True. The only good thing to come from the Facebook coin is that it is making everyone sit up and take crypto seriously. There are still questions as to whether this coin will be properly exchangeable with other crypto, and whether it will become the default stablecoin. I really hope it doesn't though. The thought of Facebook ruling crypto sickens me.

I suppose the final question that sits beneath everything else is: is self-consciousness itself an emergent behaviour? I'm still unsure about the singularity, I take your point, but I won't dismiss it completely until this question has a definitive answer. Stuff that seems magical fantasy today could be mundane and commonplace to the AIs of the future.

I take the point. If everything is given for free then there is no autonomy and no individual meaning. So if (when?) we reach a point where everything is free, then it may improve quality of life in purely material terms, but the cost is the loss of the freedom that comes from individuals being responsible for their own existence. So a full UBI that provides 100% of material needs is also doing nothing to solve the deeper problem that is the loss of the freedom, autonomy and accountability that is such a big part of what it is to be human.

I'm still not sure what the answer is, but the discussion is widening my perspective, which is always a good thing.

... and in most of these threads I appear at some point and start ranting incoherently about the evil data-vampire that is Facebook. Here I am again. countdown to rant... 3... 2... 1...

Facebook's purpose is and always has been to suck up our personal data and monetise it. At first they termed it 'data exhaust' like it was some wasteful and inadvertent by-product, but kind caring Facebook is here to recycle it into something useful. The environmental analogy is entirely purposeful, they want to seem like they are doing us a favour by cleaning up this toxic data-spill, when in fact this has always been their primary aim. These guys are master manipulators, and I suspect absolute sociopaths as well.

We give them our data for free, and they sell it to make profit. And more than this, they combine it all and use behavioural analytics to effectively construct digital models of each of us so that they can a) target advertisements more effectively, and b) predict (and influence) our future behaviour.

I don't trust them, and I don't want anything to do with Libra, which is just their latest weapon to steal and make profit from our personal data.

I'd concur. Any rise needs a period of cooling off and relative stability, or it's unsustainable. Look at what happened in 2017. The markets rose continuously, and the result was that when they inevitably started to fall, no-one knew where they should fall to because there hadn't been any period of cooling off and price consolidation during the rise. The result being they kept falling until finally this February everyone reached a consensus that we had hit bottom. If the late 2017 rise had been more gradual and with new support levels established, it's likely we wouldn't have fallen so far or for so long.

As for why this current fall started - it had become clear that the rise was unsustainable, and when this happens it needs only a tiny trigger to start the huge sell-off. This time around it's likely it was the brief Coinbase outage.

Just a quick comment on this because I don't want to derail the thread. The evolution of AlphaGo I think demonstrates how quickly things are moving. A few years ago everyone was saying a machine could never beat the world's best Go players. Then (2015?) AlphaGo was developed and trained initially by humans through the input of a vast number of previous games. Learning algorithms subsequently built on this, but there was a big human input, guided by Go experts, and a lot of reliance on just brute-forcing the calculations. In 2016 it beat the world's best human player quite comprehensively.

The 2017 follow-up was AlphaGo Zero. This time they just fed it the rules and nothing else. They got it to teach itself. Within a short time they put it up against the original AlphaGo, and the entirely self-taught version won 100-0. It is indeed reaching the stage where computers aren't just better than humans at calculating, they're also better at learning how to calculate, and at learning how to learn. There is some exciting (scary?) emergent behaviour coming out of this.

... Then we get into the possibility of power from nuclear fusion. I know it's one of those things that is always 'a few years away' - but cheap energy (free? unlimited?) is getting closer all the time.

I think this kind of highlights the fact that technology is racing ahead of us, and it won't be long before it goes way beyond the ability of mere humans to understand, and it is computers themselves doing the thinking and theorising. The most promising form of defence against quantum attacks currently under development seems to be NTRU, which relies on some quite esoteric lattice-based maths which is frankly already beyond my ability to comprehend. In a few years' time I can imagine that it is computers themselves coming up with these models, and humans struggling to keep up. It's an infinite arms race into the distance really. So long as there is one side attacking and another side defending, it's difficult to see where it will stop - unless there is some fundamental facet of quantum mechanics that provides a final barrier to one or both sides.

Tech companies manipulating voters is not new news. This has been going on for a while. Undoubtedly it is getting worse and is a threat to democracy, but it's far from being a left-wing conspiracy. It's more pro-right-wing if anything. Take the Cambridge Analytica scandal for example. Here's a couple of links from the UK:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump

KYC and AML certainly has its legitimate side, and is needed in certain circumstances.

However it's quite clear that ever since 9/11 'anti-terrorism' has been used as an excuse to implement a huge surveillance program, KYC and AML being only part of it. Governments have led the way in exploiting this climate of fear to suck up valuable personal data, and companies such as Facebook and Google have seen the opportunity to make money, and leapt on board. Now everyone is at it, it's become the new normal. Download any app on your phone, and in the terms and conditions it wants access to your contacts, your photos, your location, your call history etc etc. This sort of stuff is way out of control and it needs legislating against. But that's not likely to happen as governments are at it as well. Here in the UK we have security cameras on every corner. Everything is recorded. Privacy has gone. Protest might also soon be gone - look at the recent protesters in Hong Kong in huge queue to buy train tickets with cash because they didn't want their card purchase history tracked by China and linking them to being part of the protests.

It's one thing to implement KYC/AML and surveillance / data gathering to prevent fraud and to protect consumers, quite another when the purpose is to harvest data just in order to a) monetise it, or b) control and subdue the population.

One encouraging sign is that data privacy is becoming more of an issue in the mainstream, and is in the news with Facebook scandals etc. I hope that something is done.

My point really in starting the thread was based on my assumption that the next wave of automation will make part of the population effectively unemployable, particularly with the onward march of AI. Will a large part of the population be unemployable? The majority part? Waves of automation in the past have just moved job opportunities  to new sectors, agriculture -> industrial/manufacturing -> service sector. After the the service sector starts to be automated (smart assistants / robots etc), and also smart contracts (hello Ethereum!) - then what is left? If there is nowhere or only a limited space where humans can perform better than AI/computers, then it leaves a part of the populace absolutely disenfranchised.

So I suppose I could have phrased the question better. Really I am asking that if UBI is not the solution to having a lot of effectively unemployable people, then what alternatives are there? Doing nothing seems like a really bad decision.

No.

This is why it always always pays to research any new project as thoroughly as you can. Sometimes bounties can be misleading, whether this is the fault of the bounty manager or rather a miscommunication between the manager and the project team can be difficult to determine.

One common issue I've noticed is that listed total bounty payouts are often based on the project achieving hardcap. These days it is not that common for something to hit hardcap, so it is a good idea to a) check what the hardcap is and b) decide for yourself how achievable you think it is. It is worth checking the softcap as well, because obviously if the ICO doesn't hit softcap then the payout is $0.

Don't just go for the projects that say they are offering the most, choose instead those that you've researched and that look like good long-term bets.

Short-term is a different matter entirely, if that's what you want then the answer is go for whatever is the next IEO on Binance.

My position is generally very left-wing, I am strongly in favour of equality of opportunity and a much lower level of inequality both within societies and across the world. Equally I find the excesses of capitalism abhorrent, the multi-billionaires who don't pay any tax whilst the poorest often have to work several jobs just to stay alive.

But... I think that Socialism is becoming irrelevant as a concept. The whole thing is based upon the power of the workers. Unionise, strike for better conditions etc. Technology is rapidly superseding that. We hear a lot about automation. The tech revolutions we've had already have meant huge job losses in one sector, but new opportunities somewhere else. Industrialisation meant we needed far fewer farm workers - but more factory workers. The computer revolution meant we need fewer factory workers but more jobs appeared in the service sector. The thing with the current wave of automation (with AI playing an increasing role as well) is that there is nowhere left to go, no new sectors will arise where humans can perform the work better than machines can. This will lead to the complete disempowerment of the working class, and the loss of the big bargaining chip of Socialism.

Not sure what the outcome will be, probably some form of UBI, but the fact is that whether we like it or not, Socialism as a concept is becoming rapidly outdated.

I welcome price increases, but I don't like sudden huge rises, I prefer them to be slower and more sustainable. We all saw what happened after the huge rises at the end of 2017. There was no period of consolidation during the rise, and the consequence was that there was no consensus on where bitcoin should fall back to. The result being that it kept falling and falling, and it took more than a year before everyone agreed that we had hit bottom and could start building again.

As for big institutional money coming in - it has happened to an extent already, but the main driver of new money entering crypto at the moment isn't BTC at all, it's Facebook. Crypto is all over the news at the moment, and it's Facebook's attempt at entry that has everyone talking. Whilst I despise Facebook and their data harvesting agenda, I can't deny that the fact that one of the world's biggest tech companies is entering crypto has everyone else thinking they need to move in as well. This could be the point where crypto starts being taken more seriously by the mainstream.

Smart contracts are probably the best bet long-term. They will have a big impact on society in the future. So I would say go with the best smart contract choice, which is Ethereum. Maybe dip into some of its competitors as well, but ETH is still the strongest project in this sector and is developing well on the road to eventual PoS.

I disagree to an extent. I do think that the current system is appalling and is failing the vast majority of people. The elite get richer and richer by sucking money from the poor, and this absolutely needs to end.

However I also think that time should be valued differently for different people doing different things. Partly because of the relative availability of people with certain skills, and partly because of the complexity of the task itself. No-one is going to dress up in radiation gear and go in and fix a melting nuclear reactor if it's the same pay as working behind a shop counter.

I do however think that inequality need to be drastically reduced. This can't really be done purely with income taxation, as the elite make most of their money by investing their existing wealth. What we desperately need is the implementation of a wealth tax. There's been some decent research into it, this book is a good read if anyone is interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century

Apologies if I've moved away a bit from the original post in the thread.

In every case, an initial offering is speculation. Prices can move both ways, both short- and long-term. It can be difficult to decouple hype and FOMO from genuine expectation. Crypto offerings suffer more from FOMO and more from price volatility, purely due to being crypto.

So I would say it is probably easier to determine likely true value of an initial offering if it is non-crypto, and especially if it is from an established company that is just going to the public. Then you have at least some understanding of the business model and how it has been working in practice, and how a route to profitability may pan out. With crypto, much less so - even if it is an established company that is now dipping into crypto - in most cases you can't really tie the likely success of the asset to the success of the company itself (although Facebook may be an outlier here).

Crypto initial offerings mean increased hype, increased FOMO, increased volatility and also potentially much greater reward or a drop to $0.

The one thing I would be wary of at the moment is IEOs - they really seem to be hugely over-hyped, especially Binance ones.

I suppose one thing to look for is which alt still has a very strong project, and the drop relative to BTC looks unjustified. If that applies to many alts, and it probably does, then it makes sense to go with the most reliable option, which would tend to be the highest in market cap... so I'd be tempted to say ETH is probably the one to go for.

Shorter-term, NEO is surging fast, but this sort of sudden price movement can often lead to an equally sudden pullback, so just be wary.

Thanks, I knew I was doing something stupid!

I think one of FBs primary aims with this is so they can open up a new sphere to their relentless data mining. This new coin will give them access to huge swathes of purchasing data, which they will bolt onto the data they already have about us, and use it to improve the accuracy of their behavioural modelling, so that they can then sell the final product - more or less accurate digital models of each of us - to marketers and other nefarious third parties. This has always been Facebook's business model. This "free" product is only free in the dollar sense; we pay for it by surrendering our personal data.

They'll have other aims too of course, FB is nothing if not ambitious. Presumably they are going after WeChat and also eventually the US dollar. But we can't overlook the history of their motivations in extracting and monetising personal data.