Crowd Funding

Crypto Market Musings

Bitcoin broke through the $28,000 barrier (and for one brief moment topped $29,000) on Wednesday after spending about a week trading in the $27,000 range. It’s currently trading at $28,460.27.

Most cryptos rallied behind bitcoin’s big Wednesday surge (more than 5%). Ethereum jumped almost 4%. And Polygon was up almost 6%. Ethereum is currently trading around $1,831.30. Polygon is currently trading around $1.11.

Two factors appear to be driving the market:

1. A lack of liquidity (CoinDesk has a great explainer on why the market is relatively illiquid right now) means small buy or sell orders can trigger big price moves up or down.
2. A return to money printing to bring stability to the global banking system proves out bitcoin’s raison d’être (reason for existence) — the need for an economic system based on sound money.

While it’s nice to NOT be talking about how low bitcoin could fall, I don’t believe we’re out of the danger zone yet. Between inflation and a potential recession, danger is lurking. 

What Vin Is Thinking About

The crypto markets are in a weird place. Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) informed Coinbase (via a Wells Notice) that it would pursue an enforcement action against it. This week, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced it was suing Binance. The two most important crypto exchanges in the world are now facing enforcement actions — and the markets just shrugged it off.

The SEC hasn’t outlined its case against Coinbase. The only thing we know about the SEC action is what Coinbase has told us. And what Coinbase has told us fits the SEC these days when it comes to crypto.

“Today, we are disappointed to share that the SEC gave us a ‘Wells Notice’ regarding an unspecified portion of our listed digital assets, our staking service Coinbase Earn, Coinbase Prime, and Coinbase Wallet after a cursory investigation,” Coinbase wrote in a blog entry.

Now, do I believe Coinbase knows more than it’s letting on? Yes. But the SEC doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. The regulatory agency has provided no regulatory clarity or insight for the crypto industry to follow. The truth is that even if Coinbase wanted to register as an exchange, the SEC doesn’t have a way for it to do that.

Meanwhile the CFTC has been fairly clear in its crypto stance. It views bitcoin and Ethereum as commodities. But it wants exchanges to register with it. And the CFTC lawsuit said Binance failed to register with the agency, pursued and accepted American customers, and had inadequate know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering controls. 

Binance responded to the lawsuit in a blog post by writing, in part, “the CFTC filed an unexpected and disappointing civil complaint, despite our working cooperatively with the CFTC for over two years. Upon an initial review, the complaint appears to contain an incomplete recitation of facts, and we do not agree with the characterization of many of the issues alleged in the complaint.”

In most industries, the two biggest and most important players facing regulatory heat would send people running for the hills. In crypto, not so much.

Bitcoin and the crypto markets have rebounded. And instead of pulling out of the market, investors are focusing their anger on the SEC.

And Finally…

MicroStrategy isn’t backing off its bitcoin strategy. It repaid the remaining principal of its $205 million loan from the now-defunct Silvergate Bank and, over the past five weeks, bought $150 million worth of bitcoin. 

Crowdsourcing is a technique that makes AI smarter by allowing organisations and individuals to gather information, often large amounts of data and annotation, from a large number of people and other sources. Typically, this is done through the internet. The data can be used to train and improve machine learning models, which in turn are used to create AI systems. By collecting data from a diverse group of people, AI systems are more likely to be representative of the real-world and less likely to be biased, or restricted by employees’ mindset based on conventional company thinking.

One of the main advantages of crowdsourcing is that it allows organisations to collect large amounts of data quickly and relatively inexpensively. This can be especially useful for organisations that need to gather data from specific sub-groups of people, such as those with disabilities. For speech-based systems, there may need to be special efforts to include under-represented people who speak a particular language, or a language with a certain regional accent, or speak it as a second language.

Also, crowdsourcing makes AI smarter through using it to gather feedback on the performance of AI systems, allowing for the identification and correction of errors and biases. This can be done by asking people to evaluate the output of the AI system and provide feedback, which can then be used to improve the system. This helps ensure that AI systems are accurate and unbiased, and that they meet the needs of the people who will be using them.

Examples of crowdsourcing that makes AI smarter

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a micro-tasking platform that allows businesses and researchers to gather data and input from a large number of people in a relatively short period of time. Data providers that use the platform are able to make what are usually small sums of money as and when they have time to perform tasks around other responsibilities. The platform is commonly used to gather data for training machine learning models, such as image and text annotation.

Google’s AI Platform allows developers to train machine learning models using their own data. The platform also allows for data annotation, which can be done by anyone with a Google account. There are tasks at every skill level.

Zooniverse is a citizen science platform that allows a network of over one million volunteers to assist with scientific research by helping to record, classify and analyse data. The platform has been used to gather data for a wide range of scientific research. The platform can provide citizen scientists to take on diverse scientific challenges including the study of galaxy formation, climate change and wildlife conservation. Volunteers are able to pursue a personal passion to good purpose, and researchers have opportunities for dialogue with a wider group of people than other researchers.

Mozilla’s Common Voice is a project that aims to improve the quality of voice recognition technology by crowdsourcing voice data. In essence, it helps teach machines how real people speak. The project encourages users to submit their own voice samples through reading supplied sentences, and also validate the samples submitted by others. The speech samples are donations, contributors are not paid.

Large speech dataset users tend to have their own networks of data providers. Defined.ai  is a leading provider of speech datasets, models and tools for training voice systems driven by Artificial Intelligence. It is based in Seattle, USA, and through its Neevo platform it has a crowdsourced workforce of over 500,000 global contributors from more than 70 countries who speak over 50 languages. Between them they have logged successful completion of over 200 million tasks to record speech, annotate it, or check the work that has been done by others. Having its own datasets provides a competitive advantage, and an added income stream from renting them to clients. It is a great example of how crowdsourcing makes AI smarter.

In the security sector, Sift Science uses machine learning and crowdsourcing to detect fraudulent behaviour in real-time. The platform analyses crowdsourced data from multiple sources, including user behaviour, device fingerprinting, and network information, to identify patterns that may indicate fraud. The platform also allows companies to also crowdsource input from human experts to improve the accuracy of the system. Other operators in this sector include iovation, Riskified, and Signifyd.

These are just a few examples of how organisations are using crowdsourcing to make AI smarter. Crowdsourcing is a powerful technique that allows users to gather data and feedback from a large number of people, which can be used to train and improve AI systems. This helps to ensure that AI systems are accurate, unbiased, and meet the needs of the people who will be using them.

Crypto Market Musings

Bitcoin is soaring. It’s up more than 20% over the last 30 days and up about 5% over the last seven days. It’s trading at $27,928.74 as of this writing. Ethereum is up a more modest 10% over the last 30 days and about 1.5% over the last seven days. It’s trading at $1,771.63 as of this writing. 

Unlike other big moves up by bitcoin, this one isn’t lifting the rest of the market with it. Polygon is down more than 19% over the last month and down 7% over the last seven days. Polkadot is down more than 13% over the last month and down about 5% over the last seven days. And Uniswap is down more than 14% over the last 30 days and down almost 4% over the last seven days.

Two things are driving the market. First, people are remembering that crypto — and bitcoin in particular — was created as an alternative to the traditional banking system. And with the traditional banking system in crisis mode, investors are buying bitcoin. The other major factor in bitcoin’s surge is the extremely influential Balaji Srinivasan making a pair of $1 million bets that hyperinflation is on the way and (by extension) bitcoin would hold its value better than the dollar (more on that below). 

Srinivasan is highly respected in the crypto space. And his willingness to bet against the dollar’s future is certainly a major factor in this surge.

What Vin Is Thinking About

The Srinivasan wagers are intriguing — and extremely scary. Srinivasan is the former chief technology officer of Coinbase. He was also a managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz and is an extremely successful angel and crypto investor as well as founder. He’s rich. He’s scary smart. And he does his homework. So if Srinivasan says something is going to happen, you need to pay attention.

But what Srinivasan is betting on is pretty scary. To be clear, Srinivasan didn’t propose these bets. He accepted them. Here’s how it went down.

So Srinivasan is betting that the U.S. will enter hyperinflation within 90 days because of a worsening banking crisis and money printing. (I know I’m oversimplifying his argument. If you want a more detailed explanation of his thoughts, you should follow Srinivasan on Twitter.) 

Hyperinflation refers to rapidly rising inflation — typically more than 50% per month. If this happened, the dollar’s purchasing power would rapidly diminish. Massive economic upheaval would follow. And it would likely result in bitcoin becoming incredibly valuable extremely quickly. 

This is objectively terrible for society. The amount of pain and suffering that hyperinflation would cause is hard to understate. According to Visual Capitalist, the countries with the worst inflation rates last year were Zimbabwe (269%), Lebanon (162%), Venezuela (156%), Syria (139%), Sudan (103%), Argentina (88%), Turkey (85.5%), Sri Lanka (66%), Iran (52.2%), and Suriname (41.4%).

This is a list no country wants to be on. 

I don’t believe Srinivasan is rooting for hyperinflation. He’s also not trying to profit off of future misery or game any system or bet. Instead, he’s ringing the alarm bell and saying that this is a distinct possibility if the country continues on its current path. And he wants everyone to hear the bell.

Here’s how Srinivasan characterizes the bet on Twitter:

I believe Medlock will agree that this is an ideological bet… The hyperbitcoinization bet is obviously not a money making bet. It is purely informational…

To allay any question about my motivations, I publicly commit to never selling any Bitcoin for USD unless legally compelled to do so. While I still respect many individual Americans, I no longer have faith in the US currency or banking system.

And Finally…

If you really want to understand how fragile the semiconductor chip manufacturing industry is — and how the world might not be able to survive without Taiwanese plants producing chips — listen to this podcast. In it, the terrific John Dickerson interviews Chris Miller, author of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. The two discuss just how complex chip manufacturing is, why so much of it happens in southeast Asia and how a war in Taiwan could disrupt chip manufacturing and bring down the global economy.

Crowdtesting is a method of gathering feedback and testing products or services by utilizing a large group of testers, often referred to as a “crowd.” These testers can be sourced from a variety of sources such as online communities, marketplaces, or through social media. Crowdtesting can accelerate innovation by providing a diverse group of testers, cost-effectiveness, and speeding up the development process.

Diversity is one of the key benefits of crowdtesting. It is able to provide a large and diverse group of testers, which can result in a wider range of perspectives and insights than those delivered by an in-house team. This can be especially valuable for companies looking to create products or services that cater to a diverse customer base.

Another benefit of crowdtesting is its cost-effectiveness. Traditional testing methods such as hiring in-house testers or contracting with a testing firm can be expensive. Crowd testing allows companies to gather feedback and test their products on a large scale without incurring these costs.

Crowdtesting innovation can also speed up the product development process by allowing companies to identify and fix usability issues early on. This can help prevent delays and costly rework down the line.

It is not a replacement for professional in-house QA testing. In-house teams have a clear understanding of the product and the company’s values and goals. But sometimes, it becomes difficult and inefficient for them to test the product on all devices and operating systems available within a required timeframe.

Major examples in recent years

In the past few years there have been several examples of major companies crowdtesting innovation to accelerate product development.

Microsoft’s Release Preview Channel is where testers can “preview fixes and certain key features, plus get optional access to the next version of Windows before it’s generally available to the world.”  It is a community of millions of Windows’ biggest fans who perhaps feel a bit flattered to get the chance to preview Windows features. While previewing Windows, Insiders can provide feedback and engage directly with Microsoft engineers to help shape the future of Windows.

Another example is Uber, which used crowdtesting back in 2018 to gather feedback on its new Driver App design. The company utilized a large group of testers to identify usability issues and gather insights on how to improve the app. More than 400 drivers and delivery partners in seven cities around the world took part in a unique Beta programme to help Uber design and test a new Driver App. They collaborated with Uber designers and engineers to provide new ideas, share feedback and help report bugs. Over the course of 16 weeks, they reported over 2,600 bugs by sharing screenshots with Uber employees through various channels, including social apps. Uber employees also joined drivers and delivery partners as they took trips and made deliveries, to experience the new app being used in real time situations.

Google also uses crowd testing for new Google Maps features by utilising targeted sub-groups among their customers to gather feedback on the new feature and identify bugs. Google Maps is currently testing a sidebar on the web that provides convenient access to recently viewed places. It allows users to quickly go back to a place without having to search and sift through previous results. At the moment, this sidebar is not widely rolled out and only appears on some signed-in accounts.

Sourcing specialist crowdtesting support

There are also many startups, and any other businesses, that use crowdtesting as a key part of their development process, even though they may not have ready access to a sizeable customer database. Several third-party crowdtesting platforms can step in as intermediaries.

For instance, Testbirds provides a global crowdtesting service to digital product owners. Their network of over a million testers using more than 1.5 million devices can provide swift results and unbiased feedback. Classification by 65 criteria means that testers can be selected to closely match virtually any company’s customer and user base. A global community of testers means testing can be carried out 24/7.

This method of crowdtesting innovation provides results and insights from use in the real world, outside of lab tests, using an ever-growing range of devices, web browsers, and OS. Whether it’s for testing a new product or continuous monitoring in a post-launch period, Testbirds, and its peers, allow clients to stop guessing if their product meets their users’ expectations and start making decisions based on facts. Here is a Testbirds case study on globally crowdtesting a chatbot for cars.

There is also a range of crowdtesting tools available for organisations to start their own efforts.”Ease of Use” and “Quality of Support” are the two most frequently cited factors that positively impact user satisfaction for crowdtesting products.

For the crowdsourced testers, crowdtesting provides added income opportunities to be paid to use new and sometimes pre-launch websites and apps. Requirements include:

• A desktop device with OS, or a mobile phone.
• Stable internet connection.
• A device with a webcam and microphone.
• Good communication skills.
• Ability to quickly fill out surveys after product tests.

Crowdtesting tangible products

Crowdtesting does not have to be global, or online. Here’s an example of it operating in-person and on a local basis.

Brussels Beer Project is a Belgian craft brewery, with “the crowd” at its heart. In the earliest days after it launched in 2015 it ran a crowdfunding campaign offering future deliveries of discounted, and sometimes even free beer to pre-paying early supporters. This provided the startup with some cashflow and built a community of supporters and long-term customers. The brewery crowdsources left-over stock from bakeries in Brussels at the end of each day to brew their bread-based brand (bread already has yeast in it, a necessary requirement of the brewing process). This helped establish eco-credentials.

Early supporters were soon invited to the brewery for drinks at the end of each week, and they were a good crowdtesting source of feedback on which new beer types and flavours should be developed on a commercial basis. Early quantities of the beers that don’t make the grade for commercial production can sometimes fulfill the free beer deliveries to the early crowdfunding backers. Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, crowdtesting – the Brussels Beer Project ticks all the boxes.

In summary, these examples show that crowdtesting is a versatile process utilised by companies ranging from global tech giants to a local craft brewery.  Specialists such as Testbirds can help businesses of all sizes get the best from crowdtesting innovation through gathering feedback on products or services, identifying usability issues and uncovering new features or functionalities.