This has been a big year for Bitcoin. In 2013, the digital currency went from an obscure, nerdy dream to an increasingly mainstream reality that is making early adopters shockingly wealthy. As of January, the price of a single Bitcoin (BTC) cost just $13 – and even that was a huge jump from the pennies it cost in years past. Since then, Bitcoin’s price has exploded to a high of more than $1,200 to around $740, at the time of this writing.
The jumps and plunges in Bitcoin’s price has led to a ton of chatter from those of us in the tech press – which, in turn, seems to have resulted in a bunch of Americans wondering what the heck Bitcoin actually is.
According to the newly released Google Zeitgeist 2013 report, “What is Bitcoin” was the tenth most popular search in the US under the “What is …” category. This puts Bitcoin behind “what is twerking” (No. 1), “what is gluten” (No. 5), and “what is Snapchat” (No. 9). Still, for a massively complex and niche thing like cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is holding its own. Here’s the full top 10 “what is …” list:
Bitcoin received its first major boost in Google Search in April. That’s when the price of a Bitcoin spiked to nearly $270 – it’s highest value up to that point – before crashing back down to between $100 and $200. The uptick in searches began once again in late September, when the Bitcoin exchange rate began its ascent to above $1,000 per BTC, and has remained fairly high since late November.
As you can see from the charts below, the number of “what is Bitcoin” searches follows almost exactly the rise and fall of Bitcoin’s exchange rate.
None of this is particularly surprising, but it does show that Bitcoin really has begun to penetrate the mainstream consciousness is ways never before seen for a digital currency.
If you’re one of the people still wondering what Bitcoin is, check out our quick guide to Bitcoin here.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.