The previous articles in this series have been very abstract, working towards understanding cryptocurrencies as thermodynamics processes. Which is a nice way to think, but the thing about cryptocurrencies is that people want to make money out of them, so how can that understanding be converted into a practical project that yields a good return on investment?

This is going to require thinking and it helps if you’ve studied physics. But the TL; DR; is

1. We can find useful parallels between basic physical processes and blockchains which guide us towards developing a system for massive scale.
2. Other projects are creeping…

This is a reprise of a presentation I did for the 2016 Towards a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson, run by the University of Arizona Center for Consciousness Studies

This is easy to work out. Here’s the TL;DR;-

1. Driving is a social experience and to do it properly requires social intelligence. We use our social awareness all the time when we’re driving.
2. Therefore self-driving cars will have to have AI that can understand social context and work out the intentions and motivations of other drivers.
3. That will require deep neural networks. But..
4. Neural networks can hallucinate and see things…

In the first article in this series I pointed out that Schrodinger’s observation that living things ‘drink negative entropy’ from the environment to maintain internal order is relevant to blockchains. Living things use a system similar to Proof of Work to maintain records and transcribe records. See Thermodynamics of Blockchain and Thermodynamics of Life . I ended with a question, it’s obvious that Proof of Work consensus is a thermodynamic process, there’s lots of heat, but what role does thermodynamics play in of Proof of Stake (PoS) and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus based cryptocurrencies? Not only that but…

I was fascinated to learn that ribosomes inside all living cells rely on something very similar to blockchain proof of work when they build proteins from RNA code. They expend energy to find the right block of code that will match the next codon in the RNA so they get the right amino-acid in place to extend the growing protein chain. Which is analogous to cryptocurrency mining where energy is expended to find the sequence of bits, the nonce, which matches some criterion so the growing blockchain can be extended.

Context

This is the first of a series of articles examining…