Menu

Blockchain

@HPCpodcast-12: Framework for Top-10 Tech Trends

Web3, IoT/Edge, AI, HPC, Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, GPUs and Quantum, Cyber Risk, 5G, and BioTech represent the top-10 tech trends. Why are there so many big technology trends right now? Doug and Shahin discuss a framework to help make sense of why these trends point to important changes, how these trends are related, and what they mean individually and together.

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: A New Asset Class

A new asset class has been born. Sift through the posts on your social media and you will find that just a few years ago, it was big news that Bitcoin had broken $1000. That was a big deal because it was the third time Bitcoin was priced more than $1k. Digital money was starting […]

Cryptocurrency State of the Market and Short History

What’s behind Bitcoin’s recent price hike? Shahin Khan and Steve Perrenod look at the Cryptocurrency market and its history over the past decade. They run through and explain the major new concepts that were introduced and take stock of their progress.

Fifth Edition of CryptoSuper500 List Shows Annual Economic Value Hits New High

Menlo Park, Calif. – Nov. 13, 2020 — OrionX Research today unveiled the fifth edition of the CryptoSuper500 list. The report highlights the rapidly growing hashrate among the top six coins mined with Proof of Work consensus algorithms. In crypto mining, hashes are the metric that parallels floating point operations (flops) in the supercomputing world. Cryptocurrencies have reached Exascale class supercomputing, with a hash rate of around 115 ExaHashes per second just for Bitcoin.

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

CryptoSuper 500 – Keeping Track of the Supercomputers that Mine Money

Keeping Track of the Supercomputers that Mine Money

Supercomputers, which do the heavy lifting for AI, science, and engineering, are increasingly also safeguarding digital money. While the metric for traditional supercomputers is Petaflops or Exaflops (floating point operations per second), the figure of merit for CryptoSuper is Petahashes per second or Exahashes per second.
-By Stephen Perrenod & Shahin Khan

Fourth CryptoSuper 500 List: First After Bitcoin Halving

China has most of the top 50 cryptocurrency supercomputer-class mining pools. In many ways, CryptoSuper 500 and similar lists are a barometer of important national capabilities. As we look more deeply at the impact of technology on policy decisions at the national and global levels, we will incorporate the lessons from all such capability lists.

Fourth Edition of CryptoSuper500 List Shows Effects of Bitcoin Halving

Menlo Park, CA – June 23, 2020 –  OrionX Research today released the fourth edition of the CryptoSuper500 list, the first after the “Bitcoin Halving” that took place in May 2020. The list tracks supercomputers used for cryptocurrency mining, a computationally intensive decentralized consensus process that allows cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum to operate without the need for a central trusted authority. The CryptoSuper500 list was inspired by the well-known TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

What is 5G and Why is it a Big Deal?

Probably one of the best discussions anywhere about what 5G is and why it is a big deal. Shahin Khan and guest Walt Maclay, president of Voler Systems go over what 5G technology promises: speed, low latency, high density in terms of number of devices per square kilometer, better precision for positioning and location tracking, low power, high coverage, and significant back-end efficiencies, including new classes of services.

The Top-5 Technologies All Organizations Must Understand

30 minutes to cover the basics and high level issues related to the technologies that will drive the digital infrastructure of the future enterprise. These include IoT, 5G, HPC, AI, Blockchain (including cryptocurrencies and smart contracts), and Quantum Computing.

Crypto Exchange and Internet of Value

Digital technologies are disrupting the financial services industry in many small and big ways and companies starting to look like banks. Nikolaj Vestorp, co-founder of MarketKoin and the OrionX team discuss what is changing in financial markets. MarketKoin started in Indonesia which gives it a truly global perspective.

Truth, Trust, and Deepfakes

Looking at one of the most important topics of our time, and especially relevant in an election year, we outline the challenges and technologies that you can use towards trusted data. This is a summary of research and a conversation with our insightful guest, Dave Maher, CTO of Intertrust.

Digital Transformation (DX): Opportunity or Threat?

Digital Transformation (DX) is not just another slogan or IT upgrade, but a profound shift in what your customers want or will want, and what you have to do to deliver. It is a shift in your business model. Read about the many dimensions of DX and how OrionX can help you make it actionable.

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 […]

HPC and AI on Wall Street: Panel Discussion on Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies

HPC and AI on Wall Street Conference At the recent HPC and AI on Wall Street conference, I moderated a panel on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain. Panelists included Ryan Quick of Providentia Worldwide, Asha Dakshi of AlphaPoint, Eric Simone of ClearBlade, and Dan Simerman of the IOTA Foundation. Thanks to Jem Pagan of BluSky Consulting who […]

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. […]

CryptoSuper500, 2nd Edition

What is new with the most powerful crypto mining pools? Thanks to the efforts of my colleague Dr. Stephen Perrenod, OrionX launched a new CryptoSuper500 list last November, coinciding with the eagerly awaited TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputers. The TOP500 has spawned variations that look at different workloads and attributes, for example, the Green500, […]

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 […]

CryptoSuper500: the most powerful cryptocurrency mining pools

Cryptocurrency mining pools have become larger. A new list, CryptoSuper500 tracks them according to economical value, computational power, and by extension, energy use. If you are following my colleague Dr. Stephen Perrenod‘s blogs and reports, you know that he, and the rest of us at OrionX, aim to keep on top of business, technology, and […]

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. […]

OrionX Releases New Blockchain Constellation™ Research Paper

I am very pleased and excited to announce the release of the newest paper in our Constellation™ series about blockchain/cryptocurrency technologies: “Cryptocurrency Outlook: More Chasm Crossing.” This is a comprehensive look at this emerging and important technology, written by my colleague Dr. Stephen Perrenod who has been working with cryptocurrencies for several years and has focused […]

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 […]

Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain, and Bitcoin, part 3

Stephen Perrenod joins Shahin and Dan to make sense of Cryptocurrency/Blockchain/Bitcoin. They complete the discussion of a transaction’s journey, which they started in the last episode, and answer the common question: “can I separate Blockchain from Bitcoin?” This is the 3rd and final episode of a series that focuses on a deeper discussion of the […]

Secure IoT is the superset trend in tech, the ultimate hashtag soup, here’s why

There are more Things than anything else! And they’re going online in droves, adding capability but also vulnerability, and making the Secure Internet of Things (IoT), the super set of the technology trends. Secure IoT is the place with the most interdisciplinary, and therefore, the most difficult challenges. If you believe, as you should, that […]

Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain, and Bitcoin, part 2

We go through a transaction’s journey, explaining hash functions and public key cryptography along the way. The OrionX TeamOrionX is a team of industry analysts, marketing executives, and demand generation experts. With a stellar reputation in Silicon Valley, OrionX is known for its trusted counsel, command of market forces, technical depth, and original content. www.OrionX.net

Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain, and Bitcoin, part 1

Stephen Perrenod joins Shahin and Dan to make sense of Cryptocurrency/Blockchain/Bitcoin. In this first installment, they start at the beginning: the original Satoshi Nakamoto paper that started it all.

New podcast for big ideas in tech

Here at OrionX.net, our research agenda is driven by the latest developments in technology. We are also fortunate to work with many tech leaders in nearly every part of the “stack”, from chips to apps, who are driving the development of such technologies. In recent years, we have had projects in Cryptocurrencies, IoT, AI, Cybersecurity, […]

Top-10 Data Center Predictions for 2017

A variation of this article was originally published in The Register, “Wow, what an incredible 12 months: 2017’s data center year in review”, Feb 6, 2017. The data center market is hot, especially now that we are getting a raft of new stuff, from promising non-Intel chips and system architectures to power and cooling optimizations […]

Research from OrionX

Today, we are announcing the OrionX Constellation™ research framework as part of our strategy services. Paraphrasing what I wrote in my last blog when we launched 8 packaged solutions: One way to see OrionX is as a partner that can help you with content, context, and dissemination. OrionX Strategy can create the right content because […]

OrionX 2016 Technology Issues and Predictions

Here at OrionX.net, we are fortunate to work with tech leaders across several industries and geographies, serving markets in Mobile, Social, Cloud, and Big Data (including Analytics, Cognitive Computing, IoT, Machine Learning, Semantic Web, etc.), and focused on pretty much every part of the “stack”, from chips to apps and everything in between. Doing this […]