Daily Archives: December 21, 2021

Researchers Teach Human Brain Cells in a Dish to Play “Pong”

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[…] Researchers at the biotechnology startup Cortical Labs have created “mini-brains“ consisting of 800,000 to one million living human brain cells in a petri dish, New Scientist reports. The cells are placed on top of a microelectrode array that analyzes the neural activity.

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To teach the mini-brains the game, the team created a simplified version of “Pong” with no opponent. A signal is sent to either the right or left of the array to indicate where the ball is, and the neurons from the brain cells send signals back to move the paddle.

“We often refer to them as living in the Matrix,” Kagan told the magazine, in a horrifyingly reference to the 1999 movie in which humans are enslaved by AI overlords in an all-encompassing simulation. “When they are in the game, they believe they are the paddle.”

Well, that’s a scary enough concept to cause some existential panic for anyone.

Faster Than AI

Kagan said that while the mini-brains can’t play the game as well as a human, they do learn faster than some AIs.

“The amazon aspect is how quickly it learns, in five minutes, in real time,” he told New Scientist. “That’s really an amazing thing that biology can do.”

While this is certainly some amazing Twitch fodder, the team at Cortical Labs hope to use their findings to develop sophisticated technology using “live biological neurons integrated with traditional silicon computing,” according to the outfit’s website.

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Source: Researchers Teach Human Brain Cells in a Dish to Play “Pong”

Cryptocurrency ‘rug pulls’ cheated investors out of ‘$8bn’

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First, come up with a catchy name for a cryptocurrency project. Next, convince the credulous to buy associated digital tokens. Finally, abandon the project and keep investors’ funds.

This “rug pulling” scam lacks sophistication but evidently it works. According to Chainalysis, a blockchain data biz, separating cryptocoin buyers from their money in this manner has become particularly popular in the DeFi (decentralized finance) ecosystem and has contributed to a scam surge.

In a post previewing the company’s 2022 Crypto Crime Report, Chainalysis said scams constituted the largest form of cryptocurrency-based crime, as measured by transaction volume. Cryptocurrency investors – if that’s the right term – lost over $7.7bn worth of digital whatever in 2021.

That’s up 81 per cent from 2020, but 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, was an unusual year. This year was not quite as bad as 2019, which was close to $10bn worth of scams. But there were more scams overall (3,300 in 2021, up from 2,052 in 2020), albeit with shorter lifespans (~70 days in 2021, compared to ~192 in 2020 and to around ~2,369 in 2013).

Take-the-money-and-run gambits should not to be confused with losses attributable to security shortcomings at DeFi services that let hackers steal funds, like the recent theft of some $120m in tokens from BadgerDAO or the $31m taken from MonoX. That’s a separate dumpster fire.

Source: Cryptocurrency ‘rug pulls’ cheated investors out of ‘$8bn’ • The Register

Bitcoin’s Inequality Problem Is Putting the Dollar to Shame 0.01% owns 27% of all BTC

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new research detailed in The Wall Street Journal suggests its inequality problems are worse than the United States’ disgraceful performance under the dollar. An incredible feat considering income inequality in 2020 America was the highest of all G7 nations according to data from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development viewed by Pew Research.

That illustration, of a vanishingly small bitcoin financial elite, was revealed in a new National Bureau of Economic Research study written by professors from the MIT Sloan School of Management and London School of Economics. It found that of the 19 million bitcoin currently in circulation, just 0.01% of buyers control around 27% of the total supply. That 27% percent figure amounts to around 5 million bitcoins, which in turn comes out to about $232 billion USD. The top 1% wealthiest U.S. individuals, by comparison, control “only” about a third of all the country’s wealth, the Journal notes.

The professors conducted their research by, for the first time, mapping out and analyzing every single bitcoin transaction over its 13 years of existence.

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there have been experts and academics sounding their own alarm bells around bitcoin’s potential inequality-inducing tendencies. In an interview with CNBC Cornell University, economics professor and author of The Future of Money Eswar Prasad granted cryptocurrencies may make digital payments more accessible but said that doesn’t guarantee any lessening of inequality.

“Because of existing inequalities in digital access and financial literacy, they [cryptocurrencies] could end up worsening inequality,

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Despite all of this, mentions of “decentralization” and “democracy” and “independence” in relation to crypto abound as a new wave of Web3 investors and enthusiasts spend millions locking in NFTs and forming DAOs to make collective purchases.

Source: Bitcoin’s Inequality Problem Is Putting the Dollar to Shame