CoinDesk Podcast Network

On Long Reads Sunday, a reading of a John Street Capital piece on the realities of a market characterized by zero-bound interest rates.

This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Nexo.io and Elliptic.

On this week’s Long Reads Sunday, NLW reads: “Capital Allocation & Risk Asset Ramifications in a 0% Interest Rate World”

The piece examines how different asset classes – from stocks to bonds to bitcoin and beyond – fare in the context of a world where the Federal Reserve is determined to keep interest rates at or near zero for years to come.

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On this “Speaking of Bitcoin” episode, join hosts Adam B. Levine, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy, and Jonathan Mohan for a look at the past, present and future of global reserve currencies

This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Nexo.io and Elliptic

In the beginning (way back in 2009) there was the global reserve currency (U.S. dollars,) national currencies like the Japanese Yen, alternative currencies like Ithaca hours and just one cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.

But what a difference a decade can make, today there are thousands of cryptocurrencies, many created by enthusiasts who have ideas on how to make something even better than bitcoin, but also currencies that use some of the technology that makes Bitcoin so powerful, but which pairs it with the authority of a national government, like the Digital Yuan in China, the Digital Euro out of Brussels, or even a globe-spanning corporation with billions of customers like the Libra, backed by Facebook.

In this emerging picture, is bitcoin still interesting? First attempts at new technologies, even when successful at introducing a powerful new idea, are often not the ones which eventually succeeds in changing everything. And importantly, as the world changes and we get closer to something other than the dollar standard, where does bitcoin fit?

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On the weekly recap, NLW looks at growth in institutional investment, big interest among the G20 in CBDCs and a new National Security Council report.

This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Nexo.io and Elliptic.

On this edition of The Breakdown weekly recap, NLW looks at:

This week on The Breakdown:

Monday | How Investors Are Trading the Election

Tuesday | The IMF, G20 and BIS Gear Up for the Central Bank Digital Currency Era

Wednesday | A $10B Firm Makes Bitcoin Its Primary Treasury Asset

Thursday | Is Crypto Converging With Public Markets?

Friday | RAC on the First Truly Free Markets for Music and Culture

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Grammy-winning recording artist RAC explores the business of music and how crypto experiments could shift the balance of power.

This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Nexo.io and Elliptic.

Today’s Breakdown is a conversation with Andre Anjos – aka RAC, a Grammy Award-winning recording artist and music entrepreneur. He and NLW discuss:

Find our guest online:

Twitter: @RAC

Web: rac.fm

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Between bitcoin treasury holdings growing and crypto-focused SPACs, private crypto markets and public equities markets are closer than ever.

This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Nexo.io and Elliptic.

Today on the Brief:

Our main discussion focuses on the convergence of the crypto and public markets. NLW looks at:

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Stone Ridge Holdings Group announces $50 million in new funding for its digital asset subsidiary as well as significant BTC treasury holdings.

This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Nexo.io and Elliptic.

Today on the Brief: 

Our main discussion: Stone Ridge Holdings Group discloses $114 million in bitcoin treasury assets. 

NLW digs into what Stone Ridge is, why it spun off New York Digital Investments Group (NYDIG) and how the company has quietly built itself into a serious player in the institutional crypto asset space.

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New reports on digital currency design principles and regulatory standards show just how quickly the world’s bankers are moving.

This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Nexo.io and Elliptic.

Today on the Brief:

Our main discussion: The world’s central banks are moving quickly on digital currencies. NLW looks at a slew of recent news showing how much of a priority CBDCs are becoming:

One need only look at the increasingly speedy rollout of China’s DCEP to understand why this has become a major priority for central banks everywhere. 

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As the U.S. presidential election gets closer, market “predictions” are showing up in stocks from energy to private prisons. 

This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Nexo.io and Elliptic.

Today on the Brief:

Our main discussion: How markets are trading the U.S. presidential election in November. 

A look at what different stock and other market preferences suggests about who Wall Street expects to win, including: 

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On this “Speaking of Bitcoin” episode, join hosts Adam B. Levine, Stephanie Murphy, Jonathan Mohan and special guest Martin Rerak, creator of AllYourFeeds.com, for a look at how “AI curation” is being used to figure out what’s useful information and what’s just fluff.

This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Nexo.io and Elliptic

Hundreds of tabs

In the early days of Bitcoin, there were just a few places you might go to read news and stay informed, but over the years things have changed dramatically. Today there are thousands of projects and hundreds of articles written each day. And that’s assuming you ignore the wilds of YouTube or the depths of crypto Twitter.

There were days I was waking up to a hundred tabs that I was basically just reloading from the prior day... You know, looking at Slack, Telegram, Twitter accounts, Discord, Reddit and dozens of publications online [...] It was very easy to point somebody in the [right] direction if they're saying, "Where can I buy cryptocurrency?" But if they were saying, "Is there a use case here for traceability?" or "What do you think I should invest in?" or "How is this project developing?" that becomes a lot more loaded and challenging... - Martin Rerak

See also: What Is GPT-3 and Should We Be Terrified?

In this episode, we discuss the crypto-media landscape, AI training, the challenges around bias and un-biasing practices, potential impacts of the natural-language-generating algorithm known as GPT-3 and more.

Biased AI

While unsettling on the surface, the idea of bias within an AI is not as controversial as you might imagine – it’s almost required. As humans, we each have our own experiences and preferences which shape our viewpoint and our biases. Modern artificial intelligence consumes “training material” curated by humans to learn what’s right or wrong for its particular task. Once trained, AI can help us with those tasks and is at its most useful when it’s “instincts” match whomever it is working on behalf of.

Of course whether bias is good or bad depends a lot of your priorities. When Google trained an AI to help with hiring, the data around past and current employees led it to believe that an ideal “Google engineer” wouldn’t have a woman’s college on their academic transcript. For Google, their past records did not match their future ambitions and so bias was a problem.

But personally, I’ve developed patent-pending AI technology that assists with audio editing, and here the idea of bias is critical. There is no objective standard of what sounds best, only personal preferences. For an AI to assist an audio editor, it must be in tune with those preferences and be able to make decisions that are objectively correct for the person it is assisting.

This is much the same with AI assisted news curation. We all have our own preferences, interests and biases which help us decide what we do or don’t care about. On today’s show we dig into this fascinating topic where one size rarely fits all and the future is wide open.

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According to analyst Lyn Alden, the answer depends on bitcoin’s own cycle. 

This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Nexo.io and Elliptic.

Today on Long Reads Sunday, a reading of Lyn Alden’s piece for CoinDesk: “Bitcoin Correlations Depend on What Phase It Is In”

In it, Lyn argues that bitcoin’s correlation patterns are, in part, reliant on where bitcoin finds itself in its own cycles of expansion or consolidation.

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