Where do senescent cells come from, and why does our body create them?
As over time and as you get older, you accumulate DNA damage in your cells.
DNA damage can happen in a number of different ways, such as radiation and environmental factors, but can also happen naturally through normal cell growth and division.
This DNA damage accumulates and causes what’s known as senescent cells. Senescence means that the cells are old and have undergone aging at the cellular level.
But some cells don’t experience senescence and seem to be able to undergo healthy division almost indefinitely.
Let’s examine the differences between cells that experience senescence and those that don’t.
Somatic Cells: telomere shortening and cell division
In human bodies, our cells divide 2 trillion times per day.. that’s 2,000,000,000,000. [4]
As somatic cells divide, the caps at the end of our cells (called telomeres) slowly lose information after each subsequent cell division.
source: Khan Academy YouTube Channel [3]
When telomeres become too short, the cells stops dividing.
Telomere shortening and other types of DNA damage results in these cells becoming senescent – which means they autonomously stop dividing.
Doing so helps prevent DNA damage from continuing to happen, and being carried over into future child cells. [3]
Our somatic cells can divide between 60-70 times before the telomeres get too short (called the Hayflick limit).
Stem cells: telomerase and DNA repair
Although somatic cells undergo this natural progression towards cellular senescence after a certain number of divisions, not all cells in the body go through these stages.
Stem cells are special – they don’t experience cellular senscence.
Stem cells are able to maintain their mitotic capacity (ability to divide) and avoid senescence because they have a special enzyme called telomerase.
Telomerase helps cells “stay young” and avoid the Hayflick limit because it is able to rejuvenate the lost ends of telomeres after dividing. [4]
Humans have stem cells in all different types of tissue and organs throughout our bodies.
Why don’t somatic cells produce telomerase?
In regular cell function, telomerase is specific to stem cells, and somatic cells are not supposed to produce telomerase.
However, because our body creates 100 billion new cells every single day, mutations can happen where a somatic cell will produce telomerase. This is actually a BAD mutation!
And while telomerase might sound like the key to keep our cells young, unfortunately, its more complicated than that.
Telomerase production in somatic cells results in uncontrollable cell division and growth, which causes cancer.
Even at an extremely low rate of mutation, the high number of cells means more opportunities for cancer to form.
Problems caused by senescent cells
Similar to brain neurons and heart muscle cells, senescent cells don’t divide. They shut down and stop copying DNA and dividing.
Somatic cells undergo senescence to stop dividing and to avoid becoming cancerous. And as humans age, we have more senescent cells in our bodies.
Although good for the prevention of cancer, too many senescent cells is a detriment to human health.
Senescent cells secrete proteins and molecules that cause inflammation. (senescence associated secretory phenotype, or SASP).
Remember, inflammation is BAD. Due to the SASP factors from senescent cells increasing inflammation in our bodies, we experience debilitation and disease at increased rates.
So although we want our somatic cells to avoid growing uncontrollably and causing cancer, we also want to avoid the presence of senescent cells if at all possible.
The future of cellular aging
Scientists are looking into ways to remove senescent cells to improve health. Senolytic drugs, for example, are built to kill these cells.
How do you think the future of cellular aging will look?
Tweet @espressoinsight and let us know what ideas you have.
During a conversation with a friend, the topic of longevity research came up, which I expressed my longstanding support for.
My friend came back expressing his idea that death is actually important, and questions of why we shouldn’t die, concerned about how life will be special if we don’t die.
The argument of whether or not we should extend longevity has and will be continued to be had over and over and over again. The points and arguments may be disagreed upon, but it is important to lay them out in writing once and for all:
First of all, we should be so lucky to be able to worry about living forever.
At this stage, we aren’t even sure if curing aging is possible.
We’re pretty far from discovering the cure for aging.
The proclamation that “we shouldn’t cure aging” is silly if we don’t even know for sure that it is possible.
What we do know is that people suffer unnecessarily due to age related illnesses.
While some of us with longevity genes live healthy and active well into our 90s, many of our loved ones get older and face cancer, obesity, dementia and alzeimers, and more.
The issue is that these debilitating aging illnesses consume a large number of years towards the end of a persons life.
By solving aging, first and foremost we must allow people to live healthy, active lives up until the end.
Its unlikely we’ll be able to extend life indefinitely (at least as far as we know).
But what if humans could live healthy lives into their twelfth decade, reaching 120+ years of age?
I believe this is absolutely possible and achievable at the current pace of scientific research.
We want to find a way to end diseases. No one is saying you have to live forever.
You can still die. But wouldn’t it be great to extend our lives a little longer?
Why is extending human lifespan important?
As a person finishes school and gets their start in the “real world”, their lives are likely already 1/3 to 1/4 of the way over.
As disappointing as this may be, it is a fact – and the sooner you come to terms with mortality, the easier it will be to focus and commit to the truly important things in life – that which gives your life meaning, whatever that may be for you as an individual.
Reason #1 – more productive years for skilled professionals
Take an example of the career of a doctor.
If you decide to become a doctor, you’re going to have to spend another 8-ish years in school on top of college.
By the time you make it out of medical school and residency as a practicing physician, if you’re lucky, you will be about 30 years old.
On the other hand, many students don’t get into medical school the first time around due to grades, preparedness, slow decision making, and other reasons. Its not uncommon to see medical students enter their M1 year of school after taking a 3-4 year gap between undergrad and medical school.
Because of this, a career doctor can expect to spend between 30-35 years as a practicing physician, assuming an average retirement age of 65.
There is a shortage of primary care physicians globally, and a shortage of specialists in the US.
Its too bad that after all that school and training, one of the most valuable professions in our society gets so few years of productive work out in the real world.
The skills that a doctor possesses are important and benefit society. Becoming a doctor is no easy task. Wouldn’t it be better if a doctor was able to practice medicine for more years, allowing society to benefit more from their hard earned skillset?
How much better would surgeons be if they were able to put that much more time under their belt? Why can’t people live to be 200, 500, or even 1000 years old?
The same can be said of other skilled professions as well. How much would human society benefit from having elders with decades upon centuries of experience to help us run our seemingly broken society?
It is unfortunate that humans have to have this upper-limit to their age of productivity.
As soon as you really start to get your life figured out – by the time you get your finances under control, have learned quite a lot about the world, have developed a strong network of friendships, and built a solid career, the effects of aging start to creep up on you and slowly compound and get worse over the next several decades of life.
Reason #2 – aging is expensive
As you reach old age, the numeric age of a person is quite insignificant.
What really matters is the quality of life, health, and prevalence of disease – or ideally lack thereof.
But one thing is for sure – as people get older, they tend to develop more age related illnesses.
Medicare in the United States spends about $35 billion per year on kidney failure alone. [1]
At age 65 and older people spend over $11,000 on average per year on healthcare.
Imagine a futuristic society where people don’t have to get sick and debilitated as they get old.
Imagine that instead of spending $35 billion on treating kidney failure (which, by the way, is almost always incurable), we spent far less money on re-programming cells and turn back the aging clock.
The large healthcare costs could be more efficiently put towards other endeavors such as infrastructure, education, providing clean access to drinking water, advancing space travel – anything we can think of to make life more enjoyable for everyone on planet Earth.
Reason #3 – death is scary
No matter what they say, no one wants to die.
Yet, when bringing up the idea of living forever, so many people start acting squirrely and say something along the line of “but without death, we won’t have meaning in our lives”.
The thing is, we’ll always die. But the goal here is to stop the body from breaking down.
Let’s not worry so much about they unknown negative effects of living forever, and instead, let’s first focus on finding a cure for aging and age related diseases, enabling people to live healthy lifespans for longer.
A special thank you to David Sinclair and his inspiring book “Lifespan”.
Thesis: In addition to reducing pollution, we need to build and deploy floating clean-up robots in waterways and canals across the globe.
Plastic bottles are thought to take about 450 years to break down [1]. Leaving plastic waste in landfills is a less than ideal solution.
And besides, a lot of plastic never makes it to the landfill. Over years, large plastic bottles are broken down into tiny and even microscopic “microplastics” that are so embedded within the ocean, sand, dirt and topsoil of our world that they will never be removed.
Micropplastics [4]
There are a few questions to consider before jumping in:
What should we really do with plastics, styrofoams, and other non-decomposable garbage?
How will we identify, collect, and transport these plastics to a safe and environmentally friendly final resting place?
From the landfill and back again:
Answering these questions is simple in theory, but more challenging in practice.
Plastics are made from petroleum, which comes from deep underground. Petroleum is like natural gas, crude oil, etc. At a chemical level, these petroleum resources are made of hydrocarbon polymers that can be used to make plastic.
Given that plastics are made from petroleum, which comes from underground, the logical place to put plastic waste is back where they came from – deep underground, between 3000 and 6000 feet. (That’s around 1 mile underground) [2]
It only makes sense that we should put them back where they came from. And perhaps the heat and pressure of Earth’s crust could accelerate the speed to which these waste products are transitioned back to crude petroleum.
But pulling petroleum out of the ground is a challenging business. Humans leverage advanced petroleum engineering technologies to extract these hydrocarbons. Imagine how much complicated engineering and drilling would be required to replace tons of plastic garbage materials back where they came from.
It would be next to impossible, and absolutely unaffordable. Its not going to happen.
Great pacific garbage patch. Source: B.parsons.edu.
Analogous to setting up for a party, when you set up and get ready for a party, you go buy food and drinks for your guests, setup decorations, plan games and activities, send out invitations and logistic information, etc.
Preparing for a party is fun and requires a bit of planning and effort.
After the party is over, however, there is a similar amount of un-fun effort required to clean up. There are dirty dishes and trash to be cleaned and disposed of. There may be spilled drinks on carpet or furniture, and you have to use something like Resolve carpet cleaner to restore them to their original condition.
The work required to clean up after the party is significantly more difficult than setting up for the party.
The problem with pollution in our world is that there is no one cleaning up after the party. And understandably so. Its a difficult, challenging, dirty, and expensive task.
Besides that, there’s no incentive to do so. Humans don’t want to clean up after other people all the time, yet everyone knows that all of us contribute to pollution.
This predicament is called the “Tragedy of the Commons”.
When you have a party at your house, you live in the direct vicinity of the mess that is left after a party. In the environment and world, however, people are able to artificially remove themselves from the mess created by society (aka pollution).
Although we have some vague perception that the great pacific garbage patch exists, because we don’t encounter it day to day as individuals, we are able to go on living our lives without feeling too bad about it.
Despite the complex, energy intensive manufacturing processes that are performed to make gasoline for cars and plastic goods, the vehicle exhaust, garbage and microplastics that enter our atmosphere and ocean have nowhere to go except accumulate in the environment.
Humans seem to have accepted the fact that these are are just left there.
But this is changing in some areas.
Some states like California and Hawaii have taken measures to prevent new plastic and garbage from entering the environment. Some popular prevention measures include smog inspections, no plastic grocery bags, no plastic straws, etc.
Prevention is good, but cleaning up is still needed.
We need an efficient and scalable way to clean up the Earth.
In order to relieve humans of the burden, perhaps we can leverage machines to take on the majority of plastic and garbage collection tasks associated with removing pollution from the environment.
There is good news. Humans have started doing this already. In Xi’an, China, there is a machine the size of a skyscraper whose sole purpose is to filter and purify the air.
Xi’an tower in China [3]
Its extremely exciting to see humans embarking on these types of developments. Although, as there is no natural incentive to build these (due to the Tragedy of the Commons), perhaps governments can create artificial incentives, offering contracts to engineering and development contractors to build similar skyscrapers.
But how about plastic waste? How might we begin to remove plastics from the environment?
To make any meaningful change, we must start somewhere. China began with the noble mission of reducing air pollution, and has built air filtration skyscrapers.
To focus on removing plastics from the environment, targeting the ocean is a great place to start.
Cleaning the oceans with autonomous boats.
To remove pollution from the oceans, we need solar-powered autonomous boats whose sole purpose is dragging filtration systems through the ocean, and collecting plastic pollution.
Identifying plastic material from organic material and avoiding biological life will be important. Perhaps some sort of artificial intelligence image recognition could help identify plastic waste in the water.
Where to begin? Logically, the best places to deploy these robots are in near the areas of primary pollution – harbors, water ways, sewage outputs, etc.
An inland stretch of the Ala Wai canal.
Take the Ala Wai boat harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii.
The harbor connects the ocean to the Ala Wai canal.
A walk along the Ala Wai canal and a glance into the water will provide the onlooker with a glance at dirty water, old chairs, plastic bags, floating bottles, and more.
In a place as beautiful as Hawaii, its very sad to see any amount of garbage floating around.
And unfortunately, that water unfortunately carries bacteria, sewage, garbage, and more into the gorgeous turquoise waters surrounding the island of Oahu, and is ultimately dispersed across the entire world.
Remember, all the oceans are connected… despite different areas having different names, there is truly only one ocean on Earth. I saw a comedian on Instagram talk about the fact that there is truly only 1 ocean, and it made me think of this.
In terms of next steps, we need to find someone to build the robotic floating garbage collectors. It won’t be an easy task, but it is 100% possible.
Using an autonomy infrastructure tool such as Applied Intuition might help with the development of the software.
How much water can be filtered?
We should take a small area of the global water system like the Ala Wai canal, and deploy robotic cleaning ships here as a test. By measuring length * width we can calculate surface area, then performing various depth-measurements, we can take average depth and use this to calculate an estimate of total volume.
The throughput of each robotic boats will have an estimate of gallons per hour, or gallons per day etc.
In a perfect system, the boats will charge via some sort of docking station, or even run on solar power. They will need to be incredibly energy efficient, with no need to propel themselves too fast, they can remain largely stationary.
These may then be scaled up to larger ships that cruise across the ocean autonomously collecting garbage from the great pacific garbage patch and more.
To remove plastic from the ocean, it is only logical that we have water-filtration boats.
Final Thoughts
The white-paper presented above simply contains ideas. I am not doing these, I am just an idea maker.
And if you’ve made it to the end of this post, good news! These robots already do exist.
But if they already exist, why is there still so much plastic in the ocean? How much of an impact to these autonomous boats actually have on the reduction of plastic in the ocean?
And then of course a few follow up questions inevitably arise:
After collecting a large amount of the garbage, the important question then becomes what do we do with the plastic? It will be great to remove it from the ocean, but where do we put it as a final resting place?
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Between 2013 and 2021, Cryptocurrency has followed the Hype Cycle exactly as expected. Let me explain.
What is the Hype Cycle?
The Hype Cycle, coined by Gartner, is a law that describes how humans accept new and emerging technologies and adopt them into our everyday lives
Its a generalized way of estimating and predicting the rise and fall of a new technology and the way people react to it.
Figure 1: Phases of the Hype Cycle Curve.Source: Wikipedia; Olga Tarkovskiy – Own work
The curve above is a graph of TIME on the x-axis, and EXPECTATIONS on the y-axis.
In cryptocurrency, expectations is quantified by looking at the price or market cap of cryptocurrencies. For years, the price of cryptocurrency was not interesting. Price was flat.
Hype Cycle Phase: Technology Trigger Pre-R&D
Crypto wasn’t being discussed all over Twitter. It was a nerdy, boring conversation.
Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin were only being used by a few small groups of people, and was nowhere near mainstream discussion or adoption.
Just look at the market cap of Bitcoin between 2013 and 2017 below. Relative to where it is now, this is extremely insignificant
Figure 2: The market cap of bitcoin between 2013 and 2017. Source: CoinMarketCap
Bitcoin’s price and adoption wasn’t even relevant at this point. Compared to the Hype Cycle phases in Figure 1, cryptocurrency wouldn’t have even been on the charts.
But while the public vernacular and mainstream media ignored cryptocurrency, engineers and enthusiasts were quietly building. On the Figure 1 Hype Curve, at this point crypto is leading up to the R&D phase; it still early.
This is why venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen are famously interested in “what the nerds do at night“. By recognizing emerging tech trends before everyone else, you have the opportunity to invest in them at a favorable discount… when the technology principles have been proven, but the applications have not quite been built, they are not user friendly yet, and the mass majority of people aren’t even aware of the technology.
Vitalik Buterin was funded by Peter Thiel in 2015 to found Ethereum. As the potential applications of Ethereum started coming into light, a buzz started happening within tech circles.
Hype Cycle Phase: Early Adopters Investigate
People started to understand the power of this thing called blockchain, and could envision the possible smart contracts and more.
While Bitcoin was built to serve as digital gold, Ethereum was built as a platform from which blockchain applications would grow.
Coinbase.com became the de-facto place to purchase Bitcoin and Ethereum. It was easy to use and wasn’t that different from purchasing stocks at a place like Fidelity or Charles Schwab.
Working a desk job at a cubicle during this time, it felt like colleagues in the office were all starting to think about crypto and were considering buying it on Coinbase.
A few viral memes and Twitter conversations happened and before you know it, the prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two big flagship cryptocurrencies, were pushing all time highs almost every day.
I hate to include a disclaimer here, but as you can tell, I’m going to be generalizing a lot in this post about the crypto community. I mean no disrespect. I love blockchain technology and the projects it has enabled… I want nothing more than what’s best for crypto as a whole. As an owner of bitcoin, ethereum, and other coins, I’ve seen the emotions of early adopters around me have experienced when the prices rise extremely fast (and inevitably fall just as quickly).
Hype Cycle Phase: Inflated Expectations
Towards the end of 2016 and into 2017, everyone started buying crypto. If you took a 10 minute uber ride across town, you would almost undoubtedly hear your driver mention something about the price of bitcoin.
Crypto millionaires were created. A friend of mine even managed to pay off his student loans from selling his stake in Ethereum, which he had acquired just months earlier.
At some point, it felt like people didn’t necessarily care about the applications of blockchain technology. Your average person was interested in trading, buying and selling, getting rich quick and only focused on the price rather than the underlying technology.
At the peak of inflated expectations, a few things can happen:
Engineering and developer teams tend to over-build. More crypto’s launched between the end of 2016 and early 2017 than anyone could keep track of. But the projects being built were not being used by anyone. The projects had no customers…
What the projects DID have, however, were investors. There was an abundance of over-eager individuals looking to throw $100 bucks into any coin with a slim chance of making it in hopes of returning 1000X on their investment.
The problem with this is that there are more people in the crypto community who are focused on making money from the technology than there are users and customers who are actually using the technology for the value it brings into their lives.
As more cryptos were launched than there were users or customers, the over-inflated expectations started to become apparent.
The thing is, no one knows just how HIGH the peak of inflated expectations might go.
Peak of Inflated Expectations leads into the Trough of Disillusionment. Source: CoinMarketCap
In order to capitalize on investments in crypto, the smart ones on Twitter and Reddit communities preached the importance of holding onto the investments, not selling, and riding out the wave.
The thing is, this is a tricky thing to do. It is easy to decide to sell at the top, and even easier to decide to call it quits as an investment tanks and you lost 80-90% of your the value of your portfolio.
In some cases, those that sell at the top end up exiting while they’re ahead. In other cases, people with intentions to sell at the top end up waiting too long, and end up making an emotionally drastic decision to exit their crypto position at the worst possible time, during the trough of disillusionment.
Because the trough can last for years. In the case of Bitcoin and Ethereum, it lasted from the beginning of 2018 through late 2020.
The thing about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology (at least so far) is that the rise and fall of price of different cryptocurrencies are heavily correlated with each other.
As bitcoin rises, ethereum usually is rising also. As bitcoin enters the trough of disillusionment, ethereum was too. The same can be said for the other crypto’s that made it through the trough.
Bitcoin didn’t really start to enter the next phase until the coronavirus pandemic was in full swing mid to late 2020.
Hype Cycle Phase: Enlightenment to Productivity
Between late 2020 and today, the market cap of all cryptocurrencies has continued to push all time highs.
As of 2021, bitcoin has pushed all time highs. Source: CoinMarketCap
The reason for this may partly have been accelerated by the pandemic, but there’s more to it than that.
Within the crypto community, there is a large amount of funds going into projects that are receiving mainstream adoption.
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are one example of an application that is seeing close to mass adoption.
Although it is still a fringe hobby, NFT collectibles have some resemblance to the enthusiasm around collectible sports cards and even Pokemon cards.
People are creating NFT masterpieces using artificial intelligence and listing them for sale as unique, one-of-a-kind tokens on websites like OpenSea.
This is just one example. There are a number of other projects being built on top of Ethereum and discussed but we for many of these applications, it seems we still have a long way to go before mainstream adoption.
So as we’re pushing all time highs in almost every cryptocurrency, my question for the world is: are we entering another peak of inflated expectations? Or is this time for real? Are we truly in the Plateau of Productivity?
And this brings up a few follow up ideas and questions about the future… because at the end of the day, we can’t truly predict the future, we can only form hypothesis based on historic trends, proven laws, and observable principles.
Final Thoughts and Additional Questions
Could a technology go through the various phases of the Hype Cycle more than once?
Will cryptocurrency enter another trough of disillusionment?
How might other technologies follow the hype cycle?
Are there examples of technologies that do NOT follow the hype cycle?
As a technology follows the hype cycle, will the peak of inflated expectations ever over-extend the value of the technology as it reached the Plateau of Productivity?
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Combining two exciting emerging technologies, both blockchain and artificial intelligence, you buy and sell unique NFTs and AI-generated NFT artwork on website is called OpenSea.
Project Argo is one collection I’ve browsed through. What’s interesting about Project Argo is that the artist has been able to use AI to develop artwork that seems to have characters or entities within each piece.
As seen in Fading on the right, the NFT appears (to me at least) to feature a face.
Artworks become much more interesting when they appear to feature individual characters and facial expressions.
All types of art – whether painting or literature or music – seems to have a positive or negative connotation.
Some artists create more uplifting artwork (Norman Rockwell or Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel) while others create artwork that is mischievous or scandalous work, and other artists create powerfully dark and emotional works.
Looking through the list of images made by AI, I can’t help but wonder about the baseline emotion evoked by artificial intelligence.
What connotation and sentiment does the neural network create when generating these graphics?
As the lay observer, every photo seems to evoke the same balance of emotion, somewhere between darkness and excitement.
If we had a way to measure emotional sentiment, where might each image fit on a scale that measure how optimistic or pessimistic each image looks?
To me, it feels as though each image is quite close to neutral.
Zen by Project Argo
The surprising thing is that, looking through all of these photos on Project Argo, I get the sense that each piece of artwork is depicting entities that are saying and feeling the same representative emotions.
And yet its difficult to put it into words.
Its like trying to explain what is experienced under the influence of psychedelics – often impossible to do so in worldly terms.
The resemblance to faces in the photos are approximately accurate. Although there is no true face, the outline of eyes, nose, mouth, etc. evoke a baseline facial expression that a person might have when their face is at rest.
The entities depicted in these photos all have the same, neutral facial expression. Not a single smile, eyebrow raise, or wink. They all have the same, neutral look – one that you cannot quite figure out.
Yet the images don’t feel expressionless or emotionless.
They feel as if they are showing life at work. Life doing what life does – here to experience our world for the sake of its own existence.
Except that these entities are in a different place. They don’t exist in our world, but in an unknown realm generated by AI.
Project Argo’s creator, in naming each photo, seemed to air on the side of futuristic Armageddon.
“The last island party” and “robot revolution” for example.
Of the list, Dreamy City and Penguin one stood out. They’re all worth a look.
When artificial intelligence designs an image for humans to look at, what is it trying to say to us?
Is AI trying to tell us something?
As artificial intelligence looks back at us in society, could the message be “you can do better”?
Perhaps we can gather a sense for what AI feels, by looking at the artwork it creates, and by interpreting the conversations it has.
But we’ve got to focus on safety when dealing with artificial intelligence. AI safety is something I’ve spoken about since the beginning of this website.
I’m planning to start selling my own NFTs on OpenSea as well and donate 50% of all revenue to medical research aimed at helping humans live healthier for longer. Please follow me and consider donating or contributing!
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The community surrounding a token determines what the crypto project will ultimately become.
The community will make or break a cryptocurrency.
Sure, blockchain is the great enabler, but the technology is nothing without the people and the desire to build cool new projects.
Whether you’re a meme coin or a platform coin, the community is what dictates the success or failure of it.
source: r/cryptocurrency
And the same is true for cryptocurrency as a whole.
There is an overabundance of discussion online (reddit, twitter, discord groups) that focus solely on short term buy / sell strategies.
Surprisingly, it is difficult to find groups eager to engage in discussions about the long-term future of cryptocurrency as a utilitarian and functional technology that can improve human life.
Unfortunate Crypto Trends:
I’m in a small chat group with around 40 members. When I joined the group, I couldn’t help but notice a few disappointing trends:
There is almost no discussion on long-term strategy (even HODLing) in crypto. It is all discussion about trading, buying low selling high, buying the dip, etc.
Most are buying / selling multiple times in the same day, looking at charts with strange lines and who knows what else.
I really miss the “HODL culture”. HODL culture used to be a thing, and it really doesn’t feel like it is anymore. What happened?
There is less discussion about blockchain technology itself.
90% of people haven’t even read the bitcoin whitepaper.
They have no idea what the Double Spend problem is and how blockchain solved it in 2008 when the paper was published..
People brag about their profits from day to day arbitrarily trading coins.
The macro focus, where it exists, focuses on political aspects like how lawmakers are reacting to crypto, tax implications, which big organizations are investing in various cryptos (Tesla or El Salvador news for example).
The discussion almost never focuses on how a cryptocurrency project solves problems in the real world.
The fact that 99% of all discussion about cryptocurrency is catered towards trading isn’t healthy for the technology’s future.
What The Crypto Community Needs
I believe the crypto community needs to focus more on the execution of crypto’s promises like decentralized apps, smart contracts, and Web 3.
Thank God we have something like NFTs are taking off.
NFTs are finally one of the first mainstream applications of blockchain being used that isn’t solely focused on trading – are built on top of Ethereum. And it started with something as silly as Crypto Kitties.
Say what you will about silly artwork being sold on the blockchain – at least its a real application. Its as productive for society as Pokemon.
NFTs have had an impact because they do fit into a real market in the real world – the collection of trading cards and artwork.
Yet even with NFTs, there’s still that huge focus on buying low, selling high, and profiting.
Instead of trading, the people who actually CARE about cryptocurrency need to think about the long term future of these digital assets and bet with conviction in projects they believe in.
This ultimately comes down to the development team, the community, the real world problem that the coin solves.
This is one reason I appreciate assets that make it easier for other projects to be build. Those projects that serve as platforms for other apps in the blockchain arena.
And developers like Vitalik Buterin who are actually focused on building things that impact the real world, not just gaining hype for a coin and selling / trading and pump and dump schemes.
Ethereum is important because it allows other projects to be built on top of it.
It is almost similar to a hosting or infrastructure service for software projects.
In the early days of the internet, the companies that ended up surviving for the long term are those that focused on building the computers, infrastructure, programming languages, databases, servers and more.
As these tools were mandatory for any new internet based project, those companies were destined to be successful.
To figure out which cryptos are going to be successful…. look at the ones that help create a metaphorical “garden” for new projects to form.
Not all seeds will grow, but the garden will live forever.
That’s enough for today.
Leave a reply below and complain about crypto with me.
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also check r/SHIBadults for more realistic discussion.
113K Discord members – Official Shibatoken Community
It goes without saying, THIS IS NOT INVESTING ADVICE. Do your own research. We all know that crypto tends to follow the Hype Cycle pretty accurately, so ups and downs are to be expected.
source: happy doggo
Since the SHIB token community is actually helping raise money for Shiba Inu dogs to get rescued and adopted, it separates itself from 99% of the other coins out there.
The SHIB token and community actively promotes the Shiba Inu Rescue Association.
The Shiba Inu Rescue Association is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. The SHIB crypto community does the service of encouraging members to leverage Amazon Smile, which can donate a portion of your Amazon purchases to the nonprofit.
As fellow dog lovers, when we heard that SHIB crypto community is helping Shiba Inu’s get rescued and adopted, we wanted to be involved. So, yes – we purchased some SHIB token with no intentions of selling for the foreseeable future 🙂
Is the coin garbage? Quite possibly. If by owning SHIB coin, more cute little Shiba Inu puppies are able to find homes, will you regret your ownership regardless of how the price turns out in the long run? Doubt it.
Why The SHIB Token Crypto Community Matters
yep, that’s a bucket of shiba puppies. source: pinterest
The thing about the world of crypto today is that there are a never ending number of new projects and tokens available for purchase.
New crypto projects are launched every. damn. day.
Building a cryptocurrency token on the blockchain has become commoditized.
Although Blockchain can be difficult to wrap your head around, the technology itself is surprisingly simple and elegant compared to the complexities of other types of software.
Development is relatively simple…. the average college student majoring in computer science can write a few lines of code and create a blockchain.
In a market of commoditized goods and services, the one thing that will never be a commodity is the human. People will always determine the value of any cryptocurrency token. The people are the ones that build the community which can create something meaningful.
If you’re looking for a strong cryptocurrency to get on board with, find a token that has a dedicated community.
That being said…..
When two of the biggest names in technology are involved with a project, its a good sign. I’m talking about both Elon Musk (CEO Tesla, SpaceX) and Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum).
Their online publicity for SHIB is another signal for the dedicated and committed community that the SHIB token is building:
Elon Musk Subtweets SHIB Token
Say what you will about shitcoins being overhyped and “pump and dump” schemes. SHIB might even be a scam, who knows… and there has certainly been some big action on the “pump” side.
Tweets from Elon Musk about getting a Shiba Inu was likely a subtweet referencing the meme that SHIB as well as DOGE have become.
Vitalik Buterin Gifts $1 Billion in SHIB to India Relief Fund
source: lifehacker australia
Vitalik Buterin was gifted billions of dollars worth of SHIB token, $1 Billion of which he first donated.
But Vitalik had even more SHIB – he only donated 10% of his holdings – and his next move was unexpected.
As seen on Etherscan, Vitalik actually burned the equivalent of more than $12 BILLION in today’s value, since SHIB has appreciated since then.
Vitalik explained his rationale for the whole endeavor in a note.
In the note, Vitalik mentioned that he was “impressed with how the dog communities have treated the recent donations” and focus on “making the world better as a whole“.
For a crypto community, this is quite inspiring to see, and might just restore our faith in humanity.
SHIB Token Artwork
Aside from donating, the SHIB community encourages its members to create artwork.
Its unclear from the website how the artwork is related to the SHIB token, but it can be expected that at some point, NFT artwork may be involved.
There are all sorts of different artwork creations being made featuring the cute little Shiba Inu puppy mascot, just look at a few of them below.
As far as a Shiba Inu coin art incubator, it looks like they’ve started taking applications and we’ll look forward to seeing more exciting creations that the community comes up with.
So, its a fact that SHIB token has had more than a few positive impacts on the world: donating money to India Relief fund, as well as helping raise money for Shiba Inu dog adoption.
And if we’re going to risk betting on a cryptocurrency, we want to bet on one where we know there is at least some good in the world coming of it, because there’s always the chance that we lose our money.
Regardless of whether or not we go to the moon, funds are being raised, and dogs are being helped.
Because dogs are our best friend.
Which cryptocurrencies do you like? Which tokens do you think are actually doing something in the real world?
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Artificial intelligence has many applications – artwork is just one of them.
In the future, will artists might rely on artificial intelligence tools in the creation process?
With an easy to use text-to-image generation process, anyone in the world can create original masterpieces regardless of technical know how or skill level.
You don’t even have to know what artificial intelligence is to use tools like this. It just goes to show you the exciting power that AI is bringing to our lives.
All you have to do is type a few words, and optionally upload a starting image.
The website itself is actually fun to use as well – it includes a list of top posts, so you can see which creations have been most popular and most liked by others in the community.
Currently, the most liked post is a picture that resembles a strawberry grenade:
The process of creating the artworks is quite satisfying. It allows you to express just a bit of creativity – coming up with words that might fit together to create something unique, finding a starting point image on Google, and then letting artificial intelligence do the rest.
The exceptional levels of complexity that can arise from such simplistic inputs is quite astonishing.
Write simple words, such as “A mess yet magical” and you might end up with something like the below:
Say what you will about robots taking over, or artificial intelligence tools replacing human labor in the workforce – the company’s website states that AI is here “to make art creation accessible to the masses”.
And to be frank, the creation process couldn’t be simpler or more intuitive – literally anyone can create something.
Here’s one below that I made, and even added a saccharine title.
“Utopian Scarface 1 Million Years Into the Future” by Espresso Insight
The ability to build applications that leverage AI as features yet can be used by the layperson even if they are non-technical means that the adoption of AI might end up happening faster that you might expect.
One can only imagine what artificial intelligence generated music might be like as AI applications expand. I can’t wait for someone to build a way to create your own music using a process and technique that is as simple and easy as this one.
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Without the SUN, life on our planet would not exist.
Earth would be a lifeless, ball of ice.
It is the enabler of plants, water, heat, creating the entire ecosystem.
But the sun has a dark side.
Solar flares can interrupt power lines and radio signals causing blackouts.
Solar rays can cause skin cancer, which affects over 3.4 million Americans every year.
Sunscreen is the best defense, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a pain in the ass.
Its surface temperature of the sun is 10,000 deg. F.
90% of the sun is hydrogen, and while it might seem like a star that’s 300,000 times bigger than Earth would exist forever, it consumes 5 million tons of that hydrogen every second.
And one day, our Sun will die.
When stars die, they typically expand into a giant supernova releasing dust and other matter.
Our sun, however, is not big enough to become a supernova.
Instead, our sun will explode into a massive red giant.
The Sun will eventually engulf Mercury and Venus, while bombarding Earth with unlivable amounts of solar radiation
All plants will be burned to a crisp.
Rivers, lakes, and oceans will be baked dry.
Life on Earth will be extinct.
As life becomes uninhabitable on Earth, the goldilocks zone of our solar system will shift towards the outer planets.
This means other places in the solar system – even the moons of Jupiter and Saturn could be suitable for life.
But this will be temporary.
Shortly after the sun has shed its outer layers, it will condense to become a white dwarf, which is the small but immensely dense core of a dead star.
Planets in our solar system will continue to orbit this dead star, but will be too cold to sustain life.
If humans are to survive, we will need to develop space travel and colonization tactics.
The good news is that humanity has about 5 billion years left until the Sun begins to turn into a Red Dwarf.
But we need to continue focusing on developing deep space travel technologies immediately.
May scientists believe the Great Filter is real.
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Business professionals end up flying more than expected
Air travel ends up being a big part of the day to day experience of busy professionals.
As I’ve posted specifically about the future of air travel before, at espressoinsight.com, I generally attempt to cover the future of business and emerging technology. To minimize travel stress and maximize comfort, it is important to know how to optimize your experience as a passenger.
Moving to Oahu, Hawaii meant flights between the island and mainland became a regularity.
As taxing on my personal budget as this has been, taking a minimum of a 5+ hour flight everytime I want to go anywhere off-island meant that I quickly adapted to quick a few tricks of the trade of air travel.
I hope these are helpful – not necessarily to hack the system, but simply to make the flying experience more enjoyable.
Airport Hack #1: Boarding time
Oftentimes, when the planes are not at full capacity, you will be able to have your choice of seating if you are last to board the plane. Flying during pandemic times with a large percentage of empty flights is just glorious.
The best seats in first class and even the ones that aren’t quite first class but are still premium seats are often open.
As a bonus, you can opt to find a seat by the window or aisle to your choosing, and may even be lucky enough to get a whole row to yourself as I have a few times.
(add photo).
Boarding late on my flight from San Francisco to Honolulu, more than half of first class was completely open, as well as many seats in the premium / upgraded section, where I was able to find an entire free row.
Words of advice: Even if first class is open (the ones with the lounge chairs and private rooms / pods etc), avoid sitting in first class, though, because the flight attendants will often keep a seating chart to greet first class by name, which would be a dead giveaway for you, in which case you may be asked to move.
Airport Hack #2: Optimizing carry-on luggage
Depending on your ticket, you might not be allowed more than one personal item, meaning no bringing an extra carry on. If this is the case, there is a way to sneak an extra bag on if you absolutely need to.
On personal items and carry ons:Not all of us are minimalists, sometimes we have a lot of stuff to bring with us.
Let’s be honest – bringing extra stuff on the plane isn’t going to hurt anyone. There’s always plenty of room – and even if there weren’t, the gate attendants will start offering people a “free checked bag” directly at the gate, so there’s always a solution.
The bag rules are the airlines’ way of encouraging customers to upgrade their tickets and spend more money.
Heck, I’ve brought my guitar on the plane and stuck it in an overhead bin with absolutely no issues whatsoever. When carrying on such a large item, keep an eye out for bin space anywhere on the plane. You don’t necessarily have to use the bins directly above your seat, just find a spot that will fit your instrument and remember where you put it!
However, to ensure the overhead bin space isn’t full, consider trying to get in line to boared sooner rather than later (yes, this optimizing for Airport Hack #2 goes is the opposite strategy of Airport Hack #1).
Here’s what you do: opt for a small-ish duffel bag and a backpack, and don’t jam-pack them too full. When you walk to the gate and scan your ticket, arrange your backpack so that it is on top of your duffel with the straps of the straps of the duffel wrapped around the backpack.
(show photo here).
Voila, you have technically “consolidated” your two bags into one, and may carry on in peace! To avoid any hassles from the gatekeepers, walk up to the gate attendant with the bags in your left hand, low and at your side, with a big smile and friendly greeting, and scan your ticket / ID with your left hand exclusively.
Airport Hack #3: Masks
Mask hacks: Masks are important an a necessity on all airlines currently, however, often, masks can become uncomfortable when worn for 5+ hours on a flight because they pull on your ears.
An easy fix for this is to bend the metal nose bridge so it squeezes and affixes the mask to your face, allowing the mask to remain in place without the need of the ear-loops. Unhooking your ear loops and balancing the gently pinched mask onto your nose, I have even used a small piece of tape to keep it in place. You be the judge on what’s most comfortable, but I’ve found that it can be nice to give my ears a break from being pulled forward.
Additional options are to find a mask that has looser ear loops so that it is less tight on your face.
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Espresso Insight 