Episode 76 - Bitcoin and Google Invade Politics
Politicians and bureaucrats in the US are talking about Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency after Facebook announces that they’ll get in the game - including a Trump tweet. Some people are sending Bitcoin through the radio waves to prepare for an extreme scenario. Googlers clearly want to elect a democrat in 2020 - and this is affecting their product decisions. Researchers say an AI is learning science - but Max and Aaron break down what this really means.
Plus - find out about Max’s new job!
Links
Trump Via Twitter: I am not a fan of Bitcoin Cyrpto, Libra
Business Insider: Trump tweets Bitcoin, Libra
WSJ: Bitcoin BackersWelcome Trump Attack
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-bitcoin-facebook-libra-crypto-regulation-2019-7
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-backers-welcome-trump-attack-at-least-he-notices-us-11562923805
Treasury Secretary Mnuchin says “just don’t do anything illegal”
Kevin McCarthy: I like bitcoin (Facebook Libra not so much)
Wired: The Cypherpunks tapping Bitcoin via Ham Radio
War Bonds are largely a WW1 product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_bond
Crypto story from the past (Neil Stephenson): The Great Simoleon Caper
Project Veritas: Google Working to Elect a Democrat
New York Times: Trumps Social Media Summit
Fast Company found a bunch of Milquetoast Conservatives to take Google’s Side. Why do I characterize them in this way? The quote on Google is “They aren’t actually as bad as you think they are”.
Tensorflow’s Word2Vec (also from Google)
Joe Huffman: The Singularity is Near
Original Paper in Nature Magazine: Unsupervised word embeddings capture latent knowledge
Related Episodes
Episode 75 with Jeff Tucker on the Uncertain Definition of Money
Episode 72 covering Facebook’s Proposed Currency
Episode 59 on Internet and Bitcoin in the Third World
Episode 4 on Language Models
