Monthly Archives: September 2022

We Are Failing to Use What We’ve Learned About COVID – Medscape

Posted: September 9, 2022 at 6:01 pm

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Eric J. Topol, MD: Hello. This is Eric Topol for Medscape. I'm with my co-host Abraham Verghese for a new edition of Medicine and the Machine. We have an extraordinary guest today, Professor Christina Pagel. She is a force a professor at University College London with an extraordinary background in math, physics, and even interplanetary space. We've never had a guest with such a diverse background. Welcome, Christina.

Christina Pagel, PhD: Thank you.

Topol: You've provided extraordinary insights throughout the pandemic. But before we get into that, you've had a unique background as a physicist and mathematician. Then, somewhere along the way, after this great training you had in the United Kingdom, you went to Boston and made a switch in your career to using math and artificial intelligence (AI) to help inform data for health. How did that come about?

Pagel: I originally studied maths at university because I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. That was my aim. I always knew the kind of maths you need to do that. Then I earned a master's in quantum theory. But by then, all the bits of quantum theory that I really liked turned out to be solved.

I asked, can I do a PhD in this? And they said no, it's been done; Feynman did it all 30 years ago. So then I thought, I'd also really like to go into space and be an astronaut. I spoke to the European Space Agency, and they said, you need to do a PhD in space physics, which I'd never heard of. But I went to Imperial College London and asked, can I do a PhD in this? And they said yes. One of the benefits of doing maths is that it's actually quite easy to switch fields. So I did my PhD in interplanetary magnetic fields. And then I came to Boston University for 3 years as a postdoctoral researcher working on interplanetary electrons.

It was an amazing 3 years. But I realized two things: First, I was quite good at math but I wasn't a great physicist. Much to my disappointment, I just didn't have a feel for it in the way that some people have. And second, what I was working on, although it was kind of cool, it didn't matter. If I got it wrong, it didn't make a difference. And I wanted to feel that my work was doing that; I wanted to feel that I was contributing more to society than paying my taxes and not committing crimes.

I was looking around, thinking, what can I do? And I found this department at University College London, where they were applying mathematics to healthcare. I could see that some people there had a physics background. I thought it sounded really interesting. I've been there ever since.

Abraham Verghese: Dr Pagel, it's a great pleasure to meet you. Most of us are so narrowly specialized that we need people like you to grasp the entirety of what's going on in this world. Before we get to COVID, I know you also have a master's in medieval history and I'm sure there's a story behind that.

Pagel: Actually, I have two master's degrees in history. I have one in classical civilization, primarily the ancient Greeks and Romans, and then I went back and I did another in medieval history.

When I was 16, I had to choose between an arts or a science path. I loved both history and science. I picked science, but I never lost my love for history. It was the first time I'd chosen to do a course purely for interest. It had no impact on my career. I was doing it only for myself. It takes you back to the meaning of learning, I think, of trying to understand and find out things, and it's just so interesting.

I realized that having a mathematical background makes you quite good at history. It teaches you to look for what's not there as well as what's there, and helps you create logical arguments and understand that causation isn't correlation, which, I think, is important in history.

Verghese: I believe that it's relevant to COVID and everything you're engaged in. Santayana said that if we don't understand history, we're condemned to repeat it. And I think we're seeing a lot of that now.

Topol: By the way, if you don't follow @chrischirp, then you're missing out in terms of COVID she is a go-to for information and perspective. Before the pandemic started, you were and still are involved in work to understand congenital heart disease, and cardiac surgery in children and adults, and I suspect much more than that.

As a cardiologist, I cue into that stuff. Can you tell us about what that work has been like and how that was a background for some things you're doing now?

Pagel: I've been working on congenital heart disease for almost 15 years. It all starts with two facts about the United Kingdom. The first is that we have a national healthcare system, which means that you can organize things at a national scale. The second is that in 1997, there was the Bristol heart scandal. One of the hospitals where heart surgery was performed in babies had much higher than expected mortality rates when compared with other units that were doing the same kinds of operations.

That took a long time to come to light because it's a high-risk, highly specialized area, so you expect, unfortunately, that some children will die. Then you have this whole question of, how many is too many? What does "expected" even mean when you have this group of children who have such diverse health problems and diagnoses, and all these diverse procedures performed on them?

After that came to light, the National Health Service (NHS) decided to centralize the service, so only about 10-12 hospitals offer it. They did that because they wanted to ensure that there are enough operations happening every year in each of those hospitals. And they made it mandatory for everyone to submit their data.

It gets audited. The data are checked. Every year, they publish survival statistics on the grounds that we don't want this to happen again. That's been going on since 2000, and it has meant that congenital heart disease services are one of the best areas, with a long-standing dataset.

Over the years, we've refined the risk models for deciding how risky these surgeries are for different children. How do we know whether some of the units have higher death rates than average? We can show that, since they've started monitoring, results have gotten better pretty much every single year.

Now that the field has come along, we're looking at what other things matter. It's not just about survival. It's about complications, quality of life. How many surgeries do you need over your lifetime? What happens in outpatients? How are people engaging with it? What happens as children become adults?

So we're using these national datasets to really dig into it. It requires quite a lot of careful statistics and data, but also talking to clinicians, talking to patients, talking to parents. We've also built websites trying to explain what the data are and aren't showing. That's how I started thinking about how we present information that matters to people in a way that they find easy to understand and that's fair.

Verghese: Regarding your work in operational research, I'm wondering, is that a common department now in many universities? What is the day-to-day life of an operational researcher like?

Pagel: So few people know what operational research is. It's technically a branch of mathematics, but it can sit in lots of different places. In the United States, it's often called operations research. It's also called systems engineering, and then it sits within engineering faculties. It can also be called management science and is taught as part of an MBA. So it runs this whole gamut of different subjects and techniques. But at its core, you want to use mathematics and data and any kind of other analytical techniques to improve decision-making. That's the idea.

It's meant to be pragmatic, focused on working with people to understand the actual problem they have. The problem often is not what people say it is. It asks, what information do you have, and how can you use that to improve the decisions you're about to make?

That is the core of it. There are standard techniques such as optimization, queueing theory, mathematical modeling or simulation. But the heart of operational research is trying to improve things, and the techniques you use actually aren't part of it. It's just that certain techniques are more common than others.

Topol: That gets us into the pandemic, because this provides a unique background fresh eyes, transdisciplinary experience, and an intergalactic way to understanding health systems.

We are in the third year of the pandemic. You've been a leading light, a spokesperson for your views and data interpretation, not just in the United Kingdom but throughout the world. Can you give us an overview? Obviously, it hasn't gone well in many respects. What are your key takeaways and concerns? Where do you see the United Kingdom as an outlier, if at all, or different from other places like the United States, which is perhaps even worse?

Pagel: A few things stand out in the big picture. Right at the beginning, the rich Western countries weren't prepared. I believe we thought we were, and there was an element of complacency that we knew what to do.

We have the world's leading health systems, so of course we'll be fine. And that wasn't the case. As societies become more medicalized vaccinations, treatments, healthier lives we've become used to a growing life expectancy, not as many infectious diseases, and not as many ubiquitous public health problems.

We became quite complacent about what an infectious disease can do to a population. We had let our public health functions lapse. Certainly, in the United Kingdom, there wasn't that much public health expertise. The public health bodies are much smaller than they used to be, and people just weren't ready. Whereas some of the middle- and lower-income countries that have strong public health systems that are trying to deliver large-scale vaccination and nutrition programs, they had a much better set-up to do things like contact tracing and supporting people who were ill, to think about how to mobilize a population response.

The other thing that struck me was how unwilling the West was to learn from other countries particularly the East Asian countries, places like South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. We just felt they had nothing to teach us. I think that was a big mistake, and I think that's still the case today.

People talk about the inevitability of COVID. You only have to look at those countries to see how it wasn't inevitable. We have these quite lazy stereotypes we say that wouldn't work over here because they're different over there. Well, how do you know? What did make those countries quite different is that a lot of them had experienced SARS, and they learned from that and applied that knowledge to this new pandemic.

What worries me is that we're not trying to learn from COVID and apply it to a new pandemic.

Another thing that struck me is that you can understand the panic and the mistakes that happened in the first wave in March 2020. But by the time the Alpha wave hit in late 2020, early 2021, it felt like not that much had been learned. We didn't mitigate it, particularly factors around transmission and about it being airborne. By the summer of 2020, it was reasonably clear that it could spread through the air. It was clear that masks helped. It was clear that ventilation helped. It was clear that outside conditions were much safer than inside. But little effort was made to improve indoor air quality. To this day, I do not understand that, because good air quality comes with so many more public health benefits, beyond COVID. Clean indoor air is in the public good, along the same lines as clean water. I can't understand why we've never prioritized it.

Verghese: You were prescient about the shape of the BA.5 variant and how that might look a couple of months before we saw it. What does your crystal ball show of what we can expect in the United Kingdom and the United States in terms of variants that have not yet emerged?

Pagel: The other thing that strikes me is that people still haven't understood exponential growth 2.5 years in. With the BA.5 or BA.3 before it, or the first Omicron before that, people say, oh, how did you know? Well, it was doubling every week, and I projected forward. Then in 8 weeks, it's dominant.

It's not that hard. It's just that people don't believe it. Somehow people think, oh, well, it can't happen. But what exactly is going to stop it? You have to have a mechanism to stop exponential growth at the moment when enough people have immunity. The moment doesn't last very long, and then you get these repeated waves.

You have to have a mechanism that will stop it evolving, and I don't see that. We're not doing anything different to what we were doing a year ago or 6 months ago. So yes, it's still evolving. There are still new variants shooting up all the time.

At the moment, none of these look devastating; we probably have at least 6 weeks' breathing space. But another variant will come because I can't see that we're doing anything to stop it.

Topol: One word you have used is "complacency," which we still have a lot of a heavy dose of complacency. The other sentiment you're invoking by the unwillingness to accept exponential growth is denialism. There's a lot of that.

Long COVID is another area of concern. It's a softer endpoint than death and hospitalizations, but nonetheless, it's much more prevalent and real. But there's still a lot of denialism. Can you talk about long COVID?

Pagel: Long COVID is interesting because it took a long time for people to accept that it existed at all. And it still is dismissed and ignored.

Vaccination has not made long COVID go away to the same extent that vaccination has massively reduced the number of deaths and of severe, acute illnesses. A recent paper in JAMA showed that vaccination reduced the incidence of long COVID in healthcare workers by up to two thirds. So it helps, but it certainly doesn't make it go away.

What worries me just as much as long COVID are the longer-term problems that are becoming evident through the great work by the Veterans Administration, looking at 1-year and longer follow-up of people who've had COVID and showing elevated levels of organ dysfunction, pretty much anywhere you look.

That's the other thing about complacency: People want to fit COVID into a box they can understand. But this is a brand-new disease, and we don't understand it. As with the pandemic flu in 1918, it's thought to have been associated with a wave of Parkinson's disease about 10-15 years later.

We have no idea whats ahead of us. To me, this idea that we can live with widespread transmission is betting the future on thinking that we understand it, but there's no particular evidence that we do, even with all the new evidence showing longer-term issues with COVID, whether that's long COVID or other kinds of organ problems.

Verghese: One thing that strikes me is that we're not talking enough about indoor air and the difference it makes, and about long COVID in the sense that if the public really knew how fearful we are, perhaps it would change behavior.

From your perspective as someone with a deep understanding of history, this is not new, this disjunction between what we know would help and the public's willingness to accept it, and political opportunism. What can we do differently from what they did in the era of Camus' The Plague, for example? What can we do to impact the science ignorance that hurts us?

Pagel: I wish I knew. The thing about cleaner indoor air is that it works on any variant and any airborne disease; it helps against pollution; it helps against all kinds of things. And it doesn't take away anyone's freedoms.

What I find difficult is that people in the "COVID isn't a problem" spectrum still don't seem to be pro-ventilation. I just cannot understand why, because it doesn't impact anybody's choices for living their lives. All it does is make people slightly healthier and mitigate some harm. So, I can't quite see why we wouldn't do that. The various studies, and there have been many, showed that it's extremely cost-effective.

One of the issues is that a lot of the experts in ventilation are not doctors or clinical experts. They're engineers, architects, chemists, and physicists. They're coming from a different evidential paradigm, if you like. So you get these calls for trials of ventilation. And these nonclinical experts say, because we understand the physics, we know these things work.

It's quite a clash of cultures along those lines that is an issue. People see the pandemic and think the solution has to be medical when the solution is actually engineering. It doesn't fit into how governments prime themselves to respond.

Also, now that most people have had COVID and have recovered from COVID, including me I've had it twice now when people tell you this is a massive issue, it's easy to think, well, but I'm fine.

It's hard to overcome that and explain that you're fine now, but you don't know what the long-term implications are. Is it a question of getting COVID three times in 5 or 6 years? Or getting it twice a year? That can make quite a difference on your health. And do you really want to be taking a week to 10 days off work every single year from COVID? Can you add that to the amount of illness you were suffering before? So there's a strong economic argument for it as well.

Maybe we have to start making these arguments, because it is a different situation now. We're not in the situation we were 2.5 years ago. I think sometimes people believe that when you say anything about controlling COVID, they think you're arguing for lockdowns or something else, when it's not about that.

It's about how we maintain our economy and our quality of life and our health in a way that allows us all to enjoy our lives the way that we want to.

Topol: You are on the SAGE committee. Tell us about how that group reviews science and makes recommendations to your government.

Pagel: There's a bit of a misunderstanding there. SAGE is the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, which is the government's group of experts that does advise on the pandemic, and it was disbanded in March. At some point, probably hundreds of people contributed to that.

There is also a group, which I belong to, called Independent SAGE. That was launched in May 2020 specifically because at the beginning of the pandemic, membership of SAGE, which was advising the government, and all of the minutes of the decision-making were secret. So we had the government saying, we're making decisions based on the science, but we had no idea what that science was. Independent SAGE was formed to bring some of those discussions into the public. Then, SAGE started making their minutes public.

The government used to hold daily press briefings on COVID. They stopped in June 2020. Although the United Kingdom has published lots of data we have strong national data surveillance it's not necessarily published in a particularly friendly form for nonexperts. So what Independent SAGE has been doing is holding weekly online briefings.

I've done a lot of this as well, where I try to collate all of the data that are out there and explain what's happening right now and what it means. We've evolved into being a bit more of a public-facing science body, where we're trying to explain and interpret what's happening for the public. We take public questions and focus on particular issues such as schools or inequality; we've talked about long COVID a lot, and children.

Topol: I wish we had something like this. Right, Abraham?

Verghese: Indeed. But I must say, both of you are doing a great job of explaining the intricacies of the data to the rest of us. It's just that people with fixed mindsets can easily tune out the most obvious facts.

Pagel: I rely on Eric, especially for the literature filtering. It's incredible how you read the papers and then condense them so I can understand them. I'm not an expert in a lot of the science.

I go to my expert friends and say, you're going to have to tell me what this abstract means because I do not understand biology. Then they explain it, and I say, so is this right? And they say yes or no. Unfortunately, on academic Twitter, there are a lot of people who are amazing scientists but cannot understand how much knowledge they have that other people don't have. So I read these long Twitter threads, but I don't understand them.

Or there are people who are very much into performative cleverness. You would think that their job as an academic is to show how clever they are. Their information is not useful. I always try to provide source data and to make sure I'm not excluding people from that knowledge.

Topol: That gets to the dissemination of the information. What is so important about your background is you are into the hard data and evidence, and the interpretation of that the analytics, if you will. Then you go to social media and you get into the cesspool of toxic responses.

By putting a lot of time into trying to help, you get this ridiculous backlash of people who are just there to cause insult and trouble. How do you deal with that? Every day I wonder, what the hell am I doing? There's so much negativism. You're trying to help, and you're putting in the effort and time, and look what you get. Of course, a lot of people appreciate that. But I'm sure you're subject to similar issues.

Pagel: It's gotten a lot easier over time for me, and I imagine for you. Certainly, once you get to a certain number of followers, there's no way you can read all the comments. In fact, mostly, I don't read them.

It means that Twitter stops being a conversation. It becomes more of a broadcast medium. You lose something from that, but at the same time, you can't get too worried about what random people are saying. Right at the beginning, one of my friends who already had a large following he's in politics told me to never, ever engage in Twitter arguments. You will always regret it, and they'll never work. I mainly followed his advice. A couple of times when I didn't, I regretted it, and I still regret it because those conversations are still used against me now.

Never get engaged. If you do, always pretend that the person means well. A lot of people are doing it in bad faith, but if you respond as if they aren't, there's not that much that people do. Also, you have good mute settings.

For the first year, I didn't block anyone on Twitter. That changed when I read more about how Twitter works, and how people see tweets, and how they get amplified. I had a few quite high profile, quite horrible commentators on Twitter throwing pile-ons on me, people with a million followers calling me certifiable and saying I should be in prison. If you block them, their followers can't see it and you just stop it. Someone told me to think of it as if you're walking down the street and someone starts shouting at you. You don't have to listen to it. You have a right to walk away from it.

Now I have quite a low threshold for blocking people because if they're clearly not trying to engage or be helpful and are just shouting at me, I don't have to listen to it. I've never taken it that personally because these people don't know me.

It's been a hard pandemic. People are angry and upset for all kinds of reasons. I get that. I find it much harder when other scientists are attacking me, maybe more politely. I find that harder because they're my peers, and they're basically trying to damage my reputation.

Verghese: I see a lot of undergraduates at Stanford very narrowly focused on computer science, which is the flavor du jour right now. Your career is a wonderful testament to the importance of a broad perspective, not just math but astronomy and history. I think we're going to need more of your kind of educated people for the complexity of what we're dealing with, and it's not going to be possible otherwise to have civilized conversations.

Pagel: A lot of the time, I end up feeling like a complete idiot. I'm not this super-specialized person. And I've always got my mom, as well, telling me, why is it they are listening to you, Christina? Haven't you said it all already?

Topol: I had the privilege of doing an NHS review just before the pandemic in 2018 or 2019. And I was struck by the strong data-driven culture of the team I got to work with.

I saw it during the pandemic with the UK Health Security Agency Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports that would come out every week, and the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre (ICNARC) reports of all the ICU admissions, which we don't have here in the United States. Just extraordinary. And then the government just gave up on all this stuff. It seems premature. They were leading the world. We were all learning every day, every week from the United Kingdom because the data were extraordinary. Can you comment about that?

Pagel: Its sad because I think you're right. One area in which the UK has been leading the world is in surveillance, particularly random testing surveillance, which the ONS is still doing, and also the Imperial REACT study, which, unfortunately, was not funded and ended in April this year. I do think it's short sighted.

Some national data collections, like ICNARC, existed before the pandemic and it exists now. It routinely collects data on every single intensive care admission of adults in England and publishes reports on it; the same with pediatric-intensive care; the same with every hospital admission. We have those data. What happened during the pandemic is that they quickly added extra information relevant to COVID. Within days to weeks, they started collating it, so that capability is still there.

Our surveillance has been so good that it's often felt that we were watching and reporting on the pandemic incredibly carefully, but not actually acting on any of the information that it was showing. So in that sense, we have a very sensitive system that's not informing any decisions.

I'm guessing that's what prompted it closing down. If we're not going to do anything different, why are we measuring it? I hope that the ONS Infection Survey, which measures prevalence in a random subgroup of tens of thousands of people every week, carries on because that's the only thing we've got now. And it's one of the only global measures of national long COVID rates as well.

Topol: I also want to ask about your sense of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. You obviously have the grounding with all aspects of machine learning and the complexities of health data, which is not just from health records but all the different layers of data sensors, genomics, and the microbiome. There are lots of different datasets. Where do you see AI? In your view what can it do to improve healthcare in the future?

Pagel: I believe that it can do both more and not as much as what people think. People sometimes see it as this great savior. It isn't. Sometimes what you need is enough nurses and equipment and just old-fashioned doctoring. AI is never going to give you that. AI is incredibly good at taking complex data and using them to understand what's happening, but only if the data contain what is happening.

It's good at things like imaging. The only place where AI is commonly used in the NHS is for things like imaging. If we're looking at scans and you want to assess a tumor or a difference in a tumor, then it's very good at pattern recognition. That's what it's built for. In a sense, all the information is contained in that image.

AI is less good at routine healthcare, which is messy and dirty and subject to lots of biases as to who put it in, at what time, in which place. How has that changed over time? What is that actually telling you about the patient or the system? There it isn't as good. Also, the information of what's in there doesn't necessarily tell you about the future, which is what people are trying to use it for.

We can't predict, say, occupancy in a year's time because what's going to cause occupancy in a year's time is not contained in those data. And AI can't make that happen for me. So sometimes you have to realize there are limitations to what it can do. I believe that some important areas where it could still help more are in things like physiologic time-series data.

We're doing a project on that now, with incredibly complex data. Patients in ICUs have measurements taken multiple times per second for days on end, but we still don't understand that much about how patients get better when they're severely ill. You can see a situation there where AI could help with spotting early deterioration or spotting when patients are ready to leave the ICU, all kinds of other things.

As it turns out, when I'm working with the AI specialists on time series, it just adds a whole extra level of complexity and makes a lot of the normal ways of doing things not work because your assumptions are robbed of independence. Everything is correlated, so it becomes really difficult. But it could become a big thing.

Topol: We've enjoyed this conversation so much. The contributions you've made in the past few years, beyond everything else in your career, Christina, have been what I consider a positive outlier, even momentous.

We've all learned from you, and we're lucky to have someone of your background to be a leading force. We'll keep following you well beyond the pandemic for things that you're going to do to help healthcare. We're glad you switched from physics to healthcare. It's already made a big difference. And it's going to make even more difference in the decades ahead. Thanks so much for joining us today.

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We Are Failing to Use What We've Learned About COVID - Medscape

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Researchers Employ the Physics of Chiral Quasi Bound States in the Continuum – AZoQuantum

Posted: at 6:01 pm

An ultracompact circularly polarized light source is crucial component for the applications of classical and quantum optics information processing. The development of this field relies on the advances of two fields, i.e., quantum materials and chiral optical cavities. Conventional approaches for circularly polarized photoluminescence suffer from incoherent broadband emission, limited DOP, and large radiating angles.

Their practical applications are constrained by low efficiency and energy waste to undesired handedness and emission directions. The chiral microlasers can have large DOPs and directional output, but only in specific power ranges. Most importantly, their subthreshold performances plummet significantly. Up to now, the strategy for simultaneous control of chiral spontaneous emission and chiral lasing is still absent.

In a new paper published inScience, researchers from Harbin Institute of Technology and Australian National University employ the physics of chiral quasi bound states in the continuum (BICs) and demonstrate the efficient and controllable emission of circularly polarized light from resonant metasurfaces.

BICs with integer topological charge in momentum space and theoretically infinity Q factor have been explored for many applications including nonlinear optics and lasing. By introducing in-plane asymmetry, BICs turn to be quasi-BICs with finite but still high Q factors. Interestingly, the integer topological charge of BICs mode would split into two half integer charges, which symmetrically distribute in momentum space and correspond to left- and right-handed circular polarization states, also known as C points.

At the C points, incident light with one circular polarization state can be coupled into the nanostructures and produce dramatically enhanced local electromagnetic fields. The other polarization state is decoupled and almost perfectly transmit. Such characteristics are well known but rarely applied to light emissions. "This is mainly because the C points usually deviate from the bottom of band. They have relatively low Q factor and cannot be excited for lasing actions," says Zhang.

To realize the chiral light emission, a key step is to combine the local density of states with the intrinsic chirality at C points. If one C point is shifted to the bottom of the band, the Q factor of the corresponding chiral quasi-BIC can be maximal. According to the Fermi's golden rule, the radiation rate of one circularly polarized spontaneous emission is enhanced, whereas the other polarization is inhibited. Both the Q factor and the radiation rate reduces dramatically with the emission angle.

As a result, high-purity and highly directional light emission can be expected near the point. "Of course, the other C point can support similar high chirality with opposite handedness. However, that point also deviates from the maximal Q factor and less be enhanced. Therefore, our metasurface only produces one near unity circular polarization with high directionality around the normal direction," says Zhang.

The control of C points in momentum space closely relates to the maximization of chirality in normal direction. In principle, the realization of chirality relates to the simultaneous breaking of in-plane and out-of-plane mirror reflection symmetries. In this research, the researchers have introduced an out-of-plane asymmetry, the tilt of nanostructures. For an in-plane asymmetry, there is one out-of-plane asymmetry that can move one C point to point. "We find two types of asymmetries are linearly dependent on one another. This makes the optimization of chirality in normal direction very easy" says Zhang.

In experiment, the researchers have fabricated the metasurfaces with one-step slanted reactive ion etching process and characterized the emissions. Under the excitation of a nanosecond laser, they have successfully demonstrated the chiral emissions with a DOP of 0.98 and a far field divergent angle of 1.06 degree. "Our circularly light source is realized with the control of C point in momentum space and local density of state. It is independent of the excitation power," say Zhang, "this is the reason that we can achieve the high Q, high directionality, and high purity circular polarization emission from spontaneous emission to lasing."

Compared with conventional approaches, the chiral quasi-BIC provides a way to simultaneously modify and control spectra, radiation patterns, and spin angular momentum of photoluminescence and lasing without any spin injection. This approach may improve the design of current sources of chiral light and boost their applications in photonic and quantum systems.

Source:http://en.hit.edu.cn/

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When bitcoin plunges, Buttcoin cheers: the online community praying for the end of crypto – The Guardian

Posted: at 5:59 pm

As bitcoin plunged below $20,000 in mid-June, many cryptocurrency users were distraught over massive losses with some reporting they had lost their life savings. But one corner of the internet was cheering: Buttcoin, a Reddit subforum launched in 2011 to poke fun at cryptocurrency.

Im addicted, I need help, read one popular post. I just love watching line go down too much. I always tell myself after it breaks through this next support line, youll be satisfied but theres ALWAYS another lower level after that. Im actually hoping it levels off at 20K for tonight, said another user. Im kinda tired and need more time to think of new lower priced memes.

One tech industry worker who frequents Buttcoin told the Guardian they stayed up until 3am one night to watch the crash unfold. I know this may sound pathetic but I get a dopamine hit when I see the bitcoin price going down. It was so exciting.

The cryptocurrency flirted with its two-year low again this week, which meant a festive mood at Buttcoin. With about 135,000 members, the subreddit is tiny compared with the millions of people who chat on Reddits many pro-cryptocurrency forums. But frequent contributors to the community whose logo replaces bitcoins golden B with a pair of golden buttcheeks describe it as a kind of digital support group, laced through with dark humor, for people who are horrified by the proliferation of crypto scams and pyramid schemes. Though they may not have the power to destroy crypto, they can make jokes when it stumbles. As Buttcoin members say, instead of mining useless digital coins theyre mining comedy gold.

Just like the crypto culture it mocks, Buttcoin has its own set of memes. Some of them simply flip crypto sayings. Instead of baying for token prices to rise to the moon, Buttcoin users chant to the floor. But Buttcoins most popular jokes take pro-crypto logic and push them to sarcastic extremes. To skewer crypto promoters habit of spinning negative news, Buttcoin users comment This is good for bitcoin under stories of cryptocurrency catastrophes. (Bitcoins been banned in a major country? Good for bitcoin. Bitcoins price is plummeting? Good for bitcoin. Someone lost their life savings to a bitcoin scam? You guessed it good for bitcoin.)

Another crypto catchphrase smugly referencing the technologys complexity, Few understand, has been become a Buttcoin meme in its own right. (For example: a Buttcoin user jokes that a 2003 Toyota Camrys rising price amid the crypto crash makes the Camry a superior store of value. Every 2003 Camry has a unique VIN and you can drive it to the supermarket too Few understand, another replies. This is good for Toyota, a third chimes in.)

Buttcoins most senior moderator, an IT worker who goes by spookmann, told the Guardian that the 11-year-old forum has changed as crypto itself as grown and festered. Originally the tone was almost entirely Haha... thats so silly! And certainly that element is still present, but nowadays theres an increasingly tragic element of Ugghh... so many people are having their lives ruined by this damn thing!

The biggest posts on Buttcoin are shot through with schadenfreude. The subreddit invariably celebrates when bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency, dips below symbolic price levels which to many Buttcoin users, proves that the scam is unraveling. I definitely get hopeful when it starts seriously dipping or when some stablecoin scheme goes to zero, said Joe, a systems engineer who browses Buttcoin every day. Theres a kind of thrill to the validation of it, right? Especially since the crypto bro stereotypes are so obnoxious whenever it goes up in a new bubble.

But the more controversial posts mock crypto investors themselves for losing money though theres disagreement over how far to go. Some highly rated posts on the subreddit argue that there should be no sympathy for victims. They can go fuck themselves, read one post in late June, with more than 1,500 upvotes: Criticizing scams is not being mean. This also isnt a support group to help console people who lost all of their money on ElonDogPoop Coin. Not all Buttcoin users agree. Even if they are assholes, I dont relish the idea of the average [investor] losing their life savings even if they should have been able to see the scam for what it is. That unambiguously sucks, Joe says.

Theres a shared enjoyment of watching things go up in flames, said M, a Buttcoin user and a tech industry worker, but he still has sympathy for those drawn into crypto by family members or by the promise of a better life Times are tough for most. He pointed to the victims of Celsius, an unlicensed crypto bank that offered massive returns to over a million investors in an alleged ponzi scheme that collapsed earlier this summer. The court testimonies which included pleas from ordinary people who lost their life savings were heartbreaking, M said.

Because Reddits pro-cryptocurrency forums quickly delete critical posts, Buttcoin also attracts users looking to commiserate over loved ones who have been caught up in the scam. One support seeker was Izzycc, a 23-year-old social work student whose boyfriend of eight years had become depressed after getting sucked into the NFT fad and losing money.

Im absolutely fucking praying for the downfall of cryptocurrency, she wrote. It would mean a wakeup call for him, he might finally pull out of this scam, and maybe even start to feel a little better not staring at a number thats only going down. Buttcoin users urged Izzycc to break up with her boyfriend and so she did. It was for a couple of reasons, but the NFT stuff was kind of a big one, she told the Guardian.

I just hated being around it all the time. I hated when he would talk to my family about it. It was just kind of embarrassing, I guess. Shes doing a lot better now, but still browses Buttcoin: The people are funny, and I know too much about cryptocurrency to not at least casually browse the site at this point.

Buttcoin sometimes deals with heavier tragedy. In August, a user described a close friend who had gone all-in on crypto before he killed himself. I was secretly making fun of him, the user wrote, till I recently heard the bad news and its hard to feel sorry for crypto bros, but now that Im here, I do. Im tearing up hearing about this, wrote one user. Another user observed: This sub makes a lot of jokes that I consider comic relief, but everything about this sucks, in reality.

Thats the tension that runs through Buttcoin: beneath the memes lies real pain and a frustration of watching helplessly as more people around you get hurt. I think if the crypto cult was just a bunch of dudes off in the woods with a server farm and a maypole there wouldnt be any real call for Buttcoin to exist, said Joe. But it apparently intends to stick around and become a sufficiently big part of the world overall that I dont have that option.

Buttcoin isnt so much a force for resistance as it is a coping mechanism, Joe said, and one that at least for him, may even be backfiring.

Im pretty sure the algorithms have actually been sending me more crypto ads since I started posting regularly because they cant tell the difference between Im reading about how absurd this is and Im reading about this as a potential sucker/customer. He refreshes Buttcoin anyway, hoping hell one day witness the price go all the way to the floor.

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What Bitcoin Needs To Regain Its Higher Marks, Analyst Explains – NewsBTC

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The crypto market crash started from the Feds and its fight against inflation. The announcement to increase interest rates caused a panic that created doubts in the minds of crypto investors. As the Federal Reserve implemented the plan, the overall financial markets, including crypto, plunged.

Another factor that helped push crypto prices down was the crash of Terra Luna USDT. The algorithmic stablecoin depegged, leading to massive losses that plunged the market into oblivion. Since then, crypto prices have fluctuated in a terribly prolonged crypto winter.

Related Reading: Serum (SRM) Price Looks Set After Hibernation, Can Price Go To $1?

Cryptos such as Bitcoin and Ethereum lost their massive gains, and many crypto projects disappeared completely.

Some analysts opined a price rally as the market lamented over the continuing crypto winter. But unfortunately, these predictions seem to be delayed as the crypto market records more fluctuations.

For instance, Bitcoin has lost more than 37% since the market downtrend. June 2022 brought a lot of price crashes for the coin like never recorded before. The next month, July saw a little gain of 17% in BTC price, but that rally was short-lived. The coin lost everything and is now trading below the $20 mark.

Bitcoin even dived deeper on September 7 when the price plummeted below $19K; it recovered quickly. So whats the way forward for the number one crypto?

While the investors await a price rally for Bitcoin and others, an analyst has indicated that such occurrence depends on the Federal Reserve.

Dan Nathan, the RiskReversal Advisors principal stated this during the popular CNBCs Fast Money episode. According to Nathan, Bitcoin can only reverse to a bullish trend if the Feds change their stance on the inflation fight approach.

Recall that in the last Federal Reserve annual meeting held on August 26, 2022, Jerome H Powell made a speech that caused concerns for investors. The feds chair declared a more aggressive approach in the agencys fight against inflation.

Before the meeting, Neel Kashkari suggested using the Vokcker approach. Given that Kashkari was initially dovish in his stance, the crypto community became worried. Powell intensified the panic when he announced that the agency would intensify its strategies. So, the likelihood of the feds pivoting in its approach is farfetched.

To say that these outplay affected crypto prices is an understatement. Many coins started a downward trend from that day and are still at it until now. The short-lived rallies are no match for the frequent pullbacks.

Related Reading: On-Chain Data Shows Bitcoin Whale Dumping Behind Dip Below $19k

Bitcoin dominance has plummeted to its lowest ever. Nathan even stated that the coin is trading like an ordinary stock currently. So, a rally for the number one crypto may not be possible this 2022, given that the feds are not about to pivot.

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Christian Missionaries Are Turning to the Gospel of Bitcoin in Latin America – Gizmodo

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On a spring afternoon in Guatemala, I watched Patrick Melder, a 55-year-old missionary, find a potential convert. He began his pitch with the cadence of an experienced salesman.

Were here to talk about bitcoin, said Melder, who wore a khaki Panama hat he had bought in New York City, an Apple watch, and a bag slung over his shoulder with Guatemala Bitcoin stitched on its side.

Juana Antonio Coc listened to Melders translator with skepticism. He was urging her to accept bitcoin as payment in her small tienda, which sells alcohol, ice cream, and fishing lines in Panajachel, a vacation destination that borders a deep-blue lake and four looming volcanoes. Im not good at technology, she said in Spanish.

Melder, white and wiry with short-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair, wasnt deterred. You have a smartphone. I saw it. Thats all you need. Ill give you free bitcoin right now, he coaxed Coc, who was wearing a rose-colored traje, a traditional Mayan dress. Periodically, customers who wanted beers or watermelon-flavored popsicles interrupted Melder. She will get 146% per year, he said at one point to his translator, referencing the average annual growth of bitcoin since 2009.

Just two days earlier, the price of bitcoin had plummeted more than 20%. Investors were suddenly short millions of dollars, and the global market capitalization for all cryptocurrencies had lost almost two trillion dollars since its peak in November 2021. Why was Melder, a retired ears, nose, and throat surgeon from Atlanta, trying to persuade a small shop owner in another hemisphere to use a volatile cryptocurrency that was crashing in value?

The answer, simply, is faith. An evangelical Christian who has preached the gospel across four continents, Melder believes bitcoin is objective truth. Like Christs second coming, bitcoins eventual dominance is inevitable, he says. Since November 2021, he has traveled multiple times to Panajachel to persuade businesses to accept bitcoin, educate children about the cryptocurrency, and encourage residents to mine it.

In the not-too-distant future, those who adopted bitcoin early will be immensely wealthy, he writes in his self-published book, The Christian Case for Bitcoin.

Melders unyielding belief in bitcoin isnt unique. Bitcoin maximalists, or those who believe Bitcoin is the one true cryptocurrency, have continued to buy and sell bitcoin despite its recent downturn. Other Christian-turned-bitcoin missionaries are also spreading the good word of the blockchain to the worlds poor. Deeply committed to both bitcoin and god, Melder and those like him are blurring the boundaries between faith in technology and faith in god. As I followed him on the streets of Panajachel this past spring, he said he doesnt see much distance between the two.

Bitcoin has all the trappings of religion, he told me. No question.

An experienced Christian missionary, Melder says the techniques he uses to spread bitcoin beliefteaching children, promising riches, door knockingare similar to what Christians do when they spread the gospel. Bitcoin evangelism is no different than Christian evangelism, he told me. Its the same.

And he recognizes that bitcoin belief and belief in god are not as far apart as they seem. Bitcoin is a religion, he flatly asserts in the first chapter of The Philosophy of Bitcoin and Religion, another book he self-published.

He may not be far off. Like Christianity, there is a prophet: Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous founder of Bitcoin. There is a sacred text: Nakamotos white paper, a blueprint for the cryptocurrency. And there are die-hard believers. Like all religions, those who experience Bitcoin experience the transcendent, writes Melder.

Patrick Melder, a bitcoin missionary and a Christian one, in Guatemala.Photo: Ben Weiss

Before he found bitcoin, Melder found God. When he was a high school freshman in Houston, a classmate taught him about the Christian afterlife and scared the bejesus out of him. I didnt want to go to hell, Melder said. So, he joined a fundamentalist church and preached the gospel on the streets of Houston during the weekends. After developing a distinct libertarian streak, he went to college and medical school. Once he finished his residency, he accompanied Christian missions to southwestern India, then to Kyiv, Ukraine, and finally Guatemala. In 2012, he and his wife set up an art camp at a private Christian school in Panajachel. For the next six summers, Melder and his family returned to the school to teach art and enjoy Panajachels eternal spring, as many call the towns balmy climate.

Soon, Melder became an evangelist for another causebitcoin. He first heard about the cryptocurrency in 2018, but he didnt become a true believer until late 2020, when he discovered Twitters bitcoin community, listened to bitcoin podcasts, and read bitcoin books. I was amazed, he said. The more he learned, the more he thought that bitcoin had the potential to provide economic opportunity without creating dependence.

It was around this time that Melder first heard about Bitcoin Beach in the town of El Zonte, perhaps the worlds most famous experiment in community cryptocurrency adoption. For years, Michael Peterson, a 47-year-old evangelical Christian from California, had hosted Christian missionaries at a retreat in El Zonte, where he and his family had lived for years. In 2019, with the aim of helping residents, Peterson secured a large donation in bitcoin from an anonymous donor. It came with only one stipulation: that the donation be distributed in bitcoin, not dollars. Peterson decided to work with members of El Zontes community to create a circular bitcoin economy, or market where people buy and sell goods with bitcoin. A gifted publicist, he painted his project in El Zonte as a great success, and the Salvadoran president cited it as an inspiration when announcing that the country would become the first in the world to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. As journalists, Bitcoin enthusiasts, and curious travelers flocked to Bitcoin Beach, it became a mecca for cryptocurrency believers. The town also turned into a training ground for those who wanted to learn how to perform crypto-conversions elsewhere.

Panajachel, GuatemalaPhoto: Ben Weiss

Rich Swisher, a 53-year-old evangelical Christian from California, visited El Zonte after he had founded his own bitcoin conversion project. Having accompanied numerous Christian missions to Peru, he and Valentin Pompescu, a 42-year-old Romanian, decided to bring bitcoin to the communities where they had also ministered. They called their initiative Motiv, which empowers the disempowered and emancipates people from oppression using bitcoin, according to its website.

Melder similarly visited El Zonte to pay his respects, and he then launched his own initiative in the lakefront community of Panajachel. Like Peterson, he wants to bank the unbanked, or give those who dont have bank accounts a means of saving money. And he believes bitcoin is a natural hedge against inflation. Bitcoin is your bank, he later told me. In a nod to Peterson, he dubbed his project along Lake Atitln, Central Americas deepest lake, Lago Bitcoin, or Bitcoin Lake.

When I shadowed Melder for more than a week, I wasnt the only one to join his bitcoin mission. There were Guatemalan podcasters, a red-meat-loving representative from a bitcoin mining company, an elderly inventor from Texas, two bitcoin devotees from Switzerland, and a familya father, his teenage daughter, and her friend, who all flew out from St. Louis.

For Kate and Madaket, the teenagers from St. Louis, traveling to Guatemala for the first time was a treat at the end of their senior year of high school. However, their time in Panajachel wasnt merely a vacation. They came to lead a class on bitcoin.

The day after Melder spoke to Coc in her small tienda, we met up with the teenagers and Bill Whittaker, Madakets father. Wearing two black tank tops emblazoned with an orange bitcoin logo, Kate and Madaket were pretty nervous, before class began, they told me.

Minutes later, they sat down behind a plastic, foldable table in front of roughly 20 students from the private Christian school where Melder and his wife had run an art camp. Were here because we love bitcoin, began Kate, who was orange pilled, or converted into a bitcoiner, by Madakets father.

Through a translator, Kate and Madaket explained that, for their high schools senior project, they had refurbished bitcoin minersthe specially adapted computers used to sustain and operate bitcoins network. They then donated three miners to Panajachel, one to South Africa, and another to Zimbabwe. Bitcoin will continue to increase in value as we get older, Madaket told the class. So, you gotta get in it early, so you can get really rich off of it.

Mining distinguishes Melders project in Panajachel from Bitcoin Beach, where bitcoin supplies flow from the original donation and flush wallets. Miners that support bitcoins network receive the cryptocurrency in exchange for lending their computer power to the cryptocurrencys distributed ledger. Melder hopes to use human waste, trash, leaking methane, and used cooking oil from Panajachel to power bitcoin miners and then donate the profits back to the town. The vision is still in its infancy.

As the children looked on mutely at the teenagers, Madakets father jumped in to help. A soccer coach and residential advisor at his daughters private school, Whittaker is a bitcoin mining fanatic. Its as bad as a nicotine addiction, Melder said of Whittakers fanaticism. Every time Whittaker flies, he brings a bitcoin minerwhich looks like a big bomb, Kate told methrough security. And while he was away from St. Louis, he lined up a babysitter for his pet catsand the bitcoin miners plugged into his apartments outlets.

The last time we were here, we talked about decentralized and centralized activity, Whittaker, who is the bitcoin mining specialist for Bitcoin Lake, said to the 12-through-15-year-olds. And centralized activity typically means that theres somebody at the top that controls everything that flows down to the people.

The children stared back at him. Whittaker went on to talk about renewable energy and bitcoin mining. The children seemed similarly disinterested, except for one boy who was fidgeting in the front. The back of his t-shirt read: Mi lago! Mi casa! Mi orgullo! Bitcoin soluciona esto! or My lake! My house! My pride! Bitcoin solves this! (What bitcoin solves, though, the shirt didnt make clear.)

After Whittaker went on about the average cost of a kilowatt of electricity per hour in Guatemala, he ceded the stage to Melder. Before Melder moved on to the next topic, he made sure the children understood the importance of what they were talking about. I know all the other parents around here, he said, we feel like sometimes our kids come to us because they feel like money grows on trees. Well now, you just put the computer in the wall, and its making money.

Do you guys have any questions? asked Melder. No one responded.

For Jason Josephson Storm, a professor of religion at Williams College, Melders categorization of bitcoin as religionisnt unreasonable. Current notions of religion and science date back to the nineteenth century, and since then, new religious movements often blend the two seemingly conflicting categories, he said in an interview. Once you produce notions of religion and science and claim that theyre in conflict, it makes it very attractive to try and suture the link between religion and science, added Storm, pointing to the worship of aliens as an example.

And if bitcoin is a religion, it brings with it the same complexities and criticisms that Christianity does. Like Christian missionaries, who tend to preach to marginalized communities abroad, bitcoin and blockchain enthusiasts are experimenting financially with the worlds poor, say some academics. Its being sold by these people as if its a noble humanitarian mission, said Pete Howson, a professor at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom.

Oxfam, a nonprofit based in the UK, recently launched a blockchain project in Vanuatu, an island nation thats one of the most endangered by climate change. The nonprofit hopes to use blockchain to distribute cash for disaster relief. And in Puerto Rico, cryptocurrency investors have gentrified parts of the island as theyve flocked to the U.S. territory to exploit the local governments lax taxation policy. Howson and others have called this trend crypto-colonialism or blockchain imperialism.

Theres a colonial perception of what is possible in what are these unruly and wild west parts of the world, said Jorge Cullar, a professor at Dartmouth College who studies cryptocurrency communities in Latin America. He added that bitcoins volatility makes it a poor choice for those whose everyday finances are precarious. For the immediate timescale, everyday timescale, the volatility makes it unacceptable and literally unusable.

Melder, though, believes the opposite. Hes convinced that he is liberating the people of Panajachel from colonialism. The U.S. imposes the global financial system on less developed countries, and bitcoin is the only way out, he argues. This is not monetary colonialism, he said of his project, Petersons in El Salvador, and others who are spreading the gospel of Bitcoin far and wide. This is monetary liberation.

On one of our last days in Panajachel, Melder met with a group of indiginous leaders in the towns public library. Over 95 percent of residents that live near Lake Atitln identify as indigenous, according to Guatemalas most recent census.

As the sun set, Melder launched into an hour-long lecture on inflation, the gold standard, and colonialism. Four to five hundred years ago, the Spaniards came. They raped your land. They took your gold, he said. It is my desire that the natural resources that you have here, which will produce digital goldbitcoinwhich will stay here in the community. In front of me, a womans eyes fluttered as she struggled to stay awake.

After Melder finished, the leaders grilled him and his translator. They asked him how he was going to distribute Bitcoin he would mine using the communitys resources, why he came to Panajachel, and whether he himself has any financial interest in Bitcoin Lakes success. Melder says he doesnt. Ultimately, the community representatives seemed wary. Melder had just mentioned their homes history of colonization, after all.

Virtual money is the money of the future, but there are many complexities, Juan Carlos, one of the indigenous leaders present at the meeting, said as the discussion came to a close. So it would be best to schedule a date for the next meeting.

As night eased the daily bustle of Panajachel, we filed out of the library. Melder had sensed the leaders skepticism, but he wasnt deterred. After having preached in Houston, India, Ukraine, he knew that for every convert, there were many non-believers. Earlier that week, he said to me, You cant sell everybody on everything.

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Bitcoins Inflation Hedge Case Is Dead; Crypto Leader Heading To $12k – Forbes

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Bitcoin was once considered digital gold. Like gold, it would be a hedge against inflation. Not so. ... [+] (Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images)

Ladies and gentlemen, I hate to say this, but bitcoin BTC is not digital gold and the investment case of bitcoin being an inflation hedge is dead. If you think the $20,000 price tag is back, wait until you see $12,000.

We all wanted Goldman Sachs to be right when they called bitcoin digital gold. But like their call in 2008 that oil was going to $200 a barrel, sometimes the best minds get it wrong.

Historic inflation is pushing up the price of food and fuel, among other items. Some securities benefited as the market bet the Fed would not dare raise interest rates in the middle of a technical recession (the U.S. economy contracted for two consecutive quarters, the definition of a technical recession). Stocks did okay on this gamble. Despite the S&P 500 being down year-to-date, its way better than bitcoin. In fact, the entire cryptocurrency market is a dud. Some NFTs are down 85%. Buying on the lows is like that old saying never catch a falling knife.

Bitcoin, with its capped supply of 21 million coins, and Goldman Sachs store of value thesis (digital gold), meant the no. 1 traded cryptocurrency was supposed to be a hedge against inflation.

Bitcoin is not immune to macroeconomic factors, says Andrei Grachev, managing partner at DWF Labs, a Web 3.0 investor based in Zug, Switzerland. Ongoing factors like the Federal Reserves decision on interest rates have affected market confidence greatly, and market uncertainty means investors will turn to low-risk assets. Unfortunately, bitcoin is still seen as a newer, volatile asset to be a hedge, but I think Bitcoin is still going to be a highly profitable asset for middle and long-term investors.

Unlike the crypto investors of the past who wanted to hodl bitcoin forever, big money investors are more likely to sell Bitcoin now when markets turn defensive.

Bitcoin was heavily correlated with the Nasdaq. When it fell, Bitcoin fell more. Now it's decoupled. ... [+] (Photo by Chris Hondros/Newsmakers)

Getting defensive on bitcoin basically means, dont buy it. If youre not buying the Nasdaq, then definitely do not buy bitcoin. Build cash and wait for it to fall further, because everyone is convinced that it is.

Bitcoins tech stock correlation is over. Cryptos main drivers are still the dedicated, long-term holders," says Przemysaw Kral, CEO of Zonda, a cryptocurrency exchange based in Tallinn, Estonia, who thinks the Nasdaq correlation to bitcoin is a thing of the past.

Last year and into early 2022, bitcoin followed the Nasdaq rather than act like inflation hedge assets like gold. Bitcoins value should be, in theory, uncorrelated to the stock market. One has nothing to do with the other.

The fact that bitcoins price was so correlated to the financial markets indicates that we are still far away from Satoshis vision of decentralization, says Abraham Piha, co-founder and CEO of Tomi.com, a decentralized cloud computing solutions provider for companies building the third generation of the internet the blockchain space best known as Web 3.0.

The (cryptocurrency) market is still pretty centralized and controlled by Wall Street hedge funds, and their liquidity is damaging us as all, Piha says from his office in New York City. Only when we achieve real decentralization will Bitcoin be a hedge against inflation and a true store of value. Right now, the only real benefit is that it's an asset that no one can take away from its owner.

Billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones called Bitcoin an inflation hedge last year. Mark Cuban dismissed the idea, calling it a marketing slogan for bitcoin enthusiasts. Cuban was right.

Whats going on?

Since the birth of bitcoin, we have lived in the era of low-interest rates that encouraged investors and speculators to put their money in risky assets. Nothing is riskier than cryptocurrency. Maybe slot machines and roulette are riskier.

Mark Cuban said the idea that Bitcoin would be an inflation hedge was a "marketing slogan" for ... [+] Bitcoin bulls. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

The recent decline in crypto prices is not really driven by inflation, but by the rising interest rates to clean up the excess liquidity in the market, clamp down on inflation, and strengthen the U.S. dollar because of rising rates. Rising interest rates mean higher Treasury yields, attracting foreign bond buyers from low-yielding nations like Japan and Europe. Leveraged Bitcoin bets have been cashing out as well.

Bitcoin hasnt been around long enough to prove whether its genuinely an inflation hedge and a store of value. Despite its scarcity, the price of a cryptocurrency like bitcoin is still mainly based on investor sentiment. It could still gain acceptance over time and become less volatile, but that has not happened despite some small headlines about companies accepting bitcoin for payment. This is mostly true today in high-end real estate, often a money launderer's delight, making bitcoin the perfect match for luxury high rises in Miami and Dubai.

If you zoom out over the last decade, then you can see that bitcoin has performed better than most traditional stocks, says Irina Berezina, the Lisbon, Portugal-based COO of Uplift DAO, a platform for cryptocurrency startups. She pointed out Blackrocks recent foray into bitcoin. They created a fund for their high-net-worth clients.

If BlackRock BLK has started pumping client money into that fund, its been a money pit. Bitcoin was trading flat late Thursday. Bulls are looking for a break.

The digital gold story isnt working. The inflation hedge story isnt working. The bitcoin is a crypto Nasdaq isnt working.

That could be changing. Remember, the last time bitcoin fell below $10,000, it spent the next 12 months climbing to about $60,000.

Rather than inflation, bitcoin is a hedge against currency debasement and in its mature state offers an alternative to central banking, says Ben Caselin, Head of Research and Strategy at AAX in Hong Kong. In places like Argentina, Turkey, Nigeria or other countries where inflation has run high for decades, there is no question as to the ability for Bitcoin to act as a hedge against inflation.

Sadly, El Salvadors experiment with bitcoin as legal tender seems to have hit a wall. bitcoin as an alternative to fiat is barely a success story.

Bulls like Caselin are focused on the long-term story of bitcoin.

But in the near term, they see bitcoin losing that strong correlation with the stock market. Over the last two weeks, investors have been selling the S&P 500. Bitcoin fell in a big way on August 19 but has caught up to the S&P since. Over the last five days ending Labor Day, bitcoin was down 1.1%, and the SPDR S&P 500 ( SPY ) ETF was down 2.6%.

The long crypto winter has taken more than 50% off of Bitcoin's value this year. It's two times ... [+] worse than the Nasdaq, also in a bear market. By comparison, Nasdaq is in a Teddy Bear market. Bitcoin is in an angry, hungry, polar bear market.

One thing in favor of Bitcoin is the currency market. The euro, pound and yen are at decade lows against the dollar.

The dollar index is much moving in one direction and one direction only, and that is to the upside. Usually, when the dollar index picks up this much strength, we normally see Bitcoin price breaking down, says Naeem Aslam, chief market strategist for AvaTrade in London. Bulls are holding their ground. They have not allowed the Bitcoin price to get battered because of the tech sell-off and a strong dollar, he says.

If there is a capitulation to the downside now that Bitcoin has breached $20,000, the next move isn't going to be about the $18,000 price level or $15,000; the sell-off could be so intense that it could quickly push Bitcoin closer to $12,000, Aslam forecasts.

My overall view is that the crypto winter will get worse before it gets better. Most professional traders I talk to are looking for 10,000 rather than 30,000 in Bitcoin. There's a very limited buy side demand at the moment, says Lars Seier Christensen, chairman of the Concordium Foundation and founder of Saxo Bank. The Ethereum merge is unlikely to instill a real bullish feeling in the market, as the reality is it doesn't change a lot.

Alas, with economies looking weak because of inflation in Europe, and higher interest in the Western economies, Bitcoin failed to live up to its hype as the crypto inflation hedge.

Once it has been through a few market cycles, investors will better understand how Bitcoin responds to macro developments.

There is a strong relationship between Bitcoins price and the dollar, says Caselin. The dollar has shown strength in recent months, so a drawdown in the dollar could kick off a rally in Bitcoin in the near term. But in the future, its more interesting to me to watch how Bitcoin and digital assets take root in emerging markets on the basis of use cases. Over time, such widespread adoption will stabilize Bitcoins growth and change the dynamics between the crypto and traditional markets.

*The writer owns Bitcoin.

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From Shiba Inu to Squidgrow Sponsored Bitcoin News – Bitcoin News

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When society looks at the crypto industry today, one cannot deny that Dogecoin (Doge) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) are just as widely known as Bitcoin (BTC). SHIB to date has the highest percentage gain est. Thirty million per cent from launch to an all-time high; no other cryptocurrency has come close to this percentage return.

While most meme coins have taken a -70%+ beating from an all-time high (like the rest of the cryptocurrency market), one has proven it will be a force to reckon with even during this bear market. Shibtoshi (anonymous alias) is the CEO of Squidgrow, a meme coin launched in June of 2022 that may show future promise. Shibtoshi has been a cryptocurrency supporter since the early days of Bitcoin around 2011.

Shibtoshi has set an example by showing that diamond hands can win. Apart from diamond handing Bitcoin the individual has made it to the top wallet in Shiba Inu. During the all-time high of Shiba Inu (Oct 2021), Shibtoshis holdings in SHIB were estimated to be close to USD 5.7 billion. Accumulating all this wealth has not stopped Shibtoshi from giving back to society; from giving bone marrow to donating time and money to sick and terminally ill children, Shibtoshi showcases how caring and extensive a heart can be.

These character qualities can also highlight what kind of CEO Shibtoshi can be. Despite massive success, there have been some failures that have been learning experiences. Part of the reason for these failures was getting into projects that were total scams. The lessons learnt from the failures motivated Shibtoshi to have a safe place where friends and family could invest, creating Squidgrow. Initially, Squidgrow was meme quality, but with some future utility plans. I would rather be surprised than be disappointed, Shibtoshi had said, meaning having a working product or close to working is better than overpromising a timeline or product that would end up disappointing investors if expectations are not fulfiled.

In addition to growing an investor base in Squidgrow to 11,000+ and reaching an all-time high market cap growth of $50 million with the help of crypto marketing firm Blockchain Brothers, Shibtoshi expressed the determination to have Squidgrow be a force in the crypto world. Squidgrow has a total supply of 1 quadrillion, audited by Solidity Finance, and listed on top exchanges (Gate.io, MEXC, Bitrue, BigONE, Bitmart, Bkex, LBank) 11 in total. Staking is live with more utility coming.

With a team focused on delivering and a CEO passionately dedicated to sharing the gift of winning and profiting with crypto investing, Squidgrow is set to make waves in the meme coin ocean. Coins like Shiba Inu is an investors dream and one that isnt too late with Squidgrow.

For more information, kindly check out the Squidgrow website.

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This Bitcoin Core update will protect full node operators from hacks – Protos

Posted: at 5:59 pm

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Core developers have released an update to the worlds most popular Bitcoin software that will protect node operators from malicious actors introducing a fake version of Bitcoins blockchain. The revision, which developers have designated Bitcoin Core 25717, also adds defenses against various Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks.

When a node operator downloads Bitcoin Core software for the first time, they must also download the current Bitcoin blockchain (a large, 426GB file). During this initial block download, the old software would only perform relatively rudimentary checks of block headers to check for a canonical version of the blockchain.

Bitcoin Core 25717, however, adds a long-awaited Headers Presync phase to the softwares pre-synchronization protocol. The upgrade replaces easy-to-hack, hard-coded values in Headers Presync with far more secure Proof of Work puzzles. This protects node operators from a malicious actor introducing a fake version of Bitcoins blockchain into their node.

A full node operator in Bitcoin stores the entire blockchain since inception, including every transaction that has occurred since 2009. In this way, operators can fully validate any proposed transactions on their own hard drive, without trusting anyone to guarantee that nobody double-spends coins.

In addition to addressing vulnerabilities in the initial block download, Bitcoin Core 25717s new Headers Presync adds security during synchronization. Because a new block of data is added to Bitcoin every 10 minutes, nodes must sync again after they download the 426GB file. As time goes by, nodes must also synchronize periodically, especially after power or internet outages. Bitcoin Core 25717 improves the security of these syncs.

The software update also addresses DoS attack vectors, which can prevent nodes from downloading the canonical blockchain. In addition, the update reduces memory overhead by downloading presync data before downloading the entire blockchain.

Finally, the update also adds support for transient, one-time, Invisible Internet Project (I2P) addresses. I2P is a network layer for censorship-resistant, anonymous, peer-to-peer communication.

Read more: This Twitter account documents Bitcoin eating the world

With over a decade of operation and a multi-hundred billion dollar bounty that no hacker has yet been able to steal, experts generally agree that hacking Bitcoin is becoming increasingly unlikely. Considering the sheer amount of mining machines securing Bitcoin, a 51% attack has become prohibitively expensive.

Any other attack, such as hacking the GitHub repository or compromising a Bitcoin Core lead maintainer, would have to introduce a change and get past other lead maintainers, node operators, and miners. A compromised full node that accidentally downloaded a fake blockchain would be incompatible with the Bitcoin network because the data on its blockchain would not agree with the data on other nodes.

At least one attempt to sidestep user consensus a Bitcoin fork called Bitcoin XT failed because it couldnt get enough supporters on board.

Bitcoin Core 25717 provides an additional layer of security by making it more difficult to introduce a malicious blockchain into new full nodes or to conduct DoS attacks. Bitcoin Cores update makes nodes less likely to accept malicious data or suffer silent attacks that prevent them from downloading the valid, canonical Bitcoin chain.

For more informed news, follow us onTwitterandGoogle Newsor listen to our investigative podcastInnovated: Blockchain City.

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The Flippening: Will Ether Flip Bitcoin in the Next Year? – Blockworks

Posted: at 5:59 pm

For years, Ethereum proponents have pined for the hypothetical, as of now moment when ether eclipses bitcoins market capitalization: The Flippening.

What better time than Ethereums Merge? Its one of the most significant updates in the history of cryptocurrency yet, converting its energy-intensive, proof-of-work-backed consensus with its own brand of proof-of-stake.

The fusion of Ethereums Beacon Chain and its long-running mainnet is expected to trigger in six days time.

But whether its enough for ether to usurp bitcoin is another story. Bullish sentiment would propose June as the bottom for both equities and cryptoassets both have tanked about 70% from their respective November peaks.

Bitcoin is hovering around $19,000 and its market capitalization stands at just under $368 billion, representing 39% of the total digital asset market.

Ether trades for $1,600, and its nominal value is a touch over half bitcoins, at $196.4 billion, a little over one-fifth of cryptos collective capitalization.

Back-of-the-napkin math shows The Flippening would occur if ether reaches roughly $3,050 true only in the relatively unlikely event that bitcoins price holds steady.

The flippening is only really a symbolic victory for ETH maximalists, but perhaps not overly significant for the industry as a whole, Bobby Ong, co-founder of data provider CoinGecko, told Blockworks.

Its unlikely for ether to rise past bitcoin in the next 12 months, Ong said, as both bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) have been moving in similar directions due to the macro environment, dogged by inflation.

Ether is eyeing another run at yearly highs against the price of bitcoin, indicating markets are assigning value to the Merge.

But ether was much closer to flipping bitcoin more than five years ago, the early innings of the last bull-bear cycle. On June 12, 2017, the market capitalization of ETH was almost 84% that of BTC, with just $7.16 billion separating the two, according to TradingView data.

That figure is currently around 52% (with more than 100% indicating a flippening). In January 2020 at the bottom of the last bear market the situation was far worse, with ETH at just 11% of BTCs value ($15.4 billion to $146.7 billion).

Still, market values dont tell the full story.

Comparing on-chain metrics including transaction count, protocol fees and the number of active addresses across networks can also provide insight into their growth.

Ethereum is ahead in terms of transaction count and protocol fees, CoinGeckos Ong said, and in major dapp development. Its also steadily catching up to Bitcoin in terms of daily active addresses.

But the number of total bitcoin users active or not vastly outpaced ethers at the height of the previous bull run.

Bitcoin users grew 37.5% between July and December 2021, from 128 million to 176 million, according to a Crypto.com report published earlier this year. On the other hand, only 23 million users held ether, a statistic which only grew by 1.4% over the same period.

Ethereums switch to proof-of-stake could help boost those numbers. Not only is the Merge expected to cut Ethereums energy consumption by more than 99% replacing its GPU miner-based issuance model to one based on crypto-collateralized validator nodes (read: servers) it also lays the foundations to scale the networks base layer more effectively, proponents say.

This might help spur further ecosystem development and present an attractive investment opportunity to eco-conscious investors, even institutional ones, so goes the bull case.

We expect not only renewed interest from building projects on the platform but also from an investment perspective, Lachlan Feeney, founder of Australias largest blockchain consultancy Labrys, told Blockworks.

Yet, big money institutions are still concentrating their exposures, for the most part, to bitcoin.

This advantage cannot be understated as the influence of institutions grows within the market, said CoinGeckos Ong. Whether ETH, or any other crypto, can challenge its market share in this space remains to be seen.

Bitcoin and Ethereum differ significantly in primary use cases, diverging their value propositions. Bitcoins application scope is narrow: Its censorship-resistant money, propelled by peer-to-peer payments.

But Bitcoins architecture by design does not support smart contracts, unlike Ethereum and a raft of layer-1 competitors. This essentially restricts bitcoins usage to micropayments and tips. (Remember the Lightning Network-powered Pollofeed?)

Indeed, even with Lightning, Bitcoin is less applicable to the broader Web3 crypto ecosystem.

This magnetizes Bitcoin to its store of value sales pitch users should rather hold their bitcoin than spend it in the same way as ether and other Ethereum-bound assets.

Some argue the Bitcoin development community prides itself on an unwillingness to iterate as quickly as Ethereum, bucking the move fast, break things tradition of Silicon Valley lore.

The early abdication of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoins pseudonymous founder, contrasts Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterins persistent gravitas within Ethereum crowds another potential boon to its value prop.

Vitalik actually stepped away from doing a lot of work on Ethereum at the end of the ICO craze, but he still sets the roadmap and he still gets a lot of input, Katie Talati, director of research at Arca, told Blockworks.

Added Talati: And obviously, his opinion means a lot. Hes not necessarily dictating the day-to-day, but I think it does help having a bit of a guide.

Another effect of Ethereums proof-of-stake plan is that it will eventually turn the token into a deflationary asset, which industry participants say would likely generate significant interest.

Bitcoins supply limit is famously hardcoded to 21 million, while ethers floats. The protocol modifies ETHs issuance rate and supply constantly, with the network currently burning transaction fees rather than paying them to validators.

Sometimes, more ether is burned inside a block than issued, temporarily switching the cryptocurrency from inflationary to deflationary a phenomenon expected to occur more frequently post-Merge.

Bitcoins issuance slowly decreases, halving every four years but its supply will never formally decrease. This, at best, imbues anti-inflationary properties, although they are amplified once block rewards reduce to zero next century.

Vivek Raman, head of proof-of-stake at BitOoda, believes Bitcoins faults give Ethereum an edge in creating sustainable monetary policy, complete with high network revenue to inspire longevity.

Its almost like a mathematical inevitability, Raman said about the possibility of Ethereum flippening, estimating it could happen possibly a year after the upgrade. He argued bitcoin enjoys its status due to an early-mover advantage, backed by the idea of a pristine digital asset immaculately concepted by Nakamoto.

According to Raman, Bitcoins proof-of-work may ultimately work against its value prop, especially considering mining rewards halve every four years.

While tapering issuance hasnt threatened its security model so far, with enough miners on the network despite lower rewards, theyre still paid less over time. This means theres less and less incentive to mine every four years, Raman said.

So, what are the tell-tale signs of an impending Flippening? Surging open interest on ether futures has been floated as one indicator: Theres currently $12.8 billion in BTC open interest compared to $8.6 billion for ETH, per CoinGlass.

But Raman suggested open interest is mostly a short-term signal. And in any case, rising levels of open interest on ether futures could simply reflect appetite for Ethereums decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols.

Ethereum has decentralized finance sitting on top of it. So, it has an economy running on it because of that, theres more leverage, Raman said. If theres more leverage in the system, youre gonna see a lot more open interest from futures and options. But thats just a function of more speculators, more participants.

With no clear indicators and a suffocating macro backdrop, predicting the Flippening is a tricky undertaking.

It doesnt seem likely to occur around the Merge or even within the next year but its clear the two networks, and their native digital assets, are poised to diverge in a big way.

David Canellis contributed reporting.

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Blockworks

Senior Reporter, Asia News Desk

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Is Bitcoin heading to $15K? Why are the markets suddenly pulling back? – Cointelegraph

Posted: at 5:59 pm

In this week's episode of Market Talks, we welcome Ray Salmond, head of markets at Cointelegraph.

The main topic of discussion with Ray will be the recent crypto market pullback and whether there is a possibility of the price of Bitcoin (BTC) going all the way down to $15K. We take a look at the charts to analize the price movements and figure out important price levels to keep an eye on.

Some might see the falling crypto prices and see an opportunity. We ask Ray how this market could be a potential opportunity for some. We also get his take on why the price of Bitcoin keeps dropping so consistently.

Miners are an integral part of the Bitcoin ecosystem, but what happens when mining Bitcoin is no longer profitable and miners suffer huge losses? Will we see a capitulation event? What will that do to the price of Bitcoin and the whole crypto market? We try to get a sense of the Bitcoin miners' sentiment.

The EthereumMerge is all over the news recently. We ask Ray for his insights about the matter and whether his outlook is bearish or bullish. Also, what's his strategy for trading the Merge? The markets are getting increasingly volatile at the moment and you might be wondering what is the best strategy right now buy, sell, hodl or trade? Make sure you stay till the end of the show to find out.

Tune in to have your voice heard. Well be taking your questions and comments throughout the show, so be sure to have them ready to go.

Market Talks with Coffee 'N' Crypto's Tim Warren streams live every Thursday at 12 pm ET (4:00 pm UTC). Each week, we feature interviews with some of the most influential and inspiring people from the crypto and blockchain industry. So, be sure to head on over to Cointelegraphs YouTube page and smash those like and subscribe buttons for all our future videos and updates.

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