All world's Bitcoins belong to the government of China

Nationalized Chinese miners will turn the government into the sole decision maker

In recent days, lots of adult men commented on the stupidity of the "Bitcoin economy" – JP Morgan boss Jamie Damon, biggest hedge fund founder Ray Dalio, ECB vice-president Vitor Constancio, and many other big shots.

They pointed out it's a bubble, a tulip mania, a pure speculation, the actual value of the Bitcoins is zero – and independent of the intellectual worth of the blockchain ideas, and it's not a currency because you can't buy anything for it (especially tomorrow or later for prices you could rely upon) and it doesn't store value because of the volatility. The Motley Fool explained why it's laughable that the Bitcoin could become a safe haven like gold. Not bad for a fool – although his being Motley makes him a very smart fool, indeed, almost like the Einsteinian Moron.



Sane people have realized the facts like Dimon for a long time. What's changing most abruptly are actual steps that a government is taking these days. And I don't mean Ukraine and Indonesia that won't allow the Bitcoin payments, as we learned today (governments have lots of reasons to ban it). I mean the government of China. China banned the ICOs – the jokingly named would-be counterpart of IPOs where real money is collected for new cryptocurrencies. It is in the process of banning cryptocurrency exchanges.

But it seems very likely that it will strip the private Chinese Bitcoin miners from their freedom, too. And things get much more interesting here for certain numerical reasons.

Spencer Bogart started a Twitter thread claiming that things will get much worse. Some other users claim that local Chinese governments have stopped power going to the mining farms. Something is probably going to happen. See also Hacked.com.

NYT writes about Silicon Valley's anti-feminists

Nellie Bowles is a reporter located in San Francisco who covers the Silicon Valley's culture for the New York Times. It seems to me that she has displayed not just some journalistic integrity but also courage when she wrote an insightful article

Push for Gender Equality in Tech? Some Men Say It’s Gone Too Far (NYT)

on Saturday. James Damore became the mascot for that article. Some comments make it clear why it could have been important for the anti-feminists to finally get a soft-spoken, in some sense delicate, boy as a representative who may collect soulmates. When someone like Larry Summers speaks out against the feminists, it's much easier for them to whine that he is a bully – because he surely looks like one. Sorry Larry.

Bowles has covered lots of opinions – from a growing subculture that fights for a complete segregation of men (not too many things would change about these men-powered companies if women were completely banned there) to the people who say that they don't give a damn about the topic (Eric Weinstein – who works with Peter Thiel in some way – is close to that group but he and his brother have become a target of the extreme leftists so things are changing) to some feminists. The people who know that the struggle for the 50-to-50 parity is insane, unjustifiable, and unrealistic have suddenly realized that they have been way more cowardly than they should have and many of them aren't afraid of expressing their thoughts or at least their 100-to-1 solutions.

Germany: AfD could win the bronze medal

Update: And indeed, it did, beating expectations. Congratulations to AfD! CDU, SPD have some of the worst results since 1949. Jamaica coalition – CDU, Greens, FDP – is most likely now.

In the previous Parliamentary elections of 2013, AfD (The Alternative for Germany) was a new party that was mostly opposing the efforts to save the Euro at any cost. They scored 4.7% and stayed out of the Parliament.



A speech by the Czech ex-president at an AfD event last April. The German sounds impressive enough to me – e.g. in comparison with the German of his ex-classmate.

Things have changed, a million of migrants was added to Germany, and AfD has redefined itself as the only party in Germany that respects common sense and the European roots of their country. Aside from the EU and migration issues, AfD is the only party that opposes the Energiewende – which translates as the ecoterrorists' witch hunt against energy from coal and the nuclear power plants.

They seem to reasonably address a wider spectrum of political topics than they did 4 years ago – and, correspondingly and fairly, they're expected to score a much better result tomorrow than they did in 2013.

Pariah moonshine

Erica Klarreich wrote an insightful review

Moonshine Link Discovered for Pariah Symmetries (Quanta Mag.)

of a new paper by Duncan, Mertens, and Ono in Nature,

Pariah moonshine (full paper, HTML).

That discovery is a counterpart of the monstrous and umbral moonshine – but instead of the monster group and umbral/mock modular forms, it deals with a pariah group and weight 3/2 modular forms.



The historical bottles of Old Hunter's, a Czech whiskey, indicate that the hunter was getting younger as a function of time. ;-)

The paper was originally sent to me by Willie Soon – who wasn't the only one who was entertained by the terminology. This portion of mathematics really uses very weird or comical jargon, maybe one that is over the edge. But I believe that the playful names ultimately reflect the unusual degree of excitement among the mathematicians and mathematical physicists who study these things – and I believe that this excitement is absolutely justified.

I don't want to cover their discoveries in detail but it may be a good idea to remind you of the three kinds of moonshine and how big a portion of ideas they cover.

CMS: a locally 2.8-sigma diphoton excess at \(95\GeV\)

Finally, a paper from the LHC shows some interesting small deviation from the Standard Model again. The CMS collaboration published their

Search for new resonances in the diphoton final state in the mass range between \(70\) and \(110\GeV\) in \(pp\) collisions at \(\sqrt{s}= 8\) and \(13\TeV\)

and the key graph is seen on page 16.

UC Berkeley is breeding intellectually worthless crybabies

Sane employers should better not hire the alumni

Events at UC Berkeley have often shocked us but they always find a way to surpass our expectations. I actually learned about the newest free-speech-related events from Echo, a Czech mainstream right-wing journal, where brilliant student Ms Lucie Sulovská wrote about the University Whiners: What You Should Better Be Silent About In a College.

Much of the content is similar to Elizabeth M. Economou's article about Poor Babies at Lifezette.

OK, so conservative pundit Ben Shapiro gave a speech last week. The police maneuvers resembled 9/11 or something like that. Barricades, checks of purses and backpacks, permission to the cops who may have used pepper spray. The university had to close the upper rows in a hall because of worries that the students would be throwing chairs to the front of the hall... No Islamic terrorists were involved. The place only needed the security during Shapiro's speech "Say No to violence in the academic environment".

Tether & two pals: the only currencies among cryptocurrencies

Over the recent weeks, I occasionally spent some time by thinking about new cryptocurrencies, how a central bank could buy them into reserves, guarantee a floor under each of them, issue its own, make some crypto-payments monitored, and so on. I've also analyzed the historical data of the Bitcoin price.

It's fun to think how $130 billion of the Czech National Bank may be spent or wasted, what can be done. The possibilities are limitless – "yes, we can" applies here. At some moment, however, a rational person also asks whether these computer games are good for anything – whether they have improved someone's life or the efficiency of the economy or something like that. And the result is much worse then. ;-)

The Bitcoin price in USD, \(P(t)\), as a function of time seems to be nicely described as\[

P(t) = \exp(R(t))

\] where \(R(t)\) is a random walk – Brownian motion. In fact, all the vanishing Markov-like correlations make this function \(W(t)\) one of the best random walks you can find in all of financial markets. When we talk about the random walk, we should also mention the typical time scale at which \(R(t)\) changes by \(1\). The time scale is several months in average. Moreover, by tracing some correlations, one can see that this time scale is a "somewhat slowly changing" function of time. When one enters a more volatile period in which \(R(t)\) and therefore \(P(t)\) changes more quickly, it typically lasts between half a year and one year.



Also, there is some slight positive correlation between \(R'(t)\) and \(|R'(t)|\). That means that the periods of higher volatility are generally tending to be good for the price of the Bitcoin, too. You're invited to make these analyses, it's fun. Nevertheless, the conclusion is that the bets for/against the Bitcoin are pure lottery.

The European Union bans 43% of cartoons, wants to ban domestic rum

The Telegraph tells us that French and Greek cartoonists have submitted 28 cartoons for an exhibition. Well, a Ms Catherine Bearder, the only representative of her party in the European Parliament, blocked 12 of them – whopping 43% – because it isn't allowed to make fun of the European Union anymore and these cartoons were therefore blasphemous.



What's the name of her party which has this kind of a harsh attitude towards freedom and democracy? Is it the Dictatorial Totalitarian Party of the Fourth Reich Censors? No, it's called the Liberal Democratic Party! Cool.

But two weeks after another brutal ban on high-power vacuum cleaners (at most 700 watts are allowed now, wow! My Sencor bought a few years ago has 1800 watts consumption), a ban that would be considered way more serious by most Czechs may be getting prepared in Brussels. As the Czech media informed us, the European Commission may be preparing a universal ban on the domestic rum. Wow.

Morgan Freeman declares war on Russia

Yesterday, actor Morgan Freeman – who has starred as the U.S. president in some movies – was hired by a bunch of pro-Hillary and neocon, anti-Trump operatives and recorded an incredible monologue. America is at war with Russia because KGB agent Putin, grumpy about the fall of the Soviet Union, has hacked the U.S. computers and attacked 241 years of the U.S. democracy. This is no movie script.

Paul Joseph Watson and Marty TV gave some sensible responses.

Mr Freeman, this is indeed no movie script which is exactly the reason why you shouldn't have agreed to play it. It's no movie script, it's plain war propaganda. You've been an actor so you should play according to movie scripts and not according to war propaganda recipes. And if you and your comrades in the "Committee to Investigate Russia" – what a stupid and Soviet-like name for such a gang – managed to kickstart a big U.S. war against Russia, you should be treated as war criminals and probably killed.

You've been a great actor but the peace between the U.S. and another world's nuclear superpower is much more irreplaceable than you, Mr Freeman.

Wealth can't be created out of thin air

Jamie Dimon isn't missing anything

The New York Times published a diatribe by a Jeremy Philips,

What Jamie Dimon Is Missing About Bitcoin.

The question mark is missing and the answer to the question is "Nothing". The CEO of JP Morgan Chase, the 9th largest company in the world by its capitalization, isn't missing anything.

Philips, an adjunct janitor at Columbia, is even questioning Dimon's simple thesis

You can’t have a business where people are going to invent a currency out of thin air.

Philips teaches us that gold, the Euro, and almost everything else has value that was created from nothing, so it's natural when the same happens in the Bitcoin case. Oh, really? Were these values created out of nothing?

Five good reasons why the governments will ban "independent" cryptocurrencies

Before I start to enumerate them, let me mention that the governments obviously can ban cryptocurrencies. This ability has nothing to do with some technical virtues of the crypto-technology. The governments can ban, look for, prosecute, and punish particular patterns of human behavior they declare illegal.



So just like it may be illegal to sell or even hold drugs, it may become illegal to sell or even hold cryptocurrencies. In principle, you may have cryptocurrencies in your living room – just like you may have hashish – but there may obviously exist laws that will send you to prison for XY years if a court gets some evidence that you're selling the cryptocurrencies, e.g. if you happen to sell them to a provocateur hired by the police. At that moment, almost all people will simply abandon cryptocurrencies – much like most people avoid hard drugs. They don't want to have anything to do with illegal things because they don't even want to take the risk of years in prison.

Cryptocurrencies are a classic example of a pyramid scheme in which the founders or early adopters make the largest and safest profit, the profit is diminishing, and the promotional search for new participants is what keeps it going. The ICOs, the offerings of the new "altcoins", are activities by which some people try to keep the positive exponential expansion rate of the bubble. The bubble may keep on expanding up to some point that we can't predict. It's equally plausible that the $5,000 price of the Bitcoin was a historical maximum and we won't see it again.

Now, let's look at the reasons why it may be a good idea, if not a vital decision, to ban the cryptocurrencies.

1. Protection of citizens against too risky trades

I started with that justification not because I consider it the most important one but because that's the justification that China has used to ban the cryptocurrency exchanges in the country. The documents say that these exchanges involve too huge an amount of risk, it's an extreme gambling, and the Chinese citizens need to be protected against it. They need to be protected for the same reasons why gambling is regulated by governments – not only Chinese governments. Some gambling addicts may lose their last money. They become a liability for their families or the whole society. They become screwed. And if there were too many victims like that, it could be a threat for the financial system or the fiscal balance of a whole country. The governments may very well take this attitude and the Chinese government has started with it.

Bavaria: third Afghani guy couldn't complete the act

FOCUS, Bavaria [CZ news] – On Friday night, a 16-year-old girl was trying to catch a train in the Upper Bavarian town of Höhenkirchen-Siegertsbrunn [Tallchurch-Winnerswell], ten miles South of Munich.

While she was walking, she was joined by three extremely friendly migrants from a nearby integration facility. A man of age 27 followed by a teenager of age 17 raped her on the street.



The third future German citizen of Afghani ancestry, who was 18 years old, couldn't get a hardon – his excuse was a passer-by. Police started a manhunt in order to reward the heroes. A helicopter was used and the three men were quickly found.

Nima et al.: making the amplitude minirevolution massive

Nima Arkani-Hamed (Princeton), Tzu-Chen Huang (Caltech), and Yu-tin Huang (Taiwan) released their new 79-page-long paper

Scattering Amplitudes For All Masses and Spins

a few days ago. They claim to do something that may be considered remarkable: to generalize the spinor-indices-based uprising in the scattering amplitude industry of the previous 15 years to the case of particles of any mass and spin, and to deduce some properties of all possible particle theories out of their new formalism.

Is it possible? Does it work? What can they learn?

First, they remain restricted to the case of on-shell, i.e. scattering amplitudes, not general off-shell, i.e. Green's functions. They have a cute self-motivating semi-heuristic argument why they don't lose any generality by this constraint: the actual off-shell amplitudes are being experimentally measured by the analysis of some on-shell scattering that involves the particles as well as some new very heavy particles, namely the detectors and other apparatuses.

Nice. I guess that the numbers showed on the apparatuses' displays must be considered as labeling different particle species, not just polarizations of spin. If your Geiger-Müller counter shows "5" at the beginning and measures something and shows "6" at the end, it was a scattering in which the "Geiger-Müller-counter-type-5 particle species" collided with some small particles, got annihilated, and produced a similar big "*-6 counter" particle. Cute. ;-)

Mr Juncker, Czechia won't leave the EU because of cocoa in chocolate

North Korea's Kim III has promised to place his country's military on par with the U.S. Good luck with that, comrade. Meanwhile, a similarly ambitious leader, Jean-Claude Juncker, the general secretary of the commissars of the European Soviet, gave his "State of the Union address", probably in order to claim that this unelected drunk clown is on par with the U.S. president.

He also mentioned my country, Czechia, once in his speech. It was about the double "standards" of food products in the post-communist and old EU member states. Slovaks and Hungarians should have the same high meat content in some products while the Czechs should have as much cocoa in the chocolate as others.

I have always disagreed with the hysteria exactly because this hysteria contradicts the national idiosyncrasies, the rules of the free market, and it's an ideal "cause" for clowns such as Juncker to become more important. To violently unify and centralize Europe, it's exactly what similar politicians want to do and what they want to be paid for. So I totally expected that Juncker would become a warrior-in-chief against the "double standards in the quality of food".

There exists a small percentage of packages whose content is different e.g. in Czechia and Austria. I believe that it's not about an unambiguously lower quality in the post-communist world. In particular, I do believe that we Czechs actually prefer meat-like products that contain a higher fraction of fat and meat that isn't just the ordinary protein-based muscle, perhaps including some grounded skin, organs, if not parts of bones. It tastes more yummy. Our nation may be genetically predisposed to eat such food because our ancestors, maids and stableboys working for a German farmer (if I simplify things), have gotten used to such food. We may also prefer weaker spices, more milk-like and less bitter taste of chocolate, and many other things. At any rate, if products obey health standards and they are sold well, no one should be allowed to prevent the food companies and their consumers from the mutually agreed purchases.

Can decoding of Hawking radiation be easy?

Last month, I discussed a fresh paper by Kyriakos Papadodimas about the creation of objects inside a black hole using operators that exist outside, if I put it in catchy words.



Since that time, I was returning to my old tempting ideas that the black hole complementarity – the dependence relating the black hole interior and the black hole exterior – could be much simpler than we thought, given by some formula, and that this formula could be rationally justifiable or provable by a rock-solid, physically understandable, nearly rigorous argument.

McAfee's irrational pro-Bitcoin arguments

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, said that the Bitcoin was a fraud. JP Morgan would fire any employee who trades the Bitcoin for his being stupid. Dimon was also asked about some alternative great economy that will run on the Bitcoin and avoid taxes and other aspects of the government supervision and he said that it obviously won't happen. The Bitcoin is used as a mechanism for tax evasion and other crimes and when the lost taxes get too high, the governments will simply ban the Bitcoin.

Some cultists say that the Bitcoin cannot be banned because people make the payments in their living rooms, just with their computer, and the exchanges are in principle unnecessary. This claim is exactly equivalent to saying that hashish cannot be banned as a currency. Hashish is banned as a currency. You can use sell it and buy it – use it for payments – and quite often, no one will see you. But if someone sees you, e.g. if your other party turns out to be a policeman or agent-provocateur, you are in trouble! It may be exactly the same with the cryptocurrencies and indeed, if those would expand the black economy, the status of the Bitcoin and hashish will have to be put on equal footing (as El-Erian of Pimco said, the governments won't allow the mass adoption that is already priced-in in the Bitcoin's price).

I agree with every single word by Dimon, he is an adult in the room. Well, I added some words and I am confident that Dimon would agree with those, too.

John McAfee, the antivirus legend has promised to cut his dick if the Bitcoin doesn't cost $500,000 in a few years is afraid of his little friend. So he tried to contradict Mr Dimon.