LG and Sony decided to join Samsung in not making any 3D-enabled televisions in 2017.The announcement will quickly render every 3D Blu-ray, obsolete.Although at this point, the very mention of physical media feels like harkening to a previous era.And yet, over 6, 500 fans have signed a petition desperately imploring LG to revive 3D in 2018 Enjoying 3D movies in the comfort of one’s home was initially very appealing.The biggest problem is that most manufacturers did not implement it correctly and many of the films were merely 2D with a few gimmicky scenes tagged on.Ultimately, a lack of quality content destroyed any enthusiasm for this technology.Moreover, adoption is heavily reliant on simplicity and not looking like a fool when using it.Nobody wants to be the guy walking around a supermarket wearing a pair of Google Glasses or a Bluetooth cell phone headset.That’s why we shouldn’t be too surprised that families weren’t too keen on the idea of wearing silly glasses together when watching a film.

Affordability is another fundamental element to the success of any product.Glasses that cost nearly $100 a pair compounded by an expensive subscription to a cable package left most people thinking: Do I really need this in my life?Sometimes the failure to adopt a technology is attributed to timeliness.The technology was ahead of its time, some will say.3D has desperately been trying to achieve mainstream adoption around every five years since the fifties.But the future is leaning toward augmented reality and VR, so maybe this really is the end of the line for 3D in our homes?3D TV Had A Good Run At present, the TV industry is focused a new range of technology and gimmicks, such as 4K, HDR, and ubiquitous smart features.This range of technologies marks a stark departure from what the TV industry once was, and from our traditional viewing habits.How often do you watch a television show at its scheduled time or even look at the adverts, which cost millions of dollars to air?It is already nearly unthinkable not to view our favorite show when we want to, free from ads.

In fact, the TV set is no longer the focal point in living rooms and households; the smartphone is.bitcoin ensayoThese changes are enabling YouTube to take viewers away from the TV sets and onto their mobile devices.bitcoins eberweinThis fact of digital culture is a takeaway that VR and AR sponsors should note.epay bitcoin walletThere are more than a few parallels between these new and old technologies.For example, expensive hardware that can cause nausea represent two huge drawbacks that will undoubtedly prevent mainstream adoption.The fad of Curved TV sets is expected to meet a similar fate sooner rather than later.Once again, the combination of being overpriced and impractical ensures that consumers fail to see the value.For example, when you purchase a TV, the number one item on your list of requirements is picture quality.

Curved sets failed to offer any enhancements in picture quality leaving users feeling underwhelmed once the hype passed.This cycle of being wowed by incoming technology in theory and underwhelmed when it is on the market is so recursive as to be predictable.For ten months of the year, every tech news site will heavily promote rumors about the next iPhone spec.Once it is available, however, they spend the remaining two months explaining why it is just like the last update.As someone that has been around the block a time or two and seen people fooled into buying the same music album or movie 3-5 times, my advice is to adopt a wait-and-see approach.Of course, the early adopters among you probably won’t listen.Just don’t complain when the product isn’t what you expected.That’s the burden of being one of the first.As for the rest of us, we’ll step back and wait until the fruit ripens.Unlike banks, Bitcoins are unregulated.If an owner dies without passing on their password (called a private key), their Bitcoins expire with them.

They’ll remain in the ether, visible but unspendable.You could imagine them eventually falling prey to brute force attacks – someone guessing key after key until they stumble upon the correct one.But that’s where Bitcoin’s formidable security becomes a problem.Security expert Bruce Schneier once ruled out an attempt to crack a 256-bit key, of the type used by Bitcoin, by referring to the laws of physics: such is the magnitude of the problem.Even an impracticably large computer consuming all the energy outputted by the sun couldn't count the number of possible combinations in several decades.His mind-bending conclusion was that such an attack "will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space."Lost coins stay lost.How many coins are lost?We know that only 21m Bitcoins will ever exist, that they will be gradually mined over many years and that 13.7m have been unlocked so far.We also know that they can be lost through death, simple carelessness or a hardware failure.

But how many have actually been destroyed?Scour the archives of the Bitcoin forums and you’ll find references in the early days of the digital currency to sums worth pennies at the time, but which would now be small fortunes.Florida programmer Laszlo Hanyecz famously bought two pizzas in 2010 for 10,000 Bitcoins.At Bitcoin’s peak that pizza would have cost over $10m.Many of those early adopters gave as much thought to safe storage as a value of pennies warranted: not a lot.So tales of big losses are not uncommon.Welsh IT worker James Howells famously lost 7,500 Bitcoins in 2013 when he accidentally threw out an old hard disk containing his private key.It is reportedly under thousands of tonnes of landfill at a waste recycling centre in Pillgwenlly, Newport.Today those coins would be worth over a million pounds.And there are countless smaller, unreported losses.London-based developer David Kitchen mined around 50 coins in 2010, stopping when the noise of the fans on his mining computer in the living room started to annoy him.

He stashed the coins on a USB stick and thought little more of it.Until, that is, the price started to soar.Unfortunately, by then the USB drive had disappeared.“At the peak the Bitcoins would have been worth around £50k.I looked, on many occasions, but have never found it.I suspect I didn't actually lose the USB stick but just overwrote it with a Linux installer or something: the modern equivalent of recording a TV program over a VHS of your wedding,” he told the Telegraph.To put a figure on the scale of these losses, some clever analysis is needed.Thankfully, as all Bitcoin transactions are public, this can be done by anyone with technical skill and time on their hands.Zombie coins NVIDIA engineer John Ratcliff calculated in June that “zombie coins”, defined as those which have lay dormant for at least a year and a half, accounted for 30 per cent of all Bitcoins.Those coins were bought for just a few cents, so the lack of profit-taking despite a return of 4,000 per cent seems to rule out the possibility that they're simply long-term savings.

Historical price rises tended to get some of these zombie coins moving, as media coverage raised awareness, but that pattern has slowed.As Ratcliff says: “while there can be no way to know with absolute certainty the status of zombie coins, by looking at trends historically over time, it is probably safe to assume that the vast majority, totalling approximately 30 per cent of all Bitcoins mined to date, are irrevocably lost forever, most having been thrown out because they were worthless at the time or the victim of a hard drive crash.” At today’s price, and today’s total number of mined Bitcoins, that equates to $948,750,000 or £625,400,000.The biggest loss of all may have been intentional.Bitcoin was invented by a person or group going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto.The identity of Satoshi and his/her/their motive is unknown.What we do know is that Satoshi mined lots of the early coins.Detailed analysis suggests that it was around a million.That’s one 23rd of all the Bitcoins that will ever exist.

Today they’re worth $230,000,000, but at the peak price of $1,200 Satoshi was a billionaire.And that pile of coins accounts for a third of all zombie coins in existence: not a single penny has ever been moved or spent.Was that an intentional part of the process of getting Bitcoin up-and-running, or is there some cunning plan for their use in the future?We can never know, but we can only assume that after years of complete inactivity they are lost.Many people have inexplicably added to this figure by making “offerings” to Satoshi, sending their own Bitcoins – hundreds of thousands of dollars - to sit atop the stockpile.Take this address, for example, which received the first 50 Bitcoins ever mined.There are now 955 further transactions on top of it - another 15.4 Bitcoins destroyed.Burned coins So far we have several millions of Bitcoins lost - around a billion dollars.But that figures keeps creeping upwards.Start-up Counterparty intentionally "burned" 2,130 Bitcoins last year, worth over $1.7m at the time.

The company created a way to piggy-back on Bitcoin’s infrastructure to offer other financial services, which involved creating its own digital currency called XCP.Many start-ups have done similar things in the past and they often struggled to distribute their new currencies fairly.Counterparty decided to do this by swapping Bitcoins for XCP but, because there's no official mechanism to do this, they just handed XCP out to anyone willing to publicly destroy Bitcoin in return.By setting up a wallet with no known private key they were able to “burn” any coins sent to it.The wallet can be seen online, complete with every transaction, but the funds can never be retrieved.The company's Ivana Zuber said: “Our primary concern at the time was to give the Counterparty project maximum legitimacy right from the start and ensure that all new XCP coins are distributed fairly and proportionally.We also wanted to ensure that Counterparty developers do not enjoy any special privileges.“Instead of selling off a pile of pre-mined XCP and creating a centralized project with a potential point of failure, we decided to distribute XCP in a public, transparent and fair way and eliminate any speculation on ‘developers getting rich quick’."

While Counterparty's destruction at least served a purpose, there are many similar wallets which have been created to destroy Bitcoin for no logical reason at all, such as Bitcoin Eater.What does this mean for Bitcoin?The perilous nature of Bitcoin is due to its decentralised, libertarian nature: you’re free from inflation, quantitative easing or state seizure, but you’re also in charge of security and safekeeping.For individuals it's obviously bad news to lose Bitcoins, but for the rest of the crypto-currency economy it barely causes a ripple.In fact, due to a tiny drop in supply, other people's holdings should theoretically see a small increase in value.Currently Bitcoin can be divided by eight decimal places, but that can be increased when needed by a simple update to the source code, so a diminishing supply of coins makes no odds: the whole network could operate by using infinitesimally small fractions of a single Bitcoin.As coins are far more valuable now than in the early days it seems unlikely that newly-mined Bitcoin will be treated as carelessly as the early coins, so losses should reduce in the future.