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Stephen Perrenod

About Stephen Perrenod

http://www.OrionX.net

Stephen Perrenod has lived and worked in Asia, the US, and Europe and possesses business experience across all major geographies in the Asia-Pacific region. He specializes in corporate strategy for market expansion, and cryptocurrency/blockchain on a deep foundation of high performance computing (HPC), cloud computing and big data. He is a prolific blogger and author of a book on cosmology.

Posts by Stephen Perrenod:

Bank of America’s Hit Piece on Bitcoin

Is Bitcoin dirty? This month Bank of America Global Research issued a 49-page report on Bitcoin titled “Bitcoin’s Dirty Little Secrets” that comes across as a hit piece.
-By Stephen Perrenod

Bitcoin’s Long Term Value

It is well known that technology adoption approximates an S-Curve or logistic function. It took half a century for electricity to be widely adopted in the US, a quarter of a century for half the population to get TVs, but mobile phone adoption took only half that time.
-By Stephen Perrenod

Axions in Pulsars

Has Dark Matter been converted to X-rays in Neutron Star magnetic fields? Many people have heard of neutrinos (little ‘neutral ones’). But there is another dark matter candidate, never observed in the laboratory, which would have a mass much less than even the three known neutrinos. And is less well known than neutrinos.
-By Stephen Perrenod

Bitcoin’s Uniqueness as a Store of Value

Money is a universal intermediate good used as a form of wealth. People use it as the connector between other goods and services, and as a way to resolve debts. The first well-documented money was accounted for in Babylonian temples in the form of barley. You see already from this, that money has aspects of virtuality, and it has a definition as an accounting unit as well as serving as a medium of exchange and a store of value for delayed usage.
-By Stephen Perrenod

Bitcoin is Anti-Fragile: 20 Reasons

Bitcoin has survived many errors, shocks, and even splits from the main branch of its evolutionary tree. It has been declared dead by journalists and fiat economy wise men and women some 380 times. But these events, concerns, or self-interested attacks have not stopped Bitcoin. It keeps getting stronger, and every 10 minutes the security of all prior transactions is enhanced. Bitcoin is now functionally eternal, certainly positioned to survive beyond the year 2100.
-By Stephen Perrenod

Living on Satoshi Time: What Block is it?

Today is Block Year 12, and within the year it is Block Month 5, Block Day 137 Bitcoin Generates Its Own Calendar Our Gregorian calendar is based on the Solar year, the Lunar month, and the Terrene (Earthly) day. Bitcoin has its own natural calendar that can be constructed to approximate our human calendar of […]

Top 50 of Crypto Mining – June 2019

Today, June 14, 2019, we released the second biannual list of Top 50 cryptocurrency mining pools. We do this in conjunction with the Top 500 supercomputing list that is released twice a year, in June and November. That list has been a matter of national pride for the US, Japan, China, and many other countries. […]

Did JPMorgan Just Kill the Bitcoin Dream?

An article in Barron’s written by Ben Walsh on Valentine’s Day is titled “JPMorgan Just Killed the Bitcoin Dream”. JPMorgan Chase has announced an altcoin, a stable coin, for use by institutional customers. It will be tethered to the US dollar. This development is the first such stable coin issued by a US bank. So […]

Will Lightning Electrify Bitcoin?

Why: Scaling for bandwidth and efficiency Suppose Bitcoin could scale. Many altcoins were created in the promise of handling more transactions, and with lower fees. But Bitcoin can scale, and it will, thanks to the Lightning Network which went live in 2018. While small, it is growing rapidly. Bitcoin is often criticized for lack of […]

Is Central Bank Digital Currency Cryptocurrency?

Recently the International Monetary Fund produced a research report on Central Bank Digital Currencies, titled “Casting Light on Central Bank Digital Currency”, and available here: https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/SDN/2018/SDN1808.ashx Even the title is interesting in its omission of the terms cryptocurrency and blockchain. The basic concept they were evaluating was that of central bank controlled digital currency issued […]

Will Bitcoin Consume All Electricity?

The idea that bitcoin will consume an enormous fraction of the world’s electricity is hysteria. In a recent article in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, June 2018 issue, Nicholas Weaver (a lecturer in computer science at UC Berkeley) raised this issue, in what was otherwise a good article on the security issues […]

Is Bitcoin on your Computer? Money in the Internet

No, not asking if you own any Bitcoin. Or the IP address. This blog is prompted by the Nicholas Weaver article “Risks of Cryptocurrencies” in the June 2018 Communications of the ACM. He writes, rather misleadingly in our opinion: “This was not because our Bitcoin was stolen from a honeypot, rather the graduate student who created […]

National Security and Blockchain Technology

National Security considerations are often intimately intertwined with the adoption of new technologies. Last year Tokyo hosted a meeting of the International Standards Organization, including a session on blockchain technology to examine ideas around standards for blockchain and distributed ledgers. A member of the Russian delegation, who is part of their intelligence apparatus at the […]

Is Blockchain the Key to Web 3.0?

Web 3.0 has been around as a meme since early in the century. This writer was formerly with the Sun Microsystems Education business and recalls meetings we sponsored over a decade ago, that were attended by academic computer scientists promoting the concept. And yet it has been slow to take off, and it remains a […]

Information Economy 2.0

Bitcoin is a Trillion $ Economy We often hear that we live in an Information Economy. We have an information-based economy, but we don’t have a pure form of “money as information”. Instead we have a hybrid of digital money and paper money with encoded information such as denomination and serial numbers and engraving details. […]

Bitcoin Forks are So 2017

“Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom” Mao Tse Tung 百花齐放 Well there are 20 flowers in the Bitcoin ecosystem. And over 1400 in the cryptocurrency ecosystem at present. Salad forks, dinner forks, shrimp forks, dessert forks, tuning forks, pitchforks… so many kinds of forks.. Image credit: Ellen Levy Finch, CC BY-SA 4.0 Why fork a new […]

Bitcoin: Like Gold or Like a Currency?

Valuing the various bitcoin forks Recent News: Segwit2x fork has been postponed indefinitely Some say bitcoin acts more as digital gold then as a currency, more as a store of value than as a medium of exchange. It is very interesting to look at the various bitcoin forks with this question in mind. Everything in […]

Evolutionary Forks and Dividends

What is a fork? It is early days in evolutionary terms for cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has not been around even a decade. Ethereum has only been here for a few years. The respective economies of these and other cryptocurrencies have been growing at triple digit percentage rates. A given blockchain can be thought of as a […]

Ethereum: Smarter than a Fifth Grader?

Ethereum is described in Wikipedia as an “an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform featuring smart contract functionality“. How does it differ from Bitcoin? Well Bitcoin is open-source, public, distributed, and block-chain based. The difference is principally found in the terms “computing platform” and “smart contract functionality”. And there are other differences as well. Ethereum […]

Why Buffet Doesn’t “Get” Bitcoin

Warren Buffett is the most famous name in stock investing, the second richest person in the world, and a leading expert in valuing companies and securities. He also is a big investor in banks, including Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America. So he has a lot of vested interest in the current monetary […]

Cryptocurrency a Bridge to the Future

Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies more generally, can be a bridge to a better monetary future for the globe. In almost every nation today, fiat currency managed by a central bank is the norm. This is money that is inherently inflationary by design. Since central banks are controlled by national governments, and governments routinely run substantial deficits, […]

J-Coin Prediction: it will be a Bonsai among alt-coins

One of the largest banks in Japan, Mizuho, along with other Japanese banks, is looking to get into the blockchain game. CNBC reports “Japanese banks are thinking of making their own cryptocurrency”. Except they are not, based on the information released so far. This will be mobile Yen, a use of blockchain to allow mobile […]

Jamie Dimon is Afraid

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, goes the saying. JP Morgan (not Jamie Dimon) Jamie Dimon is CEO of JP Morgan Chase, arguably the most important money center bank. He recently called Bitcoin a “fraud”, heaping ridicule upon, and fighting with Bitcoin as well, with a single phrase. Because he […]

Money 3.0: Cryptocurrencies

Why are cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum Money 3.0? And what are Money 1.0 and Money 2.0? Recently, Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a ‘fraud’. This coming from the CEO of JP Morgan, the bank that has been fined more than any other, save one, for financial crimes since the Great Recession of 2008. His statement […]

Deep Learning & Pieces of Eight

What does a Spanish silver dollar have to do with Deep Learning? It’s a question of standards and required precision.The widely used Spanish coin was introduced at the end of the 16th century as Spain exploited the vast riches of New World silver. It was denominated as 8 Reales. Because of its standard characteristics it […]

Competitive Analysis: Developing a Competitive Culture

Competitive analysis (competitive intelligence) is critically important for strategy, planning, and sales support. But it should also permeate an organization’s DNA, preserve high ethical standards, and deliver high quality content. Competitive awareness is like security awareness or commitment to quality – it’s the duty of everyone in the organization. This is what we call a […]

IoT: The Ultimate Convergence

The Internet of Things (IoT) marketplace is expected to run into the trillions of dollars during the next 5 years. Gartner estimates 6.4 billion devices will be part of the Internet of Things this year. And they project $3 trillion of endpoint spending by the year 2020. [updated link] Gartner estimates 5.8 billion IoT endpoints […]

Big Data and HPC: Convergence? (Part 2 of 2)

Last week, in Part 1 of this two-part blog, we looked at trends in Big Data and analytics, and started to touch on the relationship with HPC (High Performance Computing). In this week’s blog we take a look at the usage of Big Data in HPC and what commercial and HPC Big Data environments have in […]

Big Data meets HPC: Convergence? (Part 1 of 2)

Data volumes, velocity, and variety are increasing as consumer devices become more powerful. PCs, smart phones and tablets are the instrumentation, along with the business applications that continually capture user input, usage patterns and transactions. As devices become more powerful each year (each few months!) the generated volumes of data and the speed of data […]

Long-Term Planning: The Next Hundred Years!

Long-term planning is an art. But it might take a real scientist to tackle a hundred-year planning horizon! Frank Wilczek is a Nobel Prize winner in theoretical physics, awarded for his work in quantum chromodynamics (quarks, to you and me). He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at M.I.T. Professor Wilczek was invited […]

Growing in the Asia-Pacific Marketplace (Part 3)

This is the final entry of a three-part blog series on Growing in the the Asia-Pacific (APAC) marketplace. In the first entry we discussed the market dynamics for 14 major countries, and presented statistics that indicate that the major share, over 60%, of American exports are sent to developed countries such as Japan, Australia and […]

Growing in the Asia-Pacific Marketplace (Part 2)

In the first entry of this 3-part series we discussed a Go Big strategy versus a Go Smart strategy, and looked at some rather surprising statistics on imports from the U.S. into various countries in the region. Yes, China and India have impressive growth rates and great potential, but if we look at 2009 import […]

Growing in the Asia-Pacific Marketplace

We are all aware that China and India are the two most populous nations on the planet, and  that their economies boast impressive growth rates in the range of 8 to 10% per year. In the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region these two nations alone have about 2/3 of the area’s population. Most of us are also […]