John Madden & Bitcoins
to a hammer the whole world looks like a nail
BITCOINS / VIDEO GAMES / TECH IS NEUTRAL
Today’s post is a bit longer than normal. It is a tribute to the limitless applications we can put a given tool to use towards. I am sure that many have heard the expression, to a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. I found an entertaining post about all the things you can use a rip hammer for. What a versatile tool and some of them are humorous also.
Today’s post is INSPIRED WRITING thanks to one of my friends in my Scotch Club who I will call M. What a group of men! Varied backgrounds, interests, and perspectives. If you take the time to step back, it is amazing the topics we all discuss and learn about. The club meeting that night had the simple theme of Rye whiskey and perhaps a drink to make from it. This is not the expected setting where one might emerge with more knowledge about bitcoins. After M shared his interesting insights, only minutes later we may have been discussing the relative merit of downtime between pitches in a baseball game. I love these guys!
As I mentioned, the last time we met, M took all of us down the road of crypto-currency and described in some depth what bitcoin mining was. M is a sophisticated tech guy. When he started talking about hashes and their role in cryptography, I think he was perilously close to losing some in the conversation. I believe once each of us has a libation in hand, no topic is off-limits. We all may have heard the words blockchain, cryptocurrency, or bitcoins before. I think that any of us can venture out if we are interested and learn about it but M really understands it and hence was able to make it more understandable for the rest of us. Learning something new or coming to a new understanding requires trust and faith. It is good to have people around who can do that for all of us. The option is to just muddle and be prone to manipulation or stay in the darkness.
So what does all this have to do with Call of Duty or Madden NFL as our title today teases? As a 60-year-old, computer games are something that I don’t know very much about. In the same way that my Mom was never going to establish an email account, I am not sure that computer games will ever become a dominant force in my life. While I may do a puzzle or play scrabble, I am referring especially to games of the sort where people put on headsets with microphones and engage with their friends looking like they are providing tech support for my refrigerator that won’t connect to WiFi. For those of you who think this is still a fringe activity, and perhaps more wedded to TV sports or the movies, ponder these facts:
In 2020, the revenue of the videogame industry was $180B
In 2019, the movie industry reached revenues of $100B for the first time
In 2020, North American sports raked in $75B in revenue
While the movie and sports businesses suffered during the pandemic, the videogame industry continued to thrive
While approximate, as can be seen from the figures above, the videogame business is larger than movies and North American sports COMBINED
While you may not yet be playing, the figures above tell me that if I do not pay attention, I will soon be a horseback rider in an automobile world. Farewell world, please don’t leave me behind.
One of my recent posts “focused” on our eyeballs and our mobile phone cameras. Our mobile phones are riding the same wave of constant innovation that has defined the world of video games. While I chose not to deep dive into Moore’s Law in that post about mobile phone cameras, a quick comment is worthwhile. Moore’s Law was more of an observation. Back when we were still using vacuum tubes and transistors were just emerging, one of the primary trailblazers was a man named Gordon Moore. Gordon is one of the co-founders of Intel, that familiar name we associate with personal computers. Gordon, way back in 1965 observed that we could economically fit 50 transistors on a chip. He thought that there was no reason why that number should not be able to double each year. He made a bold prediction/observation that we would have 1000 transistors on a chip by 1970. While advancements have become more difficult as time went on, this amazing industry has been GEOMETRICALLY doubling its capacity every 1-2 years now for almost 50 years! It is this SINGLE truth that has driven the advancements into almost everything we touch in our world today.
What happens to ANYTHING that you repetitively double for any reasonable amount of time? The number gets so large as to be MIND-BOGGLING. Apple makes a chip today with 57,000,000,000 transistors on a single chip. Whenever numbers get large enough, most of us cease to participate in the discussion because the scale is so difficult for us humans. Since we all presumably can handle big numbers when it comes to money, here is my favorite analogy. Would you rather I give you $1M today OR give you a penny today, 2 tomorrow, and so forth for 30 days. After 30 days you would have $10,737,418.23. Since the early 1960s, we have been living in this dream world of this important aspect of life on earth getting better at this unimaginable speed. A great time to be alive for just this reason alone. Ignore the naysayers who yearn for the “good old days”!
There are so many things that might be possible if we can only compute things fast enough. We see these innovations in our phones all the time. We see it in every evolving and better in the animated movies that entertain us. For those that love to play video games, the revolution for them has been mind-blowing.
We must keep our eye on the prize. The role of video games and their transformation EVENTUALLY becomes part of the story of cryptocurrencies and bitcoins. So we must explore video games first.
The video game revolution is one that just missed me. I was born in 1960 and in 1982 my University became the first school in the United States to provide a personal computer to each incoming freshman as a necessary tool to navigate their four-year experience. I had graduated the year before so I just missed the rise of this revolution. While computers would become a large influence in the work I did, they would not be so clearly associated with games as they might have been for someone born only five years later. I think that nearly all of my friends who are 55 or less, especially the males were part of the gaming revolution. By way of example for my thesis, the incredibly popular Madden football video games have now been sold for 33 years! American Football, especially the Superbowl retains a status with the public nearly unmatched. Of the thirty most-watched broadcast shows in US history, they are all Superbowls excepting the farewell episode of M*A*S*H and one Muhammad Ali fight. As a Bills fan, I wonder which of the four consecutive trips made the cut.
Despite the absolute popularity of the NFL, I venture to say that most people below the age of forty, likely know the name Madden from the video games and may not even know that John Madden was a Superbowl-winning coach and broadcaster! The Madden football video games were introduced around 1988. Watching the progression of the games, their realism, and sophistication is quite remarkable. Here is a YouTube video of the progression only through 2019. While the video is over 12 minutes long, it is worthwhile to watch even if you are not a football fan especially if killing time on a treadmill like yours truly. You can see that in the early days, a sort of block of a person represented a football player and they just disappeared and reappeared every five yards or so.
To compare the very earliest version with the latest over the last thirty years makes the realism of modern video games almost impossible to fathom. The early version of the game looks like cloudy lego football players while the latest have the sunlight shining off their helmets! We have known how light bends when it goes through a lens and we know what happens to the rays of light. In certain applications like the Hubble Space Telescope, time and expense were no object so we could work out remarkable photographs of the universe as long as we could boost a school bus-sized telescope into orbit. The mathematics of understanding the image has existed for a long time. Now imagine if we could just SIMULATE where the sun and lights are and somehow have moving characters (players) track through the scene. If you could describe and display what that might look like you would have something like the current version of Madden NFL.
The cutting-edge in video game design (and animation) is something called ray-tracing. I am not going to go into that in horrifying detail mostly because I don’t understand it that well either. Suffice to say if I had a flashlight and was shining it and you ran past it, mathematics should be able to help me understand what happens when the light and object collide or glance past imposing a shadow. All of this sounds amazing but it can be done. The math is somewhat easy thanks to Gauss who we mentioned in a previous post about phone cameras. The problem is when you break down all of the things that are moving on the screen at once, each of the elements on the screen are affected differently.
When we buy a modern computer one of the choices we make can often be amongst the most expensive of the components is the video card. The next time you are at BestBuy (another Minnesota company) take a look at the computers and there will be a card describing what is inside. I think you will notice on the more expensive computers there will be something described like “NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080”. These video cards without understanding what they do are amazing and expensive. A common description for what these magic computer components do is Ray tracing which is the holy grail of graphics. It simulates how light behaves in the real world. Someone has now figured out to not take pictures of things but rather move stuff around and be able to predict what it will look like in the real world!
If you want to shock or impress your gamer children or grandchildren, ask them whether their video card can do ray tracing. Even though they might not know exactly what that means, they will react as they know it makes video games look cool! Ray tracing is hard to do because you are doing a lot of calculations. These video cards are built to do this kind of stuff and they can be used for other things also. To be useful to paint an image, it has to be able to figure out what each pixel on the screen is supposed to look like. There are a lot of pixels on a screen and the picture changes a lot when the football players are running fast!
Finally, we come to BitCoin and how we connect the dots between video games and Bitcoin mining. These AMAZING video cards which allow designers to simulate what things look like as they move through light and darkness are amongst the best purpose-built devices for doing the intensive calculations of those optics formulas brought to us by the mathematician named Gauss. The video card is our hammer in today’s title. Now we are going to use this amazing compute capability to figure out something else. This is a really hard topic to talk about. I plan to skip through and make this easy. BitCoins each have a value and they are worth a lot! The current price for one BitCoin is more than $63,000! BitCoins are one name for a cryptocurrency. One of the main values they are striving for is they are nearly impossible to counterfeit. The way that companies attempt to make that true is to encrypt their transactions. Here is a thought experiment about how we create and track the value of something in a ledger with a cryptocurrency that is unlike any dollar bill you have ever carried.
Imagine you bought a car with three other people and agreed to split the costs according to how much each of you used it.
The biggest problem, even if you trusted everyone is who would keep the ledger! Since all of you have a financial interest, ensuring it was accurate would be really important
Along comes a new idea for the ledger. What if ALL four people would constantly get an up-to-date INDEPENDENT copy of the ledger every time it was used! Once you do this, there would be no VALUE in one of the people falsifying one of the old transactions because the other three would have their own copy.
Creating a way to track stuff each time something changes AND then sharing each change with EVERYONE involved independently is what a blockchain and cryptocurrencies are all about.
Each time a bunch of transactions of any kind occur, a bit of a contest is created to figure out what is the secret code that deciphers those encrypted transactions is. The contest reward is paid in bit coins. The contest itself is a tough math problem. It turns out the very best best kind of computers to figure out those tough math problems are video cards like we just described in our talk about Madden NFL.
So that is how BitCoins, Cryptocurrencies and great video games are all related. They all need a really great hammer to make them work. Kinda cool.
So that is how we finally get to our title Madden NFL and Bitcoins. Incidentally the subtitle today was inspired also. To that graphic card (the hammer), a really big math problem just looks like a nail whether a running back streaking for the goal line in a video game or figuring out the encryption behind a bunch of ledger transactions. Same hammer, different problem.
Choosing a song for tonight was easy and I decided on it before I even started writing. The artist is The Police and the album is “Ghost in the Machine”. In my opinion, when we have figured out how to build a machine that simulates how objects react to light in the real world, there is a Ghost in the Machine. The song is “Spirits in the Material World”. The link above is to the complete album. The songs will be familiar to many of you and you may lose 30 minutes if you just let them play. I hope you like it.
Finally, for those of you who this topic was poorly represented or confusing, this is this wonderful song for how that makes us feel when it happens. When the author doubts he made his point, that is a bad sign. I hope the music makes up for poor delivery. Thank you to M from my Scotch Club for inspiring this post.
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