📔 Weekly Journal: DIY Poster Art 👨🎨🖼️🤖
[6 min read] Your guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier (& the weekend!). Today, the usual market news as well as how to get creative and make your own high res images for DIY poster art
Welcome to this week’s Weekly Journal 📔, your guide to the latest news & innovation in emerging technology, digital assets, and our exciting path to the Metaverse. This is week 49 of the 520 weeks of newsletters I have committed to, a decade of documenting our physical and digital lives converge.
New subscribers are encouraged to check out the history & purpose of this newsletter as well as the archive.
Enjoy your weekend! 😎
Ryan
Here’s what you’re getting today:
📈 Market update: Green candles all the way. Let’s go! 🚀
🗞️ Interesting news: Midjourney now creates 4K images (so you can make your own poster art, A new tool developed by University of Chicago researchers to “poison” images so that they can’t be used by AI, and KPMG & Vodafone making moves
👓 Read of the week: Major blockchain analysis firm refutes claims of significant cryptocurrency donations to Hamas
🎥 Video of the week: 50 art styles to try in Midjourney (prompts included!)
🤖 AI: How you can now make your own 4K resolution posters for your wall
✅ Weekly poll: Help choose the emerging tech topic for Wednesday’s showcase.
🤑 DCA with me: Follow my regular $50 weekly investing in an emerging asset class.
Market Update
🔥🗺️ 7-day heatmap below shows another very strong week, with BTC breaking over 52% dominance (its value is half of the entire crypto market).
🎭 Crypto Fear and Greed Index is based on volatility, social media sentiments, surveys, market momentum, and a few other bits and pieces. Given the sustained 2 week rally, this now way into the greed zone.
Interesting news from this week🗞️
🧠 KPMG's offshoot, Cranium.ai, secured $25 million for advancing AI security. Spun off from KPMG in April, the enterprise specializes in bolstering AI trust through innovative software. The funding, led by Telstra Ventures LLC, propels KPMG's initiative, elevating Cranium's AI security prowess. Totaling $32 million raised, KPMG's strategic support amplifies Cranium's growth in AI innovation and market expansion.
🔗 This week EY has unveiled its fourth-generation blockchain analytics tool, EY Blockchain Analyzer: Reconciler, designed to independently access on-chain data. Fidelity Digital Assets, a subsidiary of Fidelity Investments, is the first enterprise to employ this tool through EY's SaaS platform, using it to enhance internal risk management. EY's web-based tool helps organizations source wallet addresses and query on-chain data for cryptocurrency workflows, ensuring operational excellence and regulatory compliance. Fidelity Digital AssetsSM will utilise a subset of its capabilities to strengthen its risk management processes in the digital assets market. EY continues to enhance its blockchain analytics suite, adding support for additional blockchains and addressing evolving client needs.
📞 Vodafone's Digital Asset Broker (DAB) collaborated with Chainlink, Sumitomo Corporation, and InnoWave to showcase blockchain's use in global trade. They utilised Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to streamline global commerce, employing IoT devices for secure transfer of trade documents. This aims to enhance blockchain security and interoperability. Vodafone's (DAB) facilitates the 'Economy of Things' through IoT technologies, envisioning a world where devices transact, creating new revenue streams. By 2025, IoT's economic impact is projected at $12.6 trillion. DAB addresses trust, cost, and tech issues, employing secure SIM-based authentication.
☠ Nightshade, an innovative tool developed by University of Chicago researchers led by computer science professor Ben Zhao, empowers artists to combat AI models. As AI-driven technologies, like ChatGPT, rely on vast training datasets often scraped from the web, artists have begun taking action against AI companies for using their work without consent. Nightshade is a significant step in this battle. It allows artists to subtly alter their digital imagery, making it indistinguishable to the human eye but disrupting AI models attempting to learn from it. The tool can even confuse AI models into recognizing objects incorrectly. While acknowledging potential misuse, the developers aim to restore power to artists by deterring copyright infringement. They've submitted their findings to a computer security conference for peer review. Read the research paper here: Prompt-Specific Poisoning Attacks on Text-to-Image Generative Models (20 Oct 2023)
👓Read of the Week
US Senator Elizabeth Warren HATES crypto. Given she has generous backing from the banking US establishment which Crypto threatens the monopoly of, it’s not really a surprise.
This week’s read from Elliptic, a blockchain analysis firm, refuting claims alleging significant cryptocurrency donations to Hamas, countering The Wall Street Journal and U.S. lawmakers' assertions. They state Hamas' crypto funding is meagre, challenging misinterpretations of data suggesting extensive crypto use in financing "terrorist" activities.
For instance, a Hamas fundraising campaign via Gaza Now, raised only $21,000, with $9,000 frozen by Tether and $2,000 frozen after conversion attempts, elucidated by Elliptic. Correcting WSJ's statement claiming $130 million raised, Elliptic revealed inconsistencies proven by on-chain data.
The controversy triggered U.S. lawmakers' concern, particularly Senator Elizabeth Warren, who immediately used the fake news to advocate crypto legislation post-Israel's tragic event. Elliptic reiterated that recent portrayals misrepresent crypto's impact on terrorist funding, emphasising blockchain transparency's ability to trace illicit funds.
Elliptic, dedicated to preventing financial crime in the crypto sphere since 2013, stands as the sole blockchain analytics provider acknowledged by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer. Read their full “clap back” post here: Setting the record straight on crypto crowdfunding by Hamas
🎥 Watch of the week
This week’s watch relates to the AI section below. In the video, the creator presents 50 art styles and their remarkable outcomes for viewers to explore. These styles encompass various subjects like people, animals, objects, and landscapes. The video concludes by offering a free download of all the prompts used (prompt guide)
AI 🎨🤖🎵✍🏼
Midjourney, a leading player in generative AI art, has this week unveiled a groundbreaking feature that addresses a significant limitation. Previously, its AI-generated images were confined to a default resolution of 1,024 x 1,024 pixels, suitable for web use but inadequate for printing beyond postcard size.
However, from this week you now have the option to upscale images by 2x or 4x, elevating the maximum image size to a remarkable 4,096 x 4,096 pixels, equivalent to a 4K resolution. This substantial enhancement allows for high-quality prints at sizes like A3, non-blurry web images, and desktop wallpapers. You can easily make your own poster art by using an online service like Apple Print.
Important to note that this upscaling may consume extra processing time (the “Basic” $10USD monthly subscription is based on 3.3 hrs of processing time).
Midjourney's move comes in the wake of Adobe's release of Firefly 2, marking an escalating competition in the generative AI art sector. Exciting times!
Weekly Poll ✅
Help choose what you would like to learn about on Wednesday for my weekly emerging tech showcase:
That’s all for the free version this week! If you have any organisations in mind that could benefit from learning about emerging technology, be sure to reach out. Educational workshops are one of many consulting services I offer.
DCA With Me 🤑
Dollar Cost Averaging is an investment strategy in which an investor regularly invests a fixed amount of money into a particular asset/asset class at regular intervals, regardless of its current market price. By doing so, the investor can reduce the impact of market volatility and potentially earn a better return over time. Motto = time IN the market beats trying to time the market
To experiment with this, I invest $50 NZD into a Digital Asset every week. Each week I will choose an asset that seems underpriced in the short term and has positive long-term potential. My timeframe is 3-5 years. I don’t give financial advice but if you want to follow along with me you can use my easycrypto.co.nz referral link to support this newsletter. Let’s dive into this week’s pick:
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