Tech News: Flying Spiders of Mars

person is absolutely true. I will also say, though, that I have enjoyed a dose of something recently, that being the second dose of the Fiser vaccine. I got the first dose a few weeks ago. Turned out that that's the only way they would give it to me. I had to take the first dose and then the second dose. I tried to convince some to reverse that, and they said it doesn't work that way. I will say also

that the shot itself wasn't bad at all. It did make my arm really sore both times, and the second time I felt a little icky the evening after I got my shot. I got my shot in the afternoon. By that evening, I wasn't feeling so great. Next day I felt great. The next day I did not feel great. So it was a real up and down. But I have received both of those shots, and a couple of weeks I should be fully vaccinated. I'll still be wearing

a mask. I'll still be socially distancing, because I want to be as safe as possible, not just for myself, but for others in my community and their loved ones. And I urge all of those listening who have the opportunity to get vaccinated to do so. I realized it can be difficult depending on where you are. It was a bit of a challenge here in Georgia. If I'm being honest, we are a state that is still ruggling to get up to speed with the rest of the US. But I like being able to see light at the

end of the tunnel stay safe. The more we do that, the fewer variants we will see, and the better chance we'll have of establishing a normal that doesn't involve everybody staying at home all the time. All right, got all that all the way, Let's move on to some tech news. My top story is that ingenuity a k a. The little experimental drone helicopter that could has taken its first flight on Mars. This was the high risk experiment, meaning

that there was never any guarantee of success. The engineers here on Earth could only try and design an autonomous flying vehicle and hope that it would work in Mars' thin atmosphere. And it did work. This is incredibly exciting news, at least to me, and I assume for at least some of you out there as well. Because of the distance between Earth and Mars, Ingenuity had actually made its flight and landed several minutes before we knew about it.

It takes time for signals to travel that much distance between Earth and Mars, and so Earth celebrated hearing about it around sixty six in the morning Eastern Time, but Ingenuity had technically set its feet down on the soil for more than ten minutes. The delay in signals means that it is impossible for a human pilot to guide Ingenuity. There's just a ten minute lag is just way too much, and that's why it has to be an autonomous device.

Ingenuity spun its rotors at around revolutions per minute. Helicopters back here on Earth average out at around four hundred to five d rpm, and that was just to generate enough lift to carry this very light device through the thin Martian atmosphere. The flight lasted about thirty nine point one seconds. It re an altitude of around ten feet or three meters, and NASA may conduct as many as four additional test flights if Ingenuity is up for it.

The little chopper hitched a ride with the rover Perseverance, but unlike the rover, Ingenuity isn't carrying any scientific equipment. It has a camera so it can take pictures, and it has the sensors it needs to achieve flight and maintain flight, but that's about it. So this is really

the beginning of something really exciting. It means that NASA and other space agencies could potentially design other autonomous aircraft that can perform actual scientific observations in Martian atmosphere down the road, which is pretty darn neat if you ask me. Over the weekend, a couple of cryptocurrency stories lead to Bitcoin's value dropping fairly quickly, almost like I picked the

wrong week to invest in cryptocurrencies now. For one, the Nation of turn Key has banned crypto payments arguing that cryptocurrency represents possible transaction risks and could lead to irreparable damage. As such, the country's government forbids the use of cryptocurrencies to pay for goods or services in the country of Turkey. The lack of regulation was really the big sticking factor apparently,

and I have some thoughts on this now. It's no secret that I think bitcoin is a pretty lousy currency because the value of the coin is so volatile. It would be like waking up to find that one day a dollar bill could buy you a candy bar, and the next day you find out that dollar bill could buy you a dozen candy bars, and maybe in a year or two, that dollar bill would be able to buy you an entire candy store, all with just one dollar.

The dollar didn't change, it's it's purchasing value changed. But this is an issue that could potentially work out much further down the road and the future, should the value of bitcoin stabilize. And there's no reason that you'd ever use a single bitcoin for purchase. You're far more likely to use just a tiny fraction of a bitcoin to do it. In fact, the vast majority of bitcoin owners don't own a whole bitcoin anyway. That's a different matter

than to suggest that the transactions themselves are risky. And I know I've talked about bitcoin exclusively, but this really applies to all cryptocurrencies. They just aren't all as volatile or valued as Bitcoin happens to be. I would say that the blockchain approach is actually very much not risky.

I would argue it's incredibly stable and visible. I suppose you could argue that it would be risky if, for whatever reason the value of the coin drops drastically, but that can happen with fiat currencies, that can happen with anything, So this move seems a bit disingenuous to me. Maybe it's more that if it's outside the control of the government, it's scary that kind of thing. After the announcement, Bitcoin's value took a hit and it dropped about four percent

in value. However, it was still above sixty tho dollars for the moment. Now that leads to the next story, because I mean it got worse for bitcoin. On Saturday. It dropped again in value. A massive amount of bitcoin was sold off, and that meant that there was a flood of bitcoins into the market. And that dropped the value of bitcoin compared to the US dollar. And it's a basic supply and demand thing. When supply ends up suddenly increasing, then you typically see the price dropped because

the demand is now overshadowed by supply. So now that sixty five thousand dollar bitcoin is down to about fifty six thousand dollars, it's a nine thousand dollar drop. Amusing estimates because the value change just so much, and a nine thousand dollar drop is a lot of money, but fifty six thousand dollars is a lot of money. However, it means that if you were someone who had been investing in bitcoin just as it was hitting sixty dollars, now you would see the value of that investment has

just dropped a pretty significant amount. Some outlets have used the word plunge to describe bitcoin's value, but I think that's a bit too alarmist and extreme. So you might ask, why was there this big flood of bitcoins sold back into the market, why were they converted over? Well, the the answer for that is not entirely clear, but there are a few theories, and one is that investors who were attempting to buy bitcoin on margin had their margin.

Called buying on margin is when an investor puts up some money as collateral for a loan of more money in order to make an investment. So, for example, let's say I wanted to invest ten thousand dollars in bitcoin, but I've only scraped together five thousand dollars. Well, I could buy on margin by putting up my five grand as collateral and then getting a loan for the ten

thousand dollars, which then I put into bitcoin. But the lender at any time could end up calling my margin and they demand I repay their loan of ten thousand dollars. Now that five thousand dollar collateral will go to some of that, but I have to cover the rest. And if the price of bitcoin has dropped significantly, it would mean that I'm out a good deal of money. So sometimes people who lend on margin are asking for the

payment back if they perceive a drop in value. So, in other words, Turkey says, we don't want to use cryptocurrency in our country. Bitcoin's value takes a hit, the lenders say, I don't want to lose money on this, so I'm gonna call in my margins now. And then you have a bunch of investors who are selling off bitcoin in order to cover their margin, uh and not

to lose too much money. That would in turn mean that you get this flood of bitcoins, saying the market and the value could take another hit, dropping like fi Insto just four. But that's just one possible theory. Another is that it may be that a couple of major cryptocurrency owners, which the current the community tends to refer to as whales, sold off a lot of coin in the hope of making that price drop. And here's the logic behind that. Okay, you are a fat cat whale,

which I realized is combining a lot of animals. But you've got a ton of bitcoin, is what I'm trying to say. And for the scenario, let's say that the bitcoin is valued at sixty five thousand U S dollars per bitcoin. You've got tons of these things, so you decide, hey, I'm gonna really make some money, and you convert your bitcoins into US dollars. You're effectively selling your bitcoins back into the market. You make billions of dollars because you've

got so many bitcoins. But by offloading all those bitcoins, it causes the value of bitcoin itself to drop down and it ends up settling around fifty six thousand dollars per bitcoin. Now you buy back all those bitcoins you sold, plus some extra because you've made a lot of US dollars, and now the bitcoin compared to the US dollar is worth slightly less than it was before, so you can actually buy more of it, and then you just wait

for the bitcoin value to grow again. So occasionally you might dump a ton of cryptocurrency, dropping the value of the currency as the in the process, then buy it back and make it into a long term investment. That means like you'd be safe from stuff. I mean, if worst case scenario, you you just get out of the market, you've got billions of dollars which you can, you know, do whatever you want with, but other investors could end

up suffering, at least in the short term. So it's it's a move that a lot of people in the cryptocurrency community considered to be um dirty pool, I guess you could say. Meanwhile, one problem that bitcoin has, whether the value is high or low, is that the process of mining bitcoins requires a lot of electricity, and this is directly tied to bitcoin's value. So we have to talk about how bitcoin mining works from a very very

high level. So essentially, the way bitcoin mining works is that computers all connected to the Bitcoin network compete against each other in an effort to guess a really big number. Now I'm oversimplifying a bit here, but that's the basic idea. So the computer that does guess the correct really big number first effectively verifies a block of transactions for the blockchain and is rewarded in return with a certain or

of bitcoins. The number of bitcoins gradually decreases over time, but right now it's at six point two five bitcoins per block, and about a hundred forty four blocks get mined every single day. And since each bitcoin is worth more than fifty thou dollars, that adds up to a

lot of money. So if you buy a really fast computer, like Screaming Lee Fast, even if that means you're sinking thousands of dollars into buying that computer, you could potentially make all that back through mining, as long as your computer is faster than all the others on the Bitcoin network at guessing that really big number. Except we are

well beyond talking about just fast computers. Were now up to fast computer networks and server farms running multiple graphics processing units in parallel trying to guess these numbers, and these networks require an enormous amount of like tricity as they try to be the first to get to that solution before any other computer can manage it. As the

price of bitcoin goes up, the competition gets more fierce. Now, at some point we should reach a stage in which the rewards you get from mining a block will be small enough that the computer systems will drop off the network because it would actually cost more money to run the systems than you would make in mining, so you would be it would be a losing proposition. You'd be spending more money just paying for electricity. Then you would

get out of the successful blocks that you mind. At that point, the number that computers have to guess will actually be easier to guess. The guessing game gets harder as more computational power is directed at getting the right answer. It's a dynamic system, which is pretty cool, But this means that more electricity goes into mining bitcoins right now than is used by some countries on a day a league basis. That blows my mind. Well, China recently responded

to this problem. Inner Mongolia is the world leader when it comes to bitcoin mining. It's responsible for eight percent of all bitcoin mining, largely because Inner Mongolia is an industrial region within China. You've got a lot of fossil fuel mining and UH power companies located in Inner Mongolia. So electricity in Inner Mongolia is significantly cheaper than it is in other parts of the world. So that means that your profit margins of running a mining cryptocurrency operation

in Inner Mongolia are much better. You're spending less money just to run the systems. UH. The United States, by the way, is that seven point two percent of all bitcoin mining, So that shows you Inner Mongolia, just one region in China, is responsible for more bitcoin mining than the entire United States. Well. Now, China has banned cryptocurrency mining in Inner Mongol y because the electricity requirements have

led to increased fossil fuel consumption. China has also struggled between supporting cryptocurrency is a potential way for the country to generate wealth versus the fact that as a deregulated, decentralized commodity, the Chinese government doesn't really have regulatory authority over the currency itself. And man, this just shows that it's tough when your greed does battle with your authoritarian sensibilities.

My heart goes out to China. Over in the UK, a regulatory body called the c m A, which focuses on preventing, you know, anti competitive practices, raised concerns about in Vidio's acquisition of microchip designer ARM. Now. According to c m A, the concern is that the sale of

ARM could potentially create national security issues for the United Kingdom. Arm, I should point out, originated in the UK, and the Digital Secretary Oliver Dalton has issued an intervention notice, essentially putting the acquisition on hold, so that the c m A might ponder whether there would be any national security

issues should the sale go through. But and Video was to purchase ARM from the Japanese mega company soft Bank, which first acquired ARM back in so I guess the concern is that a non UK company might purchase a UK based company from a different non UK company. I mean, if if soft Bank could acquire ARM and there were no national security issues stopping that acquisition, why does that

potentially change when the company doing the acquisition is in Video. Still, I think it's appropriate to scrutinize big acquisition deals because there's always a chance that such a deal will reduce competition in the market, which gives consumers fewer choices. It leads to some pretty lousy consequences for everybody apart from whatever company holds the monopoly. I just didn't anticipate the national security angle. I think there's a good reason to look into it. I just I mean, I don't see

where national security comes in. However, I also admit I am not an expert on these matters, and I could really be missing something really obvious. Finally, starting today, certain Xbox Cloud Ultimate subscribers who have a Windows ten PC or an Apple phone or tablet will be able to stream a selection of about a hundred Xbox games to those devices over browsers like Google Chrome, Safari, or of course,

Microsoft Edge. The company is opening this up gradually, and so the first folks who will get a chance to test this out will be a limited selection of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers, who should be on the lookout for an email notification from Microsoft. Players will need a game controller that can connect to their computer via USB or lue tooth. Fun fact that includes PlayStation four controllers, so you can finally play Xbox games on the inferior

PlayStation game controller. Yeah. I know that's an opinion, it's not a fact. A lot of folks probably disagree. They love the PS four controller. But while I felt the PS four was an improvement over earlier PlayStation controllers, I still don't like those controllers very much. I find them really cramped. Anyway, It's been a couple of years since Microsoft really invested heavily in game streaming with the Xbox

Cloud service, which was previously called Project x Cloud. Uh, subscription models bring in a guaranteed revenue month after month. I mean, typically you can only sell a video game once to each customer, unless you're me and you happen to be one of those people who buys the same game multiple times for different platforms. I have done that, but most of the time you can only sell a

game once. If you do have a game that has a subscription model, you know, like some online games, is a little bit different, but this is a way for Microsoft to generate an enormous amount of revenue month after month. It becomes a kind of guaranteed income source. And when it comes to the Ultimate subscription. You're looking at a fifteen dollar per month fee. I am an Xbox uh gain Pass subscriber, but I don't have the Ultimate subscription. I think I have the Basic, so I will not

be part of this initial round. I will have to wait. But in return for your subscription, you do have access to a hundred titles that you can stream to your Xbox console or starting today for some of y'all just not me, a browser which is Bring nifty. Okay, So that's all the news I have for you for Tuesday April. That's kind of a lie. I actually had a couple of other stories, but I didn't want to run too long. But stay tuned this week. You will get another news

episode later in the week. And if you have any suggest questions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is text stuff H s W and I will talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.