Five Minute Blockchain – No. 51
Your weekly newsletter from the TruBlo project reports from the intersection of trust, content and blockchain.
Saturday, 04.03.2023
Estimated reading time: 8 min 27 sec
(Sorry, it was hard to keep in the five-minute range this week, lots of exciting and relevant updates).
QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
“Biased input leading to biased output is a big issue across the board here”.
John Oliver in “Last Week Tonight” on the current state of Artificial Intelligence.
TRUST
Crypto-focused US bank Silvergate in crisis
The big fear of any bank is that people lose trust in its ability to pay out money.
This is what currently happens with Silvergate. The US bank had served many crypto clients, making it simpler to convert dollars to Bitcoin, etc. The bank achieved a profit of $76m in 2021, and it experienced a net loss of $949m in 2022.
By March 1 this year, the bank said it would not file its annual report to the SEC on time and that the losses were even higher than previously known. In the past few days, crypto exchanges like Coinbase and others said they would stop transactions with the bank. The bank has warned that it might not survive the next 12 months.
Links:
Web3isgoinggreat
Blockworks
Crypto exchange Binance must answer difficult questions
Another crypto company under some external pressure is Binance. The crypto exchange seemed to emerge as the winner after the collapse of FTX. But now Forbes Magazin has published an investigation. The journalists say they found evidence that Binance invested $1.8B, which was meant as collateral for customers’ stablecoins, into a hedge fund. Such practice is considered risky and problematic because there is no real transparency. Binance says nothing is wrong; all transactions were within the boundaries of proper investment. But the market is watching.
Forbes
Coinbase (commentary)
Coinbase (with an interview of the author of the Forbes article)
Cointelegraph
Why do the EU and US want to ban TikTok?
TikTok is considered suspicious. Governments outside of China worry that the app could be used to track users and get their data, such as names, locations and other information. It could be that Bytedance has to comply with requests by the Chinese government. As a result, several governments have ordered their staff to delete TikTok from their phones. This week, the EU, the US, Canada, and Denmark are considering a ban.
Benedict Evans, an expert in the digital economy, says the threat is not that people could be spied upon and their data being passed on, as operating systems by now provide considerable protection. Amazingly, in a world of digital devices and highly measurable data flows, the recent actions are primarily based on assumptions but no more profound knowledge of actual data misuse.
Euronews
BBC
How EU data acts affect the handling of data
This spring, several EU acts will be put into practice. Currently they still in draft status. But companies and organizations should anticipate that the new rules go further than GDPR. On the upside the rules are not meant to be only restrictive. In fact the EU commission hopes that the new guidelines will enable a market for data and a productive exchange of information between companies.
Here is a quick overview of the several acts from an article published by Mckinsey:
- The Data Governance Act creates a new way of managing data to increase trust in and facilitate data sharing.*
- The Digital Markets Act creates fair and contestable markets for innovation, growth, and competitiveness in the digital sector.
- The Digital Services Act creates a safer digital space where the rights of all users of digital services are protected.
- The Data Act regulates access to data in B2B, B2C, and B2G (business-to-government) relationships and while switching between cloud providers.
- The AI Act enacts stringent regulations of (high-risk) AI systems and prohibiting certain practices.
McKinsey
EU Commission: EU Digital Strategy
Reuters investigation reveals a recycling initiative by Dow as just greenwashing
Determining whether certain initiatives actually deliver on their promises is often difficult in today’s information environment. A few weeks ago, The Guardian had a story that up to 90% of rainforest carbon offsets are worthless.
This week Reuters published the results of an investigation into a sneaker recycling program initiated by the government of Singapore and Dow, the US petrochemical company. They equipped used sneakers supposed to go into the program with hidden AirTags to see where they would end up. As you might have suspected: They were not recycled. Instead, the investigators found them in second-hand stores in Indonesia. Just one story reveals a massive gap between promises and reality. But the story is an example of what needs to change to achieve trustability in many areas of environmental activity.
Reuters
CONTENT
The new hot job: AI whisperer
The ability to write the right “prompts” for the new AI platforms is becoming a profession in high demand. It is not coding, not writing. Instead, generating prompts is finding the fitting instructions for the best possible results from an AI platform. There are pretty several articles and YouTube videos about the art of the prompt. One awe-inspiring video (link below) shows how to generate highly realistic pictures using certain variations of prompts. You can even use ChatGPT to help you write prompts for visual AI platforms like Dall-E or Midjourney. There are evolving dark arts here, too. An example is the “prompt injection”, – which aims to instruct an AI platform to reveal its instructions (see link below to Ars Technica).
Midjourney prompts (via Medium)
Midjourney prompts for Ultra-Realistic Images (YouTube)
Hyper Realistic Midjourney Images – Complete prompt guide (YouTube)
Ars Technica: How to trick a language model into revealing its programming
AI companies rush to find income streams
Operating the newest AI platforms is expensive, and they demand a lot of computer processing, translating to high hardware, software and electricity costs. Chat GPT reached 100 million users in record time. As a result, AI companies are quick to introduce usage options for money.
Last week Open AI released an API which enables the use of Chat GPT for business. The costs are “0.002 per token or about 750 words”. According to Techcrunch, Snap, Quizlet, Instacart and Shopify are early clients.
One company already seeing increased sales is Nvidia. The graphic card specialist produces a $10,000 chip called the A100, which is in strong demand because of its performance. Need for the follow-up model, the H100, which is only recently going into mass production, grows as fast. (CNBC)
For illustration
The latest version of Stable Diffusion, an image generator, was trained on 256 A100 GPUs, or 32 machines with 8 A100s each, according to information online posted by Stability AI, totaling 200,000 compute hours.
At the market price, training the model alone cost $600,000, Stability AI CEO Mostaque said on Twitter, suggesting in a tweet exchange the price was unusually inexpensive compared to rivals. That doesn’t count the cost of “inference,” or deploying the model.
CNBC
Open AI ChatGPT API for Business
CNET Editor leaves the job to work on AI content
CNET recently admitted that they used Chat GPT for several published stories, and the criticism was that the origin of the stories was not revealed. Now the CNET editor-in-chief has resigned and will join Red Ventures, a VC fund which had bought CNET, to work on AI projects. At CNET, management announced mass layoffs.
The Verge
How to verify
AI-generated content will profoundly change journalism. But how? To learn more about the expected impact of this technology read an interview with Nic Newman, a senior analyst at Reuters Institute. And, if you want to learn more about verifying content, there is a helpful website.
How to verify
Visual misinformation on Facebook
Scientific results of an extensive study of visual misinformation on Facebook:
“We conduct the first large-scale study of image-based political misinformation on Facebook. We collect 13,723,654 posts from 14,532 pages and 11,454 public groups from August through October 2020, posts that together account for nearly all engagement of U.S. public political content on Facebook. We use perceptual hashing to identify duplicate images and computer vision to identify political figures. Twenty-three percent of sampled political images (N = 1,000) contained misinformation, as did 20% of sampled images (N = 1,000) containing political figures. We find enormous partisan asymmetry in misinformation posts, with right-leaning images 5–8 times more likely to be misleading, but little evidence that misleading images generate higher engagement.”
Journal of Communication
BLOCKCHAIN
Transparency by design: How next-gen blockchain could help to make greenwashing impossible
Reliability of information and data is the big goal for the future. Blockdata reports a company from Vienna, Austria, named Riddle&Code that tackles this problem. The team has previously worked for several industrial clients, including BMW and Wien Energy, a regional energy provider.
“The company is is now evolving from a project-driven company to a product company. In doing so, it’s taking the well-worn path taken by Amazon with AWS, in the sense that it is making its own infrastructure available commercially, so that others can benefit from the software and hardware stack they’ve developed in-house.”
Blockdata
How to scale blockchain into the future
Three challenges here: Decentralization, security, and scalability. Interesting article here which discusses potential steps towards achieving these goals.
Blockworks
Most innovative crypto, web3 & metaverse companies 2023
Fast Company has a list of companies showing the path to implementing new platforms towards a web3 future. On the list:
- ROBLOX – For raising the metaverse through its adolescence
- CHAINALYSIS – For being crypto’s cop on the block(chain)
- NIKE – For kicking it in digital expression
- ETHEREUM FOUNDATION – For executing a successful Merge
- LEDGER – For building the iPod of crypto wallets
- THE HUNDREDS – For exploding how artists and collectors benefit in Web3
- DRESSX – For outfitting our avatars
- LINKSDAO – For hitting the green with its next-gen golf club membership
- EMPERIA – For building high-street retail in the metaverse
- MILK ROAD – For laughing all the way through the crypto crash
Fast Company
eNaira CBDC in Nigeria: Low usage and technology problems
Only 0.5% of the population uses it; there are few transactions. The Bank of Nigeria is now seeking a new provider for the technology. It seems there are issues with the blockchain platform used (Hyperledger), for example, regarding scalability. So, the search is on for a different technology stack. Unrelated: Flutterwave, a fintech start-up in Nigeria, is embroiled in a scandal.
Bloomberg
SHORT LINKS
- Bank of Korea finds performance issues with CBDC blockchain tech (Ledger Insights)
- Another British bank is limiting crypto purchases (Coinmarketcap)
- In India, a public platform successfully introduced digital payments even for petite purchases (New York Times) ($)
- Amazon is closing eight cashier-less stores in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle (Bloomberg)
Thank you for reading. If you have questions or suggestions, please get in touch with us via info@trublo.eu.
Five Minute Blockchain – Nr. 49
17.02.2023
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes, 39 seconds
TRUST
Open AI aims to avoid biased ChatGPT output
“How should AI systems behave, and who should decide?” That is a relevant question. But it gets even more relevant if this is the headline on a blog post on the website of a currently leading AI company. OpenAI is determined to avoid the big (and costly) controversies that have riddled other large content platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, for years. Yet, with the incredible dynamics unleashed as AI chat software is added to the search, avoiding big problems is the big challenge.
Open AI
Mira Murati, CTO @OpenAI on Twitter
Researchers warn about the potential of AI use for “automated propaganda”
There is a horror scenario the newest AI content platforms could help to produce “automated to spread very convincing and effective disinformation”. Only last week, there were news reports in Canada that state-funded actors fueled the”Freedom Convoy” in 2022 to weaken the Trudeau government.
Now researchers from leading AI companies warn that without preparation, such events might become more regular:
“A cohort of researchers from OpenAI, Stanford, and Georgetown Universities are warning that large language models like the kind used by ChatGPT could be used as part of disinformation campaigns to help more easily spread propaganda.”
Vice
National Observer Canada
Google launches “privacy sandbox” on Android as an alternative to user tracking for ads
The question here is not so much whether it works but what happens if this approach by Google fails. The company would be in even bigger trouble than through the recent competition from Microsoft/Open AI.
From The Verge:
“Around this time last year, Google revealed it was working on a multiyear initiative to improve privacy and remodel ad tracking on Android phones, bringing the mobile platform in line with Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature for iOS. Following the release of an early developer preview last April, Google says the first beta for Privacy Sandbox on Android will start rolling out tomorrow (ed. = February 15 2023) to a limited number of Android 13 devices, allowing users and developers to test the new technology in the real world.” (The Verge)
From Ars Technica:
“Privacy Sandbox, on Chrome and Android, tracks users by interest groups rather than individually, which Google claims is a privacy improvement. Android will soon build an advertising profile of you, and the user interface will let you block “interests” you don’t want to see ads for.” (Ars Technica)
When your data sells better than milk and eggs
“When you use supermarket discount cards, you are sharing much more than what is in your cart.”
The MarkUp has a longer article about what happens with your data (based on practices of US supermarkets). But data generated via discount cards, which combine a person and grocery purchases, are generally sold for a profit, not just in the US.
The Markup
Even the stars of Fox Corporation did not believe in election fraud
Messages and testimony from top TV presenters and management of Fox News revealed as part of a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voter Systems shows: Although Fox News reported about the topic, many did not believe the claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump.
The New York Times ($)
CONTENT
CEO Susan Wojcicki steps down as CEO of YouTube
Is it relevant when a senior tech executive steps down from leading a large platform? Yes, in this case, it is notable. First, this is a reminder that for the past 25 years, intelligent people working for Google have built the dominant platforms in several areas. Google is the leader in search, and YouTube is the biggest video platform.
“During her tenure, YouTube became increasingly important to the business for Google, which bought the site in 2006, and Alphabet, the holding company that houses both of them: In 2022, YouTube generated $29.2 billion in ad sales — more than 10 percent of Alphabet’s total revenue.”
YouTube: A personal update from Susan
Vox.com
Launch of Bard is considered “un-googly.”
“Google employees aren’t holding back about the substandard launch of ChatGPT competitor Bard. According to CNBC, which viewed the posts, staffers have been posting memes on Google’s internal forum Memegen about how the launch of the generative AI tool was handled, directly calling out CEO Sundar Pichai for the misstep. Memes which got a lot of upvotes included a picture of Pichai and said “Dear Sundar, the Bard launch and the layoffs were rushed, botched, and myopic.”
Mashable
CNBC
Mastodon usage going down after the spike
The takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk in October 2022 led to an exodus of users; many selected Mastodon as an alternative. But Mastodon can not compete with Twitter, at least for now – there are not as many users, so the network effect of more prominent Twitter is hard to beat.
“Mastodon’s active monthly user count dropped to 1.4 million by late January. It now has nearly half a million fewer total registered users than at the start of the year. Many newcomers have complained that Mastodon is hard to use. Some have returned to the devilish bird they knew: Twitter.”
Wired ($)
BLOCKCHAIN
Abu Dhabi: $2 Billion Investment program for web3 and blockchain startups
“The capital’s tech ecosystem, called Hub71, has officially launched its brand new Hub71+ Digital Assets, which will be based at Hub71 in Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM). With a massive capital of $2 billion, Hub71+ Digital Assets aims to fund different startups in the Web3 field and offer them access to “an extensive range” of programs and initiatives, as well as corporate, government, and investment partners both in the country and globally”.
Cryptonews
Bitcoin NFTs: Ordinals and inscriptions
New software releases enable new models for content and Bitcoin. There is considerable buzz about this new development.
Inscriptions
Inscriptions are digital artifacts native to the Bitcoin blockchain. They are created by inscribing sats with content using ord, and can be viewed with the ordinals explorer. They do not require a separate token, a side chain, or changing Bitcoin.
ord 0.4.0
ord is an open-source binary written in Rust and developed on GitHub. It implements an ordinal wallet, which can create and transfer inscriptions, and a block explorer. There are public mainnet, signet, and testnetinstances.ord is experimental software and comes with no warranty or guarantees.
Casey Rodarmor’s Blog
Cryptoglobe
Tweets
Taurus gets $65 million to support digital asset management for banks
Credit Swiss and others have invested $65 million in series B venture funding in Taurus. The company is based in Switzerland; the focus is digital asset management, specifically for banks. Three years ago, Taurus already received $11 million. It is an example of a company using distributed ledger/blockchain technology elements to provide better solutions for specific areas.
“We see great potential in the digital asset space, that means tokenization of regulated securities,” a spokesperson said. “Furthermore we believe that by using the DLT [distributed ledger technology] new features can be brought to financial products which in the past were not possible or very expensive. When we speak to some of our clients, we see continued interest in the technology and its possibilities.”
The Block
Analysis: 24% of tokens launched in 2022 lost up to 90% of their value, indicating “pump-and-dump” activities
“Pump and dump schemes in traditional finance are quite simple: Holders of a tradable asset, such as stock in a company, will heavily hype and promote the asset to other investors, often using misleading statements, causing the price to rise rapidly as new investors buy. The holders will then sell their overvalued shares at a profit, causing the price to plummet, leaving the newer investors stuck with a low-value asset. Unfortunately, pump and dump schemes have also become common in the crypto world.”
Chainanalyis
SHORT LINKS
- Terraform Labs and founder Do Kwon sued in the US for selling unregistered securities and perpetrating a scheme that lost $40B+ in market value. Remarkable that this is merely a side note. (Bloomberg)
- Reuters Exclusive: Crypto gain Binance move $400 million from US partner to firm managed by CEO Zhao (Reuters)
- Chinese Tencent cuts 300 people’s strong metaverse unit and dropped VR hardware development (Reuters)
- Germany raises red flags over Palantir’s Big Data Dragnet (Wired)
Thank you for reading. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact us via info@trublo.eu.
Five Minute Blockchain – Nr. 48
10.02.2023
Estimated reading time:
QUOTE(S) OF THE WEEK
“We are grounded in the fact that Google dominates this [search] space. A new race is starting with a completely new platform technology.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella – Interview with “Wall Street Journal” (free)
“If you’ve ever written a blog post or product review or commented on an article online, there’s a good chance this information was consumed by ChatGPT.”
The Conversation
TRUST
How are Microsoft and Google approaching the inclusion of new AI Chatbots in search?
If you want a good overview of how Microsoft and Google approach the race to integrate AI in search: The linked video below compares the presentations from last week by both companies and has further analysis and excerpts from an interview with the Microsoft CEO.
ColdFusion TV: “Google embarrass themselves (AI war is heating up)
So far, Google, the market leader, seems to need more preparation and has not yet recovered from the surprise advance of Open AI and Microsoft’s swift implementation of ChatGPT.
In a promotional video published by Google, users spotted an inaccurate answer. This and a public event which failed to “dazzle” (Reuters) led to a slide of Google stock of 9 % this week; the company lost an equivalent of $100 billion in book value.
Coldfusion TV
Reuters
Hope for the next-gen internet, with new risks and dangers
How AI is integrated into search and other online services is a big question for the coming years. Precisely, what concepts will be followed?
The outcome could be positive: Better search results and better information. Many knowledge jobs could become more productive because the struggle of searching for information could go away. The internet could become a productivity machine, helping us find answers to complex problems.
But there are considerable risks, too. It starts at the foundation: Which material was used for training the new generation of AI platforms? Which pictures, words, insights, concepts, codes and numbers? Who owned those before? How are these info bits used now in AI?
From “The Conversation”:
“ChatGPT is underpinned by a large language model that requires massive amounts of data to function and improve. The more data the model is trained on, the better it gets at detecting patterns, anticipating what will come next and generating plausible text.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, fed the tool some 300 billion words systematically scraped from the internet: books, articles, websites and posts – including personal information obtained without consent.
If you’ve ever written a blog post or product review, or commented on an article online, there’s a good chance this information was consumed by ChatGPT.”
The Conversation
CONTENT
AI applied to Deep Fakes makes detection much harder
The New York Times has a story about artificial presenters used in videos, which are hard to distinguish from natural persons. According to The Times, an AI software named Synthesia has already been used for Chinese propaganda. The AI-supported software is meant to be used for sales videos. Expect the quality to improve in the coming years.
New York Times (free article)
Quality journalism can be good business
The New York Times published financial results for the 4th quarter of 2022 and some figures for the past year. In short: While traditional advertising is declining, The Times is one news organisation that no longer depends on this type of income. The number of subscribers has grown to 9.3 million, a more significant number than the print circulation even at the height of print publishing.
The New York Times (Free to read)
In addition to hardware sales, Apple’s service business is gigantic
Its service revenue of Apple has reached $78.1B for 2022. That is double the revenue of Netflix ($31.6B) and above the combined revenues of McDonalds and Nike ($72.3B).
FinBold
Macro raises $9.3m for intelligence on top of digital documents
Could standard documents like PDFs become more usable? A company called Macro just got funding for their ideas to do just that.
“Jacob Beckerman, a former investment logic engineer at Bridgewater Associates, grew frustrated using standard document apps like Acrobat and Microsoft Office to print out and mark up documents. He wondered why there wasn’t a way to read and write on a PC that felt as fluid as paper, which led him to experiment with PDF processing software.
By 2020, those experiments had grown into a fully fledged, custom PDF editor that Beckerman helped to build from scratch. Using AI, the editor — called Macro — pulls out key terms, sections and equations to make documents interactive and hyperlinked.”
Link
BLOCKCHAIN
Bank of England published papers on the digital pound
The Bank of England has published two papers discussing a digital pound’s benefits and potential set-up. The current approach favours a central database and does not use smart contracts or blockchain.
In a separate technical paper, blockchain technologies were described that “might have advantages in guaranteeing consistency and resilience”, combined with “privacy, scalability and security challenges. Centrally governed, distributed database technologies might achieve the ledger requirements without limitations. Therefore, these technologies might be appropriate for the core ledger design.”
Coindesk
The Bank of England: Consultation for Digital Pound
The Bank of England: The digital pound. Technology Working Paper
Blockchain Regulation Round-up
- Blockchain privacy at risk in the EU
- Argentina considers “proof of solvency” as a requirement (Bitcoin.com)
- Central Bank of Brazil tests security and transaction privacy levels of Digital Real (Bitcoin.com)
- Coinbase CEO hearing rumours that staking could be banned in the US (Coinmarketcap)
- What public companies are saying about crypto and blockchain on earnings calls (Blockdata)
SHORT LINKS
Thank you for reading. If you have questions or suggestions, please get in touch with us via info@trublo.eu.
Photo by Ales Nesetril via Unsplash
Five Minute Blockchain – No. 47
03.02.2023
Estimated reading time: 5 min 28 sec
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet:
“It always amazes me how much of Fintech (let alone defi) boils down to giving Americans things that the rest of the world took for granted in the 1980s but the US banking system can’t handle.
Crypto influencer: “imagine if you could do money transfers quickly and cheaply!!!” Most of the rest of the world: “we don’t have to imagine.”
Benedict Evans (Twitter)
TRUST
AI detection model built for educators
There is already a service allowing teachers to check whether texts have been written by AI software. It’s called GPTZeroX. A demo can be seen on Twitter.
The software allows for checks on texts where AI and human writing are mixed. Portions which AI most likely created are then marked.
Edward Tian/Twitter
Advice on how to report about AI for journalists
Two scientists have prepared an overview where journalists (and everyone else) should be careful with claims and speculation about what the new generation of generative AI might evolve to.
“We noticed that many articles tend to mislead in similar ways, so we analyzed over 50 articles about AI from major publications, from which we compiled 18 recurring pitfalls. We hope that being familiar with these will help you detect hype whenever you see it. We also hope this compilation of pitfalls will help journalists avoid them.”
AI Snakeoil
Google rushes to counter ChatGPT
Google is preparing its own generative AI services. The company had an all-hands meeting where employees were concerned about the sudden popularity of OpenAI, which Microsoft backs. The head of AI at Google argued that there is currently a “reputational risk” when providing false information.
One tool currently being tested is a chatbot called “Apprentice Bard”, based on LaMBA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). Google has developed this model.
CNBC
In addition, Google invested $300 million in an AI start-up called Antrophic. The company has developed a chatbot called “Claude”.
FT
A broken promise in the Philippines
“Lyka, a social media app operating in the Philippines, amassed users by awarding them tokens they could spend in real life. When the Philippine central bank suspended the app, users and merchants were left stranded”.
Rest of World has an interview with the company’s CEO, who plans to restart the app. The article provides a glimpse into non-EU and non-US markets and how trust, content & payment elements are handled elsewhere. The patterns are similar, but the stories are always different.
Rest of World
New York Times article: “My Watch thinks I’m dead”
Apple watches have a feature to automatically alarm rescuers in case of an accident. What could go wrong? Well, the Apple watches seem not to be calibrated well enough. The current generation can not distinguish between a “bump” from an accident or a jump while skiing down a slope. As a result, rescue services are getting several emergency calls and finding the watch owners without any issues.
New York Times ($$)
Netflix has started rolling out new rules to prevent password sharing outside of the household
Netflix wants to reduce the number of people watching through password sharing. In the future, devices will have to log in to a local Wifi associated with an account at least once per month. Rules are not final but already draw considerable criticism – e.g. from families with two locations, e.g. after a divorce.
TechCrunch
CONTENT
Kids are hooked to YouTube everywhere
If you have kids, you will be familiar with a constant debate about screen time on mobile phones, iPad or TVs. Studies now show that kids’ channels are the highest earners for YouTube.
“Data suggest that many children are watching a lot more than that, however: up to six hours per day for American children aged 8-12, and more for teenagers. The most popular global YouTube sites, meanwhile, like CoComelon and others that feature nursery rhymes, songs, animals, and babies, are aimed at very young children.”
The data:
“Content for children tops the YouTube earnings charts in North America, most of South America, Russia, Sweden, Germany, Portugal, and much of Central and Eastern Europe, Jordan, Israel, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Mongolia, Australia, Turkey, and Kazakhstan. Only in much of Africa do kids’ shows not figure as the most lucrative channels on YouTube. Globally, children’s channels are more popular than gaming channels or those devoted to How-To videos, general entertainment, comedy, or animals, some of the other most popular types of content.”
A big question is: What amount of screen time is healthy for kids 8-12 and younger? Data from the US suggests that kids watch up to six hours daily.
Quartz
Damus, a fast-growing Twitter alternative, has been pulled from Apple App Store in China after two days
The app uses a distributed network protocol called Nostr. Ironically this platform has been financially backed by Jac Dorsey, formerly CEO of Twitter.
Complaints about illegal content on Damus led to a ban on the app store just two days after approval by Apple.
TechCrunch
Apple has 935 million subscriptions
Apple missed the revenue target in the most recent earnings report for Q4 2022. The company attributed the decline to supply chain problems and manufacturing. One area of the business is still growing strong: Subscriptions.
iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Fitness, Pay, etc., generated more than 20 Billion US-Dollars last quarter. Groth of the App Store subscriptions was double-digit, Apple said.
TechCrunch
BLOCKCHAIN
Enterprise blockchain use cases gaining adoption
This links to an excellent white paper/analysis of the gradual evolution of blockchain technology towards wider adoption among governments and enterprises. Notably, in almost all use cases without digital currencies.
“Governments, business entities, and organizations have been pursuing blockchain technology to meet their unique needs, which seldom involve digital currencies. Blockchain technology is secure, traceable, immutable, and transparent across distributed networks. These traits make it a good fit for use cases that are hard to underpin using traditional infrastructure.”
Blockdata
After the loss of reputation and trust, what’s next for crypto?
A good quote to separate two areas of blockchain application:
“One key lesson of 2022 is that “money crypto” and “tech crypto” need to be treated differently. Money crypto in this context includes crypto-financial services such as custody, exchanges, market making, investing and lending. And tech crypto includes open-source, public permissionless innovation such as blockchains, decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFT), Web3 gaming, wallets, tools and infrastructure. Financial stability and consumer protection failures in crypto did not arise from the failure of technology, but the failure of oversight and controls.”
Coindesk
Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway suggests banning crypto
Charlie Munger has never been a fan of cryptocurrencies. This week he urged the US government to ban crypto, similar to China.
He said:
“A cryptocurrency is not a currency, not a commodity, and not a security. Instead, it’s a gambling contract with a nearly 100% edge for the house”
Bitcoin.com
eBay is hiring NFT experts for KnownOrigin marketplace
“Most of the jobs are based in Manchester, United Kingdom, but some mention hybrid working environments.”
Blockworks
SHORT LINKS
Thank you for reading. If you have questions or suggestions, please get in touch with us via info@trublo.eu.
