THE PAGE TURNS

October 5, 2023October 19, 2023

Why Crypto Isn’t Ready for Us

Sam Bankman-Fried is on trial this week for fraud in cryptocurrency, which seems like the perfect time to analyze why crypto is neither necessary nor sufficient for life in 2023. In other words, I don’t like it.

I’m supporting a couple of online investing classes that each had a whole module all about crypto, so I may have to “teach it.” One of my beefs is that explanation about a new payments process should not obsess about the technical aspects of how it works. If you start the discussion of “what is digital currency” by using the word “blockchain” and a set of Rubik’s cubes, then I know it’s already gone off the rails. Hope I don’t have to grade any assignments touting this nonsense er… technology still underdeveloped.

For those of you who don’t know the difference between proof of stake and proof of work or which Marvel movie featured the Scarlet Witch or how many points a ranger adds to their acrobatics D20 roll… in other words, if you’re not mesmerized by geekery over this stuff, let me see if I can detangle why digital currency’s time has not come. It has to do with 1) technological vulnerability; 2) lack of standardization; 3) volatility; 4) diffusion of purpose. Allow me to expound.

TechnoBabble

There’s actually a joke about crypto in the mystery series “After Party II.” The murdered guy made his fortune in crypto, and when one person asks what exactly he was doing, the official nerdy character jump in with, “Let me explain what blockchain is…” That’s how we know this is all silly. If you are explaining either an investment or a way to pay for a sandwich by talking about how the currency is built, we’re in trouble. Do I need to know what kind of special ink is used to make a twenty dollar bill or how they put the hologram on in order to know that it’s not counterfeit? If you ask me how a bank works, do I start by explaining what kind of reinforced concrete they use for the vaults?

Photo from Open Access Govt. Notice how you need digital art to create digital photos of blockchains.

Blockchain may indeed be quite secure. Encryption is pretty secure. Fort Knox, I suspect, is quite secure. The question of how digital currency works should not begin with whether or not it’s secure or how it’s secure. It should begin with how you use it. To my mind, there is vulnerability there. Why? Because digital currency can only be used from within a program.

Say I want to buy a soda at my local mini-mart with crypto. I need my phone, my password to the phone, my password to the app. And the phone needs service and to be fully charged. The mini-mart needs technology, too, as well as working access, service, etc. All of a sudden, this “so easy” process has several layers. Not convinced? One of the first folks to pay with crypto at Subway, which touted its willingness to accept payment, described this incredibly easy process as:

Once our subs were made the employee took out an iPad and opened Coinbase. She punched our total in the register and then in the iPad, which immediately generated a custom QR code linked to the store’s Coinbase account which was preloaded with our exact total calculated. I took out my iPhone, opened my Coinbase app, and scanned the QR code. Instantly the total popped up on my screen and gave me the option to leave a note about my purchase.
From Coindesk.com blog.

I’ll stop you right there. The employee took out an iPad? A separate piece of technology, disconnected to the register? That has to coordinate with the store’s accounting system? Who do you think is making these sandwiches at Subway? It’s not Chat GPT, I’ll tell you that much.

By the way, googling this topic about Subway also led to story #1: Subway has just been sold to a giant conglomerate private equity firm that also owns a dozen other food service chains. Story #2: Subway-themed trading bot makes millions using ‘sandwich’ attacks! That means a digital pirate stole millions digitally using Subway as his villain name. And that whatever Subway wanted to do with digital currency acceptance may soon go out the window with the new ownership. Let’s see if crypto stays on Subway’s menu.

September 12, 2023September 17, 2023

Barbenheimer: Pity, Terror, and the Lord of Misrule

Barbie/Heimer mash-up courtesy of joblow.com

I don’t know why more people writing about the Barbie and Oppenheimer double feature don’t mention Aristotle.

That probably sounds pretentious. However, since the New York Times just featured an op ed criticizing the new football kickoff rules by invoking the Greek sensation of ataraxia (sublime contentedness), I probably have license to Go Greek in my little blog post. (Plus I ranted about it the other day, and my people said “go for it!”) I saw Oppenheimer last week, and all I could think about was Aristotle: Pity and Terror, the essence of tragedy. Barbie is about the world turned upside-down in a different way, where the absurd takes center stage, and the Lord of Misrule becomes in charge: comedy at its core.

Double-feature=comedy+tragedy. Yin/Yang!

So let’s go back to high school, basic Aristotle, basic Shakespeare, too, and talk about these movies in terms of how they fit the definitions. Plus, this is a double-movie review. A twofer!

Quantum Storytelling from Christopher Nolen

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of this tale of pity and terror, was the physicist whose pioneering research at Berkeley led him to be chosen to spearhead the Manhattan Project that developed of the atomic bomb. After World War II, he parted ways with some of his colleagues on whether to use atomic power and diplomacy or whether to develop the hydrogen bomb. He ended up losing his security clearance during the anti-communist fervor of the 1950s, in part, because of political maneuvering by the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss. Strauss was later turned down for a cabinet post. That’s the history; that’s the story.

September 10, 2023September 10, 2023

Why I Need to Write About Aristotle

I’ve been futzing about for a few days, trying to decide whether to write a post that centers on Aristotle, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” My big hang-up is frankly … audience. How much are y’all going to balk if you read the word Aristotle in the first sentence? And yet I can’t write my film review without mentioning him. So I’ve been stuck between the urge to get these ideas out and the knowledge that we’re living in a time of anti-intellectualism.

It’s like a seesaw effect. We don’t even know what we think about smarts. There are constant little tests nestled in among Corgi pictures on the interwebs that tell you to “solve this puzzle and your IQ is 180.” Which anybody with some kind of education knows is patently false because that’s not how IQ works and nobody has IQs over 170 except that little kid they found in Nepal once. (OK, I checked the Internet; there are a few people now with IQs over 170. But not because they can do some little puzzle.)

Meanwhile, we don’t even care if people learn how to write anymore because we have ChatGPT and other tools coming that will just write stuff for us. As if Chat knows. I think of ChatGPT as like a rather stupid, random World Book Encyclopedia. If you happen to go to the right page and copy the right bits word for word (or verbatim–we used to use that word in a business context until we were told people didn’t know what it meant, so we had to replace it with “word for word” because people can’t learn what words mean anymore)… If you go to the right page and plagiarize it, you might just get away with it. But what if you have to combine things? And if you’re not learning because all you ever do is copy things other people wrote, then you just wander through school and come out as dumb as you started.