Technology

What makes a cryptocoin (or any currency) valuable?

Why is a Bitcoin valuable? While almost all concede that shared faith -- or what I would term "Brand" -- is a major component of all currencies, there has been much debate over whether there are more intrinsic values that can keep the currency or token valuable, or get multiplied by brand to even higher value.

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Google Meet and others up the video meeting game, what's next?

New in Meet

Recently, Google showed off some new features for Google Meet. The key new feature, with the odd name of "companion mode" addresses a major problem of meetings which have a central meeting room with multiple people, and a variety of people outside "calling in."

AI boosts videoconferencing, and Waymo puts passengers in and takes drivers out

Two new Forbes site articles this week.

AI boosts videoconferencing

NVIDIA showed off their new platform of AI tools to improve video conferencing, including vast decreases in bandwidth, ability to move a person's head so they look at you and much more.

Read AI Applied To Video Conferencing Kicks It Up Several Notches

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Bitcoin reward cut in half again, with much less effect than one should expect

Chart of the last year of Bitcoin hashrate

On May 11, a major event took place in the bitcoin world, yet it had no negative effect on the price of the coin and much less effect on mining than it would seem it should. This event is known as the "halving," and it means the reward for mining bitcoins was suddenly cut in half.

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Guide to having a good ZOOM video meeting

A Zoom 9 person meeting with smiling attractive people professionally lit and not wearing headsets.

People are doing huge amounts of videoconferencing during the Covid crisis. The tools keep improving, but there's a great deal that individual participants can do to make the meetings better. They take some effort but it's worth it.

In car navigation needs to learn to shut up

I think driving navigation is a great thing, but the UI is all wrong. It needs to work to understand me, to see the routes I have driven with it 100 times, and only tell me when there is something unusual I need to know, not where to turn to get to my house (or telling me "You have arrived at your destination" at my driveway.) The ideal navigation system, on a commute, won't even say a word to me unless there is traffic that means I should not take my standard route. How do we make it smarter?

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Reflections on 30 years of the dot-com

Tomorrow, June 8, marks the 30th anniversary of my launch of ClariNet.com. In the 1980s, there was a policy forbidding commercial use of the internet backbone, but I wanted to do a business there and found a loophole and got the managers of NSFNet to agree, making ClariNet the first company created to use the internet as a platform, the common meaning of a "dot-com."

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HODL is bad for Bitcoin

You've probably heard the catchword in the bitcoin/crytpocurrency world of "HODL!" Based on somebody's typo, it is an encouragement to hold on to your bitcoins rather than sell them as the price ramps up to crazy levels. If you're a true believer, you will HODL. Don't cave in to the temptation and pressure to sell (SLEL?) but be sure to HODL. (Previously I wrote about the issues which occur should Bitcoin's price actually stabilize.

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What happens if/when Bitcoin stabilizes in price

I've been doing some analysis of the "HODL" movement (which attempts to use social pressure to convince people to hold on to Bitcoin and other holdings, rather than taking the normal profit-taking steps after such a large appreciation.) I believe that HODL goes against what a cryptocurrency is supposed to be about, since to be valuable it has to be useful, and to be useful, people need to be using it, not holding it. I will explore this in another article next week.

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