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Bitcoin Cryonics Fund
The bitcoins that I had set aside for a Cryonics contest two years ago (and were unredeemed) are suddenly worth a lot more.
Details: I had added 10 bitcoins to get things started, and there were 4.75 worth of additional donations. These were partially lost when the hosted online wallet that I was using (MyBitcoin) was hacked, but 49% was recovered. As of today, after refunding part of the donated money, it is now worth 5.2675. I will be adding from my personal store to bring it up to an even 5.5. At $140 per coin, the new total is $770.
I've decided to follow the buy-and-hold strategy for at least another year, since it worked so well. I don't have exact details on what I'll do with it, but it will not be converted or spent for at least one year, and will eventually be used for promoting cryonics in some way.
Some things I have in mind if it gets big include:
- subsidizing cryonics dues for low-income people
- covering funding shortfalls for those unable to obtain life insurance due medical problems
- cryonics scholarships to support the development of expertise in neural cryobiology, the dying process, and other neglected areas of concern to cryonics
- hiring a public relations team professionally to repair the image of cryonics
- research to improve viability and reduce dehydration
- empirical validation through scanning the connectome
Contributions can be made to:
1Jdn36JUwvJdr3Qiie4aAseFdcoTsND9Qo
(Updated, since the previous address was attached to my personal wallet on an outdated client, which was causing money to be moved out of it by accident. The above is a brainwallet with a reasonably secure passphrase, generated using Blockchain.info.)
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Comments (67)
My own preference would be to donate to the Brain Preservation prize. Apparently no one has ever actually looked at imaging of how well cryonics procedures preserve brain cells, and the prize is a step towards really evidence-based cryonics. (If Bitcoin gains another order of magnitude or two, it would be even more valuable to see if you could fund a simple experiment like vitrifying & reviving some C. elegans or something to see if they retain learned memories like maze-running.)
Agreed, emphatically, that we need more funding to go for empirical validation of cryonics premises and procedures. However, Aschwin de Wolf has pointed out one reason it is difficult to compare vitrified brains to fixed-embedded, namely dehydration. So I'm somewhat suspicious of the usefulness of the prize at this point in time.
A non-dehydrated brain is not only more likely to survive by information-theoretic criteria, and to e.g. benefit from ice-blockers, it is easier to scan for evidence of survival. So a high priority should be to achieve reduction in dehydration. An earlier discussion with Mike Darwin had me thinking it was a problem with myelination, but currently I am given to understand (per Aschwin de Wolf and Greg Fahy) that it is primarily a matter of the blood-brain barrier. Aschwin also mentioned that there should be evidence in the literature of what ideas to try next, since this is a problem in conventional drug delivery. Yuri Pichigu has developed an approach to opening the BBB, however 21CM found that it did not increase viability in rabbit brain slices. I'm not sure whether that failure is limited to viability or also extends to the morphological characteristics we are interested in here.
Anyway, dehydration and the blood-brain barrier is high in the search order for the next thing to solve. Without it, vitrification is a bit of a shot in the dark. We can speculate that dehydration is okay as long as it is relatively uniform, but it may not be (and of course isn't, in more poorly perfused patients).
And it's done! "Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived C. elegans", Vita-More & Barranco 2015:
OpenWorm could use some money too: http://www.openworm.org/donate.html
That's good too, but I think directly measuring the quality of cryonics as it is currently being practiced and people are being cryopreserved right now is more important than speeding up some work that will get done sooner or later.
Agreed. Although BPF has been really quiet for months now, and I'd recommend them more strongly if they posted about their current status.
That's interesting, but what is their model of a cell like? I assume it's not simulating protein synthesis, for example. There's an awful lot of complexity in even a single-celled organism such as an amoeba that's probably getting swept under the rug here...
Following up on this: I contacted someone at BPF, and they say they have some initial images they will be posting soon.
Great. Some actual funded work will, even if useless, help BPF's credibility.
I think the goal is very worthy, and also interested in promoting cryonics. But why tie it to a particular highly speculative currency? I don't have any advantage as a currency trader.
They both fall under the category of a highly underestimated long bets in my mind. Bitcoin's recent rise in value vindicates my earlier speculative feelings and makes me wish I had listened to them more consistently (not selling out my personal stock, e.g.). So I should be more confident associating it with cryonics than I was before.
If you think of them as simple independent variables, success for both cryonics and bitcoin would appear a less probable conjunction than success for either cryonics or bitcoin. However popularity can drive technology and vice versa in both areas. So given that both are early-adopter material at present anyway, it is plausible that they would complement / benefit from association with each other overall.
Another point is that cryonics encourages long-term thinking about end of life / post-death long term trusts for patient care. If we assume the thing that makes it harder to win in bitcoin is the urge to spend too soon, this gives cryonicists a competitive advantage.
Not what I was trying to get at, sorry for the confusion. My aim is to boost cryonics reputation, and my concern was that e.g. associating it with bitcoin could harm it if bitcoin becomes devalued. (Actually a fairly minor concern, since cryonics already has a lot of early-adopter types.)
Learning from experience. I had 400 bitcoins at one time. Had I held them, they would be worth $40k at $100 each today. This is roughly what I would have predicted at the time, too. I let short-term fluctuations ruin my confidence despite knowing the technology was good.
Yeah. But I have to update based on evidence.
Success of cryonics and success of bitcoin aren't necessarily independent variables. Holding some bitcoins for cryonics could boost the chance of e.g. having assets needed for cryonics research, or having the ability to get people signed up to take advantage of cryonics.
Why is this topic constantly on top?
Does the code automatically put an article to the top when it's edited after saving? Might want to fix that.
(I'd expect something like: set its date in the timeline at the moment it goes from "draft" to "published". Not sure what would be a senslble way to handle putting it back from "published" to "draft"; possibly just ignore that case, and allow the social process to deal appropriately per case with posts that have been bumped. I'm assuming lsparrish was just intending to add a note to the top of the article, not specifically to bump it to the top.)
I think there's the reverse problem with comments: occasionally, I will reply to my own comments instead of editing them because I'm afraid that, since edited comment aren't moved back to the top of New Comments, no-one will read the edit.
There should be a “minor edit” checkbox (for both articles and comments), so that if I'm just tweaking the grammar I can check it and the post stays where it is, and if I'm adding new content I can uncheck it and the post goes back to the top.
Good point. I am thinking the problem stems from Discussion becoming oversaturated -- they move out of New Comments too quickly. Splitting into multiple groups focused on a general topic-area could perhaps alleviate the pressure to make sure that first comment counts / make more comments than needed.
Currently the code puts a post back to the top when it is moved from "draft" to "published". AFAICT there is no way to republish a post that has been moved to draft without bumping it to the top.
The bump was semi-intentional (there were substantial edits for clarity and brevity which the draft stage let me preview, but also I wanted to see more discussion), and happened a total of two times over the past week. "Constantly on top" is a slight exaggeration on Kawoomba's part, as it was not on the recent posts lists for a while yesterday and also was in my drafts for some time thereafter while I made changes. As a long time member, I'm used to seeing posts be visible in discussion for this amount of time. This post is intended to eventually end up in Main, if I work up the confidence for it.
Right. It's getting obnoxious, please don't do that.
Is there some particular harm in bumping posts with substantial edits? Or are you trying to criticize my particular edits as not worthy of the bump?
Edit: Regardless of he reason, sincere apologies to anyone who was annoyed. I do understand the need to keep obnoxious behaviors low because this interferes with the participation fun level for the whole community.
A rule like "don't exploit a bug to bump your own posts, period" is much easier to enforce than if you allow exceptions for a fuzzy category of posts with "substantial edits" - posters might be tempted to use that to attract extra attention, or suspect others of doing that.
More specifically, the "landscape" is already moving enough with back-and-forths between main and discussion, and people renaming their posts; if people start bumping their posts up keeping track of what I read and where there is interesting conversation will be even more of a hassle.
That makes sense, and also matches my prior intuitions as to what it might be. Thank you.
I think part of the problem is that I was operating on a mindset of a smaller / lower traffic group where this kind of promotion is has a relatively minor effect and less power to annoy others (as opposed to drawing them into a conversation that they might actually like).
In a larger userbase like we're currently seeing for Discussion, ensuring fun for all participants is more dependent on these kinds of self-filtering rules/norms being followed more strictly. I've commented in open thread expressing a desire for more subreddits, and will be more careful in Discussion.
I'm interested in sending $485 via paypal in exchange for an equal amount in MTGOX dollars. Anyone who holds bitcoins and wants to cash out a few let me know. I will also accept bitcoins at the going rate. My intention is to assist others in converting their dollars to bitcoins. PM for details.
I'd advise caution to everyone if they attempt to combine paypal and bitcoin -- see here
As an aside, why did bitcoins undergo such a tremendous deflation? IIUC the system is still supposed to be in the planned inflation phase.
As far as I can tell, the recent rise in Bitcoin prices is overwhelmingly due to speculation, and is probably a repeat of the 2011 bubble on a larger scale. If you google "bitcoin bubble", there's lots of info on this.
I'm not a quant, but if you're holding bitcoins, I'd recommend selling off half of them and then rebalancing (keeping the value of your MtGox account 50% bitcoins and 50% dollars) going forward, which basically allows you to make money off of volatility in Bitcoin (while also having the potentially useful side effect of stabilizing its price and making it more viable as an alternative currency). (You can read about the theory behind rebalancing here.)
That was my own view back when it was around $60, but now that it's ~$233, I've been reconsidering (because, well, my predictions were wildly wrong, and that seems like the sort of thing which ought to make you rethink things).
What drivers do we have? Well, there's:
Many of the catastrophic Bitcoin failure modes have ceased to materialize:
real markets can sustainably spike, and it is not an infallible sign of a bubble. One of the arguments long since made in favor of buying and holding stocks, and not attempting to time the market, is that the bulk of your stock market gains over the 20th century comes from the spikes on just a handful of days; I've seen as few as 10 days cited as giving the lion's share of appreciation. (I wonder if this were predictable just from EMH? If all spikes failed to hold, that seems like an easy money-making algorithm: any time there's a spike, short it.)
More generally, if Bitcoin were the Real Deal, we would expect large price increases as people learn of it and it directly gains value from increased use, an ecosystem slowly unlocking the fancy cryptographic features of it like all the kinds of smart contracts it enables, etc. This is the same problem as startups: how do you tell Pets.com from Facebook? In retrospect, one is a fool's bet and the other a genius investment, but we all know how much retrospective assessments are - and ultimately, in 2013, Amazon.com sells plenty of dog food, with 26k hits for
"dog food".It strikes me as being exactly the sort of thing you saw in industrial economies on strict gold standards before central banks. When you have an expanding pool of goods and services (either via industrial expansion, or the market for a type of money increasing) being chased by a money supply that is growing significantly slower, money deflates rapidly, and some people decide to hold onto their money rather than spend it as they think it will increase in value. This effectively shrinks the money pool, making the effect even stronger. Then the speculators come in, and it gets hairy and unpredictable. Eventually the money value collapses, and it starts being used for currency again.
You should EXPECT massive booms and crashes as a new currency with a fixed rate of expansion grows in use (or in speculation-attractiveness) faster than its supply does.
So maybe the bubble is still growing... I don't see how that should make you reconsider much. I wouldn't be super surprised to see bitcoin hit $1000 or greater, but I also think it's likely to lose 50% of its value or more at some point in the next 12 months.
I don't think bitcoin is a bad long-term investment. Maybe not even at the current price, for 1% of your portfolio or whatever. But I do think the recent rise has been overwhelmingly speculation-driven, and a panic is pretty likely. I think Bitcoin's price as a commodity isn't necessarily related to its use as a currency, either. The more volatility in bitcoin, the more merchants (like reddit) will convert out of bitcoin after completing a transaction. We can do this kind of fundamental analysis all we want, but realistically I think speculation has been and will be the overwhelming factor affecting bitcoin prices... and speculation is random and hard to predict, hence the rebalancing recommendation. (Has there been any investigation in to bitcoin transaction volume by speculators vs real usage?)
But it sounds like you're a lot more informed on this issue than I am. I'm also sick right now and therefore less intelligent than usual :P
$133 as of now. (Bitcoincharts.com is down, but I think I saw it at around $260 this morning.)
Mt.Gox is giving a high of $266 and a low of $105 right now, so in that sense it's lost ≥50% of its value already. But that's exaggerated by cherrypicking the high & the low, and the exchange rate's hovering around $170 now. We'll have to wait and see whether it returns below $130ish and stays there.
The longer a 'bubble' goes on without popping, the less it looks like a bubble and the more like a permanent price increase.
The only one I can think of is the Shamir blockchain paper, which since it's using the blockchain, is a rather naive and guaranteed-to-be-wrong approach.
cough
Heh, apparently I have absorbed Sumner's thinking to the extent that I almost wrote his post for him:
Ah, the nay-saying begins. "Oh no, it's only up 5x over the last month and not 10x!" Remember that the predictions I was talking about blowing were that it would peak in the $30s or $40s; I and and anyone like me was wrong, still are wrong, a fall to 'just' $100 does not make me feel much better about having blown them, and I will still have learned that there are enough people willing to buy into Bitcoin for any reason that its exchange rate can be pushed all the way to $260.
More generally, just as a large price increase does not prove that Bitcoin will ultimately not be a bubble and will go to $100k, a large price decrease does not prove that Bitcoin will ultimately be a bubble and go to $0. We of all people should know to not apply double standards and hindsight bias.
What kind of smart contracts does it enable?
The single best resource seems to be https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts but it only covers a fraction of the possibilities; for example, I corresponded with Hearn about timestamping for time-lock crypto but that hasn't been added.
Excellent! I had no idea the bitchain included all those extra fields. So much potential!
Yeah; people don't realize how Bitcoin can do so much. It's not (just) sending some irreversible transactions around, as useful as it is to replace Paypal/WU. It's like every financial cryptographic construct ever got mashed up in an academic paper, except it's not a paper, it's a real system in use worldwide and the constructs can be actually used by real people for real things. Of course none of them are easy to use, many aren't even enabled - but I think the situation is like the early Linux kernel: it's a rare geek who understands why you would want to hack on a kernel, a rarer techie who can compile kernels and mess with kernel settings, and an even rarer techie who can write a kernel module to do something, but the potential and power are there.
You have just created "a rare geek who understands why you would want to hack on a kernel". These features are screaming out to be used and may facilitate some of the projects that I have in mind (including some plans for small-scale crowdfunded research).
Do you have any other resources on bitcoin to recommend? In particular I a resource that lists definitively which features are enabled and ready to use in current clients? (I hate accidentally building or planning things that rely on features not yet in the mainstream software. It feels like crippling myself when I try to backport.)
No idea. I have a vague understanding that colored coins are a work in progress and may be added at some point in 2013, but I've never seen anyone lay out a list of the scripting language elements with the enabled and disabled ones specified. Since this is such an obscure area of Bitcoin, you probably will have to read the source to find out.
Time for me to do an expected value calculation. Is it worth becoming an expert on bitcoin? Not at all implausible. Apart from the intrinsic value of personal interest there seem to be things that the world needs that bitcoin could help with (an actual prediction market that doesn't suck for example). Some things that the world needs it is possible to create ways to be paid for doing. It aligns well with my aptitudes.
A very tempting rabbit hole to jump down.
I have been looking into the protocol for how this works. It doesn't require anything additional to be added (to the bitcoin daemon). To be practical it does require that clients are made that process them conveniently, this is what is the work in progress and does seem to be at the 'usable in a stable form some time this year' point.
The above distinction matters to me because it influence whether it is something I can just use if I find customers who want it and I am willing to do some coding to facilitate it versus features that require creation of a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal then the politically influence of a miners to start adopting it. For example zerocoin (the solution to anonymity and privacy) would require huge political advocacy to get into play in the existing bitcoin currency.
Indeed, my research has failed to turn up such a document too. The information that is out there is also significantly out of date unless pieced together rather carefully. A summary of the availability of the features that are of interest. I am reasonably confident in these findings but not certain. (90% confidence.)
Done. Now I'll have to read the source even more to work out how to make clients that use the (available) features to serve my purposes.
On a related note do you have any thoughts on ripple? It seems to offer huge potential convenience if 'distributed payment processing', which could work well to enable bitcoin to be easily spent and traded. From what I can tell their business model is based on making an essentially free, incredibly convenient service and if it takes off it will produce value in their own currency of which they will (allegedly) be distributing 80% for free. I don't precisely understand how it magically operates as a distributed currency exchange and payment processor but it seems plausible (if enough people want it).
Reading about it right now, I would analogize it to an automated barter system, the hawala money transmission system, pre-modern banking's system of drafts and correspondents like the Medici Bank, and Szabo's bitgold minting.
If I'm understanding the wiki documentation right, you can basically think of Ripple as a Bitcoin in which everyone can issue as many bitcoins as they want but each user produces a different kind of bitcoin. The only reason anyone is willing to hold a wedrifid-coin is because they know you in real life and expect you to pay up, or the reason someone is willing to hold gwern-coins is because I have in the past upheld my agreements to, say, order something off Amazon.com for them. I might decide to accept wedrifid-coins and now the wedrifid-coin holders have the option to either shake you down in real life or buy something off Amazon via me; and if someone else decided to accept gwern-coins, a holder of wedrifid-coins could convert to gwern-coins and then convert to someoneelse-coins.... Automated barter of personal IOUs, almost - like those circles you hear of involving scores of people in which A gives something to B, B gives something to C, and so on to Z who gives A what A really wanted (most famously used in kidney transplants; I need a transplant, but my brother is not compatible with me, so he gives his kidney to B, and B's son gives a kidney to C, and C's father gives me a compatible kidney).
Since you're deciding whose coins to accept directly or transitively, Ripple seems to pass the security buck to your decision there. This obviously makes Ripple's job much much easier. Since you'll be deciding basically on social or extra-network factors, Ripple also doesn't bother with any worries about anonymity. (Their list of features re mining, if I'm understanding the architecture right, less than impressive in this light.)
There's also a centralized aspect which is nasty and probably part of how they plan to monetize it.
So yeah, interesting. I don't feel compelled to trade in my one bitcoin for any Ripple stuff, though.
I think it operates pretty much the same way a PGP web of trust operates. You specify a few public keys who you trust, and you can bootstrap from there.
So (I assume) the way it can operate as a distributed currency exchange is if there is someone with Yen out there and someone with USD out there and either Yen-guy or USD-guy trust each other directly or their is a web of trust between them. So RandomJoe can sell Yen-guy coins for stuff and buy USD-coins then USD guy will give actual cash to him.
I wonder if a form of coin-locking could be used to create simulated versions of other currencies. Depending on the demand and level of trust in the given currency, a given bitcoin sum could be locked in such a way that it gets automatically distributed to all holders at some future point (if they don't choose to hold onto the simulated currency instead) in proportion to how much they have. The choice to hold or drop the simulated currency would be a way of measuring its value against the bitcoin.
I can think of various ways to facilitate this using the techniques I am considering (or considered and discarded) for the creation of a distributed prediction market. The details of the precise implementation would depend on precisely what your goal was. I can't fully determine what you are aiming at from what you have said so far? More detail? A use case?
What I have in mind is something a little bit like the zerocoin proposal, in the respect that it's an alternate coin which can be translated to Bitcoin and back as part of how the system works.
But instead of being fixed with respect to the bitcoin it would increase or decrease in relative value in response to market signals. There would be an exchange rate determined by dividing the number of spendable units of alternate currency against the number of bitcoins locked behind it.
So what you need is a series of rules for controlling that number that tend towards economic stability. Which is itself kind of tricky. I had thought locking the coins by a time-lock could do it, but I haven't thought of a way to base an exchange rate on that. Empirical work with simulator or a smart math person with a whiteboard might turn up something.
The following uses incentives to accomplish something similar-in-principle:
Alice creates 100 dollarcoins at a cost of 1 bitcoin. She transfers 1 to Bob, he can turn it into 0.01 bitcoin.
The dollarcoin has a specification that includes things like interest payments. If Bob waits 30 days after receiving a dollarcoin he gets 1% of its nominal bitcoin value in interest. He gets another 1% payment 30 days later, and so forth. But if he spends it right away or converts it to bitcoin there are no payments.
Claire decides to use the dollarcoin specification to mint some dollarcoins. She has to pay a 1% minting fee, so 1.01 bitcoins to make 100 dollarcoins. The backing rate becomes 200 dollarcoins to 2.01 bitcoins.
Thus the more dollarcoins get minted the more valuable/highly backed they are, initially. If people spend them quickly, or convert them to bitcoin quickly without collecting interest, they continue to grow in bitcoin value. On the other hand if people hold onto them over time, they become less valuable as the savers get paid for keeping them.
Criticisms: It's complicated, and the numbers for interest rates and minting fees are pulled out of thin air. Presumably there's some range that works well, and could be tested by implementing multiple currency specifications side by side.
Most mined coins never hit the open market. Many miners are only recouping equipment and electricity costs and holding the rest.
The market is still very thin, though thickening a bit in the last couple weeks.
This is not an explanation; bitcoins are fungible. Everything except transaction volume would look identical if all the miners sold off every coin they made and instead a different group bought up all those coins; you need to explain why there are so many people willing to hold bitcoins. Whether those people going long on Bitcoin happen to have mining rigs or not is irrelevant.
Gresham etc. If you could magically email gold securely tomorrow I would expect a frenzy of buying that as well.
Gresham's law is for when people are required to accept the 'bad' and 'good' money equally; then people will hoard the good money and transact exclusively in bad. When the coercive requirement is not satisfied, one ought to expect good money to drive out bad, or else they will float related to the risk, ease of acquiring it, etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law#Reverse_of_Gresham.27s_Law_.28Thiers.27_Law.29
(And if people are worried about the euro, they can hold other currencies like the deflating yen; if they are worried about dollars, they can hold euros etc)
Looks like a deflationary spiral
Not the right term for what's happening. Deflationary spiral refers to low demand reducing prices, which reduces production, which reduces the employment rate/average wage, which reduces demand. The bitcoin economy is not large enough for this to be the case. Rather, it appears to be a speculative bubble, where people predict the price will go up, so more people buy it, and so the price goes up, etc. Then enough people at once go "this is as far as the train's going" and everybody panics and tries to sell and the price crashes.
Since bitcoin is a currency experiencing deflation due to a cyclic process, "deflationary spiral" would sort of make sense if it didn't already refer to another specific phenomenon.