Of all the table games at casinos, I’ve always had a preference for blackjack — in particular because if you play disciplined basic strategy and count cards and the casino doesn’t use a card shuffling machine but deals from a 6-deck shoe (plus another bunch of rules which I won’t go into detail with), you can get the odds to within 48.5% in favor of the player — meaning the house has its odds whittled down to 1.5% over a disciplined player.
No doubt, retail disruption is increasing its pace in this digital world. Artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT) and augmented reality (AR) are reshaping the retail sector to a whole new level, offering personalized content to customers, enriching their experience, and fulfilling their demands significantly.
Governments are the biggest investors in developing offensive cyber capabilities and collecting technical exploits. Such digital arsenals are an asset but also a potential liability. Security and protection is crucial to these highly transferable and reusable resources. Strategic planning and steps must be taken to avoid or minimize unintended consequences against government services, allies, businesses, and individuals.
From healthcare to remote working, augmented reality (AR) use-cases are adding a new dimension to the fourth industrial revolution.
Luminaries of the cryptosphere such as Thomas Lee of Fundstrat, a research firm, liken Bitcoin to gold, as a potential store of value and a hedge (perhaps) against inflation. So far though, there is less obvious evidence of that. At the time of writing, Bitcoin is again pushing up against the US$4,000 level, hovering below this resistance, trading within the US$3,900 band as the world hurtles into 2019. Yet hedge funds are pouring into gold, in anticipation for greater volatility and turbulence in global markets in 2019. Now that technology stocks have fallen out of fashion and hedge funds as a whole have underperformed indexes in 2018, will Bitcoin be seen as a flight to safety?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to rule the corporate world within a few years. Organisations that are willing to invest heavily on AI should be aware about the dark side of the technology.
Throughout 2018, Bitcoin’s price has slowly fallen from the highs near $20,000 to roughly $4000 today. Opposite this massive decrease in price, though, is the hash rate on the Bitcoin network: it has mainly gone up in 2018, starting the year averaging less than 15 exahashes per second, now averaging in the 30-40 exahash range, with a peak in November of ~60 exahashes. An exahash? That's a billion gigahashes per second, or a billion billion -- that's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 -- hashes per second. That's a lot of hashes.