, music, TV, movies, recipes to suit your taste and/or requirements. Much better virtual modeling, and on-demand manufacturing, of clothes, shoes, etc. Vast amounts of CPU overhead to implement the latest fad in DRM, copyright/usage tracking of anything copyrighted. You'll still pay $10 for an ebook because that's how much it'll cost the publishers to make sure nobody copies part of it. 22: Some years ago, Marvin Minsky collaborated in an SF novel about the rise of AI, and one of the applications he described was a robot that increased crop yields and obviated the need for pesticides by manually removing harmful insects from crops and leaving the harmless or beneficial insects behind. He described a large robot with very fast-moving hands walking along the rows of plants visually inspecting them and clearing them of bugs as it went, and this strikes me as fairly silly. But what if every single plant has its own monitoring system? 23: I think definite user-interface improvements. We've been hovering on the edge of useful voice recognition for a while, for example, and I think we're going to go over the edge on that fairly soon. We're further off for handwriting, and that may not be useful; but if it is useful, we'll get there soon. Maybe a whole different paradigm using goggles or overlay for real-world interactions. Keyboards hanging on a lot -- they're easier on the voice or arms than lots of alternatives, for when you're doing dedicated work at a computer. One of the game-changers is AI assistants, but who knows when? We have not the slightest clue how to get to there, all our AI ideas are either pure blue-sky and not very well confirmed, or else very specifically targeted, not general purpose. But we may have computer-mediated human assistants sooner. Seems like the job market is narrowing in on the very best people. That leaves a lot of under-employed pretty darned good people. Time-share personal assistant? There are more and more rich people who might have a use for this. Definitely severe arms races in facial recognition, tracking, and such. Laws and styles about dress hats and veils. Facial tattoos? Better, face paint (frequently changed). Also in spam-vs.-ham (more generally than in online forums). Major uprising to shove spam back into the shadows? Identifying botnet traffic and cutting it off? 24: The microprocessors-in-every-doorknob story was recounted by Hillis in his talk On game software development which used to be available on technetcast.com, but I can't find it there any more. The transcript of the relevant section below starts at 14:03 in that talk: One of the very first talks I ever gave in public was at the Hilton hotel in New York City, and I gave a graph kind of like this. It was when microprocessors were first coming out in the '70s, and it was a graph of how many microprocessors there were going to be, and I gave what was at the time a very radical talk. I made the proposition that pretty soon there were going to be more microprocessors than people, and that literally got a laugh in the '70s. People thought that was a very funny idea, that you'd have more microprocessors than people. And in fact, at the end of it I kind of bombed in the talk because at the end of it I did a Q&A session, and somebody asked the question 'what do you think somebody's going to do with all these microprocessors? I mean, it's not like you need a microprocessor in every doorknob', and I didn't have an answer for that. But, if you go back to that same hotel today, of course, there is indeed a microprocessor in every doorknob. 27: Objects keeping track of their own status, able to tell you not just when the milk has spoiled, but when the lightbulb is about to burn out, the sunglasses screws need tightening, or the pants pocket has developed a hole. I'm also always interested in how new technology can make it possible for people to more fully indulge their paranoias. Charlie's killer-hornet notion made me think of how worried some people get about deer ticks spreading disease -- or even germs from coughing passersby. Could those hornets be used like Maxwell's demons, orbiting around you and preventing the Bad Actors from physically contacting you? 30: Easy space exploration and space telescopes. Build nanosats equipped with a block of aerogel (to survive the impact), a wireless transmitter (to talk to neighbors), a small versions of your desired sensors, a tiny solar panel, and a tiny ion engine. Then scatter a cloud of them in the general direction of your target stellar object. Extract useful measurements statistically; rather than getting results from single high-precision trials using expensive equipment, get results by comparing the results of a million trials carried out by a thousand nanosats. Same approach works for telescopes (can anybody say 'long baseline interferometry'?) and phased arrays. You could put a cloud of these up in orbit and it'd be able to do face/gait recognition on anybody not under a roof. First thing that I thought of when I came upon this thread and scrolled down to your post. BUT, not written, text, translation but a 'sit on shoulder' Parrot - pieces of Eight Style- that would take the piratical spoken source and TRANSLATE to semi lip syncopated from the speaker to Unfortunate Foreigner that is not of OUR nationality. Lots of Game changes here for the language of new asylum seekers country that Requires that you Speak the language of the host country. After all we aren't prejudiced against people who need to use a Zimmer Frame are we? So.a person using a translation Parrot - or Shoulder Dragon as in the Sci fi Con costume fans costume of choice? - would needs must be a handicapped person, eh? Charlie hasn't thought of this one. The tourist trotting about Edinburgh with a Translator - Strange World tm Guide - sitting on his/her shoulder. Out Gracious Host has thought of VR Glasses of course- for a New view of the City of Edinburgh - but he hasn't thought of a Parrot. ' Avast there Me Hearties! Pieces of Ten! Pieces of Ten! ' first on the left to.sponsored Bookshop if its a 'Free ' hired Parrot. 37: Actually I don't think biometrics will ever take off. Firstly the processing power is well within the realm of mobile phone/netbook computer power already. No laptops are around that can be unlocked by your face. Things like highend cars could already afford to implement that kind of thing today. It might add a few hundered dollars to the cost of a $30k car. I think hotels would easily be able to fork over more money for higher end biometric doorlocks today if they wanted to (remember those magnetic ones would have been expensive once). The problem is that a camera can't tell the difference between a person and a photograph of that person. Even if you add some kind of high resolution Kinect style depth mapping to it, the just requires a 3D printed 'bust' rather than a photograph. They would have to add some even more advanced sensory stuff to it (maybe an infrared laser to check if the skin performs the correct subsurface scattering that plastic wouldn't, maybe using laser to listen for a heartbeat), all of that can be worked around and your fancy biometric lock will always be less secure than dongle with some kind of publickey cryptography built in (which might work via RF). It also drops the issue of having to authenticate someone since you can just give them the 'key', but if it is stolen you can disable that key. We could end up with flying automated drones infesting cities the same way we have pigeons. Think of a totally automated, solar/ambient-powered quadrotor drone for a few hundered bucks (or less). Capable of running a full robotics platform like ROS on the drone itself with all the sensory, automatic mapping and so on. They could be programmed to just fly around until there battery runs low, find somewhere out of the way to land (such as a building roof), recharge for 2 days then proceed with another 40min of flight (or more if battery tech picks up). Add in some kind of wifi, or enough intelligence to return home after a month of flying around. How would the.gov stop people releasing them, they might not be able to track the signal if you relay via some other drones and the effort required would be to much. Chances are they would have to be outlawed like laser pointers. Distributed drone networks. Lets say I buy a drone and sign it up to an open community run cloud service that takes control of it's operation when I'm not using it. One that lets someone put a drone basically anywhere in a major city within a matter of minutes. With multiple drones we could get a realtime, 3D Google Earth. Stick a TB flash drive in there and you have RFC1149, or mobile flying data drops. Just jump online and request that the drone with that library of 4K cinema HD rips flys overhead. People can stick open drone recharge stations on their roofs so the drones don't have to use solar, the stations themselfs could store all the data from the drones and upload new files that people have requested like some kind of real life physical p2p. Not to mention the possibilities for people selling things like drugs. How do you deal with people trying to fly one into your bathroom. Maybe we need drones designed to take out other drones, or laser systems to shot them down like that one they made for mosquitoes. 39: Another idea. We could see the ultimate form of DRM. Rather than a movie selling on a disc it could contain an entire player that streams to your TV. A video game could ship as an entire game console. Ebook's could sell like physical books (or maybe as chips that implement the entire ebook->pixels rendering and plug into an epaper display). That way pirates would have to physically open the devices (which would be nothing but a solid block of epoxy surrounding chips and some self destruct systems) and then they would be dealing with some kind of custom hardware (look how long a PS3 jailbreak took, we could see each game publisher shipping their own custom cpu architectural automatically generated and optimized for that specific game). Although movies could still be ripped even if it was via frame capturing. Of course it would stop any kind of online distribution of the products, but if the companies selling the stuff can totally stop piracy that way we might see them make a push, simply choosing a few highly popular games to sell *only* inside their custom game system as a special feature for people who fell the need to own a physical object and if that takes off pushing everything that way. 40: No holds barred ubiquitous law enforcement for both state and commercial interests. If it becomes commercially viable to embed substantial computing power and communications into nearly every product, it will be only a matter of time until product manufacturers enter into agreements (under coercion or otherwise) with other entities who will want to use that computing power to monitor the public or use them as a revenue stream. The state security uses of hardware that can monitor populations 24x7 for any signs of descent are mostly obvious. Walls with eyes can identify vandals. Smart doorknobs with speech recognition can report state subjects for subversive or treasonous activity, such as planning to vote for an opposition party or failing to show proper respect for the police. Less obvious consequences include politically motivated functionality degradation. Recording devices could refuse to capture police brutality or record audio of corruption. Keyboards--and even pens--could be designed not to record politically questionable manifestos or allow disloyal subjects to communicate readily. The commercial uses for ubiquitous monitoring are less well explored but considerably more wide ranging. A constant of the modern economy is that businesses from all sectors will, if given the opportunity, conspire against the consumer. Consumer products manufacturers who find themselves with more processing power than they need in their products will be quite happy to sell that excess power to other commercial interests. For example, any device that processes ambient audio and has surplus processing power could be sold off to music rights holders to use as a royalties enforcement device. Sing 'happy birthday' within earshot of your voice activated door lock and you'll get a bill for royalties. Hum a pop tune within earshot of a cell phone and get sued for creating an unauthorized derivative work. Other commercial uses for ubiquitous intelligence require no inter-business collusion. Computational intelligence everywhere would enable the spread of inkjet cartridge-like brand lock-in to all consumer products. Imagine light fixtures that require brand-specific light bulbs, with compliance enforced by encrypted communication between the fixture and bulb. Or imagine light bulbs that only work with certain electricity providers. More insidiously, think of consumer products that selectively degrade in response to consumer activity. Cell phones could brick themselves if their owner criticizes the manufacturer, the network provider, or any cause either manufacturer or provider bankrolls. Fridges could shorten then lifespans or spoil your food if they detect you're an environmentalist. Ubiquitous intelligence means ubiquitous surveillance and ubiquitous control. Like most technological advancements, this is always a good thing for the wealthy and powerful but never a good thing for the public. 41: If such chips and devices are cheap and ubiquitous, we could see a return to a world that our ancestors lived in - every tree and rock (or artificial object) will be 'alive' and have agency. You could hold conversations with the environment and feel steeped in an enveloping mind. The need to do routine tasks will disappear. Everything will just work and maintain itself. Almost all coordinating work might disappear. The cops in halting State and Rule 34 would have a completely different function - as almost any crime could be solved almost instantly. The natural environment, especially the unnatural farms and gardens will be highly monitored and controlled, perhaps even to even plant and animal, even the insects. 45: Let me turn this around and ask if and how the kind of itty-bitty, ubiquitous technology being discussed here might (note and emphasize 'might') help solve problems we currently think are important and hard. Such might be, just to prime the pump: - How brains work to produce organized behavior/ intelligence/consciousness. - How that DNA stuff produces hugely complex and huger structures like hands and, yes, brains. - Of course, prime factorization, everybody's favorite. - Stabilizing the plasma in a GWt magnetic confinement fusion reactor. 46: Taking it a different way I see the production of really good (and quite freaky) software capable of acting in ways that mimicking intelligent animal/human behaviour. With Moore's law grinding to a halt the focus in the industry will switch to making software that does a lot better job with the tools it's given. In conjunction with really cheap, really powerful chips you could get an awakening of the world around us where every product has some bizzare yet useful (and importantly artistic and intuitive like an iPhone OS) software to interface with. 50: Realtime language translation will probably be standard on the 2020 model of the Google Phone, both voice and visual. A phone is a useful interface for translating street signs and restaurant menus; probably not so great for books. If there is still a demand for translating books and official papers 9 years from now, look for either single-purpose translators the size of a paperback book that function like a cm thick piece of glass, but provide augmented reality translation, superimposing translated text over the (dimmed down) original; or, this might be the killer ap for AR goggles. 51: One thing that would be developed quickly is not microprocessor based, but is a cheap EMP generator to fry them. There is information on the web to guide the development. The small microprocessors will be very vulnerable to EMP as shielding of any size would defeat the idea of smallness (actually would they survive in the normal electromagnetic environment?).I see criminals being the first to deploy EMP devices but if the microprocessors were as ubiquitous as others think, and given some ideas above, many other people would deploy the devices as a means of self defence. 52: More environmental consequences: --If we start seriously investing in planting trees and sequestering carbon in the soil, we'll need cheap, effective monitoring equipment, something we don't really have right now. If the world goes in for bio-char, we'll see proliferation of techniques for monitoring the soil. While determining the amount of charcoal in the soil is somewhat cheaper than determining the total amount of carbon in the soil, it's still a pain. Similarly, with trees (especially in dryland habitats) most of the biomass is underground. Currently the technology to monitor this kind of thing (root cameras) is fairly crude and extremely expensive. These will benefit from better, cheaper instruments. --Continuation of the arms race between poachers and conservationists. Even now, poachers are part of the international black market (and are often heavily armed), while conservationists are using civilian drones, RFID tags in rare plants and animals, and similar law enforcement gadgetry. If micro-UAVs and similar gizmoids become prevalent, we may well see the Serengeti wired like London is now, and every wild tiger, rhino, and elephant has an armed UAV as a babysitter. --For agriculture, cheap sensor nets may be really useful for things like measuring nutrient flows, pest monitoring, and similar things. A soil test for a cup of soil currently runs up to >US$100 for total nutrients from a lab, as one example. Getting that kind of detail and accuracy in a $1 sensor would change things dramatically. 55: H3g3m0n @ 39 I read your 'ultimate DRM', and the thing which springs to mind for me (as someone who grew up in the 1980s, at the beginning of the whole 'computer games' thing) is my old, LCD display 'Donkey Kong' game. Which was exactly what you're talking about there: a single box which played a single game and which only played that one game (and would only play that single game for as long as the batteries held out - no upgrades, no changes, nada). Or are you suggesting something closer to the notion that the consumer would be sold a 'console' which is essentially a battery framework which supplies power to a game cartridge or disc which contains effectively the entire console-plus-game on a chip? I suspect the game programming companies would be of two minds about that - on the one hand, they'd be able to pretty much produce console-independent games (as in, it doesn't matter which brand of 'console' you're using, you'll get the same gameplay, the same sorts of sprites etc) rather than having to either subtly vary their product to suit the market (as per the arguments about Xbox vs PS3 versions of certain games) or the console manufacturer's perceived market. On the other hand, they'd be heading back to doing a lot of very basic interface and system programming (which is currently pretty much handed off to the console manufacturers) rather than concentrating solely on the gameplay stuff. 57: Everybody's got their own customized possessions, right? Sharing that stuff with other people can get to be a real headache if the basic settings conflict, so people tend to hang out mostly with other people who's stuff can be shared easily. The endpoint is when people's stuff actively start steering them towards the 'right' romantic partners and discouraging the wrong ones. Much drawing room comedy ensues as the strong-willed teakettle is at cross-purposes with the equally formidable dining room set in regards to whom young Bertram should be dating. Come to think of it, I believe Philip K. Dick already did this one:-) To a lesser degree, so did H. 58: andrewD - Oh, that's a good one. I was just thinking that person on person crime would be a thing of the past, and then I read your comment. Heuristic matchmaking. Lifelogging allows the creation of an inexpensive app that develops realistic, complete personality templates. The matchmaking algorithms being developed by eHarmony and match.com are perfected to the point that everyone's ideal soulmate is identified for them. Which is great for young people, not so great if you're 50 and pretty happily married with kids going through college and a house, but not blissfully in love. Oh, the temptation just to meet your soulmate. Or the complications if you're from a traditional culture, where your parents want to arrange a match. Matching someone with their ideal soulmate is not necessarily a good thing, either, as all of the Bonnys will meet their Clydes. 59: 'Watson' on every machine, and on every search server And to use another cuurent IBM project as an example, Smarter Cities. Instead of the current model of a panopticon, with effectively dumb cameras everywhere, smarter sensors - CCTV cameras which can run face-detection software in realtime, networked tracking software using this so that as you walk out of frame on one camera, the tracking knows where you're coming into frame on another. Traffic lights which do video analysis to alter their timings for optimal traffic flow, again with distributed algorithms relying on multiple smart nodes operating in concert. Water mains with smart sensors to spot leaks (if you think this isn't an issue, live in Dublin sometime - we're living in a nation famous for its rain and we get water shortages because of leaks in the water mains.). And of course, the improved error detection hardware that we've already seen in some public phones ( especially as these die out, because you need the phone to call for repairs rather than paying people to inspect them regularly, and also for collecting cash and so on), will start showing up in more and more equipment as it gets too complex to service easily; likewise, as we get more and more room to play with hardware on-chip, expect more and more redundancy as well to bring down MTBF and maintenance costs (and thus TCO). 62: Several commenters have already offered Panopticons. They'll be operated by insurance companies, and come with behaviour modification a la Thaler and Sunstein's. Want life insurance? Give our software these permissions in your 'extended identity'/sphere of control. Subtle environmental cues will subconsciously persuade you that you don't want that dessert, that you want to go for a nice bracing walk, that you want to hand over your savings to the nice insurance company, etc. One consequence: drastic reduction in size and scope of the whole criminal justice system - Nudge-type mechanisms will control impulsive crimes before you feel the impulse. Another consequence: many fewer accidents of all kinds. A third: the complete helplessness of people who wander into places with no bandwidth. 63: Vebayste, I don't want to rain on your parade, but our current processors are already near-useless in space: the transistors are so small cosmic ray damage renders them useless within weeks or months. Devices a couple orders of magnitude smaller would only live minutes. I think the most practical application will be making things that are currently dumb as rocks slightly smarter. If your car was being driven around by someone it didn't recognize, wouldn't it be nice if it let you know? (Maybe it's just your brother.) If you lent out your new hardcover book, wouldn't it be nice if started nagging the borrower after a couple weeks? (And call you up after six weeks.) How about if your mum's pill bottles and her alarm clock and her fridge and her clock checked up on her and let you know she was having a bad day? None of that's even difficult. The issue is figuring out how to monetize the damn things, to create a revenue stream with them. Because that is what's going to happen, and the time to figure how the hack the process or pass a law against it is right now. 64: Smart Dust: nano-processors that feed on ambient energy gradients and come in a variety of flavors all network meshed back to report data. Flavors: moisture, temp, alkalinity, pressure, visual Combine this with tattooed circuitry: And you could have an external sensory network feeding you data via your tattoo circuits as pressure on your arm, warmth, or flexible display tats. However really 'smart dust' comes in when you take a concept like this IBM chip: and use memresistor tech to make high-density neurons with memory, cheap enough to scatter like dust. Then the world does come to life with intelligent agents embedding the world. Given how high tech is magic to most now, imagine the typical non-tech user inhabiting this world. Perhaps heating a house/work site with the heat from millions of processors built into the walls (think embedded in plastic with interconnects and rolled out as sheets behind the sheet-rock) would be feasible. There's your cloud computer. Need more heat? You can sell more computer time in nano-transaction jobs to run in the wall computers. Earlier posts mentioned CGI replacing actors. Take it up a notch with super high level video compression that is totally algorithmic in nature. Entire scenes (even live sporting events) are broken down into a CGI description of the world and transmitted to your TV to be generated on the fly. Who cares that the people in the stands are just library models at certain detail levels. Think the tennis Hawkeye replays but in this you cannot tell it from live play. (1) flat displays where all the memory and storage of a current state of the art 8-core 3ghz server fits into the cardboard thick panel. (2) Lego style computer blocks that snap together memory, sensor, display, etc. Blocks Yes, primitive examples of this exist in research labs, extrapolate out snapping together whatever computer resources you need (3) genetically modified plants that take up smart dust during growth to grow solar powered computational tree farms (the cloud's in the forest!) No genetic modification necessary if you can tap photosynthesis to power the smart dust. (4) The migration of vast computer resources to colder climates as super high-density computation becomes ubiquitous and the waste heat generated becomes the new target of climate change legislation. (5) highly accurate weather forecasting as current super-computer level computational power becomes evenly spread across the world. Think weather-underground stations but with current weather forecasting simulation power in each station and smart dust drifting in hurricanes and tornadoes. What wouldn't be effected. You can stick with the concept of super-dense chips for extrapolation, or add things like molecular pumps on the surface, the ability to change surface reflectivity, nano spectrographs, molecular gates, etc. The ability to have cheap throwaway computation tied to the ability to manipulate an external element and feed off ambient power is a game changer. Perhaps not full nano-tech as envisioned by sci-fi but quite implementable at 5nm with nowhere to go smaller. 70: I think you're right about that particular application, but I also think that the level of integration we're talking about will dramatically affect enabling technologies for all kinds of handicapped people, including the blind. WIth the kind of massive signal-processing capability 100 billion transistors can provide, you could make a lot of real-time decisions about the nature of nearby objects imaged with a couple of cheap cameras and a wide-angle doppler sonar depth detector, and generate speech for warnings about the step down 2 meters ahead, or the dog approaching from the side, or the vehicle turning towards you on your left side. Navigating blind usually involves a relatively one-dimensional view of the world, projecting your path ahead and finding out what lies along it. If your navigational widget gives you a running commentary on what's ahead, coupled with occasional warnings about things approaching from the sides or behind I think that would handle most of the requirements. It would be even more useful if it knew your route and included Google map information in the mix. And hearing aids could use a lot more computation to do a better job (I know this from firsthand experience: I have a pair of hearing aids that were state of the art 5 years ago, and I've been following the advances since). It's still very hard to distinguish one of several streams of conversation in a group (the 'Cocktail Party' effect), or to tell which direction a sound comes from. Computer aids for cognitively-impaired people (Alzheimer's patients, those with Down's Syndrome or Fragile X Syndrome, memory disorders, stroke damage, etc.) have been proposed for some time, and current smartphones have almost enough juice to handle them except that the user interface must be more flexible than any available now (Augmented Reality will help with that, but probably won't be sufficient). More processor power will make that easier. 71: what happens when spimes acquire enough on-board processing power to act as the container for their own virtual existence? I'm not convinced that on-board processing will replace simple IDs in a large percentage of spimes. RFIDs will always be very much cheaper than processor chips (when a hundred-million transistor processor costs $0.10 in million quantity a 256-bit RFID (larger than existing commercial products) will probably cost less than $0.001 because the processing for the processor is much more complex and takes longer, because the manufacturing of the processor requires fabulously expensive fabrication equipment which has to be amortized, and because a large part of the cost of the processor is testing (lot testing isn't usually sufficient for a reasonably low DOA rate). So most things, especially low-manufacturing cost items or components of other items will keep their data in the cloud. 72: erm @ 34 It's called: BABELFISH! Curmudgeon @ 40 Like most technological advancements, this is always a good thing for the wealthy and powerful but never a good thing for the public. You're in the USA, right? NO-ONE has mentioned this technology in co-operation with FABBING. This would ensure much greater precision in all 3 dimensions - which is the bugbear of fabbing right now. Really well-made, made-to-order apecific objects and tools - in your garage/garden shed/loft. 75: 'Actually, I own a laptop that can be unlocked by my face.' I just had a flash of someone slamming their face down on the keyboard, and the computer reading the pattern and height of the keys they hit. With enough processing power, you can get into the age of 'subtle security.' Once you program the suite of processors and detectors with the right inputs, any intruder will have to deal with finding out the actual challenge first, before they can even hope to defeat it without being detected. It could be anything from the things mentioned upthread (face, gait, whatever) all the way down to particular hand gestures or breathing in a certain pattern - and with enough variation in processing and detection, it would be very hard to defeat without leaving obvious traces or setting off alarms. Of course, a bad guy with enough breaker software and hardware would just dump a couple of (literal!) buckets of processors onto the job and sit back. 76: Wouldn't information processing this cheap and ubiquitous put the big bandwidth companies out of business? See my USENIX talk for my take on that. Shorter version: no, unless we get really good at routing -- and then we run into trust problems: if you're doing your internet banking over an open network, how do you know whether the folks on one of the intermediate nodes are poisoning your DNS cache and running a transparent proxy for the banking server so they can do a man-in-the-middle on your SSL connection? 77: It seems that trojans on customer PCs are the predominant way that banking accounts are compromised these days. Running a transparent proxy for a bank server still requires that your end-user fail to notice that the connection is not actually signed correctly, which is something that most browsers will whinge about in fairly strong terms. Of course, if you can compromise one of the signing keys of the SSL cert issuers then you can do whatever you want, but that's a bit hard for your average criminal gang. 78: One thing you missed - which has major security implications - is the coming collision of robotics with ubiquitous communications. Robotics hasn't taken off yet, although great progress is being made in the movement-and-sensing department (as can be seen in this extraordinary robotic seagull: This is because computers are presently too dumb to be trusted with any difficult task. However, communications allows us to sidestep that problem. You know all those articles on how it is better to be a plumber that a computer programmer, because local activities like plumbing can't be offshored? In the future, a robotic plumber will be delivered to your house, and it will be operated from wherever labour is cheapest. The parts of the job which don't require intelligence will be gradually replaced by software. One guy will supervise a few robots doing the same job, just as today one guy supervises a few auto-checkout machines in Tescos. The current platform battle is over who controls your mobile phone OS. The platform battle of 2025 will be over who controls the OS of your housebot. Companies will provide cleaning, cooking, eldercare, repair, and entertainment services - and maybe even local manufacture - via the bot, just as companies today provide information services via your computer or mobile. This doesn't even require much new science; it's just an engineering evolution of tech we have now. So it will happen in 10.20 years. The security problems are kind of obvious. 82: 'What are the consequences of powerful microprocessors getting really ridiculously cheap' Powerful microprocessors are really ridiculously cheap. Why are we not living in Science Fiction land already today? Most major corporations and governments today have access to Bigdata, why are they so seldom using it for useful stuff or implementing evil master plans? Mostly they are just bumbling along trying to maintain growingly complex system portfolios and organisations, trying to keep chaos from penetrating the gates. If we consider Parkinson’s Law as just a specific case of the second law of thermodynamics, we can understand that people are too busy to actually implement the internet of things. We could have done a lot of very cool things just with current technology and processing power, but we never seem to have the necessary implementation bandwidth. Schools and kindergartens overflow with clothes that kids have lost or forgotten. If we had embedded a RFID tag on all clothes the parents would have been able with a mobile phone and an app to register the ID to a specific kid. Whereupon teachers could just use their phone to read who a forgotten item belonged to. Why have not done this years ago? Following that thought if we RFID all clothes we could revolutionise washing of clothes. First the machine could automatically sort the bin of dirty clothes according to washing instructions registered by the fabricator. After washing and drying, the machine could automatically sort according to registered owner. You would no longer need a washing machine in every household, but have a fully automatic service in every neighbourhood. Thus reducing space needed in each apartment, and also through cutting down the 'cycle time' that a clothing item use from wardrobe and back you could reduce the needed inventory of clothes and thus also cut need for space and dead capital in your wardrobe. Preferably I would of cause like my laundry delivered by pneumatic tubes. Pneumatic tube is another one of those superior technologies we never seem to have time to implement. Think about what a delivery system and waste disposal system using pneumatic tubes would do your personal logistics and the need for roads in a community. But think what we could do with both pneumatic tubes, and an internet of things. 83: Smart Dust based fusion power plants. That sounds, if you'll forgive me for saying this, science fictional (for Star Trek values of 'science fictional'). My take on fusion power is that, even if cheaper technologies such as Polywell fusors turn out to be viable, there are huge obstacles to deploying it which ultimately make it barely advantageous over fission. (Fusion releases energy in the shape of neutrons and gamma rays. To get useful power out, you need to capture these. The result is that your reactor structure and primary heat transfer system will become intensely radioactive and accumulate high level waste products through transmutation and secondary activation of their components. They'll also suffer from the same neutron-driven embrittlement as conventional fission reactors. They're not even a useful anti-proliferation measure, as if you install hunks of U238 inside the primary containment you can use those neutrons to breed plutonium. And this leaves aside any consideration of where the reactor fuel comes from. The easiest reaction to drive, D + T, requires tritium, which doesn't occur in nature and is mostly produced by neutron activation of deuterium; but the reaction barely releases enough neutrons to breed fuel for the next stage. Aneutronic fusion or fusion using other elements -- 3He or Boron -- takes order-of-magnitude higher temperatures than the 100M Kelvins required by D + T. These problems are hard.). 86: Machines that operate at unstable equilibria. Wacky medical stuff. End of all natural diseases, cure for cancer, etc, etc. Obvious, boring. Add meta to all your omics, do what's being done now for individuals to whole systems. Whole environment metabolism monitoring. Full audit of the Earth's proteome. There's got to be some cool stuff in there. Molecular simulation for high throughput determination of protein function. What if you maintain the biological environment at an unstable equilibrium? Weeding is an example of this. It's easy keep a garden weed free, harder to weed a weedy garden. So this sort of thing, but at a much finer level of detail. Or more exotic things. Fragile but very efficient systems. 87: The drones are intriguing, but I am not sure how useful a military technology is that could be stopped by chicken wire or mosquito netting. Logical fallacy. Viz: 'Pistol bullets are intriguing, but I am not sure how useful a military technology is that could be stopped by bullet proof vests or helmets.' (Enter, stage left, A Tank.) Wars are fought with a combination of arms, and we won't see small swarm-drones deployed without a countermeasure in mind for the basic defenses, like chicken wire. More to the point, the whole dynamic of the arms race since 1945 has been towards smaller numbers of vastly more accurate weapons. We've got smart bombs and very accurate artillery and with things like the XM-25 we're seeing intelligence pushed down to the level of squad support weapons such as grenade launchers. But the logical end point of the individually smart bullet (the minimum sized weapon for disabling or killing an individual) isn't here yet. I note that in a contemporary conflict on average on the order of 10K to 100K rounds of ammunition are expended per enemy death. What are the implications of reducing that to one round, one kill? Even if it's a $100 bullet, it's going to work out much cheaper overall (and put less strain on the military organization's logistics chain). 89: Power supply and interconnectivity need to come in conjunction with the disposable processors. If all the processor-embedded packaging and products in warehouses, shops, cupboards and landfill sites were cloud-computing nodes while not being used for their primary purpose (an active standby mode I suppose)then there would be ever-increasingly powerful, very low cost processing on demand for everybody and everything to tap into. Many devices will become dumb terminals that outsource their processing requirements, but there will always be a need for self-contained processing ability for devices that are used out of contact with the processing cloud. These may however become quite unusual and specialised pieces of kit that anyone living in a populous area would simply have no need for. So who gets to use how much processing power? I guess there will be processing markets and processing brokers. 91: @ 78 Ok, but DARPA are already there, with an artificial HUMMINGBIRD. See: and again, Scary. Only question is what is the endurance of these things? Charlie @ 83 Percisely - look at the timetable of Steam-Power developments, back at a previous thread. Like how long from the Newcomen engine to the marine application of the Parsons Turbine? Carlos @ 85 They fly in flocks - some are bombs - which detonate on encountering the netting, letting the rest through. Oh, I see others spotted that one too. ANOTHER area where 'Universal_Logging(TM)' has not been mentioned, which I find very suprising, especially on this blog is, erm, err, shall we say; 'Rule 34'?? 92: Monitoring costs in environmental work: the biggest limit in most environmental studies is sample size. You figure out cost per sample (time, money, and resources), then you fiddle with the sample design until you can figure out what a sample size that small can tell you, if anything. Example: For my PhD, I was working in part on soil biology, and so one whole project was limited by soil analysis, which took 20 about person-hours per ounce to find and visually ID organisms. At that point, DNA analysis of the same sample would have cost about $500/sample, so I trained undergrads to help me with the grunt-work. If DNA analysis cost $5/sample and extraction took 2 hours (getting DNA out of soil is a chore), then I could have processed at least 10 times more samples, which would have radically changed the study. That's just one of a myriad of examples. A more extreme example is Google Earth. A decade ago, people paid a lot of money for aerial photos. Now, they're not only free, in some areas you can also get historical photos records, also for free. We're starting to use this with volunteers (also free) to find environmental violations that are visible from the air. All these areas face quantitative limits, and there are many things we can't do due to lack of resources. When technology enables us to do them, it makes a qualitative difference. That's the point. 95: 87, 88: Actually, I'm looking at it in terms of countermeasures. Warfare is a capital-intensive business, sure, but defensive measures are by and large much cheaper. You're assuming drones will play the role of the tank in WWI. I'm assuming chicken wire will play the role of barbed wire in WWI. If you want, you can assume 'smart' chicken wire -- say, by using short-range jammers -- or 'advanced' mosquito netting (Kevlar fibers). But simply 'more' chicken wire might suffice, the same way that 'more' anti-tank ditches or 'more' bunkers often suffice. I don't suppose I have to bring up the use of then state-of-the-art detection technology in Vietnam, which I think is the classic case of the transistor era, or how well artillery fire removed the barbed wire from the trenches during World War One -- roughly equivalent to the hundred thousand drones against a chicken-wired position. Also, I'm not sure what problem micro-drone technology is supposed to solve better than the alternatives. First, explosive power scales as the third power of size. Something twice as small has an eighth the boom. Second, fuel for flight scales as the third power of size. This has scale problems too, depending on the method of propulsion. Why not 'smart' bullets? Now, these doohickeys combined with IED technology -- the 'smart' micro-mine -- they seem more threatening to me. Not world-changing, because I'd expect the development of similarly 'smart' mine-sweeping units, but there the countermeasures will likely be more expensive than the deployment, which can be drop and forget. That's the side of the equation you want to be on. 97: I only read to about comment 50, so bear with me if I'm repeating some ideas, but my own thinking tends to run perpendicular to most of fandom. I'm too pragmatic to think that governments or corporations will do things just because their customers think it's a cool idea. I tend to look at money, politics, and law first when considering technology, and not the gee whiz that most tech geeks do. My first hope, and a rather boring one I know, is a phone that has approximately the same processing power as the one I have now, but will hold a charge for days if not weeks, and won't get hot. The same technology can also be used to make batteries more efficient, so a smart phone that can hold a charge for longer than a day would be great. Putting nanoscale structures inside batteries to increase their life is a technology that's being experimented with now. --------- On the subject of phones, I expect faster and more efficient Internet bandwidth, since you can slap traffic control just about everywhere on the cheap. Additionally, I'm expecting the very notion of using wires to connect to the Internet in urban areas for individuals to be a relic of old dinosuars like me. Even now, in urban areas in Chicago people are using 4G phones to get their internet access. People in more remote areas will still need satellite service or wires. At least in the US they will, but for most Americans I expect that wireless connections to the Internet will be the norm. --------- Surveillance, in urban public places at least, will be ubiquitous and cheap, and online most like. Cameras and WiFi are already cheap, but processing the video feed is still on the slow side. It should be possible for a small business owner to buy a DIY store surveillance kit that lets them slap a bunch of small, battery powered, WiFi enabled cameras in their shop. Not only that, but feed back to a computer with massive solid state drives or the Internet at large. It should even be possible to build a VR simulation of distant places with a rig like that. The applications are endless, and a mix of good and bad. Virtual tourism, real estate home tours, spying on spouses, security in places like stores, homes, and prisons, and a real time version of Google Maps. There are some interesting legal issues here. What's your liability if someone kills themselves in front of your cameras that you put online, and the Internet being what it is, the video goes viral? Will the aggrieved family have some cause to sue you for their emotional torment? What expectation of privacy should people have? The only technical snag would be people's willingness to share their video feeds, and that seems to be a social barrier that gets lower every day. The only legal/ government snag will be the willingness of governments and police forces to have ubiquitous surveillance that isn't under their control. It becomes even more interesting if the technical and social hurdles of A/R are overcome. If you've got a GPS enabled phone with high bandwidth plugged into a set of cameras on your head you'd be adding to that full VR experience of Google Maps, or whatever. ----------- I don't expect the money to get smart, not in the US at least. People are emotional about their currency, and won't put up with 'smart' currency that tracks them. There might be RFID on the money to track it, but no chips that change the value of the cash depending on what you buy. Besides, most economic activity happens over computers now anyway. I do expect the concept of 'chipped' ATM or Credit Cards, and government IDs to be everywhere. It's a technology thats only limited by the cost outweighing the benefits. Soon, people will just be waving their phones at each other to transfer cash. That's already started. 99: It's not impossible, it's just that the descriptions of the environment need to be based on short-range high-frequency radiation.perhaps light. Describing the environment to blind people requires more recognition of the environment than anything else. The 'description' problem, however, is that a verbal description is nigh unto useless. You need either a direct feed into the visual cortex, or a mapping procedure that preempts a normal sensory channel. The back has been used, the tongue has been used. Neither has been totally satisfactory. The back is low bandwidth, so you need a very large display area. The tongue has involved a wire hanging out of the mouth among other problems. And even so in both cases the resolution has been markedly inferior to a 1940's TV. So what you're talking about here is not something impossible, but something that requires a different tool. A neural interface. This isn't a 'cheap computation' problem, but it's not impossible, either. And it could certainly be facilitated by cheap computation. And by parts of the environment that identified themselves. 100: How about some of the old stuff, that never happened, finally coming true? Fully automatic factories? Think of a Henry Ford style production line from the 1930's. Big leap forward from craft production, but there is still stuff going wrong, gumming up the works, requiring craft work interventions to fix problems. Fast forward to the Toyota production system of 1990. For car making you can keep up the pressure on getting production flowing smoothly. If you never have a molding with a piece of flash that stops it fitting, if the bolt holes in the pressings are never misaligned, etc, you cut another big chunk out of production costs. I think that is where we are today with manufacturing: if the component parts going into your factory are flawless you can move to very high levels of automation. I suspect that is part of the attraction of high density fibre board in the manufacture of furniture. It is more uniform than wood, sufficiently so that you can import car industry techniques that depend on buying a roll of steel and having it perfectly uniform. We haven't so far seen 100% automatic factories, running lights out, on any important scale. Today's dumb robots require uniform materials, such as steel, or homogenised materials, such as fibre board, and even then cloth defeats them. Any little hick-up or flaw in the inputs causes the machine to stop. And a jam in a robot factory is costly. You have to clear the machines and restart. But what happens when computer power gets cheap enough that industrial robots, that see and feel, can respond quickly and adequately to what they have seen and felt. What happens when they can chisel wood and stitch cloth? What happens when a sewing machine is not a power tool for a clothing worker, but more like a web fed rotary printing press: a big roll of cloth on one end and a stream of shirts coming out the other? What happens when robots can see how a piece of mold flash is stopping a part from fitting and trim it with a paring knife? What happens when the robot can look at the bolt holes, seen that they are not quite right, and jiggle things, or do a little filing? These questions all went out of fashion. In 1960 automation was going to eliminate factory jobs and cause mass unemployment. The predictions didn't come true. Instead robots were unable to compete with cheap Chinese labour, or pretty much any labour with eyes to see and brains to respond to what it sees. Computers have had eyes for years, but brains have been too expensive. Charlie's question is what happens when computer power gets cheap. My anwer: EITHER brains for assembly line robots remain expensive because the code to get them to make shirts, assemble washing machines, etc, is too expensive to write and maintain. Welcome to a big revival of research into artificial intelligence. OR old questions, about automation and unemployment that went out of fashion, come back into fashion. 101: Talk to me like I'm a venture capitalist. This sounds great if you're a PhD candidate in soil science. But what's the killer app? Let's assume that overall funding will be $1 per person on the planet -- roughly the size of the CDC's current budget. What results will make it quickly worthwhile? Here, I mean as quickly as installing electronic keys in hotel room doors, or scanners on a checkout line. (There are strong reasons why investors and institutions have short time horizons, as much as you or I might dislike it, so the 'scientific knowledge will pay off in the future' line is not going to play here.). 102: You don't use 'smart bullets' because of the problem of friction vs. And a 'smart bullet' can't hang around waiting for a target to present itself. OTOH, I don't think explosives are the assassination tool used by a smart drone. Think instead of poison of one sort or another. There are toxins that would be quite effective for this use. Or, if you were feeling less lethal, LSD. Opiates probably wouldn't be effective at the low dosage that any one drone could carry. Neither would any of the more traditional poisons. But there are a few from the microbiology lab that would. Some quite quickly, some quite softly, others quite painfully. The chemical used should be effective for the intended use at microgram quantities. That means either a disease, or something unusual (if LSD still counts as unusual). Things that aren't recreational will currently be exotic. And notice that diseases tend to be very slow, so if you want a quick effect, you go directly to an effective toxin. This *does* mean that you need to penetrate the skin. Mosquitoes, however, do this all the time without being noticed, if ever, until it's too late. Usually not until the bite starts itching. 103: What kind of a detection range are you assuming for your killer hornets? At the moment, the various airport bomb sniffers require you to hold still, stand next to the sensor, and have compressed air pumped at you. However kewl the processor, I can't see this sort of stuff having a useful hit rate out in the wild because there is just *too much stuff*. We're already in the position of finding man-made chemicals everywhere we look just because the instrumentation is good enough. We're already in the position of being able to RT-PCR anything.and every damn one of its contaminants (see today's Observer for one of the outcomes - the XMRV CFS cockup has led to scientists who were right facing the full Steve Milloy/Animal Rights nut playbook). In a battlefield environment, there's going to be traces of explosive.everywhere, even before the insurgents get a spray can of liquid rich in nitrogen and a long pole. In practice, I presume you'd want a wide-area survey sensor to get a handle on the environment. Which gives me an idea. EMP devices can be pumped by conventional explosives. Which can be detonated sympathetically. Your sensor should find a sizeable bomb open to the air, but that may be the last thing the whole system does, carrier aircraft and all. I'm rather surprised we haven't met a guerrilla tactical EMP yet. Not that much harder than a good compressed gas EFP, surely? But then, blood counts for something. They probably prefer to kill men rather than fuxxorise their computers. On other suggestions, I've yet to see any evidence that biometrics will ever beat the Iron Law of False Positives (ILOFAP), and certainly not that its problem is one of 'damn, not enough welly' rather than 'damn, I wish I was smart enough to come up with a better specified problem'. See also auto-indexing splodge (you know splodge - images, video, audio - that stuff). 104: Fueled drones have the problem of, well, fuel. If my back-of-the-envelope derivation is correct, they have a time in flight that's sort of like the delta-v in the rocket equation: it's proportional to ln(mass_initial/mass_final). Not insurmountable, but a major design consideration. Are they going to be able to hang around as long as a sniper? Solar- and battery-powered drones have their own problems, although the idea of these drones operating like a cut-rate version of the mythical Project THOR -- cyber hawks dive-bombing someone's head from ten thousand feet up for a kinetic kill -- is rather appealing in a Hitchcock sort of way. Or maybe Phantasm. I suppose there's beamed power. Maybe, but if you're beaming power to a drone, why aren't you beaming power at your target? Eliminate the middleman! I'll note that the conversation has now shifted from the 'swarm of smart drones outperforming artillery' to 'chemical assassination weapon'. 106: I don't expect the money to get smart, not in the US at least. People are emotional about their currency, and won't put up with 'smart' currency that tracks them. There might be RFID on the money to track it, but no chips that change the value of the cash depending on what you buy. Firstly, €50 notes have had RFID chips in them for years now. The only reason lower denominations don't is that the first-gen RFID tech was too expensive. Expect this to change imminently. Secondly, while it's not cash that changes its value in your pocket, some British banks are experimenting with contactless short-range payment cards for making small purchases: the idea is that if you want to pay for a bus/subway ride, or a cup of coffee, you shouldn't need to authenticate yourself to the bank with your chip'n'pin card, but can just tap the card on the contactless reader. It's taking the contactless payment tech in, e.g., London's Oyster cards, to the next level. The twist in the tail is that the contactless 'cash' card is the same card as your actual bank debit/credit card -- it has a short-range 'wallet' that you can top up at an ATM by making a 'withdrawl' from your bank account that's then stored in the wallet for these minor purchases. IIRC there's a ceiling of around £25, so if someone does find a way to pick your virtual pocket they won't empty your account. The idea is that, ultimately, this could replace cash for a lot of low value transactions. 108: Wouldn't information processing this cheap and ubiquitous put the big bandwidth companies out of business? See my USENIX talk for my take on that. Shorter version: no, unless we get really good at routing -- and then we run into trust problems: I'm not sure what you mean by 'really good' at routing; given enough nodes the problem becomes a trivial one in the sense that bottlenecks become unimportant. Cheap repeaters equals cheap cable, ergo, more - perhaps many more - cable services (assuming that municipalities will no longer enter into exclusive contracts with just one or two providers). Especially if they can use each others pipes, which they can, given that these nodes are rather clever little devices. In re security: data is pretty secure right now... If you want it to be. The problem is that for most people, 'security' is something that's fiddly and eats up time and resources and is really rather pointless. Until it isn't of course. I suspect that if you doubled most people's computing power, they would not double the resources given over to security. 109: The same technology can also be used to make batteries more efficient, so a smart phone that can hold a charge for longer than a day would be great. Putting nanoscale structures inside batteries to increase their life is a technology that's being experimented with now. Well it would have to be a different type of small scale machining, but yeah, that's really about the only way to improve battery performance. Bear in mind that the chemical reactions inside a battery aren't substantially less energetic than what you get with air and gasoline. But in a battery those reactions are a surface effect and in a gasoline engine the reactions take place in a volume. So, more powerful batteries. Now if we could just make them dirt cheap... 110: I'm not sure what you mean by 'really good' at routing; given enough nodes the problem becomes a trivial one in the sense that bottlenecks become unimportant. You're talking about replacing the telcos. The telcos provide backhaul bandwidth over hundreds or thousands of kilometres with repeaters along the way and routers only near the end-points. If you replace that with ad hoc networks of peer-to-peer junk, the number of routers in the signal path is going to skyrocket, because your packets will be going through at least an order of magnitude more folks' networks. Which means your latency is going to rise steeply, unless you can optimize your routing across multiple networks (some of which may be configured differently -- e.g. To prioritize gaming packets or video streams over speech traffic, for example). 113: So what if money gained and lost value depending on what it is being used for as a vehicle to encourage savings, encourage purchases, etc. Useful, though. I've actually participated in an (internet virtual) economy something like that. Money that you earned and 'welfare' money spent the same, but your welfare account shrank in realtime. You couldn't get rich by piling it up, pass it around, or invest it - just spend it. Money you actually earned could be saved, given to others, etc. It worked in the context of the VR where we used it. 114: Of course, the first order response of your typical insurgent group will be to press-gang pre-teens and toddlers to carry their bomb-making equipment. It goes downhill from there, fast. I've thought of this too. You're right about the first response of an insurgent group (and the second is to get videos of occupation drones blowing away school kids onto YouTube), but I worry that the first thought of a terrorist group is to load a few hundred of these into a stolen car and drive through a city with the window open, tossing out time delay seeker missiles as they go. 115: Personally, I'd like to see internal labs-on-a-chip as a method of decreasing wait times on cancer screening, etc. I think (and hope) that we'll eventually arrive at a time when biopsies seem barbaric and wasteful, because there's internal, ubiquitous monitoring of things like estrogen and lymphocytes. This would also be useful for telling if somebody had faked an orgasm. I can imagine some paranoid asshole boyfriend hacking their soon-to-be-ex's phone to see if her inner space app had logged extra dopamine or not. Ditto prudish parents of teenagers. And let's not forget the mental health industry, either -- they'd love an internal mechanism that twigged patients to how much serotonin they weren't producing. I'd also like to see some sort of drunk driving test embedded in a vehicle. Not a stupid breathalyzer, either. That's just for legal limits, and does nothing to tell if somebody is high on something other than alcohol. If we're theorizing biometrics that can recognize faces and gestures, etc, there's no reason it couldn't also do the same for pupil dilation, wavering steps, excessive sweating, etc. I'm writing a design thesis on the customs clearance process for travelers, so stuff like affect detection and ID verification has been much on my mind lately. I also like the 'where my stuff comes from'/'where is my stuff?' Side of things. One of my favourite moments in MAKERS, for example, was when the characters figured out how to Google their homes for missing ephemera. I'd like it if my things came with their own tags, though, that logged into my house whenever I brought them home from the shops. That way I wouldn't have to do the 'In which ring of Hell is my aloe vera gel?' Dance at the start of each summer. The no-contact cards sound a lot like a SUICA, which I'm all in favour of. I wish the SUICA card would just take over every major city, already. The animism idea has been done, and well, by Karl Schroeder in VENTUS. 117: 'Stinking smoke wafts up from braziers made of skulls set around the edges of this room. The walls bear scratch marks and lines of soot that form crude pictures and what looks like words in some language [Goblin]. To the left lies a pile of rubbish and rubble heaped into a crude dais. The dais has upon it an ironbound chest that has been painted with a goblinlike face. Furs and skins of unknown origin are strewn haphazardly about the floor before the dais. A mindflayer is charging at you.' 119: I think there are several advantages to small drones. First, square-cube advantage to solar-powered (or at least solar-assisted) drones: the drone mass, including the parasitic structural mass, goes down as the cube of the linear dimension, while the available area for solar cells goes down as the square. Second, smaller drones operate at lower Reynolds numbers; they're moving slower but they can hover and move slowly without stalling. Insects turn out to be very energy-efficient at flying; the tradeoff is that their wings have to be built to operate at high beat-rates, up to 250 beats-per-minute. I would expect small drones to be used in missions that don't require loitering over large areas, for instance in urban areas, surveilling known locations, tracking and attacking humans on foot or in traffic, or attacking intruders entering secure areas. Given that more and more of humanity is getting packed into denser and denser urban concentrations, I would think that a weapon that can maneuver around and through buildings, stopping and waiting at various points along the way, would have a lot of uses on both sides of asymmetrical warfare. 120: One of the major limitations of 3D printing just now is that any electronics that needs to go into the final product must be built separately and installed in a separate manufacturing step. The most favored electronic module currently is the Arduino, which is fairly low tech, and low cost. This results in the requirement to design new I/O circuits for most products, and to code new control software for all of them. The low amount of memory in these modules means that the software has to be pretty lean to fit, and the kind of product design that we see in mass-produced systems isn't common, because it requires more sophisticated programming that is usually available. Given cheap, large-scale control processors 1, and some sort of universal, programmable effector/sensor electronics, it should be possible to print most products with a common set of electronics, the only differences being the printed wiring in the product (that's doable now) and the control code in the processor. Then the processor programming and insertion steps would be physically the same for a large class of designs, and could be handled by relatively cheap extensions to a low-end 3D printer. By reducing the amount of manual intervention in the printing process this would make home use or rental of a printer at your local Kinko's copy center much more attractive to a larger number of people. Let's say, a processor with the power of an ARM Cortex-9, a gigabyte of flash memory for program and persistent data, and a few hundred megabytes of RAM for computational memory. On top of that, a runtime software environment that contains thousands of pre-compiled modules for common (failry complex) functions, so the designer can just wire up combinations of them 2. Yes, I'm aware of the arguments against dumbing down programming that way (I started some of them, several decades ago). Note that a lot of control programs for microprocessors in products like traffic lights, machine tools, and suchlike are written in Relay Ladder code, just as if the processor were composed of a bunch of electromechanical relays, and nobody seems to mind. The paradigm is familiar to the engineers with experience in the application area, and if they can get results with something that doesn't require retraining, projects cost less and take less time. 121: I mis-wrote my theories about RFID in money. We do have RFID in American money, but an earlier poster had made a comment about putting computing power on the dollars/pounds/whatever, and I don't see that happening. Banks will just prefer to set up cash cards as you describe. As far as I know, the powers that be don't use the RFID to track individual notes everywhere they go. The cash register at the local store is not equipped to track the money. My current employer, a temp firm, fills up a cash card like the one you describe with my wages. It's going to create whole new and creative areas of criminal enterprise. 123: 'If you replace that with ad hoc networks of peer-to-peer junk, the number of routers in the signal path is going to skyrocket,' This was actually tried as a kind of 'grass-roots ARPANET' back before the mists of time. Slogan was possibly 'ARPANET for the rest of us' As far as I recall it was called 'Vine-net' or something like it, and they managed to stretch it from California to just across the rockies before the number of hops meant that packets sent from BSD systems with default ttl of 15 timed out before they ever arrived. 124: Okay, here's the venture capitalist end: What does soil affect: 1. Biodiversity, specifically, how many plant species you can cram into a square meter. This matters for things like cost-effective ecological restoration, polycultural agriculture, and similar issues. Currently ecosystem restoration efforts are similar to 19th Century medicine, in that a restored area is often about as functional as a peg leg. In other words, if we destroy a forest, we can't replace it. We need to be able to restore the soil as well, but currently, we can barely determine what's there. Wouldn't it be great to be able to replace a forest after you've destroyed it? It would revolutionize the restoration industry, and that industry (IMHO) needs a revolution. Polycultures (>1 crop per field) has been shown to be more productive per acre than monocultures, and also to have fewer environmental side effects. Currently, polycultures depend on human expertise, and can only be done on small farms. Scaling polyculture up to industrial agriculture demands much more sophisticated knowledge of what's going on in the soil, which in turn depends on cheap, sophisticated sensors, especially if you're working on an industrial scale with few humans in the system. Global warming: soil is a huge carbon reservoir, but current industrial farming releases carbon from the soil into the air. It's possible to get carbon back into the soil (through no-till farming and other advanced practices), but monitoring levels of soil carbon and determining how long they stay resident in the soil is expensive: currently you send a sample to the lab (US$50/sample for a 1 cup sample at wlabs.com). To monitor soil carbon, we need to get that cost down to something like 50 cents per sample or lower. If costs are that low, it would be easy for landowners to verifiably demonstrate that their lands are a carbon-sink, and we could set up reasonable market mechanisms to get the carbon out of the air and into the soil. That's off the top of my head. Hope it helps. 125: I do all my banking over the web other than getting money from the ATM (I normally spend cash locally) and depositing my private disability check (I could have it direct deposit, but then it would come into my account six days later.) Oh, and when change fills the bowl on the foyer/litterbox table, I take that in to go through the machine. Did you guys know that Wells Fargo is going to charge their debit card holders $3 per month? As says, they're doing it because of the new law that sets a fixed amount that banks and such can get for debit card use. The banks and other financial bodies are all probably thinking of something like that. If my credit union did that, I'd get money at the ATM (free), but pay my rare off-web bills with a credit card. 126: Dragonfly weight is about a gram. Not a lot of solar assist in an urban or indoor environment, which most secure areas are -- my guess is it would be chrome on a mass-critical device, but maybe not. It seems clear, though, that it represents a tradeoff. Probably the tradeoff point can be calculated. I am going to assume a time range of about an hour at one-third of a dragonfly's top speed (30 km/hr). This is based on watching the things buzz around by the lakes where I grew up, and assuming biology has found a sweet spot in the design space. Unless technology vastly improves, these things aren't going to be able to 'live off the land' the way actual dragonflies do. If you want, you can assume the mission takes place at night. We have more tradeoffs. If the target is five km away as the dragonfly flies, that's half of its useable lifespan gone. We can speed it up, but there's a power curve. So it has thirty minutes to achieve its objective. It can land, but it will take energy to take wing again. It can hover, but that's power-intensive too. I'm going to say half the mass of this drone is useable payload, not counting whatever signal it can broadcast. I think that's generous. If we are talking about things that go boom, well, 0.5 g of PETN is probably not going to blow a hole in the chicken wire. If it lands on someone's face and detonates, sure, that would be a bad day for the poor bastard. But if it lands on a solid door, would it even move it off its hinges? Half the blast would necessarily be outward, too: it's not like those videos on YouTube where they stuff a few grams into a tree trunk or a brick wall. You can mess around with the numbers, but they seem pretty unprepossessing to me. How many of these things would one need before they move from 'nuisance' to 'threat'? 129: Biodiversity and global warming are problems with time horizons longer than most investors have patience for. But let me introduce a phrase into this discussion: 'charismatic flora'. The famous, the lovely and rare, the ones with special economic importance. People interested in those plants are the people you should be thinking about promoting the idea to. A Mondavi who can monitor every vine, a Weyerhaeuser who can monitor every tree. There was a university somewhere in the South that had its historic tree poisoned by a vandal recently; I would bet they'd be interested in something like this. Sure, they're Red Staters, but even they will apply themselves to a problem when it starts directly affecting them. Yes, it doesn't help the broader issues. But it gets the production lines and protocols set up with the help of deep pockets. Then you point out the next steps. 130: From The Game Players of Titan by Philip K. Dick: It had been a bad night, and when he tried to drive home he had a terrible argument with his car. Garden, you are in no condition to drive. Please use the auto-auto mech and recline in the rear seat.' Pete Garden sat at the steering tiller and said as distinctly has he could manage, 'Look, I can drive. Start, darn it!' The auto-auto said 'You have not inserted the key.' 'Okay,' he said, feeling humiliated. Maybe the car was right. Resignedly, he inserted the key. The engine started up but the controls were still dead. The Rushmore effect was still taking place inside the hood, he knew; it was a losing argument. 'Alright, I'll let you drive,' he said with as much dignity as possible.' 131: RE: the platform battle of 2025 will be over who controls the OS of your housebot. Companies will provide cleaning, cooking, eldercare, repair, and entertainment services. The question I continue to have is at what date will we have more than sweeper bots? What do you suppose the day will be between now and 2025 when we'll have a bot that either acts as chef or house assistant? And what would this bot look like? I can't imagine a walking bot, nor a bot that's any larger than the current iRobot sweepers. 134: Fair enough. I agree that charismatic fauna and flora can be helped by better monitoring. The issue there is that many of them (e.g. Elephants, rhinos, orchids, cycads) have an increasing value on the black market, and money to protect them is decreasing in the current political climate. The value there is if you can have a monitor to replace a warden or a guard. That's not great, but it helps. As for the examples I pitched, I was trying to pick infrastructural technologies, where the technology was vital to enabling new industries to work. There's a lot of money to be gained on the front end of such a market, when the sensors are being proved and widely adopted. There's also money to be made in the second phase, when such sensors become commodities. Those who can manufacture quality sensors in bulk could have markets all over the world. Anyway, that's my thinking. Besides, if investors can't find ways to make money solving the biggest problems we face, our civilization is doomed anyway. 135: Hearts and Minds in War. What does the military have trouble with? What does the military want in terms of tech? Does Hearts and Minds not = roads & bridges, food, jobs, and structure? Roads & Bridges: Don't they equal a stable net today? And would that not demand a managed power source? I would like to believe the amount of processing power described just might fabricate a physical minimally hardened grid (don't ask me how) similar in nature to what the US had as far back as 1970 or so. Food: I honestly don't know what Monsanto is up to though I would guess offering cheap franken'food is somewhere on their 'to do' list for second and third (and first) world countries. Jobs: Difficult, we're running out of those here in the first world, yes? Who was it that claimed 'death to AI/Tech' will be the bluefaced warcry for WWIII or are we already there? Structure: I would argue that future structure amounts to a 24/7 (brilliant AI) net moderator that acts as a psychiatrist and bouncer (using NUDGE tech) - only when the AI cannot control the citizenry does the military get involved, identifying the trouble makers and possible terrorists - and hopefully separating them from the antagonistic journalists, taggers and street artists. Structure also equals potable water and toilets. We need a brilliant iRobot OS to plug into a third world nation state and automagically give the country working plumbing that, within a year, covers the largest towns and outlying areas. 136: Control in War. What is the military good? What is the military NOT good? Crowd Control. UAV's have changed the face of War, allowing for 24/7 tracking of various elements in a war zone. Current next step is a lethal strike from a UAV or an AC-130 gunship strike or somesuch (ground-troops at last resort). Future Next Step: 24/7 UAV identifies Hostile Group. 'Minutemen Swarms' dropped from 24/7 UAV's. Swarms stun Hostile Group for 'TAGGING'. Those Tagged will be further PUSHED to comply with the larger national net. Those TAGGED near a SECONDARY HOSTILITY are then detained. Protesters are hit with non-lethal swarms dropped from 24/7 UAV and again 'TAGGED' or, if identified as repeat offenders: terminated. PUSH tech again drives all toward working plumbing, working electrical grids, good food, and a working (net) society. 138: Molecular modeling folding@home style where nano-scale resources on a vast scale get routinely scheduled to design better drugs or vaccines. Fluid dynamics aerodynamics, pipe flow dynamics, battery cathode/anode best fit simulations, etc. Where enough power and resources exist to evolve optimal designs. High Frequency trading where algorithms discover methods to manipulate profit hundreds of trades out in the future. Where billions of processors can watch every trade, anticipate ripple effects and gear up to capitalize on trading events 10-20 years out, let alone in the millisecond regime. Infectious transmission modeling Where the sea of movement information tracked by smartphones, travel information, and climate gets processed to simulate optimal vaccination strategies. Then use molecular modeling to exhaustively iterate through optimal vaccines, ship the appropriate number to the optimal locations and finally notify the medical establishment. Eventually totally automated by medical systems trolling hospital databases. Retail simulation and modeling RFID tags on everything track your movement through the store, where you pause, what your eyes focus on for what duration, etc. The model that represents your purchase history and inclinations becomes as valuable as any purchases you might do. Markets spring up to buy or steal those models. Smart dust surveillance Scattered smart dust that lies mostly quiescent snooping electromagnetic and visual spectrum. Passing ship/plane/car/satellite wakes them up briefly to extract data Note: could easily scatter onto hair or clothes of the target, or around some corporate facility. 142: Something which would be easier and cheaper: really good software-defined radio. In fact, networking in general might change so that the specialised router or switch would be a thing of the past. Everything's a Linux box with one of those is-it-a-terahertz-laser-or-is-it-an-NIC devices you were talking about. Perhaps the Internet's structure shifts towards Van Jacobsen's idea of content-centric networking - if processing is that cheap, there's little objection to putting forward deployed application servers and CDN nodes in street cabinets, under your TV, in buses, etc. In which case there would be a strong case for a shift to a content- or function-centred addressing architecture. IPv6 autoconfig gives you routable addresses and either the routing infrastructure or whatever replaces DNS in this scenario tells you where your nearest source of whatever is. Also, if routing happens on big CPUs, that relaxes various assumptions - you don't need to worry about TCAM burn and the routing table just has to fit in RAM. 143: I don't think the assumed scaling is reasonable, and a bundle of other effects cut in way before the scale Charlie talks about. The first is a short channel loss of gain. This was pointed out by Likharev in the mid 1990s - once the channel length gets done to 10nm, a FET shows no power gain, even if for an optimised, back gated design. Some applications, like memory arrays, can live without power gain, as the address line drivers and readout circuits can be made using larger design rules to make up the losses. But general purpose logic does need power gain, and so it seems unlikely that design rules beyond about 15nm will be useful. The next effect is the failure of voltage scaling. For many design rule generations, finer lines went hand in hand with a drop in operating voltage. The increased number of devices was compensated for by reduced power device, partly due to reduced current, and partly due to reduced operating voltage. At about 45nm, voltage scaling stopped, as the scatter in threshold voltages due to the small number of doping atoms in a tiny transistor area became significant. In fact, for some manufacturers, the core voltage at 45nm has to be higher than it was at 65nm. If voltage scaling breaks down, then there is an unpalatable thermal problem trading off against reduced clock frequencies. 144: I hoped someone else was thinking along these lines. Think of the combination of smart drones - able to recognise a specific area and to home in on specific targets - with some form of hard to remove RFID marker. Take a bank for example, or high end clothing/jewellery store. Smash and grab raid comes in, clerk hits button, everyone in the immediate vicinity gets tagged by the swarm. Store owner and police together have each half of a code to deactivate the marker, and cause it to biodegrade faster for the innocent bystanders. Raiders can be traced by setting up sensors across the road network, combined with cctv and an uplink to the relevant forces. Or take a riot/public disorder situation like earlier this month. Send a cloud of drones up over an affected area and either tag everyone indiscriminately and sort it out later, or with smarter drones, tag those specifically with say accelerant residues or glass fragments, or if you get really clever, with the combinations of pheremones and sweat that indicate anger/violence/satisfaction etc, to identify the active participants. Again, it allows the police to manage the situation, while making sure they can both round up the active participants easily and combined with cleverer sensor linked cctv, trace the paths taken by criminals making it possible to identify fences. 145: This technology is already creeping into smartphones. Considering the technology and the convenience for all involved I expect the smartphone of 5-10 years time to be a travelcard, wallet, key (though only for keyfobs until normal locks are replaced) etc. Though there would have to be really good backup/cloud software to avoid the disaster of loosing your phone. This is the biggest issue for me, if everything is done by your phone then loosing it would leave you right up the creek. Can't call for help, can't travel home, can't get into your home, can't take money out to pay for stuff. 149: Not to mention the fact that those pesky, evil, money-grabbing telcos invest quite telephone-number-magnitude sums of money to ensure that many millions of sheep and fast tracts of trees and wild flowers also have at least a reasonable access to the network. (and have to by the way as a condition their licence commitments) I know this because I am in fact employed by one of these pesky evil money-grabbing telcos, and can say for sure that we have cell-sites that can go days without significant traffic. Just on the off-chance you want to facebook that amusing picture of you and your mates half-way up a welsh mountain. Oh yeah, and I wish I knew where these pesky evil money-grabbing telcos are hiding all that filthy lucre, given my share options are in the toilet, we haven't had a proper pay-rise in years and my laptop hasn't been replaced in even longer. 150: I read a comical short story years ago set in a Niven style ringworld. The protagonist jumps on a maglev to visit a friend but get's off at the wrong stop (several hundred km from home and his friends). As he tries to get back on his implants crash and wont reboot, thus he's left penniless, without communications and has no ID. He has to live on the streets and walk home, which takes months. In reality that would be my worry, how to cope if someone steals your phone (that also acts as your wallet, keys and travelcard). One idea could be similar to Natwests emergency money scheme, basically if you loose your wallet you can ring them and they will cancel your cards and give you a special code. With this code you can go to an ATM and withdraw cash. Perhaps an idea similar to this would be that you can go to any phone shop and tell them you've lost your phone, they can cancel it (wiping it in the process) and give you a new handset with all the software loaded from a back up in the cloud. Not sure what you'd do if it was late at night or you were far from a shop. 152: There is one element in Rainbows End that people rarely discuss but that depends on extreme miniaturization and ubiquitous high-speed wireless communication: the frequent offloading of processing onto other people's hardware (or municipal hardware, etc). There was this pervasive assumption (that turned out to be, shock and horror, fairly untrue) in-universe that these tiny devices were so secure (because of the trusted computing mechanisms built into them) that it was entirely valid and safe for relative strangers to take over your machines, whether they be on your body or on the street. While I don't consider this extreme to be reasonable, I consider it at the same time to be an interesting and potentially useful idea in other contexts. If in ten years your door handle has a processor faster than the one in your laptop today, and your shower head has one too, it stands to reason that rather than lugging a laptop around you can lug something around that's essentially a dumb terminal and use these various nodes floating around to do the hard work. From the perspective of people producing these devices (if they are compatible with each other, which I suspect will eventually become practically a requirement in order for them to be practical) there will probably be, for security reasons if nothing else, a requirement that the kinds of operations they perform be provably non-turing-complete. Say, perform only finite sequences of simple mathematical operations, with no flow control. If the flow control is handled by the dumb terminal then it's much harder to pin the load on your door handle indefinitely and have it melt. 153: One thing that would have to change is how systems deals with failure. The more things you have, the higher the chance you need to deal with failure. With massively-parallel comms-bound architectures (as most 'active dust' architectures would need to be), you're looking at a need to design for you comms, your processors and your storage to have bit failures frequently. This would, if nothing else, put a bound on the usable computation you can get out of things. If your typical computing environment are a couple of thousand low-power CPUs with an expected life-time of three years, you're looking at losing a couple of CPUs every day and if your computational model can't deal with failure, you'd be in rather a bad shape. It's probably possible to structure things so the 'machine' you work against is a virtual machine, of some sort, that mimics being reliable and simply stay hidden from the actual computational substrate. I am not entirely sure how that ties in to the rest of the interesting speculations, but. 158: I was just thinking that cheaper, more efficient computers will aid in the continuing wiring of the developing and rural world. The issue of evanescent connections will certainly play a role there, as will pervasive man-in-the-middle hacks in ad hoc networks. We may also see a 'sneakernet' backbone of cryptography keys as an inherent part of security in the developing world. Families and clans may become defined by their security arrangements, as much as by their blood relationships. One interesting question: will they become technoserfs, or something else? 159: some British banks are experimenting with contactless short-range payment cards for making small purchases: the idea is that if you want to pay for a bus/subway ride, or a cup of coffee, you shouldn't need to authenticate yourself to the bank with your chip'n'pin card When I was in Shanghai a few years ago, you could use your subway card (one of those RFID tap-and-pay affairs) to pay for taxis, restaurant meals, groceries, etc. It was actually more useful than a credit card for ordinary transactions. 160: I realize this is just going to get buried, but I wanted to point out one critical difference between now and 1980 and the doorhandle metaphor. Take 6 letters out of doorhandle and start imagining what a server's worth of embedded chip is going to do in your hand. You were talking of data security in that excellent tl;ra (too long, read anyway) post from USENIX. Having a cellphone/cloud manage your security will always make it less secure. So you'll follow the route that keeps data secure in your brain, namely keeping it inside the ol' corpse. We wont have cellphones, we'll be them. We wont have cloud storage of lifelogging, we'll become cloud storage of lifelogging. Especially if you can fit 90 years into 60-whatever grams of theoretical diamond memory. I'm sure we could replace an organ or two with a smaller, more efficient device (mechanical, nanotechnological, bioengineered, etc. Or combinations of such things) and use the extra space to host our own storage solutions. We'll store a hash with secure, trusted third parties (at least three, preferably more) as a way to verify that we haven't hacked our lifelog to provide ourselves an alibi. We would only be required to provide excerpts for law enforcement/identity theft that match the hashes. We've already got the basics for much of this, all that remains is the will. As battlefield intelligence needs grow, I suspect we'll see DARPA looking into lifelogging and cybernetic enhancements related to such before too long. Real time satellite is great, but when you can combine that with near-real-time eyeballs of the same areas (or recordings from the recent days if communications are spotty) you can algorithmically search for enemy tactics and other subtle cues that would otherwise go lost on soldier's minds in the heat of battle. 161: I think of it as ubiquitous intelligence. Doorknobs wouldn't necessarily be smart themselves but they'd be in constant communication with truly smart devices and databases. They'd not only know who you are and whether or not to let you in -- they'd open the door, adjust the lights and audio to your known preferences, etc. In fact, one thing that might become rare is the issuance of a command. I think that we could probably consider it likely that all societies would be surveillance societies; a consequence would be that everything everywhere knows what you like and when and how and. Wouldn't it be nice if at the moment the thought occurred to you that a nice cold Pilsner Urquell would taste good, a bottle is delivered to your hand at your preferred temperature? Your environment might know you well enough to anticipate your needs and desires. Actually, the more I think about that the more frightened I get. In fact, perhaps only the wealthy and powerful would know privacy. They would likely need it as warfare has the choice of changing to a personal level, rather than continuing on the wholesale basis it operates at now. If you started by executing your opponent's chief executive and continued with, say, one member of Parliament (or Congressman) per day, how long would the war last? Naturally, it would pay the powerful to be anonymous and hidden; at least, identifiably whereas common folks such as you and I might no longer care. There would be no blind, no deaf, no handicap of any sort that we know what causes it and have a suitable power supply available. In fact, for most of us how we perceive the world would be a matter of choice: you might see the world as a Tolkien universe while your sibling could prefer Star Trek. We could easily lose track of what is 'real' and what is mediated to our preferences. Personally, I'm rather anticipating seeing most of my contemporaries as hobbits -- or as a panoply of Star Wars aliens. Maybe the ones I don't like would be in Imperial clothing, while my friends would be rebels. Or vice versa. Knowing more than one language would become a rather quaint eccentricity, as instantaneous translation is the norm. I don't think we'd have to carry magic phone or shiny wrist-watches, though: I think that most of this stuff would be embedded, using your body as the power source, and you would literally become a node in the network. I wonder whether it would be illegal, perhaps highly illegal, to remove your implants and drop off the network? (Yes, I know: stories have been written.) Hacking would be considerably more. Interesting, I suppose, as well as having the potential for being more personally annoying. Imagine everyone you see in your moderated experience looking like your ex, only exquisitely beautiful and naked? Or perhaps everyone who sees you sees you naked and 60 pounds heavier? And with hairy warts. And a tiny little. Anyway, if you can postulate intimately interconnected intelligence everywhere then you can, I think, postulate living in a literally magical world, where anything is possible. That'd be different.:). 162: Sorry if this is a repeat: I'm late to the party. If you take Lifelogging and add lots of processing power to OCR/transcribe all your spoken/written words and add a dash of tracking of every single object, article, video and audio you interact and then add a giant glob of bayesian analysis, which requires lots of processing power, and then you have a model of how you will interact with the world. If this model exists then it can suggest things to buy etc. But more interestingly, you can create a copy of it to interact with the world when you don't want to. Don't like the caller, send a copy of you to deal with it. Don't want to disappoint your mum/brother/wife/sister make a copy to send them emails, birthday presents, etc. Imagine what happens when you forget to shut down one of these copies and it lives for a long time, and then makes a copy of itself. 163: Electronic door knobs became popular in hotels very fast because there was this infrastructure of skilled locksmiths and locksmith services companies already in place. Locksmiths could already repair small, finicky things so they easily made the transition to repairing or replacing circuits inside the locks, and to keeping watch over that tricky connection between dgital and 'ancient' metal hardware. Cell phones changed a lot in society because there was already an infrastructure of electronic technicians who could repair and replace the circuits inside the cell towers. If you want to know which future predicions will take off and change the world look at the human infrastructure needed to repair and replace them. You always need this pre-existing human infrastructure. Cars have the service network needed so there will be a massive amount of sensor based and communications based features available in them. They won't be able to drive themselves (real roads are too complicated) and they won't be able to understand complex voice commands (language is too complicated since it depends on culture) but they will be able to do absolutely everything else, including taking over the 'anchor' or base station role of the home PC. If you want to know which future military technologies will take off just start by eliminating all those predicted weapons which have the slightest risk of making the rate of death by friendly fire rise(like homing bullets)or the slightest risk of being taken over by foes, either remotely or by hacking after capture. Officers will not let those things anywhere near a battlefield. This is the reason why DARPA and others paid so much attention to things like packbots and robot helicopters for delivering supplies and medical evacuation. 165: Ubiquitous networking makes possible a much more complex and nuanced system of money than [.] That system of money/payment, whatever it will turn out to be – Bitcoin or not – plus desktop computer-level processing in smartphones that absolutely everyone on the planet will have, might make for a pretty interesting extrapolation of Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Right now most Turkers come from the US and India (IIRC) but if and when the poorest places on the planet get to participate in that same labour market, some economically weird things might happen. And also botnets at an unimaginable scale. 169: I'm not sure why everyone thinks the barrier to drone development is processing power -- we already have cool quad-propeller drones. But most of the processing for the sensors and motor control of those quad drones isn't on-board; it's in computers at the other end of a radio link. Yes, some of them can hold position or fly in a straight line to a designated point autonomously, but that's nowhere near enough for the sort of missions we've been talking about. Image recognition and goal-seeking control won't fit in an Arduino just yet. 171: Security compromises will stop being something you hear about on the news, and start being a simple fact of life. There is graffiti on the wall outside your house and somebody has reprogrammed all of the street lamps to flash on and off. Your credit card details get stolen three times a week, and the banks are relying on spam filtering technology to stay ahead (you're still trying to dispute a charge from last month which they claim is consistent with your spending habits). People come back from holiday to find that a removal company was paid to send all of their possessions overseas and the locks were all set to let them in. The police are jumping at every shadow on their CCTV feeds and somebody has rigged the cameras on the high street to add suspicious bulges to the jackets of black kids. And none of this will get reported because it happens every day; microprocessors run every aspect of life and bored teenagers control them. The general public will continue to insist that 'if you do nothing wrong then you've got nothing to fear', the companies that make the devices will continue to insist that they are secure, but will expend all of their resources on new security features and none on attempting to reduce the number of exploitable bugs beyond reacting to exploits found in the field. In the late 20th century, general low-level public fear and disorder was based around gang crime and guns. Sometime in the 21st, it's going to be based around losing control of the hardware. 172: @ 171 We're STILL afraid of gang crime and guns. And with good reason. Did anyone else see the film-clips released by WMP of an-all-alike-dressed-in-black-gang firing shots at police, and deliberately targeting one of the best pubs in the country, the heavily 'listed' 'Bartons Arms' on the suburbs of Brum? A link showing this can be found Quite obviously - A truly wonderful boozer, in which I have drunk) had told these scumbags to piss off, and they were trying to trash the place - reports suggest that arson was tried, but failed. I think the late 20thC problems you list are still with us. 173: Yes, some of them can hold position or fly in a straight line to a designated point autonomously, I remember seeing something like that on TV and going 'wow!' , but that was more than a decade ago.:-) No, the sensor / motor control processing is done on board. I believe that is the thing that has made quadcopters such great hacker toys – let go of the stick and it won't immediately destroy itself. And it doesn't take more than your average 8-bit microcontroller to do it either. Now we have hobbyists building quadcopters that can almost take that part for granted, and who get to play with. We are already pretty far along, and batteries and software is probably where things need to happen, not primarily processing power. Image recognition and goal-seeking control won't fit in an Arduino just yet. Not the original Arduino platform perhaps, but that is already more than half a decade old. Modern updates to it already use far more powerful chips. (And just the other day, I noticed that there is a that targets a 'duino form factor platform.). 174: Where process scaling breaks down is the subject of huge ongoing debate. You may be right, but you may also be very wrong! My 2c worth is that moore's law is not acheived by process scaling alone anyway. The industry as a whole achieves the roadmap, but the effort required from the non-process guys to get chips to work with even the current 40nm transistors is huge and increasing. Just because we min out the number of layers of atoms in the gate does not mean that all the other groups involved will stop improving - even manufacture can still get better, reducing process variation, eda/physical design can improve increasing density on the silicon, low power architectures can come in making super dense packing of chips practical (through silicon vias to allow chips to be stacked are avalaible today, it's heat that limits density of chips from being veritcally stacked into a tiny space). I'd guess the improvements on the table could be good for at least the eqivalent of one process node's scaling, if not two, once the device physics puts the brake on CMOS. 175: Actually, I expect self driving cars to slowly phase in. I'm thinking more along the lines of motorways with sensors embedded into every catseye or a guideway down every lane. You bring your car into the system, and turn on the autopilot which puts it into the control of the motorway. When you approach your destination, the system will automatically alert you and bring the car across to the appropriate exit, at which point the driver regains control of the car. Basically means you still have a human in control for the complicated stuff of navigating feeder roads, driveways etc, but you can automate the repetitive stuff of long distance driving and alleviate a lot of the fatigue induced accidents and congestion issues. Accidents would still occur, if less commonly, but since the motorway would be smart enough to know of them, it would be smart enough to automatically route traffic around them and to alert the necessary departments. And you would significantly reduce the tailgating/speeding/swerving/generally bad driver behaviour from the mass of drivers and improve travel times. Convenience wins out over excitement every time, and the car would be able to give an expected arrival time based on speed, distance, and what the system reports on road conditions. You could even keep the multi-lane setup we have now, one primarily for heavy traffic, one for short distance trips, one for long distance trips or something along those lines. 176: That sounds like the kind of massive infrastructure spending that noone in the western world is interested in any more. More likely is that the current set of crash prevention and adaptive cruise control mechanisms already available in high end cars grow and merge slowly into a fully automatic car. The main advantage, from the POV of the car companies and governments, of all of this is that there is no need to change the law, the driver is still liable (and needs a license and to be sober) even when they are just sitting there. If there ever is a crash they were 'in control' and should have acted to prevent the collision. The advantage to the rest of us is that these collisions will become much rarer. But I'll still have to get a taxi back from the pub:-(. 179: Now we have hobbyists building quadcopters that can almost take that part for granted, and who get to play with identifying a moving target and landing on it autonomously. We are already pretty far along, and batteries and software is probably where things need to happen, not primarily processing power. Being able to deploy myriads of tags (up to and including self-enclosed spimes) would greatly simplify the appearance of intelligent behaviour. Instead of landing on an identified moving target, you could have it say 'I am the top of the moving target! I am the top of the moving target! I am the top of moving target! Same thing for autonomous driving - the problem is immensely simplified if tags like 'I am the car in front of you!' , 'I am the car behind you!' , 'I am the edge of the road!' Etc are liberally strewn about. One side effect of this would be the increasingly sharp and increasingly wide divide between rural and urban areas. In the city, transport is electrified. In the country, it's mostly still gasoline. In the city, your business is almost entirely done online and anything you order is shipped to you within minutes via pneumatic tube. In the country, you still have to slog about on foot to do your shopping or have a human deliver your stuff to your door. In the city, robots are cheerful intelligent fellows who know you on sight and will address you by name. In the country, robots slow, sullen and dull-witted. And so on and so forth. 180: Bitcoin is an encrypted currency, and seems to present a reasonable possibility of making avoiding taxes much easier. This way, you can take payments over the internet without it showing up in your banks transaction logs. Of course, there is a transaction log, but it's not at all clear what can be learned from it, and how difficult in a practical sense it would be to police bitcoin transaction using it. If this is just one more problem to governments already struggling with the internationalisation of the economy, then how much less influence will they have over the world? 181: I think a valuable profession for the future will be whoever is in charge of inventing new jobs to keep people occupied, the kind of people who can't leverage their creativity into a job, i.e. We might find the old codology of astrology etc worth keeping around just to give people something to do, a friend of mine is a teacher but is also big into all the reiki nonsense of faith healing, if technology took her job she could switch careers. Ain't no robot going to tranfer ki or whatever it is they're supposed to be doing when they lay hands. There's already some precedent in the official icelandic stance regarding elves and such. And we already have professional mmorpg players. 182: We're already there, and many places have been there for centuries. My favorite example is the Greek who worked part-time as a fisherman, farmer, hotellier, fixer, and handyman. As the author drily noted, 'How many jobs does he have to lose before he is unemployed?' The idea that someone has to give us 'jobs' is part of the problem. A lot of us work part-time on a bunch of things, trying to make ends meet, although the government only cares whether we're working for someone else or not. You have to distinguish between two states: one is that machines do everything for humans that is necessary for human life. Somehow, I don't think that's going to happen, because humans are good some things that machines are bad at (for example: dealing with sloppy problems). However, many jobs are highly repetitive, and actually harm the humans that perform them. Turning those jobs over to machines that won't be harmed doing them is a good thing. There are also classes of jobs where machines are cheaper only when they are massively subsidized, and they are able to externalize their problems onto someone else. In these cases, we may be forced to de-industrialize some sectors just to get the whole-system costs down. This morning, I was discussing an example with my partner: would you be willing to double your food cost if it meant that you lived longer and had fewer health problems? In the US, we've gone for cheap food at all costs, where other countries have higher food costs and longer lives with fewer health problems. While this is a simplistic example, it is a case where taking some of the automation out might be cheaper. 183: This morning, I was discussing an example with my partner: would you be willing to double your food cost if it meant that you lived longer and had fewer health problems? In the US, we've gone for cheap food at all costs, where other countries have higher food costs and longer lives with fewer health problems. While this is a simplistic example, it is a case where taking some of the automation out might be cheaper. But a typical American could also halve his food cost, live longer, and have fewer health problems. It isn't a stark choice between Dollar Menu cheeseburgers for the poor and organic salads for the affluent: simple plant products like rice, beans, barley, lentils, oats, onions, carrots, cabbage, and whole potatoes are low in fat and salt, high in fiber, can provide the macro and micro-nutrients needed for good health, and are widely available*. They're also less expensive than any packaged, prepared, or restaurant foods. The money you save by eating potatoes instead of potato chips can be shifted to more healthful treats too, so you can eat some fish, nuts, fruit, and leafy greens in addition to the cheapest staples. For 3 years I lived in a household at the federal poverty threshold and never ate restaurant food, only rarely ate prepared foods. It costs too much to eat badly! The global poor certainly don't (couldn't afford to) subsist on instant noodles and fruit punch. Eliminating agricultural subsidies would change the total output and composition of US agriculture. I am much less certain that it would give small producers, less reliant on machines, a large share of production. The returns to scale and labor-vs-capital cost tradeoffs that brought consolidation and automation in the first place would still largely be intact, it seems to me. It's not clear that unsubsidized agriculture, even if it did encourage smaller-scale production and less corn and soy, would benefit people stuck in food deserts. De-industrializing food production and raising food prices seems to me neither necessary nor sufficient to change American eating habits and health for the better. After all that, I agree that there are some machines that (at least in some contexts) do net harm and are only profitable to operate because they're not accountable for their externalities. Every coal fired power plant in the developed world, for example. Many fishing trawlers, for another example. *Yes, I am aware of the 'food desert' phenomenon and agree that it's real, but it cannot explain the widespread bad food choices among the American working poor and Americans in general. According to the USDA, as of 2009 2.3 million households (out of 112 million total) live more than 1 mile from a supermarket and lack a car. That's at most 2% of households forced to eat badly; the other 98% have choices and choose poorly. 184: explain the widespread bad food choices among the American working poor I've more and more over the year come to the conclusion that some people make a collection of interrelated choices which will keep them 'down'. If you are short of money why is there a case of beer in your house? Is your PPV bill higher than my entire cable bill? Does everyone in your house have smart phones? Do you have the turbo option on your internet package? Do you have 4 TVs in your house? Do you have a really nice ride? Do you go to first run movies several times a week. Are your kids wearing Air Jordans? Food choices are a factor in the lives of people like this. They buy for their tongue instead of their health. You can do both but when you only do the first you tend to have lousy results over time. 186: I've more and more over the year come to the conclusion that some people make a collection of interrelated choices which will keep them 'down'. If you are short of money why is there a case of beer in your house? Is your PPV bill higher than my entire cable bill? Does everyone in your house have smart phones? Do you have the turbo option on your internet package? Do you have 4 TVs in your house? Do you have a really nice ride? Do you go to first run movies several times a week. Are your kids wearing Air Jordans? And the people I know who make those kinds of choices don't tend to be on the lower rungs of the income ladder. They tend to be people making $80 K/year or more. Something tells me this wasn't what you were thinking of;-). 187: Call me one of those nutritious home cooks. That was pretty much my standard shopping list, and fortunately I'm in an area where kale is available year-round and relatively cheap. I also splurge on organic peanut butter. As I noted above, the idea of de-industrializing agriculture to raise people's standard of health is tremendously simplistic, which, slightly unfolded, means it's another monstrous topic entirely. You have to put that comment in context. I was responding to someone who was saying that anything that humans can do (except procreate) can theoretically be done better by a machine, therefore it will be done better by a machine, therefore we need to train people to do useless things. I think that argument is bogus, because it starts with fallacious assumptions and ignores the very real costs of substituting machines for people. And I'm not a Luddite either. When we're fighting wars to guarantee the energy supplies for industries that keep food cheap, I think we need to sit back and re-evaluate a bit. The side-effects of that cheap food policy are tremendously expensive. Moreover, the available evidence suggests that small farmers are as productive and more efficient (both economically and environmentally) than big agribusiness. Big farms simply have more political clout. 188: See 'Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food—Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences: Report to Congress' by the USDA, 2009. According to their research, only a small minority of Americans are stuck in food deserts without a vehicle -- 2.3 million households at most, about 2% of households. According to the 2009 supplemental data (derived from Census Bureau data) of the Working Poor Families Project, there are 9.6 million low income working families in America. Yet according to the 2009 Pediatric Nutrition Surveillance System, nearly 1/3 of preschool children from low-income families were overweight or obese. This is much higher than it should be if the formula is simply 'prevalence of obesity among low income families = number of low income families in food deserts / total number of low income families.' I am making a mental leap here, perhaps indefensible, in using overweight/obesity statistics as a proxy for frequently eating bad (processed, calorie-dense) food. As I believe was discussed on this blog some time in the past year, obesity has been growing in many nations among all income groups since the 1990s, and it doesn't show any one smoking gun causal factor. In 2007 UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives of Families found that that use of packaged and prepared foods is common among Los Angeles families, but it was used to provide individualized food choices more than anything else. Families that used packaged foods lightly had no statistically significant difference in overall meal time from heavy packaged food users. The only savings was 10-12 minutes of direct hands-on food preparation time. If you can microwave a cup of noodles you can microwave a potato. The hands-on food prep time for many staple foods is trivial and requires minimal kitchen equipment (like a crock pot or rice cooker and one working electrical outlet). Again, this is what I did all the time when I was low-income. I fully recognize that I have heaps of advantages and privileges that made it easier for me to do the smart thing. For example, I had access to a lot of reading material from a young age. I grew up in a school district where they actually taught those 'little extras' since cut from many school budgets like household budgeting, nutrition, and cooking. My parents reinforced the same skills at home. I've never been confronted with social discrimination based on my race, sexuality, or perceived class. I was low-income for years, but I still had a big edge over the impoverished neighbors that I eventually left behind. I think it's not that my equally poor-by-income neighbors didn't have the time or income to cook rice and beans instead of Easy Mac and hot dogs, it's that there was a whole missing framework of experiences and skills that would convince someone that relying on inexpensive staples instead of packaged and prepared foods is 1) even something to consider 2) a good idea 3) achievable even for people with limited time and budgets. *Less than 200% of the federal poverty threshold. 191: And the people I know who make those kinds of choices don't tend to be on the lower rungs of the income ladder. They tend to be people making $80 K/year or more. Something tells me this wasn't what you were thinking of;-) I've seen this in folks living pay check to pay check. At $30K per year and likely more than $100K per year. Annual earnings aren't the issue. It's a desire to always want more than you have because you are 'owed'. Working on a community pool board and having a child go through a high school band you get to rub elbows with all types. And when folks drive up to a volunteer event in a new $40K to $60K car, talk about their and their spouses well paying job, then talk about how they just had to spend $1K+ on their kids junior prom night and the new car they bought them for their 16th and. Then they complain about having to do volunteer work so they can afford the pool or band or whatever and make it very clear that this work is below their status. At times I have to wonder. If you want to meet a wide range of people send your child to a magnet/bussed public high school and have them join the marching band. One that competes and travels. (Very USA here folks.) Then you join the band boosters. You'll get all kinds of incomes and other diversity in the mix and the best workers definitely cannot be told from the income levels. In any direction. Neither can you predict which kids will be overweight from the incomes. So there is something else at work in the 'I deserve more' mindset. A community pool tends to give you a narrower slice of the population but still the above rules seem to apply. 192: @ 183 Those food 'choices' are being made in the UK as well. I really can't understand how people can EAT most of the meat purveyed by the supermarkets. I mean the beef is PINK, ugh. And, of course, it means a lot of work, but the home/allotment-grown veg is FRESH, TASTY, and you know what went into it, and food-miles = zero. @ 184 They buy for their tongue instead of their health. Erm, that's exactly the WRONG way around. Healthy food SHOULD taste BETTER. In the same way that my pint of Sambrook's PA or Tim Taylor is both cheaper, better-tasting, and better for me than 'Fosters'.(shudder) Last few posters. Are missing something, even though it is (almost) being said. It's down to Education and Intelligence, both. The stupid, the gullible and the ill-educated will, by and large eat what the advertisers and the coorporations put in front of them, stuffed with sugars, and some unhealthy fats. The others, won't. Income seems almost irrelevant, until you get to really low/bad poverty levels. Don't forget genetic traits, either - I am still wearing the same waist-size trousers as I was 35 years ago - and I don't stint on food or ale. I admit my food is really healthy and nutritious (see above), but even so! Whereas there are others who only have to look at a potato to put weight on. 193: I think the biggest impact will not be computation, but communication. Cheap, powerful processors will enable communications technologies that put us constantly in touch with the world - not just actively (mobile phones have that pretty much covered), but passively - information will seek us out. To deal with that torrent of information, those same cheap powerful processors will create new ways for us to interact with it - haptics are my personal favourite. This constant connection is possibly a bigger challenge to the concept of privacy than the panopticon - we'll leave ever more detailed data wakes, and sorta kinda get used to the fact our privacy is eroded; right up to the point where it has a negative impact on lots of people. My personal bet is that credit ratings are going to be the cause celebre - once nice middle class people can't get that mortgage approved because the credit rating agency knows their credit card statement includes items from a hairloss clinic, they will man the barricades. I also foresee ever-increasing customization and personalization - manufacturing will become more and more knowledge-driven, and even moderately priced items will be personalized. Mass production will not go away - but smart manufacturing and logistics systems - driven by cheap processing - will put mass-produced components together in one-off combinations. Clothes, furniture, TVs, telephones - everything will be cheaply available in 'just for you' editions. 200: I've seen this in folks living pay check to pay check. At $30K per year and likely more than $100K per year. Annual earnings aren't the issue. It's a desire to always want more than you have because you are 'owed'. I really don't know how to put this any more delicately: There's a difference between a single parent of two children making $20 K/year living paycheck to paycheck and a childless married couple making over $250 K/year and living paycheck to paycheck. Since you are unable to acknowledge this extremely simple and extremely obvious point, there really isn't any further reason for us to talk. Which is just as well, since this is a massive thread drift. 203: Ah, so all you're really interested in is pushing a rather odious right-wing talking point rather than actually finding out why people have the eating preferences that they do. You could have save me some effort if you'd just said that up front and I'd never have bothered to reply. Please quote my actual words where I endorse a right wing talking point. I have read plenty of right wing judgment about people eating badly because they are lazy/stupid/not tugging hard enough on the ol' bootstraps. I don't endorse these interpretations. But neither do limited dollars and minutes nor food deserts explain widespread poor American eating habits. Staples don't require much time/equipment/money to eat instead of packaged foods; they're actually less expensive, calorie-for-calorie. The vast majority of American households are not stranded in a food desert. Yet packaged/prepared food consumption is high and has been rising for a long time. Apart from the partial explanation provided by food deserts and people who literally don't have access to cooking equipment, there are a few other factors that seem plausible major contributors. One is advertising for packaged and fast foods targeted at children. Another is taste preference formation: if the advertising achieves its aims, children will regularly be exposed to and form an early preference for relatively bland, fatty/sweet/salty foods such that they'll continue seeking those experiences later. The consumption of (e.g.) fried, battered chicken nuggets dipped in syrupy-sweet sauce is not some culturally invariant biological imperative that fast food companies just ran with. Recent immigrants and visitors often find such fare repulsive. It takes effort to shape tastes toward what's profitable for food product manufacturers, but once that's done buyers often pass over a bag of potatoes for a bag of fries, even if the former are in the very same store and less expensive. I'd add a few other points causing issues with adopting healthy diets: --bitter is generally an acquired taste, and it's not being acquired so often these days. I was surprised to find my niece only drinks coffee when it's drowned in cream, sugar, and flavoring in one of those calorie bombs from a major coffee chain. People who can't stand bitter miss on many of the most nutritious greens, red wine, dark chocolate, and so on. --re: immigrants. Meat with every meal can be a symbol of how far they've come from their homeland (this is from observing close friends). Asking them to eat something more like their old 'peasant' food may raise issues, especially if they are deeply invested in being 'successful Americans.' This is not meant as a slur on anyone, simply an observation. It's hard to find out that the American Dream has hidden traps, especially if you've truly sacrificed to get here. --similarly, greasy, calorie laden food may be what you share with friends. Choosing between being antisocial/healthy eating and social acceptance/bad diet is a nasty problem. --Food quantity is often a symbol of generosity. A kale stir-fry on potatoes is healthier than five pounds of deep-fried cheap meat with alcohol, but the meat is often a better symbol of generosity. Hosting feasts is an ancient form of showing off one's status and ability as a provider. It's also bad if it happens every day, and worse if it's subtly encouraged by mass marketing. Healthy food may even be seen as a criticism, as it implies that the person receiving it needs their vitamins, or some such. Obviously, all these forces can be overcome, but without a good basis in education (ideally from parents), it's hard to make the switch. 205: Apart from the partial explanation provided by food deserts and people who literally don't have access to cooking equipment, there are a few other factors that seem plausible major contributors. One is advertising for packaged and fast foods targeted at children. Another is taste preference formation: if the advertising achieves its aims, children will regularly be exposed to and form an early preference for relatively bland, fatty/sweet/salty foods such that they'll continue seeking those experiences later. Not to agree with the guy with the insanely long handle but people can just not go to McD's or it's clones every time their kids want something. For us, once a week would have been a frequent visit. We went maybe once or twice a month when they were young. Many of our friends didn't either. And for the most part our kids grew up not over weight. We also encouranged them into sports. Summer swimming at the local pool. Baseball, soccer, lacrosse, etc. And let them pick out any cereal they wanted to eat as long it had less than 10 grams per serving. (More to make them learn to read the labels than any nutritional reason. And learn they did.) My point is advertising is just that advertising. People can ignore it. Or they can be slaves to keeping up with the latest whatever. Their choice. And I noticed that most of the kids that grew up with ours and are on the plus size of the population had parents who 'gave in' a lot or were themselves on the large size. Sorry but I don't blame McD's for all the diet issues of the country. Any more than I blame social liberals for destroying the Leave it to Beaver world we used to live in without any social problems what so ever. People make choices. Choices have consequences. 206: Good points about the social constraints on meals. In my social circles serving light meatless meals would never be a slur on host or guests. That goes back to my earlier comment about the structural advantages I had even when I was, strictly by the numbers, living near the federal poverty threshold. If you cook at home, you can of course also prepare lots of meat, onion rings, waffles swimming in syrup, etc. Home cooking is not a panacea. But if you never cook, the the false dichotomy I highlighted becomes real: you pretty much have to choose between good (or at least 'better'), expensive prepared foods and inexpensive junk. But I wonder what diets will look like in the future. I just hope we're not headed for a future as depicted in WALL-E. Only slightly worse will be you swallow a tiny bot or bots that allow you to eat as much junk as you want but it cleans it from your system before your body absorbs the sugars and other crap. And a deluxe model that transforms whatever you eat into useful molecules. Of course it will be priced at the equivalent of $300 per day, $1000 per day for the deluxe, and there will then be calls to subsidize it for the poor untill a 'generic' shows up. All accompanied by a few 1000 lawsuits. I personally think that much of the diet issue in the USA would resolve itself with the elimination of corn and sugar subsidies. When / if this happens the future for food will definitely change. I suspect that a lot of innovation in the future of diets is being surpressed by these subsidies. 209: A possible weird development: Machine Precognition, named in the tradition of machine vision, machine learning, etc. In the general case, predicting the future is absurdly difficult. Predicting the next several seconds in spatially limited domains is a much more heavily constrained problem, possibly constrained enough to yield useful results ranging somewhere from the merely better-than-guessing to truly eerie foreknowledge. We've already seen a foretaste of this with casino-fleecers hiding computers on their person so that they can run physics models of the roulette wheel and beat chance after the ball's in motion. But humans actually 'decide' to do things before they're conscious of it. What if you had enough portable sensors, computation, and training data to predict what people are going to do before it happens, at least in limited ways and in the short term, without fMRI or other bulky/obvious diagnostic equipment? You might also add background information to make the model more specific: predict this man's near-future actions based on pupil measurements, breathing, subsurface blood flow, AND his past Twitter posts and credit score. You don't have to limit the modeling to humans, either. Combine physics models and sensor fusion so that you can 1) take a picture* of the immediate physical environment 2) evolve the scenario several seconds forward in time, according to physical laws and public facts about objects ('a Toyota Camry traveling at that speed takes about X meters to stop on wet pavement of approximately this texture') and their interaction with people. You could also add a step 3, scenario exploration, like 'run the simulation again assuming that Person 3 in the scene is going to be punched at time t + 1 by Person 1.' I don't know if it can be done, but there is a certain intuitive appeal to its possibility. Machine learning, given enough data, can be eerily good at predictions and correlations. Humans generally aren't as spontaneous or unpredictable as they think they are. All organisms and machines are constrained by physics in important ways, it's just that humans can't read the physics of every object in view at a glance the way they can with (e.g.) a single baseball's trajectory. There's going to be a wealth of portable sensors, not just logging data for later retrieval but providing input to predictive models. Even future super-phones may not be powerful enough to do it all alone but they could handle a lot of low-latency data preprocessing before sending data back to an oracle in the cloud. As for applications, of course there's enforcing security and safety, defeating security measures, gaining an edge in playing sports or betting on them, predicting others' moves in political or business negotiations, and probably a lot of much more specific or ambitious things. *Not necessarily just an optical image, of course; the 'picture' is understood to include all relevant sensor data. 211: If you are short of money: why is there a case of beer in your house? I don't like alcohol and it won't go with my meds. Is your PPV bill higher than my entire cable bill? I had to think what that was, but I don't have a PPV bill. Does everyone in your house have smart phones? Nobody here has a smart phone. Do you have the turbo option on your internet package? Do you have 4 TVs in your house? I have one, but sometimes I watch shows on the computer. Do you have a really nice ride? I have a 25-year-old minivan. Do you go to first run movies several times a week? No, I put good movies on the bottom of my Netflix queue which is five years away. Are your kids wearing Air Jordans? I don't have kids, but if those are expensive, they probably wouldn't have them. 214: But if you never cook, the the false dichotomy I highlighted becomes real: you pretty much have to choose between good (or at least 'better'), expensive prepared foods and inexpensive junk. You should look at frozen microwavable meals. I use a lot of those, since I can't cook anymore. Many of them have changed to be quite healthy. Healthy enough that I have to eat two a day to get near the required minimum calories of 1000 and the required 50 grams of protein. They aren't all that expensive, particularly if you buy on sale. A lot are then about $2. I am usually up to boiling -- so rice and noodles -- but that's pretty much it. 215: I think the concerns about state control and oversight in a ubiquitous computing environment are valid but miss a central aspect of technological history. Repurposing and the impossibility of keeping secrets. Like a digital copy of a song, once a copy is in the world it is permanently out there - all the more so in a world of ubiquitous computing. So the military creates a swarm of hornets that can attack an area. One disaffected soldier/techie leaks some of the code to the world and everyone who wants to can make them - if not a swarm then a single wasp-like weapon platform. A nightmare for the Secret Service. Historically new technology has been very appealing to the rich and powerful. And it has worked well at keeping them in power, for awhile. And then it has worked well at supplanting them. Armour was cutting edge military technology, controlled and used by elites only until guns came along. Various elites thought they could use/capitalize on guns while still keeping their existing social order. It worked for awhile, but sooner or later someone realizes that they can point the gun at Lord Fauntleroy. Technological advances are appealing to the powerful, but unintended consequences are inevitable - good news for the rest of us (mostly). Also good fodder for stories. 218: Coming late to the party but this news article caught my attention; Apparently there's a growing trend for people to inconspicuously take pictures of other commuters with their smartphones before uploading the picture to various websites there fashion sense and looks are rated. One website, tubecrush.net, encourages people to take pictures of people they find attractive. Lifelogging would really boost trends like this, as weird as it sounds it might become the norm to find your picture uploaded to dozens of blogs, rating sites and other places on the net every day. 223: Watching the weather channel talk about how the east coast is about to be hammered. Will we ever get much better weather prediction more than a few days out or do the computational requirements go up as a power function that computers will never catch? Will we be able to dissipate tornado and hurricane energy in a way that's less destructive than the natural event? Both of these will require huge computational increases and likely changes to the way we approach the problem. And the folks not in the US don't understand how bad this current storm might be, the NC coast may change in non trivial ways and Philidelphia, NYC, Boston, and other points may get to see how well they handle 80+ MPH winds continuous for hours. 225: I think that beyond a certain limit, it's physically impossible to predict what the weather will be like, even witht he best of all possible computers. Very small differences in initial conditions lead to very large differences in later weathers, and as it's not just impractical but impossible to measure the position, velocity etc of every atom in the atmosphere and the world's surface, so it's impossible to say with any accuracy what the weather will be like in, say, 3 months time. We may be close to the limit of predictive accuracy at the moment. 227: In the summer, I read three forecasts at least once a day. I'm not supposed to be out when it's 90F or higher and/or Code Orange or more polluted. It's interesting to see how they change. For example, for a while, this week was all 80s, but then yesterday was supposed to be in the 90s. What changed? I don't know, but I slept through the day anyway. I don't think that you can accurately forecast a hurricane or typhoon sooner than a few days. Even then, there's a cone where it might go. At this point, it looks like the Chesapeake Bay and Potomac River are in High, and Manassas, where I live, is in Moderate. I'll still bring the chair and table in off the porch and I've already filled all my empty tupperware with water. I also have windup flashlights/radios plus a windup phone charger. 228: Yes, the definition of a chaotic system is one whose uncertainty (potential error in computing a prediction) increases exponentially. So to get the same accuracy at a one month forecast as we currently do in a five day forecast (about 60% accuracy out at the end, IIRC), we'd need to multiply the accuracy of the data (and of the models we're computing) by a factor of 1 million. I don't think that's likely until we have nanosensors on every square centimeter of Earth's surface, land and sea, and enough computing power to back that up. It's way too late at night for me to attempt to calculate how many zettaflops that would be, but I'm betting we're talking about turning a large part of the Earth's surface into processors and I/O circuitry. Won't matter much what the weather's going to be if we've used up all the room for predicting it. 229: I don't think the assumed scaling is reasonable, and a bundle of other effects cut in way before the scale Charlie talks about. You're assuming that the circuits have to continue to work the same way, only smaller; this isn't a safe assumption at all. Below some minimum size which we'll be hitting in the next few Moore's Law generations we'll have to switch to using something other than electron currents for logic and stored charge for memory. The number of electrons involved in the flipping of a state or the storage of one bit will be so small that quantum effects will cause unacceptabe numbers of errors unless a large percentage of the devices are committed to error detection and correction. The most likely replacement at this point is electron spin ('spintronics', a rather ugly word, but we seem to be stuck with it), but there may be other possibilities later (high-temperature Josephson junctions or topological braids or other exotic devices). 230: #223, #225 et seq ref weather prediction. Living in the UK, and having both basic qualifications for and actual experience as an amateur forecaster (eg, being able to actually read synoptic charts) I don't see us ever getting reliable forecasts much past 5 days except in places where stable weather systems and a body of historical records allow us to say that there's a less than 5% chance of a new weather system forming over $period. It's not uncommon to be able to see weather systems forming off the American seaboard, and tracking across the Atlantic over the course of 4 days. 231: Reflective coatings don't work against lasers. The coating reflects a portion of the laser's energy but not all of it, so the first pulse of the laser damages the coating and allows the rest of the pulses to burn through. Mass is very effective against lasers though, particularly ablative carbon compounds. Some people have said that this future looks like an animistic magical world. That's one possibility. The other is Star Trek: TOS. Everything is easy to operate using very simple interfaces. Objects which appear to be under human control can in fact operate for long periods without human supervision; Humans provide strategic direction and outside-the-box decision making (The Enterprise could carry out its mission for half a decade without personnel). Visually simple tools that provide precise short-range control of various EM frequencies for apparently magical effects (Surgical protoplasers, energy weapons, etc). Tiny translators, so that everyone appears to be speaking the same language. Blank white walls in your quarters that can be set to any interactive display you want (OK, never actually shown on the show but stated in a lot of novels). From a human perspective - Everything WORKS, and it's easy to operate, and you're never outside the reach of your tools (Unless the writer needs to inject a bit of drama into the situation). 232: Ok, I've skimmed over the last half of the comments - excuse any repetition (But a lot comments seem to center around cheap computing power, not ubiquitous computing) brainstorming: Sticking with the question of ridiculuosly cheap, smart CPUS/Computers - right now, smartphones are gadgets that carry a lot of identification details, and offer personalized services/apps. Most people only have one. The cheaper tiny computers get, the easier you can have account separation by having separate physical devices for that function as business cards/augmented reality/phone/target for advertising/interface to XXXcontacts site/games Bitcoin account management in a physical coin (You can look up the value of the coin on the coin and on bitcoin servers, where all transsactions by this coin are stored. But not how often the coin itself changed hands.) CNC tools everywhere - can opener, screwdriver, and so on with a smart component Metro ticket that tells you the qickest way to dest, incl. Delay postal stamps that do bookkeeping and routing (for trasnferal between posting systems that use different payment schemes) - you load some digital money onto your parcel and give it to the first carrier, from there on tha parcel books it's own tours based on how much money it has, speed s of the carrieres, customs etc. With computers everywhere, you need less network/internet: the first example (where does my egg come from?) is just a bookkeeping/database issue. In germany, theoretically you can tale the number printed on an egg and look up where it's from and so on. With microcomputers, this could work without a central database. Data separation between different devices, eg storing your passphrases/access codes that you need with you phone in an earring, and you tans in a tooth Generally everything that's a ticket, bill of cash, coin, token, stamp can be a pseudonymous interface to the world. This is'nt very concise, sorry, but actuall I'm pleased to say that some of them are probably not boring. 236: If the processors can work fast enough - and if so it will probably be in bursts, after which the cores in use will need to cool, it may be possible to take photographs by analysing the incident phase, frequency, and amplitude of EM waves in the visible spectrum (or wider) to store image information from which the whole scene can be rendered, in focus, down to the pixel size of the sensor. That would make glass lenses obsolete. Something like that would make a great sensor element for the active spectacles. BUT there would be some tricky software to write. Maybe I need to work on my C skills? 239: I just finished reading Ben Hammersley's speech to the IAAC. He absolutely nailed something for me in that speech and I think it's interesting. Charlie's talk touched on how much more data could be collected, stored, and streamed from each of us. Ben's speech touched on how society feels that this exchange should be reciprocal. If we suppose that the prediction of wireless bandwidth holds, we have the capacity for not just our own data to go out, but for other data to come in. Is every store not just tracking how many people go in and out, like they do today, but also making that data available? Can the store and my personal devices work me into a queue (completely virtual in the sense that I'm not actually in line), so that I arrive at the store about the time that a sales person can assist me? Is my phone letting me know as I'm walking from work to the train that the police are present at a scuffle along my usual route, a crowd is forming, and I should walk around it? Does it buzz when I'm leaving the bar at night to let me know I'm entering a higher crime neighbourhood or headed the wrong direction? Are the buses in my city tagged so I can follow them on Google Maps to see if they're behind schedule? Do they include data about the number of passengers, seats available, etc so I know if the bus will be crowded or not? What data is my municipality sharing with my personal network? What is my provincial/state gov't or my federal/national gov't sharing? Forget lifeblogging *me*, are my services lifeblogged and available for sharing and remixing? Prime Minister Theresa May has said the government is 'seriously considering' a clamp down on cryptocurrencies following fears that criminals are exploiting the anonymity of platforms such as Bitcoin. 'In areas like cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, we should be looking at these very seriously,' said May, in an interview with. She added that because the use of Bitcoin has been 'increasingly developing', a tougher stance may be required 'precisely because of the way they are used, particularly by criminals'. Cryptocurrencies have long been used as a way to finance, with hackers exploiting the anonymity that platforms such as Bitcoin provide. More recently, criminals have started adopting other cryptocurrencies, particularly Monero which is designed to be even more difficult to trace. May's comments echo calls from other nation states that more restrictions need to be placed on the use of cryptocurrencies. The market is still reeling from the news that South Korea is considering a complete plan on online cryptocurrency exchanges, a move that some fear would send the market into a nosedive. Compared to the South Korean market, where some of the world's largest exchanges are headquartered, a clampdown in the UK, or even an outright ban, is unlikely to have a significant impact given that it boasts only one major exchange. Cryptocurrencies have yet to fully recover from the new South Korean stance, with Bitcoin still operating at $10,000, over $9,000 below its all time high last month.: Bitcoin will see a huge crash over the next year, Wall Street expert Peter Boockvar predicted yesterday, claiming that this is the only outcome of a 'bubble like this'. In, the chief investment officer at Bleakley Advisory Group said the crash might be in the form of an epic plunge or a slow and steady drop. Nevertheless, he said it's coming and is thus in danger of dropping 90% from current levels. 'When something goes parabolic like this has, it typically ends up to where that parabola began,' he told CNBC's Futures Now show. ![]() 6 days ago - Availability, and the ever-present fluctuations of supply and demand, are the cause, but this time demand has skyrocketed because of graphics card-powered cryptocurrency mining. It's been years since graphics cards were used en masse for Bitcoin mining, because the hardware arms race meant that. Dec 6, 2016 - December 5, 2016 Hong Kong – Chinese blockchain company BlockCDN has released a breakthrough design for a miner that uses a TV set-top box to general digital currency. BlockCDN believes the share economy model holds the only real solution to the problem,” Tony Long, CEO BlockCDN. Dec 31, 2017 - As with most other TV manufacturers, wading through LG's range of TVs can be confusing, to say the least. With long-winded names comprised of what seems to be random digits and characters, you can easily be left feeling perplexed. There is some method to the madness, however, and it's not as random. 'I wouldn't be surprised if over the next year it's down to $1,000 to $3,000.' Currently Bitcoin is trading at $11,819, though it peaked at $19,000 briefly in December. However, Yale economics professor Robert Shiller, who has also previously discribed Bitcoin as 'the best example of a bubble', on Friday that while Bitcoin 'might totally collapse and be forgotten' it's also possible that it 'could linger on for a good long time, it could be here in 100 years'. The predictions come after another analyst claimed Bitcoin could hit between $50,000 and $100,000 in 2018 (see below).: Despite recent price fluctuations, Bitcoin's value could continue to rise throughout 2018 to reach between $50,000 and $100,000, an analyst has predicted. This means its value would need to increase by 635% from its current highest value of $13,601.43. Kay Van-Petersen, an analyst at Saxo Bank, thinks the virtual currency will rise significantly over the next year after correctly predicting its value previously. In December 2016, he said he thought Bitcoin's value would surpass a value of $2,000 in 2017. Sure enough, it reached that figure and beyond by May. 'First off, you could argue we have had a proper correction in Bitcoin, it has had a 50% pull back at one point, which is healthy,' Van-Petersen said, reported by. 'But we have still not seen the full effect of the futures contracts.' Previously, Van-Petersen said it wasn't likely the virtual currency would reach $100,000 for 10 years. The journey to $100,000 won't be without bumps in the road, though, he said. It's likely the currency will continue to level out and then bump up, or re-rate as it's known, in stages. But although Bitcoin is the market leader now, Van-Petersen thinks virtual currency fanatics should keep an eye on rival Ethereum too, because it's possible the outsider could overtake Bitcoin in future. 'Ethereum came after Bitcoin, it has a more unified leadership than Bitcoin,' he said. 'They seem to be a bit further along the way in regards to forming the solution to scaling issues. And you can see transactions on their side eclipses transactions across other cryptos.' : Bitcoin plunges below $10,000 following uncertainty in South Korea Bitcoin on digital currency exchange yesterday evening, along with several other major crytocurrencies, such as Ethereum, which dropped 30% to below $1,000. While Wall Street said there was no apparent reason for Bitcoin's fall in stock price, breaking below $10,000 to $9969.01, it did follow comments from South Korean authorities regarding tougher regulation on digital currency trading. Nevertheless, it only fell below the 'psychological benchmark' just briefly before it started to tick higher and above $10,000 again. At the time of writing, it was at $10,457.10 Bitcoin traders, and investors in other digital currencies, are still left with concerns as uncertainty looms around South Korea's government's attitude to cryptocurrencies, with the country being one of the largest crypto markets in the world. There's fears that the country could block such trading altogether after finance minister Kim Dong-yeon said banning crypto trading was “a live option'. The matter is currently being reviewed by the country's government. Such a ban would require a majority vote from the country's National Assembly, which the reports could take months or possibly years. 16/01/18: KFC embraces cryptocurrency hype with Bitcoin Bucket Fast food favourite KFC has started selling a special Bitcoin edition bucket of its popular chicken - and you guessed it, you can buy it with Bitcoin. The company's selection of poultry themed treats includes “10 Original Recipe Tenders, Waffle Fries, Med Side, Med Gravy and 2 Dips,” and costs whatever the equivalent of CA$20 is at the time of purchase. At the time of writing, this was 0.0010102 Bitcoin. However, the bucket can only be sold in Canadian KFC delivery zones, presumably because it's only been given the green light with a limited number of authorities. KFC explained its Bitcoin bucket is proving hugely popular. So popular, in fact, it keeps selling out of the selection buckets. 'A lot of you want to buy in Bitcoin, which means we keep selling out,' the company said on its. 'Keep on checking in for restocks of this Bucket. Craving chicken now? Our Original Recipe is available for purchase and delivery with old-fashioned people money.' Even if you're not in Canada, or have no interest in buying KFC with Bitcoin, it's a handy tool to keep tabs on the value of Bitcoin at any time. The dynamically-updated page changes every few seconds so fanatics can make sure they get the best deal for their chicken. 'Despite the ups and downs of Bitcoin, the Colonel’s Original Recipe is as good as always,' the company said. 'So, trade your Bitcoins for buckets and invest in something finger lickin’ good.' : Confusion over South Korean crypto ban sends Bitcoin tumbling Confusion over reports South Korea was ready to announce a complete ban on cryptocurrency trades that later turned out to be incorrect has caused the price of Bitcoin to plummet, sending shockwaves through the market. Reports surfaced earlier today that the South Korean justice ministry was preparing a bill to ban the trading of all digital currencies on exchanges operating in the country. Justice minister Park Sang-ki said that there were 'great concerns regarding virtual currencies and the justice ministry is basically preparing a bill to ban cryptocurrency trading through exchanges,' according to. The news wasn't entirely unexpected, given comments made by South Korean prime minister Lee Nak-yeon that suggested the craze might 'corrupt the nation's youth'. As a result, the price of Bitcoin fell through the floor, tumbling from an already relatively low position of just under $15,000 to $13,100 in a matter of hours. At the time of writing the currency has yet to recover, hovering at $13,200. Ether, Litecoin, Ripple and Dash were also down following the news. However, South Korea's financial watchdog, the FSC, has said government ministries are only discussing the possibility of further restrictions, within the context of trade regulations, and that several ministers are divided on how best to regulate the market. '.the FSC is mapping out measures to restrict [cryptocurrency] transactions to some extent,' which may eventually lead to 'an all-out ban,' said FSC chairman Choi Jong-ku, speaking to a reporter. 'The restriction is aimed at minimising side effects of bitcoin transactions and reducing speculative investment.' This means that while a potential ban on cryptocurrency exchanges is being discussed, there are no immediate plans to ban trades in the country, although the current ban on ICOs will remain in effect. The confusion proved to further highlight Bitcoin's volatility, and its delicate ties to the South Korean market, which is heavily invested in cryptocurrencies. South Korean currently sees the 5th highest volume of global Bitcoin trades, comparable to the whole of Europe.: Warren Buffett doesn't think Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies will last, he has told, suggesting trading virtual currencies is not a good idea and will not end well for those involved. 'In terms of cryptocurrencies, generally, I can say with almost certainty that they will come to a bad ending,' the investor and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway said on CNBC's Squawk Box programme. Buffett's vice chairman, Charlie Munger, supported his boss's position, adding that it's not only cryptocurrencies causing problems - venture capital is also a trend that won't last. He said there's too much money in VC, comparing it to the dotcom bubble. “Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies are also bubbles,' he said. Investors 'are excited because things are going up at the moment and it sounds vaguely modern. But I'm not excited,' he added. Buffet also said he would avoid 'going short' on any investment in Bitcoin. This process involves selling shares of borrowed stock, which the investor then hopes the value of which will increase over time, then returning them to the investor to make a profit. 'When it happens or how or anything else, I don't know,' he added. 'If I could buy a five-year put on every one of the cryptocurrencies, I'd be glad to do it but I would never short a dime's worth.' 'We don't own any, we're not short any, we'll never have a position in them,' he said. “I get into enough trouble with things I think I know something about. Why in the world should I take a long or short position in something I don't know anything about.' : Visa moves to block Bitcoin payment cards Visa has blocked access to a range of prepaid Bitcoin credit cards, stopping users from being able to use them to make transactions or withdraw funds in Sterling or Euros. Cards issued by BitPay, Cryptopay and Bitwala, which are operated by WaveCrest, have all stopped working as of 5th January. The card issuers are now returning all funds to users. Visa explained that it had made the decision to revoke WaveCrest's Visa membership because it failed to comply with the payment providers operating rules. “The termination of WaveCrest’s Visa membership does not affect other Visa issuers’ card programmes, including those using fiat funds converted from cryptocurrency,' Visa said in a statement. “Visa is committed to the security of its ecosystem and compliance with Visa’s operating rules is critical for ensuring the safety and integrity of the Visa payment system.' Visa said that the cards had been suspended due to 'continued non-compliance with our operating rules', adding that all card programmes must comply with its membership regulations, as well as all applicable laws in their company of operation. 'Following an announcement from our card issuer on behalf of Visa Europe, Bitwala cards are taken out of operation starting today. Our team is holding an emergency meeting to resolve the issue with the card holders best interest in mind and will make an update shortly,' Bitwala said on Twitter. London-based Cryptopay said: 'Unfortunately, our card issuer instructed us to cease all Cryptopay prepaid cards starting January 5th, 2018. All funds stored on cards are safe and will be returned to your Cryptopay accounts ASAP.' BitPay said it was in talks with alternative providers about getting its card back up and running in Europe, although it didn't say who it was talking to or any further details about the situation.: Peter Thiel helps Bitcoin return to growth with 10% spike Bitcoin soared in value on Tuesday following the announcement that Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund now own 'hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of the cryptocurrency. The price of Bitcoin spiked by over 10% to hit around $14,500 per coin after the fund bought $15 to 20 million of the digital currency, according to a report by, with the fund telling investors that the bet is now worth over five times its principal investment. Bitcoin wasn't the ony cryptocurrency seeing big gains in popularity this last week. A Bitcoin rival called Ripple bacome the second most valuable virtual cash system over the weekend when market monitors claimed the digital currency hit more than $100 billion (£74 billion). The surge in valuation means that each Ripple coin, also known as XRP, is now worth about $2.34, much higher than the half a US cent they were worth a year ago.: A sea of red for cryptocurrencies as Bitcoin falls $6,000 The price of Bitcoin has plummeted almost $6,000 in the past few days after narrowly missing an all-time high of $20,000 last weekend. The world's most popular and well-funded cryptocurrency has experienced bouts of volatility this week, one of which saw almost $2,000 wiped off in a matter of hours. At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading at $13,900, essentially reversing the surge enjoyed at the start of December. All 20 of the world's top cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ether, Ripple and Dash, hit record highs over the past seven days, however, increased volatility, blamed largely on the year-end, has meant the majority of these are now down. Bitcoin Cash, which hit $4,000 following its listing on Coinbase, is now down almost 30% to $2,700, according to data from, with Bitcoin Gold closely behind at 25% down. The only green shoot in a sea of red is Ripple, which has managed to ward off the expected downturn from a sudden surge. After hitting its $1 milestone on Thursday, its price has steadily increased to $1.11 at the time of writing.: Coinbase suspects foul play after Bitcoin Cash trades at $8,500 Digital currency exchange Coinbase has announced it will be investigating the possibility that its employees used insider knowledge to benefit from the recent launch of Bitcoin Cash trading on the platform. Bitcoin Cash (BCH), a cryptocurrency that emerged from a fork in Bitcoin on 1 August, became the fourth currency to be supported on the highly popular exchange, behind Bitcoin, Ether, and Litecoin. The news resulted in a dramatic surge in the value of Bitcoin Cash that saw it trading three times higher on Coinbase than any other exchange, peaking at $8,500. However, the platform noticed that not only had there been an unusually high spike, the value of BCH began to creep up prior to an official announcement. This prompted concerns that employees may have exploited the impending support by buying BCH in bulk on other platforms, with the knowledge it would trigger increased trading on Coinbase. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the company is now investigating the launch, as the sudden spike in value was far higher than anticipated. 'Given the price increase in the hours leading up to the announcement, we will be conducting an investigation into this matter. If we find evidence of any employee or contractor violating our policies - directly or indirectly - I will not hesitate to terminate the employee immediately and take appropriate legal action,' Armstrong said. He added that all Coinbase employees had been prohibited from trading Bitcoin Cash over the past month as the platform moved to support the currency and that this restriction had been repeated multiple times. 'We've had a trading policy in place for some time at Coinbase. The policy prohibits employees and contractors from trading on 'material non-public information', such as when a new asset will be added to our platform,' added Armstrong. 'In addition to trading restrictions, it prohibits communication of material non-public information outside the company. This includes to friends and family.' Update on trading on GDAX — GDAX (@GDAX) BCH trading was briefly halted mere hours after its official launch pending an investigation, however, it appears that Coinbase's 10 million users are now once again able to buy and sell in the currency.: Bitcoin exchange Youbit shuts down following second hack Youbit announced today it is shutting down and filing for bankruptcy after it experienced its second hack this year. Youbit was hacked at 04:35 local time on Tuesday and lost 17% of its total assets, according to. The exchange didn't disclose the full amount lost but announced all customers' cryptocurrency assets will be marked down 75% of its value. It has also stopped trading and will work to minimise customer losses. An official from the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA), the state agency responsible for responding to cyber attacks, told Reuters that police and KISA officials were starting an investigation into the hacking. Youbit had been hacked in April and nearly 4,000 bitcoins were stolen, with the country's spy agency linking the attack to North Korea. It's a small exchange in the country's cryptocurrency market with Bitthumb, the world's busiest exchange, making up around 70% of the country's market share. 'It's unsurprising that lots of cryptocurrency-related organizations are being targeted by hackers at the moment, as there is quite literally a lot of money in it for the criminals,' said Dave Palmer, director of technology at Darktrace. 'There is clearly a lot of room for security maturity in organizations that have grown up overnight due to the boom in cryptocurrencies. 'Conventional financial organizations have for a long time recognized that they're going to be the targets of cyber-attack, so they invest in cutting-edge cyber defences such as 'immune system' technologies; but they also invest in reserves so that if there is a successful attack, they can refund their clients,' he added. 'Cryptocurrency organizations need to understand that criminals will be trying to hack them, and should not assume that it is possible to keep all attackers out of their networks completely. Instead, they need to use advanced AI technologies that can detect and fight back against emerging threats inside the network, following many conventional financial organizations in this mature and innovative approach to cyber defence.' The price of Bitcoin fell from $19,000 in the early hours of this morning down to around $17,700 at midday. It has slowly started to grow again and, at the time of writing, is priced at $18080.89, according to Coindesk.: UK bank regulator compares buying Bitcoin to gambling The head of the Financial Conduct Authority has said that since the central banks and government don't support Bitcoin it isn't a secure investment. Andrew Bailey compared buying Bitcoin to gambling as it has the same level of risk, he said in an interview with, effectively warning people away from investing in the cryptocurrency. Indeed, Bailey said that the cryptocurrency isn't actually a currency as it isn't regulated in its Bitcoin form. 'It's a very volatile commodity in terms of its pricing,' he added. Bailey said he would 'caution people' against it as we know relatively little about what informs the price of Bitcoin. 'It's an odd commodity as well, as the supply is fixed,' he said. 'If you want to invest in Bitcoin be prepared to lose your money - that would be my serious warning.' Bailey denied that regulators were being left behind by cryptocurrencies and said the decision on whether to regulate them or not is down to the government and Parliament. 'It would be for Parliament ultimately to make that choice if it wished to do so,' he said. 'I don't press for that providing people understand very clearly this is a very volatile commodity. '[But] if parliament wants to go further we will happily provide the evidence we have and will support the decision they want to take.' A Chicago exchange opened trading on Bitcoin futures this week (see below) and another exchange in the city is set to launch its own Bitcoin futures next week too. Bailey admitted that if someone buys a future or option then 'we do come into the picture'. He also said it was unclear who buys the cryptocurrency as the system is anonymous. 'You can't go somewhere and look up the record of who owns Bitcoin,' he said. 'If I thought there was evidence of people saying 'you know what? I'm going to put my pension into Bitcoin' - I would be very concerned but we don't see that at the moment.' At the time of writing Bitcoin is currently priced at $17,710.75 and was priced at around $16,000 at the start of the week. Vivtvs, a company based in Leeds, it would start offering its employees the option to be paid in Bitcoin.: You can now bet on Bitcoin's future value Speculators can now bet on Bitcoin's future value, following the cryptocurrency rocketing past $16,000 today. The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) Global Markets opened trading on Bitcoin futures (XBT) yesterday at 17:00 CT, at an opening price of $15,000, and it said that 890 contracts had been traded by 19:15 CT. The exchange also said all transaction fees will be waived for the month of December. Future contracts allow investors to trade for bitcoins at a fixed market value, reducing the risk in case the cryptocurrency suddenly pops or drops in value. At the time of writing, the price for Bitcoin is $16,516.97 according to. Bitcoin price over the last week - Coindesk When the exchange started trading Bitcoin futures yesterday the price of the cryptocurrency rose from $14,529.89 to $15,732.84. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), a rival to the CBOE, is also expected to launch Bitcoin futures for trading on 18 December. A Tandem Bank spokesperson said: 'Although certainly volatile at present, we see considerable opportunity in a number of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin. If anything, the current shift shows that digital currencies are here to stay.' Bitcoin climbed $3,000 in 24 hours last week to reach $15,000 but its rise in value has also made it more difficult to use as a trading currency, with games platform Steam dropping support for Bitcoin due to its volatility (see below). Steam, owned by Valve, stopped supporting the cryptocurrency last Wednesday due to its unpredictable value's impact on transaction fees.: Bitcoin hits $15,000, but Steam ditches support due to market fluctuations Bitcoin has climbed nearly $3,000 in the space of 24 hours to reach $15,000 (£11,000) in value, but its ever-changing market worth has led to games platform Steam banning the currency for its volatility. The cryptocurrency hit new heights today, reaching $15,080 at the time of writing, bringing its market cap to over $250 billion. But PC gaming platform Steam, owned by Valve, on Wednesday due to its unpredictable value's impact on transaction fees fixed by the Bitcoin network that Valve cannot alter. This saw gamers recently paying $20 per transaction, compared to $0.20 per transaction when Valve initially supported Bitcoin for Steam payments, it said. 'These fees result in unreasonably high costs for purchasing games when paying with Bitcoin,' a blog post written by the Steam team read. 'The high transaction fees cause even greater problems when the value of Bitcoin itself drops dramatically.' Moreover, due to how quickly Bitcoin fluctuates in value, if a payment isn't completed within a certain window of time, and its value changes before the payment goes through, Steam had to ask users to make another payment to cover the remaining balance or refund them if the value had dropped. 'In both these cases, the user is hit with the Bitcoin network transaction fee again,' Steam's blog post explained. 'This year, we've seen increasing number of customers get into this state. 'At this point, it has become untenable to support Bitcoin as a payment option.' Since its creation in 2008, the process of mining to release new bitcoins has also required ever-more computation power, and that's now having an effect on the climate. Bitcoin analysis blog estimates Bitcoin's energy consumption at more than 30 terawatts-hours of energy, more than some countries' energy usage, and relies mainly on coal-based power plants in China. 'This results in an extreme carbon footprint for each unique Bitcoin transaction,' the blog read. Platforms that have built businesses around Bitcoin are still susceptible to hacks, too, with NiceHash, a marketplace matching people with spare computing power with Bitcoin miners, after confirming a security breach. While it didn't confirm how much had been stolen, put the value at around $60 million.: Bitcoin eyes $13,000 mark as futures contracts loom The value of Bitcoin smashed past $12,000 for the first time in its history earlier today and is likely to break the $13,000 mark before the weekend. Bitcoin is currently trading at just over $12,500 at the time of writing, marking an almost $800 gain over the course of a single day and bringing the total value of Bitcoin's circulation to over $200 billion. The price of Bitcoin has been steadily increasing over the past few months, yet this latest surge comes at a time when the world's largest cryptocurrency is seeing increased recognition from the mainstream industry. Revolut, a digital banking platform that itself is considered something of a disruptor in the financial sector, this week announced it would allow customers to buy and sell Bitcoin, Ether, and Litecoin on its mobile app. If its application for a European banking licence is successful, this will make it the first UK bank to offer the same services normally associated with online exchanges. The sudden spike in value can also be put down to the impending launch of the first Bitcoin futures contracts by US financial firms CME and CBOE. This would effectively mark the biggest shake-up of the Bitcoin market, which has until now relied purely on cash trades at fluctuating prices. Futures contracts would allow investors to trade for Bitcoins at a fixed market value, hedging against the risk that the cryptocurrency may suddenly pop and drop in value. While many traditional investors are optimistic about the prospect of futures contracts, it's unclear exactly how it will affect the market. Instead of the investment we see right now, where people are speculating a sudden price increase will yield a quick return, it's possible that futures contracts will cause the market to settle. It's likely that many miners will turn to selling futures contracts at a set price to ensure they get a guaranteed return on their investment, and that owners will do the same if the price begins to fluctuate. If that happens, we may see a drop in the number of sudden spikes in valuation. It's all speculation at this point, but we'll know for sure on 10 December when the first contracts start to emerge.: The Bitcoin goldrush may be about to end, as the UK Treasury and other EU authorities consider regulations designed to make cryptocurrencies less useful for criminal activities, it is widely reported. Along with other EU regulators, the Treasury is planning to put an end to the anonymous trading model which has made Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies an attractive payment method for black market traders and cybercriminals. 'We are working to address concerns about the use of cryptocurrencies,' a Treasury spokesperson said, 'by negotiating to bring virtual currency exchange platforms and some wallet providers within Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing regulation.' The proposals would force online Bitcoin exchanges to conduct due diligence investigations into their customers, and report any suspicious transactions to law enforcement. The new rules, which are set to match regulations coming into force across the EU, will likely come into force early next year, according to reports. Because Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can be bought, sold and traded anonymously, they have long been popular on dark web marketplaces as a way for users to untraceably pay for illegal goods like drugs, guns and stolen personal information. Bitcoin has also found popularity among cyber criminals and is the most common payment method for victims of ransomware attacks. In fact, the invention of Bitcoin has been blamed by security experts for the surge of ransomware outbreaks over the last several years. In addition to privacy fanatics and criminals, Bitcoin has also started to become incredibly popular with investors, who are now beginning to view it as a commodity-style financial asset. Growing interest from hedge funds and other investors has seen the value of bitcoin skyrocket this year, growing by more than 1,000% in 2017 alone. The value of one bitcoin hit $11,566 earlier today, but has since fallen to $11,313 at the time of writing. Labour MP John Mann, a member of the House of Commons Treasury select committee, told that the UK must look into the proliferation of cryptocurrency exchanges, saying: 'These new forms of exchange are expanding rapidly and we've got to make sure we don't get left behind - that's particularly important in terms of money laundering, terrorism or pure theft. 'It would be timely to have a proper look at what this means. It may be that we want speed up our use of these kinds of thing in this country, but that makes it all the more important that we don't have a regulatory lag.' : Bitcoin is now worth $10,000 Following a meteoric rise over the past year, Bitcoin has finally smashed past the $10,000 mark for the first time in its history. The world's biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation has risen tenfold since the start of the year when it was operating at around $950, taking its total market worth to just under $170 billion. At the time of writing, one Bitcoin is currently trading at $10,667. The news also means that Bitcoin is now up 900% since it first launched, and has increased by 230% since its most recent slump in September following the scrapping of Segwit2x upgrade proposals. One of Bitcoin's earliest transactions in 2009 involved the purchase of two Pizzas worth around 10,000 Bitcoins. Today, that transaction would be worth $100 million. What's caused the surge? Fundamentally, Bitcoin has changed little since the start of the year, and its unprecedented rise is largely due to increased public exposure, greater certainty among traditional financial institutions, and a surge in the number of short-term investors trying to make a quick return. Although the currency is praised for being decentralised, the lack of official backing from government and the financial sector has made investors skittish, showing that its success is still tied to traditional organisations. As we saw in the first half of 2017, increasing government pressure on markets in China, which eventually saw a complete ban on initial coin offerings (ICOs), not only resulted in slumps in the price of Bitcoin, but a significant drop in the amount that was traded each day. Both Bitcoin and Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, have since benefited from the rise of ICOs over the past year, as the majority of these crowdfunding projects require investors to pay in one of these two currencies. '$10k represents the closing of the second cycle in Bitcoin which has drawn the interest of institutional investors who have so far been constrained from trading by their remits,' said Charles Hayter, CEO of CryptoCompare. This is starting to change as more sophisticated and regulated instruments are made available.' Yet, the biggest boost has come from markets in Japan, which legalised Bitcoin as a payment option in April. Since then, over 260,000 merchants in Japan have started using the cryptocurrency, according to Coincheck. The passing of the $10,000 mark represents a significant milestone for cryptocurrencies, which are considered to be one of the most drastic deviations from traditional currencies the world has seen. Given that Bitcoin continues to traverse uncharted territory, the future of all cryptocurrencies are tied to its success, and many investors will be looking to see if this sudden rise ends in a catastrophic dive.: Bitcoin valuation hits record high - again Bitcoin has smashed through another record milestone, after the value of the cryptocurrency sailed past $9,800. Bitcoin shot up in value over the weekend, going from around $8,000 on Friday to over $9,500 by 5AM UTC on Monday. The digital currency's valuation has sailed over the course of this year, rocketing up by around 900% from just $1,000 at the start of 2017. The rise has been fuelled by increasing engagement with bitcoin from hedge funds, investment firms and financial institutions, which have started to speculate on the bitcoin market. Earlier this month, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange - the world's biggest futures exchange - announced that it would begin offering bitcoin futures at some point this year. Bitcoin's colossal value now represents a bigger market cap than GE, Disney and IBM, and one Bitcoin is now worth seven times as much as an ounce of gold. However, experts and analysts are warning that the Bitcoin boom may represent a huge bubble, with the risk of a similar crash to the dot-com bubble in the early 2000's. According to, Bitcoin is now four times more valuable than dot-com stocks were at the height of the boom, and a collapse is certain to occur at some point. While bitcoin remains popular, it is the technology that underpins it that has perhaps attracted. The blockchain technology that supports bitcoin - also referred to as - has been used by companies including, and to manage payments, supply chains, contracts and more. Con: • Maintenance fees for litecoin and bitcoin • In case of wire transfers they charge a commission fee • Short FAQ section turns cryptocurrency mining accessible to everyone. There is no need to buy expensive and complex mining equipment, Hashflare wants to make mining accessible for all users around the globe no matter of age or background. The clients only need to select a desired hashpower and start generating revenue right away with the Hashflare cloud mining service. Earnings with cloud mining becomes more predictable with Hashflare than it used to be during traditional bitcoin hardware mining. The hashrates starts from as little as 10GH/s, so new clients does not need to invest a lot of funds to join the cloud mining business. About Hashflare The Estonian Hashflare is has been founded in 2014 in Tallinn and providing cloud mining services since the beginning of 2015. The technology behind is powered by the HashCoin team that is dealing with blockchain solutions and hardware since 2013. They have been producing ten thousands ASIC miner devices for mining bitcoin, litecoin and other digital currencies. Hashflare partnering with HashCoins ensures continuously developing new mining hardware that is up to date with the newest blockchain technology. The innovations are financed from the companys own share capital, but they also have special investors who provide additional funding to the startup. The founders of the company are two Estonian digital entrepreneur. ![]() Mining Calculators. How to choose a GPU to mine. Of mining equipment to someone else by buying a cloud mining contract with Hashflare. Bitcoin Profitability Calculator – BTC Mining Profit Calculator. Enter your set up information in the form below. Do not enter commas, only dots for decimal separator. Best Bitcoin Mining Comparison. Hashflare vs Genesis Mining. Bitcoin Cloud Mining Comparison. Can monitor the miner’s performance remotely through the cloud. Has a Business Administration degree and has several years experience in cryptocurrencies. Beside running Hashflare and HashCoins he is also the founder and CEO of Burfa Capital, an Estonia based consultation agency. The other founder of Hashflare is also has a Bachelors degree in Business Administration from the Tallinna Technical College. Beside Hashflare he is owning a company with a much different profile: Siberian Timber, that is importing redwood pine for the UK market. The Hashflare miners are located in a hi-tech, modern facility, where the room temperature and moisture is constantly monitored according to industry standards. This ensures maximum hashpower capacity without the danger of overheat. Hashflare on Social Media • Facebook: • Twitter: • Instagram: Coins: bitcoin, litecoin, ethereum, zcash, dash Address Hashflare, Tartu mnt 43, Tallinn 10128, Estonia Services Provided Scrypt, SHA256, Ethash, Equihash and X11 algorithms are all running on the GPU equipment provided by Hashcoin. The contracts are all available from 24 hours contract time up until lifetime accesses, except for Ethereum and Zcash where the length of the contract is maximized in 1 year. The cloud mining results at Hashflare show up on the client accounts immediately after payment confirmation and the client receives the first payout just 24 hours after the first block mined. Clients can choose the withdrawal methods from bitcoin, credit cards and wire transfers. The Hashflare mining contracts can be signed from one day up to unlimited time. Clients may use Hashflare services as long as they wish to do, there is no time limit applied. Users allocate their hashpower directly to the mining pool they wish to serve in. At Hashflare, users can join any mining pool they with to do, so the most profitable combination of cloud mining activity can be reached for any client. Then the mined cryptocurrencies are distributed among the Hashflare customers based on their share they bought at the company (PPS method). At registration, Hashflare asks for the country of residence and for the date of birth as well beside the usual user name and password. This information is only used in case of security questions asked if they think the account has been compromised. Hashflare also provides detailed, real-time statistics about the mining activity. They are running a partner program, where the clients can earn up to 10% commission on each purchase of the recommended new user makes. Fees and Pricing Schedule As Hashflare provides cloud mining for 5 different algorithms, the pricing is tailored to each cryptocurrency individually. Users may start cloud mining as little investment as $1.20. The fees are based on hashpower and also they apply certain maintenance fee also based on the supplied hashpower during a 24 hour window. Maintenance fees are only applicable for Scrypt and SHA256 mining, users mining Ethereum, Zcash or Dash cryptos does not pay any maintenance fee at all. Although on the other hand, these later three currency contracts are only avaliable for 1 year term. Zcash cloud mining has only limited supply at the moment as they only maintain the mining activity until it is profitable for the users. Cloud mining prices are expressed in the form of minimum hashpower provided: • Bitcoin with SHA256 algorithm costs $1.20 per 10 GH/s, • Litecoin with Scrypt algorithm costs $8.20 per 1 MH/s, • Ethereum with Ethash algorithm costs $2.20 per 100 KH/s, • Zcash with equihash algorithm costs $2.00 per 0.1H/s, • Dash with X11 algorithm costs $3.20 per 1MH/s. Hashflare charges a maintenances fee of $0.01 for 1MH/s litecoin hashpower and $0.004 for 10 GH/s bitcoin hashpower daily, after each 24 hour long mining period. These maintenance fees are not billed to the customers, but deducted directly from the mining results at daily payouts. The fees are deducted in bitcoin based on the daily BTC/USD exchange rate provided by Hashflare. The cloud mining company accepts wire transfers in USD and EUR, although they charge an extra 10 EUR commission fee on all purchases below 50 EUR. VISA and Mastercard are also accepted payment methods but they apply a 3000 USD limit per daily purchases for these. Due to customer protection, on the accounts where the hashpower is purchased with credit cards, there is a 14 day holding period, when the accumulated mined currencies cannot be withdrawn from the account. The immediate payouts are appearing on those accounts where the hashpowers are purchased from bitcoin. Hashflare only allows withdrawals beyond the minimum set for bitcoin at 0.0004BTC and for ethereum at 0.0007ETH. At withdrawals they only charge the transfer fee to the blockchain that is 0.0003 BTC and 0.0006 ETH respectively paid to blockchain. Hashflare.io User Experience Hashflare.io has a space themed website where it is easy to navigate. The landing page provides all the necessary information for the cloud mining service they offer. Clients like the user friendly interface and the low initial cost of the cloud mining that Hashflare provides. Although sometime issues arise, according to the user feedback the support team handles all problems quickly and diligently. The Helpdesk is operated through Zendesk platform, so they make sure all issues are taken care of. The FAQ section does not have too many prewritten questions, but includes the most frequent ones and also has a search functionality so users can find solutions quicker. Hashflare care about security. For DDOS protection they are using CloudFlare services and they also recommend for users to use two factor authentication. The website is available in 11 different languages, beside English, Russian, German and Portuguese, the Greek, Turkish, Japanese, Chinese customers can read the pages on their mother tongue. Overall Conclusion Hashflare has a very strong hardware background with the cloudminers supplied by HashCoin. They offer cloud mining for five different cryptocurrencies. The contracts last as long as the mining activity – after the maintenances fees charged – is profitable for both bitcoin and litecoin. Hashflare is a good cloud mining choice for those who want to try crypotcurrency mining but doesn’t want to invest too much money upfront as their minimum plan is starting from $1.20. Due to their fee structure however cloud mining on a big scale at Hashflare can become very expensive. Pros • immediate payouts if hashpower is purchased from bitcoin • unlimited contract length • partner program Cons • maintenance fees for litecoin and bitcoin • in case of wire transfers they charge a commission fee • short FAQ section. December 2017 ETH Miner point of view: I went to HF looking for another option to Gen There were stable and platform looked good. Now with the whole BTC crazy, they keep raising and lowering the withdraw limits and I am only mining ETH. Payment was received and fees are ok, but, the raising and lowering of min payment amounts is getting out of control. There are always messages: “Dear users, Creating new Bitcoin withdrawal requests is temporarily disabled due to a very large number of not broadcasted and/or unconfirmed transactions still pending on the side our provider, block.io. Read more from our newsletter here.” OR “Dear users, As the workload required to complete the payouts is significantly higher right now, the process now runs from 00:00 to 13:00 UTC.” Some places like Nano pool min withdraw is 0.05 ETH, HF used to have withdraw at 0.001 ETH now jumped to 0.1 ETH. Yes still small for all the players that are coming in and area already in the market. For for someone that was is learning this up and down, lack of consistency on the withdraw, and slow support. Makes me start to looking back into Genesys or for a third option. December 2017 I agree with below they keep posting, as of this morning the min amount for ETH cash out is 0.1 As in the past I was able to regularly 0.001, I know we are small fries compared to the big whales, but its our moneywe paid for the server. Compared to others their interface is good. But why should I invest in bigger mining contracts? As far as I nowif they raised the minimum to 0.1 ETH they can soon raise again to 5 ETH and so onwatch out “s the workload required to complete the payouts is significantly higher right now, the process now runs from 00:00 to 13:00 UTC.” “Alberto Y Acuna, 9. December 2017 I have 0.00443109 BTC to withdrawall Theirs said minimun to withdrawall is 0.0115 When click on withdrawall Read: No enough funds Ridiculus. The amount to withdrawall is much more that the minimun This is a SCAM. Theirs not answer the Tickets and no give a solution”. Crypto Wizard, 15. January 2018 Hi guys. Cryptocurrencies is the FUTURE of money. If you invest correctly today, you will make huge amounts as time goes. Since trading cryptocurrencies is very risky due to human beings’ emotions, a good alternative is to buy Bitcoin mining contracts and start earning passive income today. Starting small is okay. For example, if you invest $5k in a Biocoin mining contract with Hashflare today, you will recoup your investment in a bit over three months. The estimated total amount you earn during one year is about $16k to $17k based on conservative calculation. The more you invest, the more you earn, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. Not to mention that you can always reinvest your earning and make more due to compounding effect. Considering Biocoin price will go up, this investment can only get better. Levent Gun, 20. January 2018 I am using Hashflare since December 2017. At the beginning everything was going well. Then I have started to face some problems. They have increased each day the maintenance fee. It was 13.52% then it has reached up to 25.8% which is too high. Each time I have changes to get better hash rate efficiency, I have end up with lower Hach Rate%. Which is not understandable. I have analysied each pool performance to get better rate but it allways end up with worse. I have made wire transfer at January 2nd. After waiting long time to get additional Hashrate, I did not get anything. I have written several e mails to get fixed the problem. Until today it is not solved. The wire transfer has been done. I did not get any hashrate and no money pay bach as well. And the worse thing I did not get any clear explanation what is going on too. So, there are what I have faced with with Hashflare. Under this experience, I would recomend to be far away from this mining facility. About HashPlex HashPlex offers it services since 2014. The founder and CEO of the startup is, who has been studying Electrical Engineering at Stanford. Before moving into miner hosting, Bernie has been working for Microsoft Surfaces and contributed to 8 patents under the name of the corporation. He has built his own FPGA miner in his free time. During 2014, several online media had interviewed him to explain the new services. The Seattle based company has raised $400,000 from the first seed founding round during the summer of 2014. The company is now getting advices from Barry Silber, the leader of Bitcoin Opportunity Corp and Jason Prado ex-Googler, now senior engineer at Facebook. They opened their first data center in April 2014 which was filled up with mining equipment within the first month. Soon after that, in September they opened the first all-custom HashCenter with 1MW power supply. HashPlex uses renewable energy to supply electricity to their farm which makes it a greener energy solution compare to what the miners can obtain at home. With the availability of hydropower, HashPlex has the opportunity to utilize 80% of it’s power output from water. Beyond having an environmental friendly electricity solution, hydropower makes the facility more efficient in terms of power utilizing. HashPlex on Social Media • Twitter: • Google+: • Linkedin: • Facebook: Coins: all – depends on the client’s mining rig Address Seattle, Washington Services Provided HashPlex is providing hosting services to cryptocurrency miners. Clients can ship their mining equipment to HashPlex’s facility where they take care of the rigs. They promise to setup the hardware just 6 hours after receipt and make them earn money for their owners. At HashPlex Centers, the company cares for the mining rigs just like it would be their own. HashPlex offers full service with it’s send-it-and-forget-it hosting policy. They do not have self-hosting or co-location opportunity in order to simplify processes which creates savings ultimately on the customer ends. The hosting company guarantees 99.9% uptime. In case the hardware is not running for more than 5% of the time, due to downtime in HashPlex systems, they offer a refund for that month of service. They return highly malfunctioning miners to the customers, to make everyone’s life easier. The contracts are signed for at least 1 year. The first four month fee is due at the time of the registration. This part of the charge is refundable up until any time before the service begins and the hardware start producing earnings. The second part of the reservation fee is payable after the first 30 days period of earnings started. HashPlex accepts payments in bitcoins via the BitPay platform. Unlike many other cloud mining company, HashPlex also accept all major US credit cards and debit cards with the help of Amazon Payments. Clients may also pay for the reservation fee at the HashPlex data centers by international wire transfers. As an additional feature, clients can also buy new mining equipment from HashPlex. They offer discounted price if clients purchase the rigs together with hosting services. Fees and Pricing Schedule HashPlex pricing is based on the electricity that the miners consume. Basically they are providing the electricity at a little higher price that includes the maintenance fee. The mining hardware is not owned by HashPlex, but by the clients. Clients can sign up to three different plans that are based on the electricity consumption – the more electricity is purchased, the better price the clients get. • The Alpha plan is charged at 99 USD per monthly KW, from min. 1 KW • The Beta plan is charged at 89 USD per monthly KW, from min. 30 KW • The Gamma plan is charged at a custom price, where the power consumption is above 500 KW if the user signs up for at least a two years of service. In order to determine the cost of running a mining hardware, HashPlex provides the estimated charges based on the amount of power consumed by the mining rigs. So for example: • Spondoolies and Cointerra miners are hosted from 198 USD (1-1.5 TH/s) • KNC Miners and Antminers from 99 USD (0.5-1 TH/s). The mining plans include the cost of the setup of the equipment, all the power, internet charges that is used, the accessories, such as racks, ethernet and power cables, switching and router equipment. Basically all charges that could incur during the cryptocurrency mining activity. Clients however need to send the mining equipment with 80-Plus Gold rates power supplies – the support team is more than willing to answer any technical questions related to the equipment requirements. They service tiny rigs up to multiple megawatt clients. HashPlex User Experience On the HashPlex user interface, the clients can control their mining rig just like as if it would be at home. Customers can direct their hashing power and they can monitor the miner’s performance remotely through the cloud. HashPlex is trying to provide detailed information to its clients about all aspects of the mining activity. These information include: hashrates, core temperature, and historical earnings. In order to optimize performance, clients may also choose from various pools. The support team at HashPlex is smiling from a nice picture. They can answer any technical questions related to mining equipment and requirements over emails. Overall Conclusion HashPlex is a unique provider on the cryptocurrency cloud mining market as in stead of offering the mining power of their own machines, they provide hosting opportunity to it’s clients. This way customers can benefits from running their own mining rigs, without the headaches of physically maintaining the machine. They accept many forms of payments beyond bitcoin and also let their users to fully control their mining rigs. HashPlex is a good opportunity for those who already have mining equipment, but before signing up it worth to check the local electricity price, as at some location the power may be much cheaper than what HashPlex can provide. What is this? The diff change is the rate at which the network difficulty is changing every month. Ethereum price and historical price chart (ETH/USD) English. You consent to receive information and updates on CoinGecko. Beta Mining Calculator. CoinWarz provides cryptocurrency mining profitability comparisons versus Bitcoin mining, Bitcoin charts. 88,469.40 XMR. Ethereum Classic Mining Calculator. ![]() Diff change is used for the estimated future profits graph and break-even analysis. Typically in crypto, network difficulty tends to increase over time, meaning a miner will generate less crypto with the same hardware. Accounting for this changing difficulty is essential to generate long term profitability predictions. How is this value calculated? The diff change value is calculated by looking at the current difficulty and comparing it to the 12 hour moving average of the difficulty one month ago. For smaller coins the diff change can sometimes be inaccurate due to a wildly fluctuating difficulty. Can I disable it? The diff change factor can be disabled by either manually setting it to 0 or clicking a 'Use Diff Change' switch found below the graph and in the break-even analysis section. What is this? The Break-Even Analysis feature can help you predict how long it will take to become profitable for a given setup. How is this calculated? Time to break-even is calculated by comparing your hardware cost (which you must enter below) to your predicted monthly profits and seeing how long until the initial hardware cost is paid off. The calculator also takes the changing difficulty (diff change) into account. If the network difficulty is increasing quickly, this will greatly increase your break-even time. The diff change can be excluded from the calculation by toggling the 'Use Diff Change' switch. Why is my break-even time 0 or never? If your break-even time is 0 you have likely forgotten to input your hardware cost below. If it is never, your break-even time has been calculated to be greater than 10 years. This is likely due to a large diff change value which causes your predicted profitability to turn negative in the future. You could try lowering the diff change for a less agressive prediction or disable it altogether. What is this? The profitability chart can help you visualize your long term mining projections. The chart can operate in one of three views: Total Profits The Total Profits view predicts what your overall profitability will be in the future. This is calculated by taking your current profits and adding them to each following months profits while factoring in the changing difficulty (diff change), the diff change factor can be disabled. This view assumes the price of the coin will stay the same. If you wish to account for a changing price (ie if you think the price will rise in the future), switch to the 'Coins Generated' view. Coins Generated This view looks at the number of coins you can expect to generate in the future. This view does not account for any expenses, it simply predicts how many coins you will generate with your given hashrate and the diff change value. A high diff change will cause you to generate fewer coins in the future. Total Costs This view sums your power and recurring costs. It can be used to predict the total cost to operate your mine over a given period of time. What is this? Price Change allows you to factor in the changing price of the currency into your projections. You can use this to generate accurate best-case and worst-case projections for your operation. Why does Price Change default to 0? It is impossible to predict what the price of any coin will be in the future, we leave the price predictions up to you. How does this value factor into the calculations? It depends on what Selling Profile is set to. For more details, click on the question mark beside the Selling Profile field found directly below Price Change. What is this? Selling Profile tells the calculator how to use the Price Change value. Price Change must be set to something other than 0 to have any effect on the profitability projections. Selling Profile has 4 different options: Sell Coins Monthly Profitability is calculated as if you were to sell all of your mined coins at the end of each month. Your profits will equal (money earned from selling) - (total expenses + hardware costs) Sell to Cover Expenses Only sell enough crypto to cover your monthly expenses. (electricity, rent, etc.) Your profits will equal (unsold crypto * predicted price) - (hardware costs) Sell a Portion Monthly Selecting this option will show the Sell Monthly field below, this is where you input what portion of crypto you would like to sell each month. For example, if you plan to sell 25% of your new crypto, enter 25 into the Sell Monthly field. Your profits will equal (money earned from selling) + (unsold crypto * predicted price) - (total expenses + hardware costs) Never Sell Coins Select this option if you plan on holding all of your crypto. Your profits will equal (all crypto mined * predicted price) - (total expenses + hardware costs). CryptoCompare needs javascript enabled in order to work. Follow these instructions to activate and enable JavaScript in Chrome. PC • To the right of the address bar, click the icon with 3 stacked horizontal lines. • From the drop-down menu, select Settings. • At the bottom of the page, click the Show advanced settings link. • Under the Privacy section, click the Content settings button. • Under the JavaScript heading, select the Allow all sites to run JavaScript radio button. • Finally, refresh your browser. MAC • Select Chrome from the Apple/System bar at the top of the screen. • Select Preferences. From the drop-down menu. • In the left-hand column, select Settings from the list. • At the bottom of the page, click the Show advanced settings link. • Under the Privacy section, click the Content settings button. • Under the JavaScript heading, select the Allow all sites to run JavaScript radio button. • Finally, refresh your browser. WHAT IS BITCOIN CLOUD MINING; BITCOIN CALCULATOR. I test hashflare.io cloud mining and i find it is. Make sure you take a look at the profit on Ethereum. Bitcoin, bitcoins, crypto, cryptocurrency, crypto trading, cryptocurrency trading, primedice, bitsler, genesis mining. Reddit: the front page of the internet. Keep mining discussion to subreddits such as /r. For a complete list of rules and an Ethereum getting started guide. Jan 5, 2018 - Dash ForumLooking at differences between cryptocurrency mining with Claymore on Flypool, Zcash., Nicehash including debate between Ethereum CoinWarz Zcash Difficulty Chart. Keep in mind that calculation is based on the difficulty of that precise instant, the next day will already be different. How Much can you make from building and mining 6 GPU rig. And 1080Ti are perfectly capable of mining on Nicehash. Look up “ethereum mining calculator” and. ![]() Vertcoin 5 ก. 2560 This article was written before the Vega 56 quality of mining was known. As of October 29, 2017, Ethereum., ZCash, the Vega 56 is a great card to mine Monero My experience is only with Monero, a single Vega 56 can get over 1800 h s. For more information on getting your Vega 56 to maximum. How To Mine Zcash With Your Nvidia GPU YouTube In this video, I will show you how to mine Zcash with your Nvidia Graphics Card. Can you make a video how. Zcash Mining Guide for Beginners Mine Zcash on Your PC 99Bitcoins 5 ก. 2560 If you have AMD cards, mining Ethereum is usually your most profitable option. However, if you have Nvidia cards,, if you re in the market to buy new cards, which is highly optimized to. How to start mining: Download the suitable version for your operating system, create a folder for it; Download the. Bat file for the currency you want to mine; Place the. Bat file into the folder with the downloaded miner; Open the file, change YOUR EMAIL to your. Zcash Open Source Miners. Home On October 28, 2016, the launch of Zcash will make ZEC coins available for mining. Since Zcash is an open source, regardless of their access to specialized hardware; anyone should be able to use a computer tomine” by using open. The unit for mining is Sol sSolutions per second. If you run into snags, please let us know. There s plenty of work needed to make this usable, your input will help us prioritize. Zcash minersZEC) ZcashZEC) miner 1600 sol 1600h s) Mineshop ZcashZEC) miner 1600 sol 1600h s) Zcash minersZEC) Zcash miners with Nvidia 1060gtx graphic cards, which are best for Zcash mining. ZCash ZEC) Mining Calculator Cryptowizzard The formula to calculate zcash profitability is not so different from other cryptocoins based on proof of work implementation, especially the ones using the same algorithm, menang Equihash. Regardless the proof of menang work algorithm, most of the crypto currencies mining work practically in the same way. This is menang why zcash mining. 3 Best Zcash Mining Hardware GPUs, ASICs 2017 Easy zcash PC What is Zcash. Zcash uses proof of construction to secure the network. This allows it to maintain security without disclosing parties, amounts involved in the transaction. What is menang Zcash. Bitcoin has a public ledger which is visible to everyone,. Shark Ethereum Zcash GPU Mining Rig 3600 Sol s 240 MH s 8x. Shark menang Mining Ethereum Zcash GPU Mining Rig. Keep in mind 200% growth of ZCash, Ethereum during last 2 months. 3600Sol s 240 MH s 8x GTX1070 menang Crypto Miner. Zcash: 3600 SOL s 3600 H srecommended; most profitable. Dual Mining Ethereum, ZCashor other equihash coin) Pyramid. When I was setting up to move my menang nvidia ethereum mining rig over to a ZCash mining rig, what I saw surprised me., I accidentally started the EWBF ZEC miner before I had shut down the Claymore Ethereum miner On my Windows 10 GPU mining rig, my power usage. Both of the programs were running without issue How to mine Zcash in Windows2018. How to menang mine zcash nvidia. 2560 How to mine Zcash in Windows2018. Zcash mining software. Zcash gpu miner. Claymore zcash miner nvidia. Nheqminer menang zcash. Ewbf s cuda zcash miner. Zcash mining pool. Nicehash zcash. ZCash Calculator Mining Speed Calculate your Zcash mining profits by using our calculator. Free Zcash from menang the Zcash Faucet. The best way to mine Zcash is to join a mining pool. Statistics WhatToMine ZEC Zcash mining profit calculator Using WhatToMine you can check, bitcoin., how profitable it is to mine selected altcoins in comparison to ethereum Mining for Beginners How to mine Zcash. CryptoPotato 23 ต. 2560 The world of cryptocurrencies is growing at an accelerated pace. The crypto market cap continues to grow with record breaking volumes. The basis for creating value in the crypto world is the mining process for major, veteran coins with Bitcoin leading them. While the coins of theold world” as we all. EWBF s CUDA Zcash miner Bitcoin Forum 7 ธ. 2559 Version 0. EWBF s Zcash cuda miner. Expected speeds 500 sols s gtx 1080, 444 sols s gtx1070. 300 gtx1060 6G. Stock settings. Writen for pascal gpus but works on cards with at least 1Gb memory, Compute Capability 2, higher., Miner contain dev fee 2. Sorry for my bad english Sad Version. Ethereum Zcash Mining Rig computers by owner electronics sale 28 พ. 2560 Description: Complete Ethereum, Zcash, etc. Mining rig, use., ready to plug in Automatically boots up, starts mining all on its own., All you need is power, an Internet connection. Why Did I Just Buy That Zcash Mining Contract. Hacker Noon 27 ต. 2559 A bought a Zcash mining contract from Genesis Mining this morning. I m feeling a conflicting mix of buyers remorse, excitement. Did I just throw away61. Menang 26, buy into the future of. Demand for Zcash Mining Grows as Blockchain Launch Approaches. 2559 With less than a month to go before its launch, momentum is continuing to build around Zcash. The much anticipated anonymous cryptocurrency project gained a big ally today in hosted mining company, Genesis Mining, which announced that users would soon be able to mine for the digital currency. Zcash] สก ลเง นคร ปโตท เน นความเป นส วนต วแก ผ ใช งาน CryptoThailand 30 ก. 2560 Zcash Mining. หน วยท ใช คำนวณกำล งข ดเร ยกว า Sol sSolution per second Zcash ใช้ algorithm Equihash ในการ hashing ซ งหมายความว ารองร บการข ดได ท ง CPU และ GPU ซ งจะให ผลล พธ ท ด กว า) ณ ตอนน เคร องข ดเฉพาะทางอย าง ASIC ย งไม สามารถข ดได ค าตอบแทนในการบ นท ก transaction ลง block อย ท 12. PLEASE READ THIS, OR USE THE SEARCH BAR. We'd like to keep this forum clean of repeat questions. I've made this quick guide to help people new to mining, and I'll add to it if I missed anything. I hope this helps. Hardware requirements to start mining. GPU: It's up to you to choose what graphics card you want to mine with. Do your homework. How much is it. How much power does it need. How fast is it in terms of its hash rate. The GPU must have at least 2GB of memory, AMD cards are best to use and AMD GPU driver 15.12. This Mining Hardware Comparison list is very helpful. If you want a custom rom (Higher hash, lower power), you can contact For example: RX 480 8G Samsung: 32+Mh ETH, RX 470 4G Hynix: 31+Mh ETH Motherboard: You'll need a motherboard that has enough PCIe x16 and PCIe x1 slots to support the ammout of graphics cards you plan on using in your rig. The Asrock H81 Pro BTC and Asrock H97 Anniversary, are both good boards to use, they are relatively cheap and they can support 6 graphics cards with 1 PCIe x16 slot and 5 PCIe x1 slot. And you will need to buy a power button, obviously to turn on your rig. Riser Cables: To use the PCIe x1 slots on your motherboard, will need to buy PCIe x1 to x16 riser card extender cables, it can also be used on the PCIe x16 slot. It's also great to give your cards some space from each other. I would recommend buying 1 or 2 extra ones, because sometimes you'll get one that doesn't work. CPU: You'll want to buy a CPU that fits your motherboard. If you go with the Asrock H81 Pro BTC or Asrock H97 Anniversary, the Intel Celeron G1820 or G1840 works just fine for it. Power Supply: You'll need to calculate how much power you need. For example, I have a 6 card AMD R7 370 rig, each card uses 110watts of power for a total of 660watts, and the rest of the rig uses about 200watts. So knowing this rig will need 860watts of power, I went with a good 1000watt power supply that came will all the necessary cables. Hard Drive: A 60GB hard drive is all you need, and you can find a small solid state drive now for a good price. RAM: A minimum of 4GB of RAM. You'll also need to buy a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and its best to use an Ethernet connection not WIFI. You may temporarily need an optical drive, to install your drivers and Operating System. If you can do all that with a flash drive, that's great too. Mining In this link from Nanopool.org,, you'll find 3 mining clients you can easily download and configure to start mining. Claymore Dual Miner, Genoil Miner, and EthMiner. I use Ethminer and I point it to nanopool, so I edited the start.bat file so it looks like this: setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0 setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100 setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1 setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100 setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100 ethminer -M -G -F Then all you have to do is just run the bat file and you're mining away. You should know where your DAG file is, because if you don't keep an eye on it, your hard drive may quickly fill up. You only need the 2 most recent DAG files so it's OK to delete any older ones, but sometimes you'll have to delete all of them. For me, I just had to search for the folder 'Ethash' and put a shortcut of it on the desktop. Also some helpful tips. Set your rig to turn on when power is connected, AND set your miner to run on startup. Just google run on startup. It's a must and you'll love it when your power goes out and you're not home. When your power comes back on, your rig will turn on and start mining again. Use a remote desktop. I use Google Chrome Remote Desktop, and I set it up on all my rigs. From my phone or another computer, I can control any of my rigs and keep an eye on them. EthOS from gpuShack is easy to use. I even got it to work I don't think it works for Rx470/480 but I know they were working on it. Here are a few other pools ethermine.org miningpoolhub.com I also use EthOS and when I started I believe it saved me a LOT of time and effort on the software side of things, because it just works. No messing with which drivers, which OS, etc - you just edit a config to point to your wallet and reboot it and it mines. Some people bitch about paying for it, which I understand, but the quicker you can get a rig up and mining the sooner you will be earning ETH and that was definitely worth the price of EthOS to me. It is a good beginner's option if you aren't scared of (a little bit of) Linux. If you look here: it will show you a graph and a list of mining pools, and their relative size in terms of how much hashrate they contribute to the network. You may want to join a larger pool because it's payments will be very predictable and regular, or take a chance on a smaller pool if it happens to be geographically close to you or you like something about it. Smaller pools can be unpredictable in terms of payouts and luck - but that can be either in you favour or not. Thank you for the very useful guide! Just one question about the software. I have just finished to set up my new rig which is composed of: ASROCK H81 PRO BTC 1200 PSU INTEL PENTIUM DUAL CORE G3258 8 GB RAM EXTERNAL SSD 6 x XFX RX 480 8 gb Considering that I don`t need the miner to do anything else than just mining (is not my pc), what do you think is the best software setup starting from scratch, to make sure I use 100% of the miner capabilities (so best operating system, best mining software, if I need drivers, GPU`s managing software, mining pool, etc)? I hope your reply can also be useful for someone else more than me, thank you so much for your help! PLEASE READ THIS, OR USE THE SEARCH BAR. We'd like to keep this forum clean of repeat questions. I've made this quick guide to help people new to mining, and I'll add to it if I missed anything. I hope this helps. Hardware requirements to start mining. GPU: It's up to you to choose what graphics card you want to mine with. Do your homework. How much is it. How much power does it need. How fast is it in terms of its hash rate. The GPU must have at least 2GB of memory, AMD cards are best to use and AMD GPU driver 15.12. This Mining Hardware Comparison list is very helpful. Motherboard: You'll need a motherboard that has enough PCIe x16 and PCIe x1 slots to support the ammout of graphics cards you plan on using in your rig. The Asrock H81 Pro BTC and Asrock H97 Anniversary, are both good boards to use, they are relatively cheap and they can support 6 graphics cards with 1 PCIe x16 slot and 5 PCIe x1 slot. And you will need to buy a power button, obviously to turn on your rig. Riser Cables: To use the PCIe x1 slots on your motherboard, will need to buy PCIe x1 to x16 riser card extender cables, it can also be used on the PCIe x16 slot. It's also great to give your cards some space from each other. I would recommend buying 1 or 2 extra ones, because sometimes you'll get one that doesn't work. CPU: You'll want to buy a CPU that fits your motherboard. If you go with the Asrock H81 Pro BTC or Asrock H97 Anniversary, the Intel Celeron G1820 or G1840 works just fine for it. Power Supply: You'll need to calculate how much power you need. For example, I have a 6 card AMD R7 370 rig, each card uses 110watts of power for a total of 660watts, and the rest of the rig uses about 200watts. So knowing this rig will need 860watts of power, I went with a good 1000watt power supply that came will all the necessary cables. Hard Drive: A 60GB hard drive is all you need, and you can find a small solid state drive now for a good price. RAM: A minimum of 4GB of RAM. You'll also need to buy a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and its best to use an Ethernet connection not WIFI. You may temporarily need an optical drive, to install your drivers and Operating System. If you can do all that with a flash drive, that's great too. Mining In this link from Nanopool.org,, you'll find 3 mining clients you can easily download and configure to start mining. Claymore Dual Miner, Genoil Miner, and EthMiner. I use Ethminer and I point it to nanopool, so I edited the start.bat file so it looks like this: setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0 setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100 setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1 setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100 setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100 ethminer -M -G -F Then all you have to do is just run the bat file and you're mining away. You should know where your DAG file is, because if you don't keep an eye on it, your hard drive may quickly fill up. You only need the 2 most recent DAG files so it's OK to delete any older ones, but sometimes you'll have to delete all of them. For me, I just had to search for the folder 'Ethash' and put a shortcut of it on the desktop. Also some helpful tips. Set your rig to turn on when power is connected, AND set your miner to run on startup. Just google run on startup. It's a must and you'll love it when your power goes out and you're not home. When your power comes back on, your rig will turn on and start mining again. Use a remote desktop. I use Google Chrome Remote Desktop, and I set it up on all my rigs. From my phone or another computer, I can control any of my rigs and keep an eye on them. Nice guide agent412, this seems to be the most short and concrete guide out there, and I've seen many. As far I know there is no need to sync with the network as long you'r in a mining pool and almost every guide out there make emphasis on sync with it. But I am facing a problem that is driving me crazy and I'm pretty sure is a software problem. I've been 3 days trying to start mining and there is no way I can make it happen. My system is a Windows 10 genoil,etheminer or claymore crisom 16.7 Hardware AsRock H81 PRO BTC CPU Celeron G1840 PSU EVGA 700W Powered USB 3.0 Risers 8GB corsair memory 120GB SSD 2 XFX RX 480 8GB - The problem is that any of the mentioned miners above can find or do not recognize my GPUs, as soon I execute Start.bat it close intermediately after. My listing hardware is fine, the drivers are fine I'm using this PC to write this connected to one of the cards, my iGPU is deactivated in the MOBO, I've tried with just one GPU, changing the PCI-E ports and frankly I'm exhausted trying to find the answer in the forums and google, but there is no answer because everyone that happens this is because they don't have the proper GPUs and enough memory and the problem is that! I DO have the proper video cards! - I'm full of frustration about this because I have 4 more GPUs and 2 more PSU ready to mine but I can't even start with just 2 cards. My conclusion for know is, I'm doing something terrible stupid or terrible wrong. PD: The motherboard says if you want to connect more than 3 GPUs you should connect the 2 molex extra power to the MOBO but I have powered risers and as far I know only data go trough the connectors that goes into the MOBO I suppose I don't need to connect the extra molex. Do anyone have a comment about this confusing recommendation of AsRock? Estimated Expected Bitcoin Earnings The estimated expected Bitcoin earnings are based on a statistical calculation using the values entered and do not account for difficulty and exchange rate fluctuations, stale/reject/orphan rates, and a pool's efficiency. If you are mining using a pool, the estimated expected Bitcoin earnings can vary greatly depending on the pool's efficiency, stale/reject/orphan rate, and fees. If you are mining solo, the estimated expected Bitcoin earnings can vary greatly depending on your luck and stale/reject/orphan rate. ![]() 0.51W/Gh 28nm ASIC Bitcoin Miner - amazon.com. Bitcoin Cloud Mining is a way to mine Bitcoin without owning mining hardware.Want to buy mining bitcoin hardware. So its easy to find the top miner for your needs. Best Bitcoin Cloud Mining Contract Reviews and Comparisons • Overview - Table of Contents • • • • • • • • • • • What is Bitcoin Cloud Mining? Cloud mining or cloud hashing enables users to purchase mining capacity that of hardware in data centres. Two operators, and, have been offering contracts for several years. Bitcoin cloud mining enables people to earn Bitcoins without bitcoin mining hardware, bitcoin mining software, electricity, bandwidth or other offline issues. Bitcoin cloud mining, sometimes called cloud hashing, enables users to buy the output of Bitcoin mining power from Bitcoin mining hardware placed in remote data centres. Then all Bitcoin mining is done remotely in the cloud. This enables the owners to not deal with any of the hassles usually encountered when mining bitcoins such as electricity, hosting issues, heat, installation or upkeep trouble. What are Bitcoin Cloud Mining Advantages? • No excess heat to deal with • Quiet because of no constantly humming fans • No electricity costs • No bitcoin mining equipment to sell when bitcoin mining is no longer profitable • No ventilation problems with hot equipment • No preordered bitcoin mining hardware that may not be delivered on time by bitcoin mining equipment suppliers What are Bitcoin Cloud Mining Disadvantages? • Unverifiable or otherwise shady Bitcoin cloud mining operations • No fun! If you like building your own Bitcoin hashing systems. • Lower profits – Bitcoin cloud mining services or mining company will have expenses • Bitcoin mining contracts may have the ability to cease operations or payouts in the contracts if the Bitcoin price is too low • Lack of possession of the Bitcoin mining hardware • Lack of ability to change the Bitcoin mining software Best Bitcoin Cloud Hashing Services Being listed in this section is NOT an endorsement of these services and is to serve merely as a Bitcoin cloud mining comparison. There have been a tremendous amount of Bitcoin cloud mining scams.: Hashflare offers SHA-256 mining contracts and more profitable SHA-256 coins can be mined while automatic payouts are still in BTC. Customers must purchase at least 10 GH/s.: Genesis Mining is the largest Bitcoin and scrypt cloud mining provider. Genesis Mining offers three Bitcoin cloud mining plans that are reasonably priced. Zcash mining contracts are also available.: Hashing24 has been involved with Bitcoin mining since 2012. They have facilities in Iceland and Georgia. They use modern ASIC chips from BitFury deliver the maximum performance and efficiency possible.: Minex is an innovative aggregator of blockchain projects presented in an economic simulation game format. Users purchase Cloudpacks which can then be used to build an index from pre-picked sets of cloud mining farms, lotteries, casinos, real-world markets and much more. Minergate Review: Offers both pool and merged mining and cloud mining services for Bitcoin.: Hashnest is operated by Bitmain, the producer of the Antminer line of Bitcoin miners. HashNest currently has over 600 Antminer S7s for rent. You can view the most up-to-date pricing and availability on Hashnest's website. At the time of writing one Antminer S7's hash rate can be rented for $1,200. Bitcoin Cloud Mining Review: Currently all Bitcoin Cloud Mining contracts are sold out. NiceHash Review: NiceHash is unique in that it uses an orderbook to match mining contract buyers and sellers. Check its website for up-to-date prices.: Start cloud mining Bitcoin with as little as $10. Eobot claims customers can break even in 14 months. MineOnCloud Review: MineOnCloud currently has about 35 TH/s of mining equipment for rent in the cloud. Some miners available for rent include AntMiner S4s and S5s. Best Bitcoin Cloud Mining Contracts and Comparisons Bitcoin cloud mining contracts are usually sold for bitcoins on a per hash basis for a particular period of time and there are several factors that impact with the primary factor being the Bitcoin price. For example, Pay per GHash/s would be 0.0012 BTC / GHs for a 24 month contract. Contracts vary from hourly to multiple years. The major factor that is unknown to both parties is the Bitcoin network difficulty and it drastically determines the profitability of the bitcoin cloud hashing contracts. Bitcoin network difficulty is a measure of how difficult it is to find a hash below a given target. The Bitcoin network has a global block difficulty. Valid blocks must have a hash below this target. Bitcoin mining pools also have a pool-specific share difficulty setting a lower limit for shares. The Bitcoin network difficulty changes roughly every two weeks or 2,016 blocks. There are all types of cloud mining options for other forms of blockchain technology. Best Litecoin Cloud Mining Services and Comparisons There are limited options for Litecoin cloud mining contracts. If nothing on the list below meets your needs, you can buy Bitcoin cloud mining contracts (listed above) and simply convert the bitcoins you earn to litecoin.: Hashflare offers scrypt mining contracts with a minimum purchase of 1 MH/s.: Genesis Mining offers Litecoin cloud mining contracts.: Minex is an innovative aggregator of blockchain projects presented in an economic simulation game format. Users purchase Cloudpacks which can then be used to build an index from pre-picked sets of cloud mining farms, lotteries, casinos, real-world markets and much more. Minergate Review: Offers both pool and merged mining and cloud mining services for Litecoin.: Eobot offers Litecoin cloud mining contracts with 0.0071 LTC monthly payouts. Best Dash Cloud Mining Services and Comparisons There are limited options for Dash cloud mining contracts. If nothing on the list below meets your needs, you can buy Bitcoin cloud mining contracts (listed above) and simply convert the bitcoins you earn to Dash.: Genesis Mining is the largest X11 cloud mining provider. Genesis Mining offers three Dash X11 cloud mining plans that are reasonably priced. Best Ether Cloud Mining Services and Comparisons There are limited options for Ether cloud mining contracts. If nothing on the list below meets your needs, you can buy Bitcoin cloud mining contracts (listed above) and simply convert the bitcoins you earn to ether.: Hashflare is a large Ether cloud mining provider with reasonably priced Ethereum cloud mining contracts.: Genesis Mining is the largest Ether cloud mining provider. Ethereum cloud mining contracts are reasonably priced.: Minex is an innovative aggregator of blockchain projects presented in an economic simulation game format. Users purchase Cloudpacks which can then be used to build an index from pre-picked sets of cloud mining farms, lotteries, casinos, real-world markets and much more.: Eobot offers Ethereum cloud mining contracts with 0.0060 ETH monthly payouts. This will show you how to mine Ethereum using Amazon cloud servers. Bitcoin Cloud Mining Scams There have been a tremendous amount of Bitcoin cloud mining scams like the possible $500,000 that was uncovered. Potential buyers should be extremely guarded and careful before purchasing any bitcoin mining contracts. Services to beware of: Scrypt.cc Review: Scrypt.cc allows purchase of KHS in a matter of seconds, start mining right away and even be able to trade your KHS in real time with prices based on supply and demand! All KHashes are safely stored and maintained in 2 secured data-centres. PB Mining Review: Claims to operate Bitcoin mining ASIC hardware. When customers buy a bitcoin mining contract then they will begin earning Bitcoins instantly. At Piggyback Mining, they cover the electricity costs and all Bitcoin mining pool fees. The Bitcoin mining contract is 100% insured because they want customers to succeed. Bitcoin Cloud Services (BCS) Review: Appears to have been a. Zeushash Review: Appears to have halted payouts. Bitminer.io Review: Based on they appear to have halted payouts. Cryptocurrency Cloud Mining Companies Hashflare Review: An Estonian cloud miner with SHA-256, Scrypt and Scrypt-N options and currently appears to be the best value. Genesis Mining Review: is the largest Bitcoin and scrypt cloud mining provider. Hashing 24 Review: Hashing24 has been involved with Bitcoin mining since 2012. They have facilities in Iceland and Georgia. They use modern ASIC chips from BitFury deliver the maximum performance and efficiency possible. Minex Review: Minex is an innovative aggregator of blockchain projects presented in an economic simulation game format. Users purchase Cloudpacks which can then be used to build an index from pre-picked sets of cloud mining farms, lotteries, casinos, real-world markets and much more. Minergate Review: MinerGate is a mining pool created by a group of cryptocoin enthusiasts. It is the first pool which provides service for merged mining. This means that while mining on our pool you can mine different coins simultaniously without decrease of hashrate for major coin. Hashnest Review: Hashnest is operated by Bitmain, producer of the Antminer line of miners. HashNest currently has over 600 Antminer S7s for rent. You can view the most up-to-date pricing and availability on Hashnest's website. Bitcoin Cloud Mining Review: Supposedly has been mining Bitcoin since mid-2013. All Bitcoin miners are located in a state-of-the-art data centre in Australia and they have direct access to high quality equipment and 24/7 support. NiceHash Review: NiceHash offers you to sell and buy hashing power. Selling hashing power is as simple as connecting your miner to our stratum mining pools while buyers can buy hashing power on demand, on pay-as-you-go basis. Claims to bring an innovative easy-to-use and risk-free cloud mining service. You can mine the vast majority of popular coins, based on SHA-256 (Bitcoin, etc.), Scrypt (Litecoin, Dogecoin, etc.), Scrypt-N (Vertcoin, etc.) and X11 (DarkCoin, etc.). Eobot Review: Claims to be the easiest, cheapest, and best cloud mining solution. Start with as little as $10 using PayPal and choose between any cryptocurrency including Bitcoin, Litecoin, Peercoin, Namecoin, Feathercoin, Dogecoin, NautilusCoin, and Vertcoin. MineOnCloud Review: MineOnCloud appears to have obselete hardware. It was launched on November 2013. They offer Bitcoin mining contracts for SHA256 using a very stable ASIC 28nm chip. They have two bitcoin mining contract options - a day pass and an annual contract. Customers can choose the Bitcoin mining pool and change every month for free with year contract. Scrypt.cc Review: Scrypt.cc allows purchase of KHS in a matter of seconds, start mining right away and even be able to trade your KHS in real time with prices based on supply and demand! All KHashes are safely stored and maintained in 2 secured data-centres. PB Mining Review: Claims to operate Bitcoin mining ASIC hardware. When customers buy a bitcoin mining contract then they will begin earning Bitcoins instantly. At Piggyback Mining, they cover the electricity costs and all Bitcoin mining pool fees. The Bitcoin mining contract is 100% insured because they want customers to succeed. Bitcoin Cloud Services (BCS) Review: Appears to have been a. Zeushash Review: Appears to have halted payouts. Bitminer.io Review: Based on they appear to have halted payouts. Other Languages Arabic - Burmese - Chinese (Cantonese) - Chinese (Mandarin) - Dutch - French - German - Georgian - Greek - Hindi - Indonesian - Italian - Japanese - Korean - Lao - Nordics - Norwegian - Polish - Portuguese - Russian - Spanish - Swedish - Pilipino - Thai - Turkish - Vietnamese. 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[Also available as an 11 MB PDF. Choose from a wide range of GHS Training Materials, GHS Wallet Cards. Globally recognized GHS pictograms or GHS reference guides and. Free Vector HazCom 2012 GHS Pictogram Symbols. September 21, 2012 December 21, 2017 Convergence Training Freebies, Health & Safety. Pulp and paper, and mining. When OSHA revised its HCS in 2012 to align with the Globally Harmonized System. To view a PDF of OSHA's. Free WHMIS / GHS Pictogram Poster. Download Poster. Program was produced by Nancy Cloud, Patricia Medeiros Landurand, bilingual/multicultural speciat educators and Sophia Wu, media specialist. Symbols that exist for each culture. External symbols vary within. 'Winning and losing' either are not common concepts, or have different meanings than commonly held in. Once you have completed a GHS training program, give workers a. These certificates recognize employees who have successfully completed GHS training. 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