Cryptonite June 2023
Crypto meets AI
It’s time for Cryptonite - our monthly roundup of all things crypto - with Dr. Tejaswi Nadahalli.
You can follow Tejaswi on twitter @nadahalli and he blogs at tejaswin.com
tl;dr (via reccap.it):
How can AI help crypto and vice versa?
AI can help solve crypto problems and there is a need for a marketplace for AI models and training hardware.
What are the concerns within the crypto and cryptography communities?
Concerns include the lack of value in utility tokens, government surveillance, and potential loss of privacy.
How can blockchain technology ensure trust in systems?
Blockchain technology can verify proofs and provide transparency, while trusted execution environments can securely run programs.
Why does the speaker have skepticism towards big banks and IT companies?
Big banks are vulnerable to hacks and lack trustworthiness, while IT companies may not be capable of building secure banking systems.
What are the concerns and efforts regarding Lido's control and governance?
There are concerns about Lido's control over staking in Ethereum, but efforts are being made to decentralize governance and increase transparency.
Text summaries of the video can be found here and here.
Links
Economy
Central banks have defeated inflation – they should stop the punishment beatings immediately. (telegraph)
Fed's Goolsbee sees 'golden path' to lower inflation without a recession. (cnbc)
China is ‘entering a balance sheet recession’ as borrowers shy away from new debt in a potential replay of Japan’s ‘lost decades’. (fortune)
China is facing a debt bomb at home: trillions of dollars owed by local governments, their financial affiliates, and real estate developers. (nytimes)
China is in default on a trillion dollars in debt to US bondholders. Will the US force repayment? (thehill)
Chinese citizens, including many of the wealthy, are increasingly eyeing the exits in a new era of slower growth. (wsj)
U.S. companies and H-1B visa holders can benefit from new rules Canada has announced to attract high-skilled professionals. (forbes)
New episodes of negative or zero prices in European electricity markets. (pv-magazine)
PepsiCo loses appeal over potato patent in India. (cnbctv18)
McDonald's drops tomatoes from India offerings, citing quality concerns as prices surge. (reuters) Also, after theft, farmers in Karnataka forced to guard tomatoes. (mid-day)
GST officers bust 304 syndicates and expose Rs 25,000 crore fraudulent GSTINs and tax credit claims. (cnbctv18)
Investing
Tractor Supply has been one of the best performing stocks of the past twenty years. It even beat the likes of Apple. The company is a niche “rural lifestyle retailer” whose customers are “recreational farmers, ranchers, and all those who enjoy living the rural lifestyle.” A rural retailer seems like an unlikely business to back one of the country’s best-performing stocks. Which begs the question, how’d they do it? (eaglepointcap)
Recent research suggests that the small-cap effect might not be as reliable as previously thought. (citywire)
Twitter, RIP (eugenewei)
Odds & Ends
Researchers have unearthed hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets, but many remain untranslated. New AI translates 5,000-year-old cuneiform tablets instantly. (bigthink)
Large Language Models (LLMs) are not brains and do not meaningfully share any of the mechanisms that animals or people use to reason or think. LLMs are a mathematical model of language tokens. You give a LLM text, and it will give you a mathematically plausible response to that text. Many of the proposed use cases now look like borderline fraudulent pseudoscience to me. (softwarecrisis)
Markets this Week
More here: country ETFs, fixed income, currencies and commodities.
Meme of the Week
