| Navigating Turbulent Tides on the Bitcoin Titanic  Dear Daily Prophecy Reader,
Everybody is saying it. Crypto is dead or dying. Bitcoin is cooked. Stick in another hard fork! Blockchain is overrated and a fringe technology. The future is fiat, as all the fiat banks say. The future is centralized credit cards, as all the credit card companies claim. The future is internet of things (IoT), 5G, and artificial intelligence(AI) in a "singularity." Your car will drive itself by machine learning and driving you yourself — your obsolete body and nervous system — will be an AI brain fed by Elon Musk's Neuralink implants. They'll be connected to the internet. Whenever you want something, even unconsciously, Google et all will know it and give it to you, perhaps in virtual simulation. But that's as good as real, right? How can anyone compete with a singularity? Blockchain is mere plumbing and it gets in the way of VR, AI, and the rest of the Alphabet soup. All Aboard the Blockchain Train Even the pioneering Ren Zhengfei, founder-chief of Huawei, says that "blockchain is worthless," its security trumped by quantum computing and its theoretically instant hacking of prime factors used in the prevailing cryptographic algorithms. Yes, Chinese emperor Xi Jinping has just climbed on board, declaring blockchain a "core technology for China" in a speech to his politburo. Also swearing by blockchain is my favorite Chinese company of the month, the massive bank and bazaar Alibaba. It is supplying a transactional platform for literally hundreds of millions of entrepreneurs, a lending facility for all of them who want it, a money market vessel for anyone with an RMB (roughly 14 cents), and an Alipay wallet that along with the WeChat leader from Tencent is sucking up nearly all the cash in China. To make a payment, everyone in China now just waves a phone, usually from Huawei. BABA now swears by blockchain. Facebook is thrashing around, trying to gain an edge with Libra. All the banks are experimenting with various forms of the concept. But virtually no one wants to use the Rube Goldberg mining apparatus pioneered by bitcoin. And no one is doing transactions in volume. No one is pretending that bitcoin can still be the new gold. The gold in the world is currently worth about $9 trillion total, comparable to all world base money. Last I looked, Bitcoin is worth $157B and its chief rival Ethereum is worth $11B. As my counsel on monetary matters, The Man on the Margin, Mike Kendall points out nearly all the other cryptocurrencies are merely shadows of the bitcoin Titanic, cruising the same increasingly frozen seas and dribbling on the beaches into markets caps in the low millions. Hey, there's no global warming for bitcoin and blockchain! Or for me at O'Hare where the temperature is zero. Meanwhile, my Agora colleague John Forde points out that using a widely available search engine called Shodan you can break into anything that's connected to the net. "It's a search engine that lets you locate connected internet of things devices, among other surprising things, all over the world. It can also track down IP's for power plants, security cameras, all the computers on a company network, etc. If that sounds like a security nightmare, it is." | 
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