You’re witnessing what happens when markets dry-up as shown here with bitcoin (see chart below). I've been warning readers about what George Gilder calls the "cryptocosm." (Read Parts I, II and III). If you have been hitching your wagon to cryptocurrencies, you might have been enduring a rude awakening this week. Steven Russolillo, writing at The Wall Street Journal, calls it bitcoin's "Week from Hell." He explains Now, another worry has emerged: Cryptocurrency miners, the outfits that solve complex equations to generate new digital coins, seem to be losing interest. The amount of … [Read more...]

You instinctively know something evil is going on when a company’s motto is “Don’t be Evil.” As we learned in parts I and II when Google offers you “free” services (Gmail for example)—you’re the product. Will Google be able to compete against a cryptocosm several orders of magnitude larger than it could ever become? At the heart of the matter is big data. Googlers feel big data has all the answers—but big data is no match for human touch and emotional intelligence. Would you trust software to drive your family today? At the heart of self-driving cars is a battle of software (Google) vs. … [Read more...]

What we learned in Part I is there will be Life After Google as explained in futurist George Gilder’s book by the same name. Because when we use Google’s products for free, you and I give them a free pass to do what they will with our data. Who are we to complain if Google mishandles security of our data? “You fools it was free,” they counter. But what if there’s a universe, a cryptocosm, that provides search on a much larger scale where we own our data through a blockchain? Imagine musicians, artists, and other creators whose work has been essentially stolen by the “everything is free” … [Read more...]