All Things Techie With Huge, Unstructured, Intuitive Leaps

Aluminum Crypto and Dick-Pics -Intriguing Futuristic Offbeat Ideas That Just Might Work


ArmourExpo 2017, held on Seven Mile Beach in the Cayman Islands is in the bag for another year. Usually when I go to conventions, I get bored and turned off, because at those kinds of events, there are people who attend, that think that they know everything and are a major annoyance to us who do. But this time it was different.

We had great, engaging, imaginative speakers. At 90% of the conventions that I attend, we have people pretending to be relevant speakers while the audience is pretending to listen (instead of looking at the mobile phones, playing games and texting their friends). I saw one woman in the audience who I think is lovely and talented, go to her mobile phone during speeches, and the cynic in me thought the worst.

However, when I looked at her Twitter feed later, I found out that she was tweeting the most cogent thoughts presented by the speakers. I was highly flattered to see that she had tweeted my definition of blockchain, which was : "Solving problems you didn't know you had with technology that you don't understand." Later, at the podium, she crushed her presentation on data privacy.

There were two speakers who excited my imagination for different reasons. They were respectively Arthur Keleti who flew in from Hungary to attend, and Dr. Richard Rahn, the noted economist who is no stranger to the Cayman Islands, having served for six years on the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority. Dr. Rahn is the one with eye patch in the header photo.

Let's take Dr. Richard Rahn first. He is an American economist who writes for The Washington Times. He was the Vice President & Chief Economist of the United States Chamber of Commerce during the Reagan Administration. A senior fellow of the Cato Institute and the Discovery Institute, Rahn received his M.B.A. from Florida State University, his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and an honorary Doctor of Laws from Pepperdine University. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, National Review, and various international publications. He served on the Board of Directors of the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority. Rahn is chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth, and a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, sits on the boards of numerous think-tanks and advocacy groups, and has testified on economic issues before the U.S. Congress over seventy-five times. Rahn is also an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of World Politics.

Dr. Rahn is a proponent of supply-side economics, small government and a conservative thinker. He was the closing speaker of the expo. He is the author of the book (available on Amazon) "The End of Money and the Struggle For Financial Privacy". This book, which was published in 1999, makes a startling prediction for crypto and digital currencies which have come to fruition. I am a Black Swan futurist (you can predict very little and surprises are always around the corner) and I deeply respect someone who can make such a startling prediction way ahead of the curve.

Dr. Rahn believes that Bitcoin will be a failure as a digital currency because it is nothingness -- just like a turd at the side of the road with the crap kicked out of it (my analogy). He believes that we need a crypto-currency backed by something. Fiat currency is backed by valuable gold, or if the gold standard is dropped, then on the economic output of a country. Dr. Rahn is in the midst of creating a crypto-currency back by something cheap, and his answer is aluminum. He said that there were two kinds of aluminum in play. The first was the aluminum ore like bauxite and the second type was recycled aluminum which was cheaper to process by far, than bauxite.

Because of time constraints, Dr. Rahn was allowed to answer only three questions and I got two out the three in. My first was trying to understand whether he intended to have a supply of recycled aluminum locked in a vault to back his currency, and there would be only currency issued on what was in store. He answered that his currency would be backed by both refined and unrefined aluminum. My supplementary question, in an attempt to get answers, was whether he intended to issue crypto-currency on a finite supply of aluminum or on the total global supply. His answer was that he was basing his crypto-currency on the global supply, which left me more puzzled than ever because aluminum is the most abundant metal in the crust of the earth. It forms about 8.23% of the earth's crust. Now mind you, it takes a lot of energy to refine, and that could be the value that backs Dr. Rahn's idea.

My first thought was to dismiss the idea as a cockamamie one. But I kept going back to the thought that this man accurately predicted crypto-currency which was a difficult thing to do back in 1999, so it is obvious that he has impressive mental machinery in spite of his arch-conservative views on such topics as healthcare (yes I googled them and they are out of scope for this article). So .. oooooooo ... oooo, my conclusion is that this idea is so non-intuitive, that it might actually work. Dr. Rahn announced that he is patenting and otherwise protecting his intellectual property. I look forward to seeing a more detail explanation of his ideas.

And then we have Arthur Keleti with whom I resonated with on a personal level. Arthur was a keynote speaker. Let me quote from his bio. "Arthur Keleti is one of the world's leading experts on cyber security. He began his career in the banking sector at MKB Bank, after which he joined EasyCall, then Eurohivo. He soon became the communications and new business development director at ICON, after which he joined KFKI. Today, He is the IT Security Strategist of T-Systems Hungary, where he has worked since 1999. He founded and organizes the IT Security Day Conference (ITBN), and he has a broad view and understanding of the global IT Security market, which he actively helps to grow and develop. He’s particularly interested in the ever changing world of corporate and private security issues, keeping a watchful eye on the upcoming events of our near future, and its sometimes frightening and alienating tendencies. Reading about his experiences and vision can help prepare us to face the approaching tide of change more adequately equipped for survival."

Arthur has an interesting perspective on a person's data. They are secrets that belong to the person. He went into the anatomy of secrets as well as the semantics and categorically proved the most closely held secret of all men that deserves the utmost of secrecy and security, is a dick-pic or a picture of their penis (Anthony Weiner is exception that proves the rule).

Arthur was gracious enough to gift me a signed copy of his book "The Imperfect Secret" which is available on Amazon. I haven't finished reading the book yet, but the pages that I have already marked, are heavily annotated in the margins (with pen) where he has inflamed and inspired my imagination. Arthur (and Dr. Rahn) do not think conventionally, and that is a trait that I admire because of the inherent creativity in the DNA of their thoughts.

Arthur contends that humans are not equipped to handle our secrets and our privacy. His startling conclusion is that our privacy should be safeguarded by artificial intelligence and machines. They have the processing power without the bias and faults of humans to be our privacy bastions that dole out our secrets on an as-needed basis. This so inspired me, that in my spare time, I am trying to figure out a primordial AI machine to do this. So far I am planning the architecture, and I think that it may have a tie-in with blockchain. This is a wonderful time to be alive in the timeline of our technology and I am chuffed to be a part this scene.

As I make progress and learn more of these ideas, I will document them in this space.

So all in all, ArmourExpo 2017 in the Cayman Islands was a magnificent forum for the exchange of information and ideas, and to my mind, it is a can't-afford-to-miss exposition. You need to go in 2018, if not for the insights, then for the incredible tropical sunsets on Seven Mile Beach.



No comments:

Post a Comment