#Researchers discover marijuana s anxiety relief effects Researchers at Vanderbilt University have found cannabinoid receptors, through
in a key emotional hub in the brain involved in regulating anxiety and the flight-or-fight response.
This is the first time cannabinoid receptors have been identified in the central nucleus of the amygdala in a mouse model,
The discovery may help explain why marijuana users say they take the drug mainly to reduce anxiety,
said Sachin Patel, M d.,Ph d.,the paper senior author and professor of Psychiatry and of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics.
a graduate student in Patel lab, the researchers also showed for the first time how nerve cells in this part of the brain make
The study ould be highly important for understanding how cannabis exerts its behavioral effects, Patel said.
he natural endocannabinoid system regulates anxiety and the response to stress by dampening excitatory signals that involve the neurotransmitter glutamate. hronic stress or acute,
severe emotional trauma can cause a reduction in both the production of endocannabinoids and the responsiveness of the receptors.
Without their ufferingeffect, anxiety goes up. hile marijuana xogenouscannabinoids also can reduce anxiety, chronic use of the drug down-regulates the receptors, paradoxically increasing anxiety.
This can trigger vicious cycleof increasing marijuana use that in some cases leads to addiction.
In the current study, the researchers used high-affinity antibodies to abelthe cannabinoid receptors so they could be seen using various microscopy techniques
including electron microscopy, which allowed very detailed visualization at individual synapses, or gaps between nerve cells. e know where the receptors are,
Patel said. ow can we see how that system is affected by stress and chronic (marijuana) use?
#Millennials see financial institutions as irrelevant Scratch polled 10,000 millennials to find out which industry was most prime for disruption.
The results from the poll found that banks make up four of their top 10 most hated brands,
but millennials increasingly viewed these financial institutions as irrelevant. The three-year study From scratch, an in-house unit of Viacom that consults with brands,
found that a third of millennials believed theyl be able to live a bank-free existence in the future.
and Bitcoin, these millennials, defined as those born between 1981 and 2000, overwhelmingly believed that the way they access money
and pay for things will be completely different in five years. s consumers, millennials have been slow to accumulate wealth.
They have huge debt. Theye facing unprecedented underemployment. Theye been unaddressed relatively as a generation by banks.
All of a sudden, you see purchasing power by millennials growing to over $1. 3 trillion, Scratch executive vice president Ross Martin told Fast Company.
As a result, this digital-savvy cohort is looking to the tech sector to provide banking solutions.
Half of respondents said they were counting on startups to overhaul how banks work and three-quarters said they would be excited more in financial services provided by Google, Amazon, Apple, Paypal,
or Square than from their own banks. ee hearing so loud and clearly from our biggest audience that there a whole industry that not meeting their needs,
Martin said. e see such a big opportunity for banks here. i
#Spectrom: A device that allows desktop 3d printers to print in color for less than $100 Full color printing is generally a privilege limited to professional and high-end consumer 3d printers,
so the more casual user is stuck likely printing in one or two colors. But Cédric Kovacs-Johnson and Charles Haider, both chemical engineering undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, say they have come up with a solution:
a sub-$100 device that upgrades desktop 3d printers to print in a full rainbow of colors.
They call it Spectrom. The system is fused compatible with deposition modeling 3d printers that use a standard-size spool of filament.
FDM printers melt string-like plastic bit by bit and lay it down in layers to create an object.
Spectrom adds dye to the plastic as it melts, allowing printers to shift between colors. hat we find really innovative in our approach is we went back to the roots of paper printing
and we said, ow did they accomplish a range of colors??Kovacs-Johnson said. e can print everything from dark blue to pink to red and everything in between.
Desktop 3d printer makers have gotten generally around the one color problem by adding more than one print head. botobjects,
a desktop printer maker that has been teasing the community for years with its full-color printing abilities,
has revealed that its machine works by combining different pre-colored filaments. Spectrom doesn require a specialized printer to work.
The idea is that you install it on your existing printer and youe ready to go.
Your computer outputs code that tells the device when to switch between colors and your printer operates
as if it was printing with a regular filament spool. The duo didn arrive at the method immediately.
During a year and a half of development, they tried combining different colors of filament and different dyeing methods.
They experimented with both ABS and PLA plastic. t was just a whole ton of trials before we looked at something
and said, h! That works exactly how we thought? Kovacs-Johnson said. Their invention won them two first place prizes at UW-Madison Innovation Days competition last month.
Haider and Kovacs-Johnson now have a patent pending for Spectrom and are looking at bringing more people onto the team.
and as a result are focused on making sure it is compatible with any printer. e want to get it out to as many people as possible,
#3d printing may finally give artificial organs a blood supply Vascularized tissue constructed by printing cell-laden inks in a layered zigzag pattern.
Using a custom-built four-head 3-D printer and a isappearingink, materials scientist Jennifer Lewisand her team created a patch of tissue containing skin cells and biological structural material interwoven with blood-vessel-like structures.
Reported by the team in Advanced Materials, the tissue is made the first through 3-D printing to include potentially functional blood vessels embedded among multiple
all regenerative projects have run up against the same wall when trying to build thicker and more complex tissues:
The tissue is built by the 3-D printer in layers. A gelatin-based ink acts as extracellular matrixhe structural mix of proteins and other biological molecules that surrounds cells in the body.
Two other inks contained the gelatin material and either mouse or human skin cells. All these inks are viscous enough to maintain their structure after being laid down by the printer.
A third ink with counterintuitive behavior helped the team create the hollow tubes. This ink has a Jell-o-like consistency at room temperature
but when cooled it liquefies. The team printed tracks of this ink amongst the others.
and we think it going to be essential toward organ printing or regeneration, says Lewis, who is member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard university.
which is much larger than the tiny capillaries that exchange nutrients and waste throughout the body.
The hope is that the 3-D printing method will set the overall architecture of blood vessels within artificial tissue
then we want to harness biology to do the rest of the work, says Lewis. Via Technology Revie
#Tesla s plans for world s largest battery factory will be a game changer Tesla motors, the electric car maker, hasn blazed just its own trail
when it comes to designing and building a hot electric car. It also made breakthroughs in many aspects of the automotive business (the sales channel, the servicing,
the over-the-air-software updates) and now it doing the same thing for the core part of the electric car:
the battery. This week Tesla revealed more details about its plans to build a massive the largest of its kind in the world battery factory in the U s. that will produce enough lithium-ion batteries by 2020 to outfit 500,000 electric cars.
While Tesla only released a few details of the plan, the company said that by 2020 the battery cell output of the factory would be 35 gigawatt hours per year,
and battery pack output would be 50 gigawatt hours per year. Let put these production numbers in perspective.
As Tesla has said itself its cars are constrained by global battery production, and it would need to use all of the batteries produced for electric cars in 2013
(and then some) to make those 500,000 per year by 2020. According to Navigant Research analyst Sam Jaffe, Tesla already used half of all the batteries made for electric cars in the world in 2013 for its Model S car (22,477 cars sold.
In terms of global lithium ion and advanced battery production beyond just for electric cars Tesla so-called igafactoryis still massive;
it jaw-dropping actually. According to Navigant figures, battery factories in the world produced close to 27 gigawatt hours of advanced batteries (the vast majority of these,
over 90 percent, are lithium-ion batteries) in 2012. The bulk of those batteries 23 gigawatt hours were for consumer electronics,
like our laptops and cell phones. Given Tesla production goals outline above, the planned factory would more than double the current entire world lithium ion battery production.
Of course, global lithium ion battery production would also ramp up outside of Tesla as well as more gadgets and cell phones are sold
and more devices get connected. And now if you look beyond just batteries, Tesla factory could be the largest factory of any kind,
anywhere in the world in terms of inputs in and outputs out, said Jaffe, though he notes that such a thing is pretty hard to measure.
The country that made the most advanced batteries in 2012 was produced China, which about 13 gigawatt hours of batteries.
Chinese batteries traditionally have been the cheapest in the world, but theye also been of lower quality compared to those made in Japan, Korea and the U s. However, battery expert and founder and CEO of battery startup GELI,
Ryan Wartena, told me that he seen the quality of Chinese batteries go up substantially over the past year.
Chinese battery giants also have been trying to boost production as well, and Chinese lithium battery manufacturer Thunder Sky Group had been looking to build a battery factory in Russia working with Russian state run agency RUSNANO this would have been the largest lithium ion battery factory in the world (I not sure of the current
status of this factory). The second largest producer of batteries in the world in 2012 was Japan, with about 7 gigawatt hours.
South korea follows with about 2 gigawatt hours. The U s. had about 1. 2 gigawatt hours
and that following the attempts of Obama stimulus package to boost battery production in the U s. through companies like A123 Systems and LG Chem.
So as you can see, Tesla plans to generate 35 and 50 gigawatt hours per year in cells and packs, just in the U s,
. all of a sudden tilts the world lithium ion battery production in favor of the U s.,which has never been much of a battery manufacturing powerhouse.
No doubt, all of the states in the running including Arizona, Nevada, Texas and New mexico will be vying for those 6, 500 jobs.
Tesla factory will also be a competitive threat to Chinese battery production dominance and will help lower the overall price of lithium ion batteries globally. ust the threat of (Tesla CEO) Elon musk building this huge factory will lower prices,
says Wartena, as the companies will be willing to lower their margins to compete. Like Tesla has done with many of its strategies
it taking a novel approach to working with partners to build the battery factory. Tesla is selling debt (convertible senior notes) to the tune of between $1. 6 billion to $1. 8 billion to fund part of the battery factory,
but Tesla said its partners will likely poney up the extra $2 billion to $3 billion (though,
it could be even higher). Panasonic is Tesla chief battery supplier, but in recent months Tesla has also beentalking with Samsung SDI for batteries.
Traditionally auto makers have multiple suppliers for core components so that they can get the best price and use the other suppliers as leverage.
It should be noted that Tesla hasn confirmed that Panasonic is the battery supplier partner for the planned factory.
Musk even told Bloomberg that the Panasonic deal wasn done 100 percent. Essentially Tesla is keeping its options open for other suppliers to come in
and it using an unusual way of working with Panasonic. Navigant Jaffe called the method unique combination of carrot and stick.
Tesla said that it intends to use some of the battery output for stationary energy storage, which means batteries used for buildings, the grid and even homes.
As wee reported before, Tesla and solar financier and installer Solarcity (Musk other energy company) have been quietly selling small volumes of Tesla batteries as energy storage paired with Solarcity solar projects.
If Tesla is able to reduce the cost of lithium ion batteries by a third with its new factory,
it could make energy grid storage much more economical. Batteries for the grid at current prices are largely too expensive for most projects.
There a handful of companies that are trying to innovate around using batteries for grid storage
but if Tesla could get the battery price low enough it can potentially disrupt grid storage, too.
Lower-cost lithium-ion batteries could make clean energy much more viable. Pairing battery farms with wind and solar panel farms would enable clean power to store energy
when the wind stops blowing and the sun goes down. The end goal for Tesla is that cheap batteries could help Tesla deliver its $35, 000 third generation electric car.
It might not be able to get to that price with battery cost reductions alone, but it gets Tesla a whole lot closer t
#Autonomous drones flock like birds Autonomous drone flock The first drones that can fly as a coordinated flock has been created by Hungarian researchers.#
#The team watched as the ten autonomous robots took to the air in a field outside Budapest,
zipping through the open sky, flying in formation or even following a leader, all without any central control.
Video)##The aircraft, called quadcopters because they have four rotors, navigate using signals from Global positioning system (GPS RECEIVERS,
communicate their positions to one another via radio and compute their own flight plans. They were created by a team of scientists led by Tamás Vicsek, a physicist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.
This is remarkable work, says Iain Couzin, who studies collective animal behaviour at Princeton university in New jersey.
It is the first outdoor demonstration of how biologically inspired rules can be used to create resilient yet dynamic flocks.
It suggests we will be able to achieve large coordinated robot flocks much sooner than many would have anticipated.
Drones are designed typically to fly alone, and although other research groups have created flocks before, Vicsek says that those attempts involved cutting some corners the copters were restricted to indoor arenas or controlled by a central computer.
According to Vicsek, the only other truly autonomous drone flock was created in 2011 by robotics researcher Dario Floreano at The swiss Federal Institute of technology in Lausanne1.
But his machines were fixed-wing fliers that could move only at constant speeds and had to fly at different heights to avoid collisions.
It looked like a swarm but wasn t a real one because they didn t interact with one another,
says Vicsek. By contrast, his drones can coordinate their movements to form rotating rings or straight lines.
If Vicsek tells them that they face a wall with a gap in it, they can queue up to squeeze through.
Vicsek and his team drew inspiration from a computer program called Boids, created in 1986 by Craig Reynolds,
a computer graphics expert now at the University of California in Santa cruz. Reynolds simulated virtual flying objects that move according to three rules they match the average direction of their neighbours and move towards them,
but keep a distance to avoid crowding. These rules alignment attraction, repulsion were enough to produce a computer simulation of a bird-like flock,
but real fliers face other problems. The big enemies are noise and delay, says Vicsek.
The GPS (Global positioning system) signals are very noisy, so it is hard for the copters to accurately discern their position.
The fliers also need time to receive and process those signals, and these lags mean the drones often get too close to one another
or overshoot their mark. The drones did not flock successfully until the team managed to speed up their reaction times a challenge that Floreano
and his team also had to overcome. Vicsek and his team submitted their results as a presentation at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems,
to be held next September in Chicago, Illinois. For now, the drones communicate among themselves via radio,
but that sometimes leads to jammed signals. Fitting them with cameras might provide a workaround.
It s not by chance that birds have very good vision, says Vicsek. The big next step is to make the copters see each other.
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#Paddle an incredible shapeshifting smartphone You probably carry around a few gadgets. You probably have your smartphone, maybe a tablet or e reader.
You may also have a fitness band or even a second smartphone. That a lot of stuff to carry.
Imagine instead having just a single gadget that you deform physically into different shapes to suit your needs.
Pics and video) That the kind of smartphone that researchers at Hasselt University iminds in Belgium are building.
Called addle, their prototype phone, is designed around engineering principles derived from the popular 3-D Rubik Magic Puzzle.
It a folding plate puzzle consisting of a loop of eight square shaped tiles that can be transformed in a variety of surprising ways.
Studying the puzzle over a period of seven months enabled the Hasselt researchers to create a phone that could be transformed quickly into various shapes in a few simple steps. t the moment our Paddle prototype supports around 15 different shapes
but this number increases every day as we are including more and more shapes of the original Rubik Magic puzzle,
says Raf Ramakers, a Phd Student in Human computer interaction at the University. hen unfolding Paddle completely it is nearly the size of an ipad,
but when folding it up, it can become smaller than an iphone. For instance, you might transform it into a book,
whose pages you can leaf through to read. Need to scroll through a list? Not a problem.
Simply turn your phone into a bracelet and roll through individual links to scroll through various list items.
Deformable phones like Paperphone explore the idea of using bends and folds to physically control the device;
Users can physically bend the phone in ways that resemble real-world behaviors, with input and output becoming virtually indistinguishable.
the user just uses the ring form-factor, Ramakers explains, referring to a shape that resembles a prayer bead necklace;
and just roll through it. e is not even aware that he is scrolling through elements as in a traditional interface where the user explicitly interacts with a scrollbar,
The user fingers are tracked also to enable touch interaction on the device. The projector maps the user interface onto the device
and also distorts the device in response to the user movements. The team plans to create a prototype that entirely self-contained by replacing the external tracking system with tiny integrated displays like O-LED
and E Ink displays that are sensitive to the user movements. They expect to have a working prototype in another 12 to 18 months.
Adding electronics to it Ramakers says won limit Paddle transformational capabilities. Currently Paddle provides visual cues to the user to communicate how the device can be transformed,
such as highlighting regions to show where fingers go or using arrows to indicate the folding or unfolding directions.
The team is studying how quickly people remember transformations to see whether their muscle memory can take over after a
while, allowing users to perform transformations as unconsciously as they might drive a car or play an instrument.
Kind of like how speed cubers solve Rubik puzzles in a matter of seconds. Paddle, Ramakers says,
devices that combine the flexibility of touch screens with the physical qualities that real-world controls provide.
when driving a car, cycling, eating with Chinese sticks or playing sports or instruments, he explains. n contrast,
the devices that we work with nowadays do not allow for building up skill on a motor control level.
When taking into account the time we spend interacting with our phones nowadays one would expect us all to be veritable virtuosos on our devices,
Paddle could also provide a welcome relief to those who struggle with touch screens, such as the elderly.
With Paddle, they could manipulate a single mobile devicene that they operate with natural movementsreatly reducing the learning curve.
and strengthen muscles in aged mice People become less able to bounce back from injuries as they age.
This is a problem that adds risk to many of the common medical procedures the elderly face.
healthy tissue to recover from illness or injury. But because stem cell therapies remain cutting edge,
they have largely been used to target life-threatening problems such as heart failure. Stanford Helen Blau, director of the Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell biology, studies a more banal
but also more ubiquitous, use of stem cells in the body: helping muscles repair themselves. The lab most recent findings suggest that stem cell therapy could be used to help older patients recover from muscular injuries, for example from falls,
or perhaps even weakness following surgery. At a biological level, the stem cells that repair muscle damage lose their ability with age to generate new muscle fibers.
But the older stem cells can be spurred to function like younger cells. Studying stem cells from elderly mice,
Blau team found that the environment inside the muscle becomes less conducive for stem cells
and the cells themselves become less productive as the mice age. A biological process called the p38 MAP kinase pathway
which cues stem cells to become muscle progenitor cells, seemed to account for the older stem cellsdiminished productivity.
a post-doc in Blau lab who is a co-author of the recent study published in Nature Medicine.
The same basic process could lay the groundwork for helping human patients heal after surgery
or an injury. his really opens a whole new avenue to enhance the repair of specific muscles in the elderly, especially after an injury.
Our data pave the way for such a stem cell therapy, Blau said. Other recent work in stem cell therapy has looked similarly for ways the cells could improve functioning of existing organs, rather than building replacements through regenerative medicine.
For instance one recent study suggested that the cells may be able to kick-start insulin-making in pancreas in Type-1 diabetics by replacing Beta cells.
These approaches may lack the heroics of organs grown in the lab, but theye likely to reach the clinic long before replacement organs are available s
#Bitcoin is not only digital currency, it s Napster for finance Bitcoin will start its transformation from a mere currency into an entire open-source.
Bitcoin s valuation didn t just skyrocket in 2013, but its infrastructure, services, and adoption exploded as well,
culminating in recent#announcements that major online retailer Overstock. com and NBA team the Sacramento kings would accept the digital currency as payment.##
##Some still doubt#bitcoin s usefulness and durability, but 2014 may leave skeptics even further behind developers and entrepreneurs are already hard at work building features on top of the Bitcoin protocol that will allow for the decentralized execution of financial services, from currency hedging to loans to stock
issuance to rental and purchase contracts. These new services rely on the same innovative proof-of-work model of distributed security
and record-keeping that has kept the bitcoin currency secure as its value ballooned well past $10 billion.
In the long term, peer-to-peer finance threatens to weaken banks and other financial agents just as peer-to-peer file sharing did the music industry
#and some of the architects of this financial Napster seem gleeful about the possibility. The Bitcoin protocol (crucially distinct from bitcoin, the currency it underlies) was built from the ground up to support far more complex transactions and relationships than simple value transfers.
Example: Send five bitcoins to Steve.)Some of the kinds of transactions that Bitcoin can support include so-called M of N transactions,
which require agreement between a certain subset of a group, and can be used for escrow, mediation,
or shared financial management; time-locked transactions, in which bitcoins are distributed on a strict schedule,
useful for trusts or wills; and even data-conditional transactions, in which a script uses a data input such as a regular Google search to monitor real-world events that would automatically trigger disbursements or other actions.
More conditional on infrastructure development is the possibility ofsmart property, with contracts enforced by digital locks interacting with the Bitcoin blockchain to manage real-world leases, mortgages, and purchase contracts.
All aspects of these transactions would be programmed and automatic, with their transactional integrity guaranteed by the Bitcoin blockchain,
constantly vetted by the vast network ofminers rewarded for their maintenance work with a stream of bitcoin.
In fact the comparison to Napster is somewhat inaccurate, since Napster used centralized servers to track music sharing,
while Bitcoin is distributed entirely. That means loans without banks, contracts without lawyers, and stocks without brokers, executed
and recorded across hundreds of servers at all corners of the earth. Consultant Andreas M. Antonopoulos, echoing a 2012 white paper by software developer J. R. Willett,
says that the Bitcoin protocol is distributed to finance what Internet Protocol has been distributed to information. The blockchain is IP.
And through manipulation of that we can build a whole other system. In the same way that IP and the infrastructure of network nodes that make up the Internet now support functions from e-mail to video streaming
the Bitcoin protocol and its miners can support a variety of financial functions. Alternately, Antonopoulos suggests thinking of thebitcoin blockchain as#having an API#(application programming interface) that makes its data usable by third parties,
in the same way that second-layer services like Buffer or Hootsuite use the Twitter API to present
and interact with Twitter data in slightly modified or reorganized forms. Efforts to make complex financial functions a part of Bitcoin have been bubbling through 2013,
but 2014 will see them come to fruition. The most prominent active development of these functions is taking place under the auspices of the Mastercoin Foundation
a nonprofit organization of developers along the same loose, collaborative lines that define mostcryptocoin projects.
Mastercoin, based on Willett s white paper and programming, is projected to add many functions to the Bitcoin blockchain.
These include allowing users to create new asset classes, such as stocks or other ownership certificates,
and create a variety of automatedsmart contracts. Independent entrepreneurs are also working to build this infrastructure.
One of these is Reggie Middleton, currently building a client called BTC Swap. Middleton, gravelly voiced, dapper,
and businesslike, doesn t fit the stereotype of woolly young bitcoin developers. But he slyly describes himself asnot quite an anarchist
and BTC Swap is shot a directly across the bow of the financial industry. Still in early development, BTC Swap is planned to facilitate a variety of what Middleton callszero-Trust Digital Contracts,
which recreate financial functions in software code by matching offered and desired transactions between parties without the need for intermediary institutions.
Because these contracts are automated, instantaneous, and executed with assets already represented in the Bitcoin blockchain,
Middleton says they eliminate counterparty risk while also subtracting conventional banking and brokerage fees. The most immediate function Middleton envisions for his system is for hedging bitcoin against existing national currencies.
With bitcoin s valuation still showing huge volatility Middleton claims the availability of distributed hedging will both ensure the value of bitcoin for individuals holding the asset
and provide systemic stability. Given persistent skepticism, there should be plenty of takers to short bitcoin against the dollar.
And the entire system relies on decentralization for its security and integrity: My contracts are peer-to-peer,
says Middleton. If you hack my servers, there s nothing to get. Somebody call#Target#(TGT.
Such hedging functions have particularly unique promise because of the extremely low transaction costs of peer-to-peer currency.
Bitcoin makes microtransactions ranging down to fractions of a cent viable, but Middleton says thatright now,
if you do micropayments, the volatility of bitcoin can really take you out. Because of the low cost of Middleton s swaps,
I can let payees manage risk and decrease volatility at the micro-level. The most speculative and long-range potential functions of peer-to-peer finance and smart contracts are forms of what s known assmart Property.
This idea was explored in a#1997 paper#by computer scientist and former George washington University law professor Nick Szabo (who has come under occasional suspicion of being pseudonymous bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto).
In the paper, Szabo defines smart contracts as agreements enforced not by law, but by hardware or software that wouldfully embed in property the contractual terms
which deal with it. Szabo offers the humble vending machine as an existing case. But combining telecommunications with the Bitcoin blockchain presents more intriguing possibilities for example, cars able to read the blockchain could disable themselves
if a loan payment wasn made t on time. Mike Hearn, one of the main developers of the Bitcoin architecture alongside the mysterious Nakamoto, has said that any implementation of the concept is at least a decade away because of the need for hardware upgrades on physical goods. The functions that advocates say could be automated through the Bitcoin network
seem nearly endless including peer-to-peer investment funds, Kickstarter-like crowdfunding, binding arbitrations, and even nonfinancial transactions such as naming rights management and encrypted communication.
And all could be executed without a cut for intermediaries.##Bitcoin partisans, from developers down to rank-and-file users, often seem to revel in the idea that they are threatening the control and profits of Wall street institutions,
who they see as rent-seeking fat cats. If it were limited to the loss of fees on payments and transfers,
bitcoin s threat to existing financial institutions would still be substantial. But with a full array of commission-free financial services on the horizon, there is even more reason to take heed.
Middleton sounds a bit like an 18th-century pirate striking back against the Empire when he declares thatwhat
I m doing right now is a direct threat to fiat merchant banking. For him
excitement over value fluctuations in the bitcoin currency is missing the point: It s not a threat as people sit there
and ponder whether bitcoin is a bubble or not. But if people go through the protocol and use their imagination,
the existing system is threatened. However, there is a substantial obstacle to this coming revolution. Despite the emergence in 2013 of entities like Coinbase that have streamlined drastically the process,
it is still difficult to exchange bitcoin for national currencies in a quick, reliable manner.
It s unclear how Middleton s automated dollar-bitcoin hedging will work without a lightning-quick and reliable dollar-bitcoin exchange platform.
So the trueautomation of bitcoin functions that integrate with the economy as a whole may require a reconciliation with existing trading platforms.
Dominik Zynis, the Mastercoin spokesperson, sees a gentler, more granular transition. Citing studies on disruptive innovation by the likes of 20th-century economist Joseph Shumpeter,
he makes an analogy with the energy industry. We re still burning wood. There s coal fired power plants. Those didn t go away,
new technology just got added on top. Usually, of course, that new technology has ultimately proven more powerful,
and often enough more profitable. Some financial institutions Zynis predicts, will be nimble enough to adapt. If I m an investment firm, do
I see peer-to-peer finance as an opportunity, and adopt it, because it s##more efficient?
Or do I not make the investment, and in 10 or 20 years I become irrelevant?
So, all bankers and stockbrokers might not go the way of the coal miner, telephone operator, or record store clerk.
But the hard lessons of other upturned industries may now be relevant to the financial sector in ways they never were before.
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