Polygon Door

https://the-incredible-machine.com/fairbi ke.html
An interesting group of industrial designers working between The Internet of Things and Blockchain. I'm really intrigued by the idea of things/objects owning themselves..paying for their own upkeep...like the AI hotels in Altered Carbon..

http://www.artmatr.co/.
An interesting digital painting workshop/lab with some high profile tech supporters...

There is something really trite in arguing screen time should be creative....as if you can stipulate that kids can only use Scratch (an MIT sponsored project) or some alternative when they are on a device that serves YouTube and Instagram...'I was just checking how to...'. - there is always an excuse for a distraction and the best distractions are, of course, completely legitimate.
There is also an odd, patronising, judgement call in determining what activity is sanctioned ...
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The mainstream media seems to think the biggest concern with blockchain is the value of Bitcoin or ether or lack of it.
However one of the biggest problems with blockchain technology is it's massive energy consumption.
Each Bitcoin transaction uses enough power to supply 11+ average U.S homes with power for a day.
... To give you a sense of scale there were nearly 300,000 transactions in the last 24 hours (https://blockchain.info/charts)
This is mainly due to the the 'proof of work' system that Bitcoin employs to incentivise distribution and processing of each new block in the chain.
Of course all our data processing is using massive amounts of electricity. Google uses as much electricity as San Francisco in a year...but Google offsets its use by buying renewables that offset 100% of its energy consumption. https://www.google.com.au/…/google-rene wable-energy-wind-so…
It's interesting to think through what's going on here. Where there is no central gaurantor of trust there is also noone to hold to account..(in this case for energy consumption)...something that irks me no end to admit...
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-c onsumption
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Great to see this terrific project get funded on Kickstarter..

Interesting...but I wonder if X would support the development of a decentralised network -the thing we desperately need in a world where a couple big corporations have such unfettered control over the flow of information and communication? X need not find the next Google..but rather work to make Google obsolete.

And while we are mining the nettime archive this discussion re cryptocurrency and it's histories is packed full of fascinating context .... The economic and political theories that shaped and motivated the early cypherpunk and cryptocurrency lists (out of which Bitcoin was born). It's a long discussion..with lots of interesting information ....I know noone has time to read anymore...but...
https://nettime.org/Lists-Arch…/nettime -l-1712/msg00061.html

https://nettime.org/Lists-Arch…/nettime -l-1801/msg00049.html
Bruce Sterling sets a cat among the grumpy old men with some cold hard truths for a strangely invigorated nettime mailing list - some great opinion re: social media critique, network activism, and the irrelevance of the academy here.

This looks like fun..

Beautifully crafted popup books that *are* what they *describe*...

Fascinating to listen to the young founder of Ethereum ... who, it turns out, is both articulate and insightful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCQP02LHj GY

Hello World on Ethereum Blockchain
http://polygondoor.com.au/hello-world-on- ethereum-blockcha…/
Anyone attempting to learn and explore the Ethereum blockchain will quickly come across some difficult hurdles. The first of these is, of course, the difficulty inherent in getting one’s head around the paradigm shift that is blockchain technology. The second is that the software implementation is rather complex and the third is that the documentation is poor and constantly lags be...hind the latest developments.
This article is designed to help newcomers who wish to dig past the basic concepts, and get their hands dirty by implementing some very simple distributed applications on Ethereum. We have trawled through various tutorials to try and validate which combination of development tools is the best to use in exploring and testing Ethereum distributed applications.
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I love the understated elegance and subtle resonance of these works... Get along and see them at The Egg & Dart.

Radical blockchaining...

An update after running the coinhive miner for 24hours on the CPU power of users who visit the Creative Applications site.
The miner has generated 30 us cents - equivalent to a base level of Google Adsense revenue and providing a viable alternative to their user targeted advertising.
There is an interesting dynamic going on here. Mainstream news has attached the Pirate Bay Torrent Site for running coinhive without declaring it. Creative Applications are openly declaring the ...experiment as a means of you paying directly- rather than via your attention to advertising from unrelated third parties.
The interesting thing is that we are always paying when looking at a site, we are always using resources. The way we pay for that site, for those resources - knowingly or otherwise - has more far reaching cultural implications than we imagine as we go about our daily lives.
Better to be charged a cost directly and to pay knowingly than be blindly implicated as a dumb component in a bigger machine.
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Coinhive is a JavaScript miner for the monero cryptocurrency. When you visit a website that has embedded the coinhive script your CPU will be used to mine coin. The site gets a share in the coins mined. Creative Applications Net - one of my long-term favourite curators of computational art are hoping they can eventually remove advertising from their site..but this is another strange loop as you pay for sites you visit by the CPU cycles they spend.