It's not too surprising that the release of images of Google's prototype robocar have gotten comments like this:
Revolutionary Tech in a Remarkably Lame Package from Wired
A Joy Ride in Google's Clown Car says Re/Code
In what is the biggest announcement since Google first revealed their car project, it has announced that they are building their own car, a small low-speed urban vehicle for two with no steering wheel, throttle or brakes. It will act as a true robocar, delivering itself and taking people where they want to go with a simple interface. The car is currently limited to 25mph, and has special pedestrian protection features to make it even safer. (I should note that as a consultant to that team, I helped push the project in this direction.)
News from Google's project is rare, but today on the Google blog they described new achievements in urban driving and reported a number of 700,000 miles. The car has been undergoing extensive testing in urban situations, and Google let an Atlantic reporter get a demo of the urban driving which is worth a read.
Many states and jurisdictions are rushing to write laws and regulations governing the testing and deployment of robocars. California is working on its new regulations right now. The first focus is on testing, which makes sense.
Unfortunately the California proposed regulations and many similar regulations contain a serious flaw:
I wrote earlier on how we might make it easier to find a lost jet and this included the proposal that the pingers in the black boxes follow a schedule of slowing down their pings to make their batteries last much longer.
I read a lot of feeds, and there are now scores of stories about robocars every week. Almost every day a new publication gives a summary of things. Here, I want to focus on things that are truly new, rather than being comprehensive.
A recent Surpreme court case which struck down limits on the total amount donors could provide to a large group of candidates has fired up the debate on what to do about the grand problem, particularly in the USA, of the corrupting influence of money on politics. I have written about this before in my New Democracy Topic, including proposals for anonymous donations, official political spam and many others.
Look at the skyline of any growing city, and what do you see, but a sea of construction cranes. The theory is that each crane will go away and be replaced by an architectually interesting or pleasing building, but the cycle continues and there are always cranes.
Why are there lines at airport security? I mean, we know why the lines form, when passenger load exceeds the capacity, with the bottleneck usually being the X-ray machines. The question is why this imbalance is allowed to happen?
The variable wait at airport security levies a high cost, because passengers must assume it will be long, just in case it is. That means every passenger gets there 15 or more minutes earlier than they would need to, even if there is no wait. Web sites listing wait times can help, but they can change quickly.
We've all learned a lot about what can and can't be done from the tragic story of MH 370, as well as the Air France flight lost over the Atlantic. Of course, nobody expected the real transponders to be disconnected or fail, and so it may be silly to speculate about how to avoid this situation when there already is supposed to be a system that stops aircraft from getting lost. Even so, here are some things to consider:
Bitcoin is hot-hot-hot, but today I want to talk about how it ends. Earlier, I predicted a variety of possible fates for Bitcoin ranging from taking over the entire M1 money supply to complete collapse, but the most probable one, in my view, is that Bitcoin is eventually supplanted by one or more successor digital currencies which win in the marketplace. I think that successor will also itself be supplanted, and that this might continue for some time. I want to talk about not just why that might happen, but also how it may take place.
Nobody thinks Bitcoin is perfect, and no digital currency (DigiC) is likely to satisfy everybody. Some of the flaws are seen as flaws by most people, but many of its facets are seen as features by some, and flaws by others. The anonymity of addresses, the public nature of the transactions, the irrevocable transactions, the fixed supply, the mining system, the resistance to control by governments -- there are parties that love these and hate these.
Bitcoin's most remarkable achievement, so far, is the demonstration that a digital currency with no intrinsic value or backer/market maker can work and get a serious valuation. Bitcoin argues -- and for now demonstrates -- that you can have a money that people will accept only because they know they can get others to accept it with no reliance on a government's credit or the useful physical properties of a metal. The price of a bitcoin today is pretty clearly the result of speculative bubble investment, but that it sustains a price at all is a revelation.
Bitcoins have their value because they are scarce. That scarcity is written into the code -- in the regulated speed of mining, and in the fixed limit on coins. There will only be so many bitcoins, and this gives you confidence in their value, unlike say, Zimbabwe 100 trillion dollar notes. This fixed limit is often criticised because it will be strongly deflationary over time, and some more traditional economic theory feels there are serious problems with a deflationary currency. People resist spending it because holding it is better than spending it, among other things.
While bitcoins have this scarcity, digital currencies as a group do not. You can always create another digital currency. And many people have. While Bitcoin is the largest, there are many "altcoins," a few of which (such as Ripple, Litecoin and even the satirical currency Dogecoin) have serious total market capitalizations of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars(1). Some of these altcoins are simply Bitcoin or minor modifications of the Bitcoin protocol with a different blockchain or group of participants, others have more serious differences, such as alternate forms of mining. Ripple is considerably different. New Altcoins will emerge from time to time, presumably forever.
What makes one digital coin better than another? Obviously a crucial element is who will accept the coin in exchange for goods, services or other types of currency. The leading coin (Bitcoin) is accepted at more stores which gives it a competitive advantage.
If one is using digital currency simply as a medium -- changing dollars to bitcoins to immediately buy something with bitcoins at a store, then it doesn't matter a great deal which DigiC you use, or what its price is, as long as it is not extremely volatile. (You may be interested in other attributes, like speed of transaction and revocation, along with security, ease of use and other factors.) If you wish to hold the DigC you care about appreciation, inflation and deflation, as well as the risk of collapse. These factors are affected as well by the "cost" of the DigiC.
I will advance that every currency has a cost which affects its value. For fiat currency like dollars, all new dollars go to the government, and every newly printed dollar devalues all the other dollars, and overprinting creates clear inflation.
One sign of how interest is building is the large reaction to some recent concept prototypes for robocars, two of which were shown in physical form at the Geneva auto show.
Tuesday, the California DMV held a workshop on how they will write regulations for the operation of robocars in California. They already have done meetings on testing, but the real meat of things will be in the operation. It was in Sacramento, so I decided to just watch the video feed. (Sadly, remote participants got almost no opportunity to provide feedback to the workshop, so it looks like it's 5 hours of driving if you want to really be heard, at least in this context.)
The event was led by Brian Soublet, assistant chief counsel, and next to him was Bernard Soriano, the deputy director. I think Mr. Soublet did a very good job of understanding many of the issues and leading the discussion. I am also impressed at the efforts Mr. Soriano has made to engage the online community to participate. Because Sacramento is a trek for most interested parties, it means the room will be dominated by those paid to go, and online engagement is a good way to broaden the input received.
As I wrote in my article on advice to governments I believe the best course is to have a light hand today while the technology is still in flux. While it isn't easy to write regulations, it's harder to undo them. There are many problems to be solved, but we really should see first whether the engineers who are working day-in and day-out to solve them can do that job before asking policymakers to force a solution. It's not the role of the government to forbid theoretical risks in advance, but rather to correct demonstrated harms and demonstrated unacceptable risks once it's clear they can't be solved on the ground.
With that in mind, here's some commentary on matters that came up during the session.
Well, the law already requires that vehicles pull over when told to by police, as well as pull to the right when any emergency vehicle is passing. With no further action, all car developers will work out ways to notice this -- microphones which know the sound of the sirens, cameras which can see the flashing lights.
Developers might ask for a way to make this problem easier. Perhaps a special sound the police car could make (by holding a smartphone up to their PA microphone for example.) Perhaps the police just reading the licence plate to dispatch and dispatch using an interface provided by the car vendor. Perhaps a radio protocol that can be loaded into an officer's phone. Or something else -- this is not yet the time to solve it.
It should be noted that this should be an extremely unlikely event. The officer is not going to pull over the car to have a chat. Rather, they would only want the car to stop because it is driving in an unsafe manner and putting people at risk. This is not impossible, but teams will work so hard on testing their cars that the probability that a police officer would be the first to discover a bug which makes the car drive illegally is very, very low. In fact, not to diminish the police or represent the developers as perfect, but the odds are much greater that the officer is in error. Still, the ability should be there.
Yesterday, I was interviewed for the public radio program Marketplace and as is normal, 30 minutes come down to 30 seconds. So I wanted to add some commentary to that story.
The latest Bitcoin bombshell -- distracting us even from the Mt.Gox failure -- was the Newsweek cover story -- their first printed issue since 2012 -- declaring they had found the mythical creator of Bitcoin, known under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto, and he was a guy from near L.A. in his 60s whose real birth name was actually Satoshi Nakamoto.
Now known as Dorian S. Nakamoto, I'll refer to him as DSN to distinguish him from BCSN -- the Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, though of course the question is whether DSN == BCSN. DSN denies he is BCSN and says his quotes suggesting that were answers to other questions, at least in his mind.
The second surprise was a web posting from BCSN, the first in years, simply saying he is not DSN. This posting is confusing, because a little thought shows it reveals no information on that subject. If DSN is BCSN, then of course both are denying it. More to the point, BCSN is clearly somebody well versed in game theory and trust calculus, and knows very well that the denial does not add reliable information on this.
BCSN's post does tell us one big thing though -- that BCSN is still alive, around, and even willing to comment if the issue is as big as this one. Many speculated that his silence meant he was gone, and also that he had lost his estimated million bitcoins.
The Bitcoin community was quite skeptical of the Newsweek claim. One very justified reason for this skepticism is that aside from the two key disputed quotes, the article's arguments that it has found BCSN read like nonsense to the average nerd.
DSN might be BCSN, the article reasons, because he is a nerdy engineer with good technical skills, a background working at various tech companies and government projects, is aloof from his family and neighbours, and enjoys a technical hobby such as collecting model trains, even machining his own parts. "Smart, intelligent, mathematics, engineering, computers. You name it, he can do it," says DSN's brother. He's a little bit libertarian, looks scruffy and is reportedly a bit of an asshole.
Aha, links Leah McGrath Goodman of Newsweek -- this "suggested I was on the right track."
What she doesn't realize perhaps is that I literally know hundreds people who fit that description. It's a profile that is actually more likely to be true than not among wide swaths of the nerd community.
Goodman's logic reads to us like somebody saying, "I was on the track of the Zodiac killer, whom we know to be from San Francisco. I identified a suspect named John Zodiac who is a quiet loner, and is known to like the San Francisco Giants and burritos in the Mission district. I'm on the right track!"
There is only one thing in the Newsweek article that was worthy of attention. With police he summoned ready to usher Goodman away from his house, he tells her
"I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it. It's been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection."
In the context of Bitcoin, that's indeed proof enough. The police officers present have confirmed he did say something like this. DSN insists he felt he was being asked about his past classified work on government projects. He says he had not even heard about Bitcoin until this matter came up.
Various online forces have come up with other arguments against the match. DSN's known writings seem fairly different from the writings of BCSN, though Goodman finds a few commonalities, including hints that BCSN is perhaps older (like DSN.)
But most of all, BCSN is known as a scrupulous protector of his or her or their own identity. BCSN made meticulous use of online identity hiding techniques to avoid being tracked, and has never spent any of the huge cache of bitcoins mined in the early days, possibly to avoid the risk of detection. This is so completely at odds with the idea of doing it all under his real name that after a perfunctory search in the early days, most people who fancied themselves Satoshi-finding detectives rarely bothered to look at people whose real name was Satoshi Nakamoto. Common wisdom, in fact, was that he/she probably wasn't even Japanese. Certainly not somebody with no history in the cryptography or digital money communities.
While currently the tide seems to be to discredit the Newsweek story, a second question has been raised -- is it good or bad if BCSN is unmasked, and if it is this guy?
I often see the suggestion that as Robocars get better, eventually humans will be forbidden from driving, or strongly discouraged through taxes or high insurance charges. Many people think that might happen fairly soon.
It's easy to see why, as human drivers kill 1.2 million people around the world every year, and injure many millions more. If we get a technology that does much better, would we not want to forbid the crazy risk of driving? It is one of the most dangerous things we commonly do, perhaps only second to smoking.
Yesterday, I wrote about stolen bitcoins and the issues around a database of stolen coins. The issue is very complex, so today I will add some follow-up issues.
Bitcoin has seen a lot of chaos in the last few months, including being banned in several countries, the fall of the Silk Road, and biggest of all, the collapse of Mt. Gox, which was for much of Bitcoin's early history, the largest (and only major) exchange between regular currencies and bitcoins. Most early "investors" in bitcoin bought there, and if they didn't move their coins out, they now greatly regret it.
I've been quite impressed by the ability of the bitcoin system to withstand these problems. Each has caused major "sell" days but it has bounced back each time. This is impressive because nothing underlies bitcoins other than the expectation that you will be able to use them into the future and that others will take them.
It is claimed (though doubted by some) that most of Mt.Gox's bitcoins -- 750,000 of them or over $400M -- were stolen in some way, either through thieves exploiting a bug or some other means. If true, this is one of the largest heists in history. There are several other stories of theft out there as well. Because bitcoin transactions can't be reversed, and there is no central organization to complain to, theft is a real issue for bitcoin. If you leave your bitcoin keys on your networked devices, and people get in, they can transfer all your coins away, and there is no recourse.
Or is there?
If you sell something and are paid in stolen money, there is bad news for you, the recipient of the money. If this is discovered, the original owner gets the money back. You are out of luck for having received stolen property. You might even be suspected of being involved, but even if you are entirely innocent, you still lose.
All bitcoin transactions are public, but the identities of the parties are obscured. If your bitcoins are stolen, you can stand up and declare they were stolen. More than that, unless the thief wiped all your backups, you can 99.9% prove that you were, at least in the past, the owner of the allegedly stolen coins. Should society accept bitcoins as money or property, you would be able to file a police report on the theft, and identify the exact coin fragments stolen, and prove they were yours, once. We would even know "where" they are today, or see every time they are spent and know who they went to, or rather, know the random number address that owns them now in the bitcoin system. You still own them, under the law, but in the system they are at some other address.
That random address is not inherently linked to this un-owner, but as the coins are spent and re-spent, they will probably find their way to a non-anonymous party, like a retailer, from whom you could claim them back. Retailers, exchanges and other legitimate parties would not want this, they don't want to take stolen coins and lose their money. (Clever recipients generate a new address for every transaction, but others use publicly known addresses.)
It's possible, not even that difficult, to create a database of "tainted" coins. If such a database existed, people accepting coins could check if the source transaction coins are in that database. If there, they might reject the coins or even report the sender. I say "reject" because you normally don't know what coins you are getting until the transaction is published, and if the other party publishes it, the coins are now yours. You can refuse to do your end of the transaction (ie. not hand over the purchased goods) or even publish a transaction "refunding" the coins back to the sender. It's also possible to imagine that the miners could refuse to enter a transaction involving tainted coins into the blockchain. (For one thing, if the coins are stolen, they won't get their transaction fees.) However, as long as some miner comes along willing to enter it, it will be recorded, though other miners could refuse to accept that block as legit.
In my recent travels, I have often been asked what various government entities can and should do related to the regulation of robocars. Some of them want to consider how to protect public safety. Most of them, however, want to know what they can do to prepare their region for the arrival of these cars, and ideally to become one of the leading centres in the development of the vehicles. The car industry is about to be disrupted, and most of the old players may not make it through to the new world.