What a wild week it was.
This was the week of the biggest tech event of the year, NVIDIA’s GTC conference. It literally shows us the map of the future, the map of what’s coming with regard to artificial intelligence, which we know will soon impact nearly every aspect of our lives.
If you haven’t had a chance to read yesterday’s Bleeding Edge – Roadmap to the Future, I have to encourage you to do so. It’s just so important to understand what’s coming.
And at the same time, the news was happily plastering images of Teslas burning around the country. These are the same people who wanted us all to drive electric vehicles a year ago and who don’t understand how electricity is produced (primarily from fossil fuels). And now, they’re setting Tesla EVs on fire spewing toxic chemicals into the air. How is that good for the environment?
The absurdity of it all.
Elon Musk and the DOGE team continue to find astounding levels of fraud and waste with U.S. taxpayer dollars, and some are angry with Musk.
And burning Teslas? Why be angry with the team that is finding the fraud? How about being angry about the people who have committed the fraud? Chances are that the politicians most upset about the elimination of fraud are the same people who are beneficiaries of the fraud in the first place.
Let’s clean it all up. The future is bright. The path is clear to a higher quality of life, less waste, clean energy, breakthroughs in curing disease and human longevity, and a world of abundance, all enabled by technological advances.
We had some good questions on blockchain technology and digital assets this week, and my favorite one was the first one shown below about where to go for robotics training, which will be one of the largest job categories in the near future.
It’s coming far faster than you think,
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
I find your ongoing robotic articles interesting and informative. As the father of a [high school junior] looking into potential career paths that will thrive and provide viable, long-term, good careers in servicing, maintaining, and modifying industrial/manufacturing/logistical robots and robotic systems, [that] would seem to be an ideal career.
I have queried local junior colleges, technical colleges, universities, trade schools, and local firms and have yet to locate/identify any such entity in place providing certified robotic technician programs in South Carolina where we reside.
I figured if anyone could provide credible source recommendations on this, you could. These would provide high-quality, long-term employment opportunities to our next generation soon to leave [high school], who are not interested in a new, challenging, rewarding long-term employment field of robotics.
I believe there are many parents and students who will greatly benefit from your guidance, response, and recommendations.
Thank you.
– Gregory W.
Hello Gregory,
I’m so glad you wrote in with that question. It’s a perfect time to be planning ahead and thinking about training and career paths both for those who are close to entering the workforce, as well as for those who might want to make a career change.
These types of training programs are obviously specialized, so they won’t be everywhere yet, but in time there will be robotics and mechatronics training pretty much everywhere as it will become such a major job category.
A good general source of information in the U.S. is the ARM Institute which is funded by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and is a Manufacturing Innovation Institute designed to encourage and support manufacturing in the U.S.
The ARM Institute has a website roboticscareer.org that has extensive listings of technician training programs around the country, and you can search by state. If you look at the top bar on the website, you’ll see that you can select between “All Training Programs” and “Endorsed Training Programs.”
In South Carolina, I can see that there are two mechatronics certificate programs – one at Central Carolina Technical College and one at Trident Technical College. I’m not familiar with these programs, but that’s where I’d look if you want to stay local.
If you’re willing to look farther afield, there are a lot more compelling options. By selecting the “Endorsed Training Programs” you’ll get a short list of programs worth considering. Here are a few to check out.
There’s quite a lot to explore. I hope this information helps point you in the right direction. There are two things that I’d recommend. Make sure that the training has a large hands-on component.
Some can be taught online, but for practical purposes, it’s critical to work directly with the robotics systems. The other aspect to look for would be to ask about the different kinds of robotics systems that the students gain access to. The more varied, the broader the training.
And while I don’t have enough information to advise which one is the “best,” I’d probably lean towards the SMART Robotics at Carnegie Mellon, just because Carnegie Mellon is one of the very best schools for robotics research in the world. It would make sense that they have a strong program offering and also a good job placement network.
Good luck, and if you do find something it would be great to hear back from you.
Hello Jeff & Ben,
I just finished reading Tuesday’s Bleeding Edge and I have to say that I’m disappointed that the IRS wasn’t mentioned at all.
I’ve been preparing my tax documents for 2024 and it seems to be getting worse, not better. I don’t have a lot of hope for mass adoption until it is easy to file crypto taxes. It feels like the Inquisition at this point. I hope you mention that in any contacts you have with the administration.
Thank you for advocating for sensible regulations.
– Synthya G.
Hi Synthya,
I’m with you, it’s not easy at all.
And the problem has been the prior administration’s unwillingness to engage in constructive dialog with the industry and establish fair and reasonable guidelines around taxes as they apply to digital assets.
Instead, they just took the position that any digital asset is your property, the cost basis for every digital asset you purchased should be tracked, and short and long-term capital gains should be assessed on every transaction.
For anyone who has interacted with multiple blockchains and digital asset ecosystems, you’ll immediately understand that’s practically impossible to do.
Take, for example, a purchase of Ethereum. You purchased a bunch of Ethereum at $1,000, and then Ethereum rose to $2,000, but all along the way you needed to acquire different digital assets to interact with different blockchains.
Technically, any time you sold a small part of your Ethereum for another digital asset, that would be a taxable event – a capital gain – because in USD terms Ethereum increased in value.
That’s just one example. The reality is that the tracking of cost basis, entry and exit of every digital asset on a fractional basis, when staked digital assets become unstaked, and more complex transactions like borrowing capital onchain… it really becomes a nightmare.
Fortunately, the current administration is moving in the opposite direction and actively working to provide more clarity. The initiatives also include how digital assets are reported to the IRS. It’s coming, but there is a lot of basic regulatory guidance and framework that needs to be put in place first. Once this is in place, then tax regulations will follow.
At the moment, ideally with the help of a tax accountant, we just need to do our best with the limited guidance that has been given.
Now, with that said, the software and systems are much better today than they were a few years ago for tracking transactions. Services like CoinTracker have integrations with exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken and can compile your transaction data across chains. This is actually relatively easy because most blockchains are public ledgers, so software like this is effective at extracting the data.
You do have to check the data however and verify it. For example, when a digital asset is moved off of Coinbase, it can be incorrectly viewed by software as a taxable event, even though it is just being transferred from one address to another. That’s why the tax filer needs to look at the data and verify what is and isn’t a taxable event. The software helps flag these kinds of transactions, and we can verify each one.
Reasonable regulations are coming quickly this year, and IRS regulations will follow shortly after that. Hopefully, 2025 filing will be much better than 2024, and everything should be quite clear by 2026.
Hi Jeff,
I am amazed at your depth and diversity of writing – thank you.
I might have missed [it], but if not, I would like to understand blockchain better. How does it work? What is its greatest use now and [in] its future? You all are talking AI, but does much of it have to stand on the legs of blockchain to be shared? What about its value in protecting privacy and secrets?
Best regards.
– Per T.
Hello Per,
I like your curiosity, are you ready to go down the rabbit hole? I could write about book about the subject, but let’s take a high-level overview to get started.
There are a ton of different blockchains, but an easy way to categorize them is the following:
Blockchains are all programmed with a monetary policy regarding the native digital asset (cryptocurrency) designed as part of an individual blockchain. The native digital asset is usually the mechanism by which we interact with that blockchain.
Blockchains are designed to provide for secure and immutable transactions. By some kind of consensus mechanism like proof-of-work, or proof-of-stake, transactions are confirmed and written into a blockchain and then become a matter of public record.
I’ve written a lot about the cross-section between blockchain technology and AI because a blockchain environment is particularly suitable for AI agents. Because blockchains have native currencies, it makes it easy for an agentic AI to transact and perform economically meaningful work in a blockchain/Web3 environment.
There are also trading and investing implications as digital assets trade 24/7/365, unlike traditional financial markets.
One of the largest areas for blockchain adoption has already proven to be financial services. Pretty much anything we can think of in traditional finance applies to a blockchain environment with digital assets. Settlement times are measured in seconds and the costs of transacting with digital assets are a fraction of what is normal in traditional finance.
Fixed income, lending, derivatives, cross-border payments, securitization, trading, etc. are all faster and cheaper with digital assets.
Aside from financial services, proving provenance, property rights, any form of smart contracts, supply chain management, bills of lading, digital identity, and tokenization of real-world assets are all categories where there is a lot of development happening right now.
The use of blockchain technology removes friction from transactions, provides for near-instant settlement, and provides an immutable record of transaction history.
As for your last question on privacy and secrecy, most blockchains are public blockchains meaning that the transactions that take place on the blockchain are viewable.
With that said, the public address of a digital wallet is not publicly linked or visible to any individual. We can see the address and the transactions affiliated with that address, but we don’t know who that address belongs to. This is why most blockchains are referred to as pseudonymous, rather than completely anonymous.
I hope this overview is useful as a starting point for digging deeper into blockchain technology.
Hi Jeff,
I have always wondered whether quantum computing would be able to crack the encryption in the blockchain. Take BTC for example. I can see where a quantum computer could be fast enough to solve the current puzzle and acquire the BTC associated with that. It would be limited by the time between blocks. But would the time be adjusted for the speed that a QC would solve the problem?
Then there are the transactions already existing on the BTC blockchain. Could it break the encryption of all the existing wallets (which are really only the consolidation of the transactions related to that address that are stored on the blockchain) and transfer the funds to the QC’s owner?
It could possibly do it in time, which may be a while. What about the cost of running the QC to do this? I expect that they will be deployed to where the biggest payoff is. National secrets would be a high payoff. Would cracking blockchain’s encryption’s payoff be worthwhile? Would BTC be more worthwhile than a faster blockchain like ETH, XRP, or SOL?
Looks like it is getting closer.
– John K.
Hello John,
With all the latest developments that I’ve been researching and writing about regarding quantum computing, this kind of question is coming up more frequently. It’s a very interesting topic.
I tackled a similar question in my February 7 edition of The Bleeding Edge AMA. I’d encourage you to click back to that issue as it addresses most of your question about this cross-section between the two technologies.
I think you’ll also be interested in my issue of The Bleeding Edge – The High Stakes Quantum Race where we explored China’s Zuchongzhi-3 quantum computing system and the implications. I specifically mentioned China’s “harvest now, decrypt later” strategy of stealing and eventually accessing both national and corporate secrets.
As for the costs of doing so, I think you’ll be surprised. Access to quantum computers is already widely available through cloud services. Both Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services already offer access to a variety of quantum computing systems that can be leased based on usage. And some quantum computing companies are already offering access to their quantum computers via the cloud.
Cloud-based services, at scale, will always drive costs of utilization down. This means the answer is to upgrade our systems and blockchains to post-quantum encryption technologies.
And yes, to your point, it is getting closer. Given the latest progress, it will be a matter of several years before the industry has developed a universal fault-tolerant quantum computer. And when that happens, the scientific breakthroughs that follow will be extraordinary.
Hope everyone has a great weekend,
Jeff
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
