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Roberto Quaglia’s videos

Posted on 28 November 2019 by Roberto Posted in featured, Roberto In English .

Here you have a list of videos by Roberto Quaglia, first the ones in English, followed by those in other languages (Italian, German, Romanian, Portugese).
Ecco un elenco dei video di Roberto Quaglia, prima quelli in inglese, seguiti da quelli in italiano ed altre lingue.

Videos

Multipolarity in science fiction – the rise of Chinese future

Dicembre 2016 – Nessun mondo multipolare se l’informazione rimane unipolare.

Agosto 2016 – La mia umile opinione sull’arte della manipolazione mentale di massa attraverso i film di Hollywood – da un’intervista ad una televisione russa.

Agosto 2016 – Un canale TV russo si interessa a quale sia il problema di RQ con la fantascienza

10 Aprile 2016 – Perché la fantascienza non esiste nel futuro? Un talk show stocastico improvvisato da Ian Watson & Roberto Quaglia

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Multipolarity in science fiction – the rise of Chinese future

Posted on 29 January 2020 by Roberto Posted in Roberto In English .

by Roberto Quaglia

Anyone who is interested in the so-called facts of the world knows that beyond the kaleidoscopes of talks about minimal matters, the only question that really matters is: will the future of the world be unipolar or multipolar?

To be clear: the unipolar world is a world dominated by a single political pole, while a multipolar world is a world in which several important poles of power coexist. The United States has long expressed its intention to consolidate indefinitely their unipolar moment resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union. We recall in this regard a famous speech by George Bush pronounced on September 11^th,1991, that is exactly 10 years before that other most famous September 11, a speech in which he solemnly announced the advent of a new world order, led by the United States.

And we also remember the equally famous document ten years later, by the American neocons “Project For a New American Century” – whose title is already a whole program. That of an American-centered world government is also a subject dear to the American science fiction literature of the 50s – I particularly remember Isaac Asimov claiming that either the world would have given itself a world government or humanity would have died out in a nuclear war. The naive axiomatic truth that this future world government would in any case reflect the fundamental characteristics of American society and values was quite evident in this literature.

Continue reading →

What is giving Bitcoin its value? The ultimate answer is: Skin in the game.

Posted on 5 August 2019 by Roberto Posted in Roberto In English .

by Roberto Quaglia

When asked what is giving Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) its value, most of the bright people would answer just something like: “Shared consensus.”. Some would add a particular techno-mantra involving terms like “distributed ledger”, “limited supply”, “permissionless”, etc. But the core of the answer would anyway be “shared consensus” – ultimately money has a value only if there is a shared consensus over the fact that it has a value.
However, at a closer look this is telling us nothing about the reasons which are giving value to Bitcoin. “Shared consensus” is not a cause. “Shared consensus” is a consequence. And also all that fancy techno jargon mantra with concepts like “ distributed ledger”, “limited supply”, “permissionless” – is in fact telling us very little about the reasons which are causing the value. After all, there are by now literally thousands of new cryptocurrencies, all boasting about their “distributed ledger”, “limited supply”, “permissionless” nature – and yet none of them manages to achieve more than a minimal fraction of Bitcoin’s value.
In April 2014, Bitcointalk user “Peter R” has written a post in which he observes how Bitcoin’s value seems to be rising according to Metcalfe’s law about networks. “The effect (value) of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users (nodes) of the system.” Since Bitcoin is clearly a network, it seems totally legit that its value would rise the more users it would have. And it would do so in accordance to Metcalfe’s law ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=572106.0 )
This insight has sparkled a new fashion throughout the whole crypto-space: everyone and their dog would suddenly create a new cryptocurrency to be “airdropped” for free to as many people as possible – this way each time a huge network would rise and according to Metcalfe’s law it would magically acquire tons of value. Herds of people rushed to grab some of this new free money, but… guess what? In most cases the trick didn’t really work out so well. Not much value was created. Did Metcalfe’s law suddenly stop to work? Or instead there was an even more important law – or principle – which had been overriding it?
There is in fact an overriding principle which is the requirement of people who take part in a monetary network to have “skin in the game” – in other words to share the risk of the network. The bigger their investment, the more they’d have to lose should it ever fail, the more they would have a motivation to stay proactive in securing the network against failure. Continue reading →

In only 3 hours Bancor has challenged the leadership of Bitcoin

Posted on 15 June 2017 by Roberto Posted in Roberto In English .

by Roberto Quaglia

On June 12, 2017 the ICO of Bancor took place. ICO means Initial Coin Offering, similar to IPO (Initial Public Offering) in the stock market. ICOs take place in the world of cryptocurrencies and they are a quite recent type of phenomenon, which has existed for a few years only. By the way of ICOs the developers of interesting projects (usually some new cryptocurrency or cryptocurrency related instrument) can collect the money they need to actually develop it and if the project will be successful the initial buyers of the ICO will earn from the rise in price of the coins they bought during the ICO. In some cases, however, if not everybody who wishes to buy into the ICO actually manages to buy, the price typically goes to the moon as soon as the coin hits the market, as everyone tries to jump on the boat before it leaves the port. And there are hints that this is what could happen to Bancor in the coming days. Continue reading →

From Bitcoin to Bancor, the main steps of the ongoing monetary revolution

Posted on 5 June 2017 by Roberto Posted in Roberto In English .

by Roberto Quaglia – – roberto.info

Today I’d like to spend a few words on a specialistic theme most of the people still know little or nothing about, and which nevertheless in the future will have an important impact on the lives of all of us. You’ve certainly have already heard of Bitcoin. But perhaps, you likely are missing all details.

More than that, you are probably missing the sequels – I’m talking about the other coins which seek to become an alternative to Bitcoin. Of course here we won’t be able to clear all mysteries on this subject, but we can offer you a little panoramic. Bitcoin is an electronic currency which has been created in 2009, and it basically consists in a distributed peer-to-peer database which ideally is shared by everyone who holds any unit of this coin. This ensures that the circulating coins cannot be counterfeit. Also the emission of bitcoin is ruled in a certain way, in a way which is established in advance and is unchangeable, by the way of a process called Proof of Work which consists in the solving of a specific algorithm with variable difficulty. This is a minting process everybody can theoretically take part to, but in the real world it’s now reserved to those who can afford the increasingly expensive dedicated computers and even more than that all the electricity that these machines consume.

When Bitcoin was created, in 2009, it was nothing worth. The first enthusiasts who adopted it where producing thousands of coins every few days and then they had no idea what to do with them. In May 2010 a man called Lazlo offered to pay 10,000 bitcoins to whoever was willing to send him 2 pizzas. It took some time before someone cared to accept his 10,000 bitcoins offer and finally Lazlo succeeded in buying his two nice pizzas. Not too bad, he must have thought, two real, concrete, tasty and eatable pizzas in exchange with a handful of electrons and some weird string of ASCII characters on the screen of his computer. Did Lazlo do a good deal? It depends on how good were those two pizzas in the end. At the exchange rate of a few days ago, May 25, 2017, seven years later those 10,000 bitcoins are today worth more or less 26 million dollars.

Lazlo today can boast about having eaten the most expensive pizzas in the world, which by the way are getting more and more expensive as time goes by. Just in the past few months Bitcoin has doubled once again its value, reaching a max capitalization of 44 billion USD. Continue reading →

Stop the madness – a movement toward reality

Posted on 31 December 2016 by Roberto Posted in Roberto In English .

by Roberto Quaglia – roberto.info

After Trump’s victory in the American presidential election, Gianluigi Paragone led an episode of the show “The Open Cage” where, among others, faced Giulietto Chiesa and Marcello Foa, two very different journalists, with radically different origins and stories, two different political backgrounds, in short, two people who, according to the logic in which we grew up, would disagree on just about everything.

Instead, analyzing, not only the outcome of the American elections, but the entire contemporary international political landscape, Chiesa and Foa’s vision matched in a surprising way. Surprisingly, according to the old way of understanding politics, but so not surprising according to the paradigm of the 2.0 Politics.

Politics that we are used to, we could call the 1.0 Politics, is now over. It was the politics of ideologies that are no longer there, in a society made up of people with group identities that are disappearing, placed in a world without the internet that no longer exists, where the shared reality created by the media was undeniable, which, thanks to the Internet no longer exists.

Of course, the 1.0 politics has its fair share of inertia and will cause important damages within the convulsions of its agony. Of course we do not know how the 2.0 politics will be. We can’t predict the future. But we know that its increased traction force will come from aggregating power of the network. And that, above all, it could not be independent from reality, at least not to the extent that the reality, today, is independent from 1.0 Politics. Continue reading →

Hollywood embodies George Orwell’s idea of doublethink

Posted on 17 November 2016 by Roberto Posted in Roberto In English .

Katehon.com

As an essayist, I’m working on research considering the manipulation of Hollywood movies. This is nothing new; there are many books about it. But there is always something to learn. In a way, sociology has been weaponized by Hollywood and it is well known that many Hollywood producers officially collaborate with the Pentagon. This means that screenplays go to the Pentagon where analysts advise them in terms of political agenda. The Pentagon offers a lot of help in exchange for this collaboration. Continue reading →

The present has turned much weirder than science fiction could ever imagine

Posted on 17 November 2016 by Roberto Posted in Roberto In English .

Katehon.com

I am a science fiction writer and particular interested about what is happening in this field. I’m also interested in Politics – I wrote a book about September 11 and other things which are happening today. I’m also particularly interested in searching links between the reality and the world of imagination, represented by science fiction.

We are living in a very strange age, in which reality has turned weirder than in many science fiction scenarios. For a century or so, science fiction has been an intellectual movement of people who would understand the present very well and imagine a future that would extrapolate from what writers would understandand about the present. Mainly they were futures which would be different due to technological developments, but starting from the 50s and 60s, with writers like Robert Sheckley, it became also a future which would be different from sociological point of view. Extrapolation would be a more complex one than the one focused only on technology.

Today we are living in the age, where technological development, both the hard science and technological applications, as well as the sociological “black science” – sociology weaponized by the military- has led science fiction authors of being suppressed by reality. It is very difficult to write science fiction when you don’t know all the things that actually had been invented and when you don’t understand sociological manipulations which are taking place. Continue reading →

Do you like Putin? Get ready for the slammer!

Posted on 25 May 2016 by Roberto Posted in Senza categoria .

All along the new iron curtain, arrests of anti-NATO personalities are increasing. The lastest one to date is the Polish politician Piskorski: Welcome to the new pre-war Europe..

by Roberto Quaglia – roberto.info

How many times have you read in the news that “Putin the dictator” throws whoever disagrees with him in jail, that in Russia political opposition is persecuted? Well, maybe you believed! Nobody’s perfect.

On the other hand, as Goebbels used to say “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” The simple truth is that whenever you have over 80% of the public opinion on your side – as is the case with Putin in Russia – there is no need to put those few people who don’t agree with you in jail. It would be a waste of energy – and at the same time, extremely bad publicity.

Indeed, despite what our local propaganda is saying, nothing even resembling that is happening in Russia. And if you plan to object, please provide the names of the people who’ve been jailed. On the contrary, when public opinion is in freefall, that is the last resort for regimes like those of the self-proclaimed democratic west, where fewer and fewer people vote because they have lost any hope of being represented by those they “elect”.

Therefore the shrewd observer won’t be quite so surprised to learn that in Poland, on the 18th of May 2016, politicians expressing their sympathy for Russia and their dissent towards NATO were rounded up by special forces on the grounds of “spying on behalf of a foreign country”. It is important to stress just how utterly absurd such an allegation is for a politician. To be a useful spy, you need to be an official, in a key position, or operating in a role where you have something you can to spy on. Politicians can even have ideas which differ greatly from those of the mainstream position in a country, but the last thing they can do with reason is spy. Spy on what? And just how? Could someone try to explain this?
Continue reading →

Brussels 2016: Towards surreal terrorism

Posted on 15 April 2016 by Roberto Posted in Roberto In English .

by Roberto Quaglia
www.roberto.info

It may still be too early to come to a definitive conclusion on the Brussels terrorist attacks. However, after just 48 hours, the event is already verging on the surreal, as is usually the case with these kinds of events in the Brave New Western World. The head of the Ukrainian secret services would like us to know that he wouldn’t be surprised if “Russia is behind the Brussels attack”. This is the type of person Western journalists turn to for explanations of what has been going on in Ukraine over the past two years. Keep that in mind next time the news talks about the crisis in Ukraine.

Turkish president Erdogan stated he is ready to help Brussels fight terrorism, just a few days after stating that “There is no reason why bombs exploding in Ankara could not explode in Brussels.” I imagine that the next logical step will be “There is no reason why democracy in Brussels can’t be abolished like it has been in Turkey.” (Obviously, the use of the word “democracy” here has to be considered exclusively in the light of poetic license.) And to highlight the truly surreal surrealism, we also need to remember that in an interview for Bel-RTL on the 26th of April 2013, Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders, talking about Belgian jihadists, stated: “Perhaps we will erect a monument to them as revolutionary heroes.” Perhaps someone should ask him now: Has that time come? Continue reading →