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What Are Justifiable Fears About AI?
Thousands of lines of code are written in the shadows of the internet by anonymous programmers whose names are unknown to the authorities.
Individuals like these unidentified cowboys are racing over an ungoverned and generally uninhabited land like they did in the days of yore. This is the internet, not actual land. They're not stealing banks; they're really making and selling money. There's a term for this type of currency: crypto.
If you've ever heard of cryptocurrency, it's either because of Bitcoin's near $1 trillion market value or Silk Road's preferred method of payment for illegal drugs and weapons. Blockchain, the decentralized and distributed ledger on which bitcoin transactions are recorded, stores "blocks" of computer code. In order to be approved by a blockchain, a computer program must adhere to a specific set of criteria. In essence, the blockchain may be compared to a traditional paper-bound ledger that is shared by a large number of people. Any and all transactions are documented in this ledger in order to preserve historical information. When a majority of the holders of the ledger agree that a new transaction is valid, it is immediately added to everyone's ledger. At the time of this writing, it's estimated that more than a million people have access to this ledger in Bitcoin alone.
In a world where anybody may set up a cryptocurrency, bad actors have the opportunity to commit fraud. A "rug pull" is one of the most lucrative and intricate types of fraud. As you can see, here's the process: In order to get started, a nefarious programmer will build code that adheres to the regulations of a certain blockchain network. They secretly shift a major percentage of the supply into their own cryptocurrency "wallets" since they have control over the supply. Using celebrities and social media influencers to promote their bitcoin fraud unintentionally will be their next step in gaining notoriety and credibility. As these cryptocurrencies rise in popularity, many of these marketers get paid in the coin they are promoting, making their labor extremely lucrative. As a final step, the cryptocurrency's developers will sell all of their holdings, possibly resulting in a multi-million dollar bonanza while simultaneously causing the price to plunge, leaving investors with nothing but a useless piece of computer code.
Legislators have been complicit in this type of activity for too long, allowing frauds to flourish and billions to be taken. With no action from the United States government, the number and complexity of these types of scams has grown and generated over $2.8 billion in fraudulently obtained profit for scammers who are engaged in rug pulls. Legal action against Ripple, a cryptocurrency that failed to register as a securities, has been taken by the federal government in the past. But relying on conventional security measures to protect cryptocurrencies is pointless, given the volatile and dynamic character of the digital currency market.
As long as you're ready to accept the risks of anonymity, the benefits outweigh the downsides, according to the vast majority of bitcoin specialists. For all parties participating in a transaction, anonymity provides a level of security that is unmatched.
To begin, in terms of anonymity, the ledger is distributed anonymously in a decentralized network that is held by millions of people around the world, so no single person can be identified simply by engaging in a blockchain transaction; only their wallet number is publicly available, and it cannot be traced to any specific location. It's also hard to change the blockchain and produce bogus transactions since more than half of the ledger owners must verify the transactions' legitimacy.
In the near future, analysts believe that bitcoin will take over as the primary form of payment. Although it may be tough to understand, this is not the first time something like this has happened. It's not like switching to a different world to make our transactions more safe when 97 percent of all currency is digital, meaning it's just computer code. Especially since each country is likely to establish its own currency rather than utilizing popular ones like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Since bitcoin offers so many advantages, the United States is at risk of being left out of the future economy if it does not embrace the digital revolution. The European Union, for example, has drawn out a detailed framework for regulating the use of cryptocurrencies.
It's possible that if the United States doesn't accept cryptocurrency as a legitimate payment method, the economy as a whole will move to cryptocurrency in an effort to exclude the United States and other nonconforming countries from participation in the market.
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