bitcoin

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pages: 273 words: 72,024

Bitcoin for the Befuddled by Conrad Barski

Airbnb, AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, blockchain, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, Debian, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Isaac Newton, MITM: man-in-the-middle, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, node package manager, p-value, peer-to-peer, price discovery process, QR code, radical decentralization, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, software as a service, the payments system, Yogi Berra

Chapter 2: Bitcoin Basics Chapter 3: Storing Your Bitcoins Safely, Securely, and Conveniently Chapter 4: Buying Bitcoins Chapter 5: Lost at Sea: A Cryptographic Adventure Chapter 6: Why Bitcoin Is a Big Deal Chapter 7: The Cryptography Behind Bitcoin Chapter 8: Bitcoin Mining Chapter 8.5: The Strange World of Altcoins Chapter 9: Understanding the Different Types of Bitcoin Wallets Chapter 10: Bitcoin 2030 Appendix A: Hello Money! A Simple JavaScript Program Appendix B: Bitcoin Programming with BitcoinJ Index CONTENTS IN DETAIL PREFACE Acknowledgments Chapter 1: WHAT IS BITCOIN? Why Bitcoin Now? The Benefits of Using Bitcoin The Complexity and Confusion of Bitcoin What’s in This Book? Chapter 2: BITCOIN BASICS How Bitcoin Works in Simple Terms Bitcoin Units The Bitcoin Address The Private Key The Bitcoin Wallet Creating Your First Bitcoin Wallet with Electrum Acquiring Bitcoins in Your Wallet Spending Bitcoins with Your Wallet Bitcoin Addresses Generated by Your Bitcoin Wallet Program The Blockchain The Blockchain Lottery Blockchain Forking Transaction Confirmations, Double Spending, and Irreversibility Mining Bitcoins The Complexity of the Bitcoin System Chapter 3: STORING YOUR BITCOINS SAFELY, SECURELY, AND CONVENIENTLY Storing Your Private Key(s) Hot Storage vs.

On Mac, download homebrew, a command-line tool that will handle the entire process for you: # Get homebrew and if you haven't already ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/go/install)" brew tap phinze/homebrew-cask brew install brew-cask # Get node.js and bitcoin stuff brew cask install bitcoin brew install nodejs npm npm install bitcoin # Run bitcoin-qt in server mode ~/Applications/Bitcoin-Qt.app/Contents/MacOS/./Bitcoin-Qt -server For Linux Folks If you’re using flavors of Debian Linux, such as Ubuntu, you’ll just use the PPA feature to install the libraries: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bitcoin/bitcoin sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install nodejs npm bitcoin-qt npm install bitcoin bitcoin-qt -server With a working Bitcoin Core server, we’re now ready to start programming.

Hosted Wallets Safety, Security, and Convenience Storing Small Amounts of Bitcoins Online Hosted Wallet Services Online Personal Wallet Services Personal Hot Wallet Storing Large Amounts of Bitcoins Paper Wallets Encrypted Paper Wallets Offline Transaction Signing Fragmented Private Keys and Multi-Signature Addresses Special Mention: The Bitcoin Hardware Wallet Special Mention: The Bitcoin Brain Wallet Choosing the Storage Method That’s Right for You Chapter 4: BUYING BITCOINS Why Not Just Mine Bitcoins? Ways to Buy Bitcoins Buying Bitcoins the Easy Way Authentication Factors The Hassle of Converting Dollars (or Other Currencies) into Bitcoins Buying Bitcoins with Coinbase Buying Bitcoins the Efficient Way Buying Bitcoins from a Currency Exchange Buying Bitcoins the Fun and Futuristic Way Step 1: Finding Someone to Buy From Step 2: Deciding on a Meeting Place Step 3: Handing Over the Money and Getting Your Bitcoins Satoshi Square Still Don’t See a Buying Option That Works for You?


pages: 296 words: 86,610

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency by Ian Demartino

3D printing, AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, buy low sell high, capital controls, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forensic accounting, global village, GnuPG, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, initial coin offering, Jacob Appelbaum, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, printed gun, QR code, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, Skype, smart contracts, Steven Levy, the medium is the message, underbanked, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

CONTENTS Foreword Keywords Who’s Who SECTION I: WHAT IS BITCOIN? Chapter 1: Bitcoin 101: Blockchain Technology Chapter 2: A Practical Guide on How to Buy, Save, and Spend Bitcoins Chapter 3: Precursors, History and Creation, Satoshi’s White Paper Chapter 4: Who Runs Bitcoin? Chapter 5: What Gives Bitcoin Its Value? Chapter 6: Bitcoin: Anonymous or Pseudonymous? Chapter 7: Bitcoin and the Criminal Element Chapter 8: Mt. Gox: Bitcoin’s Defining Moment? Chapter 9: Other Bitcoin Scams and Common Tactics SECTION II: HOW TO INVEST IN BITCOIN Chapter 10: How to Buy Bitcoin with a Bank Account, Cash, or PayPal Chapter 11: Working for Bitcoin Chapter 12: Mining Chapter 13: HODL!

Bitcoin/bitcoin: Bitcoin with a capital B refers to Bitcoin the system, the network or the currency as a whole; bitcoin with a lowercase b refers to individual bitcoins, as in, “I have five bitcoins.” Bitcoin-Qt: Also called Bitcoin Core, it is the primary implementation of Bitcoin and what all other wallets and services are based on. Bitcoin XT: An alternative implementation of the Bitcoin code, compatible with the current main implementation of Bitcoin, that was pushed primarily by Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn. It is used to test new features and entered the public consciousness as a possible replacement for Bitcoin-Qt if the various factions in the block size debate could not reach a compromise. It offered 20MB-sized blocks as a primary feature.

Who’s Who Gavin Andresen: The core developer to whom Satoshi Nakamoto handed the keys to Bitcoin. Andreas Antonopoulos: Author, Bitcoin advocate, and security expert. The Bitcoin Foundation: A trade organization that once was the primary funder of core developments. Chamber of Digital Commerce: A pro-Bitcoin lobbying group. Hal Finney: Early cryptographer who helped create PGP. An early Bitcoin supporter, he received the first Bitcoin transaction. Mike Hearn: Bitcoin developer and Google employee; he created Lighthouse and is an advocate for Bitcoin XT. Olivier Janssens: An early adopter of Bitcoin who has become an angel investor in the space.


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Abed, Gabriel Abridello, Mike accelerators Accel Partners Adams, Douglas Afghan Citadel Afghanistan Africa A-Grade Investments Ahmadi, Parisa AIG Airbnb Akimbo Alamgir, Nadia Alcoholics Anonymous Aleph Alibaba Alipay Alisie, Mihai Allaire, Jeremy al-Qaeda altcoins dogecoin litecoin Realcoin Alyattes, King Alydian Amazon Amazon Cloud American Express AME Ventures Amidi, Saeed Andolfatto, David Andreessen, Marc Andreessen Horowitz Andresen, Gavin Android angel investors anonymity anonymous remailers AntMinter Antonopoulos, Andreas ANX Apache tribe APIs (application programming interfaces) Apple Argentina exchange houses in trust problem in Aristotle Armstrong, Brian ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) chips Assange, Julian assassination AstroPay AT&T Atlas ATS Australia Austrian school of economics automobile loan payments Avalon Average Is Over (Cowen) Babylonians Back, Adam Bacon, Francis Bagehot, Walter Banco Popular Banga, Ajay Bank of America Bank of England (BOE) bankruptcy banks, banking central fees of fractional reserve Glass-Steagall Act and ledger and Medici modern payment system centered around people excluded from system of shadow system of tellers in too-big-to-fail Baran, Paul Barbados Barbie, Johann Barclays Barrett, John barter Beckstrom, Rod Bel Bruno, Joe Bell, Jim Bernanke, Ben Betamax BitAngels BitCarbon bitcoin(s): addresses in artwork and songs about balance in blockchain ledger in boom in brand of carbon footprint of as commodity community around creation of; see also Nakamoto, Satoshi crime and cryptography mailing list and culture of as currency defined as deflationary currency dollar and double-spending of early adopters of encryption in evangelists of exchange rate of fraud and future of Genesis Block in imitators of, see altcoins issuance of meetups for mining, see bitcoin mining and miners merchants accepting as movement as payments protocol as property regulation of, see regulation release of reward program in security and software for symbols of as technology thefts of traceability of transaction confirmation in transaction fees and transaction malleability bug and transaction volumes of trust and value of volatility of wallets for wealth concentration and Wild West phase of work in Bitcoin 2.0 (Blockchain 2.0) bitcoin barons bitcoin.com Bitcoin Decentral Bitcoin Faucet Bitcoin Forum Bitcoin Foundation Bitcoinica Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin Market bitcoin mining and miners ASICs in cloud at data centers Dr. Evil attack scenario and energy used by 51 percent attack threat and forks in the blockchain and pools rigs for satellites for selfish bitcoinrichlist.com Bitcoin Suisse Bitcointalk.org Bitex.la Bitfinex BitFury BitGo bit-gold BitInstant BitLanders BitLicense Bitmain BitPagos BitPay BitPesa Bitreserve bitsats BitShares Bits of Coin Bitstamp Bitt BitTorrent BlackNet Bliley, Thomas blockchain forks in Blockchain Blockchain 2.0 (Bitcoin 2.0) BlockCypher blockexplorer.com blocks Bloomberg Businessweek b-money Boost Boring, Perianne Braendgaard, Pelle Brafman, Ori Braintree brand Branson, Richard Brazil Bretton Woods system Breyer, Jim Brightcove Brikman, Yevgeniy Britain Britcoin British West Indies Britto, Arthur Brown & Williamson Bry, Charles BTC China BTC-e Bush, George H.

By mid-2012, SatoshiDice: Megan Geuss, “Firm Says Online Gambling Accounts for Almost Half of All Bitcoin Transactions,” ArsTechnica, August 24, 2013, http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/08/firm-says-online-gambling-accounts-for-almost-half-of-all-bitcoin-transactions/. One of the first was Peter Vessenes: Blog post, “Bitcoin Startup Incubator, CoinLab, Launches in WA,” Bitcoin News Network, September 25, 2011, http://www.btcnn.com/2011/09/bitcoin-startup-incubator-coinlab.html. Bitcoin Magazine, founded by Mihai Alisie: According to Bitcoin Magazine “About Us” page, http://bitcoinmagazine.com/about-us/. In September 2012, the Bitcoin Foundation was founded: Jon Matonis, “Bitcoin Foundation Launches to Drive Bitcoin’s Advancement,” September 9, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/09/27/bitcoin-foundation-launches-to-drive-bitcoins-advancement/.

Luria is imagining a similar trajectory for bitcoin. He says bitcoiners should be “embracing volatility,” since it will help “create the payment network infrastructure and monetary base” that bitcoin will need in the future. Then there’s the argument that for bitcoin to fulfill its real potential—and here we’re talking about bitcoin the technology, not bitcoin the currency—the exchange rate itself doesn’t matter. The idea is that someday consumers and businesses won’t hold bitcoins for their account but will unknowingly access the bitcoin network whenever payments are made. Already, bitcoin payment processors such as BitPay and Coinbase shield merchants from exchange-rate risk by immediately converting the incoming bitcoins into dollars.


pages: 387 words: 112,868

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

At the same time that he was buying, Roger announced on the Bitcoin forums that his computer hardware company, Memory Dealers, would immediately begin accepting payment in Bitcoin. Not long after that, he turned a regular Memory Dealers’ advertisement that he paid for on Free Talk Live into an advertisement for Bitcoin and crowdsourced the copy for the ad from the Bitcoin forums. Soon enough, he had put up a gold-and-black billboard, on the side of an expressway in Silicon Valley, with an enormous Bitcoin emblem and the phrase “We Accept Bitcoin,” over the Memory Dealers web address. The crowd on the forums went wild. “God I love Bitcoin!” one user wrote.

The Chinese Wal-Mart executive, for instance, had grown up with grandparents who escaped the communist revolution with only the wealth they had stored in gold. Bitcoin seemed to him like a much more easily transportable alternative in an uncertain world. It was these people, in different places with different motivations, who had built Bitcoin and were continuing to do so, and who are the subject of this story. The creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi, disappeared back in 2011, leaving behind open source software that the users of Bitcoin could update and improve. Five years later, it was estimated that only 15 percent of the basic Bitcoin computer code was the same as what Satoshi had written. Beyond the work on the software, Bitcoin, like all money, was always only as useful and powerful as the number of people using it.

They were also downloading and running the Bitcoin software. The number of downloads would jump from around three thousand in June to over twenty thousand in July. The day after the Slashdot piece appeared, Gavin Andresen’s Bitcoin faucet gave away 5,000 Bitcoins and was running empty. As he begged for donations, he marveled at the strength of the network: Over the last two days of Bitcoin being “slashdotted” I haven’t heard of ANY problems with Bitcoin transactions getting lost, or of the network crashing due to the load, or any problem at all with the core functionality. But while the Bitcoin software itself was working well, new users quickly ran up against the limitations of the Bitcoin ecosystem.


pages: 416 words: 106,532

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Between international merchants needing 10 million bitcoin, and 5.5 million bitcoin held by the top 1,000 investors, there are only roughly 500,000 bitcoin free for people to use. A market naturally develops for these bitcoin because maybe another investor wants to buy-and-hold 5 bitcoin, or a merchant wants to send US$100,000 of bitcoin to Mexico. Since these people must buy that bitcoin from someone else, that someone else needs to be convinced to let that bitcoin go, and so a negotiation begins. On a broader scale, all these negotiations occur on exchanges around the world, and a market to value bitcoin is made. If demand continues to go up for bitcoin, then with a disinflationary supply schedule, so too will its price (or velocity).

Because bitcoin can claim the title of being the oldest cryptoasset—giving us the most data to investigate its maturation—understanding its longitudinal market behavior will give us a window into how other cryptoassets may evolve over time. BITCOIN’S EARLIEST PRICING Let’s go back to the first time a price was established for bitcoin, October 5, 2009, when it was priced at 1,309 bitcoin to the dollar, or 7/100 of a cent per bitcoin. A small website called the New Liberty Standard established the rate based on the amount of money it needed for electricity and rent to maintain the computer that mined bitcoin versus the amount of bitcoin that had been reaped from so doing. If at that time an investor had tracked down one of the few bitcoin miners in the world and offered $100 for the 130,900 bitcoin implied by that exchange rate, by now that investor would have amassed over $100 million.

Since these words are used frequently when people talk about different applications of Bitcoin or blockchain technology, the space appears impenetrable—but it’s not. All that’s required is a concerted effort to nail down the key concepts, which then become the mental scaffolding that will support understanding of the many applications of blockchain technology. Bitcoin with an uppercase B refers to the software that facilitates the transfer and custody of bitcoin the currency, which starts with a lowercase b. • Bitcoin equals software. • bitcoin equals currency. Much of this book will use Bitcoin (with a capital B) as the starting point. Bitcoin is the genesis of the blockchain movement.


pages: 309 words: 54,839

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts by David Gerard

altcoin, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, Californian Ideology, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, Dunning–Kruger effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, functional programming, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, margin call, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, operational security, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, slashdot, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

One member of the Wikimedia fundraising team noted in January 2014: “The bitcoin community should be aware that their persistent and often times aggressive, rude, and vulgar messaging towards me and my fellow coworkers is not appreciated; nor does it help their cause.”225) Overstock.com started accepting Bitcoin in early 2014 because CEO Patrick Byrne is a huge Bitcoin fan, and took in $1 million in the first month226 and another $2 million over the rest of 2014 – 0.2% of its total sales of $1.5 billion227 – though a loss of $117,000 on cryptocurrencies for 2015.228 WhollyHemp, a small manufacturer of hemp soap, started accepting Bitcoin out of interest in the technology, and founder Robert Lestak was for a time a moderator of Reddit /r/bitcoin. After the usual initial burst,229 WhollyHemp ended up making 0.2% of sales in Bitcoin, and an A/B test showed that prominent mention of Bitcoin acceptance reduced gross sales by 5.8%.230 They removed the Bitcoin option altogether in April 2015, and were harassed by Bitcoin advocates231 for the next several months.232 Lestak: “This is why you don’t hear about businesses publicly dropping Bitcoin as a payment option. Bitcoiners will make your life a living hell if you do.”

Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Economy > Marketplace > Lending > Long-term offers, 17 August 2012. (archive) [68] Mageant. “Bitcoin Killer App: High Yield Investments”. Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Bitcoin > Bitcoin Discussion, 22 July 2012. (archive) [69] Vitalik Buterin. “Ponzi schemes: The Danger of High Interest Savings Funds”. Bitcoin Magazine, 31 May 2012. (archive) [70] Adrianne Jeffries. “Suspected multi-million dollar Bitcoin pyramid scheme shuts down, investors revolt”. The Verge, 27 August 2012. [71] yochdog. “The pirate speaks”. Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Economy > Marketplace > Lending, 17 September 2012.

[79] Wikipedia: Dunning-Kruger effect. From which another name for bitcoins, “Dunning-Krugerrands.” [80] “Risk of Bitcoin Hacks and Losses Is Very Real”. Reuters, 29 August 2016. [81] Kyt Dotson. “Third Largest Bitcoin Exchange Bitomat Lost Their Wallet, Over 17,000 Bitcoins Missing”. SiliconAngle, 1 August 2011. [82] Coinabul. “10 Questions with Zhou Tong”. Bitcoin Magazine, 30 May 2012. (archive) [83] genjix. Comment on “[Emergency ANN] Bitcoinica site is taken offline for security investigation”. Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Bitcoin > Bitcoin Discussion, 25 May 2012. “root” is the administrator account for a Unix or Linux server.


pages: 233 words: 66,446

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

How do you get bitcoins? Using dollars or pounds is easy. You get paid in them. They’re in your bank account (hopefully). And you can pay for things with them via electronic banking, by cheque, credit card, or in cash. But where on earth do you get bitcoins? There are three ways. You can get paid in bitcoins. You can buy bitcoins. And last of all (the very unconventional bit), you can make bitcoins. Yes, you can, literally, create money. You earn bitcoins by doing or selling something in exchange for bitcoins – just as you would earn normal money. If I do this job for you, you pay me in bitcoins. You buy bitcoins just as you would buy and sell foreign currency – from the Bitcoin equivalent of a bureau de change, known as a Bitcoin exchange, or directly from an individual.

Accessed June 16, 2014. http://on.mash.to/1tHF8y5. ‘Bitcoin Forum.’ Bitcoin Forum –Index. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF7KI. ‘Bitcoin? Here’s What Warren Buffett Is Saying.’ CNBC. March 14, 2013. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://cnb.cx/1tHF7KJ. ‘Bitcoin Project Milestones’. Bitcoin Project Milestones. Tiki Toki. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF8y6. ‘Bitcoin Wiki.’ Bitcoin. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF7KK. ‘BitcoinTalk.’ BitcoinTalk.com. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF8y8. Branwen, Gwern. ‘Bitcoin – worse is better.’ Gwern.net. July 20, 2010. http://bit.ly/1tHF7KL.

Stock market saying It was probably the greatest trade in all of recorded history. In October 2009, a Bitcoin aficionado who went by the name of ‘Liberty Standard’ published the first bitcoin exchange rate. He arrived at the figure by dividing the cost of the electricity consumed by his computer over a 30-day period by the number of bitcoins it generated. 1,309 bitcoins to one dollar was the price.6 Liberty Standard was actually criticized for valuing bitcoins too high. Four years later, on November 29th 2013, one bitcoin was $1,242 – over 1.6 million times higher. A bitcoin was the same price as an ounce of gold. If anybody managed to buy the low (which actually came in December 2009 at 1,630 bitcoins to the dollar) and sell the high, they made over two million times their money.


pages: 87 words: 25,823

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by David Golumbia

3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Californian Ideology, Cody Wilson, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, digital rights, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, printed gun, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart contracts, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Travis Kalanick, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

It is rare, though not unheard of, for markets to exist that price their goods only in Bitcoin, and rarer still for those prices to exist in relation to nothing other than Bitcoin: that is to say, even the infamous deep web drug marketplaces like Silk Road and its various offshoots clearly set the Bitcoin prices for their goods according to their value in official world currencies, despite having prices nominally listed in Bitcoin (i.e., those prices rise and fall with changes not just in Bitcoin’s valuation, but in the price of drugs in national currencies). Exactly because Bitcoin lacks any relationship to bodies that need the currency to exist in relationship to mechanisms of international exchange, or of state-internal matters like taxes, Bitcoin on its own floats free of any anchor to ordinary valuing processes. If Bitcoin-only economies were to develop, in which labor were priced in raw relation to Bitcoin regardless of Bitcoin’s exchange value with world currencies (i.e., labor is priced at 1 BTC an hour regardless of whether 1 BTC is worth US$10 or US$1,000), this situation might change, but this presents the same chicken-and-egg problem we see throughout Bitcoin propaganda: if states were to go away and if entire economies existed in Bitcoin, then it could become money; but it is simultaneously said to be Bitcoin that will cause states to wither away and that will produce those economies.

Mulloy, Darren. 2005. American Extremism: History, Politics, and the Militia Movement. New York: Routledge. Murray, Cameron (Rumpelstatskin). 2013. “Everything I Was Afraid to Ask about Bitcoin but Did.” Naked Capitalism (November). http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/. “Myths.” Bitcoin wiki. http://en.bitcoin.it/. Nakamoto, Satoshi. 2008. “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Bitcoin.org. http://bitcoin.org/. —. 2009. “Bitcoin Open Source Implementation of P2P Currency.” P2P Foundation (February 11). http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/. Naughton, John. 2016. “Is Blockchain the Most Important IT Invention of Our Age?”

Here, my exclusive goal is to trace out this specific line of thought, both because of its urgency and because it has often been misunderstood by some in the media and is continually misrepresented by Bitcoin propagandists. The point is much less that Bitcoin is attractive to those on the right wing, than it is that Bitcoin and the blockchain themselves depend on right-wing assumptions, and help to spread those assumptions as if they could be separated from the context in which they were generated. Absent an awareness of that context, Bitcoin serves, like much right-wing rhetoric, to spread and firmly root a politics part of whose method is to obscure its material and social functions. 3. An Overview of Bitcoin MOST PEOPLE FIRST ENCOUNTER BITCOIN as a digital currency (this is shorthand; whether it is a “true” currency is a matter for debate).


pages: 108 words: 27,451

Magic Internet Money: A Book About Bitcoin by Jesse Berger

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, carbon footprint, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, diversification, diversified portfolio, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, liquidity trap, litecoin, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Satoshi Nakamoto, the medium is the message, Vitalik Buterin

If you want to learn more, I recommend exploring some of the resources below. Please note that this list is by no means exhaustive because the Bitcoin landscape is always changing, and no single person or organization has all the answers. The Bitcoin White Paper https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Books The Bitcoin Standard, by Saifedean Ammous Inventing Bitcoin, by Yan Pritzker The Little Bitcoin Book, by multiple authors Programming Bitcoin, by Jimmy Song Mastering Bitcoin, by Andreas Antonolopous Bitcoin Money, by Michael Caras (illustrated book for children) Full Node Solutions Casa Node: https://keys.casa Nodl: https://www.nodl.it myNode: https://mynodebtc.com Hardware Wallet Solutions ColdCard: https://coinkite.com Trezor: https://trezor.io Ledger: https://www.ledger.com Newsletters Marty’s Bent: https://tftc.io Bitcoin Optech: https://bitcoinops.org Podcasts Tales from the Crypt, hosted by Marty Bent What Bitcoin Did, hosted by Peter McCormack Stephan Livera Podcast, hosted by Stephan Livera References & Organizations Bitcoin Wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page Nakomoto Institute: https://nakamotoinstitute.org Bitcoin Only: https://bitcoin-only.com Bitcoin.page: https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information.html Coin Center: https://www.coincenter.org Bitcoin Resources: https://bitcoin-resources.com Join the Conversation A great deal of discussion occurs on Twitter, and it’s currently the best place to engage with members of the Bitcoin community.

The Bitcoin White Paper https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Books The Bitcoin Standard, by Saifedean Ammous Inventing Bitcoin, by Yan Pritzker The Little Bitcoin Book, by multiple authors Programming Bitcoin, by Jimmy Song Mastering Bitcoin, by Andreas Antonolopous Bitcoin Money, by Michael Caras (illustrated book for children) Full Node Solutions Casa Node: https://keys.casa Nodl: https://www.nodl.it myNode: https://mynodebtc.com Hardware Wallet Solutions ColdCard: https://coinkite.com Trezor: https://trezor.io Ledger: https://www.ledger.com Newsletters Marty’s Bent: https://tftc.io Bitcoin Optech: https://bitcoinops.org Podcasts Tales from the Crypt, hosted by Marty Bent What Bitcoin Did, hosted by Peter McCormack Stephan Livera Podcast, hosted by Stephan Livera References & Organizations Bitcoin Wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page Nakomoto Institute: https://nakamotoinstitute.org Bitcoin Only: https://bitcoin-only.com Bitcoin.page: https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information.html Coin Center: https://www.coincenter.org Bitcoin Resources: https://bitcoin-resources.com Join the Conversation A great deal of discussion occurs on Twitter, and it’s currently the best place to engage with members of the Bitcoin community.

The economic consequences of their actions will be explored further in Chapter 4. 3.6.1 Bitcoin on Point: Think Different “The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity.” Thomas Love Peacock, English Novelist Unlike fiat, Bitcoin is not a promissory note. Bitcoin is its own foundational monetary system. Unlike fiat, Bitcoin cannot have its supply diluted. Network consensus ensures that its supply issuance is predictable and its limit is fixed. Unlike fiat, Bitcoin is not restricted by geographical or legal limitations, and it does not insist on its own use. Its use is entirely voluntary. Unlike fiat, Bitcoin has no central banking or governing authority, and no economic mandate.


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Index Accenture, 140 addresses, blockchain, 19–20 Age of Cryptocurrency, The (Vigna and Casey), 23 Airbnb, 3, 5 Alford, Gary, 122 algorithms, in financial trading, 11–12 AlphaBay, 107–108 Alphabet, 64 altcoins, 138 crash in, 165, 202 value of, 146–148 Altman, Sam, 5–6, 7–8 American Kingpin (Bilton), 31 Andreessen, Marc, 11, 48 Andreessen Horowitz, 137, 177, 186–187, 225 Andresen, Gavin, 82 Antonopoulos, Andreas, 44 Apple, 7, 216 Coinbase app and, 40, 63 gift cards, money laundering with, 45 iPhone, 94–95 April Fools’ Day rally, 201 Arca, 105–106 Armstrong, Brian, 155, 206 in Beijing, 81–83 blog posts by, 109–111, 161 Coinbase culture and, 49–51 Covid-19 and, 222 on the crypto winter, 173 Dimon and, 211–213 first meeting with Fred, 13–14 in funding rounds, 33–37 on the future of Coinbase, 219–220 Gemini and, 116–117 Hirji and, 190, 192–200 IRS and, 125–126 leadership development of, 66, 68, 111–113, 117, 199–200 media coverage and, 159 origins of Coinbase and, 3–15 personal life of, 175 at Satoshi Roundtable, 80–81 social media scams using, 143 Srinivasan and, 186 super voting shares to, 112–113 targeted by bitcoin believers, 78–80 in Washington, DC, 129–131 workplace morale and, 67–68 authentication, two-factor, 143 Bain & Company, 191 Bain Capital, 204 Bakkt, 223 Bancor, 135–136 Berlin, Leslie, 99 Bezos, Jeff, 111 Big Pump, 144 Billions (TV show), 168, 224 Binance Coin, 179–182, 187, 196, 209 bitcoin academic attention to, 107 acceptance of by merchants, 29–30, 55, 64 anonymity of, 20 blocks, 19–20, 152–153 bull run in, 201–203 in China, 81–83 code oversight, 94 Covid-19 and, 221–223 crashes, 40, 160–161, 165–175 creation of, 4–5 criminal activity with, 17–18, 30–31, 58–60, 79, 107–108 in the crypto winter, 172–175 decentralization and, 8–9, 12, 104–105 Ethereum compared with, 88–93 federal efforts to prosecute, 17–18, 20 future of, 224–225 IRS on, 121–126 lifestyle and, 105–106 network problems with, 152–154 origin story of, 23–24 Pizza Day, 22 problems with using, 61–62 as property versus currency, 122–126 reputation of, 58, 69–70 resilience of, 208–210 as rival to gold, 83–84 scaling and, 88 traditional finance and, 65, 99–108 true believers in, 23, 25 user growth and network problems in, 75–84 US government ownership of, 126–127 value fluctuation in, 21–23, 47, 57–60, 61–62, 65–66, 121, 139, 146–148, 151–155 Wall Street and, 99 warring factions in, 75–84 Bitcoin Cash, 147, 173 on Coinbase, 159–160 collapse of, 202–203 Bitcoin Core, 75–76, 78, 82–83 bitcoin exchanges. See Coinbase; Mt. Gox Bitcoin Foundation, 54, 55, 56, 58–59 Bitcoin Magazine, 87 bitcoin maximalists, 203 bitcoin meetups, 30 bitcoin Sign Guy, 139 Bitconnect, 141–142 Bitfinex, 108, 114 BitInstant, 54–55, 97, 115–116 Bit License, 127 Bitmain, 171–172 Blankfein, Lloyd, 212 Blockchain, 179 “blockchain not bitcoin” faction, 104–105 Blockchain Revolution (Tapscott and Tapscott), 214, 217 blockchains, 19–21, 24 academic research on, 218–219 block size issues, 152–153 enterprise, 73 future of, 214–220 processing time backlogs in, 83 smart contracts and, 89–95 social engineering for, 21 2.0, 88 block rewards, 21 blocks, 19–20 infrastructure problems with, 75–84 size issues with, 152–153 Bloomberg, 179 Bloomberg Businessweek, 49, 112 Brave, 136 Bridges, Shaun, 59–60 Brooks, Brian, 224 Buffett, Warren, 171 Burges, Kolin, 56 Burnham, Brad, 36 Burning Man, 55 Business Insider, 195–196 Buterin, Vitalik, 48, 87–88, 90, 92, 182 cult of personality around, 202 profile of, 167–168 social media scams using, 143 Byrne, Preston, 206 Cantor Fitzgerald, 101–103 capital gains rules, 122–126 cap tables, 215 Carlson-Wee, Olaf, 24–30 on bitcoin valuation, 62 on Coinbase’s complacency, 177–178 on the crypto bubble, 148 in the crypto winter, 172 on dApps, 188 departure from Coinbase, 95–96, 157 hedge fund of, 223 on hiring, 38–39 legacy of, 220 on Mt.

For their trouble, winners gets a stash of bitcoin associated with each block. Some people call this stash the block reward. Some call it the coinbase. Bitcoin’s blockchain and reward system is clever—brilliant, even. But that doesn’t explain why bitcoin are worth anything in the first place. After all, bitcoin aren’t even coins. They amount to no more than wisps of computer code you can’t see or touch. But that doesn’t matter. Bitcoin is currency, and currency is trust. What matters is that enough people agree bitcoin are worth something and will give up something of value to get them. In this sense, bitcoin is no different than any other currency people have used over the course of history: shells, chunks of yellow metal, pieces of paper printed by a bank or government.

In San Francisco, Olaf found a growing community of other bitcoin believers, merchants who had started to accept bitcoin as payment. He was far from Holden Village now. To his delight, he discovered he could pay for meals, drinks, and other day-to-day essentials with his magic money. And whatever he couldn’t buy with bitcoin in the city of San Francisco, he could obtain online from crypto-friendly websites. Soon, Olaf decided that not only could he live on bitcoin, he would live on bitcoin. For the next three years, that’s what he did. • • • It wasn’t just in San Francisco that bitcoin was breaking through. In cities across the United States—and in places like Prague, Tokyo, and Adelaide, Australia—people were coming together for “bitcoin meetups” where they talked about a world beyond the control of governments while buying, selling, or sometimes just giving away bitcoin.


pages: 200 words: 47,378

The Internet of Money by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global reserve currency, information security, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, Marc Andreessen, Oculus Rift, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, QR code, ransomware, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, the medium is the message, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, underbanked, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

If you don’t control the bitcoin keys, it’s not your bitcoin. You’re back to a master-slave relationship. "In bitcoin, possession is ten-tenths of the law. If you control the bitcoin keys, it’s your bitcoin. If you don’t control the bitcoin keys, it’s not your bitcoin." 2.4. Bitcoin, a Fundamental Transformation of Money Bitcoin represents a fundamental transformation of money. An invention that changes the oldest technology we have in civilization. That changes it radically and disruptively by changing the fundamental architecture into one where every participant is equal. Where transaction has no state or context other than obeying the consensus rules of the network that no one controls.

Those are the kinds of people that come to Maker Faire. And so it’s a great place to start talking about bitcoin. Bitcoin is unexpected. Bitcoin is not money as we know it. Bitcoin should not have happened. Bitcoin really has no possibility of success. It can’t possibly work. It’s one of those things that does not work in theory, but it works in practice. Like Wikipedia. Like Linux. Like the internet. Weird ideas made by people with ponytails and neckbeards. Weirdos nobody really trusts. "Bitcoin is unexpected. Bitcoin is not money as we know it. Bitcoin should not have happened. Bitcoin really has no possibility of success. It can’t possibly work.

In fact, this has now become an amazing recruitment opportunity because all you have to do is wait for people to hear that bitcoin died, the CEO of Bitcoin was arrested, or bitcoin was shut down by Putin, and then, four months later, someone says, "You know there are some interesting new applications on bitcoin." And they go, “Bitcoin is still there?" “Bitcoin is still there” is the marketing slogan of this community. If we can just keep doing “bitcoin is still there,” people are surprised, they’re confounded. It doesn’t match their expectations. It’s not possible that bitcoin is still there because very serious people with very serious titles, working for very rich companies, told them that bitcoin was not going to be there.


pages: 271 words: 52,814

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy by Melanie Swan

23andMe, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, banking crisis, basic income, bioinformatics, bitcoin, blockchain, capital controls, cellular automata, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative editing, Conway's Game of Life, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital divide, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, friendly AI, Hernando de Soto, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, operational security, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, personalized medicine, post scarcity, power law, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, sharing economy, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, software as a service, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the long tail, Turing complete, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

Broader Perspective blog, March 2, 2014. http://futurememes.blogspot.fr/2014/03/illiberty-in-biohacking-personal-data.html. 108 Prisco, G. “Bitcoin Governance 2.0: Let’s Block-chain Them.” CryptoCoins News, updated October 13, 2014. https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-governance-2-0-lets-block-chain/. 109 Hofman, A. “Couple to Get Married on the Bitcoin Blockchain at Disney Bitcoin Conference.” Bitcoin Magazine, September 23, 2014. http://bitcoinmagazine.com/16771/couple-get-married-bitcoin-blockchain-disney-bitcoin-conference/. 110 Marty, B. “Couple Make History with World’s First Bitcoin Wedding.” PanAm Post, October 7, 2014. http://panampost.com/belen-marty/2014/10/07/couple-make-history-with-worlds-first-bitcoin-wedding/. 111 Ploshay, E.

The concept is similar for cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin neutrality means the ability for all persons everywhere to be able to easily adopt Bitcoin. This means that anyone can start using Bitcoin, in any and every culture, language, religion, and geography, political system, and economic regime.91 Bitcoin is just a currency; it can be used within any kind of existing political, economic, or religious system. For example, the Islamic Bank of Bitcoin is investigating ways to conduct Sharia-compliant banking with Bitcoin.92 A key point of Bitcoin neutrality is that the real target market for whom Bitcoin could be most useful is the “unbanked,” individuals who do not have access to traditional banking services for any number of reasons, estimated at 53 percent of the worldwide population.93 Even in the United States, 7.7 percent of households are forecast to be unbanked or underbanked.94 Bitcoin neutrality means access for the unbanked and underbanked, which requires Bitcoin solutions that apply in all low-tech environments, with features like SMS payment, paper wallets, and batched blockchain transactions.

The account is necessarily incomplete, prone to technical errors (though it has been reviewed for technical accuracy by experts), and, again, could likely soon be out-of-date as different projects described here fail or succeed. Or, the entire Bitcoin and blockchain technology industry as currently conceived could become outmoded or superseded by other models. The underlying sources of this work are a variety of information resources related to Bitcoin and its development. The principal sources are developer forums, Reddit subgroups, GitHub white papers, podcasts, news media, YouTube, blogs, and Twitter. Specific online resources include Bitcoin industry conference proceedings on YouTube and Slideshare, podcasts (Let’s Talk Bitcoin, Consider This!, Epicenter Bitcoin), EtherCasts (Ethereum), Bitcoin-related news outlets (CoinDesk, Bitcoin Magazine, Cryptocoins News, Coin Telegraph), and forums (Bitcoin StackExchange, Quora).


pages: 571 words: 106,255

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, delayed gratification, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Elisha Otis, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, initial coin offering, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, iterative process, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, QR code, quantum cryptography, ransomware, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, secular stagnation, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Stanford marshmallow experiment, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Walter Mischel, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game

Finally, in August 2017, a group of programmers proposed a new fork of Bitcoin under the name of “Bitcoin Cash,” which included many of the earlier advocates of increasing the block size. The fate of Bitcoin Cash is a vivid illustration of the problems with a Bitcoin fork that does not have consensus support. Because a majority chose to stay with the original chain, and the economic infrastructure of exchanges and businesses supporting Bitcoin is still largely focused on the original Bitcoin, this has kept the value of Bitcoin's coins much higher than that of Bitcoin Cash, and the price of Bitcoin Cash continued to drop until it hit a low of 5% of Bitcoin's value in November 2017.

Unsound Money and Perpetual War Limited versus Omnipotent Government The Bezzle Notes Chapter 8: Digital Money Bitcoin as Digital Cash Supply, Value, and Transactions Appendix to Chapter 8 Notes Chapter 9: What Is Bitcoin Good For? Store of Value Individual Sovereignty International and Online Settlement Global Unit of Account Notes Chapter 10: Bitcoin Questions Is Bitcoin Mining a Waste? Out of Control: Why Nobody Can Change Bitcoin Antifragility Can Bitcoin Scale? Is Bitcoin for Criminals? How to Kill Bitcoin: A Beginners' Guide Altcoins Blockchain Technology Notes Acknowledgements Bibliography Online Resources List of Figures List of Tables Index End User License Agreement List of Tables Chapter 3 Table 1 Major European Economies' Periods Under the Gold Standard Chapter 4 Table 2 Depreciation of National Currency Against the Swiss Franc During World War I Table 3 The Ten Countries with Highest Average Annual Broad Money Supply Growth, 1960–2015 Table 4 Average Annual Percent Increase in Broad Money Supply for the Ten Largest Global Currencies Chapter 7 Table 5 Conflict Deaths in the Last Five Centuries Chapter 8 Table 6 Bitcoin Supply and Growth Rate Table 7 Bitcoin Supply and Growth Rate (Projected) Table 8 Annual Transactions and Average Daily Transactions Table 9 Total Annual US Dollar Value of All Bitcoin Network Transactions Table 10 Average Daily Percentage Change and Standard Deviation in the Market Price of Currencies per USD over the Period of September 1, 2011, to September 1, 2016 List of Illustrations Chapter 3 Figure 1 Global gold stockpiles and annual stockpile growth rate.

Only with such an understanding, and only after extensive and thorough research into the practical operational aspects of owning and storing bitcoins, should anyone consider holding value in Bitcoin. While bitcoin's rise in market value may make it appear like a no‐brainer as an investment, a closer look at the myriad hacks, attacks, scams, and security failures that have cost people their bitcoins provides a sobering warning to anyone who thinks that owning bitcoins provides a guaranteed profit. Should you come out of reading this book thinking that the bitcoin currency is something worth owning, your first investment should not be in buying bitcoins, but in time spent understanding how to buy, store, and own bitcoins securely.


pages: 434 words: 77,974

Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts by Lorne Lantz, Daniel Cawrey

air gap, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, call centre, capital controls, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, currency peg, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, global reserve currency, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Kubernetes, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, margin call, MITM: man-in-the-middle, multilevel marketing, Network effects, offshore financial centre, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, Steve Wozniak, tulip mania, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket, WikiLeaks

In Figure 3-2, Address A has a balance of 100 BTC before the fork on the main Bitcoin blockchain. After the fork, two new chains split off of the main chain: Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Address A maintains a balance of 100 on both of the new blockchains, so it has 100 BTC on the Bitcoin blockchain (worth about $270,000 at the time of the fork) and 100 BCH on Bitcoin Cash (worth about $24,000). The previous Bitcoin chain (BTC) still exists as it did prior to the forking code being presented. Once the Bitcoin Cash nodes start accepting > 1 MB (megabyte) blocks, the Bitcoin Cash chain forks itself away from Bitcoin, creating the new chain. Miners Miners are the ones who contribute hash power to keep the network running.

Bitcoin Cash’s 8 MB block size, which was increased to 32 MB in May 2018, was designed to accommodate more transactions and features. While it has not garnered the traction many proponents expected, despite the controversy, Bitcoin Cash remains the most successful Bitcoin software fork. A Fork of a Fork: Bitcoin SV Bitcoin Cash itself faced another scaling debate before long. In November 2018, the Bitcoin Cash network split in two, forking into separate chains called Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (SV). The argument this time was a bit different. On one side was a group called Bitcoin ABC, which stood for adjustable blocksize cap—they wanted the ability to change the block size to whatever number they wanted and implement smart contracts, a programming functionality that exists in Ethereum and other “2.0” altchains (see the next section).

By building a second-layer protocol on top of Bitcoin, Omni benefited from the large network effect Bitcoin already had. Adding custom logic Bitcoin performs logical operations—rules that maintain the blockchain, proving that the fundamental concept of achieving consensus works. Omni adds custom logical operations to the Bitcoin blockchain. After March 2014, Bitcoin added the OP_RETURN field, which enables the attachment of additional data to a bitcoin transaction. Once the OP_RETURN field was added to Bitcoin, every Omni transaction began storing a record within the OP_RETURN field of a bitcoin transaction. Figure 4-2 shows an example Tether transaction recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain.


Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies by Nik Bhatia

Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, central bank independence, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, fiat currency, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk free rate, Satoshi Nakamoto, slashdot, smart contracts, time value of money, tulip mania, universal basic income

Bitcoin is also a protocol, but to send and receive value instead of data. Blockchain and Bitcoin Mining What makes Bitcoin tantamount to gold, human civilization’s most proven monetary asset? The answer lies in the rules of the Bitcoin protocol. The Bitcoin blockchain most fundamentally describes a record of transactions simultaneously kept by all peers in the network. In order to properly define blocks and chains, let’s first dive a little deeper into the word peer. In Bitcoin terms, anybody can be a peer by operating a Bitcoin node, which is a computing device running the Bitcoin software. Only those that operate a Bitcoin node are using it in a wholly trustless way, meaning they are only relying on their own software to verify the settlement of BTC transactions (trustless can be thought of as the opposite of “having counterparty risk”).

Over the years, they graduated Bitcoin from a project to a legitimate global monetary network. The most crucial updates that transitioned Bitcoin to a smart contract platform occurred from 2015 to 2017. These Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) turned one-dimensional Bitcoin transactions into wildly customizable financial contracts, without changing any of Bitcoin’s fundamental rules.27 In 2016, a paper from software engineers Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja called “The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments” built upon all the smart contract innovation happening on the Bitcoin software. The paper was a proposal for a new type of Bitcoin smart contract (HTLCs) that enabled instantly settling payments without having to wait for the next block to be mined.

The CME would add practically every commodity imaginable to its range of futures products over the years, from live cattle futures in 1964, to silver futures in 1969, to Bitcoin futures in 2017. In 2016, when the CME announced plans to publish Bitcoin price data in preparation for a launch of Bitcoin futures the following year, the weight of Chicago as the worldwide authority on commodities was thrown behind Bitcoin and significantly added to its legitimacy. CME Bitcoin futures help financial market participants translate between BTC and USD, which will directly contribute to Bitcoin’s adoption. Businesses can engage in BTC-denominated activity knowing that they can actively manage away unwanted exchange rate risk. Additionally, Bitcoin futures offer a second-layer BTC to participants that operate only within the dollar pyramid and simply want exposure to changes in the price of BTC, not possession of Bitcoin private keys.


pages: 304 words: 91,566

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

“Exactly,” Voorhees responded, “and bitcoin has all of those properties too—” “But Bitcoin is better at being gold than gold,” Charlie interrupted. “Correct. Bitcoin is not just scarce like gold, but its supply is also fixed,” Voorhees said. “By the design laid out in Satoshi Nakamoto’s original white paper, there will never be more than twenty-one million bitcoins created, whereas the supply of gold increases as new deposits are discovered. And bitcoin is more divisible than gold. Each bitcoin can be subdivided into one hundred million pieces, and you can own as little as .00000001 bitcoin. And you can send it to someone instantly, like sending an email.

Cameron and Tyler also knew that government regulation would come; and unlike many in the room, they believed that it was important to embrace and help shape that eventuality. Because over the past year, through their experience of buying bitcoin, pitching Bitcoin, and investing in one of the rising stars of Bitcoin, they had come to the following realization: the biggest danger the Bitcoin community faced was itself. Mt. Gox, failing again and again, caused tremendous instability in the market. Silk Road stained everything it touched. The radical philosophers, who were important in Bitcoin’s beginnings, were now so at odds with the campaign to bring Bitcoin mainstream. All of it was the Bitcoin community getting in its own way. Not because of some external threat or fight, which would arrive soon enough.

Tyler and Cameron continue to be Bitcoin’s biggest advocates. They believe that though Bitcoin has come a long way since its infancy, there is still a long way to go. If, as they believe, Bitcoin is truly gold 2.0, it is still radically undervalued. Gold is a seven-trillion-dollar market; Bitcoin, currently, is valued at only a fraction of that amount. Whatever happens next, there is no doubt that the Bitcoin story is far from over. Moreover, the technology behind Bitcoin has only barely begun to infiltrate the financial, technological, and online worlds. The technology that makes Bitcoin work—the blockchain and crypto private keys—has the potential to decentralize not just money but also data in a way that could “give the internet back to the people”—freeing user information from the siloed monopolies of Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.


pages: 494 words: 121,217

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, augmented reality, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, Cody Wilson, commoditize, computerized markets, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, forensic accounting, Global Witness, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, index card, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, market design, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, ransomware, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, Social Justice Warrior, the market place, web application, WikiLeaks

After all, just months after the company’s founding, the start-up had caused a brief, very public blowup in the Bitcoin community with a technique capable of identifying Bitcoin users’ IP addresses—exactly as their secret technique would years later. Gronager and Møller had created a collection of their own Bitcoin node servers, capitalizing on the way Bitcoin users broadcast their IP addresses in transaction messages, with the purpose of creating a global map of Bitcoin users’ geolocations. Could that technique somehow also have been updated and adapted to target—and locate—the Bitcoin wallets of very specific users? Even when the transactions were sent from a computer running on Tor’s anonymity network?

In 2010, while still in the process of applying to join IRS-CI, he’d come across a post on one of those sites describing something called Bitcoin. Bitcoin was a new digital currency, and it used a clever system to track who owned which coins: The Bitcoin network stored thousands of copies of a distributed accounting ledger on computers around the world—a ledger known as the blockchain. Many of Bitcoin’s advocates seemed to believe that because no bank or government was necessary for Bitcoin’s operation, no institution could control its payments or identify its users. Transactions flowed from one address to another, with none of the names or other personal details that a bank or payment service like PayPal might collect.

* * * · · · Gronager began obsessively attending Bitcoin conferences from New York to London to Prague. He fiddled with every Bitcoin service he could find to understand how it worked, a doppelgänger of Sarah Meiklejohn’s hyperactive Bitcoin user carrying out test transactions, but driven entirely by a tinkerer’s curiosity. Soon he’d designed his own Bitcoin wallets for the iPhone and as a browser plug-in, coming up with a clever way of splitting the blockchain between a phone or PC and a server to optimize its performance. He began talking with a like-minded Bitcoin technologist from the United States he’d met at those conferences, Jesse Powell, about creating their own Bitcoin exchange—what would eventually become Kraken.


Mastering Blockchain, Second Edition by Imran Bashir

3D printing, altcoin, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, cloud computing, connected car, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Debian, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, full stack developer, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, information security, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, litecoin, loose coupling, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, Network effects, new economy, node package manager, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, prediction markets, QR code, RAND corporation, Real Time Gross Settlement, reversible computing, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, single page application, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, web application, x509 certificate

PacktPub.com Contributors About the author About the reviewer Packt is searching for authors like you Preface Who this book is for What this book covers To get the most out of this book Download the example code files Download the color images Conventions used Get in touch Reviews Blockchain 101 The growth of blockchain technology Distributed systems The history of blockchain and Bitcoin Electronic cash Blockchain Blockchain defined Peer-to-peer Distributed ledger Cryptographically-secure Append-only Updateable via consensus Generic elements of a blockchain How blockchain works How blockchain accumulates blocks Benefits and limitations of blockchain Tiers of blockchain technology Features of a blockchain Types of blockchain Distributed ledgers Distributed Ledger Technology Public blockchains Private blockchains Semiprivate blockchains Sidechains Permissioned ledger Shared ledger Fully private and proprietary blockchains Tokenized blockchains Tokenless blockchains Consensus Consensus mechanism Types of consensus mechanisms Consensus in blockchain CAP theorem and blockchain Summary Decentralization Decentralization using blockchain Methods of decentralization Disintermediation Contest-driven decentralization Routes to decentralization How to decentralize The decentralization framework example Blockchain and full ecosystem decentralization Storage Communication Computing power and decentralization Smart contracts Decentralized Organizations Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Decentralized Autonomous Corporations Decentralized Autonomous Societies Decentralized Applications (DApps) Requirements of a Decentralized Application Operations of a DApp DApp examples KYC-Chain OpenBazaar Lazooz Platforms for decentralization Ethereum MaidSafe Lisk Summary Symmetric Cryptography Working with the OpenSSL command line Introduction Mathematics Set Group Field A finite field Order An abelian group Prime fields Ring A cyclic group Modular arithmetic Cryptography Confidentiality Integrity Authentication Entity authentication Data origin authentication Non-repudiation Accountability Cryptographic primitives Symmetric cryptography Stream ciphers Block ciphers Block encryption mode Electronic Code Book Cipher Block Chaining Counter mode Keystream generation mode Message authentication mode Cryptographic hash mode Data Encryption Standard Advanced Encryption Standard How AES works Summary Public Key Cryptography Asymmetric cryptography Integer factorization Discrete logarithm Elliptic curves Public and private keys RSA Encryption and decryption using RSA Elliptic Curve Cryptography Mathematics behind ECC Point addition Point doubling Discrete logarithm problem in ECC RSA using OpenSSL RSA public and private key pair Private key Public key Exploring the public key Encryption and decryption Encryption Decryption ECC using OpenSSL ECC private and public key pair Private key Private key generation Hash functions Compression of arbitrary messages into fixed-length digest Easy to compute Preimage resistance Second preimage resistance Collision resistance Message Digest Secure Hash Algorithms Design of Secure Hash Algorithms Design of SHA-256 Design of SHA-3 (Keccak) OpenSSL example of hash functions Message Authentication Codes MACs using block ciphers Hash-based MACs Merkle trees Patricia trees Distributed Hash Tables Digital signatures RSA digital signature algorithm Sign then encrypt Encrypt then sign Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm How to generate a digital signature using OpenSSL ECDSA using OpenSSL Homomorphic encryption Signcryption Zero-Knowledge Proofs Blind signatures Encoding schemes Financial markets and trading Trading Exchanges Orders and order properties Order management and routing systems Components of a trade The underlying instrument General attributes Economics Sales Counterparty Trade life cycle Order anticipators Market manipulation Summary Introducing Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin definition Bitcoin – a bird's-eye view Sending a payment to someone Digital keys and addresses Private keys in Bitcoin Public keys in Bitcoin Addresses in Bitcoin Base58Check encoding Vanity addresses Multisignature addresses Transactions The transaction life cycle Transaction fee Transaction pools The transaction data structure Metadata Inputs Outputs Verification The script language Commonly used opcodes Types of transactions Coinbase transactions Contracts Transaction verification Transaction malleability Blockchain The structure of a block The structure of a block header The genesis block Mining Tasks of the miners Mining rewards Proof of Work (PoW) The mining algorithm The hash rate Mining systems CPU GPU FPGA ASICs Mining pools Summary Bitcoin Network and Payments The Bitcoin network Wallets Non-deterministic wallets Deterministic wallets Hierarchical Deterministic wallets Brain wallets Paper wallets Hardware wallets Online wallets Mobile wallets Bitcoin payments Innovation in Bitcoin Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) Advanced protocols Segregated Witness (SegWit) Bitcoin Cash Bitcoin Unlimited Bitcoin Gold Bitcoin investment and buying and selling bitcoins Summary Bitcoin Clients and APIs Bitcoin installation Types of Bitcoin Core clients Bitcoind Bitcoin-cli Bitcoin-qt Setting up a Bitcoin node Setting up the source code Setting up bitcoin.conf Starting up a node in testnet Starting up a node in regtest Experimenting with Bitcoin-cli Bitcoin programming and the command-line interface Summary Alternative Coins Theoretical foundations Alternatives to Proof of Work Proof of Storage Proof of Stake (PoS) Various stake types Proof of coinage Proof of Deposit (PoD) Proof of Burn Proof of Activity (PoA) Nonoutsourceable puzzles Difficulty adjustment and retargeting algorithms Kimoto Gravity Well Dark Gravity Wave DigiShield MIDAS Bitcoin limitations Privacy and anonymity Mixing protocols Third-party mixing protocols Inherent anonymity Extended protocols on top of Bitcoin Colored coins Counterparty Development of altcoins Consensus algorithms Hashing algorithms Difficulty adjustment algorithms Inter-block time Block rewards Reward halving rate Block size and transaction size Interest rate Coinage Total supply of coins Namecoin Trading Namecoins Obtaining Namecoins Generating Namecoin records Litecoin Primecoin Trading Primecoin Mining guide Zcash Trading Zcash Mining guide Address generation GPU mining Downloading and compiling nheqminer Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) ERC20 tokens Summary Smart Contracts History Definition Ricardian contracts Smart contract templates Oracles Smart Oracles Deploying smart contracts on a blockchain The DAO Summary Ethereum 101 Introduction The yellow paper Useful mathematical symbols Ethereum blockchain Ethereum – bird's eye view The Ethereum network Mainnet Testnet Private net Components of the Ethereum ecosystem Keys and addresses Accounts Types of accounts Transactions and messages Contract creation transaction Message call transaction Messages Calls Transaction validation and execution The transaction substate State storage in the Ethereum blockchain The world state The account state Transaction receipts Ether cryptocurrency / tokens (ETC and ETH) The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) Execution environment Machine state The iterator function Smart contracts Native contracts Summary Further Ethereum Programming languages Runtime bytecode Opcodes and their meaning Arithmetic operations Logical operations Cryptographic operations Environmental information Block information Stack, memory, storage, and flow operations Push operations Duplication operations Exchange operations Logging operations System operations Blocks and blockchain The genesis block The block validation mechanism Block finalization Block difficulty Gas Fee schedule Forks in the blockchain Nodes and miners The consensus mechanism Ethash CPU mining GPU mining Benchmarking Mining rigs Mining pools Wallets and client software Geth Eth Pyethapp Parity Light clients Installation Eth installation Mist browser Geth The geth console Funding the account with bitcoin Parity installation Creating accounts using the parity command line APIs, tools, and DApps Applications (DApps and DAOs) developed on Ethereum Tools Supporting protocols Whisper Swarm Scalability, security, and other challenges Trading and investment Summary Ethereum Development Environment Test networks Setting up a private net Network ID The genesis file Data directory Flags and their meaning Static nodes Starting up the private network Running Mist on private net Deploying contracts using Mist Block explorer for private net / local Ethereum block explorer Summary Development Tools and Frameworks Languages Compilers Solidity compiler (solc) Installation on Linux Installation on macOS Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) Remix Tools and libraries Node version 7 EthereumJS Ganache MetaMask Truffle Installation Contract development and deployment Writing Testing Solidity language Types Value types Boolean Integers Address Literals Integer literals String literals Hexadecimal literals Enums Function types Internal functions External functions Reference types Arrays Structs Data location Mappings Global variables Control structures Events  Inheritance Libraries Functions Layout of a Solidity source code file Version pragma Import Comments Summary Introducing Web3 Web3 Contract deployment POST requests The HTML and JavaScript frontend Installing web3.js Example Creating a web3 object Checking availability by calling any web3 method Contract functions Development frameworks Truffle Initializing Truffle Interaction with the contract Another example An example project – Proof of Idea Oracles Deployment on decentralized storage using IPFS Installing IPFS Distributed ledgers Summary Hyperledger Projects under Hyperledger Fabric Sawtooth Lake Iroha Burrow Indy Explorer Cello Composer Quilt Hyperledger as a protocol The reference architecture Requirements and design goals of Hyperledger Fabric The modular approach Privacy and confidentiality Scalability Deterministic transactions Identity Auditability Interoperability Portability Rich data queries Fabric Hyperledger Fabric Membership services Blockchain services Consensus services Distributed ledger The peer to peer protocol Ledger storage Chaincode services Components of the fabric Peers Orderer nodes Clients Channels World state database Transactions Membership Service Provider (MSP) Smart contracts Crypto service provider Applications on blockchain Chaincode implementation The application model Consensus in Hyperledger Fabric The transaction life cycle in Hyperledger Fabric Sawtooth Lake PoET Transaction families Consensus in Sawtooth The development environment – Sawtooth Lake Corda Architecture State objects Transactions Consensus Flows Components Nodes The permissioning service Network map service Notary service Oracle service Transactions Vaults CorDapp The development environment – Corda Summary Alternative Blockchains Blockchains Kadena Ripple Transactions Payments related Order related Account and security-related Interledger Application layer Transport layer Interledger layer Ledger layer Stellar Rootstock Sidechain Drivechain Quorum Transaction manager Crypto Enclave QuorumChain Network manager Tezos Storj MaidSafe BigchainDB MultiChain Tendermint Tendermint Core Tendermint Socket Protocol (TMSP) Platforms and frameworks Eris Summary Blockchain – Outside of Currencies Internet of Things Physical object layer Device layer Network layer Management layer Application layer IoT blockchain experiment First node setup Raspberry Pi node setup Installing Node.js Circuit Government Border control Voting Citizen identification (ID cards) Miscellaneous Health Finance Insurance Post-trade settlement Financial crime prevention Media Summary Scalability and Other Challenges Scalability Network plane Consensus plane Storage plane View plane Block size increase Block interval reduction Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables Sharding State channels Private blockchain Proof of Stake Sidechains Subchains Tree chains (trees) Block propagation Bitcoin-NG Plasma Privacy Indistinguishability Obfuscation Homomorphic encryption Zero-Knowledge Proofs State channels Secure multiparty computation Usage of hardware to provide confidentiality CoinJoin Confidential transactions MimbleWimble Security Smart contract security Formal verification and analysis Oyente tool Summary Current Landscape and What's Next Emerging trends Application-specific blockchains (ASBCs) Enterprise-grade blockchains Private blockchains Start-ups Strong research interest Standardization Enhancements Real-world implementations Consortia Answers to technical challenges Convergence Education of blockchain technology Employment Cryptoeconomics Research in cryptography New programming languages Hardware research and development Research in formal methods and security Alternatives to blockchains Interoperability efforts Blockchain as a Service Efforts to reduce electricity consumption Other challenges Regulation Dark side Blockchain research Smart contracts Centralization issues Limitations in cryptographic functions Consensus algorithms Scalability Code obfuscation Notable projects Zcash on Ethereum CollCo Cello Qtum Bitcoin-NG Solidus Hawk Town-Crier SETLCoin TEEChan Falcon Bletchley Casper Miscellaneous tools Solidity extension for Microsoft Visual Studio MetaMask Stratis Embark DAPPLE Meteor uPort INFURA Convergence with other industries Future Summary Another Book You May Enjoy Leave a review – let other readers know what you think Preface This book has one goal, to introduce theoretical and practical aspects of the blockchain technology.

Chapter 5, Introducing Bitcoin, covers Bitcoin, the first and largest blockchain. It introduces technical concepts related to bitcoin cryptocurrency in detail. Chapter 6, Bitcoin Network and Payments, covers Bitcoin network, relevant protocols and various Bitcoin wallets. Moreover, advanced protocols, Bitcoin trading and payments is also introduced. Chapter 7, Bitcoin Clients and APIs, introduces various Bitcoin clients and programming APIs that can be used to build Bitcoin applications. Chapter 8, Alternative Coins, introduces alternative cryptocurrencies that were introduced after the invention of Bitcoin. It also presents examples of different altcoins, their properties, and how they have been developed and implemented.

The following commands can be used to start up a node in the regtest mode: $ bitcoind -regtest -daemon Bitcoin server starting Blocks can be generated using the following command: $ bitcoin-cli -regtest generate 200 Relevant log messages can be viewed in the .bitcoin/regtest directory on a Linux system under debug.log: Messages in Bitcoin debug log After block generation, the balance can be viewed as follows: $ bitcoin-cli -regtest getbalance 8750.00000000 The node can be stopped using this: $ bitcoin-cli -regtest stop Bitcoin server stopping Experimenting with Bitcoin-cli Bitcoin-cli is the command-line interface available with the Bitcoin Core client and can be used to perform various functions using the RPC interface provided by the Bitcoin Core client: A sample run of bitcoin-cli getinfo; the same format can be used to invoke other commands A list of all commands can be shown via the command shown in the following screenshot: Testnet bitcoin-cli' this is just the first few lines of the output, actual output has many commands The preceding screenshot shows a list of various command-line options available in Bitcoin-cli, the Bitcoin command-line interface.


pages: 52 words: 13,257

Bitcoin Internals: A Technical Guide to Bitcoin by Chris Clark

bitcoin, fiat currency, information security, peer-to-peer, Satoshi Nakamoto, transaction costs, Turing complete

Bitcoin definitely has the first-mover advantage, but if a competitor manages to become noticeably superior, there could be an exodus from Bitcoin. Commentators have criticized Bitcoin in various ways, most notably on its inability to scale to larger transaction volumes. However, Bitcoin developers are actively improving the system and these criticisms could be addressed before competitors get off the ground. How safe is it to hold bitcoins? The value of a bitcoin has been quite volatile. The first purchase made in bitcoins was for two pizzas at a price of 10,000 BTC (BTC is the currency code for bitcoins). At bitcoin’s current price level, those pizzas would have cost about a million dollars.

Mining, the means by which bitcoins are initially put into circulation, provides another way of obtaining bitcoins. When mining, you get paid bitcoins to run a computer that processes transactions for the bitcoin network. Mining will be discussed more in Chapter 9. * * * Figure 2.2: The "Receive coins" tab of the Bitcoin-Qt client where you can manage your addresses. * * * 2.3 Sending Payments Once you have bitcoins in your wallet, you will be able to see the balance in your wallet on the Overview tab of the Bitcoin client. You can then use the Bitcoin client to send funds to any other Bitcoin user.

Bitcoin Stack Exchange, March 7, 2013. http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8439/why-was-21-million-picked-as-the-number-of-bitcoins-to-be-created [22] "Technical background of Bitcoin addresses," Bitcoin Wiki, March 14, 2013. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Technical_background_of_Bitcoin_addresses [23] "Why are Bitcoin addresses hashes of public keys?" Bitcoin Stack Exchange, May 8, 2012. http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3600/why-are-bitcoin-addresses-hashes-of-public-keys [24] Raulo, "Optimal pool abuse strategy," February 4, 2011. http://bitcoin.atspace.com/poolcheating.pdf Notes 1Monetary inflation is a sustained increase in the supply of money, which typically results in price inflation. It is a serious risk factor for fiat currencies because governments often produce money excessively, causing perpetual price inflation. 2The creator of Bitcoin defines a bitcoin as a "chain of digital signatures" in the public ledger known as the block chain.[1] 3The Bitcoin source code can be found at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin 4According to the Bitcoin Wiki, the second biggest bitcoin based company is the underground drug website known as the Silk Road.[3] The sales figures were estimated by Carnegie Mellon computer security professor Nicolas Christin.[4] Six of the other businesses in the top 20 largest are gambling related.[3] 5The chart is from bitcoincharts.com 6See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tor 7These are foreign exchange fees, not Bitcoin transaction fees (which are much smaller). 8There is a 1 in 4.29 billion chance that a mistyped address passes the checksum test.


pages: 349 words: 102,827

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum by Camila Russo

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, altcoin, always be closing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asian financial crisis, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Cody Wilson, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, East Village, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hacker house, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, mobile money, new economy, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Turing complete, Two Sigma, Uber for X, Vitalik Buterin

That’s when Vitalik invited him to join the rest of the team in Miami. It was the week before the North American Bitcoin Conference in late January 2014. Aside from his brief meeting with London’s Bitcoin squatters and his recent foray writing code for Ethereum, Gavin hadn’t had any contact with the crypto community. He didn’t own any Bitcoin, a fact he was slightly ashamed of as he greeted the men (and maybe one or two women) at the Miami house. He assumed they all knew each other from Bitcoin parties and Bitcoin startups and had all become Bitcoin rich. Bitcoin was running on its biggest high to date, surging from around $100 at the beginning of 2013 to over $1,000 in November.

He was also focused on research to reduce what he saw as another kind of waste: the amount of energy spent in keeping proof-of-work blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum secure. There have been different estimates to quantify exactly how much energy the Bitcoin network consumes, but one often-cited report, a 2018 paper by PwC senior consultant Alex de Vries, compared Bitcoin’s energy consumption to that of Austria and Ireland. It’s also been debated how clean that energy is. China, which gets about 60 percent of its energy from coal, accounts for about half of the power used to mine Bitcoin, according to a 2017 University of Cambridge report. Bitcoin company Coinshares disputed that with a study that showed most Chinese Bitcoin mines were in Sichuan and use hydropower.

Timothy May wrote in the manifesto: Timothy May, “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” November 22, 1992, https://activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html. 3. “ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work”: Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin P2P E-cash Paper,” Cryptography Mailing List, October 31, 2008, https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/1/#selection-75.18-83.27.18. 4. Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in the paper: Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” 2008, https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 5. “Bitcoin offers a way to fix this”: Vitalik Buterin, reply to “Bitcoin Weekly Looking for Writers,” BitcoinTalk, March 25, 2011, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4916.msg72174#msg72174. 3: The Magazine 1.


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

That’s what happened to bitcoin. The structure of the ledger is also important for keeping Bitcoin secure. Nakamoto conceived of his as an ever-growing, unbroken chain of blocks, each representing a batch of transactions strung together and validated within a ten-minute bitcoin reward period. Hence the word that’s now on every CIO’s lips: “blockchain.” (Notably, the term “blockchain” never appeared in the original Bitcoin white paper—a good argument for why Bitcoin should have no exclusive claim to the term.) Within each block period, every miner that’s engaged in the proof-of-work race for the next bitcoin reward is simultaneously gathering new incoming transactions and arranging them into their own new block.

First Edition: February 2018 * Throughout this book you will see a distinction between “bitcoin” written with a lowercase “b” and “Bitcoin” with an uppercase “B.” The former refers to bitcoin’s status as a currency, the latter is a reference to the overarching system and protocol that underpins that currency and other uses for the Bitcoin blockchain ledger. * Addressing an inconsistency in popular parlance, we generally employ three distinct usages of the word “blockchain”: “The blockchain,” which refers to Bitcoin’s original distributed ledger; “a blockchain”—or, pluralized, “blockchains”—to cover a variety of more recent distributed ledgers that share Bitcoin’s chain-of-blocks structure; and “blockchain technology,” referring to the overall field.

Among other considerations, a successful attack would significantly undermine the value of all the bitcoins the attacking miner owns. Either way, no one has managed to attack Bitcoin’s ledger in nine years. That unbroken record continues to reinforce belief in Bitcoin’s cost-and-incentive security system. If we view the bitcoin currency from this angle—and not merely as it is popularly portrayed, as a strange new digital unit of value that some geeky guys think is a good alternative to dollars, euros, or yen—we can build a conceptual framework for understanding the wider implications of Satoshi’s invention. The currency, bitcoin (lowercase “b”), is first and foremost a store of value that rewards people for securing Bitcoin (uppercase “B”), the system.


pages: 365 words: 56,751

Cryptoeconomics: Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin by Eric Voskuil, James Chiang, Amir Taaki

bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, cashless society, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, Free Software Foundation, global reserve currency, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money market fund, Network effects, peer-to-peer, price stability, reserve currency, risk free rate, seigniorage, smart contracts, social graph, time value of money, Turing test, zero day, zero-sum game

gold.org Dollar has been preferred to Gold despite having similar weight, significantly larger size, and seigniorage. The Gold-Bitcoin relation assumes no distinction in volatility and liquidity, though Gold objectively outperforms [174] Bitcoin in both areas. Given that Gold and Bitcoin are both stable monies [175] , no speculative return is assumed for either. Other Gold, Bitcoin and Dollar monetary properties are assumed to be either equivalent or not relevant to state reserve currency. Private Key Fallacy Private keys do not secure Bitcoin, they secure units of Bitcoin. Private key control applies to individual security, not system security. Whoever controls keys is the owner , and Bitcoin provides security for that owner, even if the keys are stolen.

White market trade , by definition, requires permission, and black market does not. As a simple matter of definition, Bitcoin operations cannot be both white market and permissionless. Any person operating in the white market requires permission to do so. Bitcoin is therefore inherently a black market money. Its security architecture necessarily assumes it is operating without state permission [162] . The security of Bitcoin does not extend to white market systems. Any system dependent upon the value proposition of Bitcoin must also be black market. Prisoner’s Dilemma Fallacy There is a theory that in a choice to join a ban on Bitcoin, individual states face a prisoner’s dilemma [163] .

STATISM Fedcoin Objectives As implied by Value Proposition [224] there are two aspects of Bitcoin that make it a target of state controls, both threats to tax revenue. In combating [225] Bitcoin the state may attempt to introduce a cosmetically similar money [226] , which can be referred to as Fedcoin. This could be introduced as a split or alternative coin . The objective would be to preserve the superficial aspects of Bitcoin while eliminating its value proposition. This would protect tax revenues while allowing proponents to propagandize Fedcoin as a “safer” alternative to Bitcoin. Fedcoin is not itself relevant to Bitcoin except to the extent that the act of compelling its use requires resistance [227] .


pages: 661 words: 185,701

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Halving of Mining Rewards Changes in the pool of mining power imply that the Bitcoin algorithm’s difficulty target actually adjusts in both directions—the difficulty target falls when the pool of mining power declines. A graph of the difficulty over time is available at https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-difficulty.html. The calculation that yields the Bitcoin number at the May 2020 halving is as follows: 210,000 blocks × (50 bitcoins + 25 bitcoins + 12.5 bitcoins) equals 18.375 million bitcoin. For a more detailed explanation, see “Bitcoin Halving, Explained,” Coindesk, March 24, 2020, https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-halving-explainer. The April 12, 2009, email between Satoshi Nakamoto and Mike Hearn that includes the text attributed to Nakamoto is archived here: “Satoshi Reply to Mike Hearn,” Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, April 12, 2009, https://nakamotostudies.org/emails/satoshi-reply-to-mike-hearn/.

Halving of Mining Rewards Moreover, the rewards for validating a block are hardwired to fall over time as more bitcoins get mined. In this process, referred to as Bitcoin halving, the number of generated rewards per block is periodically divided by two to keep the total supply of bitcoins, which will never exceed twenty-one million, from growing too fast. This process of controlling supply is also seen as essential to preserving Bitcoin’s value. Bitcoin halving happens every 210,000 blocks and reduces the reward by 50 percent each time in a geometric progression. The latest Bitcoin halving took place in May 2020, when the reward fell to 6.25 bitcoins for each block mined. The initial block reward was 50, so this means that about 18.4 million bitcoins had been mined by the time this halving took place.

There are technical constraints, however, on how finely a bitcoin can be sliced. Each bitcoin is equal to one hundred million Satoshis, making a Satoshi the smallest unit of Bitcoin currently recorded on the blockchain. One Satoshi represents 0.00000001 BTC—or Bitcoin to its eighth decimal. If the value of one bitcoin was $10,000, one Satoshi would be the equivalent of one-hundredth of a penny. A Marvel A brief review of what Bitcoin has wrought is in order here. To understand the ingenuity of its underlying blockchain technology, let us consider the problems Bitcoin was intended to solve. Two key issues related to financial market transactions are trust and verifiability.


pages: 506 words: 151,753

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze by Laura Shin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Airbnb, altcoin, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, cloud computing, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, DevOps, digital nomad, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial independence, Firefox, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, hacker house, Hacker News, holacracy, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Internet of things, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, litecoin, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, off-the-grid, performance metric, Potemkin village, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social distancing, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks

Sometimes, the term is used to refer to just miners… The blockchain is a public list of all transactions that have ever been sent, ensuring that everyone knows which bitcoins belong to whom… A miner is someone who tries to create blocks to add to the blockchain (the term also refers to a piece of software that does this). Miners are rewarded for their work by the Bitcoin protocol, which automatically assigns 50 new bitcoins to the miner who creates a valid block. This is how all bitcoins come into existence.12 He also wrote an article, for journalists, on misconceptions about Bitcoin, explaining, “Bitcoin does not have a central organization or authority… Rather than thinking of Bitcoin as a product released by a traditional corporation, it is more appropriate to think of it as a self-sustaining digital commodity, similar to gold.

Timeline 2011 Late winter Vitalik starts learning about Bitcoin, writing for Bitcoin Weekly June 1 Gawker article, “The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable,” is published Bitcoin price shoots up from less than $9 to almost $32 within a week August Vitalik becomes a writer for Bitcoin Magazine 2012 May Bitcoin Magazine publishes its inaugural issue Vitalik graduates from high school September Vitalik begins at University of Waterloo 2013 May Vitalik decides to take time off from school August Vitalik decides to extend his break from school September Vitalik spends a week in a squat with Amir Taaki in Milan September Vitalik spends four to six weeks in Israel; has revelation about “layer 2” functionalities on Bitcoin Early October Bitcoin price in low $100s Early November Bitcoin price in the low $200s November 4–8 Vitalik in Los Angeles November 8–December 10 Vitalik in San Francisco Mid-November Bitcoin price in the $400s, breaks through $800 Vitalik takes walk in the Presidio, where he has a technical breakthrough on Ethereum’s structure November 27 Vitalik sends Ethereum white paper to friends Bitcoin price crosses $1,000 for the first time December 10–11 Vitalik and Anthony Di Iorio attend the Inside Bitcoins conference December 19 Gavin Wood writes Vitalik December 25 Jeff Wilcke and Gavin start writing implementations of the Ethereum white paper 2014 January 1 Anthony’s Decentral opens in Toronto January 20–21 Ethereum group arrives in Miami January 25–26 BTC Miami conference Mid- to late February Jeff, Gavin, and Joe added as cofounders (announced on blog March 5) March 1 Zug crew moves into Spaceship March 5 Ethereum GmbH established in Switzerland Early April Gavin publishes the Ethereum yellow paper April 11–13 Bitcoin Expo in Toronto May 26 Skype call between Stephan Tual and Mathias Grønnebæk in Twickenham and Mihai Alisie, Taylor Gerring, Roxana Sureanu, and Richard Stott in Zug May 31–June 1 Vitalik and Gavin in Vienna; receive call from Stephan and Mathias June 3 Ethereum’s Game of Thrones Day July 9 Stiftung Ethereum created July 22 Crowdsale begins September 2 Crowdsale ends November 24–28 DevCon 0 at ETH Dev in Berlin 2015 Late February to early March Foundation meeting; decision to remove current board members and recruit “professional board” February–March Kelley Becker begins as COO of ETH Dev UG June 12 Anthony Di Iorio accused of holding one of the footballs “hostage” Mid-June Wayne Hennessy-Barrett, Lars Klawitter, and Vadim Levitin are brought on as board members Ming Chan is hired as executive director July 30 Ethereum launches ~August 1–2 Ming makes accusation against Vadim Week of August 9 Stephan tries to get Vitalik to change early contributor allocations August 10 First version of MyEtherWallet created August 15 Ethereum Foundation pays early contributors August 16 Stephan and Vitalik argue on Reddit about early contributor distributions August 18 MyEtherWallet domain name registered Mid- to late August Stephan fired August 22–23 First Ethereum Foundation board meeting ~September 2–7 Vitalik, Ming, and Casey stay at a cabin in Toronto September 11 Casey, Ming, Vitalik, Joe Lubin, Andrew Keys, and others meet at ConsenSys about DevCon 1 September 28 Vitalik publishes blog post about how Ethereum is close to running out of money Board directors send official resignation letter November 9–13 DevCon 1 in London Christoph Jentzsch demonstrates the Slock; announces the DAO Late November/early December Gavin fired 2016 January 24 ETH closes above $2 February 2 Ethcore publishes a blog post about how Parity is the fastest Ethereum client February 11 ETH closes above $6 for the first time March 2 The DAO is added to GitHub March 13 ETH hits a new high of $15.26; Vitalik feels comfortable about the Ethereum Foundation’s multiyear runway Mid-April Ming reams Hyperledger’s Brian Behlendorf in phone call April 25 Vitalik, Gavin, and others from the Ethereum Foundation announced as DAO curators April 26 Announcement about establishment of DAO.link April 29 Slock.it makes first proposal to the DAO Taylor Van Orden’s fiancé, Kevin, flips a coin to choose the DAO contract April 30 The DAO sale (“creation period”) launches May 13 Gavin resigns as curator May 14 Miscalculation of when DAO token price rises May 24 “Ethereum is the Forefront of Digital Currency” blog post by Coinbase cofounder May 25 Slock.it makes first DAO security proposal May 27 Emin Gün Sirer and paper coauthors call for a moratorium on the DAO May 28 DAO sale ends/DAO created June 5 Christian Reitwießner discovers the re-entrancy bug exploit, warns other devs about it June 9 Peter Vessenes publishes a blog post about the re-entrancy attack vector June 10 Christian also blogs about it June 11 Vitalik tweets he has been buying DAO tokens since the security news June 12 Stephan Tual publishes “No funds at risk” blog post June 14, 02:52 UTC Child DAO 59, which becomes the Dark DAO, emptied June 14, 11:42 UTC DAO attacker begins turning BTC into DAO tokens and ETH via ShapeShift in multiple transactions (until June 16) June 15, 4:26 UTC DAO attacker votes yes for proposal 59 June 17 DAO hits value of $250 million 03:34 UTC DAO attacker begins re-entrancy attack on the DAO 12:27 UTC Attacker stops draining funds Greg Maxwell emails Vitalik, “Don’t be a greedy idiot” That evening, developers later called the Robin Hood Group (RHG) consider attacking the DAO; Alex van de Sande’s internet goes down Highest day of ETH trading ever June 18, 10:21 UTC Someone purporting to be the DAO attacker publishes an open letter about how he or she “rightfully claimed 3,641,694 ether” Christoph publishes blog post laying out options Robin Hood Group has phone call discussing attempting a rescue June 19 Lefteris Karapetsas publishes a blog post explaining the options June 21 Copycat attacks begin; Robin Hood Group rescues 7.2 million ETH June 22 Lefteris writes another blog post walking through how the hard and soft forks would work RHG realizes there is a “suspected malicious actor” in the White Hat DAO June 23 Bitcoin Suisse posts a letter from the suspected malicious actor to Reddit June 24 Péter Szilágyi posts soft fork versions of Geth and Parity clients Denial-of-service (DoS) attack on soft fork discovered Soft fork called off Early to mid-July RHG conducts “DAO Wars” (re-entrancy attacks/rescues) on various mini Dark DAOs in order to make sure neither the DAO attacker nor the copycats can cash out Polo employee investigating identity of DAO attacker thinks he may have good leads on culprits July 7 Christoph publishes blog post laying out the remaining issues regarding a hard fork, including how to handle the Extra Balance July 9 Stephan publishes “Why the DAO robber could very well return the ETH on or after July 14” blog post July 10 GitHub page for Ethereum Classic (ETHC) created July 11 RHG whitelists the Dark DAO address in the curator multisig, hoping the DAO attacker will send the siphoned funds there July 16 Carbonvote shows 87 percent of voters in favor of a hard fork July 17 Vitalik publishes blog post explaining how the hard fork will happen July 20 Ethereum hard-forks Fat Finger accidentally sends 38,383 ETH to the DAO after the hard fork July 21 On BitcoinTalk, people post bids to buy “ETHC” Kraken trader emails Christoph asking to purchase his “ETHC” Gregory Maxwell emails Vitalik offering Bitcoin for his “ETHC” July 23 DAO attacker sends out “ETHC” from the Dark DAO to a grandchild DAO Ethereum Foundation devs start bashing Ethereum Classic in internal Skype chat July 24 Poloniex lists ETC Ethereum Foundation devs continue trashing ETC in internal Skype chat; a conversation screenshot is posted to Reddit July 25 Barry Silbert tweets that he bought ETC Genesis begins offering over-the-counter trading of ETC July 26 Bittrex and Kraken list ETC ETC:ETH hashing power ratio goes from 6:94 in the morning to 17.5:82.5 by late afternoon Eastern Daylight Time July 27 BTC-e publishes a blog saying most of its ETC was sent to Polo by its users Greg Maxwell emails Vitalik again about purchasing his ETC July 28 White Hat Group (WHG) rescues every last Wei of Fat Finger’s money from the DAO August 1 ETC price rising; ETH dropping Vitalik’s “I am working 100% on ETH” tweet August 2 ETH falls to $8.20, while ETC jumps to new high of $3.53, 43 percent of ETH’s market cap Bitfinex is hacked; crypto markets slump 14 percent August 5 White Hat Group starts flying into Neuchatel to work on returning ETC August 6 Call with Bitcoin Suisse August 7–8 The WHG decides to return money as ETH, not ETC August 8 The WHG receives its first legal threat, from Berger Singerman “Fat Protocols” thesis blog post published August 9 WHG/Bity deposit ETC to exchanges; deposit blocked on Polo, eventually allowed, then trading on Polo blocked August 10 By phone, second whale demands ETC, not ETH August 11 The WHG receives a second legal threat, demanding immediate refund of ETC, from MME August 12 WHG announces decision to distribute the funds as ETC August 16 WhalePanda publishes blog post “Ethereum: Chain of liars & thieves” August 18 Stephan publishes an apology August 26 Bity posts a revised ETC Withdraw Contract and announces it will be deployed August 30 Bity/WHG deploy the ETC Withdraw Contract August 31 Polo and Kraken deposit the WHG ETC into the Withdraw Contract September 6 The final ETC for the White Hat Withdraw Contract is deposited The presumed DAO attacker moves money from the grandchild Dark DAO on ETC to his or her main account, 0x5e8f September 15 The Extra Balance Withdraw Contract on Ethereum is funded September 19 DevCon 2 begins in Shanghai DoS attacks on Ethereum begin October Poloniex employees realize that new owners have been added Sometime this fall, Jules Kim grudgingly gives bitcoin bonus to Johnny Garcia Sometime mid- to late 2016, Jules and Mike Demopoulos allegedly first oppose and then finally acquiesce to adding two-factor authentication to Polo October 18 Tangerine Whistle hard fork October 25 Ethereum Asia Pacific Ltd. incorporated in Singapore DAO attacker begins moving ETC to ShapeShift November 10 Golem ICO November 22 Spurious Dragon hard fork December Jules and Mike purportedly oppose adding a know-your-customer program to Poloniex so the exchange can comply with US sanctions against Iran; finally acquiesce in first half of 2017 2017 January Early Poloniex employees sign contracts for options for equity in the company, though they are not approved by the board until April January 25 EF files for trademark on “Enterprise Ethereum” and “Enterprise Ethereum Alliance” January 31 Nine ICOs in January raise almost $67 million MEW hits one hundred thousand visitors in January Global weekly crypto trade volume hits about $1 billion January/February Jeff Wilcke collapses February 27 Enterprise Ethereum Alliance announced ETH price breaks $15 for the first time since the DAO attack Taylor Gerring’s contract is not renewed by the EF February 28 Eight ICOs in February raise just over $73 million MEW hits 150,000 visits in February Spring Poloniex owners begin seeking buyers March 11 ETH closes above $20 for the first time March 24 ETH closes above $50 for the first time March 31 Six ICOs in March raise $22 million MEW hits three hundred thousand visits in March Global weekly crypto trade volume reaches over $3 billion April 24 Gnosis ICO ends April 27 Ming upset about “volunteer” project manager April 30 Thirteen ICOs in April raise $85.5 million MEW hits 386,000 visits in April May 4 ETH closes just shy of $97 In Skype chat, Ming expresses wish to buy domain names associated with Enterprise Ethereum Alliance on the Ethereum domain name system May 22 ETH closes above $174 Consensus 2017 conference begins May 23 SEC “crypto czar” Valerie Szczepanik makes her first comments on initial coin offerings May 25 Token Summit May 26–27 Ethereum Foundation delays payment to Ethereum DEV UG May 30 ETH twenty-four-hour volume exceeds that of BTC for the first time ETH price closes just shy of $232 May 31 Basic Attention Token raises nearly $36 million in twenty-four seconds from 210 buyers Twenty-two ICOs in May raise $229 million MEW hits one million visits in May June Security issues—scams, phishing attempts, hacks—pick up Poloniex sometimes sees trading volume of $5 billion a week June 10 ETH price closes just under $338 June 12 Bancor raises $153 million ETH price closes above $401 June 14 Kelley, Ming, and Patrick Storchenegger meet; Kelley quits Mid-June to mid-July Other ETH Dev office staff—CFO Frithjof Weinert and office manager Christian Vömel—also leave June 20 Status ICO June 25 4chan post claims Vitalik is dead ETH price falls, closes above $303 June 26 EOS launches its yearlong ICO June 30 Thirty-one ICOs in June raise nearly $619 million MEW hits 2.7 million visits in June July 1–13 Tezos ICO raises $232 million July 11 ETH falls to close below $198 July 13–19 Vitalik expresses to Hudson Jameson he would like to remove Ming July 16 ETH price closes above $157 July 18 CoinDash hack July 19 First Parity multisig hack July 25 SEC DAO report Thirty-five ICOs in July raise more than $555 million MEW sees 2.6 million visits in July Early August Ethereum transaction count begins to consistently exceed that of Bitcoin August 10 Anthony Di Iorio sends legal letter to Vitalik, Ming, and Herbert Sterchi Gavin tweets to Vitalik that he could have never built Ethereum without Vitalik August 31 Forty-one ICOs in August raise nearly $438 million MEW hits 3.1 million visits in August September Weekly trading volume peaks on Polo drop to $4 billion, down from $5 billion September 11 Trader from Fidelity and senior vice president from Santander hired at Polo September 30 Sixty-two ICOs in September raise almost $533 million MEW hits 3.5 million visits in September October 27 Polkadot raises over $140 million in ICO October 27–November 1 Account presumed to be controlled by devops199 appears to conduct penetration testing, as if looking for contract vulnerabilities October 31 Eighty ICOs in October raise over $3 billion MEW sees 3.5 million visits in October November 1–4 DevCon 3 in Cancun, Mexico November 4 ConsenSys “Ming must go” email chain begins November 5 Polychain portfolio company San Pedro ceremony November 6 Second Parity multisig attack; funds frozen by devops199 November 8 Bitcoin hard fork called off November 14 Vitalik fires Ming by phone November 15 My email inquiring whether Ming has been fired November 16 Ming posts in Skype channel to “disavow the rumors” November 23 CryptoKitties soft launch November 30 Eighty-four ICOs in November raise nearly $1 billion MEW sees 4.6 million visits Early December Ming, Vitalik, and Casey meet in Hong Kong December 17 Bitcoin hits new all-time high of $20,000 Late December–early January Vitalik, Aya Miyaguchi, and Vitalik’s friends have a retreat in Thailand December 31 Ninety ICOs in December raise $1.3 billion MEW hits 7.7 million visits 2018 January 1 Friends persuade Vitalik to accelerate Ming’s departure January 4 ETH breaks past $1,000 to a little over $1,045 January 7 ETH trades at $1,153 January 8 ETH hits just under $1,267 January 9 ETH nearly hits $1,321 Around now, Vitalik sells seventy thousand of the EF’s ETH January 10 ETH reaches $1,417 January 13 ETH hits an all-time high over $1,432 The New York Times publishes “Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You’re Not” January 20 Vitalik and board meet in San Francisco to finalize transition from Ming as executive director to Aya Late January Polo employees informed Circle will be acquiring Polo January 31 Seventy-nine ICOs raise $1.28 billion MEW hits ten million visits Ming publishes farewell post on Ethereum blog Aya introduced as new executive director Glossary 51% attack a type of attack on a blockchain in which an entity or multiple collaborative entities try to take over a network by obtaining more than half the mining power 2FA see two-factor authentication account (aka address) an entity that can receive, hold, and send ether; can be owned either by a person with the private keys or by a smart contract address see account alt-coins any cryptocurrency that is like Bitcoin with just a few parameters tweaked; also used pejoratively to refer to any coin that is not Bitcoin, aka “shitcoin,” often by Bitcoin maximalists asset anything that produces economic value Bitcoin (uppercase) the first blockchain; the peer-to-peer electronic cash network that runs the software enabling the first cryptocurrency, bitcoin (lowercase), to be transferred without an intermediary bitcoin (lowercase) the first cryptocurrency, the digital asset native to the Bitcoin network, with a supply of twenty-one million, giving it characteristics of digital gold Bity a crypto exchange, based in Neuchatel, Switzerland, that helped Slock.it form a Swiss legal entity so it could take payment from the DAO and helped the White Hat Group in its attempt to return the ETC from the DAO to DAO token holders block explorer a website giving data on the transactions in a blockchain blockchain a time-stamped, distributed, decentralized, historical ledger of all the transactions on a crypto network; copies of the ledger are held on a global network of computers; it acts as a golden copy of time-stamped transactions that can replace intermediaries normally tasked with executing the transactions BTC the ticker for bitcoin carbonvote a type of vote by blockchain that does not require the voter to send coins but instead records the number of coins inside the wallet from which the vote was sent; at the end, it tallies the number of coins in the wallets that sent to the yes address versus the number of coins in the wallets that sent to the no address chain split see hard fork child DAO a new instance of the DAO created from coins sent from a parent DAO client, software the piece of software, like a desktop app, that connects a user’s computer to a service; in the case of Ethereum, the software that helped individual users run or connect to the Ethereum network CME an exchange for trading futures and options coin another word for cryptocurrency or token CoinMarketCap a popular cryptocurrency data site ranking coins by their market capitalization cold storage the most secure way of storing one’s crypto, with the private keys held offline consensus (lowercase) the desired state of a blockchain in which all nodes agree on the state of the ledger and on what transactions should be included in what order Consensus (uppercase) the largest blockchain conference, held annually in New York City by crypto-focused publication CoinDesk ConsenSys the Brooklyn-based Ethereum venture production studio founded by Joe Lubin, which created Ethereum infrastructure tools and tried to foster decentralized applications on Ethereum cryptocurrency a digital asset produced by a blockchain that is highly fungible, divisible, and transportable and whose movements can be tracked, unless the chain has built-in privacy features cryptoeconomics (aka tokenomics) the game theory that gives different actors in a crypto network the incentive to offer services on it that will keep the decentralized network alive without any company in the middle hiring employees and tasking them with specific responsibilities curator, DAO the role that would determine whether or not an English-language proposal to the DAO matched the code submitted and, if the proposal were approved, check that the Ethereum address for receiving funds belonged to the contractor cypherpunk a person or ethos advocating strong encryption and privacy-preserving technologies, often to evade government detection or surveillance or to push for sociopolitical change DAO decentralized autonomous organization; an organization managed via votes on a blockchain DAO, the the decentralized venture fund built by Slock.it that aimed to have its token holders decide to which projects it would allocate its capital dapp (decentralized application) any application built on a blockchain without an intermediary, such as a company in the center hiring for all the roles to provide all the services; it instead has built-in incentives, usually involving its native coin, to entice individuals and entities to offer those services on the network Dark DAO (also see mini Dark DAOs) child DAO 59; the child DAO into which the DAO attacker siphoned 3.64 million ETH Decentral the blockchain/decentralized application community center and coworking space in Toronto founded by Anthony Di Iorio DevCon the annual Ethereum developer conference difficulty a way of keeping a cryptocurrency mining algorithm competitive for miners such that miners will find blocks at a targeted average interval, such as ten minutes on bitcoin or twelve to fifteen seconds on Ethereum DoS attack denial of service attack; a way of hobbling a company or blockchain by spamming it, or inundating it with more requests than it can handle early contributors people who worked on Ethereum before the crowdsale East Asia Pacific Ltd. a business entity Vitalik Buterin created in Switzerland to have freedom from Ming Chan; it was used to pay the researchers on his team EEA Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, the industry organization promoting use of Ethereum in companies EF Ethereum Foundation EIP Ethereum Improvement Proposal, a technical suggestion for improving things related to the Ethereum network, such as the protocol, clients, or standards for specific types of contracts ERC-20 token a token created using a standard for new tokens on Ethereum, so called because it was the twentieth issue posted on a discussion board called Ethereum Request for Comments ETC the ticker for the ether classic price ETH the ticker for the ether price ETH Dev the German business entity (UG) created by Gavin Wood in Berlin; after the crowdsale, it hired the bulk of the developers building the protocol and C++ client Ethcore (also see Parity) the start-up Gavin Wood founded when he left the Ethereum Foundation, now called Parity Ethereum Foundation (aka EF or Stiftung Ethereum) the Swiss-based nonprofit organization tasked with stewarding the development of the Ethereum protocol Ethereum GmbH The Swiss business entity first set up for Ethereum; even after the founders decided to go with a nonprofit structure, the entity held the crowdsale and then was liquidated after the network launch Etherscan a popular “block explorer” or website offering data for the Ethereum blockchain exchange a business that enables its customers to trade one asset for another, such as BTC for ETH Extra Balance the extra people paid to the DAO for DAO tokens after the price increased from 1 ETH:100 DAO in the first half of the crowdsale to 1.05 to 1.5 ETH:100 DAO in the second half fiat currency a type of money issued by a government by decree and not backed by anything such as gold fiduciary members the group of Ethereum cofounders who would also be financially responsible FUD fear, uncertainty, doubt.

Willett invented the initial coin offering: Laura Shin, “Here’s the Man Who Created ICOs and This Is the New Token He’s Backing,” Forbes, September 21, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/09/21/heres-the-man-who-created-icos-and-this-is-the-new-token-hes-backing/?sh=4a22cd0b1183. 18. Vitalik Buterin, “Bitcoin in Canada, Part I: Introducing the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada,” Bitcoin Magazine, October 11, 2013, https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/exploring-the-bitcoin-alliance-of-canada-part-i-1381547131. 19. Anthony Di Iorio (@Anthony Di I.), “Meet at Pauper’s Pub in T.O. for a beer and wings and talk all things Bitcoin,” Meetup, November 3, 2012, https://www.meetup.com/decentral_ca/events/87122762. 20. Charles Hoskinson, “Charles Hoskinson of the Bitcoin Education Project,” Let’s Talk Bitcoin, audio posted to YouTube by The LTB Network, June 9, 2013, 0:24, https://www.youtube.com/watch?


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Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Kraken thrived, went on the Bloomberg Terminal, and formed a working bitcoin “bank.” Cointerra died in the bitcoin crash of 2014. Demeester told of the even grander self-funding exploits of Bitcoin Armory, now said to be among the best bitcoin digital “wallets.” Aiming to produce a secure bitcoin wallet, in software, it launched a $100,000 funding round in 2013. The dollars poured in, and in an upside surprise, they actually raised $500,000. They spent $100,000 on the business plan and stashed $400,000 in bitcoins. The $400,000 soared to a bitcoin value of $4 million. Filling their wallet without even writing code, they provided the model for close to 1,500 blockchain companies over the subsequent five years.

By contrast, Rothbard’s monetary view has never been put in effect, but actually has an opportunity to prove its viability with bitcoin. Bitcoin with its absolutely limited supply defines the Rothbardian system. “However, there’s a reason why the world has not adopted a Rothbardian monetary system up until now. It won’t work, and bitcoin as designed will not last as a functional currency.” As Kendall drilled more deeply into bitcoin, he became increasingly alarmed at what he found. “While Satoshi was beyond brilliant in creating the blockchain as the basis for bitcoin, Satoshi had no understanding of currency as a unit of account. By limiting bitcoin’s supply to 21 million units over a 131-year period, Satoshi designed bitcoin as a deflationary currency. . . .

By limiting bitcoin’s supply to 21 million units over a 131-year period, Satoshi designed bitcoin as a deflationary currency. . . . Because of its deflationary design, bitcoin is used more as a volatile investment bet” than as a measuring stick or unit of account. As Ammous points out: “The reason Satoshi chose 100 million units per Bitcoin was that the total global money supply at the time was around $21 trillion, and he wanted the smallest unit of Bitcoin to be equivalent to one cent in case the entire world economy were to switch to using Bitcoin. . . . [If that had happened in 2009], each Satoshi would be worth one U.S. dollar cent and each Bitcoin would have been worth around $1 million.”


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Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

If more merchants accept bitcoin as a medium of payment, then people who’ve been sitting on bitcoins may start to use their store for purchases, thereby freeing up more bitcoins. If merchants begin to issue bitcoin-denominated gift cards, then more people should be exposed to cryptocurrencies and become more comfortable transacting in bitcoin. And so, hypothetically, people will have fewer reasons to hoard bitcoin. Advocates of the bitcoin protocol argue that, because bitcoins are divisible to eight decimal places—the smallest unit is called a Satoshi, worth one hundredth of a millionth of a bitcoin—the smallest denominations will buy more if demand for bitcoin increases. There’s also the possibility of tweaking the protocols to allow for greater divisibility, say, picopayments (trillionths of a bitcoin) and to remine stranded bitcoin after a period of dormancy.

Early adopters have tended to hold on to bitcoin as they hold on to gold, hoping that its value will increase in the long run, and therefore treating bitcoin as an asset rather than as a medium of exchange. According to economic theorists, low or no inflation motivates holders to hoard rather than spend their bitcoin. Still, if more trusted bitcoin exchanges facilitate consumers’ movement in and out of bitcoin, then the frequency and volume of trading could increase. If more merchants accept bitcoin as a medium of payment, then people who’ve been sitting on bitcoins may start to use their store for purchases, thereby freeing up more bitcoins.

Gox exchange or the conviction of Ross William Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road darknet market seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for trafficking illegal drugs, child pornography, and weapons using the bitcoin blockchain as a payment system. Bitcoin’s price has fluctuated drastically, and the ownership of bitcoins is still concentrated. A 2013 study showed that 937 people owned half of all bitcoin, although that is changing today.11 How do we get from porn and Ponzi schemes to prosperity? To begin, it’s not bitcoin, the still speculative asset, that should interest you, unless you’re a trader. This book is about something bigger than the asset. It’s about the power and potential of the underlying technological platform. This is not to say that bitcoin or cryptocurrencies per se are unimportant, as some people have suggested as they scramble to disassociate their projects from the scandalous ventures of the past.


pages: 269 words: 79,285

Silk Road by Eileen Ormsby

4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, disinformation, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, fiat currency, Firefox, incognito mode, Julian Assange, litecoin, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, off-the-grid, operational security, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, power law, profit motive, Right to Buy, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, stealth mode startup, Ted Nelson, trade route, Turing test, web application, WikiLeaks

What I’m trying to say is, even though I got ripped off, and my life seems to really be falling apart as I am dying, something really weird happened. A tiny little gift from the universe, a token, a bitcoin to say everything will be alright. I deposited .1 bitcoin into bitcoin fog [an online bitcoin wallet], all I could really afford at this time, as I wanted to buy before SR shut down now that i’m not getting my order from Incoming, and didn’t want to suffer over christmas/be sick. I withdrew them into my wallet, and what do you know, bitcoin fog fucked up. I was given .9328btc in return for the .1btc I deposited. While I feel bad for bitcoin fog, I can’t help but try and take this as a sign that even though my time is coming to an end, things will always be alright, and there is always a tiny light at the end of the tunnel.

This is where bitcoin comes in. In a nutshell, bitcoin is a borderless digital currency that started out as a valueless computer code. Within a few years, it had a market value closing in on US$3 billion. Bitcoin exchanges (much like stock exchanges) allow users to buy and trade bitcoin online, but those who want to remain anonymous will use cash over the counter at a local bank or exchange cash for bitcoin credit person-to-person. Pages of financial tomes have been dedicated to whether bitcoin should be categorised as a currency or a commodity, how it is created and traded, and its implications for fiat currencies, all of which are well beyond the scope of this book.

Something to think about . . .’ Finney later wrote that he had been the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction when Nakamoto sent him ten bitcoins. He left his PC running and mining until he turned it off because ‘it made my computer run hot, and the fan noise bothered me’. He then went on to other things until: The next I heard of bitcoin was late 2010, when I was surprised to find that it was not only still going, bitcoins actually had monetary value. I dusted off my old wallet, and was relieved to discover that my bitcoins were still there. As the price climbed up to real money, I transferred the coins into an offline wallet, where hopefully they’ll be worth something to my heirs.


Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World by Jeffrey Tucker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, altcoin, anti-fragile, bank run, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, driverless car, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, informal economy, invisible hand, Kickstarter, litecoin, Lyft, Money creation, obamacare, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, public intellectual, QR code, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, the payments system, uber lyft

Question: Can’t anyone create an unlimited quantity of bitcoins? The number of bitcoins are strictly and severely limited by the protocol. It’s true that bitcoin is an open source protocol, meaning that anyone can copy it but, at the same time, everyone knows who copied it. So you can create bitcoin as an exact copy but it will have no value. The ledger on the canonical system is constantly monitored for its integrity. Maintaining that ledger is not the responsibility of a company. It is the responsibility of the whole community in which anyone can enter. Question: The estimated cap on bitcoin is 21 million. Is this enough bitcoin to go around?

Now, to further understand how Mises’s theory fits with bitcoin, you have to understand one other point concerning the history of the cryptocurrency. On the day of its release (January 9, 2009), the value of bitcoin was exactly zero. And so it remained for 10 months after its release. All the while, transactions were taking place, but it had no posted value above zero for this entire time. The first posted price of bitcoin appeared on October 5, 2009. On this exchange, $1 equaled 1,309.03 bitcoin (which many considered overpriced at the time). In other words, the first valuation of bitcoin was little more than one-tenth of a penny. Yes, if you had bought $100 worth of bitcoin in those days, and not sold them in some panic, you would be a half-billionaire today.

It lived as a payment system for 10 months before the currency obtained any market value, and that value was a response to the market’s experience that the payment system was working. Question: Very simply, how does bitcoin work? Answer: Bitcoin depends on a ledger system that exists on the Internet in millions of different copies that reside on any node. The ledger keeps up with property titles to bitcoin, recording public addresses and their movements through exchange using cryptography. Bitcoin has value because of this payment network called the blockchain. Everyone can see the blockchain in operation. There is perfect transparency, even if the identity of the owners are not known. New bitcoins are created through a process called mining, which really amounts to verifying transactions.


pages: 329 words: 99,504

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Ben McKenzie, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, capital controls, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, data science, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, housing crisis, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Jacob Silverman, Jane Street, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uber lyft, underbanked, vertical integration, zero-sum game

And while some games, most notably Second Life with its Linden dollars, produced thriving online economies that extended beyond the game itself, they had yet to catch on with the broader public. Bitcoin seemed like a solution, but at first no one outside the small Bit-coin network ascribed any worth to its tokens. In a story that has become memorialized in Bitcoin lore (and etched into the blockchain’s permanent record), on March 22, 2010, 10,000 Bitcoins were used to pay for two pizzas, worth forty dollars. For some, that now-absurd expenditure reflected an idyllic time: Sure, the stuff was nearly worthless, but it was open to all, as early adopters could mine Bitcoin with their home computers without racking up enormous hardware and electricity costs.

The purported “future of money” is in fact the past of money, a failed experiment and one we revisit at our collective peril. ° ° ° I have to address one last false story that Bitcoin maxis—the people with the laser eyes who aren’t Tom Brady—have been spreading. You may have heard that Bitcoin is “digital gold,” which was a popular story when people were buying it for over $60,000 per coin but less so when its price fell dramatically. What hardcore Bitcoiners mean by this is that Bitcoin’s strictly limited supply—only twenty-one million Bitcoins can ever be mined, according to the code—make it scarce, impossible to manipulate, and therefore valuable, the same way gold functioned in the economy of the nineteenth century.

But a tulip, no matter how pretty, is just a flower, and eventually the market for them crashed back down to earth. By now, more than 90 percent of the Bitcoins that can ever exist have already been mined. That makes Bitcoin’s supply almost perfectly inelastic, a fancy word meaning it can’t grow or shrink in response to changes in price. It’s basically fixed. This makes the price of Bitcoin even more susceptible to changes in demand. Let’s compare the supply and demand chart I mentioned before with Bitcoin’s: Notice anything? Look at the differences in price between the two models in response to the same change in demand. Because supply of Bitcoin is more or less fixed, a change in demand for it has severe consequences for its price.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

As of the 2014 holiday season: Jillian Kumagai, “More Than 21,000 Retailers Accept Bitcoin Payments,” Mashable, November 15, 2014, http://mashable.com/2014/11/15/bitcoin-retailers-infographic/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-link; Jon Matonis, “Top 10 Bitcoin Merchant Sites,” Forbes, May 24, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/05/24/top-10-bitcoin-merchant-sites/; Benzinga, “What Companies Accept Bitcoin?” Nasdaq, February 4, 2014, http://www.nasdaq.com/article/what-companies-accept-bitcoin-cm323438; Jonas Chokun, “Who Accepts Bitcoins?” Bitcoin Values, http://www.bitcoinvalues.net/who-accepts-bitcoins-payment-companies-stores-take-bitcoins.html. On October 31, 2008, a research paper: Benjamin Wallace, “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin,” Wired, November 23, 2011, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/.

Prominent economist Nouriel Roubini sent out a string of tweets attacking the notion that Bitcoin is a currency. As Roubini tweeted: “Apart from a base 4 criminal activities, Bitcoin is not a currency as it is not a unit of account or a means of payments or store of value.” He went on to explain his rationale in further tweets: “Bitcoin is not a unit of account as no price of goods and services is set in Bitcoin unit nor it ever will. So it isn’t a currency.” “Bitcoin isn’t a store of value as little wealth is in Bitcoin and no assets in it. Also given price volatility it is a lousy store of value.” “Bitcoin isn’t means of payment as few transactions in Bitcoin. And given its volatility all who accept it convert it right back into $/€/¥.”

On October 31, 2008, a research paper: Benjamin Wallace, “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin,” Wired, November 23, 2011, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/. It called for the creation: Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” Bitcoin, November 1, 2008, http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. Banks must be trusted: Joshua Davis, “The Crypto-Currency,” New Yorker, October 10, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_davis. The goal is for 21 million: “How Does Bitcoin Work?” Economist, April 11, 2013, http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/04/economist-explains-how-does-bitcoin-work. At that point, no more: Alice Truong, “Top 10 Bitcoin Myths Debunked,” CoinDesk, June 4, 2013, http://www.coindesk.com/top-10-bitcoin-myths-debunked/.


pages: 329 words: 95,309

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank by Chris Skinner

algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, bank run, Basel III, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, demand response, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, gamification, Google Glasses, high net worth, informal economy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, margin call, mass affluent, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Pingit, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, quantitative easing, ransomware, reserve currency, RFID, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, software as a service, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, the long tail, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Nevertheless, I have invested in Bitcoins and suggest you do too, as it is very likely that they will be a major store of value for years to come in the near term. Bitcoin’s timeline[29] 2008–2009 In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto posted a paper describing the Bitcoin protocol on the internet. In 2009, the Bitcoin network came into existence with the release of the first open source Bitcoin client and the issuance of the first Bitcoins. 2010 The prices for the first Bitcoin transactions were negotiated by individuals on the Bitcointalk forums. One notable transaction involved a 10,000 BTC pizza. On 6 August, a major vulnerability in the Bitcoin protocol was spotted. Transactions weren't properly verified before they were included in the transaction log or "block chain" which allowed for users to bypass Bitcoin's economic restrictions and create an indefinite number of Bitcoins On 15 August, the major vulnerability was exploited.

The host of CNBC's Mad Money, Jim Cramer, played himself in a courtroom scene where he testifies that he doesn’t consider Bitcoin a true currency, saying “There’s no central bank to regulate it; it’s digital and functions completely peer to peer.” In October 2012, BitPay reported having over 1,000 merchants accepting Bitcoin under its payment processing service. 2013 In February 2013, the Bitcoin-based payment processor Coinbase reported selling $1 million in Bitcoins in a single month at over $22 per Bitcoin. In March, the US government’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) established regulatory guidelines for "decentralized virtual currencies" such as Bitcoin, classifying American "Bitcoin miners" who sell their generated Bitcoins as Money Service Businesses (or MSBs), that may be subject to registration and other legal obligations.

About Donald Norman Donald is the co-Founder of the Bitcoin Consultancy. The group works on software development for core bitcoin code. Bitcoin is the world’s first decentralized digital currency. As such, it’s implications and uses are entirely unique. While bitcoin now is already a thriving 70 million dollar marketplace, in many respects it is only a wildly successful proof of concept. Imagine the internet before the web browser, Bitcoin Consultancy is building the road map and bringing the advantages of bitcoin to a scalable and enterprise level. Donald has appeared as an advocate of bitcoin in Reuters, Newsweek, WSJ(SmartMoney), The Independent, CNBC and others.


pages: 80 words: 21,077

Stake Hodler Capitalism: Blockchain and DeFi by Amr Hazem Wahba Metwaly

altcoin, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, congestion charging, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, information security, Internet of things, Network effects, non-fungible token, passive income, prediction markets, price stability, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Skype, smart contracts, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin

Yearn.finance is useful for farmers looking for a protocol that automatically selects the optimal strategy. Chapter 6: Ways to Mine Your Bitcoin on Your Own There are three ways to get Bitcoin; by purchasing on an exchange, collecting them for goods and services, and last one is by mining new ones. Bitcoin acts like cash, but it can be mined into gold. “Mining ‘is a language used for the discovery of new Bitcoins – just like discovering gold. It is the validation of Bitcoin transactions compiled into one block with a fixed size and added to the blockchain in real life. For instance, Cynthia purchases a TV from an online retailer with a Bitcoin. To make sure her Bitcoin is real, miners perform a computational operation that is specific to each blockchain to validate transactions and add new blocks of transactions.

Here are some of these challenges: Technology cost Although blockchain existence saves users money on transaction fees, the technology is not entirely free. The “proof of work” algorithm and system that Bitcoin uses to verify transactions digest huge amounts of computational power. In the physical world, the millions of computers on the Bitcoin network are almost equal to what Denmark consumes every year. Regardless of the costs of mining Bitcoin, users still increase their electricity bills to approve transactions on the blockchain. When miners include a block to the Bitcoin blockchain, they are gifted with enough Bitcoin to make their time and energy count. For blockchains that do not use cryptocurrency, miners would like to be paid or otherwise encouraged to verify transactions.

Although experts are trying to correct them and make them perfect, these important issues discourage some likely users from hopping. Blockchains where smart contracts processes can go through: Bitcoin Bitcoin is the perfect place for performing Bitcoin transactions; however, it has limited ability to process smart contracts. Side Chains This is another name for blockchains that run adjoining to Bitcoin, and they have a broader range to offer for processing contracts than that of Bitcoin. NXT NXT is a common blockchain forum that has a limited choice of templates for smart contracts. You have to use whatever resource you are given because you cannot code independently of these resources.


pages: 199 words: 64,272

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

Millions of dollars in venture capital started flowing into start-ups that were making bitcoin wallets and bitcoin exchanges and “Buy with Bitcoin” buttons for online merchants. It was anarcho-capitalism, but without the anarchy. Bitcoin, weirdly, had become sort of normal. As it became clear bitcoin was legit, and wasn’t about to get shut down or disappear, more people began exchanging dollars for bitcoin. The exchange rate between dollars and bitcoin shot up to over $500 around the time of the Senate hearing. People started building special computers optimized to mine bitcoin—to attack the problems that the bitcoin software used to award new bitcoins. Then they started filling giant warehouses full of racks of those mining computers.

Take a relatively normal year like 2016, before bitcoin’s bananas rise in 2017. That year, the exchange rate more than doubled, to $952 per bitcoin. If we lived in a world where bitcoin was really money—where we got paid in bitcoin, and got mortgages in bitcoin, and bought groceries in bitcoin—this rise in the value of bitcoin would have caused a deflation far worse than the one in the Great Depression. It would have suddenly taken twice as much work to pay off a student loan or a mortgage. It would have destroyed the economy. Or take 2018, when the value of bitcoin fell from around $13,000 per bitcoin to around $4,000. In a world where people used bitcoin as money, this would have meant prices tripled in a single year—an inflation rate far worse than anything the United States has seen since the Revolutionary War.

Andresen—the first person Satoshi handed the code to, who gave away thousands of bitcoins because he believed so much in the process—eventually got so tired of the bitcoin civil war that he left the bitcoin world altogether. (For the record, in the bitcoin civil war, Andresen believed in bigger blocks.) The Price of Bitcoin As the nerds were fighting over the future of bitcoin, the exchange rate between bitcoins and dollars rose, then it rose some more, then it got completely ridiculous. A little later, it fell but remained much higher than it had been. Even after the crash, you could exchange a single bitcoin for thousands of dollars. This was generally seen as a good thing by people who were excited about bitcoin, not least because they had already exchanged dollars for bitcoins and—their belief in the inevitable failure of the dollar notwithstanding—they were excited by the future prospect of exchanging their bitcoins for many, many, many more dollars.


pages: 247 words: 60,543

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

This brings us, of course, to Bitcoin. There is no need for an in-depth history of Bitcoin here (for that, I strongly recommend Paul Vigna and Michael Casey’s The Age of Cryptocurrency), but it is useful to highlight a few points that will be relevant to our discussion about forms of digital currency later on. Bitcoin The Bitcoin story is, by now, well known. A person or persons unknown, under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, published a white paper setting out how to create a person-to-person e-cash system without a central system operator or database (Nakamoto 2008). At the core of the Bitcoin system were three main concepts: to replace a central database with a shared ledger, to use a new consensus technique to build that ledger absent a central coordinator (this is the ‘Nakamoto consensus’ that uses ‘proof of work’ to determine which version of the ledger is correct), and to use a particular kind of mathematical puzzle to incentivize this proof of work.

For some observers (e.g. me), the invention of what we might call smart money – that is, money which has its own apps – is actually much more interesting than the peer-to-peer payment system. The value of Bitcoin, as shown in figure 3, has changed quite unpredictably in its decade of existence, which is why people have begun to talk about creating a different kind of cryptocurrency – a ‘stablecoin’ – that might be more suited to the mainstream. I do not think this is the cause of Bitcoin’s lack of adoption, however. For this, I refer back to the examples of DigiCash, Mondex and the others. Most people simply do not have the problem that Bitcoin solves (which is censorship resistance), and Bitcoin does not solve the problem they do have (which is, broadly speaking, the need for simplicity and reliability).

I imagine it must have been rather inconvenient to step over flipping great wodges of cash to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night, so it makes me wonder why he did not either deposit the money in a bank or convert it to something with less volume. Perhaps this is a mass-market use case for Bitcoin after all! A quick look at the figures coming from the Bitcoin world indicates that while the use of this technology has peaked for ‘legit’ payments, it continues to climb for ‘dodgy’ ones. As shown in figure 7, Bitcoin use by criminals grew by two-thirds in the final quarter of 2019 (Popper 2020). Figure 7. The use of Bitcoin. The use of an immutable public ledger to store criminal transactions does not seem like much of a use case to me, but, as the figures show, the underbelly are indeed using it.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

(It’s worth noting that Andresen himself had his commit access—his ability to make changes to the Bitcoin Core source code—revoked in May 2016.)12 Even as Satoshi’s presence began to fade, other members of the Bitcoin community were building an infrastructure around the cryptocurrency. New Liberty Standard established an exchange rate in October 2009 (1,309.03 bitcoins to the dollar, based on the cost of the electricity needed to mine bitcoins at the time).13 In February 2010, the Bitcoin Market became the first Bitcoin currency exchange—a place where bitcoins could be purchased with fiat currencies, or converted into more traditional forms of money.

New Jersey (Tidbit),” Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), https://www.eff.org/cases/rubin-v-new-jersey-tidbit. 20 Now available as a PDF from the Bitcoin Foundation, https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 21 Erik Franco. “Inside the Chinese Bitcoin Mine That’s Grossing $1.5M a Month,” Motherboard, February 6, 2015, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/chinas-biggest-secret-bitcoin-mine?utm_source=motherboardyoutube. 22 Quoted in Maria Bustillos, “The Bitcoin Boom,” New Yorker, April 1, 2013. 23 Joshua Davis. “The Crypto-Currency: Bitcoin and Its Mysterious Inventor.” The New Yorker, October 10, 2011. 24 Ethan Zuckerman, “The Death of Tidbit and Why It Matters,” … My Heart’s in Accra, May 28, 2015, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2015/05/28/the-death-of-tidbit-and-why-it-matters/. 25 John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, (New York: Basic Books, 2012) 26 Mark S.

As a result, while the earliest bitcoin miners could use their personal computers to validate the blockchain, today’s miners use specialized, high-end server farms. In late 2014, one of those operations comprised six sites in China that collectively produce eight petahashes of computation per second, creating 4,050 bitcoins per month. It’s an indicator of how large the bitcoin market has grown that this massive effort claimed only 3 percent of global bitcoin mining operations.21 In fact, as this book went to press, Bitcoin underwent its second halving—meaning that the number of bitcoins generated per second decreased by one-half.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

He also brought together about 40 companies over two sessions, or “tribes,” all dedicated to working with, innovating around, mining and trading Bitcoin. Joel Yarmon first introduced me to Bitcoin when he brought in Peter Vincennes and his company Coinlab to pitch us. Coinlab would become a Bitcoin-focused innovator and miner. It seemed a little out there, but I liked it and we made a small investment in the company. Then I asked Peter if I could buy $250,000 worth of Bitcoin. The price was around $6 per Bitcoin. He bought some and stored them in Mt. Gox, the largest (at that time) Bitcoin exchange. He said he would take some money and buy an ASIC, a high-speed mining chip from Butterfly Labs to get us even cheaper Bitcoin. Then two things happened that made what should have been about 40,000 Bitcoins disappear.

While I was lamenting the fact that I had lost all that Bitcoin, something happened that gave me another shot at getting involved in the Bitcoin opportunity. The US Marshall’s office confiscated the Bitcoins owned by the Silk Road, and more than 30,000 Bitcoins were put up for auction. I looked at this as an opportunity to rebuy the Bitcoins I lost. There were 31 bidders that came to the table, and the auction was a silent bid for nine blocks of approximately 4000 Bitcoins each. Most of the discussions among the bidders were about how much of a discount from market prices the large blocks of Bitcoins would sell for. The market price then was $618 per Bitcoin.

There was a decreasing number of Bitcoins made available to be mined over time (the so-called halving), so it was likely that the price of a Bitcoin would increase in value as fewer Bitcoins were mined and its usage increased. The system was set up so that only 21 million Bitcoins would ever be created, so people would not have to worry about their Bitcoin losing value due to “overprinting,” a practice that many governments have engaged in that lowers their currencies’ values and causes inflation. In fact, as Bitcoins spread, and its usage increased, it was likely that the currency would become more valuable. It felt like it was funny money for a while. But people started accepting Bitcoin instead of dollars. Legend has it that one of the key Bitcoin programmers ordered a pizza and didn’t have cash to pay the delivery guy.


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

“Some things you need to know,” undated, bitcoin.org/en/you-need-to-know. 12.My account here is deeply indebted to Chris Pacia’s tutorial, which despite the rather patronizing title is the only one of many Bitcoin explainers I’ve come across that explores this stage of the process in such detail, chrispacia.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/bitcoin-mining-explained-like-youre-five-part-1-incentives/. 13.Among the Bitcoin community, the collapse of the Mt Gox exchange is legendary. See Yessi Bello Perez, “Mt Gox: History of a Failed Bitcoin Exchange,” CoinDesk, August 4, 2015. 14.Jose Pagliery, “The Tipping Point of Bitcoin Micropayments,” CoinDesk, November 15, 2014. 15.Gulliver, “Booking flights with Bitcoin: Taking off,” Economist, February 26, 2015. 16.http://usebitcoins.info/. 17.Pete Rizzo, “Is Bitcoin’s Merchant Appeal Fading?,” CoinDesk, March 13, 2015. 18.I actually consider this more an indictment of Visa than of Bitcoin, by the way.

,” CoinDesk, March 13, 2015. 18.I actually consider this more an indictment of Visa than of Bitcoin, by the way. Visa has been around, in one form or another, since 1958; if besting a completely unknown competitor by a mere factor of 3,000 is all that it has to show for its half-century head start, that doesn’t strike me as saying a great deal. 19.Zack Whittaker, “Hackers can remotely steal fingerprints from Android phones,” ZDNet, August 5, 2015. 20.Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan, “Bitcoin Is Not Anonymous,” An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System (blog), September 30, 2011, anonymity-in-bitcoin.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/bitcoin-is-not-anonymous.html. 21.Bitcoin Project.

London: Penguin, 2008. p. 82 et seq. 5Cryptocurrency 1.It’s important to note that blockchain operations aren’t really distributed in the sense generally meant by “distributed computation,” in which different chunks of a large problem are farmed out to a network of independent processors, and later annealed. The Bitcoin blockchain, by contrast, is replicated identically across all of the network’s nodes. The trade-off is that all of these copies are verifiably identical with one another, at the cost of other advantages of true distributed processing, chiefly speed. 2.As is customary among Bitcoin enthusiasts, in what follows I’ll simply refer to this party—whatever their actual number, gender or nationality—as a presumptively Japanese, presumptively male individual named Satoshi. 3.Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” October 31, 2008, Bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 4.Very carefully.


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The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

A growing number of people started to exchange Bitcoin for dollars, which pushed its exchange rate from under $0.001 in October 2009 to $100 in April 2013. In October that year, a US Federal Reserve spokesman hinted that Bitcoin might one day become a ‘viable currency’, and the following month the value of a single Bitcoin jumped to over $1,000. Millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin are now traded every day. In some parts of the world you can live almost entirely on Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s dramatic rise to prominence resulted in an explosion of investment, exchange companies, and even ATM machines. Many members of the Bitcoin community have entered into complex negotiations with governments and regulators about how to make the new digital currency work alongside the traditional.

Although Amir’s technical know-how and experience are admired, his ideals and motivations have put him on the fringes of what has become an increasingly respectable Bitcoin community. Dark Wallet has pitted itself directly against organisations seeking to capitalise and control Bitcoin and its market. ‘Many prominent Bitcoin developers are actively in collusion with members of law enforcement and seeking approval from government legislators,’ reads the Dark Wallet blurb. ‘We believe this is not in Bitcoin users’ self-interest, and instead serves wealthy business interests that make up the self-titled Bitcoin Foundation.’ In a 2014 interview with Newsweek, the chief Bitcoin Foundation scientist, Gavin Andresen, said that he thinks of Bitcoin as ‘a just-plain-better, more efficient, less-subject-to-political-whims money.

To keep governments and central banks out of it, Satoshi placed a cap on the total number of Bitcoins that could ever be produced: 21 million. Although Bitcoins can be bought and sold with real-world currencies, new Bitcoins are not minted by any central authority. Instead anyone who dedicates his computing power to verifying the transactions in the blockchain competes to earn a very small amount of new Bitcoins each time they do so (this is called ‘mining’). As more Bitcoins are created (approximately 13 million have been created so far), the remaining Bitcoins require more computing power to mine.fn3 The last Bitcoin is expected to be mined in around 2140.


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Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Legendary investor Warren Buffett said, “It’s a gambling device.”1 Critics find its story similar to the famous tulip mania narrative in the Netherlands in the 1630s, when speculators drove up the price of tulip bulbs to such heights that one bulb was worth about as much as a house. That is, Bitcoins have value today because of public excitement. For Bitcoin to achieve its spectacular success, people had to become excited enough by the Bitcoin phenomenon to take action to seek out unusual exchanges to buy them. For Bitcoin’s advocates, labeling Bitcoin as a speculative bubble is the ultimate insult. Bitcoin’s supporters often point out that public support for Bitcoin is not fundamentally different from public support for many other things. For example, gold has held tremendous value in the public mind for thousands of years, but the public could just as well have accorded it little value if people had started using something else for money.

The Bitcoin epidemic has progressed as a cascading sequence of surprises for most people. Bitcoin surprised when it was first announced, and then it surprised again and again as the world’s attention continued to grow by leaps and bounds. At one point, the total value of Bitcoin exceeded US $300 billion. But Bitcoin has no value unless people think it has value, as its proponents readily admit. How did Bitcoin’s value go from $0 to $300 billion in just a few years? The beginnings of Bitcoin date to 2008, when a paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” signed by Satoshi Nakamoto, was distributed to a mailing list.

To some extent, tulip mania continues even today, in a diminished form. The same might happen to Bitcoin. Nonetheless, the value of Bitcoin is very unstable. At one point, according to a headline in the Wall Street Journal, the US dollar price of Bitcoin rose 40% in forty hours2 on no clear news. Such volatility is evidence of the epidemic quality of economic narratives that may lead to an erratic jostling of prices. I will make no attempt here to explain the technology of Bitcoin, except to note that it is the result of decades of research. Few people who trade Bitcoins understand this technology. When I encounter Bitcoin enthusiasts, I often ask them to explain some of its underlying concepts and theories, such as the Merkle tree or the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm, or to describe Bitcoin as an equilibrium of a congestion-queuing game with limited throughput.3 Typically the response is a blank stare.


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Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

Chapter 12 THE DREAM OF DECENTRALIZING ALL THE THINGS 278 “practical men, who believe themselves”: John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1936), 383–84. 278 “Indeed,” Keynes wrote: Ibid. 279 On October 31, 2008: Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey, The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 41. 279 a short paper titled “Bitcoin”: Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” October 31, 2008, https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 283 “the steady addition of a constant amount”: Ibid. 285 Laszlo Hanyecz: Bitcoinwhoswho, “A Living Currency: An Interview with ‘Jercos,’ Party to First Bitcoin Pizza Transaction,” Bitcoin Who’s Who (blog), January 30, 2016, http://bitcoinwhoswho.com/blog/2016/01/30/a-living-currency-an-interview-with-jercos-party-to-first-bitcoin-pizza-transaction. 286 Mt.

Martin’s Press, 2015), 41. 279 a short paper titled “Bitcoin”: Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” October 31, 2008, https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 283 “the steady addition of a constant amount”: Ibid. 285 Laszlo Hanyecz: Bitcoinwhoswho, “A Living Currency: An Interview with ‘Jercos,’ Party to First Bitcoin Pizza Transaction,” Bitcoin Who’s Who (blog), January 30, 2016, http://bitcoinwhoswho.com/blog/2016/01/30/a-living-currency-an-interview-with-jercos-party-to-first-bitcoin-pizza-transaction. 286 Mt. Gox, a Tokyo-based firm: Yessi Bello Perez, “Mt Gox: The History of a Failed Bitcoin Exchange,” CoinDesk, August 4, 2015, http://www.coindesk.com/mt-gox-the-history-of-a-failed-bitcoin-exchange. 286 that the exchange “had weaknesses” in its system and that “bitcoins vanished”: Robert McMillan, “The Inside Story of Mt. Gox, Bitcoin’s $460 Million Disaster,” Wired, March 3, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/03/bitcoin-exchange. 286 approximately $470 million in Bitcoins: Robin Sidel, Eleanor Warnock, and Takashi Mochizuki, “Almost Half a Billion Worth of Bitcoins Vanish,” Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303801304579410010379087576. 286 $27 million in cash: Jake Adelstein and Nathalie-Kyoko Stucky, “Behind the Biggest Bitcoin Heist in History: Inside the Implosion of Mt.

Spode, “The Great Cryptocurrency Heist,” Aeon, February 14, 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/trust-the-inside-story-of-the-rise-and-fall-of-ethereum. 305 “In [minority members’] view”: Ibid. 305 “Ethereum Classic”: Ibid. 306 “The Resolution of the Bitcoin Experiment”: Mike Hearn, “The Resolution of the Bitcoin Experiment,” Mike’s blog, January 14, 2016, https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7#.rvh0ditgj. 306 “It has failed because the community has failed”: Ibid. 306 the performance of the Bitcoin system suffered: Daniel Palmer, “Scalability Debate Continues as Bitcoin XT Proposal Stalls,” CoinDesk, January 11, 2016, http://www.coindesk.com/scalability-debate-bitcoin-xt-proposal-stalls. 306 Chinese exchanges accounted for 42%: Nathaniel Popper, “How China Took Center Stage in Bitcoin’s Civil War,” New York Times, June 29, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/business/dealbook/bitcoin-china.html. 306 an estimated 70% of all Bitcoin-mining gear: Danny Vincent, “We Looked inside a Secret Chinese Bitcoin Mine,” BBC News, May 4, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160504-we-looked-inside-a-secret-chinese-bitcoin-mine. 308 “a kid in Africa with a smartphone”: Brandon Griggs, “Futurist: We’ll Someday Accept Computers as Human,” CNN, March 12, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/12/tech/innovation/ray-kurzweil-sxsw. 309 “The Nature of the Firm”: R.


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The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology by William Mougayar

Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business logic, business process, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, fixed income, Ford Model T, global value chain, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, market clearing, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, smart contracts, social web, software as a service, too big to fail, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, web application, Yochai Benkler

The blockchain will redefine the role of existing intermediaries (if they accept to change), while creating new intermediaries, therefore it will disrupt the traditional boundaries of value. The blockchain has ten characteristics, and they all need to be understood in a holistic manner. NOTES 1. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper. 2. Bitcoin “maximalism” refers to the opinion that solely supports Bitcoin at the expense of all other blockchain or cryptocurrency related projects, because maximalists believe we only a need a single blockchain, and single currency in order to achieve desired network effects benefits. 3. The Untapped Potential of Corporate Narratives. http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2013/10/the-untapped-potential-of-corporate-narratives.html. 4.

It is very much about finding new opportunities that can grow their top line. WHY CAN'T THERE BE A GLOBAL BANK? To a skeptic, it sounds like a rhetorical question, given that Bitcoin was destined to become the underpinning nerve for a new type of global financial system that is borderless. Bitcoin’s vision is a globally decentralized money network with users at the edges of it. We should ask the question—since Bitcoin is global and universal, why is not there a truly global Bitcoin bank? This is a tricky question, because Bitcoin’s philosophy is about decentralization, whereas a bank is everything about centrally managed relationships. However, a global bank with no restrictions on borders or transactions would be interesting to users that want to conduct global transactions wherever they are in the world with the same ease as using a credit card.

Those indicated by asterik (*) were kind enough to review portions of the final manuscript A PERSONAL PREFACE I HAVE NOT ALWAYS BEEN SO LUCKY IN MANY things, but one thing I lucked out on was my initial encounter with Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's principal inventor who happened to be living in the same city as I did: Toronto. On a cold early January 2014 evening, Vitalik came down the stairs at Bitcoin Decentral in an old narrow building on Spadina Avenue, an hour prior to the start of one of the weekly Toronto Bitcoin Meetups, organized by Anthony Di lorio. I spoke to him for the first time, trying to understand something that was described to me, as “beyond Bitcoin.” For six months prior to that, I had been trying to understand Bitcoin, and this Ethereum technology was news to me. Soon after my conversation started, the room was filling with people entering the building, ready for the Meetup to start.


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Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

While the public debate around Bitcoin has, from the earliest time, focused on the supposed anonymity of the payment system and therefore its use for black market purchases (Greenberg 2011), detailed analysis of data from the Bitcoin system by the Federal Reserve has shown that it has barely been used at all for payments for goods and services (let alone for guns and drugs), and further that the pattern of circulation of Bitcoins and the dynamics of the exchange rate are consistent with low usage of Bitcoin for retail transactions (Badev and Chen 2014). Despite the widespread interest, Bitcoins do not seem to be gaining much traction in the ‘real world’ of payments. Wait? Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a decentralized, peer-to-peer means of exchange. If you have a Bitcoin, which is just a string of numbers, you can send that Bitcoin (or a subdivision of it) to anyone else. (If you want to understand how Bitcoin works, a good place to start is the original paper on the topic: ‘Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system’ by ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’.) I’m no expert on cryptography but there’s no reason I know of to question the basic idea: use a computationally difficult challenge to create strings of bits that it’s hard to make but easy to copy, then use digital signatures for transactions.

To return to Mervyn King’s point about money being a ‘particular historical institution’ (King 2016b), there is no reason why money should continue to work the way it does in response to continuing technological change, and no reasonable person would expect it to. Is Bitcoin the future of money? If Bitcoin is not money now, might it be the future of money? I think not: Bitcoin is not the future of money, and the future of money is not Bitcoin. Why the interest then? A reasonable conjecture is that the interest in Bitcoin points to a latent demand for change and, usefully, generates and focuses debate about current monetary structures (Jansen 2013). Much of the interest isn’t, therefore, specifically in Bitcoin, to my mind, but rather in the feasibility of an alternative to the state-issued, interest-bearing fiat currency money system that has been in place for the last forty years.

Whether this is true or not, there is no clear evidence that Bitcoin (despite the media attention) is being used at all. While the public debate around Bitcoin has, from the earliest time, focused on the supposed anonymity of the payment system and therefore its use for black market purchases (Greenberg 2011), detailed analysis of data from the Bitcoin system by the Federal Reserve has shown that it has barely been used at all for payments for goods and services (let alone for guns and drugs), and further that the pattern of circulation of Bitcoins and the dynamics of the exchange rate are consistent with low usage of Bitcoin for retail transactions (Badev and Chen 2014).


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

The bitcoinstore.com sells a wide range of consumer goods.27 There are Bitcoin gift cards, dedicated payment system and debit cards, and a series of exchanges (such as Bitcoin-Central and Bitcoin-24.com) in which Bitcoins can be traded for major currencies in real time. In December 2012, a French bank, Crédit Mutuel, together with the payment service company Aqoba, entered into an agreement with Bitcoin-Central to provide banking and payment services denominated in Bitcoin. In early 2013, a Bitcoin-specific HTML5 scheme was whitelisted, meaning that the currency was on its way toward becoming standard on all web browsers.28 Silk Road, an online marketplace for buying and selling drugs,29 took full advantage of the untraceability of Bitcoins, in combination with the anonymizing tool, Tor.

See Forbes’s “An illustrated history of Bitcoin crashes,” http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/04/11/an-illustrated-history-of-bitcoin-crashes/. 35 The total value of all Bitcoins in the world exceeded $1 billion for the first time in March 2013. 36 See Slate, “Fool’s Gold,” http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2013/04/bitcoin_is_a_ponzi_scheme_the_internet_currency_will_collapse.html. 37 “Bitcoin Is No Great Mystery,” see http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.ie/2013/04/bitcoin-is-no-great-mystery.html, accessed April 15, 2013. 38 Sociologically, on the other hand, the image we have of the “average” Bitcoin user is rather predictable. According to a Bitcoin users’ survey that ran between February and April 2013 (with 1,087 responses), the “average” Bitcoin user is overwhelmingly male (95.2 percent) (for a discussion of Bitcoin and gender, see Scott 2014), 32.1 years old, libertarian or anarchocapitalist (44.3 percent), nonreligious (61.8 percent), with a full time job (44.7 percent), and is in a relationship (55.6 percent).

Security breaches, including various malware attacks aiming to steal Bitcoins,33 are among the major reasons most often cited for these periodic crashes:34 for example, in 2011 a user claimed that he had half a million U.S. dollars worth of Bitcoins stolen from his computer by malware. Another cause was that the very feature that was meant to ensure that Bitcoins were sound money (just like gold) in the first place—their finite supply—became a source of speculation, and a Bitcoin bubble.35 Arguably, Bitcoins were being mined primarily not in order to be used but rather to be hoarded. This phenomenon prompted some critics to liken the currency to a Ponzi scheme. The comparison seems flawed: unlike entrants to a Ponzi scheme, holders of Bitcoins are not—per se—victims of fraud. But according to Eric Posner, Bitcoin “investors” are likely to suffer the same fate: “Bitcoin will collapse when people realize that it can’t survive as a currency because of its built-in deflationary features, or because of the emergence of bytecoins, or both.


pages: 285 words: 86,853

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

Other nodes in the network then accept this newly minted tail for the blockchain and turn to assembling new transactions into a new block. The Bitcoin software is carefully calibrated so that the community generates a new block approximately every ten minutes (just like Nakamoto’s paper suggests), and the overall production of Bitcoin is itself carefully orchestrated. The system will gradually taper the reward for completing new blocks to zero, thereby ceasing the creation of new Bitcoins entirely, once 21 million Bitcoins have been created.26 At that point, transaction fees alone will provide the incentive for Bitcoin users to dedicate their computers to endlessly updating the blockchain.

The transactions annotate the movement of some quantity of Bitcoin from one identity to another. Through the blockchain, which is constantly updated and authenticated by the Bitcoin community (as I’ll discuss below), it’s possible to trace each unit of currency back to an origination point, through every single transaction it’s ever been part of. The entire Bitcoin marketplace is an open book, from the darkest recesses of terrorism financing to booking hotel rooms, purchasing virtual goods from Zynga, and ordering marijuana from the infamous digital marketplace Silk Road.25 But how does this actually work? Since the Bitcoin network has no central authority, anyone completing a transaction announces it through a peer-to-peer network.

The system will gradually taper the reward for completing new blocks to zero, thereby ceasing the creation of new Bitcoins entirely, once 21 million Bitcoins have been created.26 At that point, transaction fees alone will provide the incentive for Bitcoin users to dedicate their computers to endlessly updating the blockchain. Figure 5.1 The blockchain, a system for transparent, public accounting of Bitcoin transactions. I am dwelling on the details of this elaborate process for delivering financial consensus because Bitcoin is not simply a decentralized currency but a revaluation of commerce in algorithmic terms. Bitcoin’s true radicalism stems from the fact that the blockchain grounds its authority on collective computation as an intrinsic form of value. To understand this shift we need to consider Bitcoin in the context of the historical value propositions of capitalism. As Karl Marx famously argued, industrial capitalism is based on a powerful mode of abstraction, one that separates individuals from the profits of their labor, creating a form of alienation that abstracts the work of individuals into fungible goods and services.


pages: 218 words: 68,648

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America by Dan Conway

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, financial independence, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, holacracy, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, initial coin offering, job satisfaction, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, rent control, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart contracts, Steve Jobs, supercomputer in your pocket, tech billionaire, tech bro, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Uber for X, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vitalik Buterin

Before long, several hundred computers pointed their power at the Bitcoin blockchain. And it worked. Before long, the network had more computing power than all of Google’s servers combined. But more importantly, Bitcoin had opened Pandora’s box. It had proved decentralization was an organizing principle that worked. Hypothetically, other things could be decentralized. From the moment the price of bitcoin started rising, the world focused almost exclusively on the price and very little on the underlying philosophy of decentralization. And who could blame them? In its first two years, despite high volatility, bitcoin was up 10,000 percent, making its early adopters filthy rich.

I was looking for something that could give us financial security and ultimately enough money for deliverance, whatever that was. One day, in late 2015, while searching for a widget article, I came across something about Bitcoin. I remembered that the price of bitcoin had been high a couple of years before. Back then I had thought it was a joke. But now that the price had fallen, a question entered my mind: What if it goes up again? For the next few nights, I read about Bitcoin. “Bitcoin is dead,” the Weekly Standard, among many others, announced. But most stories included quotes from people who still believed in it. They said it wasn’t dead. They said it could never die.

Many others, including a good number of crypto veterans, had not done so, even though they’d been a part of the movement way before me, when bitcoin and ETH prices were dirt cheap and it was possible to pick up a thousand bitcoin for a thousand dollars. One person in this boat was particularly shocking. In late 2017, Bitcoin evangelist and icon Andreas Antonopoulos announced that he was struggling financially. It was inconceivable to me that he hadn’t bought and held bitcoin when it was under twenty dollars. I had assumed he had the equivalent of at least twenty to thirty million by this time, considering how early he was to the game.


pages: 366 words: 94,209

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In most of the world, that would be SWIFT. 27. Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” bitcoin.org, October 31, 2008. 28. Ibid. 29. Pedro Franco, Understanding Bitcoin: Cryptography, Engineering and Economics (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2014). 30. Ibid. 31. Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Media, 2014). 32. Franco, Understanding Bitcoin. 33. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin. 34. Rob Wile, “The Chinese Are in Love with Bitcoin and It’s Driving the Digital Currency’s Prices into the Stratosphere,” businessinsider.com, October 29, 2013. 35.

Rebecca Grant, “A Single Bitcoin Was Worth $10 a Year Ago—Today It’s Worth $1,000,” venturebeat.com, November 27, 2013. 36. Robert McMillan, “The Inside Story of Mt. Gox, Bitcoin’s $460 Million Disaster,” wired.com, March 3, 2014. 37. Ryan Lawler, “Bitcoin Miners Are Racking Up $150,000 a Day in Power Consumption Alone,” techcrunch.com, April 13, 2013. 38. Mark Gimein, “Virtual Bitcoin Mining Is a Real-World Environmental Disaster,” bloomberg.com, April 12, 2013. 39. Michael Carney, “Bitcoin Has a Dark Side: Its Carbon Footprint,” pando.com, December 16, 2013. 40. Lawler, “Bitcoin Miners Are Racking Up $150,000 a Day.” 41.

I’ll explain it here briefly, but the main takeaway is that there’s no one in charge—which means the biases of Bitcoin are very different from those of a traditional interest-generating money system. This is a money system that works through protocols—digital handshakes between peers—instead of establishing security through central authorities. Bitcoin is based on a database known as the “blockchain.” The blockchain is a public ledger of every bitcoin transaction ever. It doesn’t sit on a server at a bank or in the basement of a credit-card company’s headquarters; it lives on the computers of everyone in the Bitcoin network. When bitcoins are transacted, an algorithm corresponding to that transaction is “published” to the blockchain.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

In reaching for commodities in which to anchor his system of value, Ametrano should have ended with gold, with its intimate links to the irreversibility of time. In the end, a test of bitcoin or any other blockchain will be the price of gold. If in a mature bitcoin system the gold chain massively bifurcates from the blockchain, it will signify a disorientation of values. As in bitcoin itself, the majority of users will decide which branch bears economic truth.11 Since its creation in 2009, bitcoin’s price movements have been 80.4 percent correlated with the gold price.12 Bitcoin’s relatively tiny float has imparted much greater volatility. But its following gold down in 2014 should not have been alarming. If and when bitcoin matures into a meaningful currency, its kinship with gold, rooted in time, should become increasingly manifest.

The eminent Austrian offered similar objections to a proposal for private money backed by gold: “It would turn out to be a very good investment, for the reason that because of the increased demand for gold the value of gold would go up; but that very fact would make it very unsuitable as money.”4 Ametrano adds, “The unfeasibility of a bitcoin [or gold] loan is similar to that of a bitcoin or [gold] salary: neither a borrower nor an employer would want to face the risk of seeing her debt or salary liabilities growing a hundredfold in a few years.”5 He concludes, “This is the cryptocurrency paradox: In the successful attempt to get rid of any centralized monetary authority using the Bitcoin protocol, the bitcoin currency has inadvertently thrown away the flexibility of an elastic monetary policy.” In a presentation to the Bank of Italy, Ametrano rejected the idea that bitcoin will lose its instability with wider adoption: “This is indeed true, but not at all sufficient for stable prices, as demonstrated by the need of monetary actions to stabilize even globally accepted currencies such as the Euro and US dollar.”6 One can imagine the eminent men of Banca d’Italia nodding solemnly at this observation.

But to fully understand money, we should consider the philosophy behind the most radical experiment in digital money. Chapter 7 What Bitcoin Can Teach Bitcoin . . . is the perfect form of money for the Internet because it is fast, secure, and borderless. . . . Essentially, bitcoin mining decentralizes the currency-issuance and clearing functions of a central bank. . . . [It] has ushered in a wave of innovation in currencies, financial services, economics, distributed systems, voting systems, corporate governance, and contracts. —Andreas Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin (2015) Today the established theories of top-down money face serious challenges from digital alternatives on the Internet and from the perennial appeal of the case for gold.


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Credit Union National Association, “Credit Union Data and Statistics,” cuna.org/Research-And-Strategy/Credit-Union-Data-And-Statistics; CoBank, “About CoBank,” cobank.com/About-CoBank.aspx. 4. Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin Open Source Implementation of P2P Currency,” P2P Foundation Ning forum (February 11, 2009), p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-source; see also the original Bitcoin white paper at bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf; for a fuller account of the rise of Bitcoin, see Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money (Harper, 2015). 5. Daniela Hernandez, “Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving on Bitcoins,” Wired (September 13, 2013); Kim Lachance Shandrow, “Bill Gates: Bitcoin Is ‘Better Than Currency,’” Entrepreneur (October 3, 2014); for an eloquent critique of bitcoin, see Brett Scott’s “Visions of a Techno-Leviathan: The Politics of the Bitcoin Blockchain,” E-International Relations (June 1, 2014) and “How Can Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology Play a Role in Building Social and Solidarity Finance?”

Although Bitcoin’s open ledger is a statistician’s dream, it’s not easy to associate accounts to actual human beings. For demographic data, see Lui Smyth, “Bitcoin Community Survey 2014” (February 1, 2014), http://simulacrum.cc/2014/02/01/bitcoin-community-survey-2014; Neil Sardesai, “Who Owns All the Bitcoins—An Infographic of Wealth Distribution,” CryptoCoinsNews (March 31, 2014); CoinDesk, Who Really Uses Bitcoin? (June 10, 2015), coindesk.com/research/who-really-uses-bitcoin; Olga Kharif, “The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market,” Bloomberg Businessweek (December 8, 2017); Coin Dance, “Bitcoin Community Engagement by Gender Summary,” coin.dance/stats/gender (94.73 percent male in March 2018). 7.

In times of flux like this, it’s easy to lose sight of the basics—those nagging questions of ownership and governance that the cooperative tradition continually insists on posing. The Bitcoin Center NYC, the self-described “center of the Bitcoin revolution,” used to inhabit a retail storefront on Manhattan’s Broad Street, a block from the New York Stock Exchange. The staff of an Asian-infused kosher steak house next door shooed loitering Bitcoiners from the sidewalk, indifferent to the revolution allegedly underway. Inside the Bitcoin Center, two small tables off to one side housed a menagerie of internet-age extraction equipment: Bitcoin mining machines. They resembled boxy desktop computers, only larger and without screens or keyboards attached.


pages: 179 words: 42,081

DeFi and the Future of Finance by Campbell R. Harvey, Ashwin Ramachandran, Joey Santoro, Vitalik Buterin, Fred Ehrsam

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, collateralized debt obligation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, initial coin offering, Jane Street, margin call, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, non-fungible token, passive income, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, rent-seeking, RFID, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, smart contracts, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

The initial cryptocurrency model is the Bitcoin blockchain, which functions almost exclusively as a payment network, with the capabilities of storing and transacting bitcoins across the globe in real time with no intermediaries or censorship. This is powerful value proposition gives bitcoin its value. Even though its network effects are strong, some competitors in the cryptocurrency space offer enhanced functionality. THE SMART CONTRACT PLATFORM A crucial ingredient of DeFi is a smart contract platform, which goes beyond a simple payments network such as Bitcoin and enhances the chain's capabilities.

In January 2021, the New York Times ran a story about a programmer who used a hardware wallet but forgot the password.22 The wallet contains $220 million of bitcoin and allows 10 password attempts before all data are destroyed. The programmer has only two tries to go. Delegated custody also involves risks. For example, if an exchange holds the private keys, it could be hacked and the keys lost. Most exchanges keep the bulk of private keys in “cold storage” (on a drive not connected to the Internet). Nevertheless, there is a long history of exchange attacks, including Mt Gox (2011–2014) 850,000 bitcoin; Bitfloor (2012) 24,000 bitcoin; Bitfinex (2016) 120,000 bitcoin; Coincheck (2018) 523 million NEM worth $500 million at the time; and Binance (2019) 7,000 bitcoin.23 The attacks have become less frequent.

PayPal,3 founded more than 20 years ago, is a forerunner in the payments space; in 2017, seven of the largest U.S. banks added their own payment system called Zelle.4 An important commonality of these cost-reducing fintech advances is that they rely on the centralized backbone of the current financial infrastructure. BITCOIN AND CRYPTOCURRENCY The dozens of digital currency initiatives beginning in the early 1980s all failed.5 The landscape shifted, however, with the publication of the famous Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin white paper6 in 2008, which presents a peer-to-peer system that is decentralized and uses the concept of blockchain. Invented in 1991 by Haber and Stornetta,7 blockchain was initially primarily envisioned to be a time-stamping system to keep track of different versions of a document. The key innovation of Bitcoin was to combine the idea of blockchain (time stamping) with a consensus mechanism called proof of work (introduced by Back8 in 2002).


pages: 305 words: 93,091

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data by Kevin Mitnick, Mikko Hypponen, Robert Vamosi

4chan, big-box store, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, connected car, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, incognito mode, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, Tesla Model S, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Once you have that fake e-mail address, use Tor to set up a Bitcoin wallet, find a Bitcoin ATM to fund the wallet, and then use a tumbler to essentially launder the Bitcoin so it cannot be traced back to you on the blockchain. This laundering process requires setting up two Bitcoin wallets using different Tor circuits. The first wallet is used to send the Bitcoin to the laundering service, and the second is set up to receive the laundered Bitcoin. Once you have achieved true anonymity by using open Wi-Fi out of camera view plus Tor, find a VPN service that accepts Bitcoin for payment. Pay with the laundered Bitcoin. Some VPN providers, including WiTopia, block Tor, so you need to find one that doesn’t—preferably with a VPN provider that doesn’t log connections.

To maintain this anonymity, we need to convert our anonymously purchased prepaid gift cards to Bitcoin. In chapter 6 I talked about Bitcoin, virtual currency. By itself Bitcoin is not anonymous. They can be traced through what’s called a blockchain back to the source of the purchase; similarly, all subsequent purchases can be traced as well. So Bitcoin by itself is not going to hide your identity. We will have to run the funds through an anonymity mechanism: converting prepaid gift cards into Bitcoin, then running the Bitcoin through a laundering service. This process will result in anonymized Bitcoin to be used for future payments. We will need the laundered Bitcoin, for example, to pay for our VPN service and any future purchases of data usage on our portable hotspot or burner phone.

You keep the value of the coins minus the tumbling fee—it’s just that the cryptographic signature of each coin may be different after it’s mixed with others. That anonymizes the system somewhat. Once you have them, how do you store Bitcoins? Because there are no Bitcoin banks, and because Bitcoin is not physical currency, you will need to use a Bitcoin wallet set up anonymously using the detailed instructions described later in this book. Now that you’ve bought and stored it, how do you use Bitcoin? Exchanges allow you to invest in Bitcoin and change it into other currencies, such as US dollars, or purchase goods on sites such as Amazon. Say you have one Bitcoin, valued at $618. If you only need around $80 for a purchase, then you will retain a certain percentage of the original value, depending on the exchange rate, after the transaction.


pages: 326 words: 91,532

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

I use my private key to sign transactions, thus proving that I actually own the Bitcoin I am transferring. Bitcoin, like other cryptocurrencies, takes the form of electronic tokens that can be transferred online. If you want to pay me 0.02 Bitcoin (worth about $600), I will (happily, thank you) give you my public key. This public key serves as the ‘address’ to which you then send the Bitcoin. You can think of it as my account number. Since I have the corresponding private key, I can then later prove to others that I do actually own the Bitcoin you just sent me. Importantly, your transfer to me does not consist of a token for each Bitcoin or fractions thereof.

The investor decides to short subprime mortgages right then and there.2 But while he experienced this epiphany well before the 2008 crisis, the crypto-crash was already underway when I was wandering around Davos’ CryptoHQ: Bitcoin had peaked at $20,000 several weeks earlier, on 17 December 2017, and was now on its way back down to $3,000. Bitcoin did not, however, go down to zero. Instead, it recovered somewhat and has been trading between $4,000 and $30,0003 over the last few years – a wide range by any definition, but an especially wide one for a currency. Bitcoin first appeared in 2009, right after the financial crisis, and was conceived as a technological utopia – an alternative to banks and money, whose failings had just become all too apparent. Bitcoin does away with the need for intermediaries like banks, and authorities such as central banks and governments.

Since there are some 2,500 transactions in a block, the mining reward of BTC 6.25 per block represents some $75 per transaction, in addition to the actual transaction fees, which are estimated to be $3–5 per transaction. Interestingly, this (significant) mining cost/reward is not borne by the payer, but by all Bitcoin holders, who see their stock of Bitcoin diluted the more it is ‘mined’. All this takes time, meaning that Bitcoin is not a convenient way to pay for peak-time tube travel or grocery shopping. Bitcoin transactions become ‘final’ only after they have been verified by miners, which takes about ten minutes. In addition, payees are advised to wait another sixty minutes before considering the transaction as irreversible.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

The most popular crypto-anarchy technology at the moment is probably bitcoin. In case you are not familiar with it, bitcoin is a digital currency. I won’t describe in detail how it works here – there are plenty of other good guides available – but here’s the short version: a quantity of bitcoin is stored at a bitcoin address, the key to which is a unique string of letters and numbers that can be kept on a website, desktop, mobile phone or even a piece of paper. Anyone can download a bitcoin wallet on to their computer, buy bitcoin with traditional currency from a currency exchange, and use them to buy or sell a growing number of products or services as easily as sending an email.

But my Czech currency, koruna, which I had exchanged at the airport at an extortionate rate, were not accepted. ‘We only take bitcoin,’ said the assistant. (I later learned that this was the one place in the world that accepted only bitcoin.) Ever since we abandoned the gold standard, all national currencies have run on trust. We accept sterling or dollars because we believe others will. And people trust bitcoin and the maths that underpins it. At the institute’s cafe the staff were paid in bitcoin; rent collected for their co-working space was paid in bitcoin, too. I was given a little plastic card with a QR code, and transferred bitcoin on to it using one of three yellow ATM machines.

In late 2008, someone called Satoshi Nakamoto (in keeping with the crypto-anarchists’ love of anonymity, to date no one knows who he is) first posted his idea for bitcoin. Nakamoto distrusted the global banking system, and imagined bitcoin as a way to undermine it. He hated that bankers and governments held the key to the money supply and could manipulate it to their own ends. He placed a cap on the number of bitcoins that could ever be produced (21 million) and a timetable for how quickly they could be created. This was to make sure that no central governments or central banks could print more to inflate the economy for political purposes. Although bitcoins can be bought and sold with real-world currency, new ones are not minted.


pages: 960 words: 125,049

Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and DApps by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Gavin Wood Ph. D.

air gap, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, continuous integration, cryptocurrency, Debian, digital divide, Dogecoin, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, functional programming, Google Chrome, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, litecoin, machine readable, move fast and break things, node package manager, non-fungible token, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, sealed-bid auction, sharing economy, side project, smart contracts, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vickrey auction, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket

Bitcoin, Ethereum’s Development Culture balance, world state and, Ethereum State Bamboo, Introduction to Ethereum High-Level Languages Bancor, Real-World Examples: ERC20 and Bancor batching, The JSON-RPC Interface batchTransfer function, Real-World Examples: PoWHC and Batch Transfer Overflow (CVE-2018–10299) big-endian, defined, Quick Glossary BIP-32 standardextended public and private keys, Extended public and private keys HD wallets and, HD Wallets (BIP-32) and Paths (BIP-43/44)-Index numbers for normal and hardened derivation BIP-39 standard, Seeds and Mnemonic Codes (BIP-39), Mnemonic Code Words (BIP-39)-Working with mnemonic codesderiving seed from mnemonic words, From mnemonic to seed generating code words with, Generating mnemonic words libraries, Working with mnemonic codes optional passphrase with, Optional passphrase in BIP-39 working with mnemonic codes, Working with mnemonic codes BIP-43 standard, Navigating the HD wallet tree structure BIP-44 standard, Navigating the HD wallet tree structure BIPs (see Bitcoin improvement proposals) Bitcoinas token, Tokens on Ethereum development culture, Ethereum’s Development Culture Ethereum blockchain compared to Bitcoin blockchain, Ethereum: A General-Purpose Blockchain Ethereum compared to, Compared to Bitcoin Ethereum definition compared to, Ethereum Clients limitations of, The Birth of Ethereum Bitcoin Core, Components of a Blockchain Bitcoin improvement proposals (BIPs), Quick GlossaryHierarchical Deterministic Wallets (BIP-32/BIP-44), Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets (BIP-32/BIP-44) Mnemonic Code Words (BIP-39), Seeds and Mnemonic Codes (BIP-39), Mnemonic Code Words (BIP-39)-Working with mnemonic codes Multipurpose HD Wallet Structure (BIP-43), HD Wallets (BIP-32) and Paths (BIP-43/44)-Navigating the HD wallet tree structure bitcoind client, Components of a Blockchain blind calls, Raw call, delegatecall block gas limit, Block Gas Limit block object, Block context block timestamp manipulation security threat, Block Timestamp Manipulation-Real-World Example: GovernMentalpreventative techniques, Preventative Techniques real-world example: GovernMental, Real-World Example: GovernMental vulnerability, The Vulnerability block, defined, Quick Glossary blockchaincomponents of, Components of a Blockchain, Ethereum’s Components creating contract on, Creating the Contract on the Blockchain-Withdrawing from Our Contract defined, Quick Glossary Ethereum as developer's blockchain, Why Learn Ethereum?

You should use assert() to avoid conditions that should never, ever occur. Big-endian A positional number representation where the most significant digit is first. The opposite of little-endian, where the least significant digit is first. BIPs Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. A set of proposals that members of the Bitcoin community have submitted to improve Bitcoin. For example, BIP-21 is a proposal to improve the Bitcoin uniform resource identifier (URI) scheme. Block A collection of required information (a block header) about the comprised transactions, and a set of other block headers known as ommers. Blocks are added to the Ethereum network by miners.

The Birth of Ethereum All great innovations solve real problems, and Ethereum is no exception. Ethereum was conceived at a time when people recognized the power of the Bitcoin model, and were trying to move beyond cryptocurrency applications. But developers faced a conundrum: they either needed to build on top of Bitcoin or start a new blockchain. Building upon Bitcoin meant living within the intentional constraints of the network and trying to find workarounds. The limited set of transaction types, data types, and sizes of data storage seemed to limit the sorts of applications that could run directly on Bitcoin; anything else needed additional off-chain layers, and that immediately negated many of the advantages of using a public blockchain.


pages: 349 words: 109,304

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton

bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, crack epidemic, Edward Snowden, fake news, gentrification, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, Ross Ulbricht, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the market place, trade route, Travis Kalanick, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

And there, for sale on the Silk Road, were the magic mushrooms Ross had grown a few months earlier, listed for sale as if he were hawking a used bicycle or a box of Girl Scout cookies on Craigslist. He then explained how to buy Bitcoins, the currency needed to buy drugs on the site. It was like buying coins at a video arcade. You exchanged your cash for tokens, and then you got to play. Just as at an arcade, at the end of the day, no one knew who had used those tokens because they all looked the same. (Bitcoin wasn’t just meant for illegal purchases, either; you could use the digital cash to buy things on dozens of legitimate Web sites around the world.) “Give me your credit card,” Ross said as he navigated to an online Bitcoin exchange, where Julia could interchange her real dollars for digital gold.

It took several layers of approval, numerous meetings, and copious paperwork before Jared was finally allowed to commence his binge-shopping on the Amazon of drugs. Then there was the challenge of buying the Bitcoins. He was allocated $1,001 for his shopping excursion. So he took the cash, deposited it in a bank, then went to a Bitcoin exchange Web site where he could swap the dollars for Bitcoins. It wasn’t as easy as picking up drugs with cash on the street or finding a used bicycle on Craigslist, but it was still surprisingly painless considering what he was buying. During his first expedition to the Silk Road, Jared had three goals.

Ross’s cut from the commission fees was now averaging $10,000 a day and growing higher—quite literally—by the hour. In reality Ross’s wealth was doubling and tripling every few weeks as the exchange rate for Bitcoins rose. If Ross had $100,000 in one of his Bitcoin accounts on Monday, it could be worth as much as $200,000 by Friday without his doing a thing. If VJ’s predictions were correct, in a bear case Ross could personally be making $100 million a year by 2014. In a bull case, if the current value of Bitcoins continued to grow as it had been doing, he could be making ten times that in no time at all. But the pile of digital money introduced a whole new set of problems.


pages: 218 words: 62,889

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business by Anastasia Nesvetailova, Ronen Palan

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business process, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, critique of consumerism, cryptocurrency, currency risk, democratizing finance, digital capitalism, distributed ledger, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, independent contractor, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ross Ulbricht, shareholder value, short selling, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail

In 2013 US courts officially recognized bitcoin as a convertible decentralized virtual currency; in 2015 the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) classified bitcoin as a commodity. Today, bitcoin can be used to pay for things and services, investors use it as an investment and there are places around the world where you can convert bitcoins into real cash; there are even derivatives on the value of bitcoin. Bitcoin, therefore, seems to be a classic example of Minsky’s theory. With blockchain and bitcoin, we do have the currency that seems to have been accepted quite widely, and the platform on which to trade it. Moreover, there are no government officials in sight, intent on padding their own pockets and building their own little bureaucratic empires.

Dread Pirate Roberts is now in prison serving a life sentence. The authorities still can’t get their hands on most of his bitcoins. 17. L. Katz, ‘Criminals may ditch bitcoin for Litecoin, Dash, study says’, Bloomberg, 8 February 2018, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-08/criminals-are-ditching-bitcoin-for-litecoin-and-dash-study-says. 18. Bateman, ‘Bitcoin might make tax havens obsolete’. 19. Ibid. 20. Conducted in January 2018. (Source: J. Wieczner, ‘Bitcoin investors aren’t paying their cryptocurrency taxes’, Fortune, 13 February 2018, http://fortune.com/2018/02/13/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-tax-taxes/). 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. E.

These and other cases of fraud across China’s shadow banking industry have prompted a broader crackdown on debt and financial risk by the authorities, partly driven by the desire to avoid expensive bailouts, as a number of China’s wealth management firms, many of which are Ponzi schemes, fold.14 BLOCKCHAIN If peer-to-peer is engulfed in scandals, what about blockchain and its most famous cyber offspring, bitcoin? Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin show the truism of Hyman Minsky’s theory. Minsky, one of the greatest financial economists of the twentieth century, once said: ‘Anybody can create money, the problem is to get it accepted.’ Bitcoin is a currency that virtualizes in cyberspace as a reward for solving an algorithm. Bitcoin mining is an expensive business: one needs not only human capital but a lot of computer power, which in turn consumes a lot of energy. In 2013 US courts officially recognized bitcoin as a convertible decentralized virtual currency; in 2015 the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) classified bitcoin as a commodity.


pages: 375 words: 88,306

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

These are just a few examples of a new marketplace technology paradigm that may power the next generation of crowd-based capitalism, To better appreciate the economic and social impacts of these marketplaces, we first need to understand how some of them work. The right place to start is by understanding Bitcoin. Understanding Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Exchange In the simplest possible terms, bitcoin is a digital currency. (I refer to the currency using lowercase “b,” and the platform, technology, or ecosystem using uppercase “B.”) You can acquire bitcoin by exchanging it for your dollars, euros, or yen, by providing someone with a product or service that they pay you for in bitcoin, or by “mining” bitcoin (more on this later). Your acquisition and subsequent possession of this bitcoin exists as one or more entries in a public ledger (the blockchain) in which you are identified by a secure anonymized “key.”

Some of you may recall Mt.Gox, the exchange that held its users’ bitcoin in its own centralized Bitcoin accounts while maintaining a parallel off-the-blockchain system of keeping track of which users had how much bitcoin. Mt.Gox ceased operations in 2014 following the 2013 loss of the equivalent of $450 million of its users’ bitcoin because of what appeared to be a hacker having gained access to its Bitcoin accounts. There are also concerns that someone who controls significantly more than 51% of the computing power being used to clear transactions (in Bitcoin’s case, for example, for mining bitcoin) has the ability to alter ledger entries by “building their own chain,” which, over time, will replace the true blockchain as the one that is associated with consensus. In 2014, ghash.io, a bitcoin mining pool, did attain this dominance in computing power being spent on mining bitcoin, and were in a position to launch a “51% attack” of this kind, although they were quick to reassure the community that they had no intention of doing so.

Your acquisition and subsequent possession of this bitcoin exists as one or more entries in a public ledger (the blockchain) in which you are identified by a secure anonymized “key.” Each time you use your bitcoin, the new transaction is recorded as yet another entry in the ledger. A lot of the attention paid to Bitcoin has focused on its success in creating currency without a government backer, about how bitcoin value measured in traditional money fluctuates a lot over time (although its exchange rate has stabilized considerably in 2015), and perhaps also about the use of bitcoin for commerce that many governments consider illegal. Instead of rehashing those topics, I focus here on thinking about Bitcoin as one of many applications of a new set of enabling technologies.


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

This ledger holds a record of every transaction ever done on the network and it is shared with the network, i.e., anyone who is part of the network can see the information in this ledger. Miners who do these two functions—verifying the transaction and recording it on the blockchain—are then rewarded with bitcoins for their effort. This is how bitcoins are “mined.” Since the number of bitcoins is fixed to 21 million, it is like mining the bitcoins out of a reservoir. Hence the term miner. Although these series of operations seem relatively straightforward, they include elements of cryptography, computer science, game theory, and classical economics. The above breakdown is certainly not enough to pierce the complexities of how blockchains work, but is portrays how this decentralized and distributed value exchange system works.

All books have been referred to in the writing of this book Table A-1.Technical and business reference list Name Author Area of focus Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies Andreas Antonopoulos Technical book that gives readers an understanding of how bitcoin works. Useful for computer scientists and advanced readers. Understanding Bitcoin: Cryptography, Engineering and Economics Pedro Franco Technical book that gives readers an understanding of how bitcoin works and the economic implications of the technology. Useful for students, business persons, and advanced readers. Value Web Chris Skinner General book that offers a holistic view of how FinTech and Blockchain firms are using technology to create a new internet of value.

As the blockchain gains more traction in formal financial circles, its first manifestation in the form of Bitcoin is increasingly being excluded from the dialogue. This seems to be contrary to the symbiotic link between the two. What is more surprising is the fact that this tendency to separate bitcoin from blockchain is a repeat of what happened when the Internet first came into existence. As banks try to harness the power of the blockchain by creating private blockchains, we find ourselves witnessing the same execution of events as when private companies tried to create intranets instead of simply using the Internet. Whether you are a fan of the bitcoin or the blockchain or both, having a nuanced or biased view on the subject needs to be developed using the scientific method.


pages: 430 words: 68,225

Blockchain Basics: A Non-Technical Introduction in 25 Steps by Daniel Drescher

bitcoin, blockchain, business process, central bank independence, collaborative editing, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, job automation, linked data, machine readable, peer-to-peer, place-making, Satoshi Nakamoto, smart contracts, transaction costs

How It Works The idea of selecting a transaction history based on the computational effort that was spent for creating it has led to the following two criteria: • The longest-chain-criterion2 • The heaviest-chain-criterion3 The Longest-Chain-Criterion The longest-chain-criterion is based on the idea that the blockchain-data- structure that comprises the most blocks represents the most aggregated computational effort. In order to study this criterion, let’s consider an initial situation were all the nodes of a distributed system maintain and agree on 2Nakamoto, Satoshi. Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. 2008. https://bitcoin. org/bitcoin.pdf. 3Wood, Gavin. Ethereum: A secure decentralized generalized transaction ledger. 2014. http://gavwood.com/paper.pdf; Okupski, Krzysztof. Bitcoin developer reference. Working paper. 2014. Blockchain Basics 169 the identical version of the blockchain-data-structure, as depicted in Figure 19-1, which presents a schematic blockchain-data-structure that omits many details for simplicity.

Hence, the whole round trip through cryptography can be summed up as: start with some data, produce cypher text by encrypting the original data with a cryp- tographic key, preserve the cypher text or send it to someone, and finally recover the original data by decrypting the cypher text with a cryptographic key. Figure 12-1 illustrates the basic functioning of cryptography. 1Nakamoto, Satoshi. Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. 2008. https://bitcoin. org/bitcoin.pdf. 2See Van Tilborg, Henk, and Sushil Jajodia, eds. Encyclopedia of cryptography and security. New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2014. 96 Step 12 | Identifying and Protecting User Accounts Figure 12-1. Schematic illustration of basic cryptographic concepts and their terminology What happens if someone tries to decrypt cypher text by using an incorrect key?

Ordering Catalog The ordering catalog of our transformed book equates to the chain of block headers in the blockchain-data-structure. Each page of the ordering catalog equates to a single block header in the blockchain-data-structure. Since the 1Nakamoto, Satoshi. Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. 2008. https:// bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 120 Step 14 | Storing Transaction Data block headers are connected with one another via references in a linear fash- ion, like the links of a chain, they form a chain of block headers. Similar to our ordering catalog, the chain of block headers does not store transaction data directly, but only stores hash references to the corresponding transac- tion data.


pages: 304 words: 80,143

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Alex Hern, “How Iceland Became the Bitcoin Miners’ Paradise,” The Guardian, February 13, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/13/how-iceland-became-the-bitcoin-miners-paradise (accessed June 28, 2019); and Foreign Staff, “Iceland Set to Use More Energy Mining Bitcoin Than Powering Homes,” Telegraph (UK), February 12, 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/12/iceland-set-use-energy-mining-bitcoin-powering-homes/ (accessed June 28, 2019). 53. “Bitcoin Mining Guide—Getting Started with Bitcoin Mining,” Bitcoin Mining.com, https://www.bitcoinmining.com/getting-started/ (accessed June 28, 2019); and “Genesis Mining Review,” Cryptorival.com, https://cryptorival.com/miners/genesismining/ (accessed June 28, 2019). 54. Ben Popken, “Why Did Bitcoin ‘Fork’ Today and What Is ‘Bitcoin Cash?,’” NBC News, August 1, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/why-bitcoin-forking-today-what-bitcoin-cash-n788581 (accessed June 28, 2019); and Max Gulker, “Bitcoin: Decentralized Governance Put to the Test,” American Institute of Economic Research, May 16, 2017, https://www.aier.org/research/bitcoin-decentralized-governance-put-test (accessed June 28, 2019). 55.

Bitmain Technologies Ltd. has a 25,000 computer server farm in Erdos, Inner Mongolia, where coal power is inexpensive.51 Iceland’s cheap water power has made it a bitcoin miners’ paradise—so much so that Iceland is on the brink of using more electricity to mine bitcoins than to power its homes.52 Anybody can become a bitcoin miner by purchasing the appropriate hardware, downloading free mining software, and joining a bitcoin mining pool. If you want to save yourself the trouble, you can even sign up with a bitcoin cloud mining service such as Genesis for as little as $30.53 The current number of bitcoin miners is anyone’s guess—though it has been estimated that there may be 5,000 full nodes used by 100,000 miners.

Barrett, “Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity Version 1.1,” NIST Cybersecurity Framework, April 16, 2018, https://www.nist.gov/publications/framework-improving-critical-infrastructure-cybersecurity-version-11. 51. “Coal Is Fueling Bitcoin’s Meteoric Rise,” Bloomberg, December 14, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-15/turning-coal-into-bitcoin-dirty-secret-of-2017-s-hottest-market (accessed June 28, 2019). 52. Alex Hern, “How Iceland Became the Bitcoin Miners’ Paradise,” The Guardian, February 13, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/13/how-iceland-became-the-bitcoin-miners-paradise (accessed June 28, 2019); and Foreign Staff, “Iceland Set to Use More Energy Mining Bitcoin Than Powering Homes,” Telegraph (UK), February 12, 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/12/iceland-set-use-energy-mining-bitcoin-powering-homes/ (accessed June 28, 2019). 53.


pages: 330 words: 91,805

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

“Benevolent Dictator for Life,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life. 21. “Crypto-Currency Market Capitalizations,” http://coinmarketcap.com. 22. “Who Controls the Bitcoin Network?,” Bitcoin website, https://bitcoin.org/en/faq#who-controls-the-bitcoin-network. 23. Bitsmith, “Inside a Chinese Bitcoin Mine,” The Coinsman, August 11, 2014, www.thecoinsman.com/2014/08/bitcoin/inside-chinese-bitcoin-mine. 24. “Government as Impresario: Emergent Public Goods and Public Private Partnerships 2.0,” talk given by Nicholas Gruen as part of a luncheon series at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, January 14, 2014, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2014/01/gruen. 25.

In the potentiality of block-chain visionaries, the most useful programs, contracts, and methods will be the ones that are most copied, eventually becoming standards. The Bitcoin.org website explains how this is accomplished with Bitcoin: Nobody owns the Bitcoin network.… [It] is controlled by all Bitcoin users around the world. While developers are improving the software, they can’t force a change in the Bitcoin protocol because all users are free to choose what software and version they use. In order to stay compatible with each other, all users need to use software complying with the same rules. Bitcoin can only work correctly with a complete consensus among all users. Therefore, all users and developers have a strong incentive to protect this consensus.22 While the block-chain protocol has necessarily evolved over the last six years, the evolution is driven by consensus, with the most suitable and widely adopted changes being the ones that win out over the alternatives.

Let’s start with a very brief background on Bitcoin. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote a paper about a digital currency, called Bitcoin. “Satoshi Nakamoto” is a pseudonym, and no one knows whether it refers to a real person or a group of people. In 2009 their ideas were released as open-source software. (Note that this is yet another example where the concept and organizing principle of the platform were simply gifted out of thin air; that’s not a replicable strategy.) The Bitcoin software now exists as a platform and set of protocols for how to create, store, and use Bitcoins. Bitcoins are sent from one user directly to another digitally.


pages: 324 words: 89,875

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Like a commodity, it’s subject to wide swings in price based on speculators investing in the bitcoin market. And like gold, bitcoins are scarce. The Bitcoin protocol limits the number of new bitcoins that come into circulation each year. This number will automatically halve over time until a total of 21 million bitcoins are in existence. Then the issuance of new bitcoins will stop completely. Additionally, unlike almost all currencies currently in existence, Bitcoin isn’t controlled by any government. It’s also completely anonymous. (Well, more accurately, it’s pseudonymous—senders have to have an address to send bitcoins to.) As a result, many, particularly those who possess a more libertarian bent, view Bitcoin as the technological equivalent of the second coming.

For one, Bitcoin experienced its first major governance crisis at the beginning of 2016. While governance of the Bitcoin network is putatively decentralized, the handful of individuals who have access to and the ability to modify Bitcoin’s source code have an outsized influence. At the beginning of 2016, a few of these individuals resisted change to the Bitcoin protocol and effectively prevented changes that could increase the transaction capacity of Bitcoin’s network. While this governance crisis could be resolved in the future, the lack of a formal governance model for changing the Bitcoin protocol could hamper Bitcoin’s growth.

However, these platforms are just scratching the surface. The biggest potential disruption of the finance industry comes from the already-legendary Bitcoin. What is Bitcoin? If you want to get into an argument with your tech-savvy friends, just start talking to them about this topic. The simple answer is that it’s a new kind of digital money. But the reality is a lot more complicated than that. Bitcoin is controlled by a programming protocol that determines how new bitcoins enter circulation and how new transactions get verified. Bitcoin is usually considered a currency, but some economists think it looks more like a commodity—a sort of digital gold.


pages: 320 words: 95,629

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

yeah he got into Bitcoin—while he was here how much money did he lose? No he’s worth millions. He’s been in the New York Times. You’re telling me that our old doorman… is now a Bitcoin whale? Yeah. Hilarious! 22 Billionaire Warren Buffett Calls Bitcoin “Rat Poison Squared” Coindesk Disclosure: Our venture fund SOSV has a 6 percent share of a cryptoderivative platform, BitMex. BitMex is not authorized for use in the United States, because it’s not registered with our financial authorities. If you think buying Bitcoin is risky, BitMex allows you to bet on whether the price of Bitcoin is going to go up or down—and multiply your bet by up to one hundred times.

The whole system is permissionless, which also means it can’t keep anybody out.” In the Bitcoin universe, nobody needs permission to act like a bank or a broker-dealer. They just need the software. However, Bitcoin is completely out in the open. It makes a public record of every transaction. And because of that, we were told, criminal networks have left Bitcoin for alternative coins like Monero, which is an obfuscated ledger, meaning no user can be tracked or traced. That Bitcoin is no longer favored by criminals has made it more respectable, and led far more investors to get in. But nobody talks about their Bitcoin wealth out in the open. “You can get killed for that,” one whale said.

That’s the core critique. When the Great Cessation happened, at first Bitcoin fell even faster than the stock market. It really looked like the believers had panicked and lost their nerve. But a few weeks later, when so many world governments created stimulus packages and started printing money by the trillions… the crypto scene went ballistic with moral outrage and disgust. And along with that outrage, the price of Bitcoin rose again. The more the governments bailed out the economy, the weaker those governments looked (financially). In the course of a few weeks, Bitcoin reemerged as the only way to bet against the fiscal policy of all major governments at once.


pages: 138 words: 41,353

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

In 2011, Ver discovered and invested in the digital currency Bitcoin. It was a light-bulb moment for Ver, and his enthusiasm for the project compelled him to speak out once more, authorities be damned. “Money without borders is a world without borders,” he repeats, over and over. “Bitcoin is the future.” It didn’t hurt that Bitcoin, in addition to dovetailing perfectly with his political views, made him a rich man: Ver bought in when the currency was selling at around $1 per coin, and before the year was up, its value soared, turning him into a millionaire. When I met Ver in St. Kitts, he helped me set up a virtual wallet for Bitcoin on my iPhone, and moments later, sent me $20 worth of the currency.

And so it was particularly insulting for him to be prevented from preaching the gospel of Bitcoin at the conference in Miami because of national borders and the whims of an American bureaucrat. This is, after all, the man who’s known as “Bitcoin Jesus.” “It didn’t turn out so well for the real Jesus,” Ver said as he sounded off against the “tyrants.” “He was murdered by his government. I hope that doesn’t happen to me.” Bitcoin is a decentralized digital payment system that is entirely independent of, and unregulated by, banks. Created in 2009 by someone using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoins are “mined” by computers that take records of previous transactions.

The computers turn the records into code and add them to a “blockchain,” or a constantly evolving ledger that’s stored on every Bitcoin-holder’s computer. That means that goods can be bought anonymously, without the transactions ever getting traced back to either the buyer or the seller. It also means money can be transferred internationally without any bank fees. Because it is a currency that exists only in computer code, Bitcoin has been vulnerable to easy theft and fraud, making its worth immensely volatile, and some economists have predicted that Bitcoins will soon be worth nothing. Nevertheless, Ver is still an unreserved evangelist. He is playing the long game, perhaps because he truly believes that he will live forever.


pages: 361 words: 97,787

The Curse of Cash by Kenneth S Rogoff

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial intermediation, financial repression, forward guidance, frictionless, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, government statistician, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, moveable type in China, New Economic Geography, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, payday loans, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, RFID, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, unconventional monetary instruments, underbanked, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

Another major concern under a Bitcoin currency standard (or any digital currency) is inflation. It is true that the supply of bitcoins has been capped at 21 million coins, a limit that is expected to be reached sometime in the twenty-second century. Some people worry that this cap will eventually imply deflation, if world growth continues but the supply of bitcoins is fixed. They should be much more worried about inflation than about deflation. How is that? Because Bitcoin does not have a monopoly on the underlying technology, imitators can appear, and indeed they already have. Over time, Bitcoin 1.0’s first-mover advantage may fade, especially if Bitcoin 2.0 or Bitcoin 3.0 offers a superior mechanism (e.g., much lower maintenance costs and more surefire anonymity).

A fair dose of encryption technology is also included, and in Bitcoin, for example, individuals are allowed to use aliases with passcode-protected accounts to make it difficult to determine their identities. A lot of truly fascinating science supports the different systems, and one can find many excellent treatments.2 Governments around the world have already begun regulating cryptocurrencies more aggressively. In the United States, Bitcoin wallets must now comply with anti-money-laundering rules, and the Internal Revenue Service has begun to issue rulings on how Bitcoin earnings should be taxed. The European Union, too, is in the process of intensifying its regulations.

This would substantially reduce costs, particularly in international transactions. The approach can also be used to save on legal contracting costs. Some of Bitcoin’s competitors, notably the newer Ethereum platform, aim to offer the possibility of creating secure exchanges for transactions of almost any type. People sometimes ask whether the cryptocurrency Bitcoin could be a currency (supposing that the government does not interfere). The answer is certainly yes, Bitcoin (or perhaps one of its present or future competitors) can fulfill many of the basic functions of currency, including unit of account and medium of exchange, with or without government adherence.3 In fact, digital currencies in some ways offer the capacity for much more complex kinds of transactions and contracts than traditional paper currency offers, precisely because the former embed so much information, including the history of transactions.


pages: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

It wasn’t long before a couple of them mentioned a maneuver that surprised him: they were creating shell companies in the Cayman Islands to stockpile Bitcoin. “Why are you doing that?” he asked. “It’s because of ransomware,” one replied. “If we have to pay a ransom, we need to be able to do so quickly.” Bill was intrigued. He knew the process of setting up a shell company, and of handling and accounting for millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin, would be “a pain in the ass” for a publicly traded corporation—something they’d only do if they really thought they needed to. He called friends who had left SecondMarket to work at Digital Currency Group, a firm founded by Silbert that invested in Bitcoin and blockchain companies.

He called friends who had left SecondMarket to work at Digital Currency Group, a firm founded by Silbert that invested in Bitcoin and blockchain companies. Bill wanted to know if anyone had heard of corporations holding Bitcoin reserves in case of a ransomware attack. “Hey, is this a thing?” he asked. “Oh yeah, it’s a thing, and we know because we get calls every day,” a contact told him. Some of the businesses calling Digital Currency Group wanted more than a Bitcoin stockpile; already hit by ransomware, they wanted the firm to pay the Bitcoin ransom on their behalf. Digital Currency turned them away. Paying ransoms was outside the scope of its business, and it was afraid of running afoul of government regulations. But where Digital Currency saw risk, Bill sensed opportunity.

Samsam Kandi happens to be the name of an Iranian village, and the gang was eventually discovered to be operating from Iran. One of Proven Data’s final payments to SamSam—for 1.6 bitcoin (about $9,000 at the time)—was sent in November 2018. The payment moved from Proven Data’s Bitcoin wallet to one specified by the attackers, and ultimately to one linked directly to the Iranian hackers. Twelve days after Proven Data made the payment came the indictment of the two Iranians who allegedly developed SamSam. The U.S. Treasury Department banned payments to two Bitcoin wallets connected to the attackers, citing sanctions on the Iranian regime. Victor Congionti said that Proven Data did not know the hackers were affiliated with Iran until they were indicted.


pages: 246 words: 70,404

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free by Cody Wilson

3D printing, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, active measures, Airbnb, airport security, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, assortative mating, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Cody Wilson, digital rights, disintermediation, DIY culture, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, Google Glasses, gun show loophole, jimmy wales, lifelogging, Mason jar, means of production, Menlo Park, Minecraft, national security letter, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, printed gun, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Skype, Streisand effect, thinkpad, WikiLeaks, working poor

Both sides, the manufacturers and the political class, even preferred it that way. It would be terrible if bitcoiners were to just sleepwalk into letting the bureaucrats license their firms and activities. “There’s this bitcoin honey badger meme now which really gets under my skin,” Amir went on. “In essence it goes that it doesn’t matter what people or governments do, Bitcoin can just shrug it off and keep going. But it’s this simplistic lens, you know. It discards all of the technological issues and threats facing the protocol that we strive to protect against. Even people like Andreas push this. The idea is that Bitcoin as a consensus system subject to all power groups acting on it is an invincible agent of change no matter what.

Passing alongside an old border village, Amir brought up the European Central Bank’s new report on Bitcoin, which at that time had simply mentioned the prospect of regulation. “Everyone says it could have been worse!” he exclaimed. “This is the consensus. But these are the same people who accept the ‘being moderate’ fallacy. Like if there are two factions, they will balance out and the market will somehow find the best solution, despite being rigged by the powerful using influence and power to establish their vise grip on Bitcoin.” I nodded. I said the American gun industry was already long in the hands of the state, making it very hard to do anything innovative as a private person.

I stayed a step behind him, watching my Romanian friend navigate the cobbled streets and cramped corners. I had told Ben by email that Mihai read Falkvinge, the first leader of the Pirate Party. Among his other responsibilities, Mihai was the editor-in-chief of Bitcoin magazine, a position I was told he took after an employee of the magazine ran off with 200,000 bitcoin. Serious money, even at the start of 2013. We slipped through a breezeway and into the stark wind. We passed a gate and climbed a marbled spiral stair. At the highest floor, from behind the first door, I heard a great murmur. Inside were freaks and gangsters, dissidents and hackers, madmen and millionaires.


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

Then, on 18 August 2008, a month before the financial crisis broke in earnest, a new domain name was registered anonymously: bitcoin.org. Two weeks later, somebody with the user name ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ posted a nine-page paper outlining an idea for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system called bitcoin. The bitcoin system went live a few months later, on the day the British government reported its second bailout of the banks, an event referred to by Satoshi, who quoted a headline from The Times in his announcement of bitcoin’s birth. A month later Satoshi announced on the Peer-to-Peer Foundation website: ‘I’ve developed a new open source P2P e-cash system called Bitcoin. It’s completely decentralised, with no central server or trusted parties, because everything is based on crypto proof instead of trust.

It has since slowly declined. At the time of writing, about $6 billion worth of money is held in bitcoins. But it is still a long way from taking over as the world’s reserve currency. It does not yet work as a unit of account. The volatility and bubble-like behaviour of bitcoins are not encouraging for a world reserve currency, and nor is its relatively small supply. It is also still not easy to get many traders, even online, to accept bitcoins. The first bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, collapsed in a pile of fraud. Moreover, bitcoins have proved very popular with drug dealers, especially via an online exchange called Silk Road.

I have yet to come across a description of blockchain technology in English, as opposed to mathematics, that is really clear. In outline, I know that bitcoin is effectively a public ledger – a compendium of transactions, stored by bitcoin users all over the world. To participate, you effectively create a part of that ledger, and share it with others as a cryptographically bound ‘block’. This makes bitcoin infallible and public as a register of who has transferred value to whom, with no bank or other body verifying the fact. Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym. The founder or founders of bitcoin wished to remain anonymous, for fairly obvious reasons. Previous inventors of private money had often ended up in deep trouble with a jealous state.


pages: 378 words: 94,468

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High by Mike Power

air freight, Alexander Shulgin, banking crisis, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, drug harm reduction, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, frictionless, fulfillment center, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, John Bercow, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Network effects, nuclear paranoia, packet switching, pattern recognition, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, pre–internet, QR code, RAND corporation, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, trade route, Whole Earth Catalog, Zimmermann PGP

A new kind of currency is making official control of this area even harder. Bitcoin is an electronic cash system, produced using cryptography. It is a peer-to-peer currency, made by users, meaning that no central authority issues money or tracks transactions. For every legal bitcoin user, selling web design services or carrying out coding jobs for which they are paid in the currency, there are many more using bitcoins to buy drugs on the Silk Road. Bitcoin is today the preferred choice of hundreds of online drug dealers. You can buy bitcoins using cash or other currencies in hundreds of ways, with varying levels of anonymity. Using bitcoins can be, depending on how you use them, almost completely anonymous.

A lot of people out there think you do.’7 But the determined user can retain anonymity easily enough in the US at least, by entering a bank and paying cash into an exchanger’s account, for bitcoins are now traded just as dollars and euros are. (They now have a value that is decided by the market. The total bitcoin market capitalization stood at £72 million in November 2012 – with around 10 million coins valued by the secondary market at around £7.50 each.) By this method, cash exits the real world, and from there can enter the miasmic smog of this market. Bitcoin addresses are generated anonymously and instantly, and infinitely. You can launder bitcoins bought with pounds from your bank account and send it through 100, or 1,000, anonymous bitcoin accounts that you have generated and which you control in just a few hours, then use them to buy drugs.

My belief is today those that seek personal freedom become enemies of the state (as far as the state is concerned) and are in the eyes of the state criminals. Not unlike those who deal in drugs on Silk Road.’ In 2009 Laszlo Hancyez, an American programmer, made the world’s first purchase using bitcoins.5 He sent the bitcoins to a British man who called in a credit card payment transatlantically. It was a pizza, and it cost 10,000 – a sum worth £75,000 in November 2012. Today, many thousands of bitcoins are circulating around Silk Road users, and around 12,000 per day are spent on the site, at a value in late 2012 of around £7.50 each. Silk Road users value the currency for its supposed anonymity, although it is not entirely untrackable to the curious and competent, nor is it entirely safe.


pages: 349 words: 114,038

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

Better, the Spider calculates, to buy time and find a way to control BitCoin, and make a profit from it. BitCoin is a surprisingly strong model in some ways, yet it still has several vulnerabilities. It will depend on exchanges for converting BitCoin to other currencies until it gains (if it ever does) a sufficient internal market. BitCoin transactions -- the blockchain -- are essentially public, and it's been shown that you can tie transactions back to individual identities. Lastly, and most importantly, the whole system depends on a distributed network of "miners," who recalculate transactions, and in the process generate new BitCoin. BitCoin depends on its miners to remain honest.

It depends on conventional broadband, so is vulnerable to surveillance. BitCoin transactions are public and individual BitCoin holders' transactions can be identified. It depends on a "digital wallet" held on a computer, which is vulnerable to malware attacks and physical seizure. The history of money on the Internet and the power of the banking industry suggest that BitCoin will come under serious attack in coming years. We can expect to see the same attacks that we've seen often before: Financial blockades, prosecutions, and technical attacks on BitCoin exchanges. Association of BitCoin users with terrorists and child pornographers.

It turned out the FBI had been demanding secret keys from him, with a gag order to stop him talking about it. So it seems fair to assume that the Spider puts pressure on many firms, including US-based BitCoin exchanges. FinCEN has stated that anyone buying or selling BitCoins for profit (even in tiny amounts will need a license. This includes BitCoin miners, who are key to the BitCoin network, since they process transactions. In May 2013, the largest BitCoin exchange, Mt. Gox, a Japanese business, had its US accounts seized by the Department of Homeland Security, another of the Spider's many arms, for operating without a money transmitter's license.


pages: 316 words: 117,228

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

Recall the dilemma of Antonio in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice discussed in chapter 4, whose ship had not reached shore a n e w co d e ? 199 yet. As it happened, it never did, but it might have; and indeed, most ships do at least most of the time. There is, however, one aspect in which Bitcoin departs from these other forms of private money. Bitcoin is designed as money without credit: nobody can spend Bitcoin without proof of ownership.43 The “Bitcoin Manifesto,” published by the ominous Satoshi Nakamoto, explains that a key motivation for creating Bitcoin was to solve the “double-spending problem.”44 Yet, the ability to spend money one does not have is—for better or worse—the very essence of capitalism. Other forms of private money, the notes, bills of exchange, asset-backed securities, etc., are IOUs that are all assigned and traded with the expectation that they are convertible into state money whenever needed, and hopefully at a profit; convertibility may not be guaranteed, but the promise of convertibility makes these assets attractive and finds them buyers.

Cryptocurrencies promise greater purity than either state or private money in theory, but in reality, they are deeply infected by the same features that afflict the real world of money, namely, credit, instability, and power. As noted, proof of sufficient funds is required before a Bitcoin transaction closes and the complete chain of verified transaction is recorded on an immutable digital ledger. Yet, 200 c h a P te r 8 nobody prevents investors from buying Bitcoin on credit, which will have to be paid back in state money, whatever the future price of Bitcoin might be when the debt becomes due. The purity of Bitcoin was also compromised when the cryptocurrency was admitted to futures trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.45 In a futures trade, parties are betting on the ability to predict future price movements, but they will have to deliver, even if they lose.

Classic theories of money hold that money must perform three functions: it should be a store of value, a means of exchange, and a unit of account.50 Bitcoin has at best traces of the first two features: Its value has been pushed temporarily to unprecedented heights—but the high volatility of its price suggests that it is a lousy storage of value. And while many banks, retailers, and private parties now accept Bitcoins as a means of exchange, their reference price remains the US dollar and, like all holders of private assets, most investors expect to be able to convert Bitcoin into dollars (or another hard currency) at the time of their choosing. The brains behind Bitcoin, whoever they might be, had envisioned that this new private currency would become independent of, indeed an alternative to, state money.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

The motivation was twofold: identify users of the Bitcoin system/currency and prevent criminal money laundering systems from circumventing existing controls. At the core of Bitcoin is a decentralised ledger system that means that no one person, organisation or government controls the way Bitcoin works. There are only a few thousand Bitcoin nodes,13 but the distributed ledger system that allocates the millions of bitcoins around the world is constantly syncing and updating the records of digital currency moving from one wallet to another. For the same reason that regulators generally don’t like the Bitcoin system, i.e. a wallet functioning independent of the wallet holder’s identity, it makes the blockchain or something similar, much better suited to the future of money.

Bitcoin, however, is decentralised so it is impossible to block it or stop it without effectively pulling the plug on the entire Internet, which would seem like overkill. The only way to regulate Bitcoin’s activity was to control how people bought, sold and traded BTC,12 or how they converted other currencies into bitcoin through exchanges. The way regulators eventually cracked down on this in places like the United States, China and Russia was to make unlicensed bitcoin exchanges illegal. You could not buy, sell or trade in bitcoins unless the exchange was a licensed money transmitter or financial services business. This enabled the regulator to ensure that each user or owner of a Bitcoin wallet had his identity verified as per the traditional banking system.

There is no such thing as a bitcoin, of course, at least not in the physical sense. The blockchain simply keeps track of an ever-expanding list of addresses, and how many units of bitcoin are at each of those addresses. Figure 9.5: At the heart of Bitcoin is a distributed ledger system that is far more efficient for digital transactions than the existing banking system. If you own bitcoin, what you actually own is the private cryptographic key to unlock a specific address with a value stored in it—it just so happens that value corresponds to the number of bitcoins you hold. The private key looks like a long string of numbers and letters.


pages: 135 words: 26,407

How to DeFi by Coingecko, Darren Lau, Sze Jin Teh, Kristian Kho, Erina Azmi, Tm Lee, Bobby Ong

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, buy and hold, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, diversification, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, information retrieval, litecoin, margin call, new economy, passive income, payday loans, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, QR code, reserve currency, robo advisor, smart contracts, tulip mania, two-sided market

An example of an Inverse Synthetic Asset is Inverse Bitcoin (iBTC) which tracks the inverse price performance of Bitcoin. There are 3 key values related to each Inverse Synths - the entry price, lower limit, and upper limit. Let’s consider Inverse Synthetic Bitcoin (iBTC) as an example. Assume that at the time of creation, Bitcoin (BTC) is priced at $10,600 - this will be the entry price. If Bitcoin moves down $400 to $10,200, the iBTC Synth will now be worth an additional $400 and will be priced at $11,000. The opposite will also be true. If Bitcoin moves up to $11,000, the iBTC Synth will now be worth $10,200.

As a result of this, the black market demand for the USD has risen, causing the exchange rate to be approximately 30% higher than the officially declared rate by the government.18 Besides placing a limit on purchases, the Central Bank of Argentina also exposed 800 citizens’ names, ID number and tax identification because they exceeded the previous purchase limit of $10,000.19 Furthermore, Argentinians who work for foreign companies and are invoiced in USD must liquidate their USD to Argentine Peso within 5 days. According to Mariano, several years ago, many Argentinian freelancers preferred getting paid in Bitcoin. While this worked well in the earlier years prior to 2018 when Bitcoin price was on an uptrend, as the market turned downwards, there was an urgent need to convert Bitcoin immediately to Argentine Peso otherwise their salary will be greatly reduced. While Bitcoin provided many Argentinians with an alternative way of being paid, the volatile nature of Bitcoin meant that there was a need for “better money”. For Mariano, DAI is the solution to this problem as it has all the advantages of cryptocurrencies while staying pegged to the USD.

Multiple smart contracts are combined to operate with each other, which would be known as decentralized application (Dapp) in order to fulfill more complex processes and computation. ~ What is Ether (ETH)? Ether is the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain. It is like money and can be used for everyday transactions similar to Bitcoin. You can send Ether to another person to purchase goods and services based on the current market value. The Ethereum blockchain records the transfer and ensures the finality of the transaction. Besides that, Ether is also used to pay for the fee that allows smart contracts and Dapps to run on the Ethereum network.


pages: 390 words: 109,870

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

You don’t even have to give your real name to start up an account. Bitcoin wrestles control of the money supply away from the state. There is a cap on the total number of bitcoins that can ever be produced: 21 million. New bitcoins are not minted by any central authority. Instead, anyone who dedicates their computing power to verifying the transactions competes to earn a very small number of new bitcoins each time they do so (this is called ‘mining’). As more bitcoins are created (approximately 14 million have been created so far), the remaining bitcoins require more computing power to mine.* The last bitcoin is expected to be mined around 2140.

Many people assume bitcoin to be completely decentralised, but if a miner, or a group of miners, controlled over half the computing power that works on verifying the transaction, it could feasibly force a change on the blockchain transaction list however it wished, create a fork of the blockchain, and all the other computers would start to work on the new version (the protocol is written so that all computers work from the longest blockchain). In bitcoin, a few large pools can register most of the new bitcoin blocks, which could push them to the 51 per cent threshold for mining power: which could result in a takeover. Indeed, in 2014 one mining rig took over 51 per cent of bitcoin’s hashing power for twelve straight hours. One of bitcoin’s goals was to be a free system, independent of anyone’s control. With small pools, no one has this kind of control. There is also an environmental problem. With no other way to establish whether miners are bona fide, the bitcoin architecture forces them to do a lot of hard computing; this ‘proof of work’, without which there can be no reward, insures that all concerned have skin in the game.

Afghanistan—and then a similar experience working in Libya with rebels fighting Gaddafi—turned her into a fully committed anarchist who thought state power was the root of most of the world’s problems.17 In 2013 a former US military employee told her about bitcoin, and she immediately thought that it was a way to circumnavigate the state entirely. Bitcoin, which was invented in 2009, is digital cash, just a string of numbers. Anyone can download a bitcoin wallet or QR code on to their computer or phone, buy bitcoins with traditional currency from a currency exchange and use them to buy or sell a growing number of products and services as easily as sending an email. Transactions are secure, fast and free, with no central authority controlling value or supply, and no middlemen taking a slice.


AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

APPLICATION OF QUANTUM COMPUTING TO SECURITY In “Quantum Genocide,” the unhinged physicist, Marc Rousseau, uses a breakthrough in quantum computing to steal bitcoins. Bitcoin is by far the largest cryptocurrency that can be exchanged into other assets like gold and cash. But unlike gold, it has no inherent value. Unlike cash, it is not backed by any government or central bank. Bitcoins exist virtually on the Internet, with transactions guaranteed by computation that is unbreakable by classical computers. Bitcoins are also computationally guaranteed to be limited to no more than 21 million coins, which avoids oversupply and inflation. Bitcoins became particularly attractive after COVID-19, because more corporations and individuals are looking for safe assets impervious to inflation caused by central banks’ quantitative easing.

” * * * — LORE IN THE HACKER underworld had it that Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious father of Bitcoin, had died in a Guantánamo cell two decades earlier. He’d left behind no less than a million bitcoins, mined in his early years. The currency was supposedly hidden in a digital wallet that relied on a script pattern known as a P2PK—or pay to public key. If the rumors were true, the treasure was a golden opportunity for prospectors. Bitcoin users had all but abandoned P2PK to history because every Bitcoin transaction initiated with P2PK made its public key visible to the network. Compared to later script patterns for Bitcoin transactions—like P2PKH, which revealed only the public key hash, rather than the public key itself—P2PK was less secure.

And at the January 2021 price of $60,000 per bitcoin, that comes out to $120 billion worth of bitcoins. This is what thieves went after in “Quantum Genocide.” If you have an old P2PK account, put this book down now and go secure your wallet! Why don’t people using the old P2PK scripts move that money to secure wallets? Well, they could, but most haven’t. I can think of three explanations. First, many of the wallet owners have lost their private key, because the keys were too long to be remembered, and people didn’t care as much when bitcoins were not that valuable a decade ago. Second, these bitcoin owners were unaware of this vulnerability.


pages: 121 words: 36,908

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

But it turns out that Bitcoin, for all its media hype, may be less significant than some other alternative currencies that currently lack its pretentions. The partisans of Bitcoin aspire for it to substitute for capitalist money. This means it must mediate exchanges of physical goods and services and be a store of value that can make claims on those goods and services. In other words, in order to convince people to take Bitcoins as payment, you have to convince them that Bitcoins are worth something and will continue to be worth something in the future. Many Bitcoin evangelists believe that because it is not created or regulated by the state, Bitcoins are somehow a more stable store of value. This quixotic fixation—little different, in substance, from an older generation of cranks’ obsession with the gold standard—has led the Bitcoin subculture to naïvely recapitulate the unregulated financial systems of the nineteenth century, with all their crises, crashes, swindles, and panics.

The authors of the study quipped that Wikipedia had become “the encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semi-automated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit.”28 Bitcoins, Doges, and Whuffie A contemporary reader of Doctorow’s book may find that the concept of “Whuffie” resonates more than it used to, because of the renewed prominence of invented nonstate currencies—in particular, the distributed cryptocurrency Bitcoin. As an accounting system that maintains an artificially scarce points system that is nevertheless not tied to the traditional money and banking system, it is of some limited economic interest. But it turns out that Bitcoin, for all its media hype, may be less significant than some other alternative currencies that currently lack its pretentions.

This quixotic fixation—little different, in substance, from an older generation of cranks’ obsession with the gold standard—has led the Bitcoin subculture to naïvely recapitulate the unregulated financial systems of the nineteenth century, with all their crises, crashes, swindles, and panics. The wild fluctuations in the currency’s value belie the Bitcoiners’ faith, as does the fact that several prominent Bitcoin exchanges have collapsed and made off with their clients’ wealth, leaving their victims with no recourse, a consequence of the lack of standards and regulation. The rediscovery of the need for central banking and government regulation is good for a laugh at the expense of a gaggle of libertarian young men, but it tells us little about the future.


pages: 182 words: 53,802

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks by Ann Pettifor

Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, The Chicago School, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail

It helps create activity – artistic, scientific, practical or therapeutic. The bitcoin mania Bitcoins have introduced millions of people to a currency that appeared from nowhere and is, apparently, ‘cryptographic proof’. Whereas private banks can create money by a stroke of the keyboard, the creation of bitcoins involves vast amounts of computer processing power. This power is capable of deploying a complicated algorithm that approximates the effort of ‘mining’ coins.24 The bitcoins so mined have become the new gold and bit-coiners the new goldbugs. This new currency (which claims to be a commodity) is a form of peer-to-peer exchange.

Its advocates are keen followers of Friedrich von Hayek, and cite as inspiration his book, Denationalisation of Money, in which he calls for the production, distribution and management of money to be left to the ‘invisible hand’, so as to end the oversight of regulatory democracy.25 There are two things striking about this new currency. First, its creators (who are computer programmers) have apparently ensured that there can never be more than 21 million coins in existence. (Although bitcoins can be divided into smaller units: the millibitcoin, microbitcoin and satoshi. Satoshi is the smallest amount, representing 0.00000001 bitcoin, one hundred millionth of a bitcoin.) Bitcoin is therefore like gold: its value lies in its scarcity. The potential shortage of bitcoins has added to the currency’s speculative allure, leading to a general rise in its value. However, the volatile rises and subsequent falls in its value have made it unreliable as a means of exchange.

One commentator notes that ‘bitcoin was conceived as a currency that did not require any trust between its users’.26 Equally, its scarcity means that, unlike the endless and myriad social and economic relationships created by credit, the capacity of bitcoin to generate economic activity is limited (to 21 million coins). The currency’s architects deliberately limited the amount of bitcoins in order ostensibly to prevent inflation. In reality, the purpose is to ratchet up the value of bitcoins, most of which are owned by originators of the scheme. In this sense, bitcoin miners are no different from goldbugs talking up the value of of a finite quantity of gold, from tulip growers talking up the price of rare tulips in the seventeenth century, or from Bernard Madoff talking up his fraudulent Ponzi scheme.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

People paying with Bitcoin have to use a name to identify themselves. That name is known as a Bitcoin address. A Bitcoin address is an ugly string of alphanumeric characters, such as 1BvBMSEYstWetqTFn5Au4m4GFg7xJaNVN2. A Bitcoin address reveals how much Bitcoin is associated with that address. That information is stored on a public ledger known as a blockchain. Thus, when someone tries to pay with Bitcoin, those who maintain the blockchain check it to see whether the sender has enough Bitcoin. If so, the transaction is listed on the blockchain, so that future sellers will know that the Bitcoins associated with that address have been transferred to a new Bitcoin address.

These proxy servers acted as “cutouts”—to use spy terminology—links in a chain designed to obscure identities. To cover their tracks even further, Fancy Bear paid for these servers using Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a type of digital currency designed to be used like cash. Owners keep track of their Bitcoin using an app known as a wallet. They use the wallet whenever they want to pay for something from someone who accepts Bitcoin payments. Bitcoin is believed to be anonymous. It is not, as we will see. Fancy Bear also used Bitcoin to purchase several domain names. On March 22, pretending to be “Frank Merdeux from Paris,” Fancy Bear paid to typosquat misdepatrment.com, which directed users to the proxy server in Illinois.

Most cybercriminals today use cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. When ransomware encrypts someone’s hard drive or a company’s network, making their data unreadable, and demands that the victim pay ransom for the decryption key, the medium of exchange is almost always Bitcoin. To target the payment systems of modern cybercrime we should, therefore, target Bitcoin. Bitcoin is often advertised as an anonymous form of payment, like cash. When you hand over a dollar for gum, the cashier doesn’t need to know who you are. The cashier just takes your money. But Bitcoin is not like cash in this respect. Bitcoin is not anonymous—it is pseudonymous.


Data and the City by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic management, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, dematerialisation, digital divide, digital map, digital rights, distributed ledger, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, floating exchange rates, folksonomy, functional programming, global value chain, Google Earth, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, nowcasting, open economy, openstreetmap, OSI model, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, place-making, power law, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, semantic web, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, software studies, statistical model, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, text mining, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, urban planning, urban sprawl, web application

Pschetz Ledger 1: money, time and the blockchain There are many elements that make Bitcoin an interesting alternative currency, but critically it is the development and implementation of the blockchain – a distributed ledger that contains all transaction records ever conducted. The Bitcoin blockchain is an encrypted, cumulative ledger composed of ‘blocks’ of transactions that are verified by miners and which lead back to the first ‘Genesis’ block whose instance is timed as 18:15:05 GMT, on 3 January 2009, signifying the start of the currency. Blocks can contain the social, economic and geographic information about the senders and receivers of Bitcoin wallets, time of transaction, amount of Bitcoins being transferred, fees and IP addresses from which location can also be identified. Transaction blocks are generated approximately every 10 minutes, a timing that is calibrated by the network – if blocks are completed quicker, the difficulty of the mining is increased, and vice versa.

In this way, there are significant differences with Bitcoin and its reliance on a blockchain. Given the nature of digital systems, perfect copies of money are conceptually even easier to make than the counterfeiting of physical money. The radical invention of the blockchain uses multiple copies of a single ledger distributed across a network to deal with the ‘double spending’ potential of digital money, that is, duplicating currency and spending it twice or more, is a central feature to the Bitcoin platform. In fiat currencies, third parties, for example, banks, balance the books at the close of each trading day. In Bitcoin, ‘double spend’ is prevented by ensuring digital scarcity through the verification of transactions through the mining process and transaction blocks.

This pattern from materialist desires toward social projects reoccurs as participants place increasing faith in the trusted ledger, and for the two groups it provided the stimulus for two distinct iterations of the GeoCoin software. Civic Blocks (Project Team: Dorota Kamrowska-Zaluska, Hanna Obracht-Prondzynska, Eileen Wagner) Civic Blocks transposed the value of a fraction of a Bitcoin into a vote for how a City Council should spend a proportion of its budget. The team suggested that a City Council could convert a proportion of its capital resource budget into Bitcoin, perhaps 10 per cent. Using the unique capabilities of Bitcoins to divide them into Figure 11.2 S creenshot taken from smartphone displaying the Civic Blocks software in use. The position of the user is denoted by the marker who is spending their vote/coins on a bicycle rack project. 152 C.


pages: 291 words: 85,822

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit by Aja Raden

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, intentional community, iterative process, low interest rates, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, sugar pill, survivorship bias, theory of mind, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa

Let’s talk about the biggest, sexiest Pyramid Scheme currently going: Bitcoin. Bitcoin (in case you live in a fallout shelter) is an unregulated, nonphysical cryptocurrency based on blockchain technology. Blockchain technology is a snazzy piece of computer programming that allows for the secure and traceable transfer of Bitcoin (or anything else) almost instantaneously. Bitcoin itself is the digital currency that is “created” when so-called miners (really, nerds sitting at their computers) solve complex mathematical problems. As they do, a permanent nonlocalized ledger is created that, like the Book of Life, tracks the existence of every Bitcoin on the planet, from when, where, and how it was created—onward.

The problem is, Bitcoin isn’t actually a currency. Not because it’s digital or decentralized. Unregulated is a problem, but not the problem. Bitcoin isn’t a currency because it’s simply not. Bitcoin fundamentally lacks the basic properties of real currency.37 Sure, you can use it to buy things, in certain venues—though the same is true of live chickens—but there’s no government or entity backing its worth; no one sets prices in Bitcoin; and no, you mostly can’t buy things with it (especially now that Silk Road* has been shut down).38 That last one really gives away the game: Bitcoin isn’t currency because people don’t spend it.

Nobody buys a car in Bitcoin (even if you could) because the car would be worth less than the Bitcoin by the time you got home. Since it has no backing and it’s not even a physical object, its worth is based solely on its theoretically limited supply and its popularity,39 making its value balloon exponentially. It’s not meant to be spent. It’s meant to be hoarded. And that’s precisely what a lot of billionaires are currently doing.40 A company called Xapo, run by Argentine entrepreneur Wences Casares, has spent years persuading Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires that Bitcoin is the future—exactly what kind of future I guess we can sort out later—but in it they’ll need their Bitcoin.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

But then Kenna caught a lucky break by acting on his preoccupations—cryptography, “alternative finance,” libertarian politics, and economic collapse. Kenna accumulated a small hoard of Bitcoin when it was virtually worthless. In 2011, he launched a Bitcoin exchange, Tradehill, from an office on the beach in Chile. His cofounders included New York bankers and a former senior engineer from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. By 2013, when the goldbugs, money launderers, and Wall Street speculators joined the Bitcoin frenzy, Kenna had become a charter member of the “Bitcoin millionaires’ club,” and his distaste for “unethical” business practices had evolved. He now argued that the marketing of Ponzi schemes should be permitted so long as the terms were clearly stated.

It was called 20Mission, and it had been designated San Francisco’s “best hacker hostel” in 2014 by a local alternative newspaper, SF Weekly. The paper said 20Mission was a 41-room complex founded by Bitcoin trader and entrepreneur Jered Kenna, who recruited an international group of start-up founders and artists to coexist there. With a chicken coop, shared kitchen, and commanding view of the city’s downtown, it has the feel of university student housing—the residents are young, the parties are crowded, the idealism is embedded in the architecture. And here’s another perk: [the owner] accepts rent in Bitcoin. It sounded ideal. I didn’t have any Bitcoins, but they couldn’t be harder to come by than real money. As I researched further, it turned out 20Mission was so central to the San Francisco cryptocurrency scene that the Bitcoin Trader blog—an authoritative source on such matters—nicknamed it Bitcoin’s Hogwarts.

He now argued that the marketing of Ponzi schemes should be permitted so long as the terms were clearly stated. It was all in good fun, like a friendly game of poker. Of course, Bitcoin itself was a Ponzi scheme. As with so many other Bitcoin companies before it, Tradehill collapsed in a morass of litigation. Kenna was “pulling my hair out … not sleeping,” and once more left holding the bag. “I was, like, completely broke and I needed somewhere to live in San Francisco, which is horrible,” Kenna recalled in a video interview with a Bitcoin blogger. “I talked to a friend of mine and he said, ‘Well there’s this old crackhouse that you could get a good deal on, but it’s terrible.’


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

The system is designed to ensure no more than twenty-one million Bitcoins are ever generated, thereby preventing a central authority from flooding the market with new Bitcoins. Most people purchase Bitcoins on third-party exchanges with traditional currencies, such as dollars or euros, or with credit cards. The exchange rates against the dollar for Bitcoin fluctuate wildly and have ranged from fifty cents per coin around the time of its introduction to over $1,240 in November 2013. People can send Bitcoins to each other using computers or mobile apps, where coins are stored in “digital wallets.” Bitcoins can be directly exchanged between users anywhere in the world using unique alphanumeric identifiers, akin to e-mail addresses, and there are no transaction fees.

,” io9, March 26, 2012. 47 “I will sell my kidney”: Dan Bilefsky, “Black Market for Body Parts Spreads in Europe,” New York Times, June 28, 2012. 48 “Donate a kidney”: Denis Campbell and Nicola Davison, “Illegal Kidney Trade Booms as New Organ Is ‘Sold Every Hour,’ ” Guardian, May 27, 2012. 49 At least one seventeen-year-old: “9 on Trial in China over Teenager’s Sale of Kidney for iPad and iPhone,” CNN, Aug. 10, 2012. 50 In a deeply disturbing report: European Cybercrime Centre, “Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children Online,” Oct. 2013. 51 Organized criminal networks: Paul Gallagher, “Live Streamed Videos of Abuse and Pay-per-View Child Rape Among ‘Disturbing’ Cybercrime Trends, Europol Report Reveals,” Independent, Oct. 16, 2013; Paul Peachey, “Number of UK Paedophiles ‘Live-Streaming’ Child Abuse Films Soars, Warns CEOP,” Independent, July 1, 2013. 52 In one incident: Ann Cahill, “New Age of Cybercrime: Live Child Rapes, Sextortion, and Advanced Malware,” Irish Examiner, Feb. 11, 2014. 53 The system is designed: “How Does Bitcoin Work?,” Economist, April 11, 2013. 54 Bitcoin is the world’s largest: Nick Farrell, “Understanding Bitcoin and Crypto Currency,” Tech Radar, April 7, 2014. 55 Because Bitcoin can be spent: Joshua Brustein, “Bitcoin May Not Be So Anonymous, After All,” Bloomberg Businessweek, Aug. 27, 2013. 56 There are now more than seventy: Alan Yu, “How Virtual Currency Could Make It Easier to Move Money,” NPR.​org, Jan. 15, 2014. 57 Hackers have been able to steal: Robin Sidel, Eleanor Warnock, and Takashi Mochizuki, “Almost Half a Billion Worth of Bitcoins Vanish,” Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2014. 58 Beyond crypto currencies: Marc Santora, William K.

Anytime a purchase takes place, it is recorded in a public ledger known as the “blockchain,” which ensures no duplicate transactions are permitted. Bitcoin is the world’s largest crypto currency, so-called because it uses “cryptography to regulate the creation and transfer of money, rather than relying on central authorities.” Bitcoin acceptance is growing rapidly, and it is possible to use Bitcoins to buy cupcakes in San Francisco, cocktails in Manhattan, and a Subway sandwich in Allentown. They can also be used to purchase a new Tesla Model S, to pay your DIRECTV bill, to sign up with OkCupid, or even to book a ticket on Richard Branson’s upcoming Virgin Galactic space flight. Because Bitcoin can be spent online without the need for a bank account and no ID is required to buy and sell the crypto currency, it provides a convenient system for anonymous, or more precisely pseudonymous, transactions, where a user’s true name is hidden.


pages: 400 words: 121,988

Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets by Donald MacKenzie

algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Cambridge Analytica, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Earth, Hacker Ethic, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inventory management, Jim Simons, level 1 cache, light touch regulation, linked data, lockdown, low earth orbit, machine readable, market design, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, Satoshi Nakamoto, Small Order Execution System, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, UUNET, zero-sum game

Since May 2020, the prize has been 6.25 bitcoins, at the time of writing worth around $60,000.31 Satoshi’s original vision appears to have been that any bitcoin user could become a miner, simply by installing the requisite software on a laptop or other ordinary computer system. The analogy here with the milling of grain is actually close: the vision was, essentially, of hand-milling. Bitcoin’s water and windmills turned out to be ASICs, application-specific integrated circuits, which are silicon chips designed for a specific purpose such as bitcoin mining. A mining ASIC is vastly more efficient for that purpose than an ordinary computer. There is no abbot of bitcoin who, like the abbot of St Albans, monopolizes bitcoin ASICs—although there is one dominant designer of them, the Chinese company Bitmain, which has some 90 percent of the market (Liu and McMorrow 2019), and the miners who use Bitmain’s ASICs do tend to be organized in very large pools—but there has been deep unhappiness in the world of cryptocurrencies about the shift to ASICs.

The issue that most clearly makes material political economy applicable is how to motivate at least a subset of the users of a cryptocurrency to check the validity of each transaction (including checking the validity of each other’s checking) and take part in adding it irreversibly to the blockchain, the record of every transaction that has taken place. The solution adopted for bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto, its pseudonymous inventor, is known as proof-of-work. Roughly every ten minutes, all day, every day, bitcoin miners, as they are called (and I like the moniker’s materiality) compete to be the first to find a hash of a block of transactions that is smaller than a certain target binary number (a hash is a cryptographic transformation by a predetermined algorithm). The reward for the winner is a set amount of newly created bitcoin. Since May 2020, the prize has been 6.25 bitcoins, at the time of writing worth around $60,000.31 Satoshi’s original vision appears to have been that any bitcoin user could become a miner, simply by installing the requisite software on a laptop or other ordinary computer system.

Efficient ethereum ASICs have been developed, although they haven’t yet swept the board as fully as their bitcoin equivalents have. Another aspect of the material politics of cryptocurrencies is environmental. A back-of-the-envelope calculation of bitcoin mining’s global electricity consumption at the beginning of June 2020 is 4.5 gigawatts, the equivalent of that of an entire small country.32 (Ireland, for example, consumes around 3.1 gigawatts, as de Vries [2018: 804] points out.) In early June 2020, bitcoin transactions were averaging around 300,000 a day, which implies that each individual bitcoin transaction was consuming, at that point, around 360 kilowatt-hours, equivalent to leaving a 2-kilowatt domestic electric heater running full blast for just over a week.33 Much, but not all, of that electricity comes from renewable sources.


pages: 382 words: 120,064

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

Instead of enabling merchants to process credit card payments from Visa or MasterCard, Bitcoin bypasses the system entirely in favour of device-to-device transactions using near-field communications technology. Bitcoin’s new currency doesn’t require a third-party processor or a plug-in dongle. Because of this, Bitcoin can afford to charge users much less per transaction. At the moment, the average Bitcoin transaction fee is 0.99 per cent, while Square and PayPal’s processing apps charge 2.75 per cent and 2.7 per cent per swipe of your credit card. Like any currency, Bitcoins can also be exchanged for US dollars through a processing service.

However, suspicious transactions will still get flagged by the traditional banking system when cash is put into or taken out of the Bitcoin economy. So what’s holding Bitcoin back from shaking up the global economy and becoming a true rival currency, especially in the digital payments space? Security is the main concern. Unlike your credit card or existing bank accounts in the system, Bitcoin currently provides no protection or compensation in the event of fraud. Recently, a hacker managed to raid several Bitcoin accounts around the world and got away with $228,845.20 While current technology would enable tracking of IP activity around trades and the flow of Bitcoins, in the current instance of fraud, the weak link was the Bitcoin exchange, which didn’t have the monitoring tools in place to track the hack.

“Increasingly, these virtual economies are leading to real money trades,” notes Hunter, one of a handful of academics closely following this trend. Bitcoin is an experimental new digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. It uses peer-to-peer technology to operate, with no central authority, managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network. Bitcoin is also the name of the open-source software that enables the use of this innovative virtual currency. Over the past few years, the peer-to-peer currency it has created has gained a surprising foothold in the global market. There are now multiple Bitcoin-processing apps for Android and the iPhone, as well as an online payment system similar to PayPal.


pages: 180 words: 55,805

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

But even with risk and current high volatility, citizens in some parts of the world have less risk in holding Bitcoin than their own currency. The value can be moved across borders seamlessly or used as a payment mechanism when currency fails. In Venezuela today, for example, Bitcoin is already acting as a lifesaving currency for those who have it, as it is a much more secure payment medium than the local currency. Bitcoin’s high volatility is often used as an example of why it cannot be trusted as a global payment mechanism. Bitcoin is volatile; it lost 30 percent of its value in 2018, only to rise over 100 percent in the first six months of 2019.

The more that trust is eroded, the more likely that an alternative currency becomes a more trusted mechanism. That alternative—whether Bitcoin or something different—could emerge quickly. The digital and distributed nature of Bitcoin allows it to benefit from a network effect (which was discussed in chapter 2) with each additional user enhancing its value. As more users trust the system, more trust accretes to the system. Although it is hard to imagine it surpassing any of the main currencies, that reality could easily change tomorrow as more currencies come under pressure; the by-product of that pressure increases the value of Bitcoin or Bitcoin type of network. In other words, what starts as a way for citizens in Venezuela and other regions of the world to escape crushing currency devaluation could jump from country to country and easily build to a point where it becomes the de facto standard of trust.

It also enabled a single country to change the rules by printing more currency, and therefore set the stage to return to where we are now, where each country manipulates its currency for political gain while worsening a framework for fair trade. Bitcoin (and other cybercurrencies) is an attempt at a solution. The promise of Bitcoin was to create a system that was decentralized in nature, unable to be manipulated by anyone—including governments. As we have seen, money follows the rules of supply and demand; the US dollar goes up in value as demand for it increases relative to supply. Governments can change or manipulate this natural dynamic by increasing supply—printing more money, which lowers the value of their currency relative to others. Bitcoin attempts to change that dynamic by forever fixing supply at twenty-one million Bitcoins.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Journal of Cleaner Production, 177, 448–463. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.12.239 “From Bitcoin ‘mines’ to server ‘farms’ to data ‘warehouses’”: Ensmenger. The environmental history of computing. Central Asian countries … advertise for Bitcoin mining operations to be hosted in their jurisdictions: Redman, J. (2020, February 12). 3 cents per kWh — Central Asia’s cheap electricity entices Chinese bitcoin miners. Retrieved from https://news.bitcoin.com/central-asias-cheap-electricity-chinese-bitcoin-miners/ Estimates put electric energy consumption associated with Bitcoin mining at around 83.67 terawatt-hours per year: Digiconomist. (n.d.). Bitcoin energy consumption index.

A major study by a team of researchers at Canada’s McMaster University found that the biggest contributions to carbon emissions are likely going to come from the explosion in smartphone usage, although the largest culprits right now are still data centres (45 percent of the total information and communications technology carbon footprint), followed by communications networks (24 percent).347 Probably the most perverse example of energy consumption and waste related to digital technologies comes from the digital currency market: Bitcoin. A Bitcoin is a virtual commodity that exists only as binary digits in a distributed digital ledger called a blockchain. Unlike paper bills or coins, Bitcoins have no physical quality. And unlike the credit card issued by your bank, the currency is entirely decentralized, without any intermediaries. New Bitcoin currency is generated by a “mining” process that entails solving complex mathematical problems, which in turn require the use of vast and energy-intensive computing resources to solve. As Ensmenger puts it, “From Bitcoin ‘mines’ to server ‘farms’ to data ‘warehouses,’ the places and processes that are used to produce virtual commodities look surprisingly similar to those found in more traditional forms of industrial manufacturing.”348 Ensmenger estimates that the Bitcoin network entails more computing power — “by several orders of magnitude” — than “all of the top 500 supercomputers in the world combined.”

Retrieved May 27, 2020, from https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption; De Vries, A. (2018). Bitcoin’s growing energy problem. Joule, 2(5), 801-805; Truby, J. (2018). Decarbonizing Bitcoin: Law and policy choices for reducing the energy consumption of Blockchain technologies and digital currencies. Energy research & social science, 44, 399-410. The electricity consumed by the Bitcoin network in one year could power all the teakettles used to boil water in the entire United Kingdom for nineteen years: Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. (n.d.). Cambridge Bitcoin electricity consumption index. Retrieved from https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons A life-cycle assessment for training several common large AI models: Hao, K. (2019, June 6).


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Shortly before Taleb’s visit to Ukraine, he’d made waves on Wall Street with a paper that claimed the value of the popular cryptocurrency bitcoin was zero. Bitcoin couldn’t be used as a currency, it wasn’t a short- or long-term store of value, it wasn’t an inflation hedge, and it wasn’t a safe haven for one’s investments, since it was highly correlated to the market, Taleb claimed in his study, “Bitcoin, Currencies, and Fragility.” Because bitcoin had no inherent value, unlike gold and other precious metals, it required constant maintenance by bitcoin miners—the computer whizzes that use complex formulas to create more and more bitcoin—to prop up its value. Given the chance that miners could at some point lose interest in bitcoin, in theory reducing its value to zero, he argued that its present value was zero.

CHAPTER 23: THE GREAT DILEMMA OF RISK Spitznagel’s argument captivated Peter Coy Peter Coy, “The Risk-Return Trade-Off Is Phony,” New York Times, November 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/15/opinion/risk-investing-market-hedge.html. CHAPTER 24: DOORSTEP TO DOOM Bitcoin rallied in 2021, hitting an all-time high Elaine Yu and Caitlin Ostroff, “Bitcoin’s Price Climbs Above $20,000 After Sharp Crypto Selloff,” Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoins-price-falls-below-20-000-11655542641. As bitcoin plunged, one crypto billionaire Alexander Osipovich, “The 30-Year-Old Spending $1 Billion to Save Crypto,” Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/crypto-bitcoin-ftx-bankman-fried-11661206532. Since saving the human race is the one and only priority Christine Emba, “Why ‘Longtermism’ Isn’t Ethically Sound,” Washington Post, September 5, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/05/longtermism-philanthropy-altruism-risks/.

Sornette, like nearly everyone else with even a passing interest in finance at the time, had also grown intrigued by bitcoin, the computer-generated cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is “one of the largest speculative bubbles in human history,” he and a fellow ETH professor said in a 2020 paper. A phenomenon they called the Social Bubble Hypothesis fueled its growth. Bubbles in this context are good for innovation, driving technology forward through social herding and scaling. As investors flooded into bitcoin—driving its overall value to $300 billion by 2018—the viability of it as a useful financial instrument increased. The bitcoin bubbles “were necessary to bootstrap and scale the protocol and cryptocurrency,” the professors wrote.


pages: 325 words: 90,659

Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel by Tom Wainwright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, barriers to entry, bitcoin, business process, call centre, carbon credits, collateralized debt obligation, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, failed state, financial innovation, illegal immigration, Mark Zuckerberg, microcredit, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Skype, TED Talk, vertical integration

The effect is to make a user’s web-browsing history as good as untraceable, which is handy if you are a political dissident, spy, investigative journalist—or drug dealer. Then there is the problem of how to pay. For this, there is Bitcoin. The world’s foremost digital currency system, Bitcoin works without a central bank, instead relying on networks of computers to generate new “coins” by performing complex mathematical operations in a process known as mining. Setting up a Bitcoin account is a bit of a hassle, but not particularly complicated and, like the TOR browser, the currency is perfectly legal to use. Bitcoin’s value is ludicrously volatile: its price shot up from less than $15 at the beginning of 2013 to nearly $1,000 in November of that year, before falling back to $300 by the end of 2014.

(Evolution’s managers are thought to have made off with some $15 million in Bitcoin payments kept in escrow when the site mysteriously vanished in 2015.) And all such sites depend on Bitcoin and TOR, both of which could be pulled from under their feet if the governments of the world decided to ban them. There is no sign of that for now. Germany’s finance ministry has recognized Bitcoin as a currency, meaning its users can be taxed. In the United States, the Winklevoss twins, the nearly men of the dotcom boom who claimed that Mark Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for Facebook from them, have poured money into creating a Bitcoin exchange. Most democratic governments have so far been reluctant to outlaw the TOR browser, on the basis that it has legitimate uses as well as nefarious ones.

One academic study of the goods for sale on the original Silk Road estimated that about one-fifth of all its listings were aimed at dealers, and that these “business-to-business” transactions accounted for between 31 percent and 45 percent of the site’s trades by value.3 If that is the case, even drug users who buy their supplies “offline,” from a dealer or friend, may well be buying a product that was traded online at an earlier stage in the supply chain. Measuring the total value of the online drug economy is hard, not least because Bitcoin’s price is so volatile. The FBI originally estimated that the Silk Road had done $1.2 billion in business during its two and one-half years online. But it later scaled down this rough calculation: the estimate had been made when Bitcoin’s value was near its peak, whereas much of the Silk Road’s business was done when the digital currency was less valuable. The FBI did a revised estimate, using the currency’s varying value at the time that each different trade was made, and came up with the much lower figure of $200 million.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

Once the distributed ledger, or blockchain, was in place financial trust would be restored and monetary crises come to an end.22 Things didn’t turn out quite as Bitcoin’s mystery creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, envisaged. What he had unleashed was not so much a new type of money, but rather the most perfect object of speculation the world had ever seen. In one of the first recorded Bitcoin transactions in 2010, a hungry computer geek in Florida spent 10,000 of the cryptocurrency on a couple of takeaway pizzas. By late 2017, the cost of those pizzas at Bitcoin’s then market price was close to $200 million. To say, as the acting head of New Zealand’s central bank, Grant Spencer, did at the time, that Bitcoin resembled a ‘classic bubble’ was something of an understatement.

Over the course of 1719 the share price of John Law’s Mississippi Company climbed nearly twentyfold. The rise in Bitcoin’s market price was even greater. Mississippi shares exhibited extreme volatility. Bitcoin’s price oscillations were even more extreme. By 2017, the leading cryptocurrency had survived several setbacks, the necessary condition for a ‘super-bubble’ to form. Whereas the Mississippi bubble attracted at most half a million foreigners to Paris, Bitcoin’s followers were numbered in millions. Whereas the Mississippi bubble created printed paper millionaires, Bitcoin conjured up digital billionaires, including the Winklevoss twins of Facebook fame.

Every great bubble has its share of urban myths – fanciful anecdotes which reveal the spirit of the age. Bitcoin did not disappoint. The Wall Street Journal reported that an IT worker from Swansea, Wales, whose computer containing 7,500 bitcoins had been thrown out during an office clean-up, was excavating a landfill site in search of the missing hard drive.23 Bitcoins were more easily stolen than lost. When a leading exchange, Mt. Gox, shut down in April 2014, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of bitcoins went missing. A few years later, the death of the Canadian owner of a cryptocurrency exchange left clients unable to access their digital assets.24 To use an eighteenth-century expression, Bitcoin owners had been ‘bubbled’.


pages: 478 words: 149,810

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency by Parmy Olson

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, bitcoin, call centre, Chelsea Manning, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, lolcat, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, pirate software, side project, Skype, speech recognition, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day

Another more direct route, which Topiary often used, was to simply transfer money between a few different Bitcoin addresses: Bitcoin address 1 → Bitcoin address 2 → Bitcoin address 3 → Liberty Reserve (a Costa Rican payment processor) account → Bitcoin address 4 → Bitcoin address 5 → second Liberty Reserve account → PayPal account → bank account. If even the hint of a thought occurred to him that there weren’t enough transfers, he would add several more paths. Then on Monday, June 6, Topiary checked the LulzSec Bitcoin account. Holy shit, he thought. He was looking at a single, anonymous donation of four hundred Bitcoins, worth approximately $7,800. It was more money than Topiary had ever had in his life.

Topiary started requesting donations for LulzSec and used Twitter and Pastebin to provide the thirty-one-digit number that acted as the group’s new Bitcoin address. Anyone could anonymously donate to their anonymous account if he converted money into the Bitcoin currency and made a transfer. Bitcoin was a digital currency that used peer-to-peer networking to make anonymous payments. It became increasingly popular around the same time LulzSec started hacking. By May, the currency’s value was up by a dollar from where it had been at the start of the year, to $8.70. A few days after soliciting donations, Topiary jokingly thanked a “mysterious benefactor who sent us 0.02 BitCoins. Your kindness will be used to fund terror of the highest quality.”

Who knew if the donation had come from the Feds or opportunistic military white hats? “Guys be safe with the Bitcoins please,” said AVunit. “Let it flow through a few gateways.…Use one bit to get out of financial trouble and then sit on the rest.” “Okay, beginning the sends,” Topiary said. “All of you are now $1,000 richer.” “Excuse me while I light up a victory cigar,” said Pwnsauce. “I’m just going to stare at it,” said Kayla. “Let it grow as Bitcoin progresses.” So volatile and popular was the value of the Bitcoin crypto currency that by the following day one Bitcoin had risen to $26 in value, making their big donation worth $11,000.


pages: 412 words: 116,685

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

That is why many position them as the first digitally native payment rails, while contending that PayPal, Venmo, WeChat, and others are little more than facsimiles of legacy ones. Blockchains, Bitcoin, and Ethereum The first mainstream blockchain, Bitcoin, was released in 2009. The sole focus of the Bitcoin blockchain is to operate its own cryptocurrency, bitcoin (the former is usually capitalized while the latter is not, in order to distinguish between the two). To this end, the Bitcoin blockchain is programmed to compensate processors handling bitcoin transactions by issuing them bitcoin (this is called a “gas” fee and is typically paid by the user to submit a transaction). Of course, there’s nothing novel about paying someone—or even many people—to process a transaction.

This differs from the traditional financial services industry, which is controlled by a handful of decades-old giants with few competitors and no incentive to cut rates. The only competitive force on PayPal’s fees, for example, are those charged by Venmo or Square’s Cash App. For Bitcoin, fees are pushed down by anyone who chooses to compete for a transaction fee. Not long after Bitcoin emerged (its creator remains anonymous), two early users, Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood, began developing a new blockchain, Ethereum, which they described as a “decentralised mining network and software development platform rolled into one.”1 Like Bitcoin, Ethereum pays those operating its network through its own cryptocurrency, Ether. However, Buterin and Wood also established a programming language (Solidity) that enabled developers to build their own permissionless and trustless applications (called “dapps,” for decentralized apps), which could also issue their own cryptocurrency-like tokens to contributors.

Apple enables users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies using trading applications such as Robinhood or Interactive Brokers, for example, but they cannot purchase NFTs through these same applications. What makes this distinction strange is the fact that there is no technical distinction between these two purchases—the only difference is that bitcoin is a “fungible” crypto-based token, in that every bitcoin is substitutable with another, while buying an NFT piece of artwork is a non-fungible token, in that it isn’t substitutable with any other token. Things get more confusing if the right to this non-fungible token is fractionalized into fungible tokens (think of selling shares to a piece of artwork).


pages: 326 words: 103,170

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

Bitcoin is easy to keep and transmit, and Bitcoin transactions can be made anonymously—which has attracted drug lords and tax evaders and bred a Bitcoin-fueled black-market economy too. Bitcoin or something like it will have a role in our future, but another kind of digital currency will appear too, and it will form itself into a kind of gateland. Instead of being anonymous, backed only by algorithms, and unlinked to a government, as Bitcoin is, this currency will be built for reliability, not mystery. Bitcoin transactions are cloaked in secrecy; this new currency will be transparent, traceable. Bitcoin is free from government interference; this digital currency will be backed by a major government and tied intimately into policy and credit.

Today, the most talked-about model for an all-digital currency is Bitcoin, a system based on the algorithmic creation of money mined from computation much as gold was once mined from the hills of California. Bitcoin’s most appealing property is that it is not controlled by any government. It is meant to be free from political pressures, from the influence of central bankers, and from the risk of national default. If you’re an Indonesian farmer or an Estonian cabdriver, the thinking goes, better to store your money in BTC than local cash. Bitcoin is easy to keep and transmit, and Bitcoin transactions can be made anonymously—which has attracted drug lords and tax evaders and bred a Bitcoin-fueled black-market economy too.

If you look at an angry, barely educated terrorist wannabe and think junior varsity, you don’t. And, as a result, you may be about to have a very unpleasant surprise. A friend who controls the largest secure Bitcoin vault in the world put it to me once this way: “Platforms mattered once; now it is protocols.” His point was that the pipes and rules connecting the varied systems of our world fundamentally affect the distribution of power. The rules of the Bitcoin block chain or the implications of an addressing protocol such as IPv6 reveal something about how we’ll all connect in the future. They are examples of how the pulling pressure of networks will become operational.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Even conferences devoted to the topic of crypto avoid setting registration fees in crypto, because an overnight fall in value might wipe out the conference sponsor’s profit margins. Debt contracts also require a stable unit of account. Were someone to write a mortgage with principal and interest in bitcoin, a spike in the value of bitcoin would cause the real value of the mortgage to skyrocket. If default then likely occurs, the lender loses money, and the borrower loses her house. A true currency should also be a scalable and widely used means of payment. Bitcoin and Ethereum can handle fewer than a dozen transactions per second, due to the enormous computing resources involved. The Visa network, by contrast, handles fifty thousand transactions per second.

In crypto land, the dollar must serve as a reference. Without it, no one can compare the value of bitcoins, ethers, dogecoins or any other crypto substitute, much less use them to set prices for goods and services. One of the alleged features of crypto touted by its enthusiasts is that no one can monkey around with the money supply. There is an absolute lid on the issuance of bitcoins: issuance will end after 21 million coins are created or “mined.” Is that a protection against inflation, since no government can madly print money? With no precedent, it’s hard to predict what happens when bitcoins reach their limit. Who can enforce a limit? Must we rely on an algorithm?

As these practices proliferate, a new species of debt may elevate systemic risk. If nothing restrains the mining of cryptocurrencies, collateral social costs may pile up. Creating cryptocurrency already consumes so much energy that Tesla founder Elon Musk, who briefly embraced bitcoin as payment for his electric cars, reversed policy. The high environmental cost of the data mining that bitcoin demands clashes with the mission of a car company that is weaning automobiles off fossil fuels. Crypto assets are energy hogs, using as much energy as the Netherlands or Argentina. If crypto mining accelerates, they will blunt urgent climate initiatives to slow down global warming.


pages: 261 words: 86,905

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, Basel III, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, Kondratiev cycle, Large Hadron Collider, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

The currency’s main use is in buying and selling things anonymously over the Internet, though there are also a few cafés and bars that take them.* The value of the bitcoin has gone up and down sharply in its short life. I’m writing this in March 2014: in the last few months the bitcoin has hit a high of over $1,200 and a low of $50. The currency lost 40 percent of its value in a single day, on 2 October 2013, when the FBI seized an illegal exchange called the Silk Road, where payment was taken in bitcoins—though it should be stressed that there is nothing illegal about bitcoins per se. In essence the bitcoin is (to quote the Economist) “a giant shared transaction ledger recording who owns each individual unit of the currency at any one time,” in which all transactions taking place in the currency are simultaneously visible to all its users.

In the debate between fast and slow zombies, zombie banks are as slow as it gets. * A list of businesses that take bitcoins is available at www.spendbitcoins.com/places/. † The current value of the currency is available at www.xe.com/currency/xbt-bitcoin, and the total number of bitcoins in circulation at blockexplorer.com/q/totalbc—today, the number is 11,888,600. Bitcoin’s FAQ, which I strongly recommend to anyone with an interest in the practical or theoretical questions raised by the currency, is at en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ. Afterword So what are we going to do with these tools, with this economic language?

If you’re wondering what Norway and Venuezuela have in common, the answer is nothing, except lots of oil. bitcoin An unregulated currency, created by someone or someones calling him, her, or themselves Satoshi Nakamoto, in 2008. It has no inherent value, so its worth depends entirely on the trust people have in it: in my view, that’s the most interesting thing about bitcoin, the fact it is a built-in lesson on the arbitrary nature of money values. Bitcoins are created by “mining,” i.e., by long slow computer calculations, and are stored and exchanged via digital “wallets.” This number crunching burns a lot of energy, and the cost of that energy is the real cost of creating bitcoins. The currency’s main use is in buying and selling things anonymously over the Internet, though there are also a few cafés and bars that take them.* The value of the bitcoin has gone up and down sharply in its short life.


pages: 251 words: 80,831

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

As it turned out, they weren’t late at all. Bitcoin still belonged to a small community of hackers, and only a few websites were accepting it as a form of donation currency. “There were a few meetups about Bitcoin and there would be just a few people coming,” Armstrong later said.1 Buying or selling Bitcoin was still very hard—and downright prohibitive for anyone without technical savvy. At the time, most people who held Bitcoin were interested in its anonymous nature. They didn’t mind the technicality, and they were even willing to put up with the sketchy websites that dealt with Bitcoin, but they needed a place to store and transact with their coins safely.

—ANDY RACHLEFF, FOUNDER OF BENCHMARK CAPITAL AND WEALTHFRONT When Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam founded Coinbase in 2012, “cryptocurrency” had yet to enter the popular lexicon. Bitcoin, the first modern cryptocurrency, had been invented just four years earlier; it was still trading for less than five dollars per coin. Already, though, Armstrong and Ehrsam could see a new kind of market emerging. Armstrong had read the white paper on Bitcoin on Christmas Day, and the idea excited him. If Bitcoin caught on, then there would be demand for the infrastructure that surrounded it: brokers to manage transactions, wallets to store the coins.

They didn’t mind the technicality, and they were even willing to put up with the sketchy websites that dealt with Bitcoin, but they needed a place to store and transact with their coins safely. Ehrsam and Armstrong knew that for Bitcoin to become mainstream, they had to make it possible for these people—as well as for the everyday, mainstream consumer—to safely store and buy cryptocurrency. Armstrong and Ehrsam took the idea to Y Combinator and got accepted for the summer 2012 batch. When the company launched, it did what needed to be done for Bitcoin to become legitimate. In 2013, a reporter for TechCrunch called Coinbase “the website [where] I’ll send my mom to buy Bitcoin.”2 Coinbase’s founders could also see that the anonymous and unregulated nature of cryptocurrency had captured the attention of the government, and soon, regulation would come.


pages: 374 words: 97,288

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

3D printing, Airbnb, anti-communist, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cloud computing, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, general purpose technology, gentrification, George Akerlof, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Open Library, Paradox of Choice, peer-to-peer, price discrimination, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software as a service, software patent, software studies, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy

And because digital files are trivial to reproduce, possession in itself tells us very little about legal entitlement. Surprisingly, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin may help solve the problem of tracking rights in digital assets.50 Bitcoin is a payment system and corresponding digital currency created in 2008. It is not governed by any central authority; there is no government, central bank, or financial institution standing behind the over $3 billion of bitcoin in the market. Instead, bitcoin relies on its core underlying innovation—the block chain—to verify transactions. Fundamentally, the block chain is a record of transactions.

For a thorough discussion of the insights bitcoin offers for property in general and digital assets in particular, see Joshua A. T. Fairfield, “Bitproperty,” Southern California Law Review 88 (May 2015): 805–874. 51. James Grimmelmann and Arvind Narayanan, “The Blockchain Gang,” Slate, February 16, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/02/bitcoin_s_blockchain_technology_won_t_change_everything.html, accessed April 10, 2015. 52. Marc Andreessen, “Why Bitcoin Matters,” Dealbook (blog), New York Times, January 21, 2014, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/why-bitcoin-matters/, accessed September 4, 2015. 53.

That means the block chain costs very little to maintain, but is highly resistant to manipulation. Trust is essential; if users can’t rely on the information it provides, a ledger like the block chain has no value. While bitcoin remains a large-scale experiment in digital currency, the underlying technology is application-neutral. As Marc Andreessen, whose venture capital firm has invested $50 million in bitcoin-related companies, wrote in the New York Times: “Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer.


pages: 337 words: 96,666

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Lewis, “The Economic History of the Fur Trade: 1670 to 1870,” Economic History Association, March 16, 2008, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-history-of-the-fur-trade-1670-to-1870/. 6. Sandra E. Gleason, “Hustling: The ‘Inside’ Economy of a Prison,” Federal Probation 42, no. 2 (June 1978): 32–40, https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/50862NCJRS.pdf. 7. Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” Bitcoin.org (2008), https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 8. “Failed Bank List,” Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, https://www.fdic.gov/resources/resolutions/bank-failures/failed-bank-list/. 9. Drew Desilver, “Financial Crises Surprisingly Common, but Few Countries Close Their Banks,” Pew Research Center, July 9, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/09/financial-crises-surprisingly-common-but-few-countries-close-their-banks/. 10.

A striking feature of Bitcoin and some of its clones is the increasing scarcity of coins as the computational complexity of “mining” operations grows, and as some of the previously mined tokens are lost. Over the past couple of years, this constraint has caused the price of Bitcoin to increase more than a hundred-fold. Early growth created a positive feedback loop, where new investors would be attracted to the astonishing returns, and would double down on the currency in hopes of even higher gains. This speculative gold rush might be unsustainable—especially given that the use of Bitcoin in bona fide trade is minimal, and that future uses of this sort are hindered by a range of design flaws that lead to long processing times and steep transaction fees.

More recently, a brand-new invention has challenged the status of precious metals as the investment of choice for individuals distrustful of banks and governments, or for speculators trying to make a quick buck. Within the past 10 years or so, Bitcoin and other virtual cryptocurrencies came out of nowhere and then rapidly reached a theoretical market capitalization of more than $1 trillion—about one-tenth the capitalization of gold. Although the mechanics of various cryptocurrencies differ in important ways, the example of Bitcoin is instructive. It’s a global, decentralized currency with no recoverable intrinsic value, no central authority to issue the money or set exchange rates, and no other mechanism anchoring it to the physical world.


pages: 196 words: 61,981

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

Since the blocks are all mathematically chained together, to falsify a record would mean having to redo all the work for subsequent blocks on the chain, requiring so much electricity and resources that falsification is disincentivized. Bitcoin arrived in 2008, at the beginning of a global financial crisis. At the time, a paper was circulated online, written by someone named Satoshi Nakamoto, proposing a peer-to-peer currency. The paper outlined this peer-to-peer currency, or Bitcoin, as Nakamoto called it. Instead of a central bank verifying transactions and preventing double spending, Nakamoto proposed the system of blockchain to verify and keep records of transactions. Bitcoin would be the incentive for people with computers to verify and put blocks on the blockchain. This is the core of the Bitcoin blockchain. It leads with the idea that bad actors are intrinsic in a system, and to prevent their actions, enormous amounts of electricity must be spent on preventing them through hashing functions.

Despite Ostrom’s work, the belief in innate human selfishness in a world of scarcity had become ingrained outside of ecology—in fields like information science and economics.6 This belief in selfishness and scarcity is one of the core ideologies that gave rise to blockchain. Although blockchain has become synonymous with Bitcoin, they are not quite the same. Bitcoin is one use of blockchain, but it remains separate from blockchain technology. Some have used a biological analogy to illustrate the difference: if blockchain is DNA, Bitcoin is a distinct species. Blockchain is a special kind of distributed record-keeping system that uses cryptography to prevent records from being falsified, eliminating the need to trust a centralized authority to verify records.

It leads with the idea that bad actors are intrinsic in a system, and to prevent their actions, enormous amounts of electricity must be spent on preventing them through hashing functions. The first block on the Bitcoin blockchain was created along with the text “THE TIMES 03/JAN/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”—the anti-centralization message of Bitcoin coming through loud and clear. And since 2008, the cryptocurrency and blockchain space has blossomed beyond Bitcoin into other currencies and other blockchains, currencies like Ethereum and EOS, all with slightly different consensus algorithms—ways of ensuring that individual computers, or nodes, have records that agree with each other.


pages: 665 words: 146,542

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power by Michel Aglietta

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, secular stagnation, seigniorage, shareholder value, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stochastic process, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, the scientific method, tontine, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus

These new forms of money thus represent means of cooperation between citizens, enterprises and public authorities in the social spaces most favourable to transforming the growth regime and thus driving away the perils of our current century. LOCAL CURRENCIES AND BITCOIN: OPPOSED MONETARY LOGICS A parallel is often made between local and complementary currencies and bitcoin. These two categories of monetary innovation, characteristic of the early twenty-first century, both question the relationship between money and sovereignty and express the will of their users to regain control of money. In the case of bitcoin, this takes place virtually and in a network, whereas for local and complementary currencies it takes place at the local territorial level. On the model of numerous other crypto-monies, bitcoin has clashed with the traditional conception of money, as something unitary, sovereign, territorial and centralised.

When economic activities drop off, bitcoin cannot provide public stimulus measures. By definition, the distribution of bitcoin is highly unequal: it favours those who had it first (early adopters), to the detriment of the latest users. The hyper-volatility in its price means that it is a monetary instrument little-conducive to fixing expectations and making payments permanent. Contrary to the idea that it could provide a solution to the problems posed by the international monetary regime, bitcoin cannot fulfil the functions of a global public good. Fixed in advance, the supply of bitcoin cannot respond to the global need for liquidity.

While the protocol for validating transactions is itself highly secured, the same is not necessarily true of bitcoin storage. The anonymity of bitcoin transactions (or at least, the difficulty in tracing operations) is a godsend for cyber-criminality and money laundering. If we take a look at the crypto-anarchist and libertarian ideas that inspire bitcoin, we see that it seduces users through the illusion that they are taking ownership over money and ridding themselves of what they consider to be the harmful interventions of the actors charged with controlling it (states, central banks and other banks). Bitcoin thus reveals its true nature as a money that is anonymous, anti-sovereignty, anti-bank, anti-state and – therefore – anti-commons.


pages: 50 words: 15,603

Orwell Versus the Terrorists: A Digital Short by Jamie Bartlett

augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, eternal september, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Free Software Foundation, John Perry Barlow, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Laura Poitras, Mondo 2000, Satoshi Nakamoto, technoutopianism, Zimmermann PGP

Back in 2009, in an obscure cryptography chat forum, a mysterious man called Satoshi Nakamoto invented the crypto-currency Bitcoin.fn3 It turns out the real genius of Bitcoin was not the currency at all, but the way that it works. Bitcoin creates an immutable, unchangeable public copy of every transaction ever made by its users, which is hosted and verified by every computer that downloads the software. This public copy is called the ‘blockchain’. Pretty soon, enthusiasts figured out that the blockchain system could be used for anything. Armed with 30,000 Bitcoins (around $12 million) of crowdfunded support, the Ethereum project is dedicated to creating a new, blockchain-operated internet.

Every one of the thousands of products on offer has a detailed description, a photograph and a price. All products and vendors are rated out of five by buyers, who also provide detailed written feedback. There are customer service buttons and shopping carts and free-package-and-delivery and one-off specials. I, like thousands of others, placed an order; paid with bitcoin; and waited for my product to arrive in the post. Which it did, bang on time. The hardest thing is deciding what to buy, since there is an unbelievable choice of products on offer. The Silk Road 2.0 (which was closed by the FBI and other police forces in late 2014) was an anonymous market for anything, with few exceptions, which meant wares stretched from the mundane to the bizarre: listings I spotted on one visit included a complete box-set of The Sopranos and a hundred-dollar Marine Depot Aquarium Supplies voucher.

I explored the labyrinthine world of Tor Hidden Services in search of drugs, and to study child pornography networks. I witnessed online wars between neo-Nazis and anti-fascists on popular social media sites, and signed up to the latest porn channels to examine current trends in home-made erotica. I visited a Barcelona squat with anarchist Bitcoin programmers, run-down working men’s clubs to speak to extreme nationalists, and a messy bedroom to observe three girls make a small fortune performing sexually explicit acts on camera to thousands of viewers. By exploring and comparing these worlds, I also hoped to answer a difficult question: do the features of anonymity and connectivity free the darker sides of our nature?


pages: 275 words: 77,017

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society by David Wolman

addicted to oil, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, fiat currency, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, German hyperinflation, greed is good, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, P = NP, Peter Thiel, place-making, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steven Levy, the payments system, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

It may be tempting to belittle alternative currencies as limited, unrealistic, or maybe a little hippie-ish, but they do work, so long as they don’t run into a counterfeiting problem, and so long as the supply of this money is intelligently controlled so as to avoid inflation (or worse). That’s why Bitcoin’s algorithmic approach to steering the money supply is captivating, although wild fluctuations in its value in the summer of 2011 suggest to some that The Economist is correct: “Bitcoin is technically sophisticated. As a monetary system, it looks primitive.”7 Alternative currencies are at a disadvantage due to their limited connection to the banking system. Credit is money too, after all, but there aren’t really loans out there denominated in Ven or Bitcoin, let alone Kilowatt Cards. Nevertheless, nothing but perception makes the issuing authority of the U.S. government more legitimate than the Ithaca HOURs Circulation Committee.

People in the network transact in the “local” currency, which is priced from a basket of major sovereign currencies, commodities, and carbon futures. Your Ven can be exchanged for one of the major national currencies based on the same floating exchange rates that govern the value of world currencies against one another. Bitcoin has captured peoples’ imaginations because the money supply is determined by an algorithm, not bureaucrats or economists, and there is a cap to the number of Bitcoins that can be created: 21 million. Two related experiments are the Wuffie Bank and Serios. Wuffie has tried to set up a currency based on reputation, as determined by an algorithm that measures the influence we have on others via our social networks.

“Virtual currency isn’t just about accounting and denomination. It’s extending the game experience into real life, mixing together these elements of personal entertainment and empowerment.” Currencies connected to social networking take this idea of redefining transactions to a new level. Projects like Hub Culture, Bitcoin, and Superfluid are trying to blend the interconnectivity of social networks with alternative currency models (although who knows if they’ll still be around by the time you read this). At Superfluid, users trade in Quids, which, as the website explains, are not dollars. “They’re placeholders for favors.”


pages: 371 words: 108,317

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

sizable bag rental business: Emily Hamlin Smith, “Where to Rent Designer Handbags, Clothes, Accessories and More,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 12, 2012. phone app, such as M-Pesa: Murithi Mutiga, “Kenya’s Banking Revolution Lights a Fire,” New York Times, January 20, 2014. has $3 billion in circulation: “Bitcoin Network,” Bitcoin Charts, accessed June 24, 2015. 100,000 vendors accepting the coins: Wouter Vonk, “Bitcoin and BitPay in 2014,” BitPay blog, February 4, 2015. Six times an hour: Colin Dean, “How Many Bitcoin Are Mined Per Day?,” Bitcoin Stack Exchange, March 28, 2013. Knowledge-Based Trust: Hal Hodson, “Google Wants to Rank Websites Based on Facts Not Links,” New Scientist, February 28, 2015. tools are extensions of our selves: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

And some admirable characters championing human rights were looking for a money system that would work outside of corrupt or repressive governments, or in places of no governance at all. What they together came up with is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a fully decentralized, distributed currency that does not need a central bank for its accuracy, enforcement, or regulation. Since it was launched in 2009, the currency has $3 billion in circulation and 100,000 vendors accepting the coins as payment. Bitcoin may be most famous for its anonymity and the black markets it fueled. But forget the anonymity; it’s a distraction. The most important innovation in Bitcoin is its “blockchain,” the mathematical technology that powers it. The blockchain is a radical invention that can decentralize many other systems beyond money.

When I send you one U.S. dollar via a credit card or PayPal account, a central bank has to verify that transaction; at the very least it must confirm I had a dollar to send you. When I send you one bitcoin, no central intermediary is involved. Our transaction is posted in a public ledger—called a blockchain—that is distributed to all other bitcoin owners in the world. This shared database contains a long “chain” of the transaction history of all existing bitcoins and who owns them. Every transaction is open to inspection by anyone. That completeness is pretty crazy; it’s like every person with a dollar having the complete history of all dollar bills as they move around the world.


pages: 297 words: 108,353

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles by William Quinn, John D. Turner

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, government statistician, Greenspan put, high-speed rail, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Right to Buy, Robert Shiller, Shenzhen special economic zone , short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, the built environment, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban planning

A spark soon arrived in the form of blockchain technology: an encryption technique that allowed virtual assets known as cryptocurrencies to circulate without being managed by any central authority. The most widely known cryptocurrency was bitcoin. To its advocates, bitcoin was the money of the future: it could not be devalued through inflation by a central bank, you could spend it on anything without having to worry about government interference or taxes, and it cut out the middleman, namely commercial banks. A bitcoin did not represent anything of value – its worth lay entirely in the fact that it was, for some (mostly illicit) purposes, a superior medium of exchange.2 210 PREDICTING BUBBLES In August 2016, one bitcoin was trading at $555; in the next 16 months its price rose by almost 3,400 per cent to a peak of $19,783.3 This was accompanied by a promotion boom, as a mix of cryptocurrency enthusiasts and opportunistic charlatans issued their own virtual currencies in the form of initial coin offerings, or ICOs.

Increasingly, the nature of the news media is shifting in a direction that makes it very difficult for informed voices to be heard above the noise. This problem was clearly illustrated by the Bitcoin Bubble, during which many well-informed sceptics were limited to writing self-published books and running personal blogs with small readerships.29 The average investor was much more likely to encounter cranks, uninformed journalists repeating the misinformation of cranks, bitcoin holders trying to attract new investors to increase its price and advertisements for bitcoin trading platforms. In addition, the pressure on the business models of the news media makes investigative financial journalism costlier to support.

These coins had, on the face of it, no intrinsic value – to entitle their holders to future cash flows would have violated laws against issuing unregistered securities – but they nevertheless attracted $6.2 billion of money from investors in 2017 and a further $7.9 billion in 2018.4 By December 2017, however, it had become clear that bitcoin was hardly being used as a currency at all. It had promised freedom from middlemen, but trading it without a third party was cumbersome unless the user was expert in cybersecurity. Its popularity exposed the inability of its system to process large numbers of transactions, resulting in long delays in transferring bitcoins and substantial transaction costs. The impossibility of reversing mistakes made it impractical, and its volatility made it useless as a store of value or unit of account.


pages: 338 words: 104,815

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

A month later, he disappeared.1 Kumbhani was the founder of BitConnect, an organization that offered a way for people to participate in the market for cryptocurrencies, or “crypto”—digital assets whose values are not tied to any particular government’s policies or actions. Bitcoin, the original and most famous cryptocurrency, was invented in 2008 by one or more people using the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto.” Bitcoin has a finite supply, and its value is connected to that scarcity. In that way, it is less like a regular currency than like gold or oil; you can “mine” more Bitcoin, metaphorically, by spending computational resources (literally, computer processing time and the energy required to power it) to solve complicated mathematical problems. The ingenious code behind Bitcoin ensures that no more than about twenty-one million bitcoins can ever be mined, so in a way, it is an even more stable commodity than gold.2 Like gold and traditional currencies, Bitcoin can be bought and sold online with no mining or technical skills required, and its value can rise or fall greatly from day to day.

Glenn Arcano pleaded guilty to participating in the conspiracy to defraud BitConnect investors [https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/56-million-seized-cryptocurrency-being-sold-first-step-compensate-victims-bitconnect-fraud]. 2. The original publication on Bitcoin is S. Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, October 31, 2008 [bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf]. See also F. Schär and A. Berentsen, Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Cryptoassets: A Comprehensive Introduction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020). 3. S. Williams, “The 20 Largest Cryptocurrencies by Market Cap,” The Motley Fool, December 15, 2017 [https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/07/20/the-20-largest-cryptocurrencies-by-market-cap.aspx]. 4.

The ingenious code behind Bitcoin ensures that no more than about twenty-one million bitcoins can ever be mined, so in a way, it is an even more stable commodity than gold.2 Like gold and traditional currencies, Bitcoin can be bought and sold online with no mining or technical skills required, and its value can rise or fall greatly from day to day. Smoothing out that price volatility was the promise of BitConnect. By late 2017, its proprietary BitConnect Coin was one of the top twenty cryptocurrencies in the world, even though it could be used only for transactions on the BitConnect platform. Under what it called a “lending program,” BitConnect accepted Bitcoin deposits and gave customers its own in exchange. BitConnect then invested the Bitcoin deposits using its “BitConnect Trading Bot” and “Volatility Software” to return steady profits to its customers, buffering them from up-and-down swings in the value of the underlying Bitcoin assets.3 According to Kumbhani’s indictment, although the program ultimately took in $2.4 billion in Bitcoin from investors, it never invested any of it.


pages: 294 words: 89,406

Lying for Money: How Fraud Makes the World Go Round by Daniel Davies

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, cryptocurrency, fake it until you make it, financial deregulation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, illegal immigration, index arbitrage, junk bonds, Michael Milken, multilevel marketing, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, railway mania, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, social web, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, vertical integration, web of trust

Even leaving aside the passing references to his victims ruining their lives and committing suicide, The Brotherhood is full of somewhat ridiculous attempts to claim that the beatings, stabbings and torture carried out by other members of ‘The Firm’ were nothing to do with him. * Bitcoin and similar crypto-currencies have been designed specifically to emulate the anonymity of cash. They don’t fully succeed in doing so – you have to take lots of precautions to make sure that a bitcoin address or ‘wallet’ cannot be linked to you as an individual, and if you make mistakes then the bitcoin architecture will expose your full record of transactions. This is how the proprietor of Silk Road was tracked down and arrested. But tracing a bitcoin address to a human being is generally a task that requires the resources of a law enforcement agency making a special effort to do so.

But they could still be made the victim of fraudulent or frivolous customer disputes; it was not uncommon for unscrupulous dealers to send in dozens of orders to a rival and then dispute them all, to drive one of their enemies out of business. The biggest problem for the vendors, though, was that the dollar value of bitcoin was incredibly volatile, and they were faced with a typical small business dilemma – revenues in one currency (bitcoin) and costs in another (mainly US dollars). Since the market was competitive and transparent, mark-ups were somewhat less than those available to street dealers, and could easily be wiped out by weekly fluctuations in the bitcoin/dollar ‘exchange rate’. Various means of allowing the vendors to hedge these currency movements were attempted, but they were all quite expensive and none of them worked very well.

The customers of 9THWONDER might have avoided this exit scam by using the Evolution escrow service, but this would not have protected them against the fact that Evolution turned out to be run by scammers itself. One day, it disappeared, taking roughly $12m of bitcoin which had been deposited in its escrow accounts. This was a somewhat extreme example of darknet fraud, and in principle there is a technological solution to it – an extension to the bitcoin protocol to allow ‘multi-signature escrow’, so that bitcoins can’t be spent by someone who is only holding them on behalf of another. Darknet researchers, however,* seem to more or less despair of this technology ever catching on – it’s too inconvenient for users, most of whom can’t even be convinced to pass up the price discounts you get for dealing via FE.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Now, similar to Mint for personal finance, Wave Accounting offers 100-percent-free small business accounting, although its real business model is to mine the data buried within those transactions. A little further out, the Bitcoin phenomenon continues to unfold. The smartest five VCs we know are all building or investing in between fifteen and twenty Bitcoin companies each. These investments could prove to be unimaginably disruptive. In fact, Salim believes Bitcoin to be the single biggest technology-enabler of the above list. Leading Bitcoin investor Brock Pierce frames it thusly: While the Internet is a medium for open communication—on top of which a layer of secure transactions has been attempted with great difficulty—the block chain itself is an ultra-low-cost infrastructure of secure, guaranteed transactions over which all manner of applications can be laid (currency being just one of them).

CFO – Chief Financial Officer The finance function, although historically very conservative and cautious, is about to face radical disruption from several technologies, including AI (Deep Learning), sensors and Bitcoin (the underlying block chain protocol in particular). Key Opportunity Implications and Actions AI accounting Automatic A/P, A/R software-enabling automatic reminders and payment, automatic tax management, and AIs watching for errant behaviors in transaction flows. Taxation without borders Governments are getting their act together regarding tax havens, which will likely continue to face ever-closer scrutiny in the coming years. Digital payment solutions More than 60,000 merchants already accept Bitcoin, which we predict will hit Wall Street in late 2014 and will most likely be mainstream by 2016.

We see a consistent set of steps around disruptive innovation comprising the following: Domain (or technology) becomes information-enabled Costs drop exponentially and access is democratized Hobbyists come together to form an open source community New combinations of technologies and convergences are introduced New products and services appear that are orders of magnitude better and cheaper The status quo is disrupted (and the domain gets information-enabled) We are seeing this evolution occur in drones, DNA sequencing, 3D printing, sensors, robotics and, certainly, Bitcoin. In each domain, an open source, networked community has sprung up, delivering an accelerated stream of innovation exactly in line with the steps listed above. The reason “Disruption is the New Norm” is that democratized, accelerating technologies, combined with the power of community, can now extend Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma to an unstoppable force. 4.


pages: 247 words: 81,135

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

Step forward crypto currencies such as bitcoin, which are the next evolution in how we trade. Bitcoin Bitcoin was the first fully implemented and distributed crypto currency. It works in much the same way as other emerging crypto currencies. Crypto currencies are simply decentralised electronic cash systems. The ‘money’ is created by using peer-to-peer networking, digital signatures and cryptography to generate a currency. Bitcoins are mined out of a digital network by computers plugged into a system trying to figure out a 64-digit code that unlocks 50 bitcoins at a time. The money, or bitcoins, is generally traded within the system by using specific peer-to-peer software.

All transactions are stored on a publicly distributed database so that the record of transaction is with everyone plugged into the system, rather than in a central storage location. It creates a form of decentralised stability and control in transactions, although the currency itself is highly volatile. A key difference with bitcoin is that the owner of each bitcoin stash is anonymous. The major advantages of bitcoin There’s a cap on the amount that will ever be in circulation (21 million) so it can’t be devalued by inserting more into the economy. There’s no centralised control agency that can destabilise the currency through its economic systems. It’s pan global and not controlled by a government (like gold).

Yes, banks don’t own currency, but the reason crypto currencies such as bitcoin are emerging is because of the banks themselves. Their opportunistic fee-taking is a counter move to the lower cost transaction (of all things) world we’re moving towards. Taking advantage of the system they feed off enables new systems to emerge. Banks haven’t provided simplified systems for modern-day digital trade and the net result is that this will eat into one of their revenue streams, another hardly noticeable leak in the industry bucket. It’s a form of system hacking, if you like. Unstable yet permanent Yes, bitcoin and crypto currencies are unstable and risky, but they’re in many ways no less stable than other stores of money.


pages: 309 words: 79,414

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

‘It’s also a political statement,’ says American cyber-security expert John Bambenek, who built a tool that tracks neo-Nazi bitcoin transactions. ‘If you believe the banks are part of the Jewish world conspiracy nonsense, well, then there are only two ways to make financial transactions: it’s either cash or it’s bitcoin.’ Against this background, it is unsurprising that American white nationalist Richard Spencer labelled bitcoin the ‘currency of the alt-right’ long before the bitcoin craze started. After prominent alt-right figures were banned from mainstream crowdsourcing platforms such as Patreon and GoFundMe, and blocked by online payment providers such as PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay, some switched to Hatreon.

A pro-ISIS group was even able to generate enough money to reward its ‘cyber-jihadists’. ‘We have exchanged parts of our bitcoins to equip the brothers who helped in our last missions with computers,’ one of the group’s members wrote in their private chat group in December 2017. On Telegram and the Dark Net, terrorists have increasingly called on their sympathisers to donate in cryptocurrencies.11 For example, the Al-Qaeda-linked organisation al-Sadaqa campaigned for bitcoin donations in November 2017, while Indonesian ISIS leader Bahrun Naim used the cryptocurrency to transfer money to his followers.12 Bitcoin transactions, however, can be tracked, and wallets are easily traced back to their owners due to the highly transparent blockchain technology this cryptocurrency is built on.

The left-leaning twentieth-century ideologue was long hated by the political right but alt-right campaigners have started to employ his tactics, perhaps more effectively than the contemporary political left.21 Weev tells me that he doesn’t make speculative predictions on events he can’t control, but speculating on the election victory and continuing success of Donald J. Trump was a good decision: ‘It has earned me a literal fortune in bitcoin.’ He explains that he does most of his business in bitcoin and some in Monero, which, according to him, is better from a technical standpoint. In contrast to bitcoin, it is non-transparent and transactions cannot be traced back. ‘Less people are using it right now but I expect that this will change in the future,’ he writes. Weev continues to explain that he does not get his inspiration from previous counter-cultural movements and that he is not trying to build a counter-culture.


pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

THE POTENTIAL OF THE BLOCKCHAIN One instrument for converting open platforms into digital commons is the blockchain ledger, the software innovation that lies at the heart of the Bitcoin digital currency network. Although Bitcoin itself has been designed to serve familiar capitalist functions (tax avoidance, private accumulation through speculation), the blockchain ledger is significant because it can enable highly reliable, versatile forms of collective action on open networks. It does this by validating the authenticity of a digital object (for example, a bitcoin) without the need for a third-party guarantor such as a bank or government body. This solves a particularly difficult collective-action problem in an open network context: How do you know that a given digital object—a bitcoin, a legal document, digital certificate, dataset, a vote, or a digital identity asserted by an individual—is the real thing and not a forgery?

The technology first appeared in 2009 as the basis of the Bitcoin digital currency system, but it has potential for doing much, much more—including aiding in the development of platform cooperatives. Traditionally, institutions use centralized databases. For example, when you transfer money using a bank account your bank updates its ledger to credit and debit accounts accordingly. In this example, there is one central database and the bank is a trusted intermediary who manages it. With a blockchain, this record is shared among all participants in the network. To send bitcoin, for example, an owner publicly broadcasts a transaction to all participants in the network.

This solves a particularly difficult collective-action problem in an open network context: How do you know that a given digital object—a bitcoin, a legal document, digital certificate, dataset, a vote, or a digital identity asserted by an individual—is the real thing and not a forgery? By using a searchable online ledger that keeps track of all transactions, blockchain technology solves this problem by acting as a kind of permanent record maintained by a vast, distributed peer network. This makes it far more secure than data kept at a centralized location, because the authenticity of its records are registered among so many nodes in the network that it is virtually impossible to corrupt.


pages: 422 words: 104,457

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin

AltaVista, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Graeber, Debian, disinformation, Edward Snowden, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, medical residency, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, prediction markets, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, RFID, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, sparse data, Steven Levy, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

., https://www.abine.com/maskme/. I hoped to buy bitcoins: “FAQ—Bitcoin,” accessed August 21, 2013, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#How_can_I_get_bitcoins.3F. Bitcoins can be used on: Adrian Chen, “The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable,” Kotaku.com, June 1, 2011, http://kotaku.com/5805928/the-underground-website-where-you-can-buy-any-drug-imaginable. In May 2013, Kashmir Hill: Kashmir Hill, “Living on Bitcoin for a Week: The Journey Begins,” Forbes.com, May 1, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/05/01/living-on-bitcoin-for-a-week-the-journey-begins/. A digital cash start-up, E-gold: United States Department of Justice, “Digital Currency E-Gold Indicted for Money Laundering and Illegal Money Transmitting,” press release, April 27, 2007, http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2007/April/07_crm_301.html.

I hoped to buy bitcoins, a virtual digital currency that was all the rage in the hacker community. But I couldn’t find a place that would let me buy bitcoins with a credit card. They all wanted my bank account number or a wire transfer—apparently because people often call their credit card company complaining that they didn’t receive their virtual coins. Bitcoins can be used on online “black markets” that can sell drugs and weapons. However, some brick-and-mortar businesses have started accepting bitcoins. In May 2013, Kashmir Hill, a reporter for Forbes, lived for a week only on bitcoins—subsisting mostly via a food delivery service in San Francisco that accepted the currency.

In May 2013, Kashmir Hill, a reporter for Forbes, lived for a week only on bitcoins—subsisting mostly via a food delivery service in San Francisco that accepted the currency. However, all Bitcoin transactions are logged and publicly viewable. People’s names are not attached to their transactions, but a determined investigator could likely identify people behind certain Bitcoin transactions. This was not the anonymity I was seeking. * * * The deeper I looked at anonymous digital transactions, the less I liked them. They seemed to be havens for criminals. In 2007, a digital cash start-up, E-gold, was charged with money laundering. The indictment said the company knew that its services were used by identity thieves, child pornographers, and other criminals.


pages: 363 words: 105,039

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

Below that message, the post included links to download sites where they had uploaded free “proof” files as samples, along with another encrypted file that supposedly contained a collection of secret hacking tools that they bragged were “better than Stuxnet.” The Shadow Brokers demanded that anyone who wanted to see the contents of that file send bitcoin bids to a certain address. None of those bids, they stipulated, would be refunded. And only the highest bidder would be given the key to decrypt this purported holy grail of hacking. In another bizarre note, the Shadow Brokers said that if bidding reached one million bitcoins—at the time well over half a billion dollars—they’d release all the secret files to the public. Finally, the message ended with a strange paragraph about “wealthy elites” whom the Shadow Brokers seemed to be simultaneously threatening with their stolen NSA hacking tools and targeting with a hard-sell pitch.

Instead of an abstract fear that U.S. cyberweapons would inspire adversaries to develop their own, America’s hacking arsenal had fallen, suddenly and directly, into enemy hands. * * * ■ In the early days after the Shadow Brokers’ post, it appeared that the group’s operation might be a bust. They did not get their one-million-bitcoin jackpot. Instead, in the first twenty-four hours of their auction, they received a grand total of $937.15, according to the Bitcoin blockchain’s public record of transactions. But the auction nonetheless served to create buzz around the NSA’s security breach. Experts largely agreed the profit motive was likely a cover story, that the Shadow Brokers were probably state-sponsored hackers, not cybercriminals, and they were seeking above all to embarrass the NSA.

Or perhaps their entire moneymaking venture had been elaborate theater. Either way, by January, they suddenly declared that their sales routine had failed and that they were calling it quits. “So long, farewell peoples. TheShadowBrokers is going dark, making exit: Continuing is being much risk and bullshit, not many bitcoins,” they wrote. “Despite theories, it always being about bitcoins for TheShadowBrokers. Free dumps and bullshit political talk was being for marketing attention.” For another three months, the group seemed to have vanished. Some in the security industry speculated that the group’s work had always been designed as a distraction from Russia’s hacking of election-related targets and with the inauguration of Donald Trump as president in early 2017 their work was done.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

In the financial market, Bitcoin already has its own trading indexes where hundreds of millions of dollars are speculated on the electronically networked currency. Digital money like Bitcoin represent a peer-to-peer alternative to centrally controlled currencies like the US dollar or Swedish krona, an alternative in which middlemen and thus banks and banking fees are eliminated. Writing in the New York Times to explain “why Bitcoin matters,” Marc Andreessen—who now is the managing partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a $4 billion Silicon Valley venture fund with $50 million invested in Bitcoin-based startups like the virtual wallet Coinbase—argues that this new digital money represents “a classic network effect, a positive feedback loop.”

Writing in the New York Times to explain “why Bitcoin matters,” Marc Andreessen—who now is the managing partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a $4 billion Silicon Valley venture fund with $50 million invested in Bitcoin-based startups like the virtual wallet Coinbase—argues that this new digital money represents “a classic network effect, a positive feedback loop.” As with the Web, Andreessen says, the more people who use the new currency, “the more valuable Bitcoin is for the people who use it.”107 “A mysterious new technology emerges, seemingly out of nowhere, but actually the result of two decades of intense research and development by nearly anonymous researchers,” writes Andreessen, predicting the historical significance of this networked currency. “What technology am I talking about? Personal computers in 1975, the Internet in 1993, and—I believe—Bitcoin in 2014.”108 What Silicon Valley euphemistically calls the “sharing economy” is a preview of this distributed capitalism system powered by the network effect of positive feedback loops.

Education, transportation, health care, finance, retail, and manufacturing are now being reinvented by Internet-based products such as self-driving cars, wearable computing devices, 3-D printers, personal health monitors, massive open online courses (MOOCs), peer-to-peer services like Airbnb and Uber, and currencies like Bitcoin. Revolutionary entrepreneurs like Sean Parker and Kevin Systrom are building this networked society on our behalf. They haven’t asked our permission, of course. But then the idea of consent is foreign, even immoral, to many of these architects of what the Columbia University historian Mark Lilla calls our “libertarian age.”


pages: 550 words: 84,515

Vue.js 2 Cookbook by Andrea Passaglia

bitcoin, business logic, cognitive load, functional programming, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loose coupling, MVC pattern, node package manager, Silicon Valley, single page application, web application, WebSocket

The second kind of error can be that we tell the user the bitcoin and euro balance during a transaction, resulting in a stale and wrong amount for one of the two. To tackle these issues, we use getters: const store = new Vuex.Store({ state: { bitcoin: 600, rate: 1000 }, getters: { euro: state => state.bitcoin * state.rate } }) This way the euro amount is never in the state but always computed. Moreover, it is centralized in the store, so we don't need to add anything to our components. Now, it's easy to retrieve the two amounts from a template: <template> <div> <h1>Balance</h1> <ul> <li>{{$store.state.bitcoin}}฿</li> <li>{{$store.getters.euro}}&euro;</li> </ul> </div> </template> Here, &#3647 ; is the HTML entity for the Bitcoin symbol.

getCatPictures: state => state.pictures.filter(pic => isCat(pic)) getKittens: (state, getters) => { return getters.getCatPictures().filter(cat => !isAdult(cat)) } } In our recipe, we could call the euro getter to have some more derived data, like roughly how many houses we can buy with our Bitcoin given an average price of 150,000 euros: const store = new Vuex.Store({ state: { bitcoin: 600, rate: 1000 }, getters: { euro: state => state.bitcoin * state.rate, houses: (state, getters) => getters.euro() / 150000 }) Passing an argument If a getter returns a function with an argument, that argument will be the argument of the getter: getters: { ... getWorldWonder: state => nth => state.worldWonders[nth] } In our recipe, a practical example could specify the average cost of a house in the getter from the previous paragraph: const store = new Vuex.Store({ state: { bitcoin: 600, rate: 1000 }, getters: { euro: state => state.bitcoin * state.rate, houses: (state, getters) => averageHousePrice => { return getters.euro() / averageHousePrice } }) Testing your store As you know from Chapter 7, Unit Testing and End-To-End Testing, testing is the most important part of professional software.

Getting ready This recipe is for you if you already have some Vuex knowledge and want to expand your horizons. How to do it... Imagine that you are building a Bitcoin wallet. You want to give your users an overview of their balance, and you want them to see how many Euros it corresponds to. Create a new Webpack template with vue init webpack and npm install vuex. Create a new src/store/index.js file and write the following inside it: import Vue from 'vue' import Vuex from 'vuex' Vue.use(Vuex) const store = new Vuex.Store({ state: { bitcoin: 600, rate: 1000, euro: 600000 } }) export default store This code is prone to errors. The first error can be a miscalculation of the Euro amount if we don't get the multiplication right.


pages: 464 words: 139,088

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn King

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Doha Development Round, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, large denomination, lateral thinking, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Satoshi Nakamoto, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Transactions are verified by the use of a software accounting system accessible to all users.35 The supply of bitcoins is governed by an algorithm embodied in the software that runs the system (with a maximum number of twenty-one million). If you can persuade someone to accept payment in bitcoins, then you can use them to buy ‘stuff’. The price of bitcoins in terms of goods and services, or currencies such as the dollar, is determined in the market. Without any public body setting the standard for bitcoins as a unit of account, their price is highly volatile – less than $1 when launched, a peak of over $1100 in December 2013, and back to below $400 in late 2015.36 With no one standing ready to redeem them in terms of any other commodity or currency, bitcoins are a highly speculative investment. They have no fundamental value: their price simply reflects the value that bitcoins are expected to have in the future.

The increase of cybercrime is analysed in the 2014 US State of Cybercrime Survey, www.pwc.com/cybersecurity 35 This system, effectively a public ledger of all current and past transactions, is known as the block chain technology. 36 Similar huge swings in prices can be seen in related digital currencies, for example Scotcoins in Scotland. 37 http://auroracoin.org 38 Although, unlike cash, transactions with bitcoins leave a permanent record in the software accounting system, leading commentators such as Brito and Castillo (2013) to describe them not as anonymous but pseudonymous. Money stored as bitcoins can also be stolen by hackers or lost through carelessness, just as cash is vulnerable to theft or loss. 39 Yermack (2013) provides data on the relative volatilities of the prices of bitcoins, gold and the major currencies. The volatility of bitcoins is an order of magnitude higher than the other currencies. 40 Economies of this kind have been discussed by Fama (1980), Hall (1983) and Issing (1999). 41 On money as a unit of account see Doepke and Schneider (2013). 42 Magna Carta, chapter 35, translation of the original Latin of 1215. 43 Hayek (1976).

In principle, two parties engaged in a transaction could instead settle directly by a transfer of money from one electronic account to another in ‘real time’. A step in that direction was the creation of bitcoin – a ‘virtual’ currency launched in 2009, allegedly by one or more individuals under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. Ownership of bitcoins is transferred through bilateral transactions without the need for verification by a third party (necessary in all other current electronic payment systems). Transactions are verified by the use of a software accounting system accessible to all users.35 The supply of bitcoins is governed by an algorithm embodied in the software that runs the system (with a maximum number of twenty-one million).


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

frsc=dg%7Cd> (accessed 30 November 2017). 29. Tapscott and Tapscott, Blockchain Revolution, 18. 30. Tapscott and Tapscott, Blockchain Revolution, 253–9; Benjamin Loveluck and Primavera De Filippi,‘The Invisible Politics of Bitcoin: Governance Crisis of a Decentralized Infrastructure’, Internet Policy Review 5, no. 3 (30 September 2016) <http://policyreview.info/articles/ analysis/invisible-politics-bitcoin-governance-crisis-decentralisedinfrastructure> (accessed 30 November 2017); Erik Brynjolfsson and OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Notes 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 379 Andrew McAfee, Machine Platform Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future (New York: W.

Economist, ‘Notso-clever Contracts’; BBC, ‘Hack Attack Drains Start-up Investment Fund’, BBC News, 21 June 2016 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ technology-­36585930> (accessed 30 November 2017). Schwab, Klaus, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2016), 19; Laura Shin, ‘The First Government to Secure Land Titles on the Bitcoin Blockchain Expands Project’, Forbes, 7 February 2017 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/ 2017/02/07/the-first-government-to-secure-land-titles-onthe-bitcoin-blockchain-expands-project/#432b8b494dcd> (accessed 30 November 2017); Joon Ian Wong, ‘Sweden’s Block­ chain-powered Land Registry is Inching Towards Reality’, Quartz Media, 3 April 2017 <https://qz.com/947064/sweden-is-turninga-blockchain-powered-land-registry-into-a-reality/> (accessed 30 November 2017).

Harriet Green, ‘Govcoin’s Co-founder Robert Kay Explains Why His Firm is Using Blockchain to Change the Lives of Benefits Claimants’, City AM, 10 October 2016 <http://www.cityam.com/250993/ govcoins-co-founder-robert-kay-explains-why-his-firm-using> (accessed 30 November 2017). Kyle Mizokami, ‘The Pentagon Wants to Use Bitcoin Technology to Protect Nuclear Weapons’, Popular Mechanics, 11 October 2016 <http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a23336/ the-pentagon-wants-to-use-bitcoin-technology-to-guardnuclearweapons/?utm_content=buffer98698&utm_medium= social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer> (accessed 30 November 2017). Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), ch. 10.


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The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

A host of alternative currencies are blossoming on the Internet, and one in particular—an open-source project called Bitcoin—appears to be gaining steam. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority, allowing anyone to send “money” (the Bitcoin currency) to anyone, anywhere, at any time, and beyond the reach of governments. Bitcoin enlists participants in the community to manage transactions and issue money; the network, rather than a central bank, collectively creates the money. Lest you think Bitcoin is a nerd pipe dream, many companies—even large, publicly traded ones like LaCie—accept Bitcoin as payment.10 In the opinion of the tech entrepreneur and journalist Jason Calacanis, “Bitcoin is a P2P currency that could topple governments, destabilize economies and create uncontrollable global bazaars for contraband.”11 Recently, Bitcoin has faced significant setbacks, but it is a promising opening salvo in the advent of alternative, postgovernment currency.

Lest you think Bitcoin is a nerd pipe dream, many companies—even large, publicly traded ones like LaCie—accept Bitcoin as payment.10 In the opinion of the tech entrepreneur and journalist Jason Calacanis, “Bitcoin is a P2P currency that could topple governments, destabilize economies and create uncontrollable global bazaars for contraband.”11 Recently, Bitcoin has faced significant setbacks, but it is a promising opening salvo in the advent of alternative, postgovernment currency. It’s possible now to build some of the structures parallel to the government with very little start-up cost—like revenue collection, for example. As people find the current system of government slow and frustrating, they’ll increasingly turn to the casual opportunities offered by radical connectivity to accomplish many of the same goals, even to the point of using alternative money like Bitcoin.

Joshua Holland, The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy: And Everything Else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs, and Corporate America (Hoboken: John Wiley, 2010), 105. 6. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/01/congress-hits-a-new-low-in-approval-obama-opens-election-year-under-50/ 7. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/02/frustration-index-still-hot-in-the-kitchen/ 8. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1913/poll-trust-washington-anger-government-gay-marriage-support-abortion 9. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, The Groundswell, (Cambridge: Harvard Business Press, 2008). 10. http://www.wuala.com/en/bitcoin 11. http://www.launch.is/blog/l019-bitcoin-p2p-currency-the-most-dangerous-project-weve-ev.html 12. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/aug/08/london-riots-facebook-twitter-blackberry 13. http://articles.philly.com/2011-08-14/news/29886718_1_social-media-flash-mob-facebook-and-other-services 14. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0815/Flash-mobs-vs.


pages: 156 words: 15,746

Personal Finance with Python by Max Humber

asset allocation, backtesting, bitcoin, cryptocurrency, data science, Dogecoin, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, passive income, web application

Profit Max Humber1 (1)Toronto, Ontario, Canada You know, you got to spend money to make money. —Chief Keef A couple of weeks ago my grandma asked me if she should put some money into Bitcoin. I didn’t know what to tell her. But I knew that in a book about finance I would have to at least give Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies at least a little bit of lip service. For the uninitiated, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (and Ethereum, Dogecoin, and Zcash) are digital assets that are designed to function as a medium of exchange and that use cryptography to secure transactions, to control the creation of new money, and to verify asset transfer.

print(c.convert(3000, 'CAD', 'USD')) print(c.convert(5000, 'USD', 'CAD')) 2302.35 6515.08 show_alternative The Open Exchange Rates API is incredibly robust, and it actually includes access points for alternative cryptocurrencies. This means that it’s totally legit to instantiate a new CurrencyConverter with ETH (Ethereum), BTC (Bitcoin), and DOGE (Dogecoin) on top of CAD and USD. c = CurrencyConverter(['CAD', 'USD', 'DOGE', 'ETH', 'BTC'], API_KEY) With all the currencies stored inside of a dictionary attached to the CurrencyConverter object: c.rates_ {'BTC': 0.00013350885, 'CAD': 1.303016, 'DOGE': 289.975486957, 'ETH': 0.0017451855, 'USD': 1} we can, again, run the .convert method and find out that $3,000 CAD is equal to the following: c.convert(3000, 'CAD', 'DOGE') 667625.31 .apply The whole point of this chapter was to figure out what the values from previous chapter were in USD instead of CAD.

Your feedback is tremendously valuable, and I will do my best to respond to each e-mail. Again, I can be reached via e-mail. max{dot}humber{at}gmail{dot}com I look forward to hearing from you! Index A Alpha Vantage API key TIME_SERIES_DAILY_ADJUSTED endpoint am function Amortization evaluate functionize Anaconda B Banks Bitcoin Budget adding vacation cash flow dates flows cash flow objects date_range function .fillna(0) method month start semi-month end fun object functionize time horizon pd.date_range function timestamp date-time.datetime object totals cumsum() .tail method updating visualization vanilla matplotlib YAML C CAD to USD, converting documentation encapsulate .apply show_alternative openexchangerates.org secrets Calendar object Canadian dollars (CAD) See alsoCAD to USD, converting Computer programming D, E, F, G, H Data Dates date formatting rules datetime.date objects datetime.datetime objects get_dates function Python DatetimeIndex object Dogecoin IRR =IRR() irregular cash flow schedule mining pandas read_excel function xirr function xnpv function ROI I Internal rate of return (IRR) Investment portfolio deposit function design adding cash .at method DataFrame instantiate_portfolio function reusable function get_order function prices gaps print(portfolio) function .update method rebalance simulate_process_order function stock quotes access Alpha Vantage API get_historical function get_price function J, K, L Jupyter M Month start frequency N, O nteract blank state macOS pip install P, Q Pandas DataFrame, .from_dict code Series Pandas 1.0 Payment loop A loop B Personal investment portfolio Prophet definition forecast datestamp column .make_future_dataframe method numeric column predict method purchases purchases.csv file visualize plot convenience method plot_components method Python floor division operator forecasting libraries programming R Recurrence rule (rrule) .between method Recurrent library S Semi-month-end frequency T Time Series (Daily) key Time-series forecasting Timestamp normalizing .normalize method to_datetime function U United States dollar (USD) See alsoCAD to USD, converting V, W, X Vacation budget Y, Z YAML Anaconda loading with block totals


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

Among them are the rise of alternative currencies and of virtual or digital currencies such as bitcoin. Digital currencies exist within private peer-to-peer computer networks and are not issued by or supported by any government or central bank. The bitcoin phenomenon began in 2008 with the pseudonymous publication of a paper (by Satoshi Nakamoto) describing the protocols for the creation of a new electronic digital currency. In January 2009 the first bitcoins were created by Nakamoto’s software. He continued making technical contributions to the bitcoin project until 2010, at which point he withdrew from active participation.

He continued making technical contributions to the bitcoin project until 2010, at which point he withdrew from active participation. However, by that time a large community of developers, libertarians, and entrepreneurs had taken up the project. By late 2013, over 11.5 million bitcoins were in circulation, with the number growing steadily. The value of each bitcoin fluctuates based on supply and demand, but it had exceeded $700 per bitcoin in November 2013. Bitcoin’s long-term viability as a virtual currency remains to be seen, but its rapid and widespread adoption can already be taken as a sign that communities around the world are seeking alternatives to the dollar and traditional fiat currencies. Beyond the world of alternative currencies lies the world of transactions without currencies at all: the electronic barter market.

. : “The Rolling Student Loan Bailout,” Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323968704578652291680883634.html. “the test of a first-rate intelligence . . .”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1936; reprint New York: New Directions, 2009). The bitcoin phenomenon began in 2008 . . . : Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” November 1, 2008, http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. the history of barter is mostly a myth: David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2011), pp. 21–41. “Sept. 11 was not a failure of intelligence or coordination . . .”: Thomas L.


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Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

What’s not clear is whether “Nakamoto-san,” whoever or whatever he is, is profiting from the invention. It’s entirely possible that a private stash of bitcoins is growing in value, unseen and in secret. The entity that originated the concept may have billions of dollars in private bitcoins sequestered in an electronic file somewhere. (As of this writing, the total market value of all bitcoins is around $5 billion.) But the potential of the technology underlying bitcoins goes far beyond simple currencies. The concept is now being expanded to include enforceable, unbreakable contracts between anonymous parties.18 So in the future, it’s entirely possible for you to be hired, paid, and fired by someone or something whose identity you don’t know.

The first glimmers of this are already visible. Bitcoins, for instance. It’s a new currency that exists solely in cyberspace and isn’t controlled by anyone. It was invented by an anonymous person or entity named Satoshi Nakamoto. No one may know who—or what—he is, but it’s clear that he doesn’t control the production, management, or value of his creation. Despite halfhearted attempts to regulate or legitimize bitcoins, neither do governments. Or anyone else, for that matter. As long as they can be converted to and from other assets of value—whether legally or illegally anywhere in the world—bitcoins will continue to exist and find adherents.

Paul Miller, “iOS 5 includes Siri ‘Intelligent Assistant’ Voice-Control, Dictation—for iPhone 4S Only,” The Verge, October 4, 2011, http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/04/ios-5-assistant-voice-control-ai-features/. 17. Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790–1915 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 65–66. 18. Vitalik Buterin, “Cryptographic Code Obfuscation: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Are About to Take a Huge Leap Forward,” Bitcoin, February 8, 2014, http://bitcoinmagazine.com/10055/cryptographic-code-obfuscation-decentralized-autonomous-organizations-huge-leap-forward/. 19. For an excellent in-depth analysis of this problem, see Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 20. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-lock_braking_system, last modified December 30, 2014.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

This is the double-spending problem and it’s exactly what bitcoin was designed to solve. Bitcoin appeared in 2008, when an online paper authored by a still-anonymous person (or persons) calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto proposed a digital peer-to-peer payment system that allows cash to be exchanged without the need for a financial institution. The following year, the first bitcoin software was made public, yet because the coins had only been mined but not traded, there was no way to assign them monetary value. In 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz solved that problem, buying two pizzas—costing $25—with 10,000 bitcoins. At the time, based on the cost of those pizzas, the coins were worth $.0025 each.

Blockchain were first proposed in 1983: David Chaum, “Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments,” Advances in Cryptography (Springer 1998), pp. 199–203 See: http://blog.koehntopp.de/uploads/Chaum.BlindSigForPayment.1982.PDF. Satoshi Nakamoto: Satoshi Nakamotoe, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” See: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. In 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz solved that problem: Nick Bilton, “Disruptions: Betting on a Coin with no Realm,” New York Times, December 22, 2013. By 2019, they were just shy of $15,000: Data retreived from: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/. $308 billion: “Billion Reasons to Bank Inclusively.” See: https://www.accenture.com/us-en/_acnmedia/accenture/conversion-assets/dotcom/documents/global/pdf/dualpub_22/accenture-billion-reasons-bank-inclusively.pdf#zoom=50.

Soon, with quantum, this will be on the back of Rose’s Law and an even wilder ride. Deception: Exponentials typically generate a lot of hype when first introduced. Because early progress is slow (when plotted on a curve, the first few doublings are all below 1.0), these technologies spend a long time failing to live up to the hype. Think about the initial days of Bitcoin. Back then, most people thought crypto was a novelty toy for übergeeks or a way to buy illegal drugs online. Today, it’s a reinvention of our financial markets. This is a classic example of the deceptive phase. Disruption: This is what happens when exponentials really start to impact the world, when they begin disrupting existing products, services, markets, and industries.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

., “Relationship Between Food Waste, Diet Quality, and Environmental Sustainability,” PLOS One 13, no. 4 (April 2018), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0195405. mining it consumes more electricity: Eric Holthaus, “Bitcoin’s Energy Use Got Studied, and You Libertarian Nerds Look Even Worse than Usual,” Grist, May 17, 2018, https://grist.org/article/bitcoins-energy-use-got-studied-and-you-libertarian-nerds-look-even-worse-than-usual. See also Alex de Vries, “Bitcoin’s Growing Energy Problem,” Cell 2, no. 5 (May 2018): pp. 801–5, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.04.016. Seventy percent of the energy: Nicola Jones, “Waste Heat: Innovators Turn to an Overlooked Renewable Resource,” Yale Environment 360, May 29, 2018.

Five years ago, hardly anyone outside the darkest corners of the internet had even heard of Bitcoin; today mining it consumes more electricity than is generated by all the world’s solar panels combined, which means that in just a few years we’ve assembled, out of distrust of one another and the nations behind “fiat currencies,” a program to wipe out the gains of several long, hard generations of green energy innovation. It did not have to be that way. And a simple change to the algorithm could eliminate that Bitcoin footprint entirely. These are just a few of the reasons to believe that what the Canadian activist Stuart Parker has called “climate nihilism” is, in fact, another of our delusions.

The planet’s future will be determined in large part by the arc of growth in the developing world—that’s where most of the people are, in China and India and, increasingly, sub-Saharan Africa. But this is no absolution for the West, where the average citizen produces many times more emissions than almost anyone in Asia, just out of habit. I toss out tons of wasted food and hardly ever recycle; I leave my air-conditioning on; I bought into Bitcoin at the peak of the market. None of that is necessary, either. But it also isn’t necessary for Westerners to adopt the lifestyle of the global poor. Seventy percent of the energy produced by the planet, it’s estimated, is lost as waste heat. If the average American were confined by the carbon footprint of her European counterpart, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by more than half.


pages: 230 words: 76,655

Choose Yourself! by James Altucher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, cashless society, cognitive bias, dark matter, digital rights, do what you love, Elon Musk, estate planning, John Bogle, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, PageRank, passive income, pattern recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, superconnector, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, Y2K, Zipcar

Fortunately for us, there are now forces at work to eliminate that. The software-based online payment system bitcoin is one such force. I don’t know whether bitcoin will work or if people will embrace this form of money exchange. But I keep track of it and I keep track of the companies that are innovating on top of it. I even released Choose Yourself! a month early last year as a bitcoin-only book. Someone wrote an article saying that Choose Yourself! was the best-selling book ever on bitcoin. CNBC had me on and asked, “Did you just do this as a marketing gimmick?” and I said, “Well, I’m on national TV right now, aren’t I?”

Like, a CLUSTERF*(*K Claudia doesn’t let me invest in a private company unless all four items on my checklist apply. Which is important because I tend to believe in everything people tell me. So I’m happy to invest in a time portal black hole machine. I) What Do You Think of Bitcoin? I think bitcoin has about a 1 in 100 chance of being a survivor. So I have 1% of my portfolio in bitcoin. J) What About Metals as a Hedge Against Inflation? No, they have zero correlation with inflation. The best hedge against inflation is the US stock market since about 60% of revenues of the S&P 500 come from foreign countries. K) What About Metals Like Gold?

and I said, “Well, I’m on national TV right now, aren’t I?” Guess what domain name belonged to most of the people who bought the book using bitcoin: amazon.com. So whether or not bitcoin is the winner, I have no idea. But someone will win, and many people are looking at ways to do this. Payday loans are another phenomenon in financial technology. There’s a massive alternative banking industry comprised of people who, for various reasons, don’t use traditional banks. I’m not sure why they’ve opted to do this. Maybe they don’t trust the banks or maybe the banks don’t trust them. But here’s something that will never go away: people who live paycheck to paycheck, a rising phenomenon, often need money the day or days before their check arrives.


Alpha Trader by Brent Donnelly

Abraham Wald, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, deep learning, diversification, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, fail fast, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, global macro, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, high net worth, hindsight bias, implied volatility, impulse control, Inbox Zero, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, law of one price, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, McMansion, Monty Hall problem, Network effects, nowcasting, PalmPilot, paper trading, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, price anchoring, price discovery process, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, very high income, yield curve, you are the product, zero-sum game

Here’s the thing about bubbles. Just because you have identified one, that does not mean you should be short. Often the real money is made by identifying a bubble and jumping on for the bullish Wave 5 insanity. For example, while it was obvious that bitcoin was a classic bubble by May/ June 2017, it did not crash until seven months later after rallying another 500%. Correctly identifying bitcoin as a bubble in June 2017 would have cost you a ton of money. Identifying something as a bubble just frames the volatility to expect (high) and lets you know you should use your imagination when setting upside and eventual downside targets.

In fact, it’s often easier to make money long a bubble, not short. So what do we do? Identify bubble assets that you own and find a moving average or other technical signal that will tell you when to get out. Bitcoin had already rallied from $300 to $3,000 when people called it a bubble. Then it went from $3,000 to $20,000. Missing the last leg of a bubble can be costly. Shorting the last leg of a bubble can be deadly. In the 2017 bitcoin rally, the 100-day moving average defined the trend the whole way up. Fit a moving average to the current price trend of whatever bubble assets you own and liquidate on a daily close below.

Donnelly), 172 Asch, Solomon, 82 Asch Conformity Experiment, 82, 82, 83 Asian Financial Crisis (1998), 441 “Aspen Trading” (newsletter), 492 asymmetrical information, 156, 160 Axelrod, Bobby, 102 backtesting, 81, 221 curiosity and, 89—90 Bank of America, 42 Global Fund Manager Survey, 345 Bank of Canada, 308 bank traders annual performance and pay, 354 free capital, 356 information asymmetry and, 156 simple indicators and, 166 success rate, 40 bankrupt company, common stock of idea generation and, 406 rallies, 406 typical path followed by, 238 Batnick, Michael, 67—68 Baumeister, Roy, 56—57, 95, 106, 491 Bayes Theorem, 80, 81 Bayesian thinking, 201 Bayesian updating, 80, 81, 84 Beane, Billy, 451, 460—461 beauty contest analogy (Keynes), 311, 325 behavioral bias, 66, 179—180, 198 See also specific types of bias', biased thinking Bernanke, Ben, 208 Bernstein, Jake, 234, 345 bet size, varying, 107, 379 bet sizing, 256 better-than-average effect, 182—183 bias idea generation and, 396 post-trade, 416 See also specific types of bias', apophenia; biased thinking; gambler’s fallacy; herding; hot hand biased thinking, 155 See also specific types of bias; behavioral bias; bias bid/offer spread, 276 finding data on, 278 Big Five Personality Traits, 46—49 agreeableness, 47, 49, 50 conscientiousness, 47—48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 56-58, 71 effect of IQ and on male earnings, 49, 50 extraversion, 47, 49, 50 financial success and, 49—50, 52 lifetime stability of, 48 neuroticism, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 58, 71 openness to experience, 47, 49 versus Myers-Briggs (MBTI), 47 See also grit; personality; self-control birthday paradox, 254—255, 255 bitcoin bubble (2017-2018), 185, 239, 370, 405 bleed, slow, 167—168 blogs, 77 “Cheap Convexity,” 492 “Exante,” 492 “Liberty Street Economics,” 280 “No Mercy, No Malice,” 492 Bloomberg, 65, 97, 162, 194, 218, 259, 290, 321, 371, 393, 399, 482 blowups, 117—118 bonds as safe haven, 262 stocks and, 260—261, 261 Borish, Peter, 87, 163 breakout traders, 106 breakout trading, 173 breakouts, 161, 289 Breath (J. Nestor), 135, 491 bubbles, 236—240 bitcoin (2017—2018), 185, 239, 370, 405 Crash of 1929 (US, 1929—1932), 405 deflation before rebounding, 405—406 herding and, 236—240 NASDAQ (2000—2002), 155—156, 174, 405 Nikkei (1989—2008), 405 nonsensical moves and, 237—239 reasons for, 236 US homebuilder stocks (2005—2008), 405 XLF (2007—2008), 405 Buffett, Warren, 52, 61, 245 burnout, trader, 132 buyer’s strike, 314 call option, trader behavior like, 114, 177, 354—355, 355, 374, 374—376 Campbell, Sean D., 228—229 capacity, 150 capital, appropriate, 148—150 bank traders, 149 portfolio managers, 149—150 retail traders, 148 as trader attribute, 75, 143, 148—150 catalysts.


pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

In “The Robot Reality: Service Jobs Are Next to Go”, Blaire Briody, 26 March 2013, The Fiscal Times, http://www.cnbc.com/id/100592545 Shift 16: Bitcoin and the Blockchain The tipping point: 10% of global gross domestic product (GDP) stored on blockchain technology By 2025: 58% of respondents expected this tipping point to have occurred Bitcoin and digital currencies are based on the idea of a distributed trust mechanism called the “blockchain”, a way of keeping track of trusted transactions in a distributed fashion. Currently, the total worth of bitcoin in the blockchain is around $20 billion, or about 0.025% of global GDP of around $80 trillion.

The technology that underpins the blockchain creates trust by enabling people who do not know each other (and thus have no underlying basis for trust) to collaborate without having to go through a neutral central authority – i.e. a custodian or central ledger. In essence, the blockchain is a shared, programmable, cryptographically secure and therefore trusted ledger which no single user controls and which can be inspected by everyone. Bitcoin is so far the best known blockchain application but the technology will soon give rise to countless others. If, at the moment, blockchain technology records financial transactions made with digital currencies such as Bitcoin, it will in the future serve as a registrar for things as different as birth and death certificates, titles of ownership, marriage licenses, educational degrees, insurance claims, medical procedures and votes – essentially any kind of transaction that can be expressed in code.

Ubiquitous Computing 6. A Supercomputer in Your Pocket 7. Storage for All 8. The Internet of and for Things 9. The Connected Home 10. Smart Cities 11. Big Data for Decisions 12. Driverless Cars 13. Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making 14. AI and White-Collar Jobs 15. Robotics and Services 16. Bitcoin and the Blockchain 17. The Sharing Economy 18. Governments and the Blockchain 19. 3D Printing and Manufacturing 20. 3D Printing and Human Health 21. 3D Printing and Consumer Products 22. Designer Beings 23. Neurotechnologies Notes Introduction Of the many diverse and fascinating challenges we face today, the most intense and important is how to understand and shape the new technology revolution, which entails nothing less than a transformation of humankind.


pages: 367 words: 97,136

Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation by Sebastien Page

Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Cal Newport, capital asset pricing model, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, currency risk, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, global macro, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, iterative process, loss aversion, low interest rates, market friction, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, oil shock, passive investing, prediction markets, publication bias, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, stocks for the long run, systematic bias, systematic trading, tail risk, transaction costs, TSMC, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

On December 31, 2017, I met with three old friends in Newport Beach, California, for a champagne brunch. We got into a debate on Bitcoin, which had closed above $14,000 the week before. Two of my friends were bullish on the cryptocurrency. I said it was a bubble, about to burst. (I don’t trade Bitcoin.) I converted our fourth compadre to my view. Two against two. To settle the disagreement, we decided to bet on Bitcoin’s direction in 2018. We would meet again for brunch in a year. If Bitcoin went below $5,000—a 64% drop—the other bear and I would win. This bet was ambiguous, because we didn’t specify whether we would win if Bitcoin dipped below $5,000 at any point in 2018 or whether it had to end the year below $5,000.

It’s a perfect example of the key source of risk forecasting error: accounting for within-horizon risk. There are many scenarios in which Bitcoin could dip during the year but recover before the end of the year. The probability that it would dip below $5,000 at least once during 2018 (the “first-passage probability”) was higher than the probability that it would end the year below that threshold. We kept debating whether we should use the first-passage or end-of-horizon outcome over text messages through the year. Bitcoin ended 2018 at $3,600, down 74%. Mark Kritzman and Don Rich (2002) explain this important distinction between within-horizon and end-of-horizon risk measurement in “The Mismeasurement of Risk.”

They provide examples that show a significant difference in exposure to loss, whether we measure risk within or at the end of the horizon. For some experts, this distinction is obvious. But those who consume risk reports too often don’t realize that the numbers are based on end-of-horizon probabilities. Then they get surprised when, along the way, realized risk “feels” much higher than what was forecasted. In my Bitcoin example, the $5,000 threshold was more likely to be breached at some point within the year than precisely at the end of the year. For a more generic example, suppose you hold a plain-vanilla portfolio invested 60% in US stocks and 40% in US bonds. What is the probability that this portfolio could be down –5% over the next 12 months?


pages: 446 words: 117,660

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

Their value depends entirely on self-fulfilling expectations—which means that total collapse is a real possibility. If speculators were to have a collective moment of doubt, suddenly fearing that Bitcoins were worthless, well, Bitcoins would become worthless. Will that happen? I think it’s more likely than not, partly because of the gap between the messianic rhetoric of crypto and the much more mundane real possibilities. That is, there might be a potential equilibrium in which Bitcoin (although probably not other cryptocurrencies) remain in use mainly for black market transactions and tax evasion, but that equilibrium, if it exists, would be hard to get to from here: once the dream of a blockchained future dies, the disappointment will probably collapse the whole thing.

Instead of near-frictionless transactions, we have high costs of doing business, because transferring a Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency unit requires providing a complete history of past transactions. Instead of money created by the click of a mouse, we have money that must be mined—created through resource-intensive computations. And these costs aren’t incidental, something that can be innovated away. As Markus Brunnermeier and Joseph Abadi point out, the high costs—making it expensive to create a new Bitcoin, or transfer an existing one—are essential to the project of creating confidence in a decentralized system.

Bear in mind that conventional money generally does its job quite well. Transaction costs are low. The purchasing power of a dollar a year from now is highly predictable—orders of magnitude more predictable than that of a Bitcoin. Using a bank account means trusting a bank, but by and large banks justify that trust, far more so than the firms that hold cryptocurrency tokens. So why change to a form of money that works far less well? Indeed, eight years after Bitcoin was launched, cryptocurrencies have made very few inroads into actual commerce. A few firms will accept them as payment, but my sense is that this is more about signaling—look at me, I’m cutting-edge!


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

There was the Ubuntu lead coder who said in a speech that he was excited about their new software release because “we’ll have less trouble explaining to girls what we actually do.” There was the guy who, in a seminar on database queries, illustrated how to optimize queries with the example of ranking women by “hotness”—“WHERE sex=‘F’AND hotness>0 ORDER BY age LIMIT 10.” There was the leader of a Bitcoin meetup who responded to a female Facebook client-solutions manager who showed up, saying “You don’t look like someone who would even know about Bitcoin!,” followed by “Women don’t usually think in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.” (What’s more, another attendee groped her while she was there.) Women who talk about these sorts of experiences online face clear threats and harassment; when former Google engineer Kelly Ellis retweeted examples of harassment she got, it just invited even more.

ranking women by “hotness”: Andy Lester, “Distracting Examples Ruin Your Presentation,” Andy Lester (blog), July 26, 2011, accessed August 19, 2018, https://petdance.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/distracting-examples-ruin-your-presentation. “efficiency and effectiveness”: Arianna Simpson, “Here’s What It’s Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup,” Business Insider, February 3, 2014, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/arianna-simpson-on-women-and-bitcoin-2014-2. to focus while coding: Rhett Jones, “Lawsuit: VR Company Had a ‘Kink Room,’ Pressured Female Employees to ‘Microdose,’ ” Gizmodo, May 15, 2017, accessed August 19, 2018, https://gizmodo.com/lawsuit-vr-company-had-a-kink-room-pressured-female-e-1795243868.

An early and influential blogging tool, LiveJournal, was written by Brad Fitzpatrick. The breakthrough search algorithm that led to Google was a product of two students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin; YouTube was a trio of coworkers; Snapchat a trio (or, the level of the code, one person, Bobby Murphy). BitTorrent was entirely a creation of Bram Cohen, and Bitcoin was reputedly the work of a lone coder, the pseudonymous “Satoshi Nakamoto.” John Carmack created the 3-D-graphics engines that helped usher in the multi-billion-dollar industry of first-person shooter video games. The reason so few people can have such an outsize impact, Andreessen argues, is that when you’re creating a weird new prototype of an app, the mental castle building is most efficiently done inside one or two isolated brains.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

Speaking of reserve currencies, Bitcoin introduces addressable scarcity not in direct relation to the sum of mined minerals or national currencies, but by the mathematics of solving increasingly difficult problems toward an eventual arbitrary limit of 21 million “coins.” There is much to explore with Bitcoin, blockchains and related initiatives, such as Ethereum, but it is also the monetary platform of choice of secessionist projects for which the metaphysical expulsion of externalities is the paramount program, as important if not more than the disintermediation of central banks. The version of Bitcoin that we have (other currencies may fork or follow) is exemplary of the future-archaic quality of many Stack innovations.

See Sol Yurick, Metatron: The Recording Angel (Los Angeles: Semtiotext(e), 1985). 54.  The weight of virtual systems is amplified by the weight of virtual systems that monitor and mediate virtual systems. Consider the impact of bitcoin and coin mining. The key innovation is that “the work needed to commit a fraud is set to be higher in electricity costs than the economic benefit derived from it.” See http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-12/virtual-bitcoin-mining-is-a-real-world-environmental-disaster.html and http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/458439/cloud_real_ecological_timebomb_wireless_data_centres/. 55.  The Singularity born of spam is a plot device in Charles Stross, Rule 34 (New York: Ace, 2011). 56. 

It is, as Paul Krugman puts it, “both a 17th century and 21st century currency at once,” a currency mechanism that would freeze the sum total of possible liquid value tokens in the world, now and forever.64 In this regard, for certain persuasions, it is better than magic rocks (like gold) because incrementally more gold can always be mined, allowing rootless cosmopolitans to upset “the natural order” of hierarchical hereditary accumulation. If nothing else, Bitcoin has made money into a general design problem, as it should be, and not just the design of financial products or the look of paper bills, but of vessel abstractions of time, debt, work, and prestige. Better alternatives are needed soon, before today's digital platform currencies are prematurely entrenched in the wrong direction (artificially attenuated to closure and scarcity of the wrong stuff). Bitcoins also appear not only in mathematical space but through the energy-intensive mining of coins using special hardware with names like AntMiner, Minerscube, TerraHash HashCoins, and so on.


pages: 149 words: 43,747

How I Invest My Money: Finance Experts Reveal How They Save, Spend, and Invest by Brian Portnoy, Joshua Brown

asset allocation, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, buy and hold, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, high net worth, housing crisis, index fund, John Bogle, low interest rates, mental accounting, passive investing, prediction markets, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, time value of money, underbanked, Vanguard fund

Always look to the future and take a few chances by investing in futuristic companies or new asset classes. In my case, my bias in favor of hard assets combined with my experience during Internet 1.0 as a co-inventor of Priceline.com, led me to begin investing in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies three years ago. I have since also started a cryptocurrency hedge fund with two other partners who are veterans in the blockchain/crypto space and are members of the Satoshi Roundtable. Bitcoin has been the single best performing asset of the past decade by a mile. The law of giving People who are overly obsessed with their personal investments (e.g., watching their portfolio 10–20 times per day or similar) may achieve decent results in the short or medium term, but long term they tend to self-destruct (their portfolios/net worth that is) by being too close to it, too emotional, and too tight-fisted about their money.

I started to manage my own 401(k), loaded up on Bank of America stock, and (because I needed the business for my goals) sold myself a VUL whole life policy. “Financial planning” also became part of my vocabulary as I began to work with wealthy families and experienced how they made, grew, transferred, and protected their wealth. I left Merrill to go independent in 2017 after learning about Bitcoin in 2015 and working with startup founders in 2016. This is important because now the majority of my investments are tied up in cryptoassets and the equity of private companies. I do own a few stocks here and there, put money away in retirement accounts, and recently opened an HSA. I also recently became a business owner after realizing and then learning the wealth-building power of ownership.

Everyone should have a financial advisor if for no other reason than to have a sounding board who is less emotional about your money than you are. On the proper mentality in investing In my experience, the more intensely and emotionally a lot of people “hate on” a particular investment, that is a good signal to buy. This is exactly what has happened to me with Bitcoin over the past three years (meanwhile my returns have been approximately 500% over that period), and what happened to me with buying multi-family real estate in early 2009. Avoid the loss avoidance tendency. When facing a loss in an investment, ask yourself what opportunity cost are you giving up by holding onto the losing investment hoping it will come back?


pages: 391 words: 123,597

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

In order to edit a transaction, someone would need to hack every block ever made before that transaction, which has never been done. My eyes were open, and I was listening. I had known about the underlying technology of blockchain for a while; the earliest solution was Bitcoin. I’d first heard about Bitcoin in 2009—some of my human rights friends were tipping one another with it (sending Bitcoin as a thank-you for work or information) when running underground operations to move North Korean refugees out of harm’s way and to a place that would give them asylum. What made blockchain so revolutionary was that it was a completely new “electronic cash system that was fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” so, at the time, it was an ideal way to provide value without being tracked by governments.1 Now, so many years later, I had seen Big Data exploit users; I’d seen how it could be toxic enough to alter the very basis of democracy in both the United States and Britain.

There was a certain island I could go to. We got off the phone, and within an hour he’d booked and paid for a flight; he sent me the confirmation number. In the meantime, I’d hide out. I called my sister and asked her to liquidate the Bitcoin I had, explaining to her how to do it, where to go to a Bitcoin ATM near her, and how to send it to me via Western Union, so I wouldn’t create as much trackable data by swiping my bank card. My Bitcoin savings amounted to about a thousand dollars. It would get me through for a little while. When the first of many articles based on my evidence and interviews came out in the Guardian that day, I forwarded it to her.

And I found Assange’s choice to leak documents on the U.S. military’s involvement in war crimes in Iraq heroic—in fact, as I’ve mentioned, I had written my graduate thesis for my LLM (or “master of laws”) on war crimes using WikiLeaks’s data dumps as my primary source material. And in 2011, when WikiLeaks donations were blocked by major credit card companies, the nonprofit had launched a widget to donate using Bitcoin instead—I donated a couple of hundred dollars’ worth in recognition of the research the organization had allowed me to do. While I was incredibly skeptical of Wikileaks’ choice to leak Hillary Clinton’s emails during the election, at first I felt there had to have been a reason for the organization to do so.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

This ignores the fact that the only significant implementation of the blockchain, which is the virtual cryptocurrency Bitcoin, is deliberately and irredeemably energy-inefficient. By design it is an almost infinite sink for computer power and, by extension, coal, oil, water, and uranium.42 Already the Bitcoin network, which does not and cannot provide even basic functional financial services, is one of the largest consumers of computer power on the planet, with an annual appetite for electricity approaching that of the entire nation of Denmark. There are multiple ways to implement blockchain technology, of which the proof-of-work algorithm used by Bitcoin is by far the least desirable, at least from an environmental point of view.

Github, “Octoverse Report,” accessed August 13, 2020, https://octoverse.github.com/projects#languages. 2. Ken Thompson, “Reflections on Trusting Trust,” Communications of the ACM 27, no. 8 (1984): 761–763. 3. In his recent book Bits to Bitcoin, Mark Stuart Day briefly discusses this attack under the name Thompson’s Hack. Mark Stuart Day, Al Sweigart, Tony Veale, and Karen Brown, “Thompson’s Hack,” in Bits to Bitcoin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 243–271. 4. Discussed in Paul A. Karger and Roger R. Schell, “Multics Security Evaluation: Vulnerability Analysis,” in 18th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, IEEE, 2002.

Data centers alone account for more than 2 percent of global energy use, energy consumption predicted to grow with the expansion of the Internet of Things.4 (Google emitted over 50 kilograms of CO2 in the time it took for you to read this sentence.) Through the studies of platforms and infrastructure, bitcoin mining, programming languages, underground cable networks, and much more, this volume drives home what is often termed the “materiality of the digital”—that is, the physicality of computational and new media technologies that are too often described in ethereal terms. Computing and new media depend upon flesh-and-bone metabolism.


pages: 443 words: 116,832

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

The group began the new year with a series of tweets mocking those who thought Russians interfered in the 2016 American election.25 On January 7, they posted another message announcing they would now also sell NSA tools for hacking Windows.26 Only a few days later, the Shadow Brokers issued what they called a “farewell” post, claiming that since not enough people were paying them, they were going to shut down rather than bear the risk of continued operations. “Despite theories, it always being about bitcoins for TheShadowBrokers,” they wrote. “Free dumps and bullshit political talk was being for marketing attention.”27 To back this up, they posted their bitcoin address one more time, suggesting that the NSA’s tools would still be for sale if the right buyer came along. Two links at the bottom of the farewell message were small but packed a mighty punch. These links enabled anyone to download sixty-one different NSA hacking tools, including some that could bypass the leading antivirus software without detection.

The list of targets included the World Bank, central banks from countries such as Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, and many other prominent financial firms.16 Nor did the North Koreans limit themselves to seeking out traditional currencies. Their campaign included a series of efforts to steal increasingly valuable cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin from unsuspecting users all over the world. They also targeted a significant number of Bitcoin exchanges, including a major one in South Korea known as YouBit. In that case, the exchange lost 17 percent of its financial assets to North Korean hackers, though it refused to specify how much that amounted to in absolute terms.17 One estimate from Group-IB, a cybersecurity company, pegged North Korea’s profit from some of their little-noticed operations against cryptocurrency exchanges at more than $500 million.18 While it is impossible to confirm this estimate or the details of the hacks on cryptocurrency exchanges, the size of the reported loss emphasizes the degree to which the North Koreans have plundered smaller and more private financial institutions, almost entirely out of view.

This was a different intrusion in a different country than the North Koreans’ breach of TPBank in Vietnam, which also occurred in late 2015. 16. Jose Pagliery, “North Korea-Linked Hackers Are Attacking Banks Worldwide,” CNN, April 4, 2017. 17. Elizabeth Shim, “North Korea Targeted Bitcoin Exchange in Hacking Attempt, Expert Says,” UPI, August 24, 2017; Timothy W. Martin, Eun-Young Joeng, and Steven Russolillo, “North Korea Is Suspected in Bitcoin Heist,” Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2017. 18. Because the thefts are of cryptocurrency, their estimated dollar values fluctuate with the price of the currency. David Canellis, “North Korean Hacker Crew Steals $571M in Cryptocurrency across 5 Attacks,” The Next Web (TNW) News, October 19, 2018. 19.


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The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

Then send us one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Bitcoin. Although Bitcoin was supposed to be a safe way of doing business because it involved a publicly viewable blockchain record, it has actually turned out to be easy to use it to hide money flows. Bitcoin is the coin of the realm when it comes to ransomware, allegedly very difficult to trace. Faramarz Savandi and Mohammad Mansouri knew how to do it. The two Iranians wrote their own version of ransomware software and it became known as the SamSam kit. The two men hit about two hundred networks in the United States over two years and collected more than $6 million in Bitcoin. The damage that their ransomware did to networks was estimated at $30 million.

At Chesterfield Royal Hospital the problem was the reverse: without functioning computers, patients could not be released and had to spend another night in the hospital. It was May 12, 2017, and the British National Health Service had been hit by a ransomware cyberattack that was shutting down businesses all over Europe and North America, locking down computers and demanding payment in Bitcoin to unlock them. The attack tool used became known as WannaCry, and seven months later the Australian, British, and American governments identified the culprit as one of the North Korean government’s hacking groups, sometimes called the Lazarus Group by Western analysts. While WannaCry captured the media’s attention in the United States and many other countries, the events in May were only a prelude to a much more devastating attack a month later by another state actor.

All of their data got encrypted. Do you think they should pay the ransom?” We have had more than a few calls like that. We usually say that the answer is probably yes, you should pay, unless you have multiple, reliable, backup databases. Then our callers often respond, “Okay, then do you know where I can buy some Bitcoin?” In 2017 and 2018, there was a near pandemic of ransomware in North America and Europe. According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, sixteen hundred ransomware attacks were occurring each day in Canada in 2015. By the fall of 2016, the attacks almost doubled. As we said, a pandemic. Hackers could easily buy attack kits that would find vulnerabilities that allowed them to go from publicly facing web pages or email servers into an entire corporate network.


The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design by Michael Kearns, Aaron Roth

23andMe, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, Alvin Roth, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, cloud computing, computer vision, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, general-purpose programming language, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Chrome, ImageNet competition, Lyft, medical residency, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, p-value, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, personalized medicine, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, short selling, sorting algorithm, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, telemarketer, Turing machine, two-sided market, Vilfredo Pareto

Suppose we program a superpowerful optimization algorithm for a simple goal: mine as many bitcoins as possible within the next decade. Mining bitcoins requires solving a difficult computational problem, for which it is thought that there is no algorithm substantially better than brute-force search. One strategy that the algorithm could employ is to devote all of its computational power directly to these brute-force search problems and solve as many of them as possible within the next decade. This is what existing bitcoin miners do. But the algorithm’s objective motivates it to find a better solution if one is available.

With a bit of inspiration from science fiction, you can imagine dystopian solutions that would be improvements on the algorithm’s narrowly defined objective function but which we didn’t intend—including the forced reorientation of society’s resources and even human civilization toward building bitcoin-mining rigs. There are a couple of simple objections to these kinds of doomsday scenarios, but many of them can be dispatched with a little imagination. Perhaps the most obvious is “Why don’t we just turn the computer off once we realize it is starting to exhibit these unintended behaviors?” But if the computer is turned off, it will have mined fewer bitcoins than if it had been left on. And remember, the computer is running a superpowerful optimization algorithm, so it is unlikely to miss this simple observation.

See also p-hacking advantages of machine learning, 190–93 advertising, 191–92 Afghanistan, 50–51 age data, 27–29, 65–66, 86–89 aggregate data, 2, 30–34, 50–51 AI labs, 145–46 alcohol use data, 51–52 algebraic equations, 37 algorithmic game theory, 100–101 Amazon, 60–61, 116–17, 121, 123, 125 analogies, 57–63 anonymization of data “de-anonymizing,” 2–3, 14–15, 23, 25–26 reidentification of anonymous data, 22–31, 33–34, 38 shortcomings of anonymization methods, 23–29 and weaknesses of aggregate data, 31–32 Apple, 47–50 arbitrary harms, 38 Archimedes, 160–62 arms races, 180–81 arrest data, 92 artificial intelligence (AI), 13, 176–77, 179–82 Atari video games, 132 automation, 174–78, 180 availability of data, 1–3, 51, 66–67 averages, 40, 44–45 backgammon, 131 backpropagation algorithm, 9–10, 78–79, 145–46 “bad equilibria,” 95, 97, 136 Baidu, 148–51, 166, 185 bans on data uses, 39 Bayesian statistics, 38–39, 173 behavioral data, 123 benchmark datasets, 136 Bengio, Yoshua, 133 biases and algorithmic fairness, 57–63 and data collection, 90–93 and word embedding, 58–63, 77–78 birth date information, 23 bitcoin, 183–84 blood-type compatibility, 130 board games, 131–32 Bonferroni correction, 149–51, 153, 156, 164 book recommendation algorithms, 117–21 Bork, Robert, 24 bottlenecks, 107 breaches of data, 32 British Doctors Study, 34–36, 39, 51 brute force tasks, 183–84, 186 Cambridge University, 51–52 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 49–50 centralized differential privacy, 46–47 chain reaction intelligence growth, 185 cheating, 115, 148, 166 choice, 101–3 Chrome browser, 47–48, 195 classification of data, 146–48, 152–55 cloud computing, 121–23 Coase, Ronald, 159 Coffee Meets Bagel (dating app), 94–97, 100–101 coin flips, 42–43, 46–47 Cold War, 100 collaborative filtering, 23–24, 116–18, 123–25 collective behavioral data, 105–6, 109, 123–24 collective good, 112 collective language, 64 collective overfitting, 136.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Unfortunately, I also opened myself up to some potential problems. In 2017, a hacker bragged on the Internet that he was able to remotely hijack the Heatmiser smart thermostat—not the brand I have. Separately, a group of researchers demonstrated ransomware against two popular American thermostat brands—again, not mine—demanding payment in bitcoin to relinquish control. And if they could plant ransomware, they could also have recruited that thermostat into a bot network and used it to attack other sites on the Internet. This was a research project; no operational thermostats were harmed in the process, and no water pipes burst as a result.

They steal our credit card data and use it to commit fraud, or they steal our identity information and use that. They also lock up our data and then try to coerce us into paying for its return—that’s ransomware. In early 2018, the Indiana hospital Hancock Health was the victim of a cyberattack. Criminals—we have no idea who—encrypted its computers and demanded $55,000 in bitcoin to unlock them. Medical staff had no access to computerized medical records. Even though they had backups, they feared that the time required to restore the data would put patients at risk. They paid up. Ransomware is increasingly common and lucrative. Victims range from organizations, as in the preceding story, to individuals.

A lot of cybercrime follows from this question: I’ve hacked into all of these computers; now what can I do with them? Turns out that the answer is: plenty. Criminals have harnessed large numbers of hacked computers into bot, or zombie, networks. Botnets can be used for all sorts of things: sending spam at high rates, solving CAPTCHAs, and mining bitcoin. Hackers use bots to commit click fraud: repeatedly clicking on ads on sites they control and collecting revenue from the third parties that place them, or clicking on ads placed by competitors and forcing them to pay. They use massive botnets to launch DDoS attacks against other victims. If you control millions of bots, you can use them to overwhelm the Internet connections of individuals and even companies, and kick them off the Internet.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

they wrote—and this time they offered to decrypt it for anyone who bid the most Bitcoin. This time, the Shadow Brokers added a twist. If the bidding reached one million Bitcoin—worth well over half a billion dollars at the time—they would dump the entire contents of their stolen trove online. Chaos came with a hefty price tag. The Shadow Brokers concluded with a strange screed about “elites.” “Let us spell out for Elites. Your wealth and control depends on electronic data,” they wrote. “If electronic data go bye bye where leave Wealthy Elites? Maybe with dumb cattle? ‘Do you feel in charge?’ Wealthy elites, you send bitcoin, you bid in auction, maybe big advantage for you?”

Alongside their Boratesque rant was a screenshot of various files that the group said were worth between 1 and 100 Bitcoin each—$780—$78,000. If buyers wanted to purchase the NSA’s hacking tools à la carte, they could make a direct bid for each exploit. Whether would-be buyers found the risk that they would become an NSA target too great, or the entire auction was a farce, nobody bit. That January the Shadow Brokers announced that they were quitting the cyberarms market altogether. “So long, farewell peoples. The ShadowBrokers is going dark, making exit; Continuing is being much risk and bullshit, not many bitcoins. Despite theories, it always being about bitcoins for the ShadowBrokers.

Epidemiologists had no way to warn city health officials about spreading illnesses. Even the database that tracked bad batches of street drugs had been knocked offline. Baltimore’s data had been replaced with a ransom message—one becoming all too familiar to cities and towns around the country—demanding Bitcoin to unlock their data. Over the next few weeks, as Baltimore officials refused to pay their extortionists, the price of a single Bitcoin—which had nosedived the previous year—rose by half, raising Baltimore’s ransom to more than $100,000. But that was nothing compared to the $18 million in damages Baltimore would end up having to pay in cleanup costs. Baltimore called in a handful of incident response teams, including security engineers from Microsoft, to help recover their data.


pages: 1,082 words: 87,792

Python for Algorithmic Trading: From Idea to Cloud Deployment by Yves Hilpisch

algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, backtesting, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brownian motion, cloud computing, coronavirus, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Edward Thorp, fiat currency, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Guido van Rossum, implied volatility, information retrieval, margin call, market microstructure, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, paper trading, passive investing, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sorting algorithm, systematic trading, transaction costs, value at risk

Along the way, we will also implement classes and modules that will make any algorithmic trading project more efficient. However, the main packages used throughout will be NumPy and pandas. Figure 1-1. Historical Bitcoin exchange rate in USD from the beginning of 2013 until mid-2020 While NumPy provides the basic data structure to store numerical data and work with it, pandas brings powerful time series management capabilities to the table. It also does a great job of wrapping functionality from other packages into an easy-to-use API. The Bitcoin example just described shows that a single method call on a DataFrame object is enough to generate a plot with two financial time series visualized.

Many people who adopt Python, coming from diverse other languages, cite pandas as a major reason for their decision. In combination with open data sources like Quandl, pandas even allows students to do sophisticated financial analytics with the lowest barriers of entry ever: a regular notebook computer with an internet connection suffices. Assume an algorithmic trader is interested in trading Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency with the largest market capitalization. A first step might be to retrieve data about the historical exchange rate in USD. Using Quandl data and pandas, such a task is accomplished in less than a minute. Figure 1-1 shows the plot that results from the following Python code, which is (omitting some plotting style related parameterizations) only four lines.

/pyalgo.cfg'] In [5]: import quandl as q q.ApiConfig.api_key = c['quandl']['api_key'] d = q.get('BCHAIN/MKPRU') d['SMA'] = d['Value'].rolling(100).mean() d.loc['2013-1-1':].plot(title='BTC/USD exchange rate', figsize=(10, 6)); Imports and configures the plotting package. Imports the configparser module and reads credentials. Imports the Quandl Python wrapper package and provides the API key. Retrieves daily data for the Bitcoin exchange rate and returns a pandas DataFrame object with a single column. Calculates the SMA for 100 days in vectorized fashion. Selects data from the 1st of January 2013 on and plots it. Obviously, NumPy and pandas measurably contribute to the success of Python in finance. However, the Python ecosystem has much more to offer in the form of additional Python packages that solve rather fundamental problems and sometimes specialized ones.


pages: 196 words: 54,339

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

One or two superstars get all the plays, and everyone else sells almost nothing M. J. Salganik, P. S. Dodds, and D. J. Watts, “Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market,” Science 311 (2006). The computer power needed to create one bitcoin Nathaniel Popper, “There Is Nothing Virtual About Bitcoin’s Energy Appetite,” New York Times, January 21, 2018. 49. The CEO of a typical company in 1960 made about 20 times as much as its average worker David Leonhardt, “When the Rich Said No to Getting Richer,” New York Times, September 5, 2017. “holding a wolf by the ear” Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, avail­able at https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Letter_from_Thomas_Jefferson_to_John_Holmes_April_22_1820.

But when we hear these ideas espoused by Silicon Valley’s CEOs, it’s usually in the context of keeping the extraction going. People have been sucked dry, so now the government should just print more money for them to spend. The argument merely reinforces the human obligation to keep consuming, or to keep working for an unlivable wage. More countercultural solutions, such as bitcoin and the blockchain, are no less technosolutionist in spirit. The blockchain replaces the need for central authorities such as banks by letting everyone on a network authenticate their transactions with computer encryption. It may disintermediate exploitative financial institutions but it doesn’t help rehumanize the economy, or reestablish the trust, cohesion, and ethos of mutual aid that was undermined by digital capitalism.

It may disintermediate exploitative financial institutions but it doesn’t help rehumanize the economy, or reestablish the trust, cohesion, and ethos of mutual aid that was undermined by digital capitalism. It simply substitutes for trust in a different way: using the energy costs of blockchain mining as a security measure against counterfeiting or other false claims. (The computer power needed to create one bitcoin consumes at least as much electricity as the average American household burns through in two years.) Is this the fundamental fix we really need? A better ledger? The problem the blockchain solves is the utilitarian one of better, faster accounting, and maybe an easier way to verify someone’s identity online.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

The answer just might be the blockchain. Blockchain People have gone mad trying to understand how the blockchain works, never mind trying to explain it. Its most famous application is Bitcoin, the world’s first completely decentralized digital currency.[cccxlix] In just a few years, the Bitcoin “economy” has grown larger than the economies of some countries. The value of a Bitcoin has fluctuated wildly, hitting a peak of $1,216 in November 2013. The insights which made Bitcoin possible were published in 2008 under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, and the blockchain is at the heart of it. The blockchain is a public ledger which records transactions.

The blockchain is a public ledger which records transactions. The clever bit is that the ledger is completely trustworthy despite having no central authority, like a bank, to validate it. It is trustworthy in that you can have full confidence that if someone gives you a Bitcoin, then you do own that Bitcoin: the person who gave it to you will not be nipping off to spend the same piece of currency elsewhere, even though it is entirely digital. This confidence arises because transactions are recorded in blocks which are added to the chain by people (or rather computer algorithms) called miners. These miners are working continuously on mathematical problems whose solutions are hard to find but easy to verify.


pages: 205 words: 61,903

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Nowhere has this been made more clear than in digital’s replacement for central currency—crypto. Initially conceived alongside Occupy Wall Street, the bitcoin protocol offered a way for people to authenticate transactions without involving banks, fees, and usurious intermediaries. But, just like the monarchs behind central currency, speculators were less concerned with facilitating transactions than profiting off them and raising the price of the Bitcoin token. Millions of computers around the world now have no other purpose than to prove the value of Bitcoin by spinning their cycles and spending electricity on purposeless calculations —amounting to a bit more than the total energy consumption of all of Sweden.

They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys—yes, all men—from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the talk I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions. They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or Ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? But they didn’t seem to be taking it in. No sooner would I begin to explain the merits of proof-of-stake versus proof-of-work blockchains than they would move to the next question. I started to feel like they were testing me—not my knowledge so much as my scruples.

Lowell Harriss, History and Policies of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1951), 41–48.   86   GE eventually sold : GE, “GE Completes the Separation of Synchrony Financial,” November 17, 2015, https:// www .ge .com /news /reports /ge -completes -the -separation -of -synchrony -financial.   87   “world trade … speed of light” : Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995).   87   “new paradigm” : Alen Mattich, “The New ‘New Paradigm’ for Equities,” Wall Street Journal , May 28, 2013, https:// www .wsj .com /articles /BL -MBB -1982.   89   “competition is for losers” : Peter Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014, https:// www .wsj .com /articles /peter -thiel -competition -is -for -losers -1410535536.   89   “fidelity to an event” : Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown Business, 2014). He borrows this idea from Maoist Alain Badiou.   91   spending electricity on purposeless calculations : Bitcoin advocates argue that some percent of this energy comes from “renewable” sources. Crypto critics argue that these figures don’t even account for the additional 50 percent of energy being consumed by rival proof-of-work tokens.   92   The companies behind our activity trackers : A. J. Perez, “Use a Fitness App to Track Your Workouts?


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Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

As part of those advances, taxes can be filed online and tax refunds obtained more quickly, and if need be your tax procrastination can run until the very last moment without your having to pay a late fee or penalty. More recently, Bitcoin has created an entirely new kind of asset, based on principles that only a decade ago very few people had imagined. It competes with gold as a hedge and unorthodox store of value, and you can use it as a currency to buy (legal) marijuana, a transaction that, because of federal regulations, the regular banking system cannot support. It enables a blockchain as a new medium for recording, storing, and verifying information and common agreement as to who owns what. It remains to be seen how much Bitcoin, along with other cryptocurrencies and more generally the blockchain, will prove transformational.

While the available evidence indicates that so far most of these hacks are for financially relevant information, such as Social Security numbers, rather than to violate patient privacy, it is not hard to imagine a future where the medical records themselves become public or semi-public knowledge. Imagine you have a preexisting condition related to mental illness, your records are hacked, and then you receive an email blackmailing you, threatening to release the information unless you send $10,000 in Bitcoin. By the time you are reading this book, I bet this already has happened, whether or not the story made it into the newspapers.13 It’s not so well known that currently hackers actually target hospitals and electronic medical records. They get into a hospital database, pull out some medical information, store it in such a way that the hospital can’t access it, prove to the hospital that they are holding sensitive information, and then ask the hospital for a ransom.

It remains to be seen how much Bitcoin, along with other cryptocurrencies and more generally the blockchain, will prove transformational. It might not even hold its market value. But that is how innovation usually proceeds. Innovators try lots of new approaches; some are discarded, others take off, and yet others evolve into something more useful with the passage of time. So far Bitcoin and some of the other cryptocurrencies have defied the skeptics. Maybe they will have taken a tumble by the time you are reading this, but nonetheless, they are signs of an active process of dynamic innovation. Are you frustrated by how the credit card system works? Apple Pay is already accepted by a large number of merchants.


pages: 756 words: 120,818

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

Many of them will have failed to spot the emergence of the new trend but are quick to align themselves with it (which tells us more about the labor market than about anything else: people align their careers with hot trends). For instance, the December 2017 spike in the price of bitcoin was accompanied by a raft of new research opinions on the cryptocurrency from new cryptocoin brokers and large banks. For what it is worth, my own view on cryptocurrencies is that the future will be characterized as “Blockchain everywhere, bitcoin nowhere”—that is, the distributed ledger technology behind bitcoin will become more pervasive across economic sectors, but bitcoin will fail to prove itself as a currency proper and will live out an existence as a lurid, speculative asset.* To return to the business of forecasting, I am also often struck by the number of times that bodies like the IMF and central banks follow up a crisis or market event with a downward adjustment to their GDP forecasts.

We can turn to history for some help in thinking through an answer. For some, globalization today still has a shininess and appears very new. Many of the technological aspects of globalization are so glittering that it is hard to imagine that it has occurred before or, indeed, that we could now do without its fruits—the iPhone X, bitcoin, or artificial intelligence. But globalization does have a precedent, and it is a cautionary tale at that. Though the current wave of globalization is coming to an end, we can get a glimpse of what might happen next by going back in time to the first wave of globalization, in the period 1870 to 1913.

One can imagine a twenty-first-century Keynes, sipping his morning tea in bed, speculating on commodities with iPad in hand, booking a flight to South Africa, and remotely running his stockbroking business.2 If Anthony Trollope were to find himself in our world and if he were to try to rewrite The Way We Live Now, it might very well focus on technology. His central character would be not Augustus Melmotte but an Asian woman, wearing a designer T-shirt rather than a morning suit, and she would speculate on bitcoin rather than railway stocks. Technology today is the great creator of new wealth and the primary force changing human behavior—socially, politically, and economically. Technology’s role in the zeitgeist is manifest in many of the more intriguing economic puzzles that confound us. It reveals itself in the role of algorithmic and computer-based trading in financial markets, in the massive changes it has enabled in how we work, and in the structure of the labor market.


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Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Initially, currency-issuing nations believed they had to prop up their money by guaranteeing that it could be exchanged for gold or silver at a fixed rate. When that practice ended, around the beginning of the twentieth century, money became purely informational. Today, money is moving from the physical to the virtual—the digits signaling a transaction in our bank accounts, the bits denoting an entry into Bitcoin’s ledger—further emphasizing money’s informational role. In our daily lives, we may often overlook the informational function of money and price. After all, we are usually far more interested in completing transactions—getting the food to feed our family, purchasing the home to shelter us and our loved ones, or buying the car to get us around—than in focusing on the details of the transaction process.

For example, Coconut offers customers the ability, whenever receiving or making a payment, to swiftly (re)calculate taxes and to put money aside to pay them. Holvi’s services include free integrated invoicing and bookkeeping. Some banks have sought to push cost cutting and automation much further by teaming up with or investing in companies that are working on alternative payment systems. In financial circles, Bitcoin (as well as blockchain, its underlying technology) has not only caused fear but also instilled hope that banking can be saved—although it’s unclear how. Banks advocating deeply decentralizing technologies for transferring and holding value such as blockchain may not yet fully appreciate that these technologies obviate the need for the centralized service they are offering.

the number of listed companies: Maureen Farrell, “America’s Roster of Public Companies Is Shrinking Before Our Eyes,” Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-roster-of-public-companies-is-shrinking-before-our-eyes-1483545879. No digital currency is capable of: For more on blockchain, see Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, The Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World (New York: Portfolio/Penguin Books, 2016). fintechs attracted investments exceeding $19 billion: Andrew Meola, “The Fintech Report 2016: Financial Industry Trends and Investment,” Business Insider, December 14, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.de/the-fintech-report-2016-financial-industry-trends-and-investment-2016-12?


pages: 268 words: 74,724

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank by John Tamny

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, business logic, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Michael Milken, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, NetJets, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, War on Poverty, yield curve

Today, retailers accept all kinds of credit cards, and if private money were legalized, so would they accept certain brands of a “dollar” legally defined as 1/1000th of an ounce of gold. Gradually, a few currencies would win out as money par excellence. Interesting here is that Bitcoin isn’t one of those currencies. Thanks to the creators of Bitcoin’s Friedmanite focus on coin supply, the value of each Bitcoin is notoriously volatile. That’s a problem, because money is best when it’s stable. Future private currencies will focus on stability of value over supply, and the result will be quite special. Along the lines of the above paragraph, arguably the best answer in light of the U.S.

., 157–58 The Battle of Bretton Woods (Steil), 95, 169 Bear Stearns, 120 Beatty, Warren, 23–24, 28 Beckworth, David, 138–39 Berkshire Hathaway, 62, 85 Bernanke, Ben, 41–47, 72, 106, 128, 149, 154, 164 Bezos, Jeff, 59, 97–98, 150 Biden, Joe, 59 billion-dollar “unicorn” companies, 28, 148 Biography of the Dollar (Karmin), 100 Bitcoin, 144 Blinder, Alan, 1 Bloomberg news organization, 42 Blumenthal, Michael, 117, 170 Bonnie & Clyde (film), 23 Brady, Tom, 16 Bretton Woods monetary conference, 95, 169 Brookes, Warren, 49, 50, 69, 72, 97 Brown, James, 25 Buffett, Warren, 59, 62, 78, 85, 150 Burns, Arthur, 169, 170 Bush, George W., 71, 72–73, 118–19, 121, 171 cab fares during periods of heavy demand, 11–12 Candy, John, 22 Capital City (Kessner), 30 capitalism credit and crowdsourcing, 110 failure as feature of, 58, 89, 100, 125 and filling of unmet needs, 112, 179 turning scarcity into abundance, 53–54, 81 car companies, 56–57 car manufacturing process, 65–66 Carroll, Pete, 18–20 Carter, Jimmy, 117, 170 Cassel, Gustav, 119 Cato Institute, 135 The CEO Tightrope (Trammell), 123–24 The Changed Face of Banking (Smith), 111, 129 Chinese economy, 94, 96, 118, 135–36, 137, 138 Chinese stock market, 152–53 Citadel hedge fund, 41, 42, 43 Citigroup, 128 Cleveland, Ohio, 137–38 Clinton, Bill, 51–52, 71, 72, 171 Clinton, Hillary, 48, 51–52, 59 coaching and recruiting of college athletes, 15–21, 78–79 Cochrane, John, 102 computer company failures, 57 Congress.


pages: 525 words: 116,295

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

industry cooperation with law enforcement was sufficient: “Social Media Talks About Rioting ‘Constructive,’ ” BBC, August 25, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14657456. Bitcoins: Bitcoin is the most successful experiment in digital currency today; it uses a mix of peer-to-peer networking and cryptographic signatures to process online payments. The value of the currency has fluctuated wildly since its inception; the first publicly traded Bitcoins went for 3 cents, and a little more than a year later they were valued at $29.57 apiece. Bitcoins are held in digital “wallets,” and are used to pay for a wide range of virtual and physical goods. At the illicit online market called the Silk Road, where people can use encrypted channels to buy illegal drugs, Bitcoins are the sole currency and generate approximately $22 million in annual sales, according to a recent study.

Democratic governments will fear uncontrollable libel and leaking, autocracies internal dissent. But if illegal activity is the primary concern for governments, the real challenge will be the combination of virtual currency with anonymous networks that hide the physical location of services. For example, criminals are already selling illegal drugs on the Tor network in exchange for Bitcoins (a virtual currency), avoiding cash and banks altogether. Copyright infringers will use the same networks. As we think about how to address these kinds of challenges, we cannot afford to take a black-and-white view; context matters. For example, in Mexico, drug cartels are among some of the most effective users of anonymous encryption, both P2P and through the Internet.

At the illicit online market called the Silk Road, where people can use encrypted channels to buy illegal drugs, Bitcoins are the sole currency and generate approximately $22 million in annual sales, according to a recent study. See Andy Greenberg, “Black Market Drug Site ‘Silk Road’ Booming: $22 Million in Annual Sales,” Forbes, August 6, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/08/06/black-market-drug-site-silk-road-booming-22-million-in-annual-mostly-illegal-sales/; Nicolas Christin, “Traveling the Silk Road: A Measurement Analysis of a Large Anonymous Online Marketplace” (working paper, INI/CyLab, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA, August 1, 2012), http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.7139v1.pdf.


pages: 194 words: 56,074

Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan, Mark Blyth

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, full employment, gig economy, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, precariat, price stability, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, universal basic income

When everything crashed, a lot of those brains went home and played video games – it’s dark much of the time in Iceland. And then they hit on something. Online gaming is a global industry that requires a lot of computing power. Computing power makes heat. Heat needs to be cooled. So why not stick the servers for online gaming, Bitcoin mining, and a host of other things, in the ground in Iceland (the clue is in the name), and run the show from there? Which is what they did. Iceland had supportive institutions that didn’t throw unemployed people under a bus, which allowed them to rethink their options and redeploy their capital.

That is, stories about what technology will do to us in the future turn out to affect us now in the present. Here’s what I mean. Remember what we said about risk and uncertainty? Ideas about likely future states of the world that become dominant are causally important in bringing that future about. Think about Bitcoin for a moment. It is neither a store of value nor a unit of exchange, nor a unit of account, so it’s not money. But because people think that it will be the money of the future, fortunes are won and lost trading it. I want to suggest that how we think about emerging technologies has that character and that doing so has, over the past decade, added a whole layer of uncertainty to our lives.

Just as the global financial crisis really began to bite in Europe in 2010, the press everywhere suddenly became replete with stories about how pretty much all workers were shortly to be replaced by robots. Whether in the form of self-driving cars and trucks, drone delivery of goods, computer analysis of financial and legal data, blockchain and bitcoin, we were told over and over that no one was immune. Why? Because this time it was different – different in that AI and ML would combine to do things better than humans can do, and that such machines would get better at doing whatever they do better faster than we can catch up, hence the “race against the machine” and we were all going to lose.


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

While social currencies cued to locales are proliferating, global alternative currencies that bypass national boundaries are scaling in on the Internet. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency network with millions of bitcoins in circulation. The bitcoin is tradable with other world currencies, and as of November 2013, it was selling around 400 U.S. dollars per bitcoin.25 The creators of the currency, Amir Taaki and Donald Norman, say the idea came to them when they were in Amsterdam, and a friend from the United Kingdom asked them to wire some emergency funds. Their only two options were Western Union and MoneyGram, both of which took a usurious 20 to 25 percent of the transfer in fees. They created bitcoin, an Internet currency, to bypass the fee gouging.26 Futurist Heather Schelgel, who advises the world’s leading banks on transaction standards, doesn’t believe that global, Internet-based currencies will replace traditional currencies, but adds that “as communities begin to realize the possibility of expressing themselves through money, I expect you’ll see hundreds of BitCoin [sic], or something similar—or something we haven’t even thought of yet.”27 Others are even more bullish.

They created bitcoin, an Internet currency, to bypass the fee gouging.26 Futurist Heather Schelgel, who advises the world’s leading banks on transaction standards, doesn’t believe that global, Internet-based currencies will replace traditional currencies, but adds that “as communities begin to realize the possibility of expressing themselves through money, I expect you’ll see hundreds of BitCoin [sic], or something similar—or something we haven’t even thought of yet.”27 Others are even more bullish. Jean-Francois Noubel, a cofounder of AOL France, believes it is shortsighted to think that the same disruptive power of a distributed, collaborative, and latterly scaled Internet that gave rise to eBay, Facebook, Amazon, Etsy, and thousands of other ventures wouldn’t make its way into the financial domain.

Helena Smith, “Euros Discarded as Impoverished Greeks Resort to Bartering,” Guardian, January 2, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/02/euro-greece-barter-poverty -crisis (accessed January 3, 2013); Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Spain’s Crisis Spawns Alternative Economy that Doesn’t Rely on the Euro,” Guardian, September 4, 2012, http://www.guardian .co.uk/world/2012/sep/04/spain-euro-free-economy (accessed June 4, 2013). 25. Saabira Chaudhuri, “Bitcoin Price Hits New Record High,” Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303789604579195773841529160 (accessed November 13, 2013). 26. Garland, “The Next Money.” 27. Ibid. 28. Judith D. Schwartz, “Alternative Currencies Grow in Popularity,” Time, December 14, 2008, http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1865467,00.html (accessed June 5, 2013). 29.


Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

References [81] [82] [83] [84] [85] 411 “M4I (Midori Linux for iOpener) Homepage”, http://tengu.homeip.net/midori. “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’, 2008, http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. “Bitter to Better — How to Make Bitcoin a Better Currency”, Simon Barber, Xavier Boyen, Elaine Shi and Ersin Uzun, Proceedings of the 15th Financial Cryptography Conference (FC’12), Springer-Verlag LNCS No.7397, February 2012, p.399. “Custom Chips Could Be the Shovels in a Bitcoin Gold Rush”, Tom Simonite, 5 December 2012, http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508061/custom-chips-could-be-the-shovels-in-a-bitcoin-gold-rush. “Engineering the Bitcoin Gold Rush: An Interview with Yifu Guo, Creator of the First Purpose-Built Miner”, Alec Lui, 26 March 2013, http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/engineering-the-bitcoin-goldrush-an-interview-with-yifu-guo-creator-of-the-first-asic-basedminer

Nine months later, with the help of ASICs, it hit 2,000 trillion hashes a second, with the rate increasing as fast as the ASICs could be churned out [86]. So how do Bitcoin-mining ASICs affect general security? Passwords and encryption keys are often protected using the same hash algorithms that the mining ASICs (and FPGAs and GPUs) are designed to calculate at great speed. By repurposing the hardware that was originally designed for Bitcoin mining it would be possible to attack hashed passwords with an efficiency that wasn’t feasible before Bitcoin appeared. Having said that though, the Bitcoin ASICs for which details have been published are specifically designed for high-speed mining rather than passwordcracking, so that they would require significant changes to their control circuitry in order to make them suitable for password cracking — it’s not for nothing that they’re called application-specific ICs)71.

Although the intent of the attack (which would nowadays be called jailbreaking) was to obtain a cheap PC-style device, the fact that QNX had been inadvertently turned into a target meant that when its security was broken it also broke the security of every embedded QNX device ever shipped. Another situation in which a security mechanism ended up as collateral damage occurred with Bitcoin mining. Mining Bitcoins requires finding a bit string that yields a SHA-256 hash value beginning with a certain number of zero bits. In other words to mine a Bitcoin you need to hash data values until you find one whose hash begins with the required number of zero bits [82][83]. To do that you need a means of calculating SHA-256 hashes very quickly. Initially this was done with conventional CPUs.


pages: 328 words: 84,682

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

Many transaction platforms also used the payment services of other transaction platforms, such as Google Checkout or PayPal, or provided a financial “escrow” service to sellers. Other friction-reducing or risk-reducing services included authentication (verifying users’ identities), insurance, and, for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, currency exchanges and virtual wallets.14 Third, transaction platforms often create additional value for their members by providing complementary services. Sometimes they offer these services for free, but most of the time they charge. For example, Taobao did not charge sellers and buyers to sign up, but it charged sellers for obtaining a better ranking in its internal search engine.

IBM was trying to turn its Watson AI technology into a new consulting service as well as an innovation platform by building partnerships with application developers at companies and universities, especially for health care applications.40 General Electric opened up its Predix operating system to other firms, encouraging them to build products and services for the Internet of things.41 (We explore this case in Chapter 5.) We also have some open general-purpose technologies emerging as potentially new innovation platforms. Blockchain is a good example. This was once associated with Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency (also a kind of transaction platform technology). Various firms were starting to use blockchain software to track different types of transactions over the Internet, including shipments of food as well as transfers of money and confidential documents.42 Third, managers and entrepreneurs in many more industries probably need to give serious thought to combining innovation and transaction functions—adopting a hybrid strategy.

For instance, several broadcast streaming or online gaming platforms, including Mpath, broadcast.com, and globalmedia.com, launched around the turn of the century before broadband was widely available. More recently, two digital asset exchanges failed after a short time due to low trading volumes, as the number of people wishing to exchange Bitcoin for other currencies remained too small. Because platforms often brought a new model and structure to existing businesses, they often ran into problems with the legal and regulatory regimes. Uber and Airbnb have famously tangled with local regulators in various cities where they have done business.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

It’s Amazon—if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals.”54 Built and operated by a mysterious figure who went by the name of Dread Pirate Roberts, Silk Road had two components that allowed it to operate in total anonymity. One, all purchases were processed using a new digital crypto-currency called Bitcoin, which was created by the mysterious pseudonymous cryptographer Satoshi Nakamoto. Two, to use Silk Road, both buyers and sellers first had to download a program called Tor and use a specialized browser to access a specialized store URL—http://silkroad6ownowfk.onion—that took them off the Internet and into the Tor cloud, a.k.a. the dark web.

His success spawned a mass of copycats—dark web entrepreneurs who set up online stores in Silk Road’s image, allowing people to anonymously buy whatever they wanted: weed, marijuana, ecstasy, cocaine, meth, guns, grenades, and even assassinations.59 Some of the sites were possibly a racket, meant to bilk people of their Bitcoins, but others appeared dead serious. Tor’s dark web became a haven for child abuse pornography, allowing forums and markets where such material was swapped and sold to exist beyond the reach of law enforcement. It also housed websites operated by terrorist cells, including recruitment platforms run by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.60 Tor’s ease of use and bullet-proof anonymity didn’t just empower the seedy side of the Internet.

As I dug into the technical details of how Tor worked, I quickly realized that the Tor Project offers no protection against the private tracking and profiling Internet companies carry out. Tor works only if people are dedicated to maintaining a strict anonymous Internet routine: using only dummy email addresses and bogus accounts, carrying out all financial transactions in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and never mentioning their real name in emails or messages. For the vast majority of people on the Internet—those who use Gmail, interact with Facebook friends, and shop on Amazon—Tor does nothing. The moment you log into your personal account—whether on Google, Facebook, eBay, Apple, or Amazon—you reveal your identity.


Getting Started With Ledger by Rolf Schröder

asset allocation, bitcoin, don't repeat yourself, machine readable

For example, if one bought some shares a year ago, their value has most probably changed. How could Ledger know? A simple text file can be used to associate specific dates to exchange rates. The file’s content may look like this: ; P ; P ; P On that particular day, 1 bitcoin was worth 4242 Ether. 2042/02/29 10:00:00 BTC 4242 ETH On that particular day, 1 bitcoin was worth $1337. 2042/02/29 10:00:00 BTC 1337 $ On that particular day, 1 share of AAPL was worth $3.14 2042/02/29 10:00:00 AAPL 3.14 $ Having defined such a database, one can get the current market values by: $ ledger --price-db <filename> --market balance Every once in a while, one can append current prices to the database.


pages: 568 words: 164,014

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game

They also ran a lot of “side projects” off the hop points, engaging in criminal frauds or schemes through the hijacked network. Hop points were a good way to save money, too: sometimes you could even catch a hacker using them to conduct activities like Bitcoin mining, relying on the processors of the hijacked computers to earn cryptocurrency and force someone else to bear the cost of the electricity, making the Bitcoin for the hacker pure profit. Most importantly for our case, though, from sitting atop these hop points we were able to begin to see some very interesting data—for example, photos of the hackers dressed in the uniforms of their day jobs, with the Chinese Army.

Typically arriving on a victim’s machine under the cover of an unassuming email attachment, the Business Club’s ransomware used strong encryption and forced victims to pay using Bitcoin. It was embarrassing and inconvenient, but many relented. The Swansea, Massachusetts, police department grumpily ponied up $750 to get back one of its computers in November 2013; the virus “is so complicated and successful that you have to buy these Bitcoins, which we had never heard of,” Swansea Police Lieutenant Gregory Ryan told his local newspaper. The following month, Dell’s security firm SecureWorks estimated that as many as 250,000 machines worldwide had been infected with CryptoLocker that year.

One time i alert you that if you do this again i will publish every client on this Server! I don’t wanna do this because i don’t win anything here ! So why your trying to lose my access on server haha ?” The system administrator wrote back the next day, “Please dont attack our servers,” at which point the hacker demanded a payment of two Bitcoins—then worth about $500—in exchange for leaving the server alone and explaining how he’d accessed it in the first place. The FBI was able to trace the internet address of the sent email to Malaysia, where they began to piece together a picture of the prime suspect: Ardit Ferizi. An ethnic Albanian, Ferizi came from Gjakova, Kosovo, a region deeply affected by the war there in 1999.


pages: 66 words: 10,995

Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook: Top 30 Autoimmune Paleo Recipes Revealed ! (The Blokehead Success Series) by The Blokehead

bitcoin

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QH01KH4 The Ultimate Body Weight Workout: Transform Your Body Using Your Own Body Weight http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QF5VCW4 Art Creative Confidence: How To Unleash Your Confidence, Be Super Innovative & Design Your Life In 30 Days http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PSFV3EO Doodling: How To Master Doodling In 6 Easy Steps http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PRHKE0W Mind Mapping: Step-by-Step Beginner's Guide in Creating Mind Maps! http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PSI0VVW Minimalist: How To Prepare & Control Your Minimalist Budget In 30 Days Or Less & Get More Money Out Of Life Now http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PUMNOT2 Bitcoin: The Ultimate A - Z Of Profitable Bitcoin Trading & Mining Guide Exposed! http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PUMNI48 Emotional Vampires: How to Deal with Emotional Vampires & Break the Cycle of Manipulation. A Self Guide to Take Control of Your Life & Emotional Freedom http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QAJ7HGA Religion For Atheists: The Ultimate Atheist Guide & Manual On The Religion Without God http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QEYMAXQ Scrum - Ultimate Guide to Scrum Agile Essential Practices!


pages: 122 words: 38,022

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

Amber A’Lee Frost, Chapo Trap House Angela Nagle is one of the few writers anywhere who has consistently refused to hold a double standard for virulent racism and misogyny even when it came in edgy countercultural packaging. Kill All Normies is a brilliant exposé of the new faces of online nihilism and fascism, which can no longer be explained away as doing it “for the lulz”. David Golumbia, Author of The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism With a liberal left dangerously lost in the stormy waters of middle class self-flagellation, Angela Nagle is the lighthouse keeper showing us the way out. Her writing is unsparing in its diagnosis but never cruel. Unlike much of the Left who’ve grown far too accustomed to marginalization and defeat, Nagle still believes in politics as the only way of changing an increasingly brutal world.

The Dark Enlightenment is an ironic play on the idea of the Enlightenment, based on a suspicion of progress and rejecting the liberal paradigm. Among all of these thinkers Land is the greatest misfit, once closer to the radical left-oriented Accelerationist school of thought and still a highly idiosyncratic thinker, he is not so easily categorized. Within the radical right libertarian pro-tech tendency, common preoccupations include Bitcoin, Seasteading – Peter Theil’s idea to create a separate state off the coast of the US – and rightist elite applications of transhumanism. But of course what we call the alt-right today could never have had any connection to the mainstream and to a new generation of young people if it only came in the form of lengthy treatises on obscure blogs.

Hakim Bey’s idea of the temporary autonomous zone was based on what he called ‘pirate utopias’ and he argued that the attempt to form a permanent culture or politics inevitably deteriorates into a structured system that stifles individual creativity. His language and ideas influenced anarchism and later, online cultures that advocated illegal downloading, anonymity, hacking and experiments like bitcoin. Echoes of John Perry Barlow’s manifesto ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ can be seen in this earlier period of Anon culture and in analyses that reflect a more radical horizontalist politics, like Gabriella Coleman’s work. Barlow was one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, anarchist hackers and defenders of an Internet free of state intervention, capitalist control and monopolizing of the online world.


pages: 421 words: 110,406

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

To solve this problem, competing exchanges, such as the alternative trading system IEX, are using their own supercomputers to precisely time the order of bids, thereby eliminating the advantages of a Goldman Sachs.36 Architecture can level the playing field, making markets more competitive and fair for all. One of the most innovative forms of architectural control ever invented made its appearance in 2008, when an anonymous coding genius known as Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper on the Cryptography mailing list defining the Bitcoin digital currency and the so-called blockchain protocol governing it. Although Bitcoin is notable as the world’s first unforgeable digital currency that cannot be controlled by a government, bank, or individual, the blockchain is truly revolutionary. It makes possible fully decentralized, completely trustworthy interactions without any need for escrow payments or other guarantees.

INDUSTRY EXAMPLES Agriculture John Deere, Intuit Fasal Communication and Networking LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Tinder, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat Consumer Goods Philips, McCormick Foods FlavorPrint Education Udemy, Skillshare, Coursera, edX, Duolingo Energy and Heavy Industry Nest, Tesla Powerwall, General Electric, EnerNOC Finance Bitcoin, Lending Club, Kickstarter Health Care Cohealo, SimplyInsured, Kaiser Permanente Gaming Xbox, Nintendo, PlayStation Labor and Professional Services Upwork, Fiverr, 99designs, Sittercity, LegalZoom Local Services Yelp, Foursquare, Groupon, Angie’s List Logistics and Delivery Munchery, Foodpanda, Haier Group Media Medium, Viki, YouTube, Wikipedia, Huffington Post, Kindle Publishing Operating Systems iOS, Android, MacOS, Microsoft Windows Retail Amazon, Alibaba, Walgreens, Burberry, Shopkick Transportation Uber, Waze, BlaBlaCar, GrabTaxi, Ola Cabs Travel Airbnb, TripAdvisor FIGURE 1.2.

Transportation services requested via Uber are delivered on real city streets using actual cars; dinner reservations made via Yelp result in physical meals consumed around real tables in actual restaurants. Exchange of currency. When goods or services are exchanged between platform participants, they are typically paid for using some form of currency. In many cases, this is traditional currency—money transmitted in one of a variety of ways, including credit card data, a PayPal transaction, a Bitcoin transfer, or (rarely) physical cash. However, there are other forms of value, and therefore other ways in which consumers “pay” producers in the world of platforms. Video viewers on YouTube or followers on Twitter pay the producer with attention, which adds value to the producer in a variety of ways.


pages: 361 words: 117,566

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth by Dan McCrum

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kinder Surprise, lockdown, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, multilevel marketing, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, price stability, profit motive, reality distortion field, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Vision Fund, WeWork

These financial wizards could throw $1bn at Wirecard while taking very little actual financial risk. To broker the deal Akshay Naheta turned to Christian Angermayer, a business wunderkind with a mixed record and a very successful knack of attaching himself to voguey trends. For a while it was Africa, where he befriended the president of Rwanda, then Bitcoin and psychedelics. In 2015 he tried ’shrooming in the Caribbean (where it was legal) and the lifetime teetotaller returned evangelical. He backed a company researching psilocybin-based treatments for depression, and another focused on speculative science to extend ‘healthy ageing’. He also dabbled in Hollywood as a movie producer.

Her team had persuaded the former Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson to help sell tickets with a video endorsement. Other entertainment that evening included a sermon from the Reverend Craig Wright, an Australian chancer with a giant bodyguard, who claimed (to snorts of derision from some watching) to be the billionaire inventor of Bitcoin. As Murphy and I ran through our careful script, we were interrupted by shouts from giant puppets, socks with buttons for eyes, projected on to the back of the stage: ‘Crummy McCrum is going to jail!’; ‘Go for it Markus!’ It felt good to show a small part of the world we weren’t hiding away. The location was also a reminder of how the underworld had changed.

Kukies, a former co-chief executive of Goldman Sachs, was no slouch, and Braun stayed in his comfort zone up in the blue sky of German international competitiveness. Start-ups needed more venture capital finance to succeed, was his considered view. He bent Kukies’s ear about taking Crypto mainstream; Wirecard’s prepaid card service could be used to transact Bitcoin, if the regulations were supportive. Then it was on to a curious bugbear. Due to Europe’s lack of other technology companies, its financial institutions had to rely on the American giants if they wished to store their data in the cloud. Shortly after they spoke that day, Braun announced a transaction Wirecard had prepared for months, its entry into China with the €109m purchase of a Beijing payments company, Allscore.


pages: 313 words: 91,098

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, attribution theory, bitcoin, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dmitri Mendeleev, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Flynn Effect, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, hive mind, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Peoples Temple, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, seminal paper, single-payer health, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vernor Vinge, web application, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Platforms to support this kind of decentralized collaborative activity are just coming into being with futuristic names like Ethereum, Sensorica, and Colony. Ethereum is inspired by the success of Bitcoin, an Internet currency that is decentralized, not administered by any single entity. The information about who owns how much Bitcoin is stored in a public ledger of transactions called a block chain. A block chain is a sophisticated technology for maintaining a record of all transactions that is updated and stored across the network of Bitcoin users. Distributing the ledger of transactions across the network is a good way to prevent mistakes and cheating. Ethereum uses a block chain method to allow collaboration via decentralized agreement of everyone involved in a project.

See diagnostic reasoning ballot measures California Sodomite Suppression Act, 190 Proposition 13, 190–91 transferring power from legislators to voters, 189–91 Band-Aids example of explanation foes and fiends, 237–38 Barlow, Robert, 44 bat and ball problem from Cognitive Reflection Test, 81 The Beatles’ source of greatness, 121 bee example of optic flow, 100 beehive example of complexity, 107–08, 113–14 bias, 188–89 biblical storytelling, 63–64 bicycle example of the illusion of explanatory depth (IoED), 23–24 Binet, Alfred, 203 Bitcoin, 150 Block, Lauren, 164 block chain technology, 150 Bodmer, Walter, 156 Bodmer Report, 156–59 body-brain cooperation in cognitive processing, 101–05 arithmetic using body-based counting example, 102–03 embodiment, 102 watering can handle example, 101–02 Bolton, Lisa, 168 Borges, Jorge Luis, 37–39, 47 Boston Tea Party example of storytelling, 66–67 Bostrom, Nick, 132 the brain animals vs. plants, 40–42 body-brain cooperation in cognitive processing, 101–05 complexity of, 29–30 encephalization, 112, 133–34 evolution of, 48, 111–12 function of different systems within, 29–30 of the horseshoe crab, 43–45 nervous systems compared across species, 29, 42 social brain hypothesis, 112–13 Brazilian street sellers’ math abilities, 215–16 bridge and wheel example of causal reasoning, 56 Brooks, Rodney, 90–93 Brown, Ann, 228–30 building construction, collaborative nature of, 110–11 Cahill, Larry, 38 calibrated knowledge, 262 car analogy of division of cognitive labor, 207–08 car example of complexity, 28 car mechanic example of education’s purpose, 219–20 “Casey at the Bat” (Thayer), 87–89 Cassie (dog), 49–50 Castle Bravo thermonuclear fusion bomb (“Shrimp”), 1–3, 5–6 health effects, 2 hive mind collaboration, 5–6 lithium-7, 2–3 “tickling the dragon’s tail” experiment, 19–20 causal explanation illusion affects donations to an advocacy group example, 180–81 illusion of explanatory depth in public policy, 175–81 and values-driven issues, 183–84 vs. reasons, 179–81 water rationing example, 178 causal reasoning, 51–58 bridge and wheel example, 56 diagnostic reasoning, 59–62 faulty understanding, 72–73, 164–70 and interpersonal relationships, 57–58, 75 kayak example, 56–57 knowing enough to get by, 73–74 and long-term planning, 56–57 mechanical adjustments, difficulty making, 70–71 modus ponens, 54, 58 Ms.

See chaos theory consequences vs. values arguments, 182–87 contribution of individuals example of group thinking, 122 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 198–99 counterfactual thought, 64–65 Galileo’s experiments with dropping different weights, 65–66 imagining scenarios to figure out likely outcomes, 66 crowdsourcing expertise, 146–50 ox’s weight example, 148 Pallokerho-35 Finnish soccer club example, 148 prediction market, 149 user ratings, 148 crows ability to reason diagnostically, 62 CRT (Cognitive Reflection Test), 80–84 bat and ball problem, 81 lily pad problem, 81–82 machines and widgets problem, 82 crystallized intelligence, 202 cult communities, 260 cultural values and cognition, 160–63 reconciling conflicting beliefs, 161–62 “Science Mike” (Mike McHargue), 160–62 cumulative culture, 117–18 curse of knowledge, 128, 244 curving bullets example of physics, 69–70 Dalio, Ray, 253 Damasio, Antonio, 103 decentralized collaborative activity, 149–50 Bitcoin, 150 block chain technology, 150 Ethereum, 150 decision-making, 103–05, 240, 241, 248–49, 250–53 deficit model of science attitudes, 157–60 Dehghani, Morteza, 185–86 Descartes, René, 87 de Soto, Hernando, 244–45 DeVito, Danny, 45–46 Dewey, John, 216 diagnostic reasoning, 58–62 crow example, 62 lethargy example, 59–61 diSessa, Andrea, 71 disgust, feelings of, 104–05 division of cognitive labor, 14, 109–11, 120–21, 128–29 area of expertise example, 120 car analogy example, 207–08 in the field of science, 222–23 household finances, 247 wine expert example, 120 dogs Cassie example, 49–50 Pavlovian conditioning, 50–51 doorway example of optic flow, 99–100 driving ability example of ignorance, 257–58 Dunbar, Robin, 113 Dunning, David, 257–58 Dunning-Kruger effect, 258 Eastwood, Clint, 172 economics of science, 227–28 education application of classroom learning, 216–17 becoming a car mechanic example, 219–20 expressing desire to learn that which is unknown, 221 financial issues, 240–41 history of Spain example, 220 Ignorance course, 221 illusion of comprehension, 217–18 just-in-time, 251–52 learning to accept what you don’t know, 220–21 mathematical abilities of Brazilian children, 215–16 peer, 230–31 purpose of, 219–21 teaching science, 222, 225–32 Einstein, Albert, 199 embodied intelligence, 91–93 embodiment, 102 emotional responses that influence decision-making, 103–05, 240 engagement as a human concept, 117 environment, knowledge of your personal, 94–96 Ethereum, 150 expertise and crowdsourcing, 146–50 in scientific matters, 226–27 to understand community issues, 188–89 explanation foes and fiends, 237–39 advertising, 239–40, 241–42 Band-Aids example, 237–38 skin care example, 239–40 vesting service letter example, 243–44 explorers’ self-confidence, 263 eyesight.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

This project aims to build and test governance frameworks to realize the benefits of technology for the environment and society, including understanding the environmental impact of new technologies, while mitigating harm arising from deployment.” The way in which unintended consequences can impact the evolution of such technologies is strikingly evidenced by what has happened with one part of the Blockchain world, the cyber-currency Bitcoin. The Chinese government actually published a notice adding Bitcoin to a list of industries that could be shut down.11 With China, there are always other reasons for such decisions and announcements, but the argument made is that the amount of energy consumed by the industry, in which the currency is created by “mining” activities involving computers solving ever more complicated puzzles, contributes to pollution and wastes valuable resources.

See also: https://hbr.org/2017/05/saving-the-planet-from-ecological-disaster-is-a-12-trillion-opportunity. 8.https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/ 9.https://www.weforum.org/centre-for-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/areas-of-focus 10.Associated Press, “Major Saudi Arabia Oil Facilities Hit by Houthi Drone Strikes,” The Guardian, September 14, 2019. See also: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/14/major-saudi-arabia-oil-facilities-hit-by-drone-strikes. 11.“Bitcoin Mining Ban Considered by China’s Economic Planner,” BBC News, April 9, 2019. See also: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47867031. 12.“Synthetic Biology: A Whole New World,” The Economist Technology Quarterly, April 6, 2019. 13.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR 14.Jennifer Kahn, “Preparing to Unleash Crispr on an Unprepared World,” Wired, March 19, 2019. 15.Clive Cookson, “Scientists Model ‘Gene Drive’ for Carrier Insect,” Financial Times, April 29, 2019. 16.Olaf J.

See Anthropocene epoch aging, as worldwide trend, 2–3, 222–223 agriculture, future of, 240–241 aircraft, unmanned, 178–179 Akerlof, George, 203–204 Akkad, Omar El, 110 Alberta oil sands industry, 244 algorithms, versus leadership, 223–230 Allianz, 69 Alphabet, 125, 131 Amazon, 52, 125, 131, 227 American War (Akkad), 110 Americas, European colonization of, 29, 43 Amfori, 197–198 Anderson, Ray, 142 Anderson, Ted, 168–169 Antarctic ozone hole, 196 Anthropocene epoch, 7, 27–29, 86–89, 230–234 antibiotics, 102–108, 111 anti-satellite testing, 113 Apolitical, 211 Apple, 11–12, 24, 125, 131, 213–214 Apple, Martin, 174 Arbib, Jamie, 241 artificial intelligence (AI), 176–177, 231 assets, stranded, 71–73, 243 The Atlantic (magazine), 240 Atlas of the Future, 9–10, 248 atmosphere, space junk reentering, 114, 115 atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, 65 Attenborough, David, 43 Atwood, Margaret, 110 Auld, Graeme, 84–85 Austin, Duncan, 228 auto industry, 76–77, 78, 135–136, 214, 215 autonomous mobility, 178 Aviva, 210 B B Corporations, 50, 239 B Lab, 50 bacteria, antibiotic-resistant, 104–107, 111 bad exponentials Anthropocene epoch, 86–89 “gradually, then suddenly” transitions, 78–80 overview, 76–78 super wicked problems, 84–86 wicked problems, 80–84 Bakan, Joel, 26 Barnes Wetland Centre, 200 Bayer, 68, 119 BBC, 194 Becker, Gary, 203 Bendell, Jem, 5 Benioff, Marc, 15, 131 Benyus, Janine, 142 Berdish, Dave, 76 Bernstein, Steven, 84–85 Better Business, Better World (report), 232–233 Beyond Meat, 233 Bezos, Jeff, 52, 155, 220, 227 billiard balls, 93 biology, synthetic, 180, 217–218 Biomimicry 3.8, 142 Biotechnology Bulletin (newsletter), 173 Bitcoin, 180 The Black Swan (Taleb), 2, 21, 254 Black Swans, 2, 166, 220–221. See also change process stages; technology; wicked problems defined, 7, 21–22 historical, 41–42 identifying, 7–8 Lehman Brothers, 48 losing control, risk of, 193–197 materiality and, 69–70 as parallel reality with Green Swans, 9–10 in social media, 53 spotting, 254–256 starting off as Green Swans, 182 three horizons, two scenarios for, 38–39 BlackRock, 13, 129 Blackwell, Norman, 202 Blockchain, 174, 180 blockchain technology, 177–178 The Blue Planet (TV series), 43 BlueNalu, 233 BMW, 214 boardrooms.


pages: 265 words: 69,310

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Neal Gorenflo of non-profit Shareable writes that the theme “brought the elephant in everybody’s room to the fore—the gaping contradiction between the utopian possibilities and the hyper-capitalist realities of the sharing economy.” 23 If the newly-skeptical OuiShare attendees are going to find a way to convert the Sharing Economy into something useful, something that actually delivers on the promise of community and human-scale exchange, it must leave aside its identification with technology. There are few signs that it will do so; Gorenflo reports that the “blockchain” technology underlying Bitcoin is the new thing: “Everybody was talking about the blockchain from keynotes to side conversations.” To look for a technical fix, a designed-in mechanism for solving social problems, will only end up going down the same path. Bitcoin itself has already cycled through the familiar trajectory of rebellious alternative, promising a currency independent of the state, through to a venture-capital-funded investment vehicle in which 0.1% of the participants own 50% of the coins.

The Sharing Economy may be new, but it does have a history and a context, and we need to explore these to understand its agenda, and to understand how it is evolving. Chapters 7 and 8 explore the origins of the Sharing Economy in Internet culture: the values and practices that permeate Silicon Valley companies and the wider world of technology enthusiasts, from open source programmers to Bitcoin advocates to the “maker movement” and beyond. Any short description will undoubtedly be an oversimplification, and of course there are disagreements and disputes among its adherents, but a coherent Internet culture does exist. It embraces values of rebellion, drawing from a loose set of attitudes sometimes called the hacker ethic.

But a moment later, he is more interested in building businesses: I attended a meeting of Sharing Economy participants . . . they were developing ideas—brilliant ideas actually—to share customers with each other, across verticals. One person even suggested that there could be a peer economy currency—maybe Bitcoin. Or even points to encourage people to cross verticals and recruit new people into this new economy. So it is not surprising that almost all the campaigns at Peers were focused on the well-funded sectors of the Sharing Economy represented by Airbnb and Lyft. The highest-profile campaigns, such as the 2014 ridesharing initiative in Seattle, operated side-by-side with well-funded efforts driven by Lyft and Uber themselves.


pages: 231 words: 64,734

Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms by Mark Spitznagel

Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, commodity trading advisor, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, fiat currency, financial engineering, Fractional reserve banking, global macro, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Spitznagel, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Schrödinger's Cat, Sharpe ratio, spice trade, Steve Jobs, tail risk, the scientific method, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-sum game

But the stuff inside those boxes, just by virtue of the secure, convenient, cool boxes, is now presumed to have value—by decree or, dare I say, by fiat. (The economist Robert Murphy has even argued that in Mises's framework, we have no choice but to call crypto fiat currencies.) Moreover, bitcoin isn't even ultimately anonymous; the technical term is that it's pseudonymous, meaning that the owner of each bitcoin is public knowledge at any moment, although it's not obvious which human is tied to each address. But it's quite traceable, nonetheless. Worst of all, as a highly speculative vehicle, it is a symptom of (and, I would argue, even inseparable from) the liquidity‐fueled environment that created it.

It means that we need certain things to go right for gold to even be effective in mitigating systematic risk (of a crash), much less cost‐effective. And this is an internal contradiction, and a problem for gold as a strategic safe haven. Does gold even have a unique place as this monetary‐like insurance against crashes? Some would say that cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, are taking gold's place in that function. But are these modern inventions really safe havens? Cryptocurrencies' safe haven payoff profiles are currently too sparse and too noisy to even evaluate intelligently (though the early indication is that they look more like unsafe havens). By that alone, they are hopeful havens at best.

., 40–42, 53–54, 77, 94–95 with insurance, 88–90, 94–95, 188 and Kelly optimal bet size, 84, 85 and median, 74 with Nietzsche's demon, 66–70 in Petersburg merchant trade, 48 in Petersburg wager, 34–35 reductionist understanding of, 125 of SPX portfolio with safe havens, 131–132 on US Treasuries, 172 when betting less of your stack, 79 Arithmetic cost: as change in arithmetic average returns, 136 in cost‐effectiveness analysis, 136–142 for CTA returns, 176–178 and efficiency, 202 for gold, 181 and Kelly optimal bet size, 84–86, 94 in no‐crash bootstrap, 146 in Petersburg merchant trade, 47 for real‐world safe havens, 184 and safe haven frontier, 186 tradeoff between geometric effect and, 152 when betting less of your stack, 79 when reshuffling returns, 143 Ars Conjectandi (Jacob Bernoulli), 30 Austrian School, 37 Auto racing, 155–157 B Babylonians, 40 Balanced portfolio, 172 Basel, Switzerland, 29 Basis risk, 169 Bastiat, Frédéric, 153–154 Bayesians, 24 Belief, 61 Bernoulli, Daniel: admonition and imperative of, 195 background of, 30–31 and concavity of curve, 54–56 emolumentum medium concept of, 35–39, 198 and geometric average, 39–42 and geometric mean maximization criterion, 81 Latané influenced by, 80 and math of compounding, 52–54 original Saint Petersburg Paradox, 31–34 Paris Academy Grand Prizes for, 31 second Saint Petersburg Paradox, 43–52, 115 Bernoulli, Jacob, 29–30, 67, 70 Bernoulli, Johann, 29–31 Bernoulli, Nicolas, 31–33 Bernoulli function, 37–39, 52 Bernoulli principle, 31 Bernoulli's expected value (BEV): in emolumentum, 38–39 as geometric average, 40–42 with Nietzsche's demon, 73 in Petersburg merchant trade, 48–49 Bias: hindsight, 113 opportunity cost neglect, 153 Biology: classification of living things in, 100–104 phenotypes in, 105 Bitcoin, 181, 182 Black swans, 16 Book value, 104 Bootstrap methodology: checking for blindspots in, 144–148 comparing 25 SPX returns with 25 safe haven returns, 128–132 to counteract naïve empiricism, 127 higher wealth in, 162–163 as nonparametric estimation, 128 for real‐world safe havens, see Real‐world safe havens reshuffling 25 SPX returns and 25 safe haven returns, 142–144 “with replacement,” 128–129 Brachistochrone problem, 29–30 Breiman, Leo, 80 Buffett, Warren: on buying during/after stock market crashes, 149–150 on diversification, 115–116 on losing money, 56 value investing by, 104 Bürgi (Swiss clockmaker), 40 C CAGR, see Compound annual growth rate Calculus of variations, 30 Capital base, 77 Cash, 170–175, 182–184 Casino, 23–24, 30–31, 65, 81–82, 87, 194 you are not a, 76, 82, 200 Cassandras, 111 CEA, see Cost‐effectiveness analysis Central banks, distortions built up by, 11 Change, within species, 102 Chemical industrial agriculture, 154–155 “Cigar butt” companies, 104 Classification: of living things, 100–102 of safe havens, see Taxonomy of safe havens Clinical trials, 129–136 Commodities shipping paradox, 43–52 Commodity trading advisor (CTA) strategies, 108, 175–178, 182–184 Complacency, 114 Compound annual growth rate (CAGR).


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Instead, those communities have what we call platform stewards, who play recognizable but sometimes informal leadership roles that allow them to channel the energy of the broader community, create rules or norms, and define the structure of a platform. Even the most radically decentralized models, like the virtual currency Bitcoin, have seen such figures emerge. Though anyone is free to take Bitcoin’s code, adapt it, and create a new protocol for others to follow, only a handful of people have the power to “commit” code to the Bitcoin code base. These few have played a stewardship role in directing the technology. A similar function is played by the heads of decentralized terrorist networks like Al-Qaeda—its top leaders are not necessarily directing the activities of individual cells, but they have the ability to set rules, norms (such as they are), and the general direction of the network, even if they can’t be described as genuine “owners.”

Unlike a centralized secret ledger—such as those of banks—it is transparent. And transactions are verified not by a central force, but as a distributed process. You might know the Blockchain from its most famous (and controversial) application to date: it is the underlying technology upon which the virtual currency Bitcoin is built on. For non-technologists—even those who have spent hours trying to get their heads around this—the way this actually works can be hard to grasp. But the most important things to understand are the potential human applications. As The Economist puts it, “It offers a way for people who do not know or trust each other to create a record of who owns what that will compel the assent of everyone concerned.


pages: 329 words: 100,162

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following by Gabrielle Bluestone

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, cashless society, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, financial thriller, forensic accounting, gig economy, global pandemic, growth hacking, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Kevin Roose, lock screen, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Mason jar, Menlo Park, Multics, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post-truth, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Russell Brand, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech bro, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork

Meanwhile, Musk’s ill-advised tweets have become such a core component of his business that not only did the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) start requiring him to run them past a securities lawyer before posting, they’ve even sparked their own cottage industry of scams. “I’m giving 10,000 Bitcoin (BTC) to all community!” reads the typical message posted in the comments of Musk’s tweets. All the user has to do is send “Musk” a small amount of bitcoin first as a verification device, which will of course be returned at a 10x rate. These tweets are posted from verified accounts whose names and photos have been changed to look like Musk’s and then promoted to hit as many marks as possible before Twitter shuts the account down.

Here’s What’s Going On, and Why Musk’s Ventilator Efforts Have Become Controversial," Business Insider, April 17, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-ventilator-controversy-explained-2020-4#april-2-musk-defends-the-ventilators-he-delivered-after-facing-criticism-for-sending-non-invasive-bipap-machines-instead-of-traditional-ventilators-6. 60. Tyler Sonnemaker, "The Hackers Who Took Over the Twitter Accounts of Joe Biden and Elon Musk May Have Made Off With as Much as $120,000 Worth of Bitcoin—But We May Never Know for Sure," Business Insider, July 16, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-hackers-joe-biden-elon-musk-received-120000-bitcoin-payments-2020-7. 61. Bill Ruthhart and John Byrne, "Chicago Taps Elon Musk’s Boring Company to Build High-Speed Transit Tunnels That Would Tie Loop with O’Hare," Chicago Tribune, June 14, 2018, https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-met-ohare-high-speed-transit-elon-musk-boring-company-20180613-story.html. 62.

These tweets are posted from verified accounts whose names and photos have been changed to look like Musk’s and then promoted to hit as many marks as possible before Twitter shuts the account down. As obvious and dumb as their methods are, these Musk pretenders have reportedly pulled in millions this way, and Twitter has been largely unable to stop it in real time. The platform even briefly, accidentally, blocked the real Elon Musk after he tweeted about Bitcoin in 2018. And in July 2020, the scammers were able to hack a number of notable Twitter accounts, including Musk, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, to post the messages directly. Authorities say they were able to steal about $120,000 before Twitter could shut it down.60 But overt Twitter scams aside, if the most celebrated companies are hemorrhaging money, the most powerful executives are openly bragging about all the laws they’re breaking in the name of capitalism, and the richest people are promising things they can’t actually execute just for clout, what exactly was McFarland’s crime?


pages: 302 words: 73,581

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary

3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, fake it until you make it, frictionless, game design, gamification, growth hacking, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, search costs, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, software as a service, software is eating the world, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, TaskRabbit, the long tail, the payments system, too big to fail, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Wave and Pay

They provide an early glimpse into a future where value creation may not need a supply chain, instead being orchestrated via a network of connected users on a platform. h. Cryptocurrencies Platform theory helps to explain the workings of cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin. Decentralized management – through mechanisms like the blockchain – has the potential to change governance structures for the next generation of platforms, much like social feedback tools power curation on many of the current generation of platforms. While we do not explore Bitcoin in detail in this book, the principles laid out apply equally well to understanding all emerging platforms that the book may not explicitly cover. PLATFORM SCALE IMPERATIVE At their core, platforms enable a plug-and-play business model.

YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram are described as social platforms, while Uber, Airbnb, and their ilk are referred to as “marketplace platforms.” All these businesses are vastly different from each other. To complicate matters further, the Nest thermostat is called a platform. Nike is working on a platform to connect its shoes, while GE claims to be using a platform approach to manage its factories. The Internet of Things and Bitcoin may have nothing in common, but they are both platforms. While all of the above subscribe to the general definition of the platform as a plug-and-play business model that enables interactions, each is vastly different from the others. This chapter proposes a unifying architectural framework to explain the different configurations of platforms.

Solving the chicken-and-egg problem on such platforms requires solving quality control issues rather than gunning for a critical mass of users. 4.6 THE CURIOUS CASE OF NEW PAYMENT MECHANISMS Why M-Pesa Works Finding adoption for a new payment mechanism has always involved solving a chicken-and-egg problem. Ranging from the introduction of new forms of currency in medieval to early modern times, and the adoption of credit cards to the rise of PayPal (as alluded to in many of the strategy discussions in this section) and the recent rage around Bitcoin, new payment systems have regularly offered some of the most complex chicken-and-egg challenges. Both buyers and sellers need to adopt the same exchange mechanism, almost simultaneously. The staging that is possible in some platforms – attracting one side first and then the other – does not work in the case of payment mechanisms.


pages: 1,136 words: 73,489

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Big Tech, bitcoin, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, commons-based peer production, context collapse, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, death of newspapers, Debian, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Ethereum, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Induced demand, informal economy, information security, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, leftpad, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, node package manager, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, pull request, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ruby on Rails, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, urban planning, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, Zimmermann PGP

But JavaScript, including Node.js, is designed to be modular, where each maintainer has a limited ability to affect other components of the ecosystem, so JavaScript developers are more likely to prioritize moving fast and accepting contributions. In cryptocurrency, these philosophies play out as visible differences in how the Bitcoin and Ethereum projects are managed. Bitcoin’s community, like Clojure’s, prioritizes stability and security, preferring to move slowly and with care, even if it means including fewer features and contributors. Ethereum is more like Node.js: it’s a platform for others to develop on, flinging itself far and wide. It resembles a sprawling city like Los Angeles, comprised of many neighborhoods and subcultures.

The same article carries different value depending on who wrote it, as well as the reader’s interest in, and expectation of, reading other work by that person in the future. Velocityraps is the pseudonym of an Egyptian streamer named Mostafa, who, over the course of one NBA season, livestreamed more than 1,000 NBA basketball games to hundreds of thousands of viewers. Instead of using advertisements, he posted donation links, accepting money via Bitcoin and Venmo. Mostafa made between $15,000 and $20,000 in donations in less than a year, which he claimed was more than he could make in his town of Port Said as a mechanical engineer.259 What’s particularly interesting about this example, however, is that Mostafa was illegally streaming NBA games that sports fans could theoretically have watched simply by paying for a cable subscription.


pages: 268 words: 76,702

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

Three of the big web giants that we think of are databases. Your account balance, my account balance is being maintained in a database.’ For Wenger the database insight is a particularly exciting one because he is a believer in blockchain, a relatively new technology best known for being what powers Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies – but at its core is a distributed database technology over which no one party theoretically has control. To its advocates, this could disrupt the online data oligopoly – but to its critics it’s a convoluted and unproven technology with many side effects. ‘The re-centralising force for the internet was these databases,’ says Wenger.

For people in the UK, the first sign that something was wrong was reports from across the National Health Service that its computers were failing. Computers were locking up, and then restarting with a locked screen saying the system’s contents had been encrypted – and would be kept locked unless a payment of $300 in Bitcoin (the anonymous online currency) was made within three days. After three days, the price would double. After seven, the data would be irretrievably deleted for ever. This is a type of attack known as ransomware, named because it holds your computer and data hostage in hope of a quick profit if you pay up.

‘There are many signs that attackers have gone from the stereotypical somebody working out of their mom’s basement,’ Meckl says. ‘These are criminal organisations that are constantly shifting their technical expertise and investments in different types of attacks because the profitability landscape shifts. When Bitcoin was really high, people worried a lot of coin miners’ malware was going out there. They were leveraging your computer to mine cryptocurrency for themselves and taking their own energy costs out of the equation, so they can become profitable. Now that cryptocurrency seems to be crashing at the moment, people are shifting back to other types of attacks … stealing passwords or credit cards.’


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How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

Murray, Alan, and David Meyer. “Amazon HQ2, Iran Sanctions, Xi vs Trump: CEO Daily for November 5, 2018.” Fortune, November 5, 2018. https://fortune.com/2018/11/05/amazon-hq2-iran-sanctions-xi-trump-ceo-daily-for-november-5-2018/. . “China Slumps, Pinterest Drops, Bitcoin Plunges: CEO Daily for May 17, 2019.” Fortune, May 17, 2019. https://fortune.com/2019/05/17/china-pinterest-bitcoin-ceo-daily-for-may-17-2019/. . “China Talks, Nuclear Deal, Boeing Safety: CEO Daily for May 9, 2019.” Fortune, May 9, 2019. https://fortune.com/2019/05/09/china-talks-iran-nuclear-boeing-safety-ceo-daily-for-may-9-2019/. . “Huawei Order, Trump Pardon, PG&E Fire: CEO Daily for May 16, 2019.”

Older companies’ reluctance to innovate and embrace cost-cutting technologies is what gives newcomers an opportunity to disrupt whole industries. Another innovation, blockchain, also promises to upend traditional business processes. Blockchain is the decentralized, secure record-keeping technology behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. It can be used to speed up global transactions, such as a US-based company buying a barrel of oil from the Middle East. Where a transaction like this has traditionally taken many weeks or even months, with lots of paperwork and numerous middlemen—including accountants, lawyers, and banks—blockchain makes it so that it can be done in a matter of minutes.

For example, many securities transactions still take a long time—up to two or three business days—to fully settle. Similarly, real estate transactions can take months to complete, due to a protracted verification process. And small businesses often face expensive transaction fees from their banks. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin can address these issues. They can also facilitate transactions in a war-torn country or where the government has ceased to function. In this situation, cryptocurrencies offer the same benefit of traditional money in that they are a unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value. Supporters of cryptocurrencies argue that the governments behind today’s dominant currencies of global commerce—the US dollar, the euro, and the yen—are managing them in a reckless way, with high levels of debt that will cause inflation and ultimately undermine the currencies’ value.


pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

Every so often, the internet rediscovered the puzzle amid a flurry of YouTube videos and podcasts; I could tell whenever this happened because people started messaging me on Twitter and Instagram demanding clues. One obvious clue in the puzzle was the man’s name: Satoshi. It is not a rare name, and it happens to be the same as that of the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.26 So, of course, some people thought Perplex City’s Satoshi created Bitcoin. Not many, but enough that I received messages about it every week—until December 2020, when Tom-Lucas Säger from Hamburg used the PimEyes AI facial recognition search engine to discover a 2018 photo of Satoshi holding a large mug of beer.27 All in all, it was quite sweet and innocent.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/” Twitter, January 26, 2021, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354174279894642703; Dorothy Gambrell, “A Brief History of Elon Musk’s Recent Market-Moving Tweets,” Bloomberg, February 11, 2021, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-11/how-elon-musk-s-tweets-moved-gamestop-gme-bitcoin-dogecoin-and-other-stocks. 80. Matt Levine, “AMC Brings Out the Popcorn,” Bloomberg, June 2, 2021, www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-02/amc-brings-out-the-popcorn. 81. Matt Levine, “Elon Musk Picks the Money Now,” Bloomberg, February 8, 2021, www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-08/elon-musk-works-his-magic-on-dogecoin-and-bitcoin. 82. Caitlin Petre, “The Traffic Factories: Metrics at Chartbeat, Gawker Media, and the New York Times,” Columbia Journalism Review, May 7, 2015, www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/the_traffic_factories_metrics_at_chartbeat_gawker_media_and_the_new_york_times.php. 83.

Social media’s ability to focus and amplify attention means that indiscretions that once might have taken entire hours or days to be published or broadcast (or not, if deemed insufficiently newsworthy) can now race around the world in minutes—long before the subject can calm down enough to apologise. The same sped-up dynamics were at work in the GameStop short squeeze when Elon Musk tweeted “Gamestonk!!” on January 26, 2021, to over forty-two million followers, leading to an instant jump in the share price, which closed that day up 92 percent.79 Musk’s other tweets about Bitcoin, Etsy, and Dogecoin have all led to price increases. Even companies that were only nominally related to his tweets saw share price jumps, like Signal Advance, Inc. (after he tweeted “Use Signal,” an app operated by an unrelated organisation) and Clubhouse Media Group (after he talked about the Clubhouse app, also run by a different company).


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Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Lita Person, Mobile Wallet (NFC, Digital Wallet) Market (Applications, Mode of Payment, Stakeholders, and Geography)—Global Share, Size, Industry Analysis, Trends, Opportunities, Growth, and Forecast, 2012–2020 (Portland, OR: Allied Market Research, November 2013), accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/mobile-wallet-market; Marion Williams, “The Regulatory Tension over Mobile Money,” Australian Banking and Finance, February 17, 2014, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.australianbankingfinance.com/banking/the-regulatory-tension-over-mobile-money/. 30. “University of Cumbria Becomes First in World to Accept Tuition Fees in Bitcoin,” India Today, January 22, 2014, accessed September 30, 2014, http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/british-university-to-accept-tuition-fees-in-bitcoin/1/339087.html. 31. Philip N. Howard and Nimah Mazaheri, “Telecommunications Reform, Internet Use, and Mobile Phone Adoption in the Developing World,” World Development 37, no. 7 (2009): 1159–69, doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2008.12.005. 32.

Such virtual currencies are designed to free money, or more abstractly “value,” from the control of a particular country’s central bank. The World Bank estimates that by 2020, the economy of mobile-phone money exchanges might top $5 trillion and include the two billion people who otherwise have no access to banks.29 Some of the oldest institutions around—universities—have started accepting virtual currencies like Bitcoins for tuition.30 It was easier for governments to hoard and guard their gold than it is data, information infrastructure, and intellectual property. States don’t control public information infrastructures upon which value is exchanged. For the first time, governments don’t control the information infrastructure upon which public life is lived.

See also M-Pesa Barlow, John Perry, 163 behavior, prediction of, 141 Beinecke, Jessica, 194 Belarus, protests in, 85, 115 Belgium, minorities in, building collective identity, 145 Ben Ali, Zine el-Abidine, 50, 216, 221 Bennett, Lance, 138–39 Berners-Lee, Tim, 37–38 big data, 61, 295; analyzing, 176, 179, 180–81; in authoritarian regimes, 195; bringing stability, 68; collection of, overseeing, 112; definition of, 141; growth of, 179, 256; management of, 256; providing collective security, 112, 140–45; providing connective security through, 107; solving social problems with, 176, 178; taking down dirty networks, 99; tracking international criminal activity, 177–78 bin Laden, Osama, 38, 53, 60–61, 114, 176 Bitcoins, 56 Black Code (Deibert), 179 blogging, 76–78, 84–85, 127, 130, 171 Bloomberg News, 192 Blue Coat Systems, 215 Boeing, 115, 212 Boko Haram, 81, 83, 135 Bolivia, 215 Bosykh, Alexander, 198–99 botnets, 2–4, 202–3, 205 bots: attacking security companies, 32; dominating digital networks, 34; evolution of, 203–4; in financial markets, 34; identifying, 210–11; political, 204–11, 233, 234; as political tools, 29–33; pro-regime, 29–30; threats posed by, 208, 209–11; Twitter-based, 30–31; types of, 203; usage of, by country, 206–7; use of, 203–8; wartime use of, 34 bot wars, 53 Bouazizi, Mohamed, 50–51, 137, 221 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz, 92 Brazil: elections in, 128–29; internet rights in, 165 Breivik, Anders Behring, 216 Bretton Woods system, 231 Bring Back Our Girls, 81 British Empire, 1, 4–5, 15, 67, 107–8, 146–47, 231 broadcast licenses, 249–50 Brown Moses.


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

So they fly out and have drinks at the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where venture capitalists hang around, as do expensive “companions,” many with Eastern European accents. They eat lunch at the Battery, a members-only private club for social-climbing parvenus in San Francisco. They wangle an invitation to a Bitcoin party and rub shoulders with the scammers, hustlers, Ponzi schemers, and obnoxious knobs who are trying to cash in on a modern-day tulip mania based around a cryptocurrency that Warren Buffett describes as “rat poison squared.” Buffett’s partner, Charlie Munger, was even less polite about Bitcoin mania: “It’s like somebody else is trading turds and you decide you can’t be left out.” The problem is that when you dig through the bullshit you discover, as Gertrude Stein once said about Oakland, that “there is no there there.”

Its highlight is Katsura House, a replica of a teahouse from a sixteenth-century royal compound in Kyoto. The replica, which was built in Japan, then disassembled and shipped to California, is 10 percent bigger than the original. Non-billionaires settle for McMansions priced in single-digit millions, like a “secluded Tuscan estate” that the nouveau riche Chandler Guo, the self-proclaimed “Bitcoin King,” snapped up for $5 million in 2018. As for “regular” houses, those no longer exist. In March 2018, a drab, tiny, 848-square-foot house in Sunnyvale sold for $2 million, more than $2,300 per square foot, the highest square-foot price ever recorded on the Multiple Listing Service. From San Francisco to San Jose, house prices keep soaring.

But instead of trying to fix the situation, they are making plans to escape whatever calamity might arise from the forces Trump has unleashed—civil war, a proletariat uprising, a collapse of the power grid, an economic meltdown. According to a 2017 article in the New Yorker by Evan Osnos titled “Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich,” the loaded have taken to stockpiling guns and food, gold bars and Bitcoin. Others have been building “boltholes”—armed compounds in places like faraway New Zealand, where they can ride out a catastrophe. Tech oligarch Peter Thiel owns a hideaway there and has even obtained Kiwi citizenship. “Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more.


pages: 310 words: 85,995

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

Marxists, who in practice imposed the most state-centric organization of society ever attempted, have a very different ostensible goal: the state is supposed to ‘wither away’. But the anti-state ideology currently most influential is that of the Libertarians of Silicon Valley. According to them, bitcoin will supplant the state provision of money as users walk away from official currencies. The supermen who own the new e-utilities will each individually determine how best they are used, ignoring or defeating state-imposed regulation. Globally enabled person-to-person connectivity will supplant the spatially bounded society of the nation state.

In principle, we could re-engineer our political units to be non-spatial. Presumably some of the techno-geeks of Silicon Valley have such a future as a gleam in the eye: the opt-in, opt-out polity with each individual free to choose regardless of where they happen to be living. Each could have its own currency – to each its own bitcoin. Each could have its own tax rates, welfare benefits, health scheme; there are schemes for floating islands outside any national jurisdiction. Does this sound attractive? If so, try to think what would be likely to happen. Rich people would be likely to opt into those artificial political entities that offered low tax rates.

A shell company, established by highly skilled lawyers in a metropolis – typically London or New York – is one whose true ownership is concealed. If such a company opens a bank account in a secrecy haven jurisdiction, the money deposited is shielded from scrutiny by a double wall of obfuscation. This structure has become a major means of protecting corrupt and criminal money from detection. Bitcoin has recently added a further option. As with trade itself, for the potential gains from corporate globalization to be realized, public policy must react. In practice, it hasn’t: the globalization of companies has not been matched by the globalization of regulation. The capacity to tax and regulate remains firmly lodged at the national level.


Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

FEIC founder Robbie Davidson told me he lost money on the 2017 conference, which was sponsored by an obscure wood-burning stove company and a brand of “energy pills” that contained two coffee cups’ worth of caffeine per capsule. (Davidson’s previous employment seems to have been a get-rich-quick scheme in which he raised awareness for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin by driving a Kia Soul covered in Bitcoin decals around the country, trying to get people to buy raffle tickets for the car.) He said he broke even on the 2018 conference, which hosted a large hall of vendors selling conspiracy goods and attracted some six hundred believers, all of whom paid between $199 and $349 for tickets to the two-day extravaganza.

He and a handful of others from this secret police force had turned rogue after discovering the wonders that lay at the earth’s edge, and now he was leading expeditions to the end of the world to share the truth of what lay beyond. For his trouble, of course, he needed funding. Specifically $1 million in hard-to-track Bitcoin payments. “You might think that’s a lot of money, but it’s just the cost of ten Tesla Model S cars,” he told viewers in a YouTube clip. “People spend, collectively, way more than this on personal luxuries.” He planned to earn his million by selling ten seats on his expedition for $100,000 each. He never showed his face in his videos, and the avatar he used on Facebook and Twitter had been stolen from a stock-image website.

If the swastika is a chart-topping single, the sonnenrad is a deep cut: less mainstream but well known among true fans. Mike’s Big Dipper explanation was particularly obscure; I had to Google it to discern what the hell he was talking about, and even then I only got a few hits, largely from the notorious troll forum 4chan, as well as from a blog called Daily Bitcoin News, where a blogger explained why various Nazi symbols were, in his opinion, actually not racist. I moved on to the next vendor table, where I chatted with the saleswoman about the Flat Earth cover-up. I asked her, Who was bothering Flat and Fascist 183 to conceal the shape of the earth? “The CIA, the FBI,” she told me.


pages: 407 words: 90,238

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

With so much experience in self-organizing”: Peter Hirshberg, From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond ([N.p.]: Off the Common Books, 2014). 22. It’s for this reason that Rosie von Lila: Author interview with Rosie von Lila, July 25, 2016. 23. Burning Man demonstration projects”: Washoe Tribe installing solar panels at seven sites,” Record-Courier, June 8, 2015; “Stained Glass ‘Space Whale’ to Blow Minds at Burning Man,” Reno-Gazette Journal, November 13, 2015; “How a Chat App for Burning Man Turned into a Tool for Revolution,” AdWeek, March 25, 2015. 24. Burning Man didn’t invent the festival: Hirshberg, From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond. 25.

While Burners without Borders and Beer for Data mark two of the earliest examples of festival principles being exported into crisis zones, they’re unlikely to be the last. “With so much experience in self-organizing their own municipal infrastructure21 in a hostile environment,” former Apple executive Peter Hirshberg wrote in his book From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond, “Burners are particularly skilled at functioning during chaotic crises when normal services—running water, electricity, communication channels and sanitation systems—are not available. Burners don’t just survive in such an environment; they create culture, art and community there.”

See Teafaerie ESADE Business School (Spain), 105–6, 112 Esalen, 77, 78–79, 81, 82, 93, 168, 190, 192 Esalen (Kripal), 79 eschatothesia, 204 EST (Erhard Seminars Training), 79–80, 81 everyday lives: dissemination of innovation in, 174–78 “everything/nothing” dialectic, 217 evolution, 117–19, 134, 215 “experience economy,” 195 Extreme Technology Challenge (XTC), 172–73 facial expressions: and neurobiology, 96–100 Fadiman, James, 49–50, 126 Falling Whistles (Summit project), 171 fats, 212–14 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 183, 192 Fermi, Enrico, 131 Ferriss, Tim, 50, 159 Fifty Shades of Grey (James), 85 film: and Altered States Economy, 30–31 Firechat, 167 The First Earth Battalion Operations Manual (Channon), 190, 191 flow in advertising, 195 and Altered States Economy, 29 benefits of, 43, 74–75 and Carhart-Harris research, 126 categories of, 23–24 and consciousness, 4–5 Csikszentmihalyi research about, 42, 43 definition of, 4, 23 and Google, 27, 28 Navy SEALs and, 25 and neurobiology, 108 and neurotheology, 108 neurotransmitters in, 42 and Pale of the Body, 57 psychology and, 90 and sex, 85 and solving wicked problems, 46–50 and technology, 74–75, 136, 149 transcranial magnetic stimulation and, 48 See also Flow Dojo; Flow Genome Project; group flow; specific topic Flow (Csikszentmihalyi), 42 Flow Dojo, 148–53 Flow Genome Project, 4–6, 46, 135 Fly Ranch (Burning Man site), 163 food industry, 212–14 Ford, Henry, 80 Fortune magazine: and Task Force Delta, 190 France caves in, 140, 143 churches in, 141 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 192 French Revolution, 68 From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond (Hirshberg), 167 Funktion-One (Andrews company), 139, 140, 142, 143, 157 future Channon’s views about, 190 predicting the, 96 and timelessness, 41 See also precognition G Pause (Google mindfulness training), 27–28 gambling, 30 gamma waves, 47–48 Garcia, Jerry, 189 Gates, Bill, 205 genetics, 133 Geneva Convention, 182 geography: and pharmacology, 118, 119, 123, 134, 153 Ginsberg, Allen, 77 God Helmut, 59 Google and altering mental states to enhance performance, 6, 23, 27–28, 32 and Burning Man, 19–22, 27 CEO hiring at, 18–22 communal vocational ecstasy at, 20, 21, 27–28 and ecstasis, 18–22, 23, 25 Flow Dojo and, 149–50, 152 and flow states, 27, 28 and marketing, 197 mindfulness training at, 27–28 See also Brin, Sergey; Page, Larry Google Doodle, 19–20 Googleplex (Mountain View), 6, 23, 27–28 Gore, Al, 35 Graham, Martha, 47 Grateful Dead, 189 Great Awakening, 179 Greece churches in, 141 revolution in, 1–2 Green Berets, U.S., 190–91 Gregg, Melissa, 64–65 Griffiths, Roland, 59, 87–88, 120 Grof, Stanislav, 23, 67, 124 group flow, 11, 23, 103–4, 105–6, 138, 147, 171 Group Genius (Sawyer), 11 gut instinct, 98 Gutenberg, Johannes, 73–74, 75 Hagel, John, 43 hallucinogens, 50, 116.


pages: 316 words: 90,165

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, digital map, don't be evil, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Edward Snowden, Firefox, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, license plate recognition, lone genius, openstreetmap, polynesian navigation, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thales of Miletus, trade route, turn-by-turn navigation, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Zipcar

At regular intervals the user would top up the account by adding more money. This could be done at a bank or retail store, but Blumberg prefers the idea of using an anonymous “electronic cash” service like the controversial and little-used Bitcoin system. If an EZ Pass service accepted Bitcoin, a user could add value to the account from any computer, in a manner that would leave behind no trace of his or her identity.30 Aside from the fact that hardly anyone uses Bitcoin, it is difficult to see how this EZ Pass revision would pass muster with police and Homeland Security agencies. They have grown accustomed to using EZ Pass to track down lawbreakers and are not likely to favor a less useful redesign of the system.

See Celestial navigation AT&T, 114, 116, 117, 126, 134, 199, 204 AtlasBook, 117 Atomic bombs, 40, 65–66, 79, 153, 154, 157, 159 Atomic clocks, 20, 94–96, 97–98, 100–102, 108, 113, 119 Aubin, Mark, 177 Australia, 17, 140 Automatic Location Identification (ALI) database, 90 Barlow, John Perry, 193–194 Bar-Zeev, Avi, 177 Belgium, 34, 165 Bell Labs, 162 Bellinger, Patrick, 57 Bellini, Ettore, 24 Bellini-Tosi system, 26, 29 Bible, 223–224 Bing Maps, 188 Bitcoin, 227 BlackBerry, 117, 135 Blair, Dennis, 163 Blumberg, Andrew, 227–228 Bohnenberg, Johann Gottlieb Friedrich, 49–50 Bond, Kit, 163 Boot, Henry, 39 Borchers, Bob, 133–134, 135 Boykow, Johann Maria, 64–65 Boyle, William, 162 Brin, Sergei, 178 British Air Ministry, 38 Broadcom, 136, 205 Burke, Arleigh, 79 Bush, George H.


pages: 287 words: 62,824

Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth by Nick Maggiulli

Airbnb, asset allocation, Big Tech, bitcoin, buy and hold, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial independence, Hans Rosling, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, lifestyle creep, mass affluent, mortgage debt, oil shock, payday loans, phenotype, price anchoring, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Sam Altman, side hustle, side project, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, time value of money, transaction costs, very high income, William Bengen, yield curve

Asset (1997–2020) Average-In Underperformance Over 12 Months Percentage of 12-Month Periods Where Average-In Underperforms Bitcoin (2014–2020) 96% 65% U.S. Treasury Index 1% 72% Gold 3% 60% Developed Market Stocks 2% 60% Emerging Market Stocks 4% 57% 60/40 U.S. Stock/Bond Portfolio 2% 77% S&P 500 Total Return 3% 74% For example, the table shows us that for an investor Averaging-In to Bitcoin in any 12-month period from 1997 to 2020, while also holding their cash in Treasury bills, the average underperformance against Buy Now was 96% and this strategy of Averaging-In underperformed Buy Now 65% of the time.

The table shows how much the Average-In strategy has underperformed Buy Now over all 12-month periods from 1997–2020. Asset (1997–2020) Average-In Underperformance Over 12 Months Percentage of 12-Month Periods Where Average-In Underperforms Bitcoin (2014–2020) 96% 67% U.S. Treasury Index 2% 82% Gold 4% 63% Developed Market Stocks 3% 62% Emerging Market Stocks 5% 60% 60/40 U.S. Stock/Bond Portfolio 3% 82% S&P 500 Total Return 4% 76% U.S.


Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World by Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, content marketing, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, deepfake, delayed gratification, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, fake news, Ford Model T, Goodhart's law, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, meta-analysis, new economy, nowcasting, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pluto: dwarf planet, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, Socratic dialogue, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, stem cell, superintelligent machines, systematic bias, tech bro, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, When a measure becomes a target

In general, we advocate that a percentage change be reported with respect to the starting value. In this case the starting value was $19,211, so we say bitcoin lost 34 percent of its value over those thirteen days. This can be a subtle issue, however. One would say that bitcoin lost 34 percent of its value over this period, because when we talk about a loss in value, the starting value is the appropriate comparison. But we would also say that bitcoin was apparently overvalued by 52 percent at the start of December 2017, because when we talk about something being overvalued, the appropriate baseline for comparison is our current best estimate of value.

Percentages can be particularly slippery when we use them to compare two quantities. We typically talk about percentage differences: “a 40 percent increase,” “22 percent less fat,” etc. But what is this a percentage of? The lower value? The higher value? This distinction matters. In the month of December 2017, the value of the bitcoin digital currency first surged to $19,211 per unit on the seventeenth of the month, and then plummeted to a low of $12,609 per unit thirteen days later. This is a decrease of $6,602 per unit. But what was the percentage change? Should we say it was 34 percent (because $6,602 is 34.3 percent of $19,221), or is it 52 percent (because $6,602 is 52.4 percent of $12,609)?


pages: 246 words: 68,392

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Marketing theoretically would be cheaper using social media and digital advertising. The digital infrastructure for a ride-hailing app or a task marketplace, unlike a brick-and-mortar building, could be shared between several different companies. And the emerging blockchain technology, the decentralized ledger-keeping system behind the success of Bitcoin, promises to make transactions between people easier and less costly by making them incredibly secure and transparent without intermediaries. Still, Trebor was often asked: Could a self-funded cooperative really compete with venture-backed startups like Uber? The lobby of Uber’s San Francisco headquarters featured a ceiling-high world map outlined on a black wall, with blue dots sprinkled over most of it, to show where Uber’s service was available.

And yes, he’d found real estate gurus online, but none of them had asked him for money the way that Kevin Trudeau had or requested a percentage of each of his transactions, the way Uber had. A $25,000 lawsuit settlement payment from a former employer allowed him to buy his second house and start collecting rent. His plan was to buy one house a year, until he could become “financially free.” In case that didn’t work, he’d started investing in Bitcoin. Donald Trump’s election, Abe believed, boded well for him. Abe had heard that the new president would pass laws beneficial to real estate tycoons. And he liked Trump’s intentions to cut taxes on corporations. The way he saw it, both of these things would benefit him and his mission to become a millionaire.

Accenture (professional services company) AFL AFL-CIO Airbnb (hospitality service) Amazon net sales See also Mechanical Turk Arise (customer service company) Artsicle (art rental service) A-Ryde (ride-hailing app) Aspen Institute Atlantic, The (magazine) Attenborough, David automated cars automation baby boom generation Backchannel (tech website) Bahá’í BBS (bulletin board system) Belsky, Scott Bernstein, Michael Better Business Bureau Bezos, Jeff Big Brother (reality television program) Bitcoin Black Car Fund blockchain technology Bloomberg (magazine) Bloomberg, Michael Borzi, Phyllis C. Bravo Brio Restaurant Group Brustein, AJ Bureau of Labor Statistics Burton, Diane Bush, Jeb Camp, Garrett Campbell, Harry Care.com (marketplace for independent caregivers) CB Insights Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, The Chia, Stan churn (customer attrition) Clark, Shelby cleaning services churn (customer attrition) See Handy; Homejoy; Managed by Q Clinton, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton Global Initiative collective action.


CRISPR People by Henry T. Greely

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, clean water, CRISPR, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Gregor Mendel, Ian Bogost, Isaac Newton, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mouse model, New Journalism, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, special economic zone, stem cell, synthetic biology, traumatic brain injury, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

The consensus (but not unanimous) view is that women, on the other hand, actually make all their eggs before they are born but recruit some to maturity each month during their fertile years. 9. Antonio Regalado, “The DIY Designer Baby Project Funded by Bitcoin,” MIT Technology Review, February 1, 2019, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612838/the-transhumanistdiy-designer-baby-funded-with-bitcoin. Chapter 3 1. A good source for an understandable description of CRISPR and a history of its discovery and development can be found in Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).

On the other hand, in February 2019 Antonio Regalado published a piece about another person who was planning to do germline gene editing, not on embryos but through injecting CRISPR into men’s testicles. Antonio Regalado, “The DIY Designer Baby Project Funded with Bitcoin,” MIT Technology Review, February 1, 2019, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612838/the-transhumanist-diy-designer-baby-fundedwith-bitcoin. A quick review of the article shows that this effort should not engender serious concern. 53. Ed Yong, “Chinese Project Probes the Genetics of Genius,” Nature (May 14, 2013), https://www.nature.com/news/chinese-project-probes-the-genetics-of-genius-1.12985. 54.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Earlier this month, cybercriminals attacked a hospital in Los Angeles, then demanded payment in bitcoin to let the hospital regain access to their computers. It’s the most high-profile case yet of cyber-extortion using software known as ransomware. The attack on Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center effectively knocked it offline. As a result, patients had to be diverted to other hospitals, medical records were kept using pen and paper, and staff resorted to communicating by fax. The attackers demanded 9,000 bitcoins—around $3.6 million. After a two-week stand-off, the hospital yesterday paid out $17,000 … “Ransomware has really exploded in the last couple of years,” says Steve Santorelli, a former UK police detective who now works for Team Cymru, a threat intelligence firm based in Florida.

“These guys are crazy sophisticated,” says Jake Williams, the founder of cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec … Ross Anderson, a security researcher at the University of Cambridge, says bitcoin has helped cybercriminals to access payments without being caught. “In the old days, collecting ransom was really hard. The police would just put a radio tracker in the carpet bag full of £20 notes, and they would always get the guy. Now it’s possible to collect ransoms by bitcoin. Lots of people are doing it.” Last story: In a February 9, 2016, worldwide threat assessment report to the Senate Armed Services Committee, James Clapper, the U.S. director of national intelligence, added gene editing—for the first time—to a list of threats posed by “weapons of mass destruction and proliferation.”

Slowly but surely people are using PayPal to do away with cash. Like all big financial players, PayPal is experimenting with the emerging technology known as “blockchain” for validating and relaying global transactions through multiple computers. Blockchain, which is most famously used by the virtual currency Bitcoin, “is a way of enabling absolute trust between two parties making a financial transaction,” explained Schulman. “It uses Internet protocols to make the transaction go around any nation-state in a way that is visible to all the participants and goes beyond all middlemen and regulatory bodies—and therefore has the promise of lower costs.”


pages: 579 words: 183,063

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

–W “I’d rather give an understated good recommendation: be interdisciplinary . . . the interactions between [fields] tend to very often inform strategic and protocol decisions.” Vitalik Buterin TW: @VitalikButerin Reddit: /u/vbuterin VITALIK BUTERIN is the creator of Ethereum. He first discovered blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies through Bitcoin in 2011, and was immediately excited by the technology and its potential. He co-founded Bitcoin magazine in September 2011, and after two and a half years looking at what the existing blockchain technology and applications had to offer, wrote the Ethereum white paper in November 2013. He now leads Ethereum’s research team, working on future versions of the Ethereum protocol.

., 343 Alwaleed bin Talal Foundation, 362 Amazon, 101 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 324 America Online (AOL), 101, 345, 346 Anderson, Chris, 41, 407–9 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, 336 AngelList, 31 Aoki, Steve, 519–25 Aoki Foundation, 522 AOL, 101, 345, 346 A Plus, 250 Appiah, Kwame, 57 Apple AirPods headphones, 498 Apple Music, 37 Apple Pencil, 25 Arnold, John, 373–74 Aroma Housewares AHP-303/CHP-303 Single Hot Plate, 386 Aronofsky, Darren, 398–400 Ashley, Maurice, 368–70 Asna, 82 Aspen Institute, 324 Attia, Peter, 514–18 Audible, 133, 245 Authenticity, 81, 273, 344, 370, 530 Ayasdi, 200 B Babauta, Leo, 236–38 Back Buddy, 83 Ballmer, Steve, 59 Balsbaugh, Brian, 533–34 Bar complex, 466 Barkley, Gnarls, 204 Bartók, Béla, 341 Basecamp, 203 Bashō, Matsuo, 275 Bazaarvoice, 64 Be a STAR, 509 The Beastie Boys, 239 Beats Music, 37 Beats Solo headphones, 168–69 Behance, 459, 461–62 Bell, Mark, 309–12 Bell, Mike, 310 Belmont, Veronica, 100–103 Belsky, Scott, 459–62 Beltrame, Lorenzo, 563, 564 Benchmark, 459 Benioff, Marc, 445–50 Bergeron, Ben, 421–23 Bezold, Michael, 369 Big questions, 565 Birdhouse Skateboards, 298 Bitcoin, 153, 382, 507 Bitcoin magazine, 153 BitGold, 382 BitTorrent, Inc., 404 Black List, 277 Blaine, David, 448 Blakely, Sara, 352 Blinkist app, 301 Blockstack, 468, 492 Blogger, 401, 402 Blue Origin, 470 BMG Entertainment, 289 Bodily awareness, 552–53 in decision making, 61, 274 in exercise, 316, 426, 490 in handling overwhelm/lack of focus, 4, 238, 274 in meditation, 559, 560 with music, 57 Body Back Company, 83 Boeree, Liv, 300–304 Bohr, Niels, 39 Bono, 288 Boone, Amelia, xvii–xviii, 127–30 Bose noise-canceling earphones, 158 Botmakers.org, 101 Botwiki.org, 101 Boyle, Hal, 182, 184 Brach, Tara, 540 Brain.fm app, 168–69 Brand, Stewart, 332–34 Branson, Richard, 78, 451 Breakthrough Energy Ventures, 373 Breathing techniques, 99 to create nasal apnea sequence, 338 heart rate variability, 189, 198, 430 in meditation, 89, 559–60 when making decisions, 124 when stressed/overwhelmed/unfocused, 138, 144, 238, 274, 415, 438–39, 491 Bridgewater Associates, 321 Brown, Brené, 232–34, 356 B-School, 451 Bucky neck pillow, 509 Buddhism, 237, 270, 272, 285 Buffett, Warren, 204, 205, 209, 321 BuiltLean, 290 Burry, Mike, 62 Busyness, 26 Buterin, Vitalik, 153–55 Butterfly Petr Korbel table tennis racket, 330 C Cain, Susan, 10–13, 41 Call, Jon, 385–88 Callaway, 284 Cameron, James, 275 Cameron, William Bruce, 206 Campbell, Bill, 65 Campbell, Joseph, 16, 112, 335 Canfield, Jack, 432 Cantley, Lewis, 107–11 Carmichael, Christopher, 259 Carrey, Jim, 138 Carroll, Pete, 412 Carse, James P., 403, 540 Carter, Maverick, 79 Cartier, 75 Case, Jean, 345 Case, Steve, 345–48 Case Foundation, 345 Centaurus Energy, 373 Center for Applied Rationality, 163 The Center for Public Integrity, 211 Centre of Entrepreneurship, 451 Chadha, Richa, 85–90 Chainani, Soman, 70–74 Chanel No. 5, 87 Charell, Ralph, 156 Charitable giving, 202, 262–63, 321, 324, 345 Charyn, Jerome, 330 Chegg, 64 Chesterton, G.

The phrase and concept of “smart contracts” were developed by Nick with the goal of bringing what he calls the “highly evolved” practices of contract law and practice to the design of electronic commerce protocols between strangers on the Internet. Nick also designed Bit Gold, which many consider the precursor to Bitcoin. * * * What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, explains more about life (including human behavior and myself) than anything else I’ve read. What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”?


pages: 290 words: 72,046

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose by Nik Halik, Garrett B. Gunderson

Airbnb, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, business process, clean water, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Ethereum, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, gamification, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Isaac Newton, Kaizen: continuous improvement, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, market fundamentalism, microcredit, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Skype, solopreneur, subscription business, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, traveling salesman, uber lyft

Property leases or rentals. Ongoing income from land or building agreements. Farm or ranch land leases may provide income with little or no work from the owner. Rental property typically requires some involvement by the owner — warehouses or storage units require less, residential housing more. Earning Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency with shares in a mining pool. Frequency of Work: Monitor and maintain. After an agreement is executed there can be an ongoing stream of income. Then the owner has to do little work. Physical Presence: Rarely required. Owning a Business but Not Managing ItNet income from a business that you own fully or partially, but that is managed by someone else.

Cryptocurrencies make it easier to transfer funds between two parties in a transaction, and with minimal processing fees compared to the steep fees charged by most financial institutions. The adoption rate of cryptocurrencies is increasing daily with banks, corporations, and governments recognizing its mainstream popularity. The current leading cryptocurrencies are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero, Dash, and Ripple. A popular way to buy and sell cryptocurrencies and create your own digital currency “wallet” is to use a platform like Coinbase.com or Bittrex.com. Speculative investors should be aware there are risks involved in the investment and use of cryptocurrencies, such as fraud and security of the platforms.

See sharing economy accountability, and healthy inner circle action active income, Active/Passive Income Scale and cash flow and entrepreneurship and freedom and Growth investments and income growth and investment resources and Momentum investments Passive Income Score Sheet and passive vs. active income streams as trap using to fund lifestyle and wealth creation step See also income; passive income Active Income Ratio (AIR) Active/Passive Income Scale administrative fees adventure advertising, and materialism advertising revenues, as entrepreneurial opportunity Airbnb, as entrepreneurial opportunity The Alaska Life (blog) Alexander the Great AliExpress.com alkaline water, and energy amplification amateurism, and purpose Amazon American Psychological Association AnnualCreditReport.com arbitrage opportunities, and Airbnb artificial intelligence Ashe, Arthur auctions.godaddy.com auto insurance, as protective expense automobile expenses, as tax deduction B Bailie, Gil Bank Strategy Bannister, Roger Berkshire Hathaway Berry, Bertice Bitcoin Bittrex.com body energy boom/bust cycles boredom Bradbury breaks, and energy amplification Buffett, Warren business ownership, and economic cycles vs. self-employment business ownership (not managing), and Active/Passive Scale business ownership (working and managing), and Active/Passive Scale business startups, as Momentum investment opportunities buzzsumo.com C Calls to Action, Passive Income Ratio when to begin using Your 5 Day Weekend Plan Contract Your Debt Free Plan Your Entrepreneurial Income Plan Your Freedom Lifestyle Plan Your Investing Plan Your Power Up!


pages: 245 words: 72,893

How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, Russell Brand, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, Yogi Berra

They do this to keep the value of their money safe from outside interference. They do not give it up to corporate rivals. Until Google and Facebook have their own currencies, both still have reason to be afraid of the US Federal Reserve. They need the state to provide them with a store of value. Without it, their own value is uncertain. That is why Bitcoin and other digital currencies are so attractive to many technologists – they open up the possibility of liberating them from their dependence on the state. Google and Facebook may well have their own money one day, or at least their own money-like equivalent that can serve as a store of value, unit of account and medium of exchange – it is a far more realistic prospect than either ever acquiring its own army.

Li’s coalition was made up of the stay-at-homes, who lived off their meagre universal basic income, and the travellers, who moved from state to state looking for part-time work. His support was lowest among the over-80s, who were worried he would substitute their retirement income with dollars. The old had grown attached to their Bitcoins. They needn’t have feared – during the transition the Chair of the Federal Reserve had already explained to the President-Elect that it would be impossible to make paper money forgery-proof. Li had been forced to drop the idea. He was still looking for another one. There was little expectation that Li would be able to get much done, given the Congress that had been elected with him.

Index A accelerationism, 199–202 Achen, Christopher see Bartels, Larry and Achen, Christopher Ackerman, Bruce, 54–5 advertising, 160 and elections, 158 internet, 157, 159 Afghanistan, 75 Africa, 79 see also Algeria; Zimbabwe Algeria: coup, 41–3 Amazon, 131, 137 anarchism, 192–3, 214 appeasement, 144 Apple, 131, 137 Arendt, Hannah, 85, 86–7, 98 Eichmann in Jerusalem, 84 Argentina, 162 Aristotle, 161 armies see military artificial intelligence (AI), 122–3, 126, 129–30, 189–91 Athens, ancient, 35–8, 142, 161 conspiracy theories, 60 epistocracy, 179 Athens, modern, 27–8; see also Greece austerity, 208 Australia, 162 authoritarianism, 154–5, 171–3 ‘competitive’, 175 pragmatic, 174–5, 176, 177–8, 181, 205 B bankers, 69, 116, 181 banks, 131, 135; see also European Central Bank Bannon, Steve, 13 Bartels, Larry and Achen, Christopher: Democracy for Realists, 184 Bell, David A., 176 Benn, Tony, 58 Bentham, Jeremy, 127, 151, 152 Bermeo, Nancy, 44, 45 bio-engineering, 102–3 Bitcoin, 136 Bostrom, Nick, 105–6 Bourne, Sam (pseudonym): To Kill the President, 57, 58 Brazil, 217 Brennan, Jason: Against Democracy, 183–5, 186–7, 188–9 Bryan, William Jennings, 68–9 bureaucracies, 85, 86–7, 99, 127, 164; see also civil service Burton, Robert, 159–60 Bush, President George W., 12, 55 C Cambridge Analytica (firm), 156, 157, 159 capitalism, 196, 199 Carson, Rachel, 85, 87–8 Silent Spring, 82–3, 89, 90–91, 93 catastrophes, 6, 7, 85–6 environmental, 82–3, 85, 87–93; see also climate change nuclear, 83–4, 97 total, 100 Chicago: violence, 211 China and climate change, 174 Communist Party, 172–3 economy, 172, 208 foreign policy, 30–31 government model, 174 as a meritocracy, 175–6 nationalism, 172 pollution, 89 view of Trump, 173 Churchill, Winston, 8, 75–6, 168–9, 177 civil service, 41, 55–6; see also bureaucracies Clark, Christopher: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, 115 Clemenceau, Georges, 71, 75–6 climate change, 90–93 China and, 174 consciousness raising, 89, 92–93 conspiracy theories, 91–92 incremental nature of, 97 and risk, 101 support for, 108 and uncertainty, 96 see also global warming Clinton, President Bill, 54–5 Clinton, Hillary, 13–15, 16, 198 Cold War, 28–9, 67, 94, 95–6, 106–7, 108–9 communism 194; see also China: Communist Party; Marxism-Leninism; Stalinism consciousness raising, 85, 89, 92–3, 106 conspiracy theories, 60–71 climate change, 91–2 and division, 99 and fake news, 75 France, 69 India, 65–6 nuclear weapons, 96 Poland, 65, 66 and totalitarianism, 98 Turkey, 65, 66 United Kingdom, 62–3 United States, 62, 64–5, 67 and war, 77 conspiracy theorists, 153 Constantine I, king of Greece, 27, 28 consumerism, 166 Corbyn, Jeremy, 58, 94–5, 148–9, 150, 209 corporations, 129–32, 139, 166 coups, 3, 217 Algeria, 41–3 and catastrophes, 85 and clarity, 59 and conspiracies, 7, 60 and counter-coups, 56–7 Cyprus, 33, 38–9 economic conditions for, 31 in fiction, 57–8 Greece, 26–30, 27, 32, 33, 34–5, 38, 40, 45 Luttwak on, 41–2, 46 Turkey, 50–52, 53, 66 varieties of, 44–5 election-day vote fraud, 44 executive, 44 executive aggrandisement, 44, 52, 55 promissory, 44, 47, 50–51 strategic election manipulation, 44 Zimbabwe, 48 crises, 5–6 Cuban missile Crisis (1962), 107–8 mid-life, 5, 8, 169, 218 Cummings, Dominic, 179 currencies, 135 digital, 136 Cyprus: coups, 33, 38–9 D databases, 123 de Gaulle, General Charles, 41, 42 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 142, 187 death, 23–4, 204, 216–17 democracy appeal of, 6, 169–71 audience, 47, 117 direct, 35, 48, 143, 161, 162, 163 failure of, 50 obsolescence, 167–8 plebiscitary, 47 spectator, 47 spread of, 3 strong and weak, 59–60 threats to 6–7, 53–4, 108, 112; see also coups digital revolution, 152, 164, 200–201, 215, 219 dignity collective, 172, 173, 177 and elections, 170, 177 and loss, 175 disruption, 198–9 Dorsey, Jack, 137 Dreyfus, Alfred, 69 dystopias, 90–91, 113, 114, 118–19, 126, 220 E East India Company, 130–31 economic growth, 172, 192 accelerationists and, 200 and populism, 192 United States, 175 Western Europe, 175 Economist (journal), 133 Edgerton, David, 122 education, 109–10, 163–4, 183–4, 185 Eggers, David: The Circle, 139, 140, 141–2, 144 Egypt, 48–50 Eichmann, Adolf, 84, 85–6 elections 4, 218 and advertising, 158–9 computers and, 125 and coups, 44, 45 decision-making process, 188–9 and dignity, 170, 177 and disinformation, 156–7 Egypt, 48–9 France, 148 fraud, 44 Greece, 28, 29, 39, 40, 148 Italy, 148 manipulation of, 44 Netherlands, 148 online, 162 Turkey, 51 United Kingdom, 95 United States see under United States see also vote, right to elites, 75 and climate change, 91–2 corporate, 139 and nuclear disarmament, 95 and populism, 65 power of, 61 see also wealth environmentalists, 200 epistocracy, 178–9, 180, 181–8, 191, 205 equality, 202–3; see also inequality Erdogan, President Recep, 51–3, 66, 149, 213 Estlund, David: Democratic Authority, 185 Ethiopia, 154–5 European Central Bank (ECB), 33, 39, 116–17 European Union (EU) and corporations, 132 and Greece, 30, 32, 116–17 executive aggrandisement, 45–6 military, 55, 56 United States presidents, 92 experts see epistocracy; technocracy ExxonMobil, 92 F Facebook, 131, 132–3, 134–5, 136, 138–9, 140, 141, 145, 150, 157 fascism, 169 financial crash (2008), 79, 110, 116 Forster, E.


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The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees by Ben Mezrich

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Carl Icahn, contact tracing, data science, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, gamification, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Hyperloop, meme stock, Menlo Park, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, security theater, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Two Sigma, value at risk, wealth creators

WallStreetBets wasn’t populated by professionals—it was mostly amateurs, gamblers, hell, they called themselves “retards,” “apes,” and “degenerates,” terms that disturbed Gabe, and that he would never use. Some of them appeared to be doing real due diligence—but did they really believe they could dislodge a ticker from a company, somehow turn a stock into some sort of token, like bitcoin or doge? In the deeper corners of Gabe’s mind, maybe he knew that what was spurring him on wasn’t entirely math, but also his competitive nature. He’d never put it like this himself, but plenty of others in the industry would: Gabe was a winner—and these little shits on their couches tossing off angry memes onto Reddit were losers.

A freshly bored tunnel fitted with electrodynamic suspension rails and linear induction motors, as well as a partially constructed Hyperloop capsule, complete with inlet fan and axial compressor. Elon Musk, CEO and chief techno-king of Tesla; CEO, CTO, and chief designer of SpaceX; dogecoin enthusiast; bitcoin proselytizer; sometime richest man in the world; and the former president of the Galactic Federation of Planets, was moving fast, his legs churning at what felt like a thousand RPMs, as he tore through the twelve-foot-high, mile-long Hyperloop test track. He was breathing hard, fighting for air in the reduced pressure environment of the underground tube, but the state-of-the-art neurolink imbedded in his cerebellum instantly compensated for the lack of oxygen, firing messages down his neural pathways to continuously modify his circulatory and respiratory needs.

About the Author Ben Mezrich is the New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires (adapted by Aaron Sorkin into the David Fincher film The Social Network) and Bringing Down the House (adapted into the No. 1 box office hit film 21), as well as many other bestselling books. His books have sold over six million copies worldwide. Mezrich’s forthcoming novel, The Midnight Ride, will be published by GCP in early 2022. Also by Ben Mezrich Nonfiction Bitcoin Billionaires Woolly The 37th Parallel Once Upon a Time in Russia Straight Flush Sex on the Moon The Accidental Billionaires Rigged Busting Vegas Ugly Americans Bringing Down the House/21 Standalone Novels Seven Wonders The Carrier (as Holden Scott) Skin Skeptic (as Holden Scott) Fertile Ground Reaper Threshold Middle Grade Charlie Numbers and the Woolly Mammoth (with Tonya Mezrich) Charlie Numbers and the Man in the Moon (with Tonya Mezrich) Bringing Down the Mouse Novellas Q


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

Murray, Sarah (2015). “The Safe Cities Index 2015: Assessing Urban Security in the Digital Age.” The Economist Intelligence Unit. London: The Economist. 46. Wile, Rob (2014, June 14). “It’s Clear That the Future of Bitcoin Is Not in the US.” Business Insider. Retrieved from www.businessinsider.com; SourceForge (2015). “Bitcoin.” Retrieved from sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/stats/timeline. 47. International Monetary Fund (2015). “House Price-to-Income Ratio around the World.” Global Housing Watch. Retrieved from www.imf.org/external/research/housing. 48. Allen, Kate and Anna Nicolaou (2015, April 16).

What they give back to their host city more than makes up for the cost.44 In 2015, The Economist’s Safe Cities Index ranked Toronto “the best place to live” in the world—confounding those who want to argue that immigration is a bad thing.45 Other big cities showing how to become new global crossroads through deliberate design include Mumbai (global offshore services), Lagos (African trade and finance) and Tel Aviv (technology). Smaller cities, if well run, can become major intersections at a niche or regional level. Copenhagen may never challenge New York or London for traditional financial flows, but it is rapidly becoming a hub for crypto-currencies. Per capita, more Bitcoins are used in Scandinavia than anywhere else.46 Regina, a small city in the middle of the Canadian Prairies, in 2010 opened one of Canada’s largest inland ports, a 1,700-acre Global Transportation Hub, to interconnect North America’s major rail and trucking networks. A city in the middle of nowhere is equidistant from everywhere, and as global trade volumes swell, such places can make themselves essential nodes to help balance loads across different transportation systems.


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New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

This balance between hard and easy money, between the necessities of scarcity and prevalence, has been the subject of countless battles over currency. Increases in the money supply have helped unleash contemporary economic growth. But there are always voices of retrenchment and austerity. Like a gold standard, Bitcoin is deflationary by design. As currency becomes harder to mine and thus rarer and dearer, people who hold on to it are supposed to get richer relative to spenders. That is great for those who got in early hoarding gold or cryptocurrency, but its logic is disastrous for economic growth if it becomes a pervasively held ideal.

Just as encryption buffs celebrate pure mathematics as a bedrock foundation for secrecy and privacy (rather than the social and legal structures that perform the bulk of data protection), cryptocurrency fans promote blockchains as immutable, “censorship resistant” stores of value. A bank may fail; the government may renege on its pension promises; but the perfected blockchain would be embedded into the internet itself, automatically memorialized on so many computers that no one could undermine it.14 Some crypto diehards even imagine Bitcoin or ether as a last currency standing, long after central banks lose credibility. Like the gold bugs of old locking ingots in vaults, they want wealth unaffected by society or politics. They sincerely believe they are developing a currency guaranteed by the cold, reliable efficiency of computing rather than the fickle will of managers and bureaucrats.

Slate, February 15, 2008, https://slate.com/culture/2008/02/it-is-what-it-is-a-sports-cliche-for-our-times.html. 13. A good recent overview is Nicholas Weaver, “Inside Risks of Cryptocurrencies,” Communications of the ACM 61, no. 6 (2018): 1–5. For broader background, see David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 14. This possibility is expertly critiqued by Angela Walch; see “The Path of the Blockchain Lexicon (and the Law),” Review of Banking and Financial Law 36 (2017): 713–765. 15. Evan Osnos, “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” New Yorker, January 22, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich. 16.


pages: 144 words: 43,356

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

These teams need high-level support and freedom from the usual metrics of return on investment, at least for a while. The theory is fairly easy but putting it into practice is hard: most will need external help, and many will fail. Of course the disrupters can also be disrupted. A service called La’Zooz (16) is planned, based on the blockchain technology you will have heard about in connection with Bitcoin, which may provide serious competition for Uber. 3.2 – Killer robots It is not only commerce where AI is threatening disruption. Human Rights Watch and other organisations are concerned that within a decade or two, fully autonomous weapons will be available to military forces with deep pockets. (17) They argue that lethal force should never be delegated to machines because they can never be morally responsible.

lang=en (27) http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-great-forgetting/309516/ (28) https://twitter.com/MFordFuture/status/606939607356219392/photo/1 (29) http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/34u1a9/technostism_the_ideology_of_futurology/People also talk about a financial singularity arriving if and when cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin based on the blockchain technology disrupt traditional banking. Are we perhaps nearing peak singularity, or a singularity singularity? (30) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html (31) http://www.nature.com/news/flashing-fish-brains-filmed-in-action-1.12621 (32) http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/dec/20/research.it (33) http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/is-deep-learning-a-revolution-in-artificial-intelligence (34) http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/21/google-a-step-closer-to-developing-machines-with-human-like-intelligence (35) . https://intelligence.org/2014/05/13/christof-koch-stuart-russell-machine-superintelligence (36) http://uk.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-will-be-here-within-five-years-2014-11#ixzz3XHt6A8Lt (37) I am grateful to Russell Buckley for drawing my attention to this illustration


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New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

In response to vast increases in data storage and computational capacity in the last decade, the amount of energy used by data centres has doubled every four years, and is expected to triple in the next ten years. A study in Japan suggested that by 2030, the power requirements for digital services alone would outstrip the entire nation’s current generation capacity.19 Even technologies that make explicit claims to radically transform society are not exempt. The cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which is intended to disrupt hierarchical and centralised financial systems, requires the energy of nine US homes to perform a single transaction; and if its growth continues, by 2019 it will require the annual power output of the entire United States to sustain itself.20 Moreover, these figures reflect processing power, but do not account for the wider network of digital activities empowered by computation.

Elberling, ‘Permafrost thawing in organic Arctic soils accelerated by ground heat production’, Nature Climate Change 5:6 (2015), 574–8. 13.Elizabeth Kolbert, ‘A Song of Ice’, New Yorker, October 24, 2016, newyorker.com. 14.Council for Science and Technology, ‘A National Infrastructure for the 21st century’, 2009, cst.gov.uk. 15.AEA, ‘Adapting the ICT Sector to the Impacts of Climate Change’, 2010, gov.uk. 16.Council for Science and Technology, ‘A National Infrastructure for the 21st century’. 17.AEA, ‘Adapting the ICT Sector to the Impacts of Climate Change’. 18.Tom Bawden, ‘Global warming: Data centres to consume three times as much energy in next decade, experts warn’, Independent, January 23, 2016, independent.co.uk. 19.Institute of Energy Economics, ‘Japan Long-Term Energy Outlook – A Projection up to 2030 under Environmental Constraints and Changing Energy Markets’, Japan, 2006, eneken.ieej.or.jp. 20.Eric Holthaus, ‘Bitcoin could cost us our clean- energy future’, Grist, December 5, 2017, grist.org. 21.Digital Power Group, ‘The Cloud Begins With Coal – Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power’, 2013, tech-pundit.com. 22.Bawden, ‘Global warming’. 23.Alice Ross, ‘Severe turbulence on Aeroflot flight to Bangkok leaves 27 people injured’, Guardian, May 1, 2017, theguardian.com. 24.Anna Ledovskikh, ‘Accident on board of plane Moscow to Bangkok’, YouTube video, May 1, 2017. 25.Aeroflot, ‘Doctors Confirm No Passengers Are In Serious Condition After Flight Hits Unexpected Turbulence’, May 1, 2017, aeroflot.ru. 26.M.

., 149–50 Barclays, 109 basic research/brute force bias, 95 Bel Geddes, Norman, 30–1 Bell, Alexander Graham, 19–20 Benjamin, Walter, 144, 156 The Task of the Translator, 147, 155–6 Berners-Lee, Conway, 78 Berners-Lee, Tim, 78–9, 81 Berry, John, 189 ‘better than the Beatles’ problem, 94 Bevan Aneurin, 111 In Place of Fear, 110 big bang, 106 big data, 84 Bilderberg Group, 241 Binney, William, 176, 180, 181 Birther movement, 206 Bitcoin, 63 ‘Black Chamber,’ 249 blast furnace, 77–8 BND, 174 Borges, Jorge Luis, 79–80 Bounce Patrol, 223 branded content, 220 Brin, Sergey, 139 Broomberg, Adam, 143 Bush, George W., 176 Bush, Vannevar ‘As We May Think,’ 23–4 Bush Differential Analyser, 27 on hypertext, 79 Bush Differential Analyser, 27 Byron “Darkness,” 201–2 C Cadwalladr, Carole, 236 calculating machines, 27 calculation p-hacking, 89–91 raw computing, 82–3 replicability, 88–9 translation algorithms, 84 Cambridge Analytica, 236 Campbell, Duncan, 189 ‘Can We Survive Technology?’


pages: 629 words: 83,362

Programming TypeScript by Boris Cherny

billion-dollar mistake, bitcoin, business logic, database schema, don't repeat yourself, duck typing, Firefox, functional programming, Internet of things, pull request, source of truth, SQL injection, type inference, web application

Tip If you’re coming from a language with namespaces, note that although namespaces are supported by TypeScript, they’re not the preferred way to encapsulate code; if you’re not sure whether to use namespaces or modules, choose modules. Namespaces abstract away the nitty-gritty details of how files are laid out in the filesystem; you don’t have to know that your .mine function lives in the schemes/scams/bitcoin/apps folder, and instead you can access it with a short, convenient namespace like Schemes.Scams.Bitcoin.Apps.mine.1 Say we have two files—a module to make HTTP GET requests, and a consumer that uses that module to make requests: // Get.ts namespace Network { export function get<T>(url: string): Promise<T> { // ... } } // App.ts namespace App { Network.get<GitRepo>('https://api.github.com/repos/Microsoft/typescript') } A namespace must have a name (like Network), and it can export functions, variables, types, interfaces, or other namespaces.

Exercise Play around with declaration merging, to: Reimplement companion objects (from “Companion Object Pattern”) using namespaces and interfaces, instead of values and types. Add static methods to an enum. 1 I really hope this joke ages well, and I don’t end up regretting not investing in Bitcoin. Chapter 11. Interoperating with JavaScript We don’t live in a perfect world. Your coffee can be too hot and burn your mouth a little when you drink it, your parents might call and leave you voicemails a little too often, that pothole by your driveway is still there no matter how many times you call the city, and your code might not be completely covered with static types.


pages: 470 words: 125,992

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, central bank independence, Charlie Hebdo massacre, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, high net worth, income inequality, independent contractor, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

Simpson, “The Business Deals That Could Imperil Trump,” New York Times, April 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/opinion/sunday/trump-business-mueller-money-laundering.html. 42 to make the island a center for cryptocurrencies: Kai Sedgwick, “Malta Prime Minister Welcomes Binance to Its ‘Blockchain Island,’” Bitcoin.com, March 23, 2018, https://news.bitcoin.com/malta-prime-minister-welcomes-binance-to-its-blockchain-island/. 43 collected more than $1.2 billion in evaded taxes: Douglas Dalby and Amy Wilson-Chapman, “Panama Papers helps recover more than $1.2 billion around the world,” ICIJ, April 3, 2019, https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/panama-papers-helps-recover-more-than-1-2-billion-around-the-world/. 44 more than 150 government and corporate inquiries: Will Fitzgibbon and Emilia Diaz-Struck, “Panama Papers have had historic global effects—and the impacts keep coming,” The Center for Public Integrity, December 1, 2016, https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/12/01/20500/panama-papers-have-had-historic-global-effects-and-impacts-keep-coming. 45 In March, Mossfon announced: “Comunicado de Cierre de Operaciones,” Mos-sack Fonseca, March 14, 2018. 46 they couldn’t be found: Olmedo Rodriguez, “Fiscal detiene a siete personas por caso Mossack Fonseca,” La Prensa, May 23, 2018, https://impresa.prensa.com/panorama/Fiscal-detiene-personas-caso-MF_0_5036496409.html. 47 more than a million additional files: Will Fitzgibbon, “New Panama Papers Leak Reveals Firm’s Chaotic Scramble to Identify Clients, Save Business Amid Global Fallout,” ICIJ, June 20, 2018, https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/new-panama-papers-leak-reveals-mossack-fonsecas-chaotic-scramble/. 48 the firm knew the names of the owners: Nicholas Nehamas, “‘A Mickey Mouse operation’: How Panama Papers law firm dumped clients, lost Miami office,” Miami Herald, June 20, 2018, http://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article213423514.html. 49 “I don’t care”: Fitzgibbon, “New Panama Papers Leak Reveals Firm’s Chaotic Scramble to Identify Clients, Save Business Amid Global Fallout.” 50 “we stayed a client”: Email from Johan Van den Braber to Mossack Fonseca & Co.

The debate over the law cited the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers as a motivating factor. However, questions quickly surfaced about how the territories would respond, how such a law would be enforced, and whether this would simply drive illegal activity further underground. In Malta, Muscat’s government moved forward with plans to make the island a center for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin,42 which many fear has become a new frontier for money laundering. By April 2019, tax authorities worldwide had collected more than $1.2 billion in evaded taxes as a result of the Panama Papers.43 The United Kingdom topped the list, recouping almost $253 million. ICIJ estimated that more than 150 government and corporate inquiries in 79 countries had been launched in the first year alone.44 However, prosecutions in Panama itself presented the biggest personal threat to Jürgen Mossack, Ramón Fonseca, and their employees.

See Paradise Papers Australia, 43, 127, 147, 154, 161 Austria, 94 Aviva Holdings Limited, 111 Azerbaijan, 261–65, 277–78 Azerbaijan America Alliance, 264–65 Backslash Distributors, 36–38 Báez, Lázaro, 192–94, 217, 269 Bahamas, 29–30, 34, 35–38, 55, 76, 86, 256, 266, 280 mafia in, 29–30 Mossfon operations, 29–30, 35–38, 121, 133 tax havens, 24, 29–30, 35–38, 55, 64, 70, 121, 133 Bahamas Software, 36–38, 77 Baku, 263–65 Bale, Peter, 226–27, 273–74 banking, 47–60, 79 Bank Rossiya network, 90–102 Commerzbank raid, 5–10 Germany, 205–10 HSBC, 47–60, 79, 137–44, 177–81, 186–90, 195–99 Iceland, 118–24, 214–16, 223, 229 offshore credit cards, 70–74 offshore system, 47–60, 68–74, 79, 130–44 Russia and, 88–102, 252, 256 sexism in, 52–53 Swiss Leaks HSBC investigation, 177–81, 186–90, 195–99, 202–4, 216, 224–25 2008 crisis, 116–17, 123–24, 128–29, 184, 197, 214, 215, 229, 239, 257, 258, 261 UBS, 130–32, 135–37 See also specific banks Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), 66–67 Bank Rossiya, 90–102 Barmanbek, Imre, 266 Bayrock Group, 256–61 Bay Street Boys, 30 BBC, 186, 217 bearer shares, 26, 35–36, 115, 132–35, 140, 168, 181, 210 Beijing, 104, 165, 166, 167 Belgium, 53, 198–99, 258 Belize, 24 Belongers, 20–23, 25, 32–33 Bergman, Sven, 216, 228–30, 239 Berke, Richard, 152 Bermuda, 24, 84, 280–81, 283 Bethancourt, Rómulo, 270 Bharara, Preet, 245, 252 Big Tobacco, 149, 164 Birkenfeld, Bradley, 130–31, 249 Bitcoin, 284 Björgólfur family, 119, 122 Blackwater, 202 Blairmore Holdings, 133, 240 Bloomberg News, 164, 245 bluefin tuna industry, 149–51, 157 Blue Ocean Finance Limited, 140–41 Blum, Jack, 66, 67, 70, 72 Bobrov, Vladimir, 102 Boehner, John, 265 Boncamper, Malchus Irvin, 183–84 Bonny Island National Liquefied Gas Project, 55 bootlegging, 29–30 Bordachenko, Edward, 101 Borodin, Pavel, 92–93 Botín, Emilio, 197–98 Bourdon, William, 180, 181 Bo Xilai, 171–73 Bransten, Eileen, 109–10 Brazil, 185 Lava Jato scandal, 284 Mossfon operations, 231–32, 270–71 Brezhnev, Leonid, 262 British Virgin Islands (BVI), 19–33, 34, 35, 50, 54, 55, 90, 95, 99, 166, 233, 268 anti-money-laundering laws, 132–35, 182 bearer shares and, 132–34 Belongers, 20–23, 25, 32–33 double tax treaty, 21–22 drug trade, 27–28 Mossfon operations, 19–33, 41, 42, 56, 80–87, 121–23, 129, 132–45, 161, 169, 182–84, 268, 285 origins as a tax haven, 21–24 Panama Papers and, 268–70 population, 23 public registries law and, 283–84 tax havens and offshore system, 19–33, 41, 42, 56, 72, 80–87, 99, 121–23, 129, 132–45, 161, 169, 182–84, 268 Broadhurst, Nancy, 30–31, 193 Bronstein, Scott, 233 Brooks, Richard, 185, 186, 188 Brooks Trading, 122 Brothelgate, 279 Brothers Circle, 92 Brown & Root, 55 BTA Bank, 260 Buchholz, Dieter, 135–36 Burson-Marsteller, 201–2 Burton, Dan, 264 Bush, George W., 73, 75, 137 Butler, Paul, 21–22 Buzenberg, Bill, 149, 150, 161, 273 BVI Financial Services, 61 Cabra, Mar, 157, 160–65, 173, 177, 179–81, 187, 189, 195–99, 209–10, 213, 217–25, 243, 246–47, 274 Caicos, 24 Caijing, 164–65, 173–75 Camarena, Enrique “Kiki,” 44, 45 Cameron, David, 133, 240 Cameron, Ian, 133, 240 Campagnoli, José María, 192–93 Campbell, Duncan, 149, 152, 158 Canada, 154, 252 Caraballo, Javier, 244, 246, 269–70 Cardona, Christian, 278–79, 282–83 Caro Quintero, Rafael, 44–46 Caruana Galizia, Daphne, 237, 275–79 assassination of, 275, 278–80, 282–83 Caruana Galizia, Matthew, 188, 222, 237, 275, 278–80 Caruana Galizia, Paul, 278 Carvajal, Rigoberto, 157–58, 180–81, 188, 196, 209, 213, 218, 223, 248 Casey, William, 60 Casper, Norman, 63 Castle Bank and Trust Company, 63 Castro, Fidel, 30 Catholic Church, 12, 20 Cavendish International, 54 Cayman Islands, 4, 23, 66, 98, 115, 140 Center for Public Integrity (CPI), 148–52, 161, 187, 225–27 ICIJ independence from, 273–74 Central Bank of Cyprus, 61 Chagall, Marc, 113 Chan, Yuen-Ying, 164–66, 175, 244 Channel Islands, 24, 259 charities, as fake beneficiaries, 44 Charlie Hebdo massacre, 202 Chase Manhattan, 69 Chavarria de Estribi, Adelina Mercedes, 26 Chávez, Hugo, 137 Cheney, Dick, 55–57 Cheney, Lynne, 55 Cherry Group USA LLC, 2–3 China, 29, 31, 48, 50, 68, 104, 162–75, 203 banking, 50, 68, 162–75 China Leaks, 169–75 economy, 163–64, 167 government censorship, 164, 165, 175, 244 Internet, 164, 165, 175 journalism and, 162–75, 244 Mossfon and, 163, 166–75 Offshore Leaks and, 162–75 Opium Wars, 50 Panama Papers and, 244 politics, 170–73 princelings, 164–75 role in secrecy world, 162–75 tax havens and offshore system, 162–75 China Leaks, 169–75 Chittum, Ryan, 228 Chodiev, Patokh, 258 Chowaiki, Ezra, 112–14 Christensen, John, 24, 25, 124–25, 184–85 Christie’s, 105, 108, 110–15 CIA, 9, 58–60, 66, 67, 241 secret bank accounts, 59 tax havens and, 58–60 Citibank, 107 Citicorp Overseas Finance Corporation, 21–22 Clinton, Bill, 154, 165 Clinton, Hillary, 250, 251, 254 CNN, 19 CNN Türk, 266, 267 cobalt mining, 281 cocaine, 17–18 Cohen, Leon, 140–41 Cohen, Mauricio, 140–41 Cohen, Michael, 283 Cold War, 7, 60, 89, 93 Cologne, 7, 20 Colombia, 11, 137, 281 drug trade, 17, 44, 46 Columbia University, 150, 157, 180, 225 Comey, James, 250 Commerzbank, 205–10 commodities trades, 17 Commonwealth, 165, 174, 244 Commonwealth Trust Limited, 145, 155 Communism, 91, 163, 170, 171, 262 Community Action, 11 Congo, 53, 259, 281 Congress, U.S., 17, 29, 69, 75–76, 91, 265 HSBC investigation, 139–44 offshore tax evasion investigations, 65–66, 72–73, 139–44, 245–46, 254 tax cuts of 2017, 283 Trump and, 254–55 Constable, John, The Lock, 115 Contadora, 35 Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions, 57 Cook, Captain James, 31 Cook Islands, 115, 154, 280 copper mining, 281 Cornejo, Sandra de, 77–78, 83, 184, 284 Cornelia Company, 115 Coronel, Sheila, 157, 225, 227 Correa, Rafael, 242–43 Costa Rica, 10, 41, 45, 46, 157, 158, 180 counterfeiting, 36 Microsoft software, 36–38 credit cards, 70–74 Crédit Commercial de France, 52 Crédit Lyonnais, 81–82 Credit Suisse, 137, 170, 182–83 Cross Trading, 32 Crusades, 28 cryptocurrencies, 284 Cuba, 9, 137 communism, 9 mafia, 30 Curatola, Eugenio, 84–85 currency trades, 68 Customs, U.S., 127, 187 Cyprus, 24, 52, 61, 62, 86, 90 banking crisis, 276 Manafort and, 283 tax havens, 24, 92–93, 99–100, 123 Damelo Group, 101 Damiano, Juan Pedro, 240 Daniels, Stormy, 283 Daphne Project, 283 Darfur, 87 Darvishi, Kamal, 264 Davet, Gérard, 181, 187 DEA, 44–46 Degas, Edgar, Danseuses, 107 Degiorgio, Alfred, 279, 282–83 Degiorgio, George, 279, 282 Delaware, 2, 4, 15, 65, 254, 256 tax havens, 15, 20, 22, 31, 35, 68, 104, 125, 285 Deloitte & Touche, 170, 200 Delta State, 32 del Tiempo, Arturo, 199 Deltour, Antoine, 184, 202, 249 Democratic Party, 282 Deng Jiagui, 171 Deng Xiaoping, 170, 171 Denmark, 79, 232 Deripaska, Oleg, 252 Dex, Anabella, 118–24, 201 Dex, Jost, 118–24, 201 diamond trade, 48, 53–54, 143, 198–99 Díaz-Struck, Emilia, 217–18 Disney Company, 200 Doe, Samuel, 166 Doğan, Aydın, 265–67 Doğan Holding, 253, 265–67 Dominican Republic, 199 double tax treaties, 21–22 Doyen Group, 257 drug trafficking, 17–18, 19, 27–28, 44–46, 66, 76, 138, 198–99, 215, 217, 270 Dubai, 274 due diligence procedures, 58, 72, 77–78, 81–83, 120, 128, 182–84, 213, 231, 262, 263 Dunbar, John, 274 Eastern Europe, 29, 94, 256 Economist, 35 Ecuador, 32, 242–43 Panama Papers and, 242–43 Egrant, 277 Egypt, 182, 221 Elf oil company, 116 Elizabeth, Queen of England, 21 Elliott Management, 191–95, 269 Ellsberg, Daniel, 230 Elmaleh, Judah, 53, 138–39, 143 Elmaleh, Mardoche, 138–39, 143 Elmaleh, Meyer, 138–39, 143 El Salvador, 245 Endeavour Resources, 86–87 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 252–53, 256, 265–67 Ernst & Young, 200 Escobar, Ana, 77, 80, 81, 83 Escobar, Pablo, 46 Essential Consultants, LLC, 283 Estera, 281 Ethan Allen, 183–84 Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC), 258–60 Europe, 7–8, 49, 21, 200 European Commission, 189 European Community, 81 European Savings Directive, 79 European Union (EU), 75, 79, 99, 189–90, 199, 200, 272, 276–77 Europol, 272 Excellence Effort Property Development, 171 Facebook, 238, 239 Faisal, King of Saudi Arabia, 66, 223 Falciani, Hervé, 177–81, 186–90, 196, 197, 203 Federal Reserve, U.S., 49 Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 66 FedEx, 185 Fiandor, Miguel, 210 Fidentia, 39, 42–44, 133 FIFA, 224, 240 Finland, 232, 236 Firepower, 147 Firtash, Dmitry, 252 Fischer, David, 59–60 Fitch, 121 Fitzgibbon, Will, 225 Fitz Patrick, Mariel, 218, 242 FKK Acapulco sex club, 278–79 Flax, Keith, 24, 25, 269 Flax, Rosemarie, 25, 80, 269 Fleg Trading, 241 FL Group, 257–58 Florida, 4, 63, 72, 140, 141, 256 real estate, 4, 260–61 Fonseca, Ramón, 6, 10–13, 34, 48, 76, 80, 118, 130, 166, 201, 211, 220, 232, 284 arrest of, 271–72 background, 10–16 law firm beginnings, 5–7, 10, 14–18 meets Mossack, 10, 17 as nominee director, 26 Panama Papers and, 235–39, 244–48, 268–72, 274 retirement of, 211–13 UN career, 14–16 Forbes, 100, 109 Forbidden Stories, 282–83 Ford, F.


pages: 309 words: 121,279

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

air freight, airport security, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, big-box store, bitcoin, British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, global pandemic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kintsugi, lockdown, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, refrigerator car, sharing economy, social distancing, space junk, Suez canal 1869, Tim Cook: Apple

Jamie’s crew dug the whale a grave and buried it, to protect it from the gulls – a small act of dignity within an otherwise foul end. Occasionally, landfills are host to even more exotic discards. In 2013, James Howells, a computer engineer in Newport, South Wales, accidentally threw out a memory card containing 8,000 Bitcoin, which ended up in the local landfill. At Bitcoin’s peak, in 2021, the card’s contents were worth nearly half a billion dollars. For the last few years, Howells has been trying to convince the city to dig up the landfill to find the card, offering to share the proceeds if found. So far, they have declined his offers – and so the riches remain buried.

Aberfan disaster (1966) 277 Accra, Ghana 122–41, 262–72 Adana, Turkey 74–5 aerobic bacteria 33, 160 Agbofah, Yayra 122–8, 131–2, 138–41 Agbogbloshie, Accra 262–71 agriculture 13, 27, 34, 76, 77, 84, 140, 147, 148, 174, 175–6, 261, 274, 284, 286, 297, 300; composting and 197–9, 203–4, 206–8; digestion and 212, 213, 214, 215–16; gleaning 182–93; no-till/regenerative 197 air pollution 31, 51–2, 102, 105, 230 Air Pollution Control 102, 105 Air Spectrum 7 Akbar, emperor 224 Aki India Industries 234–5 Alcoa 253 Ali, Sheikh Akbar 17–18 aluminium 2, 51, 58, 60, 76, 248, 251, 252, 253 Amazon (online retailer) 1, 2, 42, 224, 254, 258, 326 American Can Company 63 American Chemistry Council 64 American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance 66 ammonia 22, 33, 102, 160–1, 163, 204, 205, 335 Amoo, Wisdom 264–5 anaerobic digesters 160, 162, 205, 209, 212–14, 235 Anderson, Gary 59 Animas river, US 291 Anthropocene 23, 67, 316, 333 antibiotics 34, 99, 168 Apeel Sciences 323–4 Apollo program 4 Apple 28, 254, 264, 266; Batterygate 258–9; repair of products 259–60 Arshi, Mohammad 243–6 assimilative capacity 227 Athens, ancient 8 atomic priesthood 313–14 Baia Mare, Romania 275 Bakke, Amager 108 Bangladesh 27, 120, 245, 293 Ban the Bag project 66 Barren Island waste-sorting plant 50 Basel Convention (1992) 85, 90–1, 264 Basti Suraksha Manch 18 Bastide, Françoise 314 bauxite ore 51 Bazalgette, Joseph 152–9, 162, 164–5, 166, 167, 168, 169, 225 Beccarin, Giuseppe 197–8 Beckton sewage works 153, 159, 162–3 Belgrand, Eugène 154 bentonite clay 30, 34, 311, 315 benzene 33, 52, 69 Beyond Plastics 71 Bhagavata Purana 224 Bhattacharya, Professor Bishakh 237–8 Biden, Joe 293 Biffa Polymers 7, 55–8, 69, 83–4, 204 Big Compost Experiment 211 Big Plastic 46, 64 ‘Big Pollution Diseases’ 239–40 Big Waste 83–4, 113, 204 Bilott, Robert 241 Binliners/waste freight 93–5 bins 5, 7, 12, 49–51, 70, 73, 108, 113–16, 117, 118, 170, 171–2, 176, 179, 193, 194, 195, 200, 202, 207, 209, 211, 251–2, 325, 336 biochar 199 biodegradation 5n, 32–3, 207–11, 240, 330 biofuels 212–14 biogas 179, 195, 207, 212, 213, 235 Biogen 212–13 bioplastics 207–9 Bisphenol-A (BPA) 34, 69, 228, 242 Bitcoin 38 Black Friday 93, 100, 129, 328 blame, industry shifts onto consumers 63–4, 284 Blast Beach 55 Blue Planet II 57 Blum, Aaron 249 Bokashi 202 bola boys 128 boomerang theory 239–40 Boone formation 278 bottom ash 104–6 Boundary Farm, Kent 182–4 BP 63 Bradley, Trevor 182 bread 175, 180, 181, 193, 202 Bricobio 314 British East India Company 230 British Standards Institution 206 Brumadinho, Brazil 273–5, 288 Brunel University 69 Burberry 255 Bureau of Indian Affairs 281 burning waste 4, 6, 11, 31, 39, 52, 56–7, 72, 79, 80–1, 92, 93–110, 121, 195, 208, 212, 214, 247, 268, 269; ash waste 104–6; binliners/waste freight and 93–5; burners (home incinerators) 96–7; burning of waste 103–4; Calorific Value (‘CV’) 100; combined heat and power (CHP) plants 108–9; destructor (first municipal garbage incinerator) 95–6; energy-from-waste (EfW) plants 93–100; history of 95–7; incinerator emissions 101–2, 108; London household waste and 107–8; medical waste and 98–9; off-spec waste and 100; practice comes under question 109; private finance initiatives and 107; recycling, competition with 107–8; ‘renewable’, classifying as 106–7 busyness 323 ‘Buy One, Get One Free’ 178 cadaverine 22 cadmium 77, 81, 101, 220, 227, 237, 239, 240, 268, 279, 280 Calder Hall 299 Calorific Value (‘CV’) 100, 108 Camorra mafia 82 Canada 84, 96, 125, 128, 139, 240, 254, 285, 304, 314 carbon dioxide 6, 22, 33, 51, 101–2, 106–7, 108–9, 120, 181, 197, 201, 202, 206, 212, 213, 284, 292–3, 295, 317, 318, 322, 335; farmers 198; footprint 63, 136, 172, 179; sequestration 199 cardboard 2, 11, 42, 44, 45, 46, 69, 73, 172, 203, 286 Cardin 278, 288, 289 Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring 240 Castle Environmental 106 Centers for Disease Control, US 280 Central Park, New York 50 cesspits 27, 146–7, 148, 149, 167 Chadwick, Edwin 48–9, 145–6, 149, 156, 215–16; Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain 48 Charity Retail Association 111 charity shops 111–14, 126, 135, 136, 138, 250 chat 279–84, 286, 287–8, 289, 290, 291–2, 293 Chemical Beach 55 Chemours 241 Chenghai (‘Toy City’), China 76 chengshi kuanchan (‘urban mining’) 77 Chicago, US 155 Chilton, Ben 298, 299, 301–5, 316, 339 China 19, 46, 147, 148; biogas and 213; EfW plants 97, 101–2, 109; e-waste in 249, 253, 259, 261–2, 270–1; exports of waste to 10–11, 75–92, 261–2, 270–1, 319; food waste 174; mining waste and 275, 276; nuclear power in 305, 317; Operation National Sword bans waste imports 11, 78–9, 84–6, 87, 88, 90, 330; recycling in 76–9, 84, 87–92 China Scrap Plastics Association 87 cholera 9, 48, 145–57, 161, 168 Christmas 76–7, 93, 100, 138, 184, 203–4, 251, 287, 328–9 chromium 220, 228n, 231, 231n, 233, 235, 236–7, 244–5; chromium-6 231, 237 Church of England 275 Church Rock, New Mexico 295–6 cigarette filters 4–5 circular economy 40, 42, 57, 69, 113, 141, 148, 321, 324–5, 326, 331 circulatory system 215–16 Civil Nuclear Constabulary 297–8 ‘clamps’ (composting vessels) 204–5 Clean Air Act (1956) 31 Clean Europe Network 64 Clean India campaign 24, 225 Clean Water Act (1972) 226 Clingan, Jonathan 294, 305 Cloaca Maxima 148 Coalhouse Fort 332 coal mining 47, 55, 96, 101, 121, 277, 286 Coca-Cola 5, 56, 63, 64–5, 69–70, 208, 323, 325, 331 cofferdam 164–5, 166 Colombo, Sri Lanka 23 colonialism 6, 85–6, 123–4, 138, 271, 272, 318 combined heat and power (CHP) plants 108–9 compactor 37–8, 129–30 compost 5, 39, 49, 50, 158, 172, 194–216, 243, 320, 322; biochar and 199; Bokashi 202; business/industry 203–4; carbon emissions and 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 206, 212, 213; circle of life and 195–6; compost toilet 200–1, 214–15; ‘compostable’ or ‘biodegradable’ plastics 207–11; Compost John 194–6, 198–202, 205, 211, 214–15; history of 196–7; microplastics and 216; peat compost 201; rates of food waste turned into 195; rotation and 197–8; soil and 196–7; South Korea 207; terroir 211; vermicomposting 198 Compost Association 206 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (Superfund) (1980) 34, 278, 280–1, 282, 287, 293, 333, 338 construction waste 37 consumption levels, reducing 326–9 Container Corporation of America 59 container ships 5, 10, 59, 67, 75, 76, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86–7, 88, 91, 93, 95, 97, 119, 120, 125, 187, 263, 297, 301, 302, 304, 308–10, 311, 318, 322 controlled tipping 31 copper 47, 52, 76, 248, 249, 251, 276, 312 Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine, Brazil 273–4 Cossham, John 170–3, 176–7, 192 Council for Solid Waste Solutions 64 Covid-19 pandemic 18, 22, 27, 29, 46, 87, 123, 150, 161, 222, 237, 238, 243, 245, 263, 267, 299, 307, 322 creosote 47 Crossness pumping station 153, 154 ‘Crying Indian’ advert 63 Cumberlows farm 203–4, 206, 208 Cummings, Alexander 148 Cuyahoga river fires 225–6 Dalit 27, 147 Danke IT Systems 264–5 DDT 229, 240 deadstock 121, 124–6, 254–5 dead zones 197, 227–8 decomposition 6, 8, 22, 23, 48, 54, 55, 162, 196–7, 198, 200, 202, 204, 207–9 DeLillo, Don: Underworld 20, 319, 331, 334 Dell 263, 264, 266 Department of Energy, US 313 destructor 95–6 diamines putrescine 22 diarrhoea 150, 156 Dickens, Charles: Bleak House 9, 48, 145; Little Dorrit 149; Oliver Twist 48; Our Mutual Friend 48, 48n dilution maxim 226–7 dimethyl sulphide 22 dioxins 6, 77, 101, 105, 216, 228n, 242, 268 Dispatches 99 disposables/disposability 9–10, 12, 53–4, 62–4, 122, 256–7, 325, 329 Disraeli, Benjamin 152, 154 Dixie cup 63 Dixit, Kaushlesh 243 Douglas, Mary 85 downcycling 68–70, 68n, 135 DRS (Deposit Return Scheme) 58, 64, 331 DS Smith 43–4, 58, 68–9 ‘dumping’, term 85–6 DuPont 53, 56, 64, 241 dustbin 9, 49 Earl, Harley 257, 258 East African Community 131 East Java, Indonesia 74 East Tilbury 332, 333 Effra 149, 165 EHESS 314 electronic waste.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

Its Early Ads Tell a Different Story,” Vox, January 25, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/1/25/18194953/vape-juul-e-cigarette-marketing. questionable financial products: Max Chafkin and Julie Verhage, “Robinhood Thinks Bitcoin Belongs in Your Retirement Plan,” Bloomberg Businessweek, February 8, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-08/brokerage-app-robinhood-thinks-bitcoin-belongs-in-your-retirement-plan?sref=4ZgkJ7cZ. known as a captcha: The original captchas asked users to read letters that had been slightly distorted; newer versions use pictures. its own conference room: Paul Cox, “PayPal and FBI Team Up to Combat Wire Fraud,” The Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2001, https://www.wsj.com/articles/B992639123888198275.

If you followed his logic, all manner of gray- and black-market transactions would be impossible for governments to stop, and the fees for those transactions would be revenue to PayPal. It was a real-world version of the wild arguments he’d published in his Stanford Review days. Forget bringing down morally bankrupt university administrators—PayPal had the potential to bring down governments. Two decades later, bitcoin enthusiasts would use a similar logic to pursue the same goal. Thiel made no secret of his revolutionary ambitions, communicating them freely to early employees, as well as investors, who put $3 million into the company using a PalmPilot to send Thiel the money at a press event in July 1999. “Paper money is an ancient technology,” he explained in a meeting later that year.

They imagined four to eight years of business-friendly tax policy, an embrace of Silicon Valley by the military-industrial complex, and deregulation of the Food and Drug Administration, a potential boon to venture capital‒backed biotech companies. Maybe—and this was really dreaming, but maybe—Trump would embrace cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Even Trump’s anti-China position wasn’t as bad as it might appear. A U.S. crackdown on trade might hurt some factories in the Midwest but could be a boon to tech companies that manufactured domestically, such as Musk’s companies, SpaceX and Tesla Motors, as well as chip companies like Intel. Who knew how far the tech-friendly policies could extend?


pages: 601 words: 135,202

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

Clarida’s term would expire in early 2022, and Quarles’s term as vice-chair for supervision would end in 2021, though he could remain on as a governor should he choose. Brainard stuck around the central bank. As she waited to learn whether her years of loyalty would be rewarded with a higher post, she busied herself with the biggest upheaval money had faced since the end of the gold standard more than half a century earlier. Bitcoin had roared onto the financial scene in 2008, and for years it was treated as something of a joke by the financial cognoscenti and by economists in academia and within the Fed system. In the years leading up to 2020, though, it had become clear that people were investing in it as an asset class, at a minimum, and that the technology behind it—distributed ledger—had security characteristics that might have broader uses.

He usually wore a bandana wrapped around his forehead, but he had ditched the headwear and donned a tie for his Webex with Congress. Gill, along with investors across America, had piled money into the stock of video game store GameStop over the prior months, sending its price on a precipitous rise that eventually gave way to a roller-coaster decline. It and other meme assets—stocks of Bitcoin and the movie theater chain AMC—had drawn lawmaker attention, as had the explosion in small-time trading on the Robinhood app and other platforms. Ordinary investors were carrying out complex transactions involving options, trading on borrowed money, and even staging crowdsourced rebellions against hedge funds.

“Joe” Biden: approval rating of, 283; Campbell as part of administration, 342n28; climate policy under, 269–70, 270n; continuation of relief programs under, 256, 260; election of, 253; mask wearing by, 219; racial unemployment gap focus of, 234; renomination of Powell by, 294–8, 299; stimulus checks sent by, 280–3, 281n; transfer of power and transition to, 281, 281n Bies, Susan, 92 Bitcoin, 272, 291 Black Lives Matter protests, 220–3 BlackRock, 189, 208, 209–11, 344–5n11 blockchain technology, 126 Boeing, 248, 248n bonds/Treasury securities: buying by Fed to support economy, 4–5, 20, 21, 22, 72–4, 72n, 93, 113–14, 113n; buying program during 2008 crisis, 7, 7n, 25, 32n, 93, 98, 113n, 285; buying program during pandemic, 33–6, 149–50, 152, 167, 182, 187, 189–90, 210, 263, 285–7, 286n, 301, 335n7; buying program during World War I, 61; consequences of Fed purchases, 5, 113–14; foreign governments’ dumping of Treasury holdings, 197–8; impact of pandemic on market, 141, 147–50, 343n27, 343n35; interest rates and bond-buying program, 32n, 93; low rates on, 115; normal function and activities related to, 146–7; QE programs, 5, 21, 32n, 113–14, 113n, 189–90, 225, 335n7; safety of Treasury securities, 30–2, 147; sales of Treasury securities and the pandemic, 29–35; Salomon Brothers and changes to buying and selling of, 16–17; trade wars and mass bond buying, 8 Bostic, Raphael, 223, 230 Bowman, Michelle, 154, 154n Brady, Nicholas F., 16 Brainard, Lael: background, education, and expertise of, 122–3; bipartisan qualities of, 127, 271, 300; career of, 122–3; climate conference speech of, 268; community outreach events of, 233; digital currency and role of Fed, position on, 270, 272–5; Fed Listens outreach branding by, 132; governor role of, 6, 122, 124–8; influence of, 126–7; loyalty of and higher position for, 271–2; Main Street program role of, 212–14, 247; marriage and family of, 123–4; monetary policy ideology of, 125–8, 297, 297n; opposition to regulatory changes by, 122, 125–6, 127; pandemic rescue program role of, 162, 168, 204, 206; political donation of, 124–5, 342n31; politics of, 122, 124–5, 127, 127n, 268, 270–1; reputation of and respect for, 124–5, 126, 162, 214, 271–2; suspension of bank payments, opinion about, 215; Treasury secretary candidacy potential for, 271; trust between and working relationship of Powell, Quarles, and, 127–8; trust between and working relationship with Powell, 300; vice-chair position of, 6, 299; wealth of, 133 Bretton Woods meeting and monetary system, 75–6 Buffet, Warren, 16, 24 Bullard, James B.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Alternative currencies have limited acceptance within a small area and, sometimes, a finite expiry date. They are designed to encourage local business and emphasize community values. The rise of bitcoin, originally intended for anonymous payments for online purchases of illicit items, and of other digital or crypto-currencies reflects, in part, increased concern about the monetary system. But bitcoin is subject to price manipulation and fraud. When one bitcoin exchange collapsed, holders seeking to recover their investment discovered belatedly the rationale for state regulation of payment systems. Irrespective of whether alternative currencies succeed or fail, they are testament to a growing distrust of governments, central banks, and the financial system, and they represent a challenge to the authority and apparatus of the state.


pages: 284 words: 92,688

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

When Andreessen put money into Rockmelt, a middling start-up with the lame idea of developing a new kind of web browser, the tech press went into a frenzy; a few years later, when Rockmelt was sold for scrap to Yahoo, nobody held Andreessen’s feet to the fire. When Andreessen Horowitz piled money into Bitcoin-related companies, the tech press began writing that Bitcoin was the next big thing. Nobody blinked when two companies in Andreessen’s portfolio, Instagram and Oculus, were acquired by Facebook, where Andreessen sits on the board of directors. These deals were even more remarkable than the Netscape and Loudcloud acquisitions, since while those earlier companies were sold for billions while not turning a profit, Instagram and Oculus were sold for billions without even generating revenue.

Because they’re Andreessen Horowitz.” Andreessen is a physically imposing man: six feet, four inches tall and heavyset, with an enormous shaved head. He’s an avid Twitter user, sometimes posting more than one hundred tweets a day, pontificating and picking fights. When Warren Buffett expressed skepticism of Bitcoin, a technology in which Andreessen has invested heavily, Andreessen called Buffet “an old white man crapping on tech he doesn’t understand.” Andreessen was quite literally the poster boy for the first dotcom bubble, posing for a February 1996 Time cover sitting barefoot on a throne, a millionaire boy king, twenty-four years old.


Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems by Martin Kleppmann

active measures, Amazon Web Services, billion-dollar mistake, bitcoin, blockchain, business intelligence, business logic, business process, c2.com, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, data science, database schema, deep learning, DevOps, distributed ledger, Donald Knuth, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, exponential backoff, fake news, fault tolerance, finite state, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, full text search, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Hacker News, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kubernetes, Large Hadron Collider, level 1 cache, loose coupling, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, microservices, natural language processing, Network effects, no silver bullet, operational security, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, place-making, premature optimization, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, social graph, social web, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, source of truth, SPARQL, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, web application, WebSocket, wikimedia commons

The replicas continually check each other’s integ‐ rity and use a consensus protocol to agree on the transactions that should be exe‐ cuted. I am somewhat skeptical about the Byzantine fault tolerance aspects of these technol‐ ogies (see “Byzantine Faults” on page 304), and I find the technique of proof of work (e.g., Bitcoin mining) extraordinarily wasteful. The transaction throughput of Bitcoin is rather low, albeit for political and economic reasons more than for technical ones. However, the integrity checking aspects are interesting. Cryptographic auditing and integrity checking often relies on Merkle trees [74], which are trees of hashes that can be used to efficiently prove that a record appears in some dataset (and a few other things).

., an aircraft crashing and killing everyone on board, or a rocket colliding with the International Space Station), flight control systems must tolerate Byzan‐ tine faults [81, 82]. • In a system with multiple participating organizations, some participants may attempt to cheat or defraud others. In such circumstances, it is not safe for a node to simply trust another node’s messages, since they may be sent with mali‐ cious intent. For example, peer-to-peer networks like Bitcoin and other block‐ chains can be considered to be a way of getting mutually untrusting parties to agree whether a transaction happened or not, without relying on a central authority [83]. However, in the kinds of systems we discuss in this book, we can usually safely assume that there are no Byzantine faults.

This page can be found by searching the web for the 23-character string obtained by removing the hyphens from the string allla-mport-spubso-ntheweb. [81] John Rushby: “Bus Architectures for Safety-Critical Embedded Systems,” at 1st International Workshop on Embedded Software (EMSOFT), October 2001. [82] Jake Edge: “ELC: SpaceX Lessons Learned,” lwn.net, March 6, 2013. [83] Andrew Miller and Joseph J. LaViola, Jr.: “Anonymous Byzantine Consensus from Moderately-Hard Puzzles: A Model for Bitcoin,” University of Central Florida, Technical Report CS-TR-14-01, April 2014. [84] James Mickens: “The Saddest Moment,” USENIX ;login: logout, May 2013. [85] Evan Gilman: “The Discovery of Apache ZooKeeper’s Poison Packet,” pagerd‐ uty.com, May 7, 2015. Summary | 317 [86] Jonathan Stone and Craig Partridge: “When the CRC and TCP Checksum Disa‐ gree,” at ACM Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication (SIGCOMM), August 2000. doi: 10.1145/347059.347561 [87] Evan Jones: “How Both TCP and Ethernet Checksums Fail,” evanjones.ca, Octo‐ ber 5, 2015. [88] Cynthia Dwork, Nancy Lynch, and Larry Stockmeyer: “Consensus in the Pres‐ ence of Partial Synchrony,” Journal of the ACM, volume 35, number 2, pages 288– 323, April 1988. doi:10.1145/42282.42283 [89] Peter Bailis and Ali Ghodsi: “Eventual Consistency Today: Limitations, Exten‐ sions, and Beyond,” ACM Queue, volume 11, number 3, pages 55-63, March 2013. doi:10.1145/2460276.2462076 [90] Bowen Alpern and Fred B.


pages: 1,237 words: 227,370

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems by Martin Kleppmann

active measures, Amazon Web Services, billion-dollar mistake, bitcoin, blockchain, business intelligence, business logic, business process, c2.com, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, data science, database schema, deep learning, DevOps, distributed ledger, Donald Knuth, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, exponential backoff, fake news, fault tolerance, finite state, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, full text search, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Hacker News, informal economy, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, iterative process, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kubernetes, Large Hadron Collider, level 1 cache, loose coupling, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, microservices, natural language processing, Network effects, no silver bullet, operational security, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, place-making, premature optimization, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, social graph, social web, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, source of truth, SPARQL, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, web application, WebSocket, wikimedia commons

The replicas continually check each other’s integrity and use a consensus protocol to agree on the transactions that should be executed. I am somewhat skeptical about the Byzantine fault tolerance aspects of these technologies (see “Byzantine Faults”), and I find the technique of proof of work (e.g., Bitcoin mining) extraordinarily wasteful. The transaction throughput of Bitcoin is rather low, albeit for political and economic reasons more than for technical ones. However, the integrity checking aspects are interesting. Cryptographic auditing and integrity checking often relies on Merkle trees [74], which are trees of hashes that can be used to efficiently prove that a record appears in some dataset (and a few other things).

., an aircraft crashing and killing everyone on board, or a rocket colliding with the International Space Station), flight control systems must tolerate Byzantine faults [81, 82]. In a system with multiple participating organizations, some participants may attempt to cheat or defraud others. In such circumstances, it is not safe for a node to simply trust another node’s messages, since they may be sent with malicious intent. For example, peer-to-peer networks like Bitcoin and other blockchains can be considered to be a way of getting mutually untrusting parties to agree whether a transaction happened or not, without relying on a central authority [83]. However, in the kinds of systems we discuss in this book, we can usually safely assume that there are no Byzantine faults.

[81] John Rushby: “Bus Architectures for Safety-Critical Embedded Systems,” at 1st International Workshop on Embedded Software (EMSOFT), October 2001. [82] Jake Edge: “ELC: SpaceX Lessons Learned,” lwn.net, March 6, 2013. [83] Andrew Miller and Joseph J. LaViola, Jr.: “Anonymous Byzantine Consensus from Moderately-Hard Puzzles: A Model for Bitcoin,” University of Central Florida, Technical Report CS-TR-14-01, April 2014. [84] James Mickens: “The Saddest Moment,” USENIX ;login: logout, May 2013. [85] Evan Gilman: “The Discovery of Apache ZooKeeper’s Poison Packet,” pagerduty.com, May 7, 2015. [86] Jonathan Stone and Craig Partridge: “When the CRC and TCP Checksum Disagree,” at ACM Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication (SIGCOMM), August 2000. doi:10.1145/347059.347561 [87] Evan Jones: “How Both TCP and Ethernet Checksums Fail,” evanjones.ca, October 5, 2015


pages: 190 words: 56,531

Where We Are: The State of Britain Now by Roger Scruton

bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Corn Laws, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fellow of the Royal Society, fixed income, garden city movement, George Akerlof, housing crisis, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, old-boy network, open borders, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, sceptred isle, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, web of trust

It is a broker among possible worlds, and resides nowhere among them. Such a business cannot be easily pinned down, and the question where it is, for purposes of taxation, legal accountability, and obedience to sovereign laws and policies may be decidable, but only by convention and without calling upon any basic loyalty of the firm. The arrival of Bitcoin and blockchain may facilitate this mass escape from the grip of sovereign overlords, by making currency itself into a network of freely associating users, outside the control of any state. More and more businesses are built on this model, offering goods and services through networks that ignore national boundaries, coming to earth here and there like Amazon and Ikea, but only temporarily and only where the tax regime is favourable.

INDEX Abbé Sieyès here Act of Settlement (1701) here, here Act of Union (1707) here Act of Union (1800) here, here Acton, Lord here Addison, Joseph here adolescents and home here, here, here see also network psyche American Constitution here American Revolution here Amritsar massacre (1919) here Anglers’ Conservation Association here Anglo-American alliance here anonymity and global business conduct here anti-Semitism here ‘anywheres’ and ‘somewheres’, David Goodhart’s here, here, here, here Apostolic Succession here architecture, globalization and here art here, here, here Ashcroft, Lord here Australia here Austro-Hungarian Empire here authority/officialdom, attitudes to here Barnett, Correlli here, here Baudrillard, Jean here Becket, Thomas here Belgium here, here benefits tourism here Benetton here Bernanos, Georges here, here Betjeman, John here Betts, Alexander here Bitcoin and blockchain here Blackman, Alexander here Blair, Tony here, here, here, here, here, here boundaries, countryside land here Bowlby, John here Boyle, Danny here Brexit here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also European Union Britain‘anywheres’ and ‘somewheres’ here attitude to authority/officialdom here bottom-up legal system here, here, here, here, here, here British as ‘subjects of the Queen’ here charitable donations here ‘Christian’ attitude of charitableness here, here Church of England here, here, here collective trust and stability here, here, here, here see also citizenship Common Law/law of the land here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Court of Chancery/civil law here current Royal family here, here, here, here declinist literature here development through private ventures and institutions here, here, here education here, here, here environmental accountability here farm subsidies here ‘free movement of labour’/Treaty of Maastricht (1992) here, here, here see also immigration/immigrants; Islam freedom here, here, here, here, here, here, here housing and planning here, here, here identity here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also citizenship; nationality/nationhood institutions and ‘clubbable’ instinct here interpretations of national history here, here land-ownership here, here, here landscape and countryside here left-wing intellectuals here, here see also Blair, Tony; Labour Party military power here, here, here neighbourhood and home here North-South divide here overcoming oppressive systems here patriotism here, here, here, here perception of European Union here relationship with Commonwealth here religion here, here see also Islam sovereignty and national identity here, here, here sovereignty and the Church here sovereignty and the law here, here, here town-country divide here urban elite/upper classes here, here urbanization – ‘garden cities’ here working classes here, here, here young voters here, here, here see also England; Ireland, Northern; Scotland; United Kingdom; Wales Britten Benjamin here Brown, Gordon here building societies/friendly societies here, here, here Burke, Edmund here, here business and cyberspace here, here Butterfield, Herbert here Byron, Lord here Cadbury family here, here Calvin, John here Cameron, David here Canada here, here capitalism and globalization here Catholic Church here, here Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) here, here Catholic revival, French here charities here Chesterton, G.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Amazon’s demand for programmers, salespeople, warehouses, and data servers is redrawing Seattle’s skyline. Hundreds of towns from California to Missouri have blocked Walmart from opening stores that threaten their retail outlets, but they can’t stop Amazon from doing the same by delivering straight to one’s door. At the same time, Bitcoin began as a niche crypto-currency, but people increasingly live off it in the “real” world; if it acquires a banking license to issue credit, it could outmaneuver banks in reaching the bottom billions. Mobile transmission technologies are eclipsing the need for giant towers, and more digital payment and e-commerce mean fewer physical coins: Sweden is going cashless and Canada has stopped minting pennies, something the United States might do as well, meaning less consumption of nickel and other metals.

Today approximately thirty corporations control 90 percent of world Internet traffic; Google alone manages an estimated 20 percent of the Internet’s content through websites, storage, and enterprise apps. ISPs, the current backbone of the Internet, prefer self-management and self-regulation to heavy state involvement. Furthermore, the publicly accessible Web is but a small fraction of the total Internet. The Dark Web of anonymous Tor-encrypted networks and Bitcoin transactions, the Deep Web of unindexed pages, corporate intranets, and other publicly unsearchable databases make up the vast majority of the Internet’s content. Though the Internet has no central authority, it is moving from its halcyon days as an ungoverned stateless commons with only technical supervision into a geopolitical arena of intense complexity.

Palestine and Kurdistan act like virtual states through their Internet servers hosted in friendly territories, illustrating how the Internet enables even stateless communities to conduct elections and manage international diplomatic and economic relations. But alliances can also be illusory in cyberspace. Indeed, cloud communities take on not just governments but also each other, such as when Anonymous declared war on ISIS in 2014 or when a hacker group stole $5 million worth of Bitcoin from Europe’s leading exchange Bitstamp in 2015. The supply chain world’s blending of geopolitical and commercial agendas very much applies to cyberspace as well. The NSA revelations legitimized a surge of techno-nationalism. Particularly in China, where PLA officers were directly named in an American industrial espionage investigation, Microsoft and Cisco were suddenly delisted from government and corporate procurement mandates, replaced by indigenous products such as a Chinese operating system.


pages: 477 words: 144,329

How Money Became Dangerous by Christopher Varelas

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airport security, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, cashless society, corporate raider, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, eat what you kill, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Michael Milken, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, pensions crisis, pets.com, pre–internet, profit motive, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Saturday Night Live, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, universal basic income, zero day

People have become so comfortable with alternate forms of currency, while simultaneously disillusioned with our traditional financial structures, that they’re willing to put their money into something that an anonymous entity created and is nearly impossible to use for anything legal other than speculation and trading. Stories are common of people having mortgaged their houses to buy Bitcoin. They may not trust the bank, but they’ll trust sinking their savings into a currency with little history and unproven legitimacy. That’s how cynical we have become, how disconnected we now are from conventional forms of money. A recent trend in Silicon Valley—which capitalizes on the popularity of cryptocurrency—is to issue an initial coin offering (ICO) when raising funding.

The startup world is already fraught with risk and inflated promises, and ICOs magnify those problems by injecting the crypto landscape with flimsy new currencies, further corrupting the trust and integrity of that market. A lot of people believe that what will survive the crypto bubble will be the infrastructure, rather than many of the currencies themselves. Blockchain is a digital ledger originally created to record Bitcoin transactions, but it has since found a multitude of other valuable uses. Blockchain, as the infrastructure that allows the majority of cryptocurrencies to operate, is the shovel salesman, just like Equinix was for the internet, while the cryptocurrencies are the gold seekers or the startups. One use of Blockchain that will have a dramatic impact on wealth management and the way we look at value will be the ability to divide an asset into as many parts as desired and sell those to third parties.

They don’t know what’s going to precipitate the end of the world as they know it, but they’re worried it’s going to happen; and when it does, they want to make sure that their advantages are protected. It’s pretty scary that the people with the most knowledge—those from Wall Street who built our financial world and those from Silicon Valley who built our technology—are the ones who are most worried that the whole system could melt down. This has inspired the rise of things like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. When people lose faith in their civil society, government, and financial institutions, they begin to invest in alternatives—store up gold, build a compound, buy crypto, assemble a personal arsenal. But what if their strategies are misguided? I have many friends who are preppers.


pages: 377 words: 110,427

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Legislative Exchange Council, Benjamin Mako Hill, bitcoin, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, deliberate practice, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, failed state, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, full employment, functional programming, Hacker News, Howard Zinn, index card, invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Gruber, Lean Startup, low interest rates, More Guns, Less Crime, peer-to-peer, post scarcity, power law, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, semantic web, single-payer health, SpamAssassin, SPARQL, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, unbiased observer, wage slave, Washington Consensus, web application, WikiLeaks, working poor, zero-sum game

Recently, DNS legend Dan Kaminsky used this to argue that since electronic cash was pretty much the same as naming, Zooko’s triangle applied to it as well. He used this to argue that Bitcoin, the secure, decentralized, human-meaningful electronic cash system was impossible. I have my problems with Bitcoin, but it’s manifestly not impossible, so I just assumed Kaminsky had gone wrong somewhere. But tonight I realized that you can indeed use Bitcoin to square Zooko’s triangle. Here’s how it works: Let there be a document called the scroll. The scroll consists of a series of lines and each line consists of a tuple (name, key, nonce) such that the first N bits of the hash of the scroll from the beginning to the end of a line are all zero.


pages: 344 words: 104,077

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

This approach is limited, however, by the number of people who want to voluntarily reduce their emissions in this way. It might also be possible to create additional financial incentives for people to reduce their emissions. For example, several Climate CoLab proposals have suggested using digital currencies (like bitcoin) to buy and sell emission rights.4 It is common for the value of these digital currencies to increase very substantially over time. The value of a bitcoin, for instance, has increased from about $0.30 in 2011 to over $1,200.00 in 2017, and there are structural reasons to expect that such increases may continue.5 In this case, early participants in a voluntary emissions-trading program with a digital currency might receive an initial allocation of emission rights.

The contests where people compete to come up with basic ideas for improving things like transportation and electricity are called basic contests. Higher-level contests, where people compete to combine these basic proposals into national and global climate action plans, are called integrated contests. For instance, one of our winning global proposals suggested that a digital currency called solar dollars (based on Bitcoin-like blockchain technology) could be used to encourage emission reductions in countries around the world. This global proposal contained subproposals for how the major countries and regions of the world could contribute to the overall plan (see the following illustration). The subproposal for Europe, for example, suggested that Greece could be used as a test laboratory for renewable energy approaches that could be used all over Europe.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

He advocates systems “that live everywhere and nowhere, protecting and processing the data of millions of people, and executing on millions of internet computers.”77 One important study of Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that relies on blockchain, suggests that such machine solutions both express and contribute to the general erosion of the social fabric in ways that are both consistent with instrumentarianism and further pave the way for its success. Information scholars Primavera De Filippi and Benjamin Loveluck conclude that contrary to popular belief, “Bitcoin is neither anonymous nor privacy-friendly… anyone with a copy of the blockchain can see the history of all Bitcoin transactions… every transaction ever done on the Bitcoin network can be traced back to its origin.”

Harvard Business Review Staff, “With Big Data Comes Big Responsibility,” Harvard Business Review, November 1, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/11/with-big-data-comes-big-responsibility. 77. “Who Should We Trust to Manage Our Data?” World Economic Forum, accessed August 9, 2018, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/10/who-should-we-trust-manage-our-data/. 78. Primavera De Filippi and Benjamin Loveluck, “The Invisible Politics of Bitcoin: Governance Crisis of a Decentralized Infrastructure,” Internet Policy Review 5, no. 3 (September 30, 2016). 79. Staff, “With Big Data Comes Big Responsibility.” CHAPTER SIXTEEN 1. “The World UNPLUGGED,” The World UNPLUGGED, https://theworld unplugged.wordpress.com. 2. For an insightful account, see Katherine Losse, The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network (New York: Free Press, 2012). 3.

See also instrumentarianism; ubiquitous computing Bing search engine, 95, 162, 163 biomedical telemetry, 205–206 biometrics: in Chinese social credit system, 389, 392; data collected by Sleep Number bed, 236; and Facebook, 251–252; fingerprints, 389, 489; regulation of data collection, 125, 251, 252–253; used in emotion analytics products, 283, 289. See also emotion analytics; facial recognition; voice recognition; wearable technologies Bitcoin, 442 blockchain, 442 Bloomberg, 76–77, 315 Bloomberg Businessweek, 28, 102, 263, 388, 511 Blumenthal, Richard, 146–147 body consciousness, 464 body rendition: through facial recognition, 251–253; through health care apps, 247–251; through location data, 242–245; through wearables, 246–248, 249 Bogost, Ian, 314 Boston Globe, 388 Boston Police Department, 388 Bosworth, Andrew, 457, 505–506 bots, “conversations” with, 164.


Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean

4chan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, bash_history, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, finite state, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Conference 1984, Ian Bogost, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, Larry Wall, late capitalism, means of production, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, power law, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Slavoj Žižek, social software, social web, software studies, speech recognition, SQL injection, stem cell, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, Turing machine, Turing test, Vilfredo Pareto, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 52. 112. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 113. For example, the P2P virtual currency Bitcoin created in 2009 replaces the centralized bank with the distributed network, thus offering a critique of monopolistic practices. (See http:// www.bitcoin.org/.) 114. Despite being written as a joke, it brought the attention of the FBI, and Kamkar pled guilty to a felony charge of computer hacking, agreeing not to use a computer for three years. Further explanations and press coverage of the Sam Kamkar case are available at http://namb.la/popular/. 115.


Phil Thornton by The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, double helix, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, loss aversion, mass immigration, means of production, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, trade route, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce

. • The idea that the price system is the way in which individuals with limited knowledge combine to produce one social outcome underpins the rational expectations hypothesis – that people make choices based on their rational outlook, available information and past experiences. 138 The Great Economists • His thesis that order emerges spontaneously out of apparent chaos is the defining characteristic of the science of complex adaptive systems, which is a key concept in many fields such as biology, financial markets and the study of communities. • His suggestion that currencies should compete against each other may win new supporters in the wake of the advent of private currencies such as Bitcoins and computer-gamesbased money. However, it was Hayek’s ideas on the primacy of individuals’ decisions over central planning as the best way to run an economy that have had a lasting legacy. When economists started to question the impact that Keynesianism was having on modern economies in the 1960s and 1970s they turned to Hayek.

Index A Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith, 1759) 2, 5–6 Adelman, Irma 110 American Economic Association 170 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations see The Wealth of Nations anarchism 156 apartheid system in South Africa 199 Ariely, Dan 234 Arrow, Kenneth 191, 213 AT&T 22 austerity versus stimulus debate 43–4, 140–1 Austrian School of Economics 121–2 autarky concept 184 bank bailouts in the financial crisis 162 Bank of England 161 Barro, Robert 43 Barro-Ricardo equivalence 43–4 Becker, Gary (1930– ) 193–216 approach to human behaviour 212–15 building human capital 200–2, 210 early life and influences 195–7 economic perspective on discrimination 196–7, 198–9 Economics of Discrimination (1957) 196–7, 198–9 economics of the family 213–15 family decision making 203–6 key economic theories and writings 197–212 long-term impact 212–15 new home economics 203–6 Nobel Prize (1992) 194, 195–6 on crime and punishment 207–10 on drug addiction 210–12, 215 rational choice model 197, 212– 15, 216 verdict 215–16 Becker–Posner Blog 215 behavioural economics 218–19, 233–6 Bentham, Jeremy 31, 181 Bergmann, Barbara 206 Bergson, Abram 182 Bergson–Samuelson social welfare function 182–3 Bernanke, Ben 77, 159, 162 Bernoulli, Daniel 229 bias in decision making 222–5 in financial decision making 225–32 Bitcoin currency 138 Black, Fischer 187 Blinder, Alan 215 Bloomsbury Group 94 Blunt, Anthony 94 boom and bust cycles see business cycles Bretton Woods agreement 95, 108–9 Brown, Gordon 3, 42 Burgess, Guy 94 Burns, Arthur F. 147 Bush, George H.W. 139 business cycles 57, 65 Hayek’s explanation 123–6 Samuelson’s oscillator model 174–5 Butler, Eamonn 162 Cambridge School of economics 74, 86 Cambridge spy ring 94 capital flow controls 113 capital-intensive goods, effects of increase in wages 33 capitalism exploitation of the working class (Marx) 56–8, 62–3 Index239 ‘fictitious capital’ concept (Marx) 62 seeds of its own downfall (Marx) 56–8, 61–3 capitalist production process (Marx) 54–6 Carlyle, Thomas 33 cartels evil of 10–11 regulation to prevent 21–2 central banks control of economic activity 161 over-expansion of credit 123–4 central state planning, Hayek’s opposition to 134–6, 140 certainty effect 229, 230 ceteris paribus approach to economic analysis 79–80 Chapman, Bruce 19 Chicago School of economic thought 146, 160, 194 China savings and investment imbalance with the US 113 trade imbalance with the US 45 choice architecture 234 Churchill, Winston 98 classical economics 40, 54 Coase, Ronald 73 cognitive biases (Kahneman) 222–5 communism 19, 50 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 52, 58–61 company bailouts in the financial crisis 162 comparative advantage 35–8, 183–4 complex adaptive systems, science of 138 complex financial products 61–2, 187 computer-games-based money 138 confirmation bias 227 consumer demand marginal rate of substitution 180 revealed preference theory 180–1 consumption smoothing concept 149, 163 Corn Laws, attack by Ricardo 33–5 costs of production, relationship to value 75–7 credit expansion, as a driver of boom and bust cycles 123–4 crime and punishment, views of Becker 207–10 Darling, Alistair 112 Das Kapital (Marx) 52, 53–4, 59–61, 62, 67–8 decision making biases and errors in financial decisions 225–32 heuristics and bias in 222–5 Prospect Theory (Kahneman) 228–32, 234 under risk 228–32 demand side economics 127 depression Keynesian interventionist view 92–3, 94, 105–6 see also Great Depression (1930s) dialectic style of analysis 52, 54 Diamond, Peter 179 diminishing marginal utility 82 discrimination economic perspective of Becker 196–7, 198–9 views of Friedman 157 distribution of economic value (Marx) 54–6 division of labour and productivity 11–14 car production 20–1 in daily life 20–1 divorce rates 205 drug addiction, views of Becker 210–12, 215 Dubner, Stephen 234 Eastern Europe, influence of Hayek 140 Ebenstein, Larry 158 Economics: An Introductory Analysis (Samuelson, 1948) 168, 171–3, 188–9 Economics of Discrimination (Becker, 1957) 196–7, 198–9 Efficient Market theory 111, 112, 187 240Index elasticity of demand 82–4 Elizabeth II, Queen 158 emerging markets, offshoring of jobs to 41 endogenous growth 202 endowment effect 232, 234 Engels, Friedrich 52, 58–61 ethical judgements in economics 182–3 European Central Bank 161 exchange rates, impact of trade on 185–6 expected utility theory (EUT) 228, 229–30, 232 externalities 85 factor price equalisation theorem 186–7 Fama, Eugene 160, 187 family decision making economic perspective 183, 203–6, 213–15 welfare decision making 183 fiat currency 152 ‘fictitious capital’ concept (Marx) 62 financial decision making, biases and errors in 225–32 financial economics, work of Samuelson 187 First World War 95 Folbre, Nancy 206 Ford Model-T car, assembly-line production system 21 Foundations of Economic Analysis (Samuelson, 1947) 168, 169–70 Fox, Charles James 23 Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner) 234 free-market mechanism of supply and demand 8–9 free market system view of Adam Smith 13–14, 16–18 view of Hayek 131–3 view of Friedman 155–7 free rider problem in public goods 177–8 Free to Choose (Friedman and Friedman, 1980) 158 free trade, influence of Adam Smith 22–3 Freeman, Richard 201 frictional unemployment 155 Friedman, David 156 Friedman, Milton (1912–2006) 94, 110, 145–64, 190–1, 196 advocate of the free market 155–7 belief in individualism 155–7 criticism of Keynesianism 149–50 early life and influences 147–8 economics in action 160–3 fiat currency 152 Free to Choose (1980 ) 158 influence of the Great Depression (1930s) 148 influence on modern economic theory 158–60 limited role of government in the economy 152, 155–7 long-term legacy 157–63 monetarism 151–2 monetarist rule 152 monetary policy 151–2 ‘natural’ rate of unemployment 153–5 new explanation for the Great Depression 150–1 Nobel Prize in economics (1976) 146, 147–8, 154, 161 non-accelerating inflation of unemployment (NAIRU) 153–5 permanent income hypothesis 148–50 role of money supply in the economy 151–2 verdict 163–4 Friedman, Rose (formerly Rose Director) 147, 148, 157, 158, 160 FTSE-listed plcs 86 Funk, Walter 108 Funk Plan 108 Galbraith, J.K. 159 gambler’s fallacy (misconception of chance) 224 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 40 Index241 general equilibrium theory 8 genetically modified foods 42 geographical effects in economics 84–6 Giffen goods 84 global financial crisis (2007–8) 92, 174 and Keynesianism 111–13 global stimulus package 113 Marxist view 61–3 global free trade influence of Adam Smith 22–3 influence of Ricardo 40–2 global public goods 177–8 global recession (2009) see Great Recession (2009) gold standard, criticism by Keynes 95, 98, 107 government debt and the Great Recession (2009) 43 taxpayer view of (Ricardo) 38–9 government role in the economy anti-central planning view of Hayek 134–6, 140 Keynesian view 92–3, 94, 105–6 view of Adam Smith 9, 10, 16–18 view of Friedman 152, 155–7 Great Crash (1929) 98, 99 Great Depression (1930s) 19, 22–3, 85, 92 explanation of Friedman and Schwartz 150–1 influence on Friedman 148 influence on Keynes 99–100 role of the Federal Reserve 159 Great Recession (2009) 23 and government debt 43 arguments against protectionism 42 austerity versus stimulus debate 43–4, 140–1 Greece, sovereign debt crisis 113–14 Greenspan, Alan 111–12, 235 Grossman, Michael 212 Hansen, Lars Peter 160 Hayek, Friedrich (1899–1992) 110, 111, 119–42 business cycle theory 123–6 clash with Keynes 120, 126–31 collapse of the Soviet Union 140 early life and influences 120 emphasis on individual freedom 134–6, 140 explanation for boom and bust cycles 123–6 First World War 121 focus on supply side economics 127 influence in Eastern Europe 140 influence on George H.W.


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Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

But what I think his analysis also makes clear is that the evolution of an alternative to capital would require as a necessary but not sufficient condition a radical reconfiguration of how exchange is organised and the ultimate dissolution of the power of money not only over social life but, as Keynes indicates, over our mental and moral conceptions of the world. Envisaging a moneyless economy is one way to get a measure of what an alternative to capitalism might look like. The possibility of this, given the potentialities of electronic moneys or even substitutes for money, may not be so far off. The rise of new forms of cybercurrency, such as Bitcoin, suggest that capital itself is now on the way to invent new monetary forms. It is opportune and wise, therefore, for the left to frame political ambitions and political thought around this ultimate objective. An alternative monetary politics of this sort becomes more imperative when we consider a particularly dangerous immediate problem.

The money form has acquired a good deal of autonomy over the last forty years. Fiat and fictitious values created by the world’s central banks have taken over. This leads us back to some reflections on the relation between the path of technological evolution we have here described and the evolution of monetary technologies. The rise of cyber moneys, like Bitcoin, in some instances seemingly constructed for purposes of money-laundering around illegal activities, is just the beginning of an inexorable descent of the monetary system into chaos. The political problem posed by the question of technology for anti-capitalist struggle is perhaps the most difficult to confront.

., Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, New York, Routledge, 2006 Index Numbers in italics indicate Figures. 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 271 A Abu Ghraib, Iraq 202 acid deposition 255, 256 advertising 50, 121, 140, 141, 187, 197, 236, 237, 275, 276 Aeschylus 291 Afghanistan 202, 290 Africa and global financial crisis 170 growth 232 indigenous population and property rights 39 labour 107, 108, 174 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 population growth 230 Agamben, Giorgio 283–4 agglomeration 149, 150 economies 149 aggregate demand 20, 80, 81, 104, 173 aggregate effective demand 235 agribusiness 95, 133, 136, 206, 247, 258 agriculture ix, 39, 61, 104, 113, 117, 148, 229, 239, 257–8, 261 Alabama 148 Algerian War (1954–62) 288, 290 alienation 57, 69, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 198, 213, 214, 215, 263, 266–70, 272, 275–6, 279–80, 281, 286, 287 Allende, Salvador 201 Althusser, Louis 286 Amazon 131, 132 Americas colonisation of 229 indigenous populations 283 Amnesty International 202 anti-capitalist movements 11, 14, 65, 110, 111, 162 anti-capitalist struggle 14, 110, 145, 193, 269, 294 anti-globalisation 125 anti-terrorism xiii apartheid 169, 202, 203 Apple 84, 123, 131 apprenticeships 117 Arab Spring movement 280 Arbenz, Jacobo 201 Argentina 59, 107, 152, 160, 232 Aristotelianism 283, 289 Aristotle 1, 4, 200, 215 arms races 93 arms traffickers 54 Arrighi, Giovanni 136 Adam Smith in Beijing 142 Arthur, Brian: The Nature of Technology 89, 95–9, 101–4, 110 artificial intelligence xii, 104, 108, 120, 139, 188, 208, 295 Asia ‘land grabs’ 58 urbanisation 254 assembly lines 119 asset values and the credit system 83 defined 240 devalued 257 housing market 19, 20, 21, 58, 133 and predatory lending 133 property 76 recovery of 234 speculation 83, 101, 179 associationism 281 AT&T 131 austerity xi, 84, 177, 191, 223 Australia 152 autodidacts 183 automation xii, 103, 105, 106, 108, 138, 208, 215, 295 B Babbage, Charles 119 Bangkok riots, Thailand (1968) x Bangladesh dismantlement of old ships 250 factories 129, 174, 292 industrialisation 123 labour 108, 123, 129 protests against unsafe labour conditions 280 textile mill tragedies 249 Bank of England 45, 46 banking bonuses 164 electronic 92, 100, 277 excessive charges 84 interbank lending 233 and monopoly power 143 national banks supplant local banking in Britain and France 158 net transfers between banks 28 power of bankers 75 private banks 233 profits 54 regional banks 158 shell games 54–5 systematic banking malfeasance 54, 61 Baran, Paul and Sweezy, Paul: Monopoly Capitalism 136 Barcelona 141, 160 barrios pobres ix barter 24, 25, 29 Battersea Power Station, London 255 Battle of Algiers, The (film) 288 Bavaria, Germany 143, 150 Becker, Gary 186 Bernanke, Ben 47 Bhutan 171 billionaires xi, 165, 169, 170 biodiversity 246, 254, 255, 260 biofuels 3 biomedical engineering xii Birmingham 149 Bitcoin 36, 109 Black Panthers 291 Blade Runner (film) 271 Blankfein, Lloyd 239–40 Bohr, Niels 70 Bolivia 257, 260, 284 bondholders xii, 32, 51, 152, 158, 223, 240, 244, 245 bonuses 54, 77, 164, 178 Bourdieu, Pierre 186, 187 bourgeois morality 195 bourgeois reformism 167, 211 ‘Brady Bonds’ 240 Braudel, Fernand 193 Braverman, Harry: Labor and Monopoly Capital 119 Brazil a BRIC country 170, 228 coffee growers 257 poverty grants 107 unrest in (2013) 171, 243, 293 Brecht, Bertolt 265, 293 Bretton Woods (1944) 46 brewing trade 138 BRIC countries 10, 170, 174, 228 Britain alliance between state and London merchant capitalists 44–5 banking 158 enclosure movement 58 lends to United States (nineteenth century) 153 suppression of Mau Mau 291 surpluses of capital and labour sent to colonies 152–3 welfare state 165 see also United Kingdom British Empire 115, 174 British Museum Library, London 4 British Petroleum (BP) 61, 128 Buffett, Peter 211–12, 245, 283, 285 Buffett, Warren 211 bureaucracy 121–2, 165, 203, 251 Bush, George, Jr 201, 202 C Cabet, Étienne 183 Cabral, Amilcar 291 cadastral mapping 41 Cadbury 18 Cairo uprising (2011) 99 Calhoun, Craig 178 California 29, 196, 254 Canada 152 Cape Canaveral, Florida 196 capital abolition of monopolisable skills 119–20 aim of 92, 96–7, 232 alternatives to 36, 69, 89, 162 annihilation of space through time 138, 147, 178 capital-labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9 and capitalism 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 centralisation of 135, 142 circulation of 5, 7, 8, 53, 63, 67, 73, 74, 75, 79, 88, 99, 147, 168, 172, 177, 234, 247, 251, 276 commodity 74, 81 control over labour 102–3, 116–17, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 creation of 57 cultural 186 destruction of 154, 196, 233–4 and division of labour 112 economic engine of 8, 10, 97, 168, 172, 200, 253, 265, 268 evolution of 54, 151, 171, 270 exploitation by 156, 195 fictitious 32–3, 34, 76, 101, 110–11, 239–42 fixed 75–8, 155, 234 importance of uneven geographical development to 161 inequality foundational for 171–2 investment in fixed capital 75 innovations 4 legal-illegal duality 72 limitless growth of 37 new form of 4, 14 parasitic forms of 245 power of xii, 36, 47 private capital accumulation 23 privatisation of 61 process-thing duality 70–78 profitability of 184, 191–2 purpose of 92 realisation of 88, 173, 192, 212, 231, 235, 242, 268, 273 relation to nature 246–63 reproduction of 4, 47, 55, 63, 64, 88, 97, 108, 130, 146, 161, 168, 171, 172, 180, 181, 182, 189, 194, 219, 233, 252 spatiality of 99 and surplus value 63 surpluses of 151, 152, 153 temporality of 99 tension between fixed and circulating capital 75–8, 88, 89 turnover time of 73, 99, 147 and wage rates 173 capital accumulation, exponential growth of 229 capital gains 85, 179 capital accumulation 7, 8, 75, 76, 78, 102, 149, 151–5, 159, 172, 173, 179, 192, 209, 223, 228–32, 238, 241, 243, 244, 247, 273, 274, 276 basic architecture for 88 and capital’s aim 92, 96 collapse of 106 compound rate of 228–9 and the credit system 83 and democratisation 43 and demographic growth 231 and household consumerism 192 and lack of aggregate effective demand in the market 81 and the land market 59 and Marx 5 maximising 98 models of 53 in a new territories 152–3 perpetual 92, 110, 146, 162, 233, 265 private 23 promotion of 34 and the property market 50 recent problems of 10 and the state 48 capitalism ailing 58 an alternative to 36 and capital 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 city landscape of 160 consumerist 197 contagious predatory lawlessness within 109 crises essential to its reproduction ix; defined 7 and demand-side management 85 and democracy 43 disaster 254–5, 255 economic engine of xiii, 7–8, 11, 110, 220, 221, 252, 279 evolution of 218 geographical landscape of 146, 159 global xi–xii, 108, 124 history of 7 ‘knowledge-based’ xii, 238 and money power 33 and a moneyless economy 36 neoliberal 266 political economy of xiv; and private property rights 41 and racialisation 8 reproduction of ix; revivified xi; vulture 162 capitalist markets 33, 53 capitalo-centric studies 10 car industry 121, 138, 148, 158, 188 carbon trading 235, 250 Caribbean migrants 115 Cartesian thinking 247 Cato Institute 143 Central America 136 central banks/bankers xi–xii, 37, 45, 46, 48, 51, 109, 142, 156, 161, 173, 233, 245 centralisation 135, 142, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 219 Césaire, Aimé 291 CFCs (chloro-fluorocarbons) 248, 254, 256, 259 chambers of commerce 168 Chandler, Alfred 141 Chaplin, Charlie 103 Charles I, King 199 Chartism 184 Chávez, Hugo 123, 201 cheating 57, 61, 63 Cheney, Dick 289 Chicago riots (1968) x chicanery 60, 72 children 174 exploitation of 195 raising 188, 190 trading of 26 violence and abuse of 193 Chile 136, 194, 280 coup of 1973 165, 201 China air quality 250, 258 becomes dynamic centre of a global capitalism 124 a BRIC country 170, 228 capital in (after 2000) 154 class struggles 233 and competition 150, 161 consumerism 194–5, 236 decentralisation 49 dirigiste governmentality 48 dismantlement of old ships 250 dispossessions in 58 education 184, 187 factories 123, 129, 174, 182 famine in 124–5 ‘great leap forward’ 125 growth of 170, 227, 232 income inequalities 169 industrialisation 232 Keynesian demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi; labour 80, 82, 107, 108, 123, 174, 230 life expectancy 259 personal debt 194 remittances 175 special economic zones 41, 144 speculative booms and bubbles in housing markets 21 suburbanisation 253 and technology 101 toxic batteries 249–50 unstable lurches forward 10 urban and infrastructural projects 151 urbanisation 232 Chinese Communist Party 108, 142 Church, the 185, 189, 199 circular cumulative causation 150 CitiBank 61 citizenship rights 168 civil rights 202, 205 class affluent classes 205 alliances 143, 149 class analysis xiii; conflict 85, 159 domination 91, 110 plutocratic capitalist xiii; power 55, 61, 88, 89, 92, 97, 99, 110, 134, 135, 221, 279 and race 166, 291 rule 91 structure 91 class struggle 34, 54, 67, 68, 85, 99, 103, 110, 116, 120, 135, 159, 172, 175, 183, 214, 233 climate change 4, 253–6, 259 Clinton, President Bill 176 Cloud Atlas (film) 271 CNN 285 coal 3, 255 coercion x, 41–4, 53, 60–63, 79, 95, 201, 286 Cold War 153, 165 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 78 Collins, Suzanne: The Hunger Games 264 Colombia 280 colonialism 257 the colonised 289–90 indigenous populations 39, 40 liberation from colonial rule 202 philanthropic 208, 285 colonisation 229, 262 ‘combinatorial evolution’ 96, 102, 104, 146, 147, 248 commercialisation 262, 263, 266 commodification 24, 55, 57, 59–63, 88, 115, 140, 141, 192, 193, 235, 243, 251, 253, 260, 262, 263, 273 commodities advertising 275 asking price 31 and barter 24 commodity exchange 39, 64 compared with products 25–6 defective or dangerous 72 definition 39 devaluation of 234 exchange value 15, 25 falling costs of 117 importance of workers as buyers 80–81 international trade in 256 labour power as a commodity 62 low-value 29 mobility of 147–8 obsolescence 236 single metric of value 24 unique 140–41 use value 15, 26, 35 commodity markets 49 ‘common capital of the class’ 142, 143 common wealth created by social labour 53 private appropriation of 53, 54, 55, 61, 88, 89 reproduction of 61 use values 53 commons collective management of 50 crucial 295 enclosure of 41, 235 natural 250 privatised 250 communications 99, 147, 148, 177 communism 196 collapse of (1989) xii, 165 communist parties 136 during Cold War 165 scientific 269 socialism/communism 91, 269 comparative advantage 122 competition and alienated workers 125 avoiding 31 between capitals 172 between energy and food production 3 decentralised 145 and deflationary crisis (1930s) 136 foreign 148, 155 geopolitical 219 inter-capitalist 110 international 154, 175 interstate 110 interterritorial 219 in labour market 116 and monopoly 131–45, 146, 218 and technology 92–3 and turnover time of capital 73, 99 and wages 135 competitive advantage 73, 93, 96, 112, 161 competitive market 131, 132 competitiveness 184 complementarity principle of 70 compounding growth 37, 49, 222, 227, 228, 233, 234, 235, 243, 244 perpetual 222–45, 296 computerisation 100, 120, 222 computers 92, 100, 105, 119 hardware 92, 101 organisational forms 92, 93, 99, 101 programming 120 software 92, 99, 101, 115, 116 conscience laundering 211, 245, 284, 286 Conscious Capitalism 284 constitutional rights 58 constitutionality 60, 61 constitutions progressive 284 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 US Constitution 284 and usurpation of power 45 consumerism 89, 106, 160, 192–5, 197, 198, 236, 274–7 containerisation 138, 148, 158 contracts 71, 72, 93, 207 contradictions Aristotelian conception of 4 between money and the social labour money represents 83 between reality and appearance 4–6 between use and exchange value 83 of capital and capitalism 68 contagious intensification of 14 creative use of 3 dialectical conception of 4 differing reactions to 2–3 and general crises 14 and innovation 3 moved around rather than resolved 3–4 multiple 33, 42 resolution of 3, 4 two modes of usage 1–2 unstable 89 Controller of the Currency 120 corporations and common wealth 54 corporate management 98–9 power of 57–8, 136 and private property 39–40 ‘visible hand’ 141–2 corruption 53, 197, 266 cosmopolitanism 285 cost of living 164, 175 credit cards 67, 133, 277 credit card companies 54, 84, 278 credit financing 152 credit system 83, 92, 101, 111, 239 crises changes in mental conceptions of the world ix-x; crisis of capital 4 defined 4 essential to the reproduction of capitalism ix; general crisis ensuing from contagions 14 housing markets crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22 reconfiguration of physical landscapes ix; slow resolution of x; sovereign debt crisis (after 2012) 37 currency markets, turbulence of (late 1960s) x customary rights 41, 59, 198 D Davos conferences 169 DDT 259 Debord, Guy: The Society of the Spectacle 236 debt creation 236 debt encumbrancy 212 debt peonage 62, 212 decentralisation 49, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 219, 281, 295 Declaration of Independence (US) 284 decolonisation 282, 288, 290 decommodification 85 deindustrialisation xii, 77–8, 98, 110, 148, 153, 159, 234 DeLong, Bradford 228 demand management 81, 82, 106, 176 demand-side management 85 democracy 47, 215 bourgeois 43, 49 governance within capitalism 43 social 190 totalitarian 220, 292 democratic governance 220, 266 democratisation 43 Deng Xiaoping x depressions 49, 227 1930s x, 108, 136, 169, 227, 232, 234 Descartes, René 247 Detroit 77, 136, 138, 148, 150, 152, 155, 159, 160 devaluation 153, 155, 162 of capital 233 of commodities 234 crises 150–51, 152, 154 localised 154 regional 154 developing countries 16, 240 Dhaka, Bangladesh 77 dialectics 70 Dickens, Charles 126, 169 Bleak House 226 Dombey and Son 184 digital revolution 144 disabled, the 202 see also handicapped discrimination 7, 8, 68, 116, 297 diseases 10, 211, 246, 254, 260 disempowerment 81, 103, 116, 119, 198, 270 disinvestment 78 Disneyfication 276 dispossession accumulation by 60, 67, 68, 84, 101, 111, 133, 141, 212 and capital 54, 55, 57 economies of 162 of indigenous populations 40, 59, 207 ‘land grabs’ 58 of land rights of the Irish 40 of the marginalised 198 political economy of 58 distributional equality 172 distributional shares 164–5, 166 division of labour 24, 71, 112–30, 154, 184, 268, 270 and Adam Smith 98, 118 defined 112 ‘the detail division of labour’ 118, 121 distinctions and oppositions 113–14 evolution of 112, 120, 121, 126 and gender 114–15 increasing complexity of 124, 125, 126 industrial proletariat 114 and innovation 96 ‘new international division of labour’ 122–3 organisation of 98 proliferating 121 relation between the parts and the whole 112 social 113, 118, 121, 125 technical 113, 295 uneven geographical developments in 130 dot-com bubble (1990s) 222–3, 241 ‘double coincidence of wants and needs’ 24 drugs 32, 193, 248 cartels 54 Durkheim, Emile 122, 125 Dust Bowl (United States, 1930s) 257 dynamism 92, 104, 146, 219 dystopia 229, 232, 264 E Eagleton , Terry: Why Marx Was Right 1, 21, 200, 214–15 East Asia crisis of 1997–98 154 dirigiste governmentality 48 education 184 rise of 170 Eastern Europe 115, 230 ecological offsets 250 economic rationality 211, 250, 252, 273, 274, 275, 277, 278, 279 economies 48 advanced capitalist 228, 236 agglomeration 149 of dispossession 162 domination of industrial cartels and finance capital 135 household 192 informal 175 knowledge-based 188 mature 227–8 regional 149 reoriented to demand-side management 85 of scale 75 solidarity 66, 180 stagnant xii ecosystems 207, 247, 248, 251–6, 258, 261, 263, 296 Ecuador 46, 152, 284 education 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 127–8, 129, 134, 150, 156, 168, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 223, 235, 296 efficiency 71, 92, 93, 98, 103, 117, 118, 119, 122, 126, 272, 273, 284 efficient market hypothesis 118 Egypt 107, 280, 293 Ehrlich, Paul 246 electronics 120, 121, 129, 236, 292 emerging markets 170–71, 242 employment 37 capital in command of job creation 172, 174 conditions of 128 full-time 274 opportunities for xii, 108, 168 regional crises of 151 of women 108, 114, 115, 127 see also labour enclosure movement 58 Engels, Friedrich 70 The Condition of the English Working Class in England 292 English Civil War (1642–9) 199 Enlightenment 247 Enron 133, 241 environmental damage 49, 61, 110, 111, 113, 232, 249–50, 255, 257, 258, 259, 265, 286, 293 environmental movement 249, 252 environmentalism 249, 252–3 Epicurus 283 equal rights 64 Erasmus, Desiderius 283 ethnic hatreds and discriminations 8, 165 ethnic minorities 168 ethnicisation 62 ethnicity 7, 68, 116 euro, the 15, 37, 46 Europe deindustrialisation in 234 economic development in 10 fascist parties 280 low population growth rate 230 social democratic era 18 unemployment 108 women in labour force 230 European Central Bank 37, 46, 51 European Commission 51 European Union (EU) 95, 159 exchange values commodities 15, 25, 64 dominance of 266 and housing 14–23, 43 and money 28, 35, 38 uniform and qualitatively identical 15 and use values 15, 35, 42, 44, 50, 60, 65, 88 exclusionary permanent ownership rights 39 experts 122 exploitation 49, 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 124, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 159, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 193, 195, 208, 246, 257 exponential growth 224, 240, 254 capacity for 230 of capital 246 of capital accumulation 223, 229 of capitalist activity 253 and capital’s ecosystem 255 in computer power 105 and environmental resources 260 in human affairs 229 and innovations in finance and banking 100 potential dangers of 222, 223 of sophisticated technologies 100 expropriation 207 externality effects 43–4 Exxon 128 F Facebook 236, 278, 279 factories ix, 123, 129, 160, 174, 182, 247, 292 Factory Act (1864) 127, 183 famine 124–5, 229, 246 Fannie Mae 50 Fanon, Frantz 287 The Wretched of the Earth 288–90, 293 fascist parties 280 favelas ix, 16, 84, 175 feminisation 115 feminists 189, 192, 283 fertilisers 255 fetishes, fetishism 4–7, 31, 36–7, 61, 103, 111, 179, 198, 243, 245, 269, 278 feudalism 41 financial markets 60, 133 financialisation 238 FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sections 113 fishing 59, 113, 148, 249, 250 fixity and motion 75–8, 88, 89, 146, 155 Food and Drug Administration 120 food production/supply 3, 229, 246, 248, 252 security 253, 294, 296 stamp aid 206, 292 Ford, Martin 104–8, 111, 273 foreclosure 21, 22, 24, 54, 58, 241, 268 forestry 113, 148, 257 fossil fuels 3–4 Foucault, Michel xiii, 204, 209, 280–81 Fourier, François Marie Charles 183 Fourierists 18 Fourteen Points 201 France banking 158 dirigiste governmentality under de Gaulle 48 and European Central Bank 46 fascist parties 280 Francis, Pope 293 Apostolic Exhortation 275–6 Frankfurt School 261 Freddie Mac 50 free trade 138, 157 freedom 47, 48, 142, 143, 218, 219, 220, 265, 267–270, 276, 279–82, 285, 288, 296 and centralised power 142 cultural 168 freedom and domination 199–215, 219, 268, 285 and the good life 215 and money creation 51 popular desire for 43 religious 168 and state finances 48 under the rule of capital 64 see also liberty and freedom freedom of movement 47, 296 freedom of thought 200 freedom of the press 213 French Revolution 203, 213, 284 G G7 159 G20 159 Gallup survey of work 271–2 Gandhi, Mahatma 284, 291 Gaulle, Charles de 48 gay rights 166 GDP 194, 195, 223 Gehry, Frank 141 gender discriminations 7, 8, 68, 165 gene sequences 60 General Motors xii genetic engineering xii, 101, 247 genetic materials 235, 241, 251, 261 genetically modified foods 101 genocide 8 gentrification 19, 84, 141, 276 geocentric model 5 geographical landscape building a new 151, 155 of capitalism 159 evolution of 146–7 instability of 146 soulless, rationalised 157 geopolitical struggles 8, 154 Germany and austerity 223 autobahns built 151 and European Central Bank 46 inflation during 1920s 30 wage repression 158–9 Gesell, Silvio 35 Ghana 291 global economic crisis (2007–9) 22, 23, 47, 118, 124, 132, 151, 170, 228, 232, 234, 235, 241 global financialisation x, 177–8 global warming 260 globalisation 136, 174, 176, 179, 223, 293 gold 27–31, 33, 37, 57, 227, 233, 238, 240 Golden Dawn 280 Goldman Sachs 75, 239 Google 131, 136, 195, 279 Gordon, Robert 222, 223, 230, 239, 304n2 Gore, Al 249 Gorz, André 104–5, 107, 242, 270–77, 279 government 60 democratic 48 planning 48 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 spending power 48 governmentality 43, 48, 157, 209, 280–81, 285 Gramsci, Antonio 286, 293 Greco, Thomas 48–9 Greece 160, 161, 162, 171, 235 austerity 223 degradation of the well-being of the masses xi; fascist parties 280 the power of the bondholders 51, 152 greenwashing 249 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba 202, 284 Guatemala 201 Guevara, Che 291 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 141 guild system 117 Guinea-Bissau 291 Gulf Oil Spill (2010) 61 H Habermas, Jürgen 192 habitat 246, 249, 252, 253, 255 handicapped, the 218 see also disabled Harvey, David The Enigma of Capital 265 Rebel Cities 282 Hayek, Friedrich 42 Road to Serfdom 206 health care 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 134, 156, 167, 189, 190, 235, 296 hedge funds 101, 162, 239, 241, 249 managers 164, 178 Heidegger, Martin 59, 250 Heritage Foundation 143 heterotopic spaces 219 Hill, Christopher 199 Ho Chi Minh 291 holocausts 8 homelessness 58 Hong Kong 150, 160 housing 156, 296 asset values 19, 20, 21, 58 ‘built to order’ 17 construction 67 controlling externalities 19–20 exchange values 14–23, 43 gated communities ix, 160, 208, 264 high costs 84 home ownership 49–50 investing in improvements 20, 43 mortgages 19, 21, 28, 50, 67, 82 predatory practices 67, 133 production costs 17 rental markets 22 renting or leasing 18–19, 67 self-built 84 self-help 16, 160 slum ix, 16, 175 social 18, 235 speculating in exchange value 20–22 speculative builds 17, 28, 78, 82 tenement 17, 160 terraced 17 tract ix, 17, 82 use values 14–19, 21–2, 23, 67 housing markets 18, 19, 21, 22, 28, 32, 49, 58, 60, 67, 68, 77, 83, 133, 192 crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22, 82–3 HSBC 61 Hudson, Michael 222 human capital theory 185, 186 human evolution 229–30 human nature 97, 198, 213, 261, 262, 263 revolt of 263, 264–81 human rights 40, 200, 202 humanism 269 capitalist 212 defined 283 education 128 excesses and dark side 283 and freedom 200, 208, 210 liberal 210, 287, 289 Marxist 284, 286 religious 283 Renaissance 283 revolutionary 212, 221, 282–93 secular 283, 285–6 types of 284 Hungary: fascist parties 280 Husserl, Edmund 192 Huygens, Christiaan 70 I IBM 128 Iceland: banking 55 identity politics xiii illegal aliens (‘sans-papiers’) 156 illegality 61, 72 immigrants, housing 160 imperialism 135, 136, 143, 201, 257, 258 income bourgeois disposable 235 disparities of 164–81 levelling up of 171 redistribution to the lower classes xi; see also wages indebtedness 152, 194, 222 India billionaires in 170 a BRIC country 170, 228 call centres 139 consumerism 236 dismantlement of old ships 250 labour 107, 230 ‘land grabs’ 77 moneylenders 210 social reproduction in 194 software engineers 196 special economic zones 144 unstable lurches forward 10 indigenous populations 193, 202, 257, 283 dispossession of 40, 59, 207 and exclusionary ownership rights 39 individualism 42, 197, 214, 281 Indonesia 129, 160 industrial cartels 135 Industrial Revolution 127 industrialisation 123, 189, 229, 232 inflation 30, 36, 37, 40, 49, 136, 228, 233 inheritance 40 Inner Asia, labour in 108 innovation 132 centres of 96 and the class struggle 103 competitive 219 as a double-edged sword xii; improving the qualities of daily life 4 labour-saving 104, 106, 107, 108 logistical 147 organisational 147 political 219 product 93 technological 94–5, 105, 147, 219 as a way out of a contradiction 3 insurance companies 278 intellectual property rights xii, 41, 123, 133, 139, 187, 207, 235, 241–2, 251 interest compound 5, 222, 224, 225, 226–7 interest-rate manipulations 54 interest rates 54, 186 living off 179, 186 on loans 17 money capital 28, 32 and mortgages 19, 67 on repayment of loans to the state 32 simple 225, 227 usury 49 Internal Revenue Service income tax returns 164 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 49, 51, 100, 143, 161, 169, 186, 234, 240 internet 158, 220, 278 investment: in fixed capital 75 investment pension funds 35–6 IOUs 30 Iran 232, 289 Iranian Revolution 289 Iraq war 201, 290 Ireland dispossession of land rights 40 housing market crash (2007–9) 82–3 Istanbul 141 uprising (2013) 99, 129, 171, 243 Italy 51,161, 223, 235 ITT 136 J Jacobs, Jane 96 James, C.L.R. 291 Japan 1980s economic boom 18 capital in (1980s) 154 economic development in 10 factories 123 growth rate 227 land market crash (1990) 18 low population growth rate 230 and Marshall Plan 153 post-war recovery 161 Jewish Question 213 JPMorgan 61 Judaeo-Christian tradition 283 K Kant, Immanuel 285 Katz, Cindi 189, 195, 197 Kenya 291 Kerala, India 171 Keynes, John Maynard xi, 46, 76, 244, 266 ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ 33–4 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money 35 Keynesianism demand management 82, 105, 176 demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi King, Martin Luther 284, 291 knowledge xii, 26, 41, 95, 96, 100, 105, 113, 122, 123, 127, 144, 184, 188, 196, 238, 242, 295 Koch brothers 292 Kohl, Helmut x L labour agitating and fighting for more 64 alienated workers 125, 126, 128, 129, 130 artisan 117, 182–3 and automation 105 capital/labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9, 146 collective 117 commodification of 57 contracts 71, 72 control over 74, 102–11, 119, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 deskilling 111, 119 discipline 65, 79 disempowering workers 81, 103, 116, 119, 270 division of see division of labour; domestic 196 education 127–8, 129, 183, 187 exploitation of 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 195 factory 122, 123, 237 fair market value 63, 64 Gallup survey 271–2 house building 17 housework 114–15, 192 huge increase in the global wage labour force 107–8 importance of workers as buyers of commodities 80–81 ‘industrial reserve army’ 79–80, 173–4 migrations of 118 non-unionised xii; power of 61–4, 71, 73, 74, 79, 81, 88, 99, 108, 118–19, 127, 173, 175, 183, 189, 207, 233, 267 privatisation of 61 in service 117 skills 116, 118–19, 123, 149, 182–3, 185, 231 social see social labour; surplus 151, 152, 173–4, 175, 195, 233 symbolic 123 and trade unions 116 trading in labour services 62–3 unalienated 66, 89 unionised xii; unpaid 189 unskilled 114, 185 women in workforce see under women; worked to exhaustion or death 61, 182 see also employment labour markets 47, 62, 64, 66–9, 71, 102, 114, 116, 118, 166 labour-saving devices 104, 106, 107, 173, 174, 277 labour power commodification of 61, 88 exploitation of 62, 175 generation of surplus value 63 mobility of 99 monetisation of 61 private property character of 64 privatisation of 61 reserves of 108 Lagos, Nigeria, social reproduction in 195 laissez-faire 118, 205, 207, 281 land commodification 260–61 concept of 76–7 division of 59 and enclosure movement 58 establishing as private property 41 exhausting its fertility 61 privatisation 59, 61 scarcity 77 urban 251 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 land market 18, 59 land price 17 land registry 41 land rents 78, 85 land rights 40, 93 land-use zoning 43 landlords 54, 67, 83, 140, 179, 251, 261 Latin America ’1and grabs’ 58, 77 labour 107 reductions in social inequality 171 two ‘lost decades’ of development 234 lawyers 22, 26, 67, 82, 245 leasing 16, 17, 18 Lebed, Jonathan 195 Lee Kuan-Yew 48 Leeds 149 Lefebvre, Henri 157, 192 Critique of Everyday Life 197–8 left, the defence of jobs and skills under threat 110 and the factory worker 68 incapable of mounting opposition to the power of capital xii; remains of the radical left xii–xiii Lehman Brothers investment bank, fall of (2008) x–xi, 47, 241 ‘leisure’ industries 115 Lenin, Vladimir 135 Leninism 91 Lewis, Michael: The Big Short 20–21 LGBT groups 168, 202, 218 liberation struggle 288, 290 liberty, liberties 44, 48–51, 142, 143, 212, 276, 284, 289 and bourgeois democracy 49 and centralised power 142 and money creation 51 non-coercive individual liberty 42 popular desire for 43 and state finances 48 liberty and freedom 199–215 coercion and violence in pursuit of 201 government surveillance and cracking of encrypted codes 201–2 human rights abuses 202 popular desire for 203 rhetoric on 200–201, 202 life expectancy 250, 258, 259 light, corpuscular theory of 70 living standards xii, 63, 64, 84, 89, 134, 175, 230 loans fictitious capital 32 housing 19 interest on 17 Locke, John 40, 201, 204 logos 31 London smog of 1952 255 unrest in (2011) 243 Los Angeles 150, 292 Louis XIV, King of France 245 Lovelace, Richard 199, 200, 203 Luddites 101 M McCarthyite scourge 56 MacKinnon, Catherine: Are Women Human?


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

According to Mises, a citizen must have economic freedom in order to be politically and morally free. Ulbricht wrote on his LinkedIn page that he wanted to “use [Mises’s] economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind.” With the arrival in 2009 of the anonymous currency Bitcoin, all the pieces were in place to unite Dread Pirate Roberts’s three obsessions: libertarian economics, the Dark Web, and drugs. He built Silk Road in two months and went live in January of 2011 with his own home-cultivated psilocybin mushrooms as a starter product. Within months he had sellers of heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine as well as prescription opioids doing business on the site.

Alford was pretty sure he had the proprietor of Silk Road, but it took him more than three months to convince the FBI that this was their man. Two months after Ross Ulbricht was arrested, the notorious cyberanarchist Cody Wilson, inventor of the world’s first 3-D-printed handgun, stood onstage in London at the MIT Bitcoin Expo and castigated his colleagues: “Ross Ulbricht is alleged to be the founder and operator of Silk Road, the glittering jewel of all things libertarian, black market, and wonderful. And it’s a severe indictment of the modern libertarian conscience that he can’t get any support at all.” Perhaps that’s because Ulbricht used Silk Road to purchase the services of hit men to take out his rivals, who were threatening to assume control of Silk Road.


pages: 213 words: 70,742

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

Reluctant to enrich Davidson or the Rees-Mogg estate any further, I bought a used edition online, the musty pages of which were here and there smeared with the desiccated snot of whatever nose-picking libertarian had preceded me. It presented a bleak vista of a post-democratic future. Amid a thicket of analogies to the medieval collapse of feudal power structures, the book also managed, a decade before the invention of Bitcoin, to make some impressively accurate predictions about the advent of online economies and cryptocurrencies. Its four-hundred-odd pages of near-hysterical orotundity can roughly be broken down into the following sequence of propositions: 1) The democratic nation-state basically operates like a criminal cartel, forcing honest citizens to surrender large portions of their wealth to pay for stuff like roads and hospitals and schools. 2) The rise of the Internet, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, will make it impossible for governments to intervene in private transactions and to tax incomes, thereby liberating individuals from the political protection racket of democracy. 3) The state will consequently become obsolete as a political entity. 4) Out of this wreckage will emerge a new global dispensation, in which a “cognitive elite” will rise to power and influence, as a class of sovereign individuals “commanding vastly greater resources” who will no longer be subject to the power of nation-states and will redesign governments to suit their ends.

as he put it, in what I assumed was a purely rhetorical formulation.) He told us of one wealthy American of his acquaintance, “pretty left-of-center,” who had bought land down here to allay his apocalyptic fears in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election. Another couple he knew of, a pair of Bitcoin billionaires, had bought a large lakeside estate on which they were constructing a gigantic bunker. This was the first I’d heard since coming here of an actual bunker being built. From the point of view of the modern apocalypticist, the whole appeal of the country—its remoteness and stability, its abundant clean water, its vast and lovely reaches of unpeopled land—seemed to be that it was itself a kind of reinforced geopolitical shelter, way down there at the bottom of the world.


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

THE COLOSSUS IS A BFG NICHOLAS HUMPHREY Emeritus professor of psychology, London School of Economics; visiting professor of philosophy, New College of the Humanities; senior member, Darwin College, University of Cambridge; author, Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness A penny for your thoughts? You may not choose to answer, but the point is that as a conscious agent, you can. That’s what it means to have introspective access. You know—and can tell us—what’s on stage in the theater of your mind. Then how about machines? A bitcoin for the thinking machine’s thoughts? But no one has yet designed a machine to have that kind of access. Wittgenstein remarked that if a lion could speak, we wouldn’t understand him. If a machine could speak, it wouldn’t have anything to say. What do I think about machines that think? Simple. I don’t think there are, as yet, any such machines.

They change over time based on what they “learn” from examples. (While it remains linguistically controversial whether machines think, the vernacular has accepted the usage “machines learn.”) Adaptability is useful. We want, say, our automated spelling-correction programs to learn new terms, such as “bitcoin,” without waiting for a new dictionary edition to list them. But sometimes an adaptable program can be nudged, example by example, to the point where its responses are inaccurate. Just as bridge designers must deal with crosswinds, so the designers of AI systems must deal with these issues. Some critics worry that many AI systems are built with a framework that maximizes expected utility.

WHEN THINKING MACHINES BREAK THE LAW BRUCE SCHNEIER Security technologist; fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School; chief technical officer, Co3 Systems, Inc.; author, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World Last year, two Swiss artists programmed a Random Botnot Shopper, which every week would spend $100 in bitcoin to buy a random item from an anonymous Internet black market—all for an art project on display in Switzerland. It was a clever concept, except there was a problem. Most of the stuff the bot purchased was benign—fake Diesel jeans, a baseball cap with a hidden camera, a stash can, a pair of Nike trainers—but it also purchased ten ecstasy tablets and a fake Hungarian passport.


pages: 587 words: 117,894

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know by P. W. Singer, Allan Friedman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, air gap, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business continuity plan, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, do-ocracy, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, global supply chain, Google Earth, information security, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, M-Pesa, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, packet switching, Peace of Westphalia, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, Twitter Arab Spring, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day, zero-sum game

Alertpay, on the other hand, was repeatedly warned by its acquiring banks for dealing with online scams and child pornography sites before being shut down in 2011. To evade the growing security and control of the payment networks, some bad actors turn to digital currencies. These are alternate currencies that can be traded just like other forms of money, provided that you can find someone in the online world to accept them. Examples range from Bitcoin to the Linden Dollar used in the online world Second Life. Proponents of these currencies often make the argument that they are more efficient ways to trade in a virtual world that doesn’t have clear national boundaries. Especially compared to developing world currencies, they can be more stable than government-backed money, as well as offer the more than 2.5 billion people in the world who don’t have access to traditional banks a way to connect and trade.

Data encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted with the private key, and vice versa. This allows secure communications without a shared secret. Autonomous System (AS): An independent network serving as a node in the interconnected Internet. Traffic between ASs is governed by the Internet protocols and routing policies. Bitcoin: A popular digital currency, first developed in 2008, that offers significant anonymity and requires no centralization or coordinated control. botnet: A network of “zombie” computers controlled by a single actor. Botnets are a common tool for malicious activity on the Internet, such as denial-of-service attacks and spam, since they provide free (stolen) computation and network resources while hiding the identity of the controller.

See cryptography Automated Teller Machine (ATM), 32, 85, 244 Autonomous System (AS), 24–25 Axelrod, Robert, 182, 193 Baker, Stewart, 215 Barlow, John, 84, 181 Baruch Plan, 160, 162 Bataller, Erik, 226 Beijing Olympics, 75, 92 Bellovin, Steve, 166, 169 Bernard, Baruch. See Baruch Plan Biden, Joe, 195 Big Data, 250 Bin Laden, Osama, 101–102, 105 biometric, 32, 244 Bitcoin. See digital currency black market (digital), 73, 90, 98, 109, 158, 178. See also Silk Road blue-team. See red-team Botnets and attribution, 72–73 combating against, 176, 187, 208 definition of, 44–45 Braithwaite, Bill, 231 Brammer, Robert, 240 Brenner, Joel, 121, 234 Britain, 83–84, 105, 181 Brookings Institution, 21–23, 57, 249–250 Brown, Brittany, 102 Bucci, Steven, 242 Bush, George W., 15, 199 Byzantine Hades, 75 Cartwright, James, 156 cats, 10, 21, 38, 174, 193, 219, 252, 254 cell phone.


pages: 457 words: 126,996

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman

1960s counterculture, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, Debian, digital rights, disinformation, do-ocracy, East Village, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, false flag, feminist movement, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Santayana, Hacker News, hive mind, impulse control, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, lolcat, low cost airline, mandatory minimum, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pirate software, power law, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, TED Talk, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, zero day

Thankfully, he reigned in my imagination and clarified: “The IRC channel—we had a channel called #kittencore, and another called #upperdeck. The only difference is that #upperdeck had all the same people in #kittencore but one less.” I asked why they kept one person in the dark. He replied, “Because he came very late into it and we became reluctant to have him in the center and also because he came just as we were splitting the bitcoins.” “Micro-micro-politics and cabals nested within cabals,” I replied. It is precisely this mixture of concreteness and abundance—one channel, exactly the same as the other, minus one person, since he is too new and not yet trustworthy—which makes Anonymous both so difficult to describe and so resistant to being slotted into a pre-fabricated mental template.

But no Anonymous or LulzSec hacker has ever admitted or been charged for this crime (and five of them, along with two associates, have been found guilty of scores of hacking crimes that involved their hard drives being trucked away for forensic analysis). The PSN hack, a mystery in 2011, is still unsolved today. “Laundering money, funneling bitcoins, PPI scaming, botnets, database dumping” The drama that surrounded OpSony’s fouling of the PlayStation Network provided the immediate context for LulzSec’s germination. In mid-April, a few of the hackers on #internetfeds managed to weasel their way into fox.com and steal a sales database. Alongside personal information on Fox employees and journalists, it included over seventy thousand email addresses and passwords for people who had signed up to receive updates about auditions for Fox’s forthcoming TV talent show, The X Factor.

twitter.com/LulsSec tflow: perfect Falcon: though that’s @LulzSec Falcon: shit son I wrote that off the top of my head in 2 minutes, BRB getting a cookie Topiary and Sabu offered prescient predictions: Sabu: oh man lol Sabu: this is going to be fun Falcon: LulzSec at its finest Falcon: laundering money, funneling bitcoins, PPI scaming, botnets, database dumping Falcon: the lulz they do go on All that hype, however, was for naught. The first dump yielded little in the way of media response. LulzSec was still totally unknown; it was Friday after all, a terrible day to release something new to the media. But AnonOps was going through serious drama, and these hackers, secure in their newfound identity as LulzSec, could turn to the juicy gossip about an AnonOps operator named Ryan Cleary, who had recently gone rogue.


pages: 578 words: 131,346

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbnb, Anton Chekhov, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Broken windows theory, call centre, data science, David Graeber, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Easter island, experimental subject, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Garrett Hardin, Hans Rosling, invention of writing, invisible hand, knowledge economy, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nocebo, placebo effect, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey

Implications for Cumulative Culture’. 30Graeber and Wengrow, ‘How to Change the Course of Human History (at Least, the Part That’s Already Happened)’. 31Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 149. 32David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules. On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn and London, 2015), pp. 31–3. 33This is why serious economists were able to predict early on that the myth we call ‘Bitcoin’ was doomed to fail while the dollar will prevail for many more decades. The dollar is backed by the world’s most powerful army, whereas the Bitcoin is backed only by belief. 34Harari, Sapiens, p. 153. 35Quoted in Noam Chomsky, ‘What is the Common Good?’, Truthout (7 January 2014). 36Just how effective shaming can be was recently proved yet again by the #MeToo movement.

., here Bahn, Paul, here, here bananas, here ‘barbarians’, here Bataclan massacre, here Battle of the Somme, here Baumeister, Roy, here BBC Prison Study, here, here, here Beethoven, Ludwig van, here behavioural disorders, here behaviourism, here Belyaev, Dmitri, here, here Bentham, Jeremy, here Berkowitz, Roger, here Berlin Wall, fall of, here, here Berners-Lee, Tim, here Bertsch, Leann, here bestiality, here bin Laden, Osama, here binge drinking, here Bird Mound, here Birdman Cult, here Bismarck, Otto von, here Bitcoin, here Blackett, Patrick, here Bletchley Park, here Blitz, the, here, here, here Bloom, Paul, here blushing, here, here, here, here, here Boer Wars, here Boersema, Jan, here, here, here, here bonobos, here, here Book of Genesis, here Book of Samuel, here Bornem, Coca-Cola Incident, here Bosch, Reinier, here, here Boston Marathon bombing, here, here Bowman, Steve, here brain areas, here brain damage, here brain size, here, here, here, here Bratton, William, here Breivik, Anders, here Brexit, here, here Brown, Jack, here Buddha, here bullying, here Burke, Edmund, here Buss, David, here Buurtzorg, here, here, here, here, here, here bystander effect, here Calvin, John, here canaries, here cannibalism, here, here, here, here, here, here capitalism, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and incentives, here, here cargo cults, here Carib people, here Carlin, John, here Cattivelli, Walter, here cave paintings, here, here Chagnon, Napoleon, here, here Charles V, Emperor, here Chávez, Hugo, here Chávez, Julio, here Chekhov, Anton, here Chernoweth, Erica, here chimpanzees, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Christmas truce (1914), here, here Churchill, Winston, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Cicero, here Cleary, Raoul, here climate change, here, here Clinton, Bill, here Code of Hammurabi, here coinage, here Cold War, here collective work events, here Collins, Randall, here Colombia, and FARC insurgency, here, here, here Columbus, Christopher, here, here commons, the, here, here communism, here, here, here, here, here, here and evolutionary theory, here, here and incentives, here, here from Latin communis, here Confucius, here conquistadors, here, here Cook, James, here Cookie Monster study, here Crécy, Battle of, here Crick, Francis, here crime, here broken windows theory, here, here, here see also prisons; terrorists Crimean War, here crocodiles, here, here Curtis, Richard, here Daily Mail, here, here Dams, John, here Darley, John, here, here Dart, Raymond, here, here, here Darwin, Charles, here, here, here, here Dawkins, Richard, here, here, here, here de Blok, Jos, here, here, here, here, here de Klerk, Frederik Willem, here De May, Joseph, here de Moor, Tine, here de Queirós, Pedro Fernandes, here de Tocqueville, Alexis, here de Waal, Frans, here, here, here Deci, Edward, here, here demand characteristics, here democracy, here Alaska, here Leicester East, here Porto Allegre, here, here, here Torres, here, here Vallejo, California, here see also commons, the; participatory budgeting depression, here Diamond, Jared, here, here, here, here, here, here Diaz, Julio, here, here Diderot, Denis, here dogs, here Dresden bombing, here drones, here Drummen, Sjef, here, here, here, here, here, here Du Bois, W.


pages: 257 words: 77,612

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime by Bradley Hope

Airbnb, battle of ideas, bitcoin, blockchain, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital map, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, operational security, Potemkin village, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

At times, he struck listeners as a lawyer making a moral case for a client’s actions; the twist was the client hadn’t committed the acts yet. In practical terms, Adrian also laid out core tenets of the group, including secrecy and compartmentalization. After this meeting, efforts would be segmented into groups with only those who “need to know” given all the details. Different groups also worked on problems like how to set up a Bitcoin wallet for donations to the group, anti-regime propaganda efforts, and secrecy protocols for the group. Everyone was to use disappearing messages on apps like Signal to communicate. They’d hold conference calls using a piece of software called Silent Circle. Afterward, Adrian led the whole group to Dallas BBQ, a discount barbecue restaurant popular with thrifty twentysomethings in Manhattan who wanted to eat and drink to their heart’s content.

North Korea’s interest in alternative forms of money is not surprising. Severely sanctioned and barred from the global financial system, North Korea found the idea of using cryptocurrencies to trade with the world distinctly appealing. North Korean state hackers had for years been extorting people out of their cryptocurrency and stolen Bitcoin through computer intrusion techniques. U.S. prosecutors later charged Virgil Griffith, a cryptocurrency designer and one of the attendees of the cryptocurrency conference, with violating U.S. sanctions. After initially trying to fight the charges, he agreed to plead guilty in September 2021 and was awaiting sentencing at the time of the writing of this book.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

“It would make the Web a very different place. It might be really enabling. Certainly the ability to pay for a good article or song could support more people who write things or make music.”52 Andreessen said he hoped that Bitcoin,42 a digital currency and peer-to-peer payment system created in 2009, might turn out to be a model for better payment systems. “If I had a time machine and could go back to 1993, one thing I’d do for sure would be to build in Bitcoin or some similar form of cryptocurrency.”53 We at Time Inc. and other media companies made one other mistake, I think: we abandoned our focus on creating community after we settled into the Web in the mid-1990s.

., ref1 Lovelace’s business plan for, ref1 Lovelace’s views on potential of, ref1 Menabrea’s notes on, ref1 punch cards and, ref1, ref2 as reprogrammable, ref1 Analytical Society, ref1 “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, The” (Brin and Page), ref1 Anderson, Sean, ref1 Andreessen, Marc, ref1, ref2, ref3 Android, ref1 A-O system, ref1 Apollo Guide Computer, ref1 Apollo program, ref1, ref2, ref3 Apple, ref1n, ref2, ref3n, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 creativity of, ref1 headquarters of, ref1, ref2 Jobs ousted from, ref1, ref2 lawsuits of, ref1 Microsoft’s contract with, ref1 patents of, ref1 Apple I, ref1 Apple II, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 AppleLink, ref1 Apple Writer, ref1 Applied Minds, ref1 Aristotle, ref1 Armstrong, Neil, ref1 ARPA, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 funding for, ref1 ARPANET, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 bids on minicomputers for, ref1 connected to Internet, ref1 distributed network of, ref1, ref2 first four nodes of, ref1, ref2 military defense and, ref1 start of, ref1 ARPANET News, ref1 arsenic, ref1 artificial intelligence, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 human-machine interaction and, ref1, ref2 as mirage, ref1, ref2, ref3 video games and, ref1 Artificial Intelligence Lab, ref1 Asimov, Isaac, ref1 assembly code, ref1 assembly line, ref1, ref2 Association for Computing Machinery, ref1n “As We May Think” (Bush), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Atanasoff, John Vincent, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 influence of, ref1, ref2 Atanasoff, Lura, ref1 Atanasoff-Berry computer, ref1 AT&T, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Atari, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 founding of, ref1 Atari 800, ref1 Atkinson, Bill, ref1, ref2 Atlantic, ref1, ref2 atom bomb, ref1, ref2 Atomic Energy Commission, ref1 atomic power, ref1 ATS-3 satellite, ref1 Augmentation Research Center, ref1, ref2, ref3 augmented intelligence, ref1 “Augmenting Human Intellect” (Engelbart), ref1, ref2 Auletta, Ken, ref1 Autobiography (Franklin), ref1 automata, ref1 Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), ref1, ref2 automobile industry, ref1 Aydelotte, Frank, ref1 Baba, Neem Karoli, ref1 Babbage, Charles, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15 Ada’s first meeting with, ref1 government attack published by, ref1 limits of Analytical Engine mistaken by, ref1 logarithm machine considered by, ref1, ref2 Lovelace given credit by, ref1 Lovelace’s Analytic Engine business plan and, ref1 programming as conceptual leap of, ref1 weekly salons of, ref1, ref2, ref3 Babbage, Henry, ref1 BackRub, ref1 Baer, Ralph, ref1 Baidu, ref1 ballistic missiles, ref1, ref2 Ballmer, Steve, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Bally Midway, ref1, ref2, ref3 Baran, Paul, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 packet-switching suggested by, ref1 Bardeen, John, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 in dispute with Shockley, ref1, ref2, ref3 Nobel Prize won by, ref1 photovoltaic effect studied by, ref1 solid-state studied by, ref1 surface states studied by, ref1 Barger, John, ref1 Bartik, Jean Jennings, see Jennings, Jean BASIC, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 for Altair, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 batch processing, ref1 BBC, ref1 Beatles, ref1 Bechtolsheim, Andy, ref1 Beckman, Arnold, ref1, ref2, ref3 Beckman Instruments, ref1 Bell, Alexander Graham, ref1, ref2, ref3 Bell & Howell, ref1 Bell Labs, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21 founding of, ref1 Murray Hill headquarters of, ref1 patents licensed by, ref1 solid-state physics at, ref1, ref2, ref3 transistor invented at, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Bell System, ref1 Benkler, Yochai, ref1, ref2 Berkeley Barb, ref1, ref2 Berners-Lee, Tim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 background of, ref1 and creation of browsers, ref1 hypertext created by, ref1 and micropayments, ref1 religious views of, ref1 Bernoulli, Jacob, ref1n Bernoulli numbers, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Berry, Clifford, ref1, ref2 Beyer, Kurt, ref1, ref2 Bezos, Jeff, ref1 audaciousness celebrated by, ref1 Bhatnagar, Ranjit, ref1 Big Brother and the Holding Company, ref1, ref2 Bilas, Frances, ref1, ref2 Bilton, Nick, ref1 Bina, Eric, ref1, ref2 binary, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 in code, ref1 in German codes, ref1 on Z1, ref1 Bitcoin, ref1n bitmapping, ref1 Bletchley Park, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Blitzer, Wolf, ref1 Bloch, Richard, ref1, ref2, ref3 Blogger, ref1, ref2 Blogger Pro, ref1 blogs, ref1 coining of term, ref1 McCarthy’s predictions of, ref1 Blue, Al, ref1 Blue Box, ref1, ref2 Board of Patent Interferences, ref1 Bohr, Niels, ref1 Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 bombe, ref1 BOMIS, ref1, ref2 Bonneville Power Administration, ref1 Boole, George, ref1, ref2 Boolean 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ref1, ref2n, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Cold War, ref1 Collingwood, Charles, ref1 Colossus, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 as special-purpose machine, ref1 Command and Control Research, ref1 Commodore, ref1 Community Memory, ref1, ref2, ref3 Complex Number Calculator, ref1, ref2, ref3 Compton, Karl, ref1 CompuServe, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 computer, ref1, ref2 debate over, ref1, ref2, ref3 “Computer as a Communication Device, The” (Licklider and Taylor), ref1 Computer Center Corporation (C-Cubed), ref1 Computer Quiz, ref1 Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, ref1 computers (female calculators), ref1, ref2 Computer Space, ref1, ref2, ref3 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Turing), ref1 Conant, James Bryant, ref1, ref2 condensers, ref1, ref2 conditional branching, ref1 Congregationalist, ref1 Congress, U.S., ref1 Congress of Italian Scientists, ref1 Constitution, U.S., ref1n content sharing, ref1 Control Video Corporation (CVC), ref1, ref2 copper, ref1 Coupling, J.

The links were done by the servers rather than embedded in the documents. It was named after the university’s mascot and was also a pun on “go for.” 41. A year later, Andreessen would join with the serially successful entrepreneur Jim Clark to launch a company called Netscape that produced a commercial version of the Mosaic browser. 42. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies incorporate mathematically coded encryption techniques and other principles of cryptography to create a secure currency that is not centrally controlled. 43. In March 2003 blog as both a noun and a verb was admitted into the Oxford English Dictionary. 44. Tellingly, and laudably, Wikipedia’s entries on its own history and the roles of Wales and Sanger have turned out, after much fighting on the discussion boards, to be balanced and objective. 45.


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Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design by Alvin E. Roth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Build a better mousetrap, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, computer age, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, deferred acceptance, desegregation, Dutch auction, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, High speed trading, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, law of one price, Lyft, market clearing, market design, medical residency, obamacare, PalmPilot, proxy bid, road to serfdom, school choice, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two-sided market, uber lyft, undersea cable

That said, in recent years the Internet revolution has opened the door to competition from wholly new directions—including new kinds of payment services, such as PayPal; an international network of automatic teller machines to challenge old standbys such as traveler’s checks; and maybe even new types of “virtual money” such as Bitcoin. As I write this in 2014, Apple has announced a new payment system on the latest iPhones, and we can reasonably expect that it and/or other new payment systems that make use of mobile devices will become commonplace. The bank that handles Amazon’s transactions, or the one that manages the account of your favorite restaurant, is typically different from the bank that issued your credit card and takes your payment.

See also labor markets for college admissions, 5–6, 169, 170–73 in law firm recruiting, 65–68 signaling in, 169–73 strategic decision making in, 10–11 apps, 21–22 Arunta people, 71–72 Ashlagi, Itai, 48, 149, 239, 243, 244 auctions, 121–22, 180–89 ascending bid, 182, 184, 188–89 eBay, 104–5 first-price, 184–85 package bidding in, 188–89, 225–26 price discovery in, 185–89 sealed bid, 182–84 second-price sealed, 182–84 simultaneous ascending, 187–89 for spectrum licenses, 185–89 for targeted ads, 189–92 automatic teller machines, 24 Avery, Chris, 91, 239 BandwidthX, 105 bankruptcy, 201 banks and banking, 178, 200–201 banner ads, 191–92 barriers to entry, 24 barter kidney donation as, 31–32 repugnant markets and, 202–5 Becker, Gary, 245 behavioral economics, 52 Beran, Bob, 146 Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Boston), 42 Bitcoin, 24 BlackBerry, 22 black markets, 207 blocking pairs, 139–43 Bloomberg, Michael, 106, 107 Bolton, Gary, 118, 240 Boston Globe, 126 Boston Pool Plan, 138 Boston Public Schools, 11, 122–28, 162–65. See also algorithms Bowl Championship Series, 63–64 boxing, 7 Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Boston), 42 British National Health Service, 140–41 Brown, Janice Rogers, 97 Budish, Eric, 82, 86, 88, 239, 246 Burns, Adele, 42 Burns, Jack, 42 busing, 166–67 California Penal Code, 195–97 Carnegie Mellon University, 180 Catholic Church, 207 cell phones, 186.


Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker

8-hour work day, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, British Empire, Brownian motion, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, fake news, Flash crash, forensic accounting, game design, High speed trading, Julian Assange, millennium bug, Minecraft, Neil Armstrong, null island, obamacare, off-by-one error, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, publication bias, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, selection bias, SQL injection, subprime mortgage crisis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Therac-25, value at risk, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Or, to put it another way, if the bolts are too similar to tell apart, write the product number on them. TEN Units, Conventions, And Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? A number without units can be meaningless. If something costs ‘9.97’ you want to know what currency that price is listed in. If you’re expecting British pounds or American dollars and it ends up being Indonesian rupiah or bitcoin, you’re in for a surprise (and a very different surprise, depending on which of those two it is). I run a UK-based retail website and we had a complaint from a customer for our audacity in listing prices in a ‘foreign currency’. So the charge amount listed was foreign currency? Obviously, and probably for a good number of us ordering, we would be expecting a US dollar quote.

Well, you’re going to need a random object. Nothing beats physical actions like flipping a coin or rolling a dice for getting real random numbers, even in our modern, high-tech age. This is why I keep various dice on me at all times, including a sixty-sided dice in case I need to generate a random seed for a bitcoin address (which use base-58 numbers). In the San Francisco office of Cloudflare, lava lamps are used as a physical randomness generator. This is back to internet security and SSL, but on a much bigger scale than Netscape: Cloudflare handles over a quarter of a quadrillion encryption requests per day.


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The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

A few days after, r0gue_0, a ‘black hat’ using hacking for criminal purposes, revealed that he had already identified the vulnerabilities and had been on the system for a long time. He demonstrated that he had both reading and writing access to all the data and put on sale the entire database of Rousseau users for 0.3 Bitcoin, which at that point were convertible in around 1,000 euros. These events are testament to the rather amateurish character of Five Star Movement digital operations, themselves a consequence of the familial and opaque management of the movement. Podemos’s participatory platform is called Participa and is one of the sections of the main party website, Podemos.info.

‘Digital democracy: reimagining pathways to political participation.’ Journal of Information Technology & Politics 7, no.1 (2010): 36–51. Gillespie, Tarleton. ‘The politics of “platforms”.’ New Media & Society 12, no.3 (2010): 347–364. Gladwell, Malcolm. ‘Small change.’ New Yorker (2010, 4 October) 42–49. Golumbia, David. The politics of Bitcoin: software as right-wing extremism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Ed. and transl. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Gramsci, Antonio, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith.


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Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

OpenBazaar exists as little more than a proof of concept: the plan was sketched out by a group of hackers in Toronto in mid-April, where they won the $20,000 first prize for their idea.”11 Two years later, an entrepreneur named Brian Hoffman took the OpenBazaar code, commercialized it, and got a $3 million investment from venture capital firms Union Square Ventures and Andreesen Horowitz to run the marketplace using Bitcoin, an alternative digital currency. In this, we can see the libertarian paradise that Thiel and others imagine: a new space, beyond the reach of government. It seems that their plan is working. Lend Edu, a fintech firm, surveyed millennials about their use of Venmo, a payments app owned by PayPal. Thirty-three percent of respondents said they had used Venmo to buy marijuana, Aderall, cocaine, or other illegal narcotics.12 A site called Vicemo.com boasts the tagline “See who’s buying drugs, booze, and sex on Venmo.”

., 46–47 Angwin, Julia, 154–156 App hackathons, 165–174 Apple Watch, 157 Artificial intelligence (AI) beginnings, 69–73 expert systems, 52–53, 179 fantasy of, 132 in film, 31, 32, 198 foundations of, 9 future of, 194–196 games and, 33–37 general, 10–11, 32 narrow, 10–11, 32–33, 97 popularity of, 90 real vs. imagined, 31–32 research, women in, 158 sentience challenge in, 129 Asimov, Isaac, 71 Assembly language, 24 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 145 Astrolabe, 76 Asymmetry, positive, 28 Automation technology, 176–177 Autopilot, 121 Availability heuristic, 96 Babbage, Charles, 76–77 Bailiwick (Broussard), 182–185, 190–191, 193 Barlow, John Perry, 82–83 Bell Labs, 13 Bench, Shane, 84 Ben Franklin Racing Team (Little Ben), 122–127 Berkman Klein Center (Harvard), 195 Berners-Lee, Tim, 4–5, 47 Bezos, Jeff, 73, 115 Bias in algorithms, 44, 150, 155–157 in algorithms, racial, 44, 155–156 genius myth and, 83–84 programmers and, 155–158 in risk ratings, 44, 155–156 in STEM fields, 83–84 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 60–61, 157 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, 180 Bitcoin, 159 Bizannes, Elias, 165, 166, 171 Blow, Charles, 95 Boggs, David, 67–68 Boole, George, 77 Boolean algebra, 77 Borden, Brisha, 154–155 Borsook, Paulina, 82 Bowhead Systems Management, 137 boyd, danah, 195 Bradley, Earl, 43 Brains 19–20, 95, 128–129, 132, 144, 150 Brand, Stewart, 5, 29, 70, 73, 81–82 Brin, Sergei, 72, 151 Brown, Joshua D., 140, 142 Bump, Philip, 186 Burroughs, William S., 77 Burroughs, William Seward, 77 Calculation vs. consciousness, 37 Cali-Fame, 186 California, drug use in, 158–159 Cameron, James, 95 Campaign finance, 177–186, 191 Čapek, Karel, 129 Caprio, Mike, 170–171 Carnegie Mellon University, autonomous vehicle research ALVINN, 131 University Racing Team (Boss), 124, 126–127, 130–131 Cars deaths associated with, 136–138, 146 distracted driving of, 146 human-centered design for, 147 Cars, self-driving 2005 Grand Challenge, 123–124 2007 Grand Challenge, 122–127 algorithms in, 139 artificial intelligence in, 129–131, 133 deaths in, 140 driver-assistance technology from, 135, 146 economics of, 147 experiences in, 121–123, 125–126, 128 fantasy of, 138, 142, 146 GPS hacking, 139 LIDAR guidance system, 139 machine ethics, 144–145, 147 nausea in, 121–123 NHTSA categories for, 134 problems/limitations, 138–140, 142–146 research funding, 133 SAE standards for levels of automation, 134–135 safety, 136–137, 140–142, 143, 146 sentience in, 132 Uber’s use of, 139 Udacity open-source car competition, 135 Waymo technology, 136 CERN, 4–5 Cerulo, Karen A., 28 Chess, 33 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), 63–64 Chinese Room argument, 38 Choxi, Heteen, 122 Christensen, Clayton, 163 Chrome, 25, 26 Citizens United, 177, 178, 180 Clarke, Arthur C., 71–72 Client-server model, 27 Clinkenbeard, John, 172 Cloud computing, 26, 52, 196 Cohen, Brian, 56–57 Collins, John, 117 Common Core State Standards, 60–61 Communes, 5, 10 Computer ethics, 144–145 Computer Go, 34–36 Computers assumptions about vs. reality of, 8 components, identifying, 21–22 consciousness, 17 early, 196–199 human, 77–78, 198 human brains vs., 19–20, 128–129, 132, 144, 150 human communication vs., 169–170 human mind vs., 38 imagination, 128 limitations, 6–7, 27–28, 37–39 memory, 131 modern-day, development of, 75–79 operating systems, 24–25 in schools, 63–65 sentience, 17, 129 Computer science bias in, 79 ethical training, 145 explaining the world through, 118 women in, 5 Consciousness vs. calculation, 37 Constants in programming, 88 Content-management system (CMS), 26 Cooper, Donna, 58 Copeland, Jack, 74–75 Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS), 44, 155–156 Cortana, 72 Counterculture, 5, 81–82 Cox, Amanda, 41–42 Crawford, Kate, 194 Crime reporting, 154–155 CTB/McGraw-Hill, 53 Cumberbatch, Benedict, 74 Cyberspace activism, 82–83 DarkMarket, 159 Dark web, 82 Data on campaign finance, 178–179 computer-generated, 18–19 defined, 18 dirty, 104 generating, 18 people and, 57 social construction of, 18 unreasonable effectiveness of, 118–119, 121, 129 Data & Society, 195 DataCamp, 96 Data density theory, 169 Data journalism, 6, 43–47, 196 Data Journalism Awards, 196 Data journalism stories cost-benefit of, 47 on inflation, 41–42 Parliament members’ expenses, 46 on police speeding, 43 on police stops of people of color, 43 price discrimination, 46 on sexual abuse by doctors, 42–43 Data Privacy Lab (Harvard), 195 Data Recognition Corporation (DRC), 53 Datasets in machine learning, 94–95 Data visualizations, 41–42 Deaths distracted driving accidents, 146 from poisoning, 137 from road accidents, 136–138 in self-driving cars, 140 Decision making computational, 12, 43, 150 data-driven, 119 machine learning and, 115–116, 118–119 subjective, 150 Deep Blue (IBM), 33 Deep learning, 33 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge, 123, 131, 133, 164 Desmond, Matthew, 115 Detroit race riots story, 44 Dhondt, Rebecca, 58 Diakopoulos, Nicholas, 46 Difference engine, 76 Differential pricing and race, 116 Digital age, 193 Digital revolution, 193–194 Dinakar, Karthik, 195 Django, 45, 89 DocumentCloud, 52, 196 Domino’s, 170 Drone technology, 67–68 Drug marketplace, online, 159–160 Drug use, 80–81, 158–160 Duncan, Arne, 51 Dunier, Mitchell, 115 Edison, Thomas, 77 Education change, implementing in, 62–63 Common Core State Standards, 60–61 competence bar in, 150 computers in schools, 63–65 equality in, 77–78 funding, 60 supplies, availability of, 58 technochauvinist solutions for, 63 textbook availability, 53–60 unpredictability in, 62 18F, 178–179 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 82 Elevators, 156–157 Eliza, 27–28 Emancipation Proclamation, 78 Engelbart, Doug, 25, 80–81 Engineers, ethical training, 145 ENIAC, 71, 194, 196–199 Equality in education, 77–78 techno hostility toward, 83 technological, creating, 87 technology vs., 115, 156 for women, 5, 77–78, 83–85, 158 Essa, Irfan, 46 Ethics, 144–145, 147 EveryBlock, 46 Expertise, cognitive fallacies associated, 83 Expert systems, 52–53, 179 Facebook, 70, 83, 152, 158, 197 Facial recognition, 157 Fact checking, 45–46 Fake news, 154 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), 63–64 FEC, McCutcheon v., 180 FEC, Speechnow.org v., 180 FEC.gov, 178–179 Film, AI in, 31, 32, 198 FiveThirtyEight.com, 47 Foote, Tully, 122–123, 125 Ford Motor Company, 140 Fowler, Susan, 74 Fraud campaign finance, 180 Internet advertising, 153–154 Free press, role of, 44 Free speech, 82 Fuller, Buckminster, 74 Futurists, 89–90 Games, AI and, 33–37 Gates, Bill, 61 Gates, Melinda, 157–158 Gawker, 83 Gender equality, hostility toward, 83 Gender gap, 5, 84–85, 115, 158 Genius, cult of, 75 Genius myth, 83–84 Ghost-in-the-machine fallacy, 32, 39 Giffords, Gabby, 19–20 GitHub, 135 Go, 33–37 Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI), 10 Good vs. popular, 149–152, 160 Google, 72 Google Docs, 25 Google Maps API, 46 Google Street View, 131 Google X, 138, 151, 158 Government campaign finance, 177–186, 191 cyberspace activism, antigovernment ideology, 82–83 tech hostility toward, 82–83 Graphical user interface (GUI), 25, 72 Greyball, 74 Guardian, 45, 46 Hackathons, 165–174 Hackers, 69–70, 82, 153–154, 169, 173 Halevy, Alon, 119 Hamilton, James T., 47 Harley, Mike, 140 Harris, Melanie, 58–59 Harvard, Andrew, 184 Harvard University Berkman Klein Center, 195 Data Privacy Lab, 195 mathematics department, 84 “Hello, world” program, 13–18 Her, 31 Hern, Alex, 159 Hernandez, Daniel, Jr., 19 Heuristics, 95–96 Hillis, Danny, 73 Hippies, 5, 82 HitchBOT, 69 Hite, William, 58 Hoffman, Brian, 159 Holovaty, Adrian, 45–46 Home Depot, 46, 115, 155 Hooke, Robert, 88 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) HP, 157 Hugo, Christoph von, 145 Human-centered design, 147, 177 Human computers, 77–78, 198 Human error, 136–137 Human-in-the-loop systems, 177, 179, 187, 195 Hurst, Alicia, 164 Illinois quarter, 153–154 Imagination, 89–90, 128 Imitation Game, The (film), 74 Information industry, annual pay, 153 Injury mortality, 137 Innovation computational, 25 disruptive, 163, 171 funding, 172–173 hackathons and, 166 Instacart, 171 Intelligence in machine learning Interestingness threshold, 188 International Foundation for Advanced Study, 81 Internet advertising model, 151 browsers, 25, 26 careers, annual pay rates, 153 core values, 150 drug marketplace, 159–160 early development of the, 5, 81 fraud, 153–154 online communities, technolibertarianism in culture of, 82–83 rankings, 72, 150–152 Internet Explorer, 25 Internet pioneers, inspiration for, 5, 81–82 Internet publishing industry, annual pay, 153 Internet search, 72, 150–152 Ito, Joi, 147, 195 Jacquard, Joseph Marie, 76 Java, 89 JavaScript, 89 Jobs, Steve, 25, 70, 72, 80, 81 Jones, Paul Tudor, 187–188 Journalism.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Protocols like IPFS are allowing for the online exchange of data between independent players, resulting in the creation of what Burnham calls “decentralized marketplaces.” Other examples of this are the so-called decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), such as the controversial peer-to-peer currencies Bitcoin and Etherium, which operate on blockchain technology. These networked platforms do away with the need for the middleman: a bank or a government agency. They are returning us to Berners-Lee’s original web, a level playing field on which power resides on the edge, with its users. After Burnham’s speech, I talk with him outside the Alte Teppichfabrik in a small beer garden overlooking the river Spree.

., 208. 8. https://e-estonia.com/facts. 9. Press release. 10. “Estonians’ Trust in Parliament, Government Much Higher Than EU Average,” Baltic Times, December 29, 2014. 11. “Linnar Viik—Estonia’s Mr. Internet,” EUbusiness.com, April 20, 2004. 12. Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World (Portfolio, 2016), 6. 13. Ibid. 14. More, Utopia, 46. 15. Ibid., 79. 16. Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Down of the Post-Market Era (Tarcher, 1996). 17. Andreas Weigend, Data for the People: How to Make Our Post-Privacy Economy Work for You (Basic, 2017). 18.


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Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, cognitive load, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, constrained optimization, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Sedaris, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, double helix, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, first-price auction, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google Chrome, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Lao Tzu, Leonard Kleinrock, level 1 cache, linear programming, martingale, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, NP-complete, P = NP, packet switching, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert X Cringely, Sam Altman, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, sorting algorithm, spectrum auction, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman, Turing machine, urban planning, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

If you’re willing to tolerate an error rate of just 1% or 2%, storing your findings in a probabilistic data structure like a Bloom filter will save you significant amounts of both time and space. And the usefulness of such filters is not confined to search engines: Bloom filters have shipped with a number of recent web browsers to check URLs against a list of known malicious websites, and they are also an important part of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Says Mitzenmacher, “The idea of the error tradeoff space—I think the issue is that people don’t associate that with computing. They think computers are supposed to give you the answer. So when you hear in your algorithms class, ‘It’s supposed to give you one answer; it might not be the right answer’—I like to think that when [students] hear that, it focuses them.

the URL is entered into a set of equations: Bloom, “Space/Time Trade-offs in Hash Coding with Allowable Errors.” shipped with a number of recent web browsers: Google Chrome until at least 2012 used a Bloom filter: see http://blog.alexyakunin.com/2010/03/nice-bloom-filter-application.html and https://chromiumcodereview.appspot.com/10896048/. part of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin: Gavin Andresen, “Core Development Status Report #1,” November 1, 2012, https://bitcoinfoundation.org/2012/11/core-development-status-report-1/. “The river meanders”: Richard Kenney, “Hydrology; Lachrymation,” in The One-Strand River: Poems, 1994–2007 (New York: Knopf, 2008). use this approach when trying to decipher codes: See Berg-Kirkpatrick and Klein, “Decipherment with a Million Random Restarts.”

Thomas Bayes’s Rule defined BBC BBC News Beautiful Mind, A (Nasar) beauty Bedarf, Erwin Bélády, László “Les” Bélády’s Algorithm Belew, Rik Bell, Alexander Graham bell curve Bellman, Richard Bellows, Meghan Belmont Report benchmarks Berezovsky, Boris Berkeley, Bishop George Berlin Wall Bernard, Claude Berry, Don best-case performance Bezos, Jeff big data Big-O notation. See also constant time; exponential time; factorial time; linearithmic time; linear time; polynomial time; quadratic time Big Ten conference Bikhchandani, Sushil bill-paying schedule Bing Binmore, Ken births, male vs. female Bitcoin “Blind Variation and Selective Retention” (Campbell) blocking Bloom, Burton H. Bloomberg Businessweek Bloom filter Blum, Avrim Boguslavsky, Leonid bookbinding Booker, Christopher bracket tournaments Bradáč, Zdeněk breaking symmetry Brighton, Henry bubbles, financial Bubble Sort Bucket Sort bufferbloat buffers Buffon, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de burglar problem Burks, Arthur business.


pages: 589 words: 147,053

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson

8-hour work day, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, business cycle, business process, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, deep learning, demographic transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fault tolerance, financial intermediation, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, lone genius, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market design, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pneumatic tube, power law, prediction markets, quantum cryptography, rent control, rent-seeking, reversible computing, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Vernor Vinge, William MacAskill

Myers, David, and Ed Diener. 1995. “Who Is Happy?” Psychological Science 6(1): 10–19. Nagy, Bela, J. Doyne Farmer, Quan Bui, and Jessika Trancik. 2013. “Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress.” PLoS ONE 8(2): e52669. Nakamoto, Satoshi. 2008. “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” November. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. Navarrete, C. David, Robert Kurzban, Daniel Fessler, and Lee Kirkpatrick 2004. “Anxiety and Intergroup Bias: Terror Management or Coalitional Psychology?” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 7(4): 370–397. Nguyen, Anh Ngoc, Jim Taylor, and Steve Bradley. 2003.


pages: 543 words: 153,550

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, discrete time, distributed ledger, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Higgs boson, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, money market fund, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Network effects, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, Phillips curve, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, school choice, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, selection bias, six sigma, social graph, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Great Moderation, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, value at risk, web application, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Predictive models: This model explains prices as forecasts of future value. The value of the one-acre lot in Ocala, Bitcoin, or a stock depends on how much people will pay for them in the future. These valuations depend on predictive models, which in turn depend on attributes and categories. We might categorize Ocala as warm, low-tax, and inland. Variation in people’s valuations arises from different predictive models. Investors use multiple predictive models. These models may rely on attributes or, as in the case of valuing Bitcoin, also make assumptions about coordination. These three models provide three distinct explanations for the value of a good.

basketball, 157 Bass model, 136–137 Bayesian multi-armed bandit problems, 321–324 Beatles, 132 Bednar, Jenna, 283 behavioral rules, 284 belief-based learning rule, 316 beliefs, 14 in rational-actor model, 48 benchmarks rational choice and, 50 in rational-actor model, 51 Berkshire Hathaway, 154 Berlin Observatory, 24 Bernoulli bandit problems, 320–321 Bernoulli urn model, 154–155, 163 betweenness network structure and, 118 score, 119 bias immediacy, 52 psychological, 51–53 selection, 89 big coefficient, 89–90 big rocks first, 17 bin packing problem, 17 binary categorization model, 30–31 binary classifications, of data, 92–93 Bitcoin, 241–242 BlackRock, 4 block entropy, 326 blocks, 177 body mass index (BMI), 37–38 Boldrin, Michele, 336–337 bootstrap aggregation, 42 Borges, Jorge Luis, 33 Botswana, 96 Box, George, 6 Boyle’s law, 19 broadcast model, 132–134 data and, 134 defined, 132 r-shaped adoption curve and, 133 (fig.)


pages: 807 words: 154,435

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

And what is meant by ‘money’ is temporally and geographically specific. Money is dollars in the US, and euros in Europe. Not so long ago, money was gold and silver. For the inhabitants of Yap in the Caroline Islands, money was Rai, heavy circles of limestone with a hole in the middle. Some people think that crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are ‘money’. Numbers are essential to economic analysis. But economic data and economic models are never descriptive of ‘the world as it really is’. Economic interpretation is always the product of a social context or theory. Expressing uncertainty When we are wondering whether the man in the compound is bin Laden or what happened to the Mary Celeste , whether the second Smith child is a girl or whether Joyce met Lenin, probabilities are unhelpful.

The collapse of a narrative is a more rapid process than its transmission. And as we write, the financial press is full of perhaps the thinnest story since tulips to give rise to a bubble – the imagined future takeover of the world monetary system by crypto-currencies. Like other popular fictions, the Bitcoin phenomenon combines several perennial narratives – in this case, a libertarian vision of a world free of state intervention, the power of a magic technology, and the mystery of ‘money creation’. Round-up at Jackson Hole In the 1980s, bond markets, once staid backwaters of the financial system, became the focus of an exciting new narrative based on securitisation.

INDEX 10 (film, 1979), 97 737 Max aircraft, 228 9/11 terror attacks, 7 , 74–6 , 202 , 230 Abbottabad raid (2011), 9–10 , 20 , 26 , 44 , 71 , 102 , 118–19 , 120 , 174–5 ; reference narrative of, 122–3 , 277 , 298 ; role of luck in, 262–3 ; and unhelpful probabilities, 8–19 , 326 abductive reasoning, 138 , 147 , 211 , 388 , 398 ABN AMRO, 257 Abraham (biblical character), 206 Abrahams, Harold, 273 Abramovich, Roman, 265 accountancy, 409 aeronautics, 227–8 , 352–6 , 383 Agdestein, Simen, 273 AIDS, 57 , 230 , 375–6 Airbus A380, 40 , 274–6 , 408 Akerlof, George, 250–1 , 252 , 253 , 254 , 382 Alchian, Armen, 158 alien invasion narratives, 295–6 Allais, Maurice, 134–5 , 136 , 137 , 437 , 440–3 Allen, Bill, 227–8 Allen, Paul, 28 , 29 Altair desktop, 28 Amazon, 289 , 309 Anderson, Roy, 375 ant colonies, 173 anthropology, 160 , 189–91 , 193–4 , 215–16 antibiotics, 40 , 45 , 284 , 429 Antz (film, 1998), 274 apocalyptic narratives, 331–2 , 335 , 358–62 Appiah, Anthony, 117–18 Apple, 29–30 , 31 , 169 , 309 Applegarth, Adam, 311 arbitrage, 308 Archilochus (Greek poet), 222 Aristotle, 137 , 147 , 303 Arrow, Kenneth, 254 , 343–5 , 440 artificial intelligence (AI), xvi , 39 , 135 , 150 , 173–4 , 175–6 , 185–6 , 387 ; the ‘singularity’, 176–7 Ashtabula rail bridge disaster (1876), 33 Asimov, Isaac, 303 asteroid strikes, 32 , 71–2 , 238 , 402 astrology, 394 astronomical laws, 18–19 , 35 , 70 , 373–4 , 388 , 389 , 391–2 , 394 AT&T, 28 auction theory, 255–7 Austen, Jane, 217 , 224–5 , 383 autism, 394 , 411 aviation, commercial, 23–4 , 40 , 227–8 , 274–6 , 315 , 383 , 414 axiomatic rationality: Allais disputes theory, 134–5 , 136 , 137 ; Arrow– Debreu world, 343–5 ; assumption of transitivity, 437 ; and Becker, 114 , 381–2 ; and behavioural economics, 116 , 135–6 , 141–9 , 154–5 , 167–8 , 386–7 , 401 ; capital asset pricing model (CAPM), 307–8 , 309 , 320 , 332 ; completeness axiom, 437–8 ; consistency of choice axiom, 108–9 , 110–11 ; continuity axiom, 438–40 ; definition of rationality, 133–4 , 137 , 436 ; definition of risk, 305 , 307 , 334 , 420–1 ; efficient market hypothesis, 252 , 254 , 308–9 , 318 , 320 , 332 , 336–7 ; efficient portfolio model, 307–8 , 309 , 318 , 320 , 332–4 , 366 ; and evolutionary rationality, 16 , 152–3 , 154–5 , 157 , 158 , 166–7 , 171–2 , 386–7 , 407 ; and ‘expectations’ concept, 97–8 , 102–3 , 121–2 , 341–2 ; extended to decision-making under uncertainty, xv , 40–2 , 110–14 , 133–7 , 257–9 , 420–1 ; and Friedman, 73–4 , 111–12 , 113–14 , 125 , 257–9 , 307 , 399–400 , 420 , 437 ; hegemony of over radical uncertainty, 40–2 , 110–14 ; implausibility of assumptions, xiv–xv , 16 , 41–4 , 47 , 74–84 , 85–105 , 107–9 , 111 , 116–22 , 344–9 , 435–44 ; independence axiom, 440–4 ; as limited to small worlds, 170 , 309–10 , 320–1 , 342–9 , 382 , 400 , 421 ; and Lucas, 36 , 92 , 93 , 338–9 , 341 , 345 , 346 ; and Markowitz, 307 , 308 , 309–10 , 318 , 322 , 333 ; maximising behaviour, 310 ; ‘pignistic probability’, 78–84 , 438 ; and Popperian falsificationism, 259–60 ; Prescott’s comparison with engineering, 352–6 ; ‘rational expectations theory, 342–5 , 346–50 ; and Samuelson, xv , 42 , 110–11 , 436 ; and Savage, 111–14 , 125 , 257–9 , 309 , 345 , 400 , 435 , 437 , 442–3 ; shocks and shifts discourse, 42 , 346 , 347 , 348 , 406–7 ; Simon’s work on, 134 , 136 , 149–53 ; triumph of probabilistic reasoning, 15–16 , 20 , 72–84 , 110–14 ; Value at risk models (VaR), 366–8 , 405 , 424 ; von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms, 111 , 133 , 435–44 ; see also maximising behaviour Ballmer, Steve, 30 , 227 Bank of England, xiii , 45 , 103–5 , 286 , 311 Barclays Bank, 257 Barings Bank, 411 Basel regulations, 310 , 311 Bay of Pigs fiasco (1961), 278–9 Bayes, Reverend Thomas, 60–3 , 66–7 , 70 , 71 , 358 , 431 Beane, Billy, 273 Bear Stearns, 158–9 Becker, Gary, 114 , 381–2 Beckham, David, 267–8 , 269 , 270 , 272–3 , 414 behavioural economics, 116 , 145–8 , 154 , 386–7 ; and Allais paradox, 442 ; ‘availability heuristic’, 144–5 ; biases in human behaviour, 16 , 136 , 141–8 , 154 , 162 , 165 , 167–8 , 170–1 , 175–6 , 184 , 401 ; and evolutionary science, 154–5 , 165 ; Kahneman’s dual systems, 170–1 , 172 , 271 ; Kahneman–Tversky experiments, 141–7 , 152 , 215 ; ‘noise’ (randomness), 175–6 ; nudge theory, 148–9 Bentham, Jeremy, 110 Berkshire Hathaway, 153 , 319 , 324 , 325–6 Berlin, Isaiah, 222 Bernoulli, Daniel, 114–16 , 199 Bernoulli, Nicolaus, 199 , 442 Bertrand, Joseph, 70 Bezos, Jeff, 289 big data, 208 , 327 , 388–90 billiard players, 257–8 bin Laden, Osama, 7 , 8–10 , 21 , 44 , 71 , 118–19 , 120 , 122–3 , 262–3 , 326 Bismarck, Otto von, 161 Bitcoin, 96 , 316 Black Death, 32 , 39–40 BlackBerry, 30 , 31 blackjack, 38 Blackstone, Sir William, 213 BNP Paribas, 5 , 6 BOAC, 23–4 Boas, Franz, 193 Boeing, 24 , 227–8 Boer War, 168 Bolt, Usain, 273 bonobos, 161–2 , 178 Borges, Jorge Luis, 391 Borodino, battle of (1812), 3–4 , 433 Bortkiewicz, Ladislaus, 235–6 Bower, Tom, 169–70 Bowral cricket team, New South Wales, 264 Box, George, 393 Boycott, Geoffrey, 264–5 Bradman, Don, 237 , 264 Brahe, Tycho, 388–9 Brånemark, Per-Ingvar, 387 , 388 Branson, Richard, 169–70 Brearley, Michael, 140–1 , 264–5 Breslau (now Wrocław), 56 Brexit referendum (June 2016), 241–2 ; lies told during, 404 bridge collapses, 33 , 341 Brownian motion, 37 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 143 , 147 Buffett, Warren, 83 , 152 , 179 , 319–20 , 324 , 335 , 336–7 Burns, Robert, 253 Bush, George W., 295 , 407 , 412 business cycles, 347 business history (academic discipline), 286 business schools, 318 business strategy: approach in 1970s, 183 ; approach in 1980s, 181–2 ; aspirations confused with, 181–2 , 183–4 ; business plans, 223–4 , 228 ; collections of capabilities, 274–7 ; and the computer industry, 27–31 ; corporate takeovers, 256–7 ; Lampert at Sears, 287–9 , 292 ; Henry Mintzberg on, 296 , 410 ; motivational proselytisation, 182–3 , 184 ; quantification mistaken for understanding, 180–1 , 183 ; and reference narratives, 286–90 , 296–7 ; risk maps, 297 ; Rumelt’s MBA classes, 10 , 178–80 ; Shell’s scenario planning, 223 , 295 ; Sloan at General Motors, 286–7 ; strategy weekends, 180–3 , 194 , 296 , 407 ; three common errors, 183–4 ; vision or mission statements, 181–2 , 184 Buxton, Jedediah, 225 Calas, Jean, 199 California, 48–9 Cambridge Growth Project, 340 Canadian fishing industry, 368–9 , 370 , 423 , 424 cancer, screening for, 66–7 Candler, Graham, 352 , 353–6 , 399 Cardiff City Football Club, 265 Carlsen, Magnus, 175 , 273 Carnegie, Andrew, 427 Carnegie Mellon University, 135 Carré, Dr Matt, 267–8 Carroll, Lewis, Through the Looking-Glass , 93–4 , 218 , 344 , 346 ; ‘Jabberwocky’, 91–2 , 94 , 217 Carron works (near Falkirk), 253 Carter, Jimmy, 8 , 119 , 120 , 123 , 262–3 cartography, 391 Casio, 27 , 31 Castro, Fidel, 278–9 cave paintings, 216 central banks, 5 , 7 , 95 , 96 , 103–5 , 285–6 , 348–9 , 350 , 351 , 356–7 Central Pacific Railroad, 48 Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, 39 Chabris, Christopher, 140 Challenger disaster (1986), 373 , 374 Chamberlain, Neville, 24–5 Chandler, Alfred, Strategy and Structure , 286 Chariots of Fire (film, 1981), 273 Charles II, King, 383 Chelsea Football Club, 265 chess, 173 , 174 , 175 , 266 , 273 , 346 Chicago economists, 36 , 72–4 , 86 , 92 , 111–14 , 133–7 , 158 , 257–8 , 307 , 342–3 , 381–2 Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 423 chimpanzees, 161–2 , 178 , 274 China, 4–5 , 419–20 , 430 cholera, 283 Churchill, Winston: character of, 25–6 , 168 , 169 , 170 ; fondness for gambling, 81 , 168 ; as hedgehog not fox, 222 ; on Montgomery, 293 ; restores gold standard (1925), 25–6 , 269 ; The Second World War , 187 ; Second World War leadership, 24–5 , 26 , 119 , 167 , 168–9 , 170 , 184 , 187 , 266 , 269 Citibank, 255 Civil War, American, 188 , 266 , 290 Clapham, John, 253 Clark, Sally, 197–8 , 200 , 202 , 204 , 206 Clausewitz, Carl von, On War , 433 climate systems, 101–2 Club of Rome, 361 , 362 Coase, Ronald, 286 , 342 Cochran, Johnnie, 198 , 217 Cochrane, John, 93 coffee houses, 55–6 cognitive illusions, 141–2 Cohen, Jonathan, 206–7 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 411 Cold War, 293–4 , 306–7 Collier, Paul, 276–7 Columbia disaster (2003), 373 Columbia University, 117 , 118 , 120 Columbus, Christopher, 4 , 21 Colyvan, Mark, 225 Comet aircraft, 23–4 , 228 communication: communicative rationality, 172 , 267–77 , 279–82 , 412 , 414–16 ; and decision-making, 17 , 231 , 272–7 , 279–82 , 398–9 , 408 , 412 , 413–17 , 432 ; eusociality, 172–3 , 274 ; and good doctors, 185 , 398–9 ; human capacity for, 159 , 161 , 162 , 172–3 , 216 , 272–7 , 408 ; and ill-defined concepts, 98–9 ; and intelligibility, 98 ; language, 98 , 99–100 , 159 , 162 , 173 , 226 ; linguistic ambiguity, 98–100 ; and reasoning, 265–8 , 269–77 ; and the smartphone, 30 ; the ‘wisdom of crowds’, 47 , 413–14 Community Reinvestment Act (USA, 1977), 207 comparative advantage model, 249–50 , 251–2 , 253 computer technologies, 27–31 , 173–4 , 175–7 , 185–6 , 227 , 411 ; big data, 208 , 327 , 388–90 ; CAPTCHA text, 387 ; dotcom boom, 228 ; and economic models, 339–40 ; machine learning, 208 Condit, Phil, 228 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 199–200 consumer price index, 330 , 331 conviction narrative theory, 227–30 Corinthians (New Testament), 402 corporate takeovers, 256–7 corporations, large, 27–31 , 122 , 123 , 286–90 , 408–10 , 412 , 415 Cosmides, Leda, 165 Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, 32 , 39 , 71–2 Crick, Francis, 156 cricket, 140–1 , 237 , 263–5 crime novels, classic, 218 crosswords, 218 crypto-currencies, 96 , 316 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 140 , 264 Cuba, 278–80 ; Cuban Missile Crisis, 279–81 , 299 , 412 Custer, George, 293 Cutty Sark (whisky producer), 325 Daily Express , 242–3 , 244 Damasio, Antonio, 171 Dardanelles expedition (1915), 25 Darwin, Charles, 156 , 157 Davenport, Thomas, 374 Dawkins, Richard, 156 de Havilland company, 23–4 Debreu, Gerard, 254 , 343–4 decision theory, xvi ; critiques of ‘American school’, 133–7 ; definition of rationality, 133–4 ; derived from deductive reasoning, 138 ; Ellsberg’s ‘ambiguity aversion’, 135 ; expected utility , 111–14 , 115–18 , 124–5 , 127 , 128 – 30 , 135 , 400 , 435–44 ; hegemony of optimisation, 40–2 , 110–14 ; as unable to solve mysteries, 34 , 44 , 47 ; and work of Savage, 442–3 decision-making under uncertainty: and adaptation, 102 , 401 ; Allais paradox, 133–7 , 437 , 440–3 ; axiomatic approach extended to, xv , 40–2 , 110–14 , 133–7 , 257–9 , 420–1 ; ‘bounded rationality concept, 149–53 ; as collaborative process, 17 , 155 , 162 , 176 , 411–15 , 431–2 ; and communication, 17 , 231 , 272–7 , 279–82 , 398–9 , 408 , 412 , 413–17 , 432 ; communicative rationality, 172 , 267–77 , 279–82 , 412 , 414–16 ; completeness axiom, 437–8 ; continuity axiom, 438–40 ; Cuban Missile Crisis, 279–81 , 299 , 412 ; ‘decision weights’ concept, 121 ; disasters attributed to chance, 266–7 ; doctors, 184–6 , 194 , 398–9 ; and emotions, 227–9 , 411 ; ‘evidence-based policy’, 404 , 405 ; excessive attention to prior probabilities, 184–5 , 210 ; expected utility , 111–14 , 115–18 , 124–5 , 127 , 128–30 , 135 , 400 , 435–44 ; first-rate decision-makers, 285 ; framing of problems, 261 , 362 , 398–400 ; good strategies for radical uncertainty, 423–5 ; and hindsight, 263 ; independence axiom, 440–4 ; judgement as unavoidable, 176 ; Klein’s ‘primed recognition decision-making’, 399 ; Gary Klein’s work on, 151–2 , 167 ; and luck, 263–6 ; practical decision-making, 22–6 , 46–7 , 48–9 , 81–2 , 151 , 171–2 , 176–7 , 255 , 332 , 383 , 395–6 , 398–9 ; and practical knowledge, 22–6 , 195 , 255 , 352 , 382–8 , 395–6 , 405 , 414–15 , 431 ; and prior opinions, 179–80 , 184–5 , 210 ; ‘prospect theory’, 121 ; public sector processes, 183 , 355 , 415 ; puzzle– mystery distinction, 20–4 , 32–4 , 48–9 , 64–8 , 100 , 155 , 173–7 , 218 , 249 , 398 , 400–1 ; qualities needed for success, 179–80 ; reasoning as not decision-making, 268–71 ; and ‘resulting’, 265–7 ; ‘risk as feelings’ perspective, 128–9 , 310 ; robustness and resilience, 123 , 294–8 , 332 , 335 , 374 , 423–5 ; and role of economists, 397–401 ; Rumelt’s ‘diagnosis’, 184–5 , 194–5 ; ‘satisficing’ (’good enough’ outcomes), 150 , 167 , 175 , 415 , 416 ; search for a workable solution, 151–2 , 167 ; by securities traders, 268–9 ; ‘shock’ and ‘shift’ labels, 42 , 346 , 347 , 348 , 406–7 ; simple heuristics, rules of thumb, 152 ; and statistical discrimination, 207–9 , 415 ; triumph of probabilistic reasoning, 20 , 40–2 , 72–84 , 110–14 ; von Neumann– Morgenstern axioms, 111 , 133 , 435–44 ; see also business strategy deductive reasoning, 137–8 , 147 , 235 , 388 , 389 , 398 Deep Blue, 175 DeepMind, 173–4 The Deer Hunter (film, 1978), 438 democracy, representative, 292 , 319 , 414 demographic issues, 253 , 358–61 , 362–3 ; EU migration models, 369–70 , 372 Denmark, 426 , 427 , 428 , 430 dentistry, 387–8 , 394 Derek, Bo, 97 dermatologists, 88–9 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), 27 , 31 dinosaurs, extinction of, 32 , 39 , 71–2 , 383 , 402 division of labour, 161 , 162 , 172–3 , 216 , 249 DNA, 156 , 198 , 201 , 204 ‘domino theory’, 281 Donoghue, Denis, 226 dotcom boom, 316 , 402 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 34 , 224–5 , 253 Drapers Company, 328 Drescher, Melvin, 248–9 Drucker, Peter, Concept of the Corporation (1946), 286 , 287 Duhem–Quine hypothesis, 259–60 Duke, Annie, 263 , 268 , 273 Dulles, John Foster, 293 Dutch tulip craze (1630s), 315 Dyson, Frank, 259 earthquakes, 237–8 , 239 Eco, Umberto, The Name of the Rose , 204 Econometrica , 134 econometrics, 134 , 340–1 , 346 , 356 economic models: of 1950s and 1960s, 339–40 ; Akerlof model, 250–1 , 252 , 253 , 254 ; ‘analogue economies’ of Lucas, 345 , 346 ; artificial/complex, xiv–xv , 21 , 92–3 , 94 ; ‘asymmetric information’ model, 250–1 , 254–5 ; capital asset pricing model (CAPM), 307–8 , 309 , 320 , 332 ; comparative advantage model, 249–50 , 251–2 , 253 ; cost-benefit analysis obsession, 404 ; diversification of risk, 304–5 , 307–9 , 317–18 , 334–7 ; econometric models, 340–1 , 346 , 356 ; economic rent model, 253–4 ; efficient market hypothesis, 252 , 254 , 308–9 , 318 , 320 , 332 , 336–7 ; efficient portfolio model, 307–8 , 309 , 318 , 320 , 332–4 , 366 ; failure over 2007–08 crisis, xv , 6–7 , 260 , 311–12 , 319 , 339 , 349–50 , 357 , 367–8 , 399 , 407 , 423–4 ; falsificationist argument, 259–60 ; forecasting models, 7 , 15–16 , 68 , 96 , 102–5 , 347–50 , 403–4 ; Goldman Sachs risk models, 6–7 , 9 , 68 , 202 , 246–7 ; ‘grand auction’ of Arrow and Debreu, 343–5 ; inadequacy of forecasting models, 347–50 , 353–4 , 403–4 ; invented numbers in, 312–13 , 320 , 363–4 , 365 , 371 , 373 , 404 , 405 , 423 ; Keynesian, 339–40 ; Lucas critique, 341 , 348 , 354 ; Malthus’ population growth model, 253 , 358–61 , 362–3 ; misuse/abuse of, 312–13 , 320 , 371–4 , 405 ; need for, 404–5 ; need for pluralism of, 276–7 ; pension models, 312–13 , 328–9 , 405 , 423 , 424 ; pre-crisis risk models, 6–7 , 9 , 68 , 202 , 246–7 , 260 , 311–12 , 319 , 320–1 , 339 ; purpose of, 346 ; quest for large-world model, 392 ; ‘rational expectations theory, 342–5 , 346–50 ; real business cycle theory, 348 , 352–4 ; role of incentives, 408–9 ; ‘shift’ label, 406–7 ; ‘shock’ label, 346–7 , 348 , 406–7 ; ‘training base’ (historical data series), 406 ; Value at risk models (VaR), 366–8 , 405 , 424 ; Viniar problem (problem of model failure), 6–7 , 58 , 68 , 109 , 150 , 176 , 202 , 241 , 242 , 246–7 , 331 , 366–8 ; ‘wind tunnel’ models, 309 , 339 , 392 ; winner’s curse model, 256–7 ; World Economic Outlook, 349 ; see also axiomatic rationality; maximising behaviour; optimising behaviour; small world models Economic Policy Symposium, Jackson Hole, 317–18 economics: adverse selection process, 250–1 , 327 ; aggregate output and GDP, 95 ; ambiguity of variables/concepts, 95–6 , 99–100 ; appeal of probability theory, 42–3 ; ‘bubbles’, 315–16 ; business cycles, 45–6 , 347 ; Chicago School, 36 , 72–4 , 86 , 92 , 111–14 , 133–7 , 158 , 257–8 , 307 , 342–3 , 381–2 ; data as essential, 388–90 ; division of labour, 161 , 162 , 172–3 , 216 , 249 ; and evolutionary mechanisms, 158–9 ; ‘expectations’ concept, 97–8 , 102–3 , 121–2 , 341–2 ; forecasts and future planning as necessary, 103 ; framing of problems, 261 , 362 , 398–400 ; ‘grand auction’ of Arrow and Debreu, 343–5 ; hegemony of optimisation, 40–2 , 110 – 14 ; Hicks–Samuelson axioms, 435–6 ; market fundamentalism, 220 ; market price equilibrium, 254 , 343–4 , 381–2 ; markets as necessarily incomplete, 344 , 345 , 349 ; Marshall’s definition of, 381 , 382 ; as ‘non-stationary’, 16 , 35–6 , 45–6 , 102 , 236 , 339–41 , 349 , 350 , 394–6 ; oil shock (1973), 223 ; Phillips curve, 340 ; and ‘physics envy’, 387 , 388 ; and power laws, 238–9 ; as practical knowledge, 381 , 382–3 , 385–8 , 398 , 399 , 405 ; public role of the social scientist, 397–401 ; reciprocity in a modern economy, 191–2 , 328–9 ; and reflexivity, 35–6 , 309 , 394 ; risk and volatility, 124–5 , 310 , 333 , 335–6 , 421–3 ; Romer’s ‘mathiness’, 93–4 , 95 ; shift or structural break, 236 ; Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, 163 , 254 , 343 ; social context of, 17 ; sources of data, 389 , 390 ; surge in national income since 1800, 161 ; systems as non-linear, 102 ; teaching’s emphasis on quantitative methods, 389 ; validity of research findings, 245 ‘Economists Free Ride, Does Anyone Else?’


Active Measures by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, 4chan, active measures, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, continuation of politics by other means, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, East Village, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, guest worker program, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, operational security, peer-to-peer, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

The Americans’ aim, he said, was to weaken Russia from within: “to spread distrust for the ruling authorities and the bodies of power within society.” Meanwhile, Unit 26165 officers had “mined” some bitcoin, then a favored cryptocurrency widely, but falsely, believed to enable anonymous payments. This meant that the GRU had earned some of its own cryptographic money by dedicating computing resources to verifying and registering payments on a public ledger.9 Now, five days after Putin’s Q&A, the spies used $37 worth of freshly minted bitcoin to reserve a domain called electionleaks.com with a Romanian web-hosting company called THC Servers, leaving a cryptographic trail of evidence in the process.10 But the site was never furnished with content.

The attack seriously compromised the Democratic Party’s internal and external communications.12 The clandestine intruders also accessed the DNC’s telephone systems, giving the military intelligence officers access to phone calls and even voice mail inside the Democratic headquarters, all while an election campaign was in full swing.13 Just one day after compromising the DNC, on April 19, the GRU registered yet another website, DCLeaks.com, using the same Romanian hosting company, and paying for the new site out of the same pool of bitcoin. Now the GRU needed to do some web design. The next day, on April 20, the Russian operators finished drawing a sleek logo, with “DC” in blue, the white silhouette of the Capitol building perched between the D and the C, and “Leaks” printed in red underneath.14 The GRU worked through May on getting the leak portal ready for publication.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

At worst, we could end up with a chaotic ever-changing constellation of currencies challenging globalization on three separate fronts: first, the desire for individual countries to deflect their debt problem somewhere else; second, the American economy’s diminishing status on the world stage; and third, the absence of a global financial imperium to replace the US. It’s no great surprise that, given this prospect, interest in new currency algorithms – most obviously the Blockchain that underlies Bitcoin – is on the increase. ‘CONSPANSIONARY’ MONETARY POLICY Monetary policy’s redistributional qualities are not, however, confined to cross-border effects alone. Within countries, it increasingly appears that monetary stimulus has both expansionary and contractionary effects – a combination that might best be termed ‘conspansionary’.8 Before the global financial crisis, these effects tended to even out over time.

London, January 2017 INDEX Abbasids (i), (ii) Abu Bakr (i) Acemoglu, Daron (i) advertising (i) Afghanistan (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Africa (i) China and (i) high levels of ethnic diversity (i) oil, commodities and (i) population percentages (i) ‘scramble for’ (i), (ii) sub-Saharan nations (i), (ii), (iii) trade flows and slavery (i) ageing population (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Agincourt, Battle of (i) Al Qaeda (i), (ii)n2 Alaska (i) Ali (cousin/son-in-law to Prophet Mohammad) (i) Alibaba (i) Allies (Second World War) (i) Almaty (i) Almohads (i) Almoravids (i) Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) (i) Amazon (i) America see United States American Civil War (i), (ii) American dollar (i), (ii) as good as gold (i) global foreign exchange market and (i) peso and (i) premier reserve currency (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) American Dream (i) American Samoa (i) Amin, Idi (i) Amsterdam Treaty (1997) (i), (ii) Anatolia (i) Andalucía (i) Andes (i) Angell, Norman (i), (ii), (iii) Angola (i) ‘animal spirits’ (i) Annecy (i) Apple (i), (ii) Arab nations (i), (ii) Arab Spring (i) Arabic language (i), (ii) Arabs (i), (ii), (iii) Aramaic (i) Arc of Prosperity (i) Argentina (i), (ii), (iii) Armenia (i) ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) (i) Asia see also China and other individual countries 1997/8 crisis (i), (ii), (iii) ageing population (i) balance of payments deficits (i) Central Asia (i), (ii), (iii) Columbus’s belief (i) East Asia (i) emerging market labour (i) events impinging on the West (i) immigrants in America (i) mathematical ability (i) Obama and (i), (ii), (iii) rail connections (i) Russia and (i) Trump and a vacuum (i) Asian Development Bank (i) Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Asiatic Barred Zone Act (i) al-Assad, Bashar (i), (ii) asylum seekers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)n17 see also immigration; refugees Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal (i) Atlantic (i), (ii) Austen, Jane (i) austerity (i), (ii), (iii) Australia ASEAN and (i) Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and (i) average incomes (i) foreign-born share of population (i) Second Gulf War (i) tobacco policy (i) Austria (i), (ii) Austro-Hungarian Empire (i), (ii) Axis (Second World War) (i) Azerbaijan (i) Bagehot, Walter (i) Baghdad (i) Baker, James (III) (i) balance of payments (i) Asian Crisis (i) Latin America (i) Plaza Accord and (i) UK and Suez (i) US (i), (ii) Varoufakis on (i) Balkans (i) Baltic Sea (i), (ii) bancor (i), (ii), (iii) Bangladesh (i) Bank of Credit and Commerce International (i) Bank of England (i), (ii) Bank of Japan (i) bankers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) see also central banks Barings (i), (ii)n1 Basel I (i) Basel II (i) Basra (i) Battle of Bretton Woods, The (Ben Steil) (i)n4 BBC Two (i) Bedford (i) Beijing (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Belarus (i), (ii) Belgium (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Belt and Road strategy (i), (ii) Benn, Tony (i) Bentham, Jeremy (i) Berbers (i) Bergère, 14 rue (i) Berghof sanatorium (i) Berlin Wall (fall of) asylum seekers after (i) changing times after (i), (ii) Poland goes from strength to strength (i) relative living standards after fall (i) Soviet living standards (i) US military spending and (i) Bernanke, Ben (i) Big Brother (i) Bilderberg Club (i) bin Laden, Osama (i) Bitcoin (i) Black and White Minstrel Show, The (i) Black Death (i) Black Sea (i), (ii), (iii) Blair, Tony (i), (ii), (iii) Blanchard, Olivier (i) Blockchain (i) Blue Feed (i) BMW (i) BNP Paribas (i) Boers (i) Boko Haram (i) Bolsheviks (i) see also communism borders (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) see also cross-border capital flow capital flows see cross-border capital flow EU and (i) globalization and (i) historical accident (i) Mediterranean (i) movement of labour (i), (ii) post-global financial crisis (i), (ii) railways and (i) slowly dissolving (i), (ii) technology and (i), (ii) Triffin Dilemma (i) Boston (i), (ii) Boughton, James M.


pages: 299 words: 88,375

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy by Eric O'Neill

active measures, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, computer age, cryptocurrency, deep learning, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, fear of failure, full text search, index card, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, PalmPilot, ransomware, rent control, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, thinkpad, Timothy McVeigh, web application, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, young professional

But today, many of those spies don’t even know that they’re compromised. CHAPTER 27 THERE ARE NO HACKERS, ONLY SPIES On Friday, May 12, 2017, North Korea started a pandemic that made the world look up and listen. Bright-red screens popped up on more than 200,000 infected computers worldwide, with a mocking message demanding that users pay $300 in Bitcoin to the attackers before a countdown timer expired and all their data disappeared forever. Those who did pay quickly learned that the ransom demand was a hoax: all the data was already gone. More than 150 countries desperately fought the attack, but resistance was futile. The malware leapt across borders at the speed of thought, worming its way through businesses and government agencies, wreaking havoc in banks and universities, shutting down airports and bringing hospitals to a standstill.

A July 13, 2018, indictment from the Robert Mueller investigation accused Lukashev and eleven other Russian GRU officers of hacking into the computers of US persons involved in the 2016 presidential election, stealing documents from those persons, and staging the release of that information in order to interfere with the election. To mask their connection to Russia, the twelve cyber spies used false identities and exploited a network of computers located across the world funded by cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin. These “middle server” computers acted as proxies to obscure the connection between the Russian attackers and their victims at the DCCC, DNC, and Hillary Clinton campaign. Essentially, the Russians created a modern Moonlight Maze. Russia has long sought to influence and undermine elections and the political process of rival nations.


pages: 328 words: 90,677

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

Because of this environment, in which it’s easy to raise money without a lot of scrutiny of the fundamentals of your business, “there’s this general sense that if you believe you’re changing the world, you can lie to investors,” he argued. “That’s a bull market phenomenon . . . A whole generation has forgotten about the late 1990s, and so a lot of people who are buying these stocks or the Bitcoin craziness never saw these things go down 90 or 99 percent like my generation did. We saw a bull market phenomenon in the late 90s, and when the market turned down and the glasses became half empty and not half full, the access to capital dried up overnight. If you have positive cash flow you can survive, but if your burn rate is really high and capital markets shut down for six months, you’re dead.

YouTube video, June 30, 2015. https://youtu.be/1llEcjAIDjY INDEX A AC Propulsion, 23, 24, 26–27, 31, 37, 43, 49 Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), 124, 132–133 AEB (Automatic Emergency Braking), 125, 127 Anderson, Sterling, 140, 171 Andreessen, Marc, 41 Apple, 41, 95 Aptera, 11 Audi, 114, 203–204 auto industry, xi, 1–3, 11, 16, 42, 78–79, 197 Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB), 125, 127 Automotive News, 2 AutoNation, 99–100 autonomous cars, 163–179 Level 4, 175–176 Level 5, 170, 172, 175–176, 178 and Mobileye, 167–170 obstacles to, 171–179 as robotaxis, 166–167 Tesla’s master plan for, 163–167 Autopilot system, 88, 120–133, 140, 155, 161, 165, 167–173, 176–178, 212, 223, 228 Autosteer, 125 B Baer, Drake, 23, 30 Banks, Azealia, 219 barriers to entry, 35, 56 batteries fast-charging, 205 improvements in, 35 lead-acid, 23–24, 197 lithium-ion, 22–24, 26, 34 for Model S, 90–91, 200 Panasonic, 77, 183–184 production of, 48, 67–69, 183–184, 188–189, 205, 206 for Tesla Roadster, 37–38 battery swapping, 4, 5, 12, 88, 93, 108, 114–119 Begley, Ed, Jr., 45 Beijing Auto, 206 Bentley, 200–201, 203–204 Bitcoin, 104 Black Sheep Planet (blog), 99 Bloomberg News, 124, 189 Bloomberg View, 2 The Boring Company, 16 Brammo, 11–12 branding, 16, 18, 59–63, 225–234 environmentalism as, 231–232 large screen as Tesla’s, 225–231 Elon Musk’s role in, 232–234 Brin, Sergey, 44 Brown, Joshua, 127–133 Brownlee, Marques, 96 Bugatti Chiron, 214 BusinessInsider, 23, 30, 189 BuzzFeed, 218 C Cadillac, 132, 204 Cadillac Super Cruise system, 132 California, 3, 34, 48, 70, 170–171 California Air Resources Board (CARB), 12, 46, 118–119 carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP), 39, 48 Chanos, Jim, 103–105 China, 11, 204–207 Christensen, Clayton, 195–197 Chrysler Corporation, 2–3, 11, 15, 34, 88 Citroën (company), 193–195, 209 Citroën, André, 194–195 CleanTechnica, 100 Clooney, George, 61 CNBC, 189 Cocconi, Alan, 13, 24 Coda, 11 collisions, 127–133 Consumer Reports, 143 continuous improvement, 58 The Contrarian Investor, 96 Cordaro, Peter, 148–149, 151, 154–155 culture of Tesla, 51–52, 60 D The Daily Beast, 2 Daimler, 67–68, 75, 76, 81, 83, 159, 160, 204 Dediu, Horace, 56 defects, 59, 149–162 non-disclosure agreements surrounding, 149–151, 152, 155–156 “stealth recalls” due to, 160–161 Delphi, 171 Deming, W.


pages: 327 words: 90,013

Boundless: The Rise, Fall, and Escape of Carlos Ghosn by Nick Kostov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, bitcoin, business logic, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, Masayoshi Son, offshore financial centre, rolodex, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, the payments system

Ghosn counseled the former soldier to hunker down in Lebanon, but Taylor was losing his mind after so many weeks away. “I’m not a runner,” he told a relative. Instead, he asked Ghosn for help to cover his legal fees. Ghosn agreed to send the Taylors some money in cryptocurrency to keep the transfer secret. The sixty-five-year-old Ghosn had never handled Bitcoin before, so he asked Anthony to process the transfer. On February 16, Taylor had finally had enough. Having booked and not boarded three flights since landing in Lebanon, he decided to take a chance and hopped on a flight home to Massachusetts via Dubai. He made it home without issues. Back in the United States, he picked up his old activities, including playing basketball on Wednesday and working on expanding his vitamin water business.

In the extradition file prepared by Japanese prosecutors and passed on to US authorities, a document showed that Anthony Ghosn had made six transfers to Peter Taylor using the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange platform for a total of more than $500,000. When those details became public and reporters sought comment from Anthony, he was angry. He was back in the news, this time for financing an international caper. He had sent the Bitcoin to help out his dad, with no idea that the beneficiary was Peter Taylor. He didn’t want that kind of attention. * * * Greg Kelly, at sixty-four years old, was finally going to have his first day in court. He had been fighting to get his trial started for nearly two years and was eagerly waiting for a chance to defend himself against what he regarded as trumped-up charges.


Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere by Christian Wolmar

Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, BRICs, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, deskilling, Diane Coyle, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, gigafactory, high net worth, independent contractor, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, technological determinism, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, Zipcar

— Kate Barker Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax System to Make Us Healthier — David Fell A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier — Danny Dorling Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No Transport Policy — Christian Wolmar Travel Fast or Smart? A Manifesto for an Intelligent Transport Policy — David Metz Britain’s Cities, Britain’s Future — Mike Emmerich Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand To Money That Understands Us — David Birch The Weaponization of Trade: The Great Unbalancing of Politics and Economics — Rebecca Harding and Jack Harding Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere — Christian Wolmar Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere Christian Wolmar London Publishing Partnership Copyright © 2018 Christian Wolmar Published by London Publishing Partnership www.londonpublishingpartnership.co.uk Published in association with Enlightenment Economics www.enlightenmenteconomics.com All Rights Reserved ISBN: 978-1-907994-76-0 (interactive PDF) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This book has been composed in Candara Copy-edited and typeset by T&T Productions Ltd, London www.tandtproductions.com Contents Prefacevii Chapter 1 The myth of motoring freedom 1 Chapter 2 The hard sell 13 Chapter 3 The triple revolution 31 Chapter 4 What can cars do now?


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

It brought together a great many entrepreneurs and financiers who invest in entrepreneurs, some artists and yoga teachers to keep things interesting and healthy, and various others who tend to run in those circles and whose bios refer to them using terms like “influencer,” “thought leader,” “curator,” “convener,” “connector,” and “community manager.” Summit, being one of the hotter MarketWorld tickets, had drawn to this cruise ship the founders or representatives of such venerable institutions as AOL, Apple, the Bitcoin Foundation, Change.org, Dropbox, Google, Modernist Cuisine, MTV, Paypal, SoulCycle, Toms Shoes, Uber, Vine, Virgin Galactic, Warby Parker, and Zappos. There were some billionaires and many millionaires on board, and lots of others who had paid a typical American’s monthly salary to attend. Selena Soo, a New York publicist who was on board and represented many of these entrepreneur types, perfectly captured the prevailing view.

These protocol-equipped figures pressed companies to embrace a new philosophy: Do each of your activities where it can be best done, wherever that might be. You raised money from Korean investors, sourced from Mexico, sold in France, paid taxes in the Caribbean, and, when growth hit, chose a Swiss bank or ethereal Bitcoins to store the proceeds—or reinvested them in whatever venture on earth promised you the most attractive returns. It was an expansion of commercial freedom. Porter suggested, however, that it had disrupted an older pattern of companies behaving with a sense of citizenship. “There is somehow a detachment because of this notion of globalization—that we’re no longer an American company,” he said.


pages: 309 words: 96,168

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

But this has really, really done it.’ ” Danny has already spent a lot of time talking to his industry colleagues, asking, “What is the opportunity that this crisis is providing to deal with things that none of us as individuals have succeeded at dealing with in the past?” They’re now looking at ways to improve how restaurant people are paid, the tipping system, the problems restaurants face with payroll taxes and liquor laws, and relationships with landlords. Wences Casares, CEO of the Bitcoin wallet platform Xapo, and Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, both believe that a crisis can be a good time to make your company more adaptable and flexible—specifically, by changing the way the company is structured. More specifically, by pivoting to a remote office structure. If there’s one positive change wrought by the pandemic, it’s that companies large and small have witnessed firsthand the benefits of shifting to an all-remote workforce.

But as soon as we met him we said, ‘This guy is on to something.’ ” Endeavor helped Wences raise capital from Flatiron Partners and Chase Capital. They found him a COO. And a year later, Banco Santander bought Wences’s company for three quarters of a billion dollars. Wences went on to other successes, including starting the bitcoin wallet Xapo, which aims to “democratize money” by promoting a more stable universal currency. But at the time Linda Rottenberg approached Wences, he was skeptical that an outsider would have any interest in his business ideas. Linda says that after she helped him get going, he confessed something to her: “When I first approached him,” Linda says, “he thought I was running a cult.


pages: 318 words: 99,524

Why Aren't They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis by Kevin Rodgers

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, capital asset pricing model, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, diversification, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, latency arbitrage, law of one price, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Minsky moment, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Northern Rock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, Y2K, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

But what is true is that the same technologies that are undermining the traditional roles of banks could have a more radical and profound effect. Using computer power, the new competitors are not just limiting themselves to doing what banks have always done in better, faster and more convenient ways – they are also striking at the very heart of what banking means. Innovations like the virtual computer-generated currency Bitcoin are taking the monopoly of the creation of money away from governments and, with them, the banks that serve them. Online peer-to-peer funding initiatives like Prosper, LendingClub or Zopa enable individuals to lend directly to other individuals without going through the intermediation of a bank. Similar technological efforts – dubbed crowd-funding – are democratising the raising of equity capital for start-ups.

A Ackermann, Josef, 226 Admati, Anat, 211 ‘agency’ model, 7 agency-like risk, 119, 127 aggressive prices, 14–15 AIG, 90, 174 algorithms, 58, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 192–4, 195 Alpari, 83 alternative assets, 146–7 American Home Mortgage Investment Corporation, 89 amputation analogy, 128, 129 analytic formula, 106 Apple, 234 Application Program Interfaces (APIs), 59–60, 66, 71, 78 arbitrage, 31–2, 42, 44, 54, 70, 72, 91, 133, 142, 152 Asia, 3, 37–8, 56, 58, 106, 114, 117–18, 135–7, 146, 228 Financial Crisis (1997), xi, 114, 135–7, 139, 146, 228 Asian options, 106 assets, 6, 89, 92–5, 97, 104, 108, 112–14, 116, 117, 123, 136, 146, 147, 149, 150, 154–7, 160, 166–74, 203, 211, 223, 228, 233 alternative, 146–7 risk-weighted assets (RWA), 124–31, 134, 166, 208, 211 Atom Bank, 233 atomic bomb, see nuclear bomb Australia, 30, 65 dollars, 28, 75 Autobahn, 48–51, 53, 64, 68, 69–70, 78, 225 Automated Risk Manager (ARM), 53–5, 56–9, 64, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 79, 101, 129, 169 B back testing, 149 BaFin, 200, 202 bandwidth, 71 ‘banging the close’, 190 Bank for International Settlements (BIS), 73, 77, 80, 208 Bank of America, 174 Bank of England, 32, 173, 182, 233 bank runs, 89 bank tax, 216 Bankers Trust, xi–xii, 3–6, 24, 29–37, 40, 44, 46, 48, 65, 68, 103–14, 116–35, 137–143, 149, 166, 168, 169 carry trade, 108–10 Deutsche Bank takeover, 29–30, 34–5, 37, 46, 48, 166, 168 Emerging Markets, xi, 29–30, 116–17, 130–1, 143 Engine, 127–31, 135, 139, 157, 167, 169 exotic derivatives, 105–11, 127 Gibson Greetings suing, 109 Monte Carlo pricing, 111–14, 150 Procter and Gamble suing, 109 quantitative analysis, 103–8, 110–14, 126, 150 Risk Management, 122–31 risk-adjusted return on capital (RAROC), 126–7, 131 rouble-denominated bonds (GKOs), 118–32, 134, 138–43, 149, 152, 158, 159, 173 Russian Financial Crisis (1998), 115–16, 124, 137–143 Spreadsheet Solutions Framework (SSF), 111, 121, 138, 153 value at risk (VaR), 127–31, 135, 139, 169 Barcelona, Spain 87–9, 151, 159, 171, 172 Barclays, 63–6, 67, 68, 167, 186–7, 197 barrier products, 104, 107, 108 BARX, 64, 65 Basel Accords, 124, 125, 130, 166, 207–9, 211, 217, 231 basis points, 12 basis risk, 152 Bear Stearns, 88–9, 90, 172, 230 Bentham, Jeremy, 199 Berlin Wall, 204 Bernanke, Ben, 90 bid-offer spreads, see spread ‘Big Are Getting Bigger, The’, 41, 145 Big Bang (1986), 201 big figure, 13 binomial tree, 112–14 Bitcoin, 234 Black Monday (1987), 108, 138, 204, 207 Black–Scholes formula, 94–5, 97, 99, 105, 128, 219 Black, Fischer, 94–5, 97, 134, 135 BlackBerries, 169 Blackpool, England, 33 Blair, Tony, 120 Bloomberg, 9, 22–3, 142, 187, 189, 191, 197 Bohr, Niels, 43 bonds, xiv, 8, 23, 28, 33, 38, 89, 108–10, 118–43, 146–7, 151, 154–64, 170–2, 174, 192, 197, 211, 224–5 carry trade, 108–10 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), xiv, 154–64, 170–2, 174, 192, 224–5 credit default swaps (CDSs), 151 mortgage-backed, xiv, 197 rouble-denominated (GKOs), 118–32, 134, 138–43, 149, 152, 158, 159, 173 total return swaps (TRSs), 119–20, 136, 152 US government, 119, 129, 133, 147 bonuses, 5, 117, 161, 210, 216 boxes and arrows, 159 Brazil, 167, 231 Breuer, Rolf, 42 Bristol, England, x British Bankers Association (BBA), 182, 187 British pound, 9, 13, 28, 53, 184 Bruno, Philip, 234 BTAnalytics, 107, 108, 112, 134, 150 Businessweek, 170 C Cable, 9, 13, 28 California, United States, 234 calls, 19–21, 23, 27, 51, 53, 98, 99 Cambios, 21, 123 Cambridge University, 165 Canada, 88, 172 dollars, 28 Cannes, France, 35, 41, 44, 46, 55, 64, 65, 77 carry trade, 108–10 Case–Schiller index, 163, 170 cash settlement, 109 ‘CDO-squared’, 161 central banking, 79, 102–3, 187, 193, 220 Central Counterparties (CCPs), 209, 213–15, 229 chain of command, 224–6 Chase Manhattan, 51, 168, 169 Chemical Bank, 168, 169 Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), 193, 209 China, 78, 149, 229 Chopin, Frédéric, 61 circuit breakers, 80 Citigroup, 23, 27, 36–7, 47, 51, 68, 167, 216, 226, 229 Clackatron, 32–3, 54, 91 Cold War, 204 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), xiv, 154–64, 170–2, 174, 192, 224–5 multi-sector CDOs, 155 risk 154, 156, 158–63 sub-prime mortgages, 159–60, 170–2 synthetic, 163–4 tranches, 154–9, 161, 174, 208 colocation, 71 colonial currencies, 28 commodities, viii, xii, 144–50, 153–4, 157, 174, 223, 231–2 commodities indexes, 147–50, 153–4, 157, 163 commoditisation, 110–11 Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), 202 commodity futures, 92 Communism, 199 complex risk, 159, 222 complexity, 90, 100, 103–14, 121, 127, 130, 134, 136, 143, 157, 196, 200–1, 218–24, 225, 228, 229 Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR), 212 computers, ix–x, xii–xv, 6, 21–8, 32–55, 56–84, 89–90, 99–114, 116, 121, 127, 130, 134, 136, 138, 143, 144, 147, 150, 157, 160, 161, 164, 167, 169–70, 172, 190–200, 209, 213, 218–24, 225, 228, 231–5 algorithms, 58, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 192–4, 195 Autobahn, 48–51, 53, 64, 68, 69–70, 78, 225 Application Program Interfaces (APIs), 59–60, 66, 71, 78 Automated Risk Manager (ARM), 53–5, 56–9, 64, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 79, 101, 129, 169 BARX, 64, 65 BTAnalytics, 107, 108, 112, 134, 150 Clackatron, 32–3, 54, 91 complexity, 90, 100, 103–14, 121, 127, 130, 134, 136, 143, 157, 196, 200–1, 218–24, 225, 228, 229 DBAnalytics, 150, 153 decimalisation, 63–6, 67, 73, 77 decentralisation, 232–5 efficiency improvements, 169–70 Electronic Broking Services (EBS), 24–8, 31, 32–3, 42, 45, 46, 48, 50, 59–60, 63, 69–70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 83, 188 Electronic Communication Networks (ECNs), 59, 61, 66, 193 Engine, 127–31, 135, 139, 157, 167, 169 FX-fixing scandal (2013), 190–2 OPTICS, 101, 103, 131, 153, 170 options trade automation, 27, 33, 38–47 Piranha, 48 prime brokerage (PB), 61–3, 66, 120, 209 regulation, 209, 213 Revolutionary Application Program Interface Development (RAPID), 56–9, 77, 101 Reuters Dealing machines, 23, 25–8, 31, 32, 50, 59, 73 rogue systems, 79–80 screen scraping, 32–3, 50, 59 simplification, 231–2 spoofing, 192–3 spot trade automation, 23–8, 31–3, 42, 48–55, 56–84, 111, 199, 201 spreads, 80–3 concentration risk, 213 Conservative Party (UK), 201 correlation, 14, 79, 129–30, 142, 156–8, 160, 163 cost–benefit analysis, 41 Costello, Elvis, 140 counterparty credit risk, 141–2, 172, 201, 209 Countrywide, 90 credit default swaps (CDSs), xiv, 150–3, 157, 158, 164, 225 credit risk, 7, 8, 62–3, 123, 125–6, 130, 141, 151, 209 counterparty, 141–2, 172, 201, 202–3, 209 Credit Suisse, 140, 198 credit trading, 146–7, 150–63, 166, 175, 224 crowd-funding, 235 currency pairs, 9, 12, 14, 46, 53, 75, 80 Currenex, 59 CVIX, 74 D D:Ream, 120, 121 daisy-chaining, xiv DBAnalytics, 150, 153 decentralisation, 232–5 decimalisation, 63–6, 67, 73, 77 delta hedging, 97 ‘dentists, the’, 82–3 deposits, 124 derivatives, xi, xii, xiv, 44–5, 87, 91–114, 118, 119, 121, 127, 132, 134, 138–43, 144–5, 150–74, 182–6, 189, 196, 209, 210, 214, 218–25, 231 Asian options, 106 barrier products, 104, 107, 108 carry trade, 108–10 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), xiv, 154–64, 170–2, 174, 192, 224–5 commoditisation, 110–11 credit default swaps (CDSs), xiv, 150–3, 157, 158, 164, 225 delta hedging, 97 democratisation, 108, 219 double knockouts, 107 exotics, 105–11, 127 foreign exchange, 10, 13, 20, 23, 27, 33–4, 38, 43–7, 49, 77, 95–114, 222–3 forward rate agreements (FRAs), 182 gamma, 97–8, 100 Greeks, 98, 99, 101, 105, 107, 110, 111, 112, 114, 127, 129, 150, 157, 158, 182, 219 interest rate derivatives, 8, 92, 104, 132, 182–6, 214 lattice methods, 112, 150, 157 lookbacks, 107 over-the-counter (OTC) market, 96, 209 power options, 107 pricing, 91–5, 107, 111–14, 128, 133, 150 range trades, 107, 108 rho, 98 risk-weighted assets (RWA), 124–31, 134, 166, 208, 211 spoofing, 99, 192–3 strike price, 94, 95, 104, 113, 218 swaps, 8, 92, 119–20, 121, 125, 126, 132, 134, 136, 141, 148, 149, 152, 173 theta, 98, 140 time decay, 98 total return swaps (TRSs), 119–20, 136, 152 tree approach, 112–14 vega, 98 volatility, 94, 98, 128–9 weather, 144–5, 146 zero coupon bonds, 118–31, 134, 138–43, 149, 152, 158, 173 desk real estate, 25 Deutsche Bank, vii–x, xii–xiii, 12, 21, 23, 28, 29–30, 33–55, 56–80, 84, 87, 101, 122, 144–74, 179–80, 187, 190, 195–6, 199, 200, 201, 209–10, 212–13, 216, 222, 224–6, 231 Autobahn, 48–51, 53, 64, 68, 69–70, 78, 225 Automated Risk Manager (ARM), 53–5, 56–9, 64, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 79, 101, 129, 169 BaFin audits, 200, 202 Bankers Trust acquisition, 29–30, 34–5, 37, 46, 48, 166, 168 Barcelona Conference, 87–9, 151, 159, 171, 172 Commodities, 144–50, 153–4, 157, 165, 175, 223, 231–2 Complex Risk, 159, 222 Compliance, 195, 196 Corporate and Investment Banking division, 166 Credit Trading, 146–7, 150–63, 166, 175, 224 CVIX, 74 DBAnalytics, 150, 153 e-trading, 55, 57, 67–73, 75, 84, 122 Foreign Exchange, vii–x, xii–xiii, 12, 21, 23, 28, 29–30, 33–55, 56–80, 84, 87, 101, 122, 165, 175, 210, 212–13, 224, 225 FX-fixing scandal (2013), 187, 190 Global Currencies and Commodities, 165–6 Great Financial Crisis (2007–8), 174–5 Liquid Commodity Index (DBLCI), 148, 149 market share, 36, 41, 48, 51–2, 54, 55, 56, 57, 64, 66–8, 70, 77 MortgageIT acquisition, 160 offsites, 35–41, 46, 55, 64, 65, 77 options trade automation, 27, 33, 38–47 Plankton Strategy, 38, 40, 55, 58 production credits, 49, 50 regulation, 200, 202, 209–10, 212–13 Revolutionary Application Program Interface Development (RAPID), 56–9, 77, 101 Risk Management, 175, 206–7, 209, 226 risk-weighted assets (RWA), 124–31, 134, 166 simplification, 231–2 small deals team, 52, 55 spot trade automation, 48–55, 56–77 video messaging system, 71 weather derivatives, 144–5, 146 Deutschmark, 9, 96, 97, 99, 100, 104 Dewar, Sally, 197 Dickens, Charles, 162 Digital Reasoning Systems Inc., 197–8 dividends, 91, 147, 212 Dodd–Frank Act (2010), 209, 230 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 30 dot-com boom (1997–2000), 37, 146, 207 double knockouts, 107 Dow Jones, 79, 138, 147 Dresdner Bank, 20, 48 drive-bys, 17, 20, 68, 132 E e-trading, 55, 57, 67–73, 75, 84, 122 efficiency improvements, 169–70 efficient market theory, 203 Electronic Broking Services (EBS), 24–8, 31, 32–3, 42, 45, 46, 48, 50, 59–60, 63, 69–70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 83, 188 Electronic Communication Networks (ECNs), 59, 61, 66, 193 elephant deals, 38 email, 169, 191, 195, 197, 199 emerging markets, xi, 6, 29–30, 116–43, 147, 228 Empire State Building, New York, 130 ‘Engine’, 127–31, 135, 139, 157, 167, 169 engineering, x–xi, 10 Enron, 156 equities, viii, 23, 50, 66, 71, 74, 80, 89, 95, 146, 193, 207, 211, 235 circuit breakers, 80 colocation, 71 sales-traders, 50, 78 euro, 22, 28, 31, 37, 53, 69, 80, 81–3, 189 Euromoney, 36, 41, 47, 51–2, 54, 55, 56, 57, 64, 66–8, 70, 77, 81, 233 Europe, Middle Eastern and African (EMEA) markets, 117–18 European Union (EU), 102, 196, 201, 203, 207, 210, 212, 230 Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), xi, 22, 102–3, 106, 123, 130, 136, 207, 224 Liikanen Report (2012), 230 Maastricht Treaty (1992), 102 Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), 209 ‘Every Day I Write the Book’ (Elvis Costello), 140 Excel, 107, 221 exchange rates, 9, 11–13, 14, 17, 32, 100 exotic derivatives, 105–11, 127 F ‘F9 monkeys’, 221 Fannie Mae, 90 Federal Reserve, xii, 90, 109, 143, 187, 202–6, 212 Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 193 fibre-optic cables, 77, 84 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), 167 Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), 190 Financial Services Act (2013), 210 Financial Stability Board (FSB), 212, 214, 216 Financial Times, 116, 187 financial transactions tax, 216 fines, 181, 190, 196 First Chicago, 168 Fitch, 155 fixings, 181, 187–92, 198 Flannery, Mark, 215 Flash Crash (2010), 79–80, 193 Florence, Italy, 78 Florida, United States, 116 football, 10–11, 43, 83, 117, 167, 195 Forbes, 234 foreign direct investment (FDI), 136 foreign exchange (FX), viii, xi, xii, xiv, 3–28, 29–55, 56–84, 89, 90–1, 95–114, 115–44, 145, 158–9, 165, 174, 175, 180, 181–94, 196–7, 210, 213, 222–3, 224, 225, 233 aggressive prices, 14–15 Application Program Interfaces (APIs), 59–60, 66, 71, 78 Autobahn, 48–51, 53, 64, 68, 69–70, 78, 225 Automated Risk Manager (ARM), 53–5, 56–9, 64, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 79, 101, 129, 169 banging the close, 190 BARX, 64, 65 bidirectional flows, 69 calls, 19–21, 23, 27, 51, 53, 98, 99 carry trade, 108–10 Clackatron, 32–3, 54, 91 colocation, 71 complex risk, 159, 222 corporations, 9, 36, 61, 76, 96, 109–10 costs, 42 currency pairs, 9, 12, 14, 46, 53, 75, 80 decimalisation, 63–6, 67, 73, 77 drive-bys, 17, 20, 68, 132 Electronic Broking Services (EBS), 24–8, 31, 32–3, 42, 45, 46, 48, 50, 59–60, 63, 69–70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 83, 188 Electronic Communication Networks (ECNs), 59, 61, 66, 193 elephant deals, 38 emerging markets, xi, 6, 29–30, 116–43 Engine, 127–31, 135, 139, 157, 167, 169 fixings, 181, 187–92, 198 forwards trades, 10, 52, 77, 92, 121 hedge funds, 9, 29, 36, 57, 61, 66, 69–74, 77, 81, 120, 123, 131–5, 141–3 hedging, 97, 108, 117–18, 190, 225 high frequency trading (HFT), 57, 63, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 84, 180, 194 LIBOR scandal (2012), 181–7, 188, 189, 190, 197, 198 liquidity, 18–19, 21, 27, 80–1, 83, 233 making rates, 13–21, 27, 38–9, 50, 96 market makers, 18–19, 21, 83 market shares, 41, 48, 51–2, 54, 55, 65, 66–8, 70, 77, 81, 169 ‘mine-and-yours’, 15–16, 18, 19, 192 Monte Carlo pricing, 111–14 off system trades, 111 OPTICS, 101, 103, 131, 153, 170 options trade, 10, 13, 20, 23, 27, 33–4, 38, 43–7, 49, 77, 95–114, 222–3 over-the-counter (OTC) market, 96, 209 passive v. active strategies, 17–19 pay, 43 pension funds, 9, 61, 76, 96 pips, 13, 18, 41, 65, 73, 77 Piranha, 48 pre-deal services, 8 prime brokerage (PB), 61–3, 66, 120, 209 production credits, 49–50 proprietary trading, 22, 31, 39, 46–7, 125 relative value trades, 72–3 retail trade, retail aggregators, 21, 61, 66, 74, 75, 79, 82–3 Reuters Dealing machines, 23, 25–8, 31, 32, 50, 59, 73 Revolutionary Application Program Interface Development (RAPID), 56–9, 77, 101 risk, 15, 16, 19, 20–1, 24, 29, 31, 38, 39, 40, 44–5, 49, 51, 53, 62, 77, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101–8, 110–14, 121–31, 135, 192 risk management systems, 24, 40, 44–5, 53–5, 56–9, 64, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 99, 101–8, 110–14, 121–31, 135 rogue systems, 79–80 salespeople, 8–9, 11, 13–15, 20, 24, 28, 29, 33, 35, 37, 46, 47–52, 68, 96, 120 settlements, 5, 24, 40, 44, 51, 61, 101, 209 screen scraping, 32–3, 50, 59 skewed prices, 18, 19, 73, 96, 98 slippage, 188–9 speculation, 21, 31, 102–14 spot, 3–28, 33–4, 42–4, 46, 48–55, 67, 76, 77, 91, 96, 97, 98–9, 108, 111, 118, 122, 159, 165, 169, 188, 189, 199, 201, 222 spread, 12, 14–15, 16, 18, 19, 31, 41–2, 44, 45, 53, 55, 61, 64, 68, 69, 75, 80, 96, 225 traders, 3–28, 33, 35, 38, 41, 43, 46, 50, 52–4, 67, 73, 76, 78, 96, 99, 122, 189 Triangle arbitrage, 31–2, 42, 54, 91, 122 two-way pricing, 11–21, 23, 99 volatility, 14, 26, 46–7, 74–5, 80, 98, 137 wallet, 40 window, 118, 137, 188 WM/R, 187–8 zero coupon bonds, 118–32, 134, 138–43, 149, 152, 158, 159, 173 forward rate agreements (FRAs), 182 forwards trades, 10, 52, 77, 92, 121 Four Seasons, The, 3–5, 9 France, 6–7, 35, 37, 41, 46, 55, 64, 65, 77, 102, 140, 159, 207 Freddie Mac, 90 free market economics, 202–6 FTSE 100, 147 Fuld, Dick, 226 FX All, 59, 78 FX-fixing scandal (2013), 181, 187–92, 198 FXCM, 82–3 G G20 nations, 209, 212, 216 gambling, 31, 102–14 gamma, 97–8, 100 Gaussian copula, 158 geekiness, x, 10, 43, 223 geopolitics, 229 Germany, vii–x, xii, xiii, 16, 28, 36, 44, 54, 75, 144–5, 159, 167, 180, 200, 204 mark, 9, 96, 97, 99, 100, 104 Gibson Greetings, 109 GKOs (rouble-denominated bonds), 118–32, 134, 138–43, 149, 152, 158, 159, 173 Glass–Steagall Act (1933), 168, 201, 230 globally systemically important banks (G-SIBs), 216 Goldman Sachs, 23, 146, 198, 216, 230 Commodity Index (GSCI), 148 Google, 78, 234 GQ, 141 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (1999), 168, 201 Great Depression (1929–39), 168 Great Financial Crisis (2007–8), xiii, xiv–xv, 74–5, 87–90, 114, 124, 163, 172–5, 179–80, 196, 204–6, 207, 217, 219, 220, 223, 227–8 Greece, 82, 92, 181 Greeks, 98, 99, 101, 105, 107, 110, 111, 112, 114, 127, 129, 150, 157, 158, 182, 219 Greenspan, Alan, 202–6 GSA, 233 Gulf War (1990–1), xi, 22, 95 Gulliver, Stuart, 231 H ‘haircuts’, 132 Haldane, Andrew, 173 hand signals, 16 Hang Seng, 137 Harrison, William, 168 Harrow School, London, 149 Harvard University, 166 La Haye Sainte, Belgium, 10 hedge funds, xi, 9, 29, 36, 57, 61, 66, 69–74, 77, 81, 97, 114, 116, 122, 123, 131–5, 141–2, 164, 171, 172, 201, 229, 233 hedging, 94, 95, 97, 108, 117–18, 144, 145–6, 157, 190, 225, 226 delta hedging, 97 Hellwig, Martin, 211 Henry, John, 28 Herrhausen, Alfred, 226 high frequency trading (HFT), 57, 63, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 84, 180, 194 Hodgkin, Howard, 195 Holder, Noddy, 232 Hong Kong, 137 Hotspot, 59 Hounslow, London, 193 HSBC, 216, 229, 231 Hussein, Saddam, 22, 95 I ICAP, 73 Iceland, 167, 174 identity theft insurance, 231 Immendorff, Jörg, 56 indexes, 147–50, 153–4, 157, 163, 190 India, 149 Indonesia, 135, 137, 139 IndyMac, 90 initial margin, 120, 132 insurance, 93, 151, 164, 168, 172, 174, 229 Intelligent Flow Monster, 146 interest rates, viii, 7, 10, 92, 108–10, 135, 225 carry trade, 108–10 derivatives, 104, 132, 182–6, 214 futures, 182 LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate), 109, 181–7, 188, 189, 190, 197, 198 swaps, 8, 92, 182–4 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 132, 135, 140, 211, 214, 230 International Swap Dealers Association (ISDA), 152, 153 Internet, xii, 5, 42, 76, 78, 169, 191–2, 195, 197, 199, 228, 233–5 investment banking, 36, 87, 110, 133, 145–6, 151, 158, 165–8, 229–30 iPhone, 5, 228 Iran, 181–2 Iraq, xi, 22, 95 Israel, 29, 138 Italy, 10, 13, 22, 78, 115–16, 141 lira, 22, 102–3, 123 iTraxx, 153 J Jagger, Mick, 87 Japan, 61, 72, 79, 159 yen, 9, 14, 17, 28, 71–2, 75, 79, 80, 136, 184 JPMorgan Chase, 131, 150, 158, 163, 168, 182, 197, 216, 229, 231, 23 J.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

Regulators will want to suppress twenty-first-century digital curb exchanges to prevent price discovery and maintain the myth of pre-panic prices. Curb exchanges could be conducted online in an eBay-style format with settlement by bitcoin or cash delivered face-to-face. Title to shares can be recorded in a distributed ledger using a blockchain. Eliminating cash helps the suppression of alternative markets, although bitcoin presents new challenges to elite power. The second reason for eliminating cash is to impose negative interest rates. Central banks are in a losing battle against deflationary trends. One way to defeat deflation is to promote inflation with negative real interest rates.


pages: 480 words: 112,463

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gravity well, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, out of africa, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spinning jenny, synthetic biology, TED Talk, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic, Works Progress Administration

The industry of fabric is older than pottery or metallurgy and perhaps even than agriculture and stock-breeding. Cloth is the original technology.7 Trade and Technology The weavers take the intertwined threads and through their expert, value-added activity create a strong fabric – which is exactly what the global distributed network of computers creating the Bitcoin Blockchain does. David Orban, ‘Weaving is a Better Metaphor for Bitcoin, Instead of Mining’, 2014 In 2015, Google I/O, one of the firm’s secretive research and development divisions, announced that they were planning to make a pair of trousers that would also be computers. They would be made of a special textile – available in a wide palette of colours and myriad textures – that would function as a touchscreen, registering special gestures and able to control devices such as smartphones.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

The subsequent second and third waves of industrialization—which brought the world the internal combustion engine, cars, planes, and computers—made the human footprint on the environment only worse, even as it increased the quality of life for billions of people. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, which started recently, and brought us innovations such as the Internet of Things, 5G, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrencies, is so far adding to the ever-expanding human footprint on the environment. Electricity required to produce Bitcoin, one of the most popular cryptocurrencies, leads to annual carbon emissions of 22 to 23 megatons of CO2, scientists calculated.37 That figure is comparable to the emissions of countries such as Jordan or Sri Lanka. And while connected devices make our energy infrastructure smart, that doesn't automatically mean it turns green as well.

, France Culture, November 2019, https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/linvite-des-matins/fin-du-mois-fin-du-monde-meme-combat. 27 “Per Capita Emissions, Navigating the Numbers: Greenhouse Gas Data and International Climate Policy,” World Resources Institute, http://pdf.wri.org/navigating_numbers_chapter4.pdf. 28 “Palau Climate Change Policy for Climate and Disaster Resilient Low Emissions Development,” Government of Palau, 2015, p.22-23, https://www.pacificclimatechange.net/sites/default/files/documents/PalauCCPolicy_WebVersion-FinanceCorrections_HighQualityUPDATED%2011182015Compressed.pdf. 29 “Urbanization,” Our World in Data, November 2019, https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization. 30 “68% of the World Population Projected to Live in Urban Areas by 2050, Says UN,” UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, May 2018, https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-revision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html. 31 “Global Gridded Model of Carbon Footprints (GGMCF),” http://citycarbonfootprints.info/. 32 “Sizing Up the Carbon Footprint of Cities,” NASA Earth Observatory, April 2019, https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144807/sizing-up-the-carbon-footprint-of-cities. 33 “Why a Car Is an Extravagance in Singapore,” CNN, October 2017, https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/31/asia/singapore-cars/index.html. 34 “World Population Growth,” Our World in Data, May 2019, https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth 35 “Russia's Natural Population Decline to Hit 11-Year Record in 2019,” The Moscow Times, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/12/13/russias-natural-population-decline-hit-11-year-record-2019-a68612. 36 “Fertility Rate, Total (Births per Woman)—India,” World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=IN. 37 “The Carbon Footprint of Bitcoin,” Christian Stoll, Lena Klaaßen, Ulrich Gallersdörfer, Joule, July 2019, https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30255-7. 38 “Firms Must Justify Investment in Fossil Fuels, Warns Mark Carney,” Andrew Sparrow, The Guardian, December 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/dec/30/firms-must-justify-investment-in-fossil-fuels-warns-mark-carney. 39 “The Net-Zero Challenge: Fast-Forward to Decisive Climate Action,” World Economic Forum, January 2020, https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-net-zero-challenge-fast-forward-to-decisive-climate-action. 40 “German Air Travel Slump Points to Spread of Flight Shame,” William Wilkes and Richard Weiss, Bloomberg, December 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-19/german-air-travel-slump-points-to-spread-of-flight-shame?


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

The subsequent second and third waves of industrialization—which brought the world the internal combustion engine, cars, planes, and computers—made the human footprint on the environment only worse, even as it increased the quality of life for billions of people. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, which started recently, and brought us innovations such as the Internet of Things, 5G, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrencies, is so far adding to the ever-expanding human footprint on the environment. Electricity required to produce Bitcoin, one of the most popular cryptocurrencies, leads to annual carbon emissions of 22 to 23 megatons of CO2, scientists calculated.37 That figure is comparable to the emissions of countries such as Jordan or Sri Lanka. And while connected devices make our energy infrastructure smart, that doesn't automatically mean it turns green as well.

, France Culture, November 2019, https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/linvite-des-matins/fin-du-mois-fin-du-monde-meme-combat. 27 “Per Capita Emissions, Navigating the Numbers: Greenhouse Gas Data and International Climate Policy,” World Resources Institute, http://pdf.wri.org/navigating_numbers_chapter4.pdf. 28 “Palau Climate Change Policy for Climate and Disaster Resilient Low Emissions Development,” Government of Palau, 2015, p.22-23, https://www.pacificclimatechange.net/sites/default/files/documents/PalauCCPolicy_WebVersion-FinanceCorrections_HighQualityUPDATED%2011182015Compressed.pdf. 29 “Urbanization,” Our World in Data, November 2019, https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization. 30 “68% of the World Population Projected to Live in Urban Areas by 2050, Says UN,” UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, May 2018, https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-revision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html. 31 “Global Gridded Model of Carbon Footprints (GGMCF),” http://citycarbonfootprints.info/. 32 “Sizing Up the Carbon Footprint of Cities,” NASA Earth Observatory, April 2019, https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144807/sizing-up-the-carbon-footprint-of-cities. 33 “Why a Car Is an Extravagance in Singapore,” CNN, October 2017, https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/31/asia/singapore-cars/index.html. 34 “World Population Growth,” Our World in Data, May 2019, https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth 35 “Russia's Natural Population Decline to Hit 11-Year Record in 2019,” The Moscow Times, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/12/13/russias-natural-population-decline-hit-11-year-record-2019-a68612. 36 “Fertility Rate, Total (Births per Woman)—India,” World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=IN. 37 “The Carbon Footprint of Bitcoin,” Christian Stoll, Lena Klaaßen, Ulrich Gallersdörfer, Joule, July 2019, https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30255-7. 38 “Firms Must Justify Investment in Fossil Fuels, Warns Mark Carney,” Andrew Sparrow, The Guardian, December 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/dec/30/firms-must-justify-investment-in-fossil-fuels-warns-mark-carney. 39 “The Net-Zero Challenge: Fast-Forward to Decisive Climate Action,” World Economic Forum, January 2020, https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-net-zero-challenge-fast-forward-to-decisive-climate-action. 40 “German Air Travel Slump Points to Spread of Flight Shame,” William Wilkes and Richard Weiss, Bloomberg, December 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-19/german-air-travel-slump-points-to-spread-of-flight-shame?


pages: 391 words: 106,255

Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge by Ted Conover

autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fixed income, gentrification, George Floyd, McMansion, off grid, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, place-making, social distancing, supervolcano

As the friendship grew, they became partners in some gold-mining claims, mostly on Blanca, and interested in the idea of lost treasure. Both had other moneymaking schemes, as well. Matt’s included allowing an application to take over his smartphone’s processor when he wasn’t using it, in order to mine Bitcoin. His take from this was pennies a day “but it adds up,” he said. Both loved raising animals and tried to monetize that: Matt’s latest scheme was shipping horse manure to buyers who found him via eBay. It was organic, the product of alfalfa feeding; he sold it dried, wrapped in plastic, and packed into a flat-rate postal service box.

See also La Puente Alaska, 70 alcoholism, 57, 80 allergies, 186–87 al-Qaeda, 89 Amalia, New Mexico, 194 America first, 70 American flag, 4, 89, 167, 221 American West, history of, 112–14, 119–26, 248 AmeriCorps, 13, 21, 65, 208–9, 213, 237 Amish, 173 Andersen, Paul, 192–93 Anderson, Harold, 114–20, 218, 254, 264n Angels in America (Kushner), 68 Ania (Polish immigrant), 88–92 antelope, pronghorn, 11, 40, 71–72 anti-government ideology, 70, 88–92 Antonito, Colorado, 10, 14, 20, 54, 73, 93, 95–98, 100, 124, 155, 160, 165, 185, 190–91, 199, 212, 215 Appalachia, 70 Apple Valley, California, 123 Arapahoe people, 190 Arellano, Sidney, 66, 199–200 Arizona, 70, 112, 159 Armando (Paul’s neighbor), 17–18 Ashley (Grubers’ cousin), 73–74 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 76 Aspen, 174 Aspen Times, 192 Asperger’s syndrome, 148, 150, 154 at-risk families program, 25 Attica prison, 199 Aurora, Colorado, 80 autism, 154, 265n–66n auto insurance, lack of, 91 B Bankers Life, 46, 119–22, 129, 142 Baroz, Adre “Psycho,” 198–99 BBC World Service, 138 “Beach, The,” 81–82, 95 Beaubien, Carlos, 112–13 Beaubien, Narciso, 112 bentonite mine, 97 Bewitched (TV show), 160 Big Rock Candy Mountain, The (Stegner), 217 bipolar disorder, 211–12 birds deaths of, 228–32 watching, 100, 229 Birds, The (film), 231 birth certificates, 90 bison, 12 Bitcoin mining, 148 Black Lives Matter, 219–23, 227 Blacks, 20, 65, 91, 144–45, 176–84, 227 Blanca Peak (Sisnaajini), 9–11, 10, 13, 15, 23, 26, 50, 64, 82, 106, 124, 127, 129, 141, 148, 200–203, 245, 263n Blanca RV Park, 34, 86, 106, 221 Blanton, Carolyn Gloria, 191 Blanca (town), 10, 25, 49, 81, 85, 88, 116, 119, 127, 146, 243–44, 252, 265n Bobby (Troy Zinn’s friend), 121, 195 Bosdell, Don and Sherry, 166–70 Bowie, David, 217 Branson online curriculum, 72 Brown, Calvin, 220 Brown, Wesley, 260 Brownlow, Lonnie, 123–24 Bundy family, 91 Bureau of Land Management (BLM), 15, 97, 259 burn pits, 105, 157, 170–72 Busse, Brian, 147 C California, 70, 73, 112, 122, 159, 198 Calvin (Vera’s friend), 86–88, 90, 92 Camaro Jim (neighbor), 144–45, 162–63, 230–31 camping, 28, 32, 51, 86, 117, 135, 160, 236 cancer, 78–79 Cano’s Castle, 14 capital letters, 89–90 carbon footprint, 69, 232 Caring for Colorado, 25 Caro, Robert, 128 “Car Wash” Kevin, 237, 256–57 Casper, Wyoming, 44, 74, 207 Catholic Church, 196 cattle, 19, 46, 94–95, 119–21, 140, 143, 144–5, 167, 196, 205, 214, 227 mutilated, 232–34 cell phones, 11, 35, 97, 131, 156, 201 Central Americans, 20 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 88–89 Cerro de la Olla mountain, 234 Chama settlement, 110 Changes in the Land (Cronon), 268n Charlie (Ania and Jurek’s friend), 91–92 Chatwin, Bruce, 260 Chávez, César, 98 Cheap and Easy Way to Find Gold, The (video), 201 Cherokee people, 264n Cheslock, Lance, 13, 18, 21, 24–25, 27–28, 34, 65–66, 85, 96, 98, 100–101, 199, 217, 219, 229, 234, 253, 256 Cheslock, Rachael, 24, 27 Cheyenne people, 190 Chicago, 176–77, 184, 192–93 Chicago Tribune, 109, 126 Chicano activists, 191 China, 227 Choman, Chet, 127–30, 265n Christians, 87–88, 92, 155, 168–69, 215 Christmas, 65–67, 156, 180, 200 Church of Christ halfway house, 67 Church of England, 89 Cielo Vista Ranch (formerly Taylor Ranch), 109–10 Cindy (Sam’s partner), 74, 78–79, 105, 159, 237 climate change, 231 Climax Molybdenum mine, 119 Clinton, Hillary, 70 “Cloud on the Title, A” (Trillin), 110 Cobb, Jelani, 250 cocaine, 52 Cochran (road grader), 134 code violators, 17.


pages: 147 words: 39,910

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish

Albert Einstein, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bitcoin, Black Swan, colonial rule, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, feminist movement, Garrett Hardin, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Bogle, Linda problem, mandelbrot fractal, Pepsi Challenge, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, Richard Feynman, statistical model, stem cell, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem

Maybe it doesn’t match up to our experiences. Maybe it’s something that used to be true but isn’t true anymore. And maybe we just think very differently about something. When it comes down to it, everything that is not a law of nature is just a shared belief. Money is a shared belief. So is a border. So are bitcoin. So is love. The list goes on. If we want to identify the principles in a situation to cut through the dogma and the shared belief, there are two techniques we can use: Socratic questioning and the Five Whys. Socratic questioning can be used to establish first principles through stringent analysis.


pages: 364 words: 112,681

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, failed state, financial engineering, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Global Witness, high net worth, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, income inequality, joint-stock company, land bank, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, medical malpractice, Navinder Sarao, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

St Kitts has provided nothing like that level of detail but, judging by what it has released, its programme has more or less the same client base as its two Caribbean neighbours: equal parts Chinese, Middle Easterners and residents of the former Soviet Union, with a final quarter made up of everyone else. Roger Ver, whose success in the world of cryptocurrencies has earned him the nickname ‘Bitcoin Jesus’, was happy to sit down and chat with me about his decision to swap his American passport for a Kittitian one. He has made a fortune out of his website bitcoin.com, and reckons he’s 10 to 15 per cent more productive now he doesn’t have to fill in a US tax return. But he’s not exactly a typical applicant, partly because he doesn’t believe in passports anyway (‘It’s a big giant rock in space.


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

As AI improves, we might soon reach a point when no human can make sense of finance any more. What will that do to the political process? Can you imagine a government that waits humbly for an algorithm to approve its budget or its new tax reform? Meanwhile peer-to-peer blockchain networks and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin might completely revamp the monetary system, so that radical tax reforms will be inevitable. For example, it might become impossible or irrelevant to tax dollars, because most transactions will not involve a clear-cut exchange of national currency, or any currency at all. Governments might therefore need to invent entirely new taxes – perhaps a tax on information (which will be both the most important asset in the economy, and the only thing exchanged in numerous transactions).

Abbasid caliphs 94 Abraham, prophet 182–3, 186, 187, 274 advertising 36, 50, 53, 54, 77–8, 87, 97, 113, 114, 267 Afghanistan 101, 112, 153, 159, 172, 210 Africa 8, 13, 20, 58, 76, 79, 100, 103–4, 107, 139, 147, 150–1, 152, 168, 182, 184, 223, 226, 229, 239 see also under individual nation name African Americans 67, 150, 152, 227 agriculture 171, 185; animals and 71, 118–19, 224; automation of jobs in 19–20, 29; climate change and modern industrial 116, 117; hierarchical societies and birth of 73–4, 185, 266–7; religion and 128–30 Aisne, third Battle of the (1918) 160 Akhenaten, Pharaoh 191 Al-Aqsa mosque, Jerusalem 15 al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr 98 Algeria 144, 145 algorithms see artificial intelligence (AI) Ali, Husayn ibn 288 Alibaba (online retailer) 50 Allah 104, 128, 130, 204, 271–2, 289 AlphaZero 31, 123 al-Qaeda 162, 168 Amazon (online retailer) 39, 40, 50, 52, 91, 267–8 Amazon rainforest 116 Amos, prophet 188 Amritsar massacre (1919) 10 Andéol, Emilie 102 animals xi, 73, 86, 98–9, 182, 190, 218, 245; distinct social behaviours 94–5; ecological collapse and 71, 116, 118–19, 224; farm animals, subjugation of 71, 118–19, 224; morality and 187–8, 200; religious sacrifice of 190 anti-Semitism 142, 143, 194, 195, 235–6 see also Jews Apple (technology company) 91, 178 Arab Spring xi, 91 Arjuna (hero of Bhagavadgita) 269–70, 271, 299 art, AI and 25–8, 55–6, 182 artificial intelligence (AI) xiii, xiv; art and 25–8, 55–6, 182; authority shift from humans to 43, 44–72, 78, 268; biochemical algorithms and 20, 21, 25–8, 47–8, 56, 59, 251, 299; cars and see cars; centaurs (human-AI teams) 29, 30–1; communism and 35, 38; consciousness and 68–72, 122, 245–6; creativity and 25–8, 32; data ownership and 77–81; dating and 263; decision-making and 36–7, 50–61; democracy and see democracy; digital dictatorships and xii, 43, 61–8, 71, 79–80, 121; discrimination and 59–60, 67–8, 75–6; education and 32, 34, 35, 38 39, 40–1, 259–68; emotional detection/manipulation 25–8, 51–2, 53, 70, 79–80, 265, 267; equality and xi, 8, 9, 13, 41, 71–2, 73–81, 246; ethics and 56–61; free will and 46–9; games and 29, 31–2, 123; globalisation and threat of 38–40; government and xii, 6, 7–9, 34–5, 37–43, 48, 53, 61–8, 71, 77–81, 87, 90, 121, 267, 268; healthcare and 22–3, 24–5, 28, 48–9, 50; intuition and 20–1, 47; liberty and 44–72; manipulation of human beings 7, 25–8, 46, 48, 50–6, 68–72, 78, 79–80, 86, 96, 245–55, 265, 267, 268; nationalism and 120–6; regulation of 6, 22, 34–5, 61, 77–81, 123; science fiction and 245–55, 268; surveillance systems and 63–5; unique non-human abilities of 21–2; war and 61–8, 123–4 see also war; weapons and see weapons; work and 8, 18, 19–43 see also work Ashoka, Emperor of India 191–2, 286 Ashura 288, 289 Asia 16, 39, 100, 103, 275 see also under individual nation name Assyrian Empire 171 Athenian democracy, ancient 95–6 attention, technology and human 71, 77–8, 87, 88–91 Australia 13, 54, 116, 145, 150, 183, 187, 232–3 Aztecs 182, 289 Babri Mosque, Ayodhya 291 Babylonian Empire 188, 189 Baidu (technology company) 23, 40, 48, 77, 267–8 Bangladesh 38–9, 273 bank loans, AI and 67 behavioural economics 20, 147, 217 Belgium 103, 165, 172 Bellaigue, Christopher de 94 Berko, Anat 233 bestiality, secular ethics and 205–6 bewilderment, age of xiii, 17, 215, 257 Bhagavadgita 269–70, 271, 299 Bhardwaj, Maharishi 181 Bible 127, 131–2, 133, 186–90, 198, 199, 200, 206, 233, 234–5, 240, 241, 272, 298 Big Data xii, 18, 25, 47, 48, 49, 53, 63, 64, 68, 71–2, 268 biometric sensors 23, 49, 50, 52, 64, 79, 92 biotechnology xii, xiv, 1, 6, 7, 8, 16, 17, 18, 21, 33–4, 41, 48, 66, 75, 80, 83, 88, 109, 121, 122, 176, 211, 251–2, 267 see also under individual area of biotechnology bioterrorism 167, 169 Bismarck, Otto von 98–9 bitcoin 6 Black Death 164 Blair, Tony 168 blockchain 6, 8 blood libel 235–6 body, human: bioengineered 41, 259, 265; body farms 34; technology and distraction from 88–92 Bolshevik Revolution (1917) 15, 248 Bonaparte, Napoleon 96, 178, 231, 284 Book of Mormon 198, 235, 240 Book of the Dead, Egyptian 235 Bouazizi, Mohamed xi brain: biochemical algorithms of 20, 21, 47, 48; brain-computer interfaces 92, 260; brainwashing 242–4, 255, 267, 295; decision-making and 50, 52; equality and 75, 79; flexibility and age of 264–5; free will and 250–2, 255; hominid 122; marketing and 267; meditation and 311, 313–14, 316, 317 Brazil 4, 7, 12, 76, 101, 103, 118, 130 Brexit referendum (2016) 5, 9, 11, 15, 45–6, 93, 99, 115 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 283–4, 302–3 Britain 5, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 44–5, 94, 99, 108, 115, 139, 143, 150, 165, 172, 178, 182, 232–3, 243 Brussels bombings (March, 2016) 160 Buddha/Buddhism 58, 102, 136, 183, 184, 186, 190, 196, 278, 291, 302–6, 315 Bulgaria 169, 195, 227 Burma 304–5 Bush, George W. 4, 168, 176, 178 Caesar, Julius 96, 179 California, U.S. 8, 39, 85, 88, 148, 172, 177, 178, 200, 266 Cambridge Analytica 80, 86 Cambridge University 12, 45, 194 Cameron, David 45, 46 Canaan 189, 190, 289, 291 Canada 13, 38, 74, 107 capitalism xii, 11, 16, 35, 38, 55, 68, 76, 77, 96, 105–6, 108, 113, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 148, 210, 217, 245, 273, 292, 309 carbon dioxide 117 care industry 24–5 Caro, Rabbi Joseph 195 cars 133, 135; accidents and 23–4, 54, 56–7, 114, 159, 160; choosing 78; GPS/navigation and 54; self-driving 22, 23–4, 33, 41, 56–7, 58–9, 60–1, 63, 168 Catalan Independence 124, 125 Catholics 108, 132, 133, 137, 213, 292, 299 centaurs (human-AI teams) 29, 30 Chad 103, 119 Chaucer, Geoffrey: Canterbury Tales 235–6 Chemosh 191 chess 29, 31–2, 123, 180 Chigaku, Tanaka 305 child labour 33, 224 chimpanzees 94–5, 98, 122, 187–8, 200, 242 China xi, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 64, 76, 100, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 113, 114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 135, 145, 150, 151, 159, 168, 169, 171, 172–3, 175, 176, 177–8, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 193, 201, 227–8, 232, 251, 259–60, 262, 274, 284–5 Chinese Communist Party 5 Christianity 13, 55, 58, 96, 98, 126, 128–30, 131, 132, 133, 134–5, 137, 142, 143, 148, 183, 184–6, 187, 188, 189–90, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 199, 200, 203, 204, 208, 212–13, 233, 234–5, 236, 253, 282, 283, 288, 289, 291, 294, 296, 308; Orthodox 13, 15, 137, 138, 183, 237, 282, 308 Churchill, Winston 53, 108, 243 civilisation, single world xi, 5, 92, 95–109, 110, 138; ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis and 93–8; economics and 105–6; European civilisation and 95–6, 108–9; human tribes and 98–100; science and 107–8 ‘clash of civilisations’ 93–4 climate change x, xi, 15, 75–6, 78, 108, 109, 116–20, 121, 122–3, 124, 127, 128, 130, 133, 138, 168, 195, 219, 223, 228, 244, 265 Clinton, Bill 4, 168, 176 Clinton, Hillary 8, 97, 236 Cnut the Great, King of the Danes 105 Coca-Cola 50, 238, 267 Coldia (fictional nation) 148–50, 152–4 Cold War (1947–91) 99, 100, 113, 114, 131, 176, 180 communism xii, 3, 5, 10, 11, 14, 33, 35, 38, 74, 87, 95, 131, 132, 134, 176–7, 209–10, 251, 262, 273, 277, 279 Communities Summit (2017) 85 community 11, 37, 42, 43, 85–92, 109, 110, 135, 143–4, 201, 230, 241; breakdown of 85–7; Facebook and building of global xiii, 81, 85–91 compassion 62, 63, 71, 186; Buddhism and 305–6; religion and 186, 200, 201–2, 204, 208–9, 234, 305–6; secular commitment to 200, 201–2, 204–6, 208–9, 210 Confucius 15, 136, 181, 190, 260, 284–5 consciousness ix; AI and 36, 68–72, 122; intelligence and 68–70, 245–6; meditation and 315, 316; religion and 197 Conservative Party 45 conservatives: conservation and 219–20; embrace liberal world view 44–5 conspiracy theories 222, 229 Constantine the Great, Roman Emperor 192 Constantius II, Roman Emperor 192 cooperation 12, 29, 134; fictions and mass 134, 137, 233–42, 245; human-AI 29, 31; morality and 47, 187; nationalism and 134, 137, 236–8; religion and 134, 137, 233–6 corruption 12, 13, 15, 188–9 Council of Religion and the Homosexual (CRH) 200 creativity 25–8, 31, 32, 75, 182, 234, 262, 299 Crimea 174–5, 177, 179, 231, 238 Croats 282 Crusades 96, 165, 184, 199, 212, 213, 296 cryptocurrency 6 Cuba 9–10, 11, 114, 176 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) 114 cultures, differences between 147–55 culturism 150–4 cyberwarfare 127, 176, 178, 179 cyborgs 8, 76–7, 212, 278 Czech Republic 200 Daisy advertisement: US presidential election (1964) and 113, 114 Darwin, Charles 194; On the Origin of Species 98–9 Darwinism 213 data: Big Data xii, 18, 25, 47, 48, 49, 53, 63, 64, 68, 71–2, 268; liberty and 44–72; ownership regulation 77–81, 86 see also artificial intelligence (AI) Davos World Economic Forum 222 Dawkins, Richard 45 Deep Blue (IBM’s chess program) 29, 31 democracies: ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis and 93–8; data processing and 65; equality and 74; individual, trust in and 217, 220; liberal democracy see liberal democracy; liberty and 44–6, 53, 55, 64, 65, 66, 67; media manipulation and 12–13; secular ethics and 204, 210 Denmark 4, 94, 105, 144, 153, 200, 210 dharma 270, 271, 286, 299, 309 Di Tzeitung 97 dictatorships 3, 5, 33, 74, 210, 305; digital xii, 43, 61–8, 71, 79–80, 121 discrimination: AI and 59–60, 67–8, 75–6; brain and structural bias 226–8; religion and 135, 191, 200, 208; racism/culturism, immigration and 147–55 disease 16, 22, 28, 49, 88, 107, 218, 289 disorientation, sense of 5, 6 DNA 49, 66, 67, 79, 98, 150, 182 doctors 22–3, 24, 28, 48–9, 106–7, 128–9, 280 dogmas, faith in 229–30 dollar, American 106 Donbas 238 Donetsk People’s Republic 232 drones 29, 30, 35, 64, 76 East Africa 239 ecological crisis, xi, xiv, 7, 109, 195, 219, 244, 265; climate change x, xi, 15, 75–6, 78, 108, 109, 116–20, 121, 122–3, 124, 127, 128, 130, 133, 138, 168, 195, 219, 223, 228, 244, 265; equality and 75–6; global solution to 115–26, 138, 155; ignorance and 219–20; justice and 223, 228, 244, 265; liberalism and 16; nationalism and 15, 115–26; religion and 127, 128, 130, 133, 138; technological breakthroughs and 118–19, 121, 122–4 economics xii, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 16, 68, 99, 222, 224, 225, 240, 262, 309; AI and 6, 7, 8, 9, 19–43; capitalist see capitalism; communism and see communism; data processing and 65–6; economic models 37, 105–6; equality and 9, 71, 73–7 see also equality; liberalism and 3–5, 16, 44–5; nationalism and 115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 124; religion and 130–3; war and 171–5, 177–8, 179–80; work and 19–43 education 11, 16, 66, 74, 75, 111, 112, 113, 184, 194, 259–68; AI and 32, 34, 35, 38 39, 40–1, 259–68; basic level of 40–1; future of 259–68; liberal 217, 219, 261; secular 207, 209 Egypt 63, 74, 128–9, 172, 181, 188–9, 235, 284, 291, 296 Einstein, Albert 45, 181, 193, 194, 195 El Salvador 4, 150 ‘End of History’ 11 Engels, Friedrich: The Communist Manifesto 262, 273 England 105, 139, 235–6 equality xi, 13, 41, 71–2, 73–81, 92, 95, 144, 204, 223; AI and 75–81; history of 73– 4; secularism and 206–7, 208–9 ethics: AI and 56–61, 63, 121; complex nature of modern world and 223–30; nationalism and 121–2; religion and 186–93, 199–202; secular 199–202, 203–14 Europe xi, xii, 5, 10, 11, 16, 40, 47, 79, 93–100, 103–4, 105, 106, 107, 108–9, 113, 114, 115, 124–5, 128, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 143–4, 145, 147, 150, 153, 154–5, 159, 160, 164, 169, 171–2, 175, 176, 186, 187, 193, 201, 207, 228, 236, 252, 294, 307 see also under individual nation name European Union xii, 47, 93, 94, 95, 99, 108, 115, 124, 169; Constitution 95, 124; crisis in 138; immigration and 138, 139, 143–4, 154–5; Russia and 177; size and wealth of 176; terrorism and 159 Evangelical Christians 133 evolution 47, 98–9, 110–11, 127, 187, 194, 205, 206, 217, 218, 223, 274, 276, 277 Ex Machina (film) 246 Facebook xiii, 27, 77, 178, 230, 301, 302, 306; community-building and xiii, 85–91, 93; equality and 77, 80; liberty and 55, 64, 65, 67, 80, 86; ownership of personal data 80, 86; post-truth and 233, 235, 238; US presidential election (2016) and 80, 86 failed states 101, 112, 210 fair game rules 187 fake news xi, 231–42 famine 16, 33, 208, 212, 238, 251, 271 farming, modern industrial 29, 116, 118, 127, 128, 129, 224, 260, 262 see also agriculture fascism xii, 3, 9, 10, 11, 33, 142, 148, 154, 237, 251, 292–5, 297, 305 feminism 87, 143, 208, 217, 246, 280 Ferdinand, Archduke Franz 9, 11, 171 Fernbach, Philip 218 financial crisis, global (2008) 4, 171 financial system, computers and complexity of 6 Finland 38, 74 First World War (1914–18) 9, 10, 11, 30, 33, 99–100, 112, 123, 124, 160, 170, 171, 172, 265 Flag Code of India 285–6 flags, national 103, 285–6 fMRI scanner 21, 240 football, power of fictions and 241 France 10, 13, 51, 63, 66, 76, 94, 96, 99, 102, 103, 104, 115, 122, 139, 144, 145, 164, 165, 172, 182, 184, 194, 204, 285, 295–6 Francis, Pope 133 Freddy (chimpanzee) 188 free-market capitalism xii, 3, 4, 11, 16, 44, 55, 217, 245 free will 20, 44, 45–6, 47–8, 250–1, 299–301 French Revolution (1789) 63, 184, 207 Freud, Sigmund 135, 185, 193, 194–5, 286 Friedman, Milton 130 Front National 13 Galilei, Galileo 193, 207 gay marriage 44, 198, 205–6 Gaza 173 genetically modified (GM) crops 219 Georgia 176, 177 Germany 13, 66, 68, 95, 96, 98–9, 108, 118, 139, 147, 148, 155, 169, 171–2, 173, 179, 182, 194, 195, 239, 251, 277; Nazi 10, 66, 96, 134, 136, 212, 213, 226, 237, 251, 279, 294, 295 Gandhi, Mahatma 132 globalisation 8, 9, 113, 139; AI/automation and 38–9; history of 99; inequality and 73, 74, 76; nationalism and 109; reversing process of xiii, 5; spread of 4, 99 global stories, disappearance of 5, 14 global warming see climate change God xi, xiii, 46, 106, 197–202; 245, 252, 254, 269, 281, 285, 287, 303, 304; Bible and see Bible; ethics and 199–202, 205, 206, 208, 209; existence of 197–9; Jewish and Christian ideas of 184–5, 189, 190; justice and 225; mass cooperation and 245; monotheism and 190–3; post-truth and 234–6, 239; sacrifice and 287, 289; state identity and 138 gods xii, 277, 281, 291; agriculture and 128, 129; humans becoming ix, 79, 86; justice and 188, 189; sacrifice and 287–9; state identity and 136, 137 Goebbels, Joseph 237 Goenka, S.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

His reckoning was that competition between money providers would favour the most stable of the currencies in circulation. The same competition would also enforce self-regulation. The work was widely derided. Milton Friedman pointed out that there was nothing in current law to prevent bilateral trade using any medium of exchange accepted by all parties. Curiously, the recent rise of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, which are digital currencies that can be used to make purchases on the internet, are an example of non-governmental money. Nevertheless, Hayek’s body of work had made an impression on the politicians who would introduce free-market economics into the British and American economies in the 1980s.

artificial intelligence Arts Council, British ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) Asia financial crisis (1997–98) see also specific countries asset management companies Aung San Suu Kyi austerity Austrian School of economics see also Hayek, Friedrich Austro-Hungarian Empire automation see also artificial intelligence; robotics BAE Systems Bagehot, Walter banks/banking ‘bad banks’ bail-outs Bank Charter Act of (Peel Banking Act) central banks see central banks China competition constrained lending European Investment Bank financial crises see financial crises government guarantees on deposits and the Great Crash (1929) and Great Depression and the Great Recession interest rates see interest rates investment banking mortgage lending see mortgage lending regulation and Schumpeter shadow banking US Banking Acts (1933 and 1935) World Bank see World Bank Barro, Robert Bear Stearns Beijing Consensus Bentham, Jeremy Bernanke, Ben Beveridge Report ‘Big Bang’ (1986) Bitcoin Bitterlich, Helene Blackberry Blackett, Basil Blaug, Mark Bloomsbury Group Böhm von Bawerk, Eugen Bolshevik Party Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon Boody Firuski, Romaine Elizabeth Botswana Brazil Bretton Woods System Brexit foreign investment after BRIC economies see also Brazil; China; India; Russia Britain/UK and the financial crisis aerospace industry banking sector difficulties Black Wednesday budget deficits see budget deficits credit rating current account deficit deindustrialization ERM exit of pound EU referendum exports (general) exports of services foreign investment after Brexit GDP and the gold standard gold supply government administration government’s renewed focus on growth and the Great Depression IMF bail out (1976) industrialization/Industrial Revolution inequality information technology industries investment as share of GDP labour force growth as largest world trader low wages manufacturing national debt National Infrastructure Commission oil and gas industry productivity and wage growth productivity puzzle rebalancing the economy reindustrialization services sector slow productivity growth telecommunications industry trade-to-GDP ratio trade deficit trade with US Treasury unemployment wages and productivity welfare state as ‘workshop of the world’ Brookings Institution Brown, Douglas V.


pages: 394 words: 117,982

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

Computer users throughout the country all saw the same broken-English message pop onto their screens. It announced that everything on the hard drives of their computers had been encrypted: “Oops, your important files have been encrypted…Perhaps you are busy looking to recover your files, but don’t waste your time.” It went on to make the dubious claim that if they paid $300 in Bitcoin, the hard-to-trace cryptocurrency, their data would be unlocked. The attack was designed to look like a national shakedown scheme. It wasn’t. The hackers weren’t after money, and they didn’t get much. This was “NotPetya”—so nicknamed by Kaspersky Lab, which was itself suspected by the US government of providing back doors to the Russian government via its profitable security products.

It can hold large swaths of nation-state infrastructure and private-sector infrastructure at risk. It’s a source of income.” At an earlier time, North Korea counterfeited crude $100 bills to finance the country’s operations. That grew more difficult as the United States made the currency harder and harder to copy. But ransomware, digital bank heists, and hacks of South Korea’s fledgling Bitcoin exchanges all made up for the loss of the counterfeiting business. Today the North may be the first state to use cybercrime to finance its state operations. Bangladesh was hardly the only victim, and not even the first. In 2015 there was an intrusion into the Philippines, then the Tien Phong Bank in Vietnam.


Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman by Ben Hubbard

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, bitcoin, Citizen Lab, Donald Trump, fake news, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

By July, he knew it was risky to go home. KHASHOGGI: I spoke to my lawyer. I think I should stay and go to London. If I was a drinker, I would’ve gone to the bar. I hate planning for my life. I’ll go and smoke a cigar. Bye. LORD OF THE FLIES IN 2012, AN amateur hacker and poet with an interest in bitcoin, bots, and online video games got in touch with Hacking Team, an Italian company that sold cyber tools to governments to allow them to hack cellphones and other devices. Dear Sir, We need people visit us in Hosted by the Saudi governmen that have high technical knowledge and high Authority in order to provide an integrated display and explain the solutions you offer and training and costs. we Will bear all the costs of the trip from a-z. please send to me all the info you need to manage that.

He found it hard to believe that a hacker had hacked him. “i think he is a very good man and look trusted!!!” he wrote. That was the first of at least four times that the hackers whose services al-Qahtani sought tricked him. He later paid $150 to restore control of his Hotmail account, and lost $3,000 in Bitcoin. In 2015, someone hacked his account on the forum itself. Two weeks later, he returned and implored its other members to secure their accounts. But his skills improved. At one point, he promised $500 to anyone who could hack Hotmail accounts, but soon rescinded the offer when he did it himself.


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

A colleague at Stanford, Susan Athey, conducted a more systematic exploration of the value of privacy with students at MIT. She surveyed them about their privacy preferences in the context of a campus-wide effort to encourage undergraduates to experiment with the use of Bitcoin. The university offered students a variety of online “wallets” to manage their Bitcoin, each with a different level of privacy protection. The striking fact was that students made choices based on the order in which the wallet options appeared, regardless of their privacy preferences. Athey then went one step further. She wanted to see whether a small incentive could influence the students’ decisions about privacy.


pages: 138 words: 40,525

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the hedge-fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own. They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern. Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one?


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

The complete dematerialisation of payments potentially deprives governments and established banking institutions of their traditional mechanisms of control: monopoly of currency issue and access to physical records. The invention of the credit card means that it is no longer necessary to have cash or deposits to make a payment, only a certificate of anticipated future resources sufficient to settle the transaction: a change that is potentially the end of money as we have known it. The evangelists for bitcoin, the much-hyped digital currency that is a strange mixture of the visionary and the fraudulent – are, in a sense, not imaginative enough. They are simply trying to reproduce in the electronic world a commodity – currency – that has long existed in the material world. The larger question is whether currency as we have known it is any longer necessary at all.

.: ‘The Fall of Rome’ 119 Augar, Philip 114–15 Australian central bank 243 automobile manufacture 44 AXA 27, 200 B Bagehot, Walter 244 bail-outs 75, 138, 150, 260, 268, 271 balance sheets 221 Bank of England 245 derivatives 193 Deutsche Bank 191, 192, 192, 222 Federal Reserve System 245 financial institutions’ claims against each other 190 Halifax 140, 164, 190 Japanese banks 221 of large US banks 38 of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac 75 need for new capital 137 removal of debt from the public-sector balance sheet 158 value of securities 41 Baltic Exchange 17 Bank for International Settlements (BIS) 221 ‘bank levy’ 266 Bank of America 113, 135, 150, 185, 186, 193, 300 Bank of England 98, 139, 247, 260, 264 advocacy of City of London interests 20 balance sheet 245 central bank for the UK 183 and Diamond 35 direct funding to HBoS and RBS 135 Eurodollar market 20 nationalised (1946) 243 and Overend, Gurney & Co. 31 saves Scottish banks 26 and Soros 23 Bank of Italy 243 Bank of Japan 221 Bank of New York (now incorporated into BNY Mellon) 24 Bank of Scotland 11, 12, 14, 24, 26, 34, 78, 124, 125, 129, 135, 139 Bank of Spain 183 banking annualised shareholder returns of major banks 134 assets 91 bank managers 11–12, 27, 84, 125, 129, 197, 198, 281 banking crises (1800–2010) 37 Basel rules on bank lending 21, 151, 220–25 career in 11–12 cartelised 219 co-operative banks 169 complexity 276–7 conglomerate banks 133, 136, 137 deposit and investment channels 25–6 deposit-taking banks 259–60, 288–9, 290 equity in 282 inter-bank lending 244 long history of banking institutions 24 nationalisation 301 retail banks 33, 185, 198, 220, 284, 290, 291 ‘reverse-engineering’ products 21 run on bank 90 savings banks 169 size in 276 transformation of investment banking 15 universal banks 220 zombie banks 38, 39, 219 ‘banking book’ 320n20 Banque de France 243 Barclays Bank 24, 34, 35, 113, 135, 139, 166, 185, 186, 261, 266, 267 Barings Bank 31, 130, 134 Basel agreements 21, 151, 220–25, 234, 270, 298 Bausparkassen 149, 154 BBC 58 Bear Stearns 48, 90, 135 Berkshire Hathaway 107–8, 203, 212, 282 Berle, Adolf 51 Berlin financial centre 26 Bernanke, Ben 40, 57, 58, 73, 104 beta (β) parameter 206 beta-blockers 47 bezzle 127, 128, 132, 136, 176, 177, 190, 201, 244, 280 bias to action 203–8, 211, 273, 291 ‘Big Bang’ (1986) 28 ‘Big Dig’ tunnel, Boston 158 biotechnology 168 bitcoin 187 Black, Fischer 19, 69 Black, James 47 ‘Black Monday’ (19 October 1987) 242 ‘black swans’ 67 Black-Scholes model 20, 69 BlackRock 200, 207, 213, 253 Blair, Tony 262 Blankfein, Lloyd 14–15, 143, 160, 300 Blodget, Henry 199, 293 Bloomberg 281, 302 Bloomingdale’s department store 46 BMW 170 BNP Paribas 33, 50, 193, 200 BNY Mellon 200 Bogle, Jack 207 Bolton, Anthony 108, 109 bond trading 20 bonus culture 50–52 Born, Brooksley 57 Bovis 158 Bowie, David 21 Bradford and Bingley 135 Brandeis, Louis: Other People’s Money 114 Brecht, Bertolt: Happy End 188 Bretton Woods conference (1944) 17, 18, 36, 221 Britain assets and liabilities of British banks 1 English law 263 failure of UK banking sector (2008) 276–7 and FISIM 264 global dominance of the finance industry 218, 265 housing 149, 174 British Telecom sale 158, 250 Brittan, Samuel 58, 70 Brokaw, Tom 258 broker-dealer 29, 84, 117, 198 brokers 29–30 Brooke, Rupert 95 ‘Heaven’ 87 Brooks, Rebekah 292, 295 Brown, Gordon 24, 231, 235, 262 Browning, Robert: ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ 262 BTR 45 Buffett, Warren 69–70, 100, 107, 108, 109, 112–13, 124, 127, 131, 132, 192, 203, 205, 212, 267, 268, 282 building societies 25, 149, 150, 151, 154, 290 Building Societies Act (1986) 150–51 Bundesbank 243 Burke, Edmund: Letters on a Regicide Peace 173 Burrough, Bryan and Helyar, John: Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco 46, 164, 204 Burroughs, William S. 259 Bush, George W. 58, 255 buy-outs 166 buy-side analysts 199 Byng, Admiral 71[?


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

It is very difficult to change merchant behavior.”16 No one knows how this market will evolve, but markets, competition, and consumer behavior – not only the technology itself – will determine its future success. The same is true for another promising technology that can be applied to the payments market: blockchain, or mutual distributed ledger technology (like bitcoin). The market clearly sees a big potential in blockchain technology. It could reduce the costs and risks in transactions, and create a far better system for sharing information in financial markets. Some have billed it as a greater technological leap than the internet for capital markets. Perhaps it will be, but the hype around the technology is premature and the expectation of big market changes is an aspiration.

Chance character (i), (ii) Belgium profit margins (i) taxi services and regulation (i) Bell, Alexander Graham (i), (ii) Bell Labs (AT&T) (i) Bellamy, Edward (i) Bellman, Richard (i) benchmarking (i), (ii) benefits, and incomes (i) Benz, Karl (i) Bergman, Ingmar (i) Berkshire Hathaway (i) Berle, Adolf (i) Berra, Yogi (i) Bezos, Jeff (i) Bhide, Amar (i) big firms big firm market dominance (i) and investment allocation for innovation (i) and private standards (i) relative importance of in European countries (i) reputation of (i) see also firm boundaries; firms; multinational (global) companies “big swinging dicks” (i) big-data business models (i) biofuels and EU regulation (i) see also energy sector biotechnological sector, and EU regulation (i) Bismarck, Otto von (i) bitcoin (i) BlackBerry (i) blackboard economics (i) Blackrock (i) blockchain (mutual distributed ledger) technology (i) Blue Ribbon Commission (US) (i) The Blues Brothers (movie) (i) boom and bust cycles (i), (ii), (iii) boomer (or baby boomer) generation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Boston Consulting Group index of complicatedness (i) on performance imperatives (i) on working time of managing teams (i) branding (i), (ii) Brazil and BRIC concept (i), (ii) taxi services and regulation (i) BRIC as a Bloody Ridiculous Investment Concept (i) countries (Brazil, India, Russia, and China) (i), (ii) Bridgewater (i) Brin, Sergey (i) Britain see United Kingdom (UK) British managerialism (i) Brockovich, Erin (i) Brookings (i) Brown, Gordon (i) Brynjolfsson, Erik, The Second Machine Age (Brynjolfsson and McAfee) (i), (ii) budget process, and compliance officers (i) Buffett, Warren (i), (ii) bureaucracy and capitalism (i), (ii) and competition (i) and compliance officers (i) and globalization (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and IBM (i) and index of complicatedness (Boston Consulting Group) (i) and Indian economy (i) and managerialism (i), (ii), (iii) and organizational diversification (i) and principal–agent debate (i) and socialism (i) see also bureaucracy brake; bureaucrats; corporate managerialism; managerialism bureaucracy brake, and regulation (Germany) (i) bureaucrats vs. entrepreneurs (i), (ii) see also bureaucracy; bureaucracy brake Burning Man festival (Nevada) (i) Burns, Scott, The Clash of Generations (Kotlikoff and Burns) (i) business-building skills, vs. financial skills (i) business cycles, and productivity (i) business development, and strategy (i), (ii) business information technology (IT) services (i) business investment and cash hoarding (i) and corporate net lending (i), (ii) declining trend (i) explanations for decline (i) and financial regulation (i), (ii) and gray capitalism (i) investment allocation for innovation and big firms (i) low investment growth vs. fast corporate borrowing growth (i) measuring issues (i) and mergers and acquisitions (i) and policy uncertainty (i), (ii) and shareholders (i), (ii), (iii) UK business investment (i), (ii) US business investment (i), (ii) see also asset managers; investment; R&D business management (i), (ii) see also corporate managerialism business productivity growth (i) Business Week, on Peter Drucker (i) CAC 40 index (France) (i) cadmium (i), (ii) Canada diffusion of innovations (i) GDP figures (i) North American Free Trade Agreement (i) cancer research, and innovation (i), (ii) capital accumulation, and capitalism (i) capital expenditure (capex) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n39 capital markets (external) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) capitalism and agency (i) and asset bubbles (i) and bureaucracy (i), (ii) and capital accumulation (i) “complex by design” capitalism (i) criticism of Western capitalism (i) crony capitalism (i) death of capitalism utopia and socialism (i) decline of Western capitalism (i) and digital age (i) and dissent (i), (ii), (iii) and eccentricity (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) and economic dynamism (i), (ii), (iii) and Enlightenment (i), (ii) and entrepreneurship (i), (ii) financial capitalism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) free-market capitalism (i) and individual freedom (i), (ii), (iii) and innovation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) joint-stock capitalism (i), (ii) and labor vs. work (i) vs. the market (i), (ii) Marxist monopolistic theory of (i) “middle-aged” capitalism (i), (ii), (iii) “money manager capitalism” (Hyman Minsky) (i) and organization (i) and planning machines (i) rentier capitalism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) and Swedish hybrid economy (i) and technology (i) see also capitalist ownership; corporate managerialism; entrepreneurs; entrepreneurship; the future (and how to prevent it); globalization; gray capitalism; regulation; rich people capitalist ownership and corporate globalism (i) and diversification (i) and gray capitalism: case of Harley-Davidson Motor Company (HD) (i); decline/obituary of capitalist ownership (i); dispersed ownership (i); gray ownership (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi); severing gray capital–corporate ownership link (i) ownership structure reforms (i) and pensions (i) and principal–agent problem (i) and uncertainty (i) car industry car sales and regulation (i) driverless vehicles (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) German car production and value chains (i) lean production (i) US environment-related regulations (i) Carew, Diana G.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

, in that it isn’t a mainstream idea, though it remains commonplace in certain streams of American political thought. It is relevant, however, because the idea that there must be a hard limit to the amount of money in the world also drives most Silicon Valley–styled schemes to create new forms of money, like Bitcoin. If the world were to run on a gold standard, then that stash would have to function as the memory of the global computer that humanity uses to plan its economic future. Therefore, the gold standard is a fundamentally pessimistic idea. Limiting our model of how to invent the future to the memory capacity of around 50 billion troy ounces§ is just a way of saying the future holds nothing of surprising value.

Brian, 169n artificial hearts, 157–58 artificial intelligence (AI), 23, 61, 94, 95, 114, 116, 136, 138n, 147, 155, 157, 178, 191, 192–93, 325, 330, 354, 359n artificial memory, 35 art market, 108 Art of the Long View, The (Schwartz), 214 ashrams, 213 assets, 31, 60 “As We May Think” (Bush), 221n asymmetry, 54–55, 61–66, 118, 188, 203, 246–48, 285–88, 291–92, 310 Athens, 22–25 atomic bomb, 127 “attractor nightmare,” 48 auctions, 170, 286 aulos, 23n austerity, 96, 115, 125, 151, 152, 204, 208 authenticity, 128–32, 137 authors, 62n automata, 11, 12, 17, 23, 42, 55, 85–86, 90–92, 97–100, 111, 129, 135–36, 155, 157, 162, 260, 261, 269, 296n, 342, 359–60 automated services, 62, 63, 64, 147–48 automated trading systems, 74–78, 115 automation, 7, 85, 123–24, 192, 234, 259, 261, 343 automobiles, 43, 86, 90–92, 98, 118–19, 125n, 302, 311, 314, 343, 367 avatar cameras, 265 avatars, 89n, 265, 283–85 baby boomers, 97–100, 339, 346 bailouts, financial, 45, 52, 60, 74–75, 82 Baird-Murray, Kathleen, 200n “Ballad of John Henry, The,” 134–35 bandwidth, 171–72 banking, 32–33, 42, 43, 69, 76–78, 151–52, 251, 269n, 289, 345–46 bankruptcy, 2, 89, 251 bargains, 64–65, 95–96 Barlow, John Perry, 353 Barnes & Noble, 62n, 182 barter system, 20, 57 Battlestar Galactica, 137, 138n “beach fantasy,” 12–13, 18, 236–37, 331, 366–67 Beatles, 211, 212, 213 behavior models, 32, 121, 131, 173–74, 286–87 behavior modification, 173–74 Belarus, 136 belief systems, 139–40 Bell, Gordon, 313 bell curve distribution, 39, 39–45, 204, 208, 262, 291–93 Bell Labs, 94 Bentham, Jeremy, 308n Berners-Lee, Tim, 230 Bezos, Jeff, 352 big business, 265–67, 297–98 big data, 107–40, 150, 151–52, 155, 179, 189, 191–92, 202–4, 265–66, 297–98, 305, 346, 366, 367 big money, 202–4, 265–67 billboards, 170, 267, 310 billing, 171–72, 184–85 Bing, 181–82 biodiversity, 146–47 biological realism, 253–54 biotechnology, 11–13, 17, 18, 109–10, 162, 330–31 Bitcoin, 34n BitTorrent, 223 blackmail, 61, 172–73, 207, 273, 314, 316, 322 Black Monday, 74 blogs, 118n, 120, 225, 245, 259, 349, 350 books, 1–2, 62, 63, 65, 113, 182, 192, 193, 246–47, 277–78, 281, 347, 352–60 bots, 62, 63, 64, 147–48 brain function, 195–96, 260, 328 brain scans, 111–12, 218, 367 Brand, Stewart, 214 brand advertising, 267 Brandeis, Louis, 25, 208 Brazil, 54 Brooks, David, 326 Burma, 200n Burning Man, 132 Bush, George H.


pages: 469 words: 132,438

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

But in a DC microgrid future, networks might arise organically, from the bottom up.46,47 This theory is known as “swarm electrification,” and the researcher who conceived the term, Sebastian Groh, likens a bottom-up electricity network to a “swarm of fish,” in which “there is no central intelligence, and the fish work together to create unity.” His company, ME SOLshare, is making it possible for the 4 million households in Bangladesh with DC SHSs to connect to one another and trade electricity. Using peer-to-peer mobile payments—securely logged using blockchain technology, which is also used to authenticate Bitcoin transactions—homes can participate in a bottom-up marketplace, dynamically balancing supply and demand across a self-assembled DC microgrid. This concept could work in any place with a high population density—Bangladesh is an ideal starting point, with a population of 160 million squished into an area the size of New York State.48 Clearly, DC microgrids could enable a wealth of new ways to improve energy access.

., 228–231 for solar home systems, 123 storage capacity of, 235, 235f Batteries and Energy Storage hub, 263 Bazilian, Morgan, 119 BBOXX, 126–127 Becquerel, Edmond, 32 Bell Laboratories, 37, 260 Berkshire Hathaway Energy Renewables, 108 Bernard, Rob, 213 Bihar, India, 133–134 Biomass, burning of, 59 Birds, CSP plants and, 183 Bitcoin, 134 Black cells, 40–41 Blackouts, 77, 207, 215, 245–247 Blackstone, 93 Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), 51, 64, 80, 252 Bonds, green/climate, 113, 288g Boston Celtics, 93 British Petroleum (BP), 35, 41 Brooklyn, New York, 208 Buffett, Warren, 109 Building materials, solar, 162–163 Burning mirrors, 29 Bush, Vannevar, 254–255, 260 Business model innovation defined, 58b, 288g and economic appeal of solar, 78–79, 83 for expansion of solar energy, 23–24, 85, 90 and future of solar energy, 2 with microgrids, 130 with off-grid solar, 118, 135 to overcome deployment challenges, 57, 58b in regulated utilities, 108 BYD (company), 223 Cadmium telluride (CdTe), 38, 151, 155, 280g CAISO.


pages: 420 words: 135,569

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

To consider just a few examples, it took, give or take a few months: ten years for the civil rights movement against racial segregation in the United States to go from its first boycott of segregated bus seating to the successful passage of the federal Civil Rights Act (1955–1964) ten years for the first international economic sanctions against South Africa’s segregationist apartheid system to lead to a new constitution that enfranchised Black South Africans and other racial groups (1985–1996) ten years for same-sex marriage to go from being considered controversial when it was legalized by a country for the first time (the Netherlands) to being supported in global surveys by a majority of people in a majority of countries (2001–2010) ten years for marijuana to go from being legalized for all uses in one US state, Colorado, to being decriminalized in forty-four out of fifty states (2012–2021) And it took: ten years from when just sixteen million people, mostly scientists and other academic researchers, were using the internet—they thought it would be used mostly to share scientific data—to when a billion people were using it (1991–2001) ten years from the first iPhone release until a majority of people on the planet had smartphones, creating a new era of always-on communication (2007–2017) ten years for Facebook to go from one user to one billion daily users, on its way to becoming the first product used by more than one in three humans on the planet (2004–2015) ten years for Bitcoin to go from being a hypothetical idea discussed in a scientific article to having a nearly US$1 trillion market capitalization, larger than the three biggest US banks combined (2008–2019) ten years from Airbnb’s and Uber’s foundings for a full 36 percent of US workers to be engaged in some form of “gig work” (2008–2018) ten years for Zoom to go from its first user testing session to becoming a critical lifeline for humanity during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the de facto tool for learning, work meetings, and staying in touch with friends and family (2011–2020) In other words: things that are small experiments today in ten years can become ubiquitous and world-changing.

Anything with the potential to change the world can be a future force. It might be a quickly advancing area of scientific research, like human genetic modification or artificial intelligence. It might be a social movement, like Black Lives Matter. It might be a new technology entering the mainstream, like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It might be an increasingly popular policy idea, like lowering the voting age to sixteen. It might be a shift in consumer behavior, like the rise of plant-based diets. It might be a growing threat documented by experts and researchers, like sea-level rise from climate change or the impact of noise pollution on mental health.


pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Census, via the machines that cracked the Nazi enigma code, the CBS vacuum-tube computer, the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, and more recently the integrated circuit– based personal computer. * The blockchain is an almost incorruptible digital ledger that can be used to record practically anything that can be digitized: birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, educational degrees, medical records, contracts, and votes. Bitcoin is one of its many implementations. With exponentially advancing technologies, things move very slowly at first and then advance dramatically. Each new technology advances along an S-curve—an exponential beginning, flattening out as the technology reaches its limits. As one technology ends, the next paradigm takes over.


pages: 198 words: 53,264

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments by Michael Batnick

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, hindsight bias, index fund, initial coin offering, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, multilevel marketing, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Pershing Square Capital Management, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, short squeeze, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Y Combinator

“I'm going to hold onto this fund that's done horribly because I can't stand the thought of selling at the bottom,” and it can compel us to do something because we don't want to regret not doing it: “I'm going to buy this ICO (initial coin offering) because I won't be able to live with myself if I miss the next Bitcoin.” You know Steve Jobs and his early partner Steve Wozniak, but the name Ronald Wayne likely means nothing to you. Wayne was the third founder of Apple, but the reason his name is erased from the history books is because in 1976 he sold his 10% stake in the company for $800.4 Apple is currently worth north of $900 billion!


pages: 573 words: 157,767

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett

Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Build a better mousetrap, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, deep learning, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fermat's Last Theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, information retrieval, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, language acquisition, megaproject, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Probably one of the most powerful subliminal supports for the belief in the reality of dollars comes from the undoubted existence of dollar bills and coins, legal tender you can see and weigh and manipulate and carry around. Bitcoin, in contrast, seems much more illusory to most folks, but if they reflect on it, they will discover that the palpable, foldable dollar bills that are physical objects are ontological crutches of sorts, to be thrown away once you’ve learned how to walk, leaving in place only the mutual expectations and habits that can in principle support bitcoin as well as dollars. Well into the twentieth century there were heated political debates on the necessity of maintaining such crutches—the gold standard and silver certificates, and the like—but tomorrow’s children may grow up with only credit cards to hold and manipulate and be none the worse off for it.


pages: 688 words: 147,571

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

Secondly, the New Zealand scheme does not cover financial loss which is not directly related to physical harm (known as “pure economic loss”). The vast and increasing range of AI’s applications means that harm which it causes will not be limited merely to physical accidents. If an AI trading program invests all of a company’s money in a volatile commodity/financial instrument like Bitcoin immediately before a crash, then under the New Zealand scheme there would be no compensation available to the victim. They would have to seek recourse through the various other mechanisms identified above and below, such as negligence, product liability or contract . 2.5 Contract A contract is a legally binding agreement, or set of promises.85 Not all promises are enforceable in law: a promise to meet a friend for dinner is unlikely to have contractual force.

The possibility remains though for such rivers to have other, non-human legal rights. 30Thomas Burri, “Free Movement of Algorithms: Artificially Intelligent Persons Conquer the European Union’s Internal Market”, in Research Handbook on the Law of Artificial Intelligence, edited by Woodrow Barfield and Ugo Pagallo (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2018). 31See, for a similar argument, Shawn Bayern, “Of Bitcoins, Independently Wealthy Software, and the Zero-Member LLC”, Northwestern University Law Review Online, Vol. 108 (2014), 257. 32[1991] 1 WLR 1362. 33Überseering BV v. Nordic Construction Company Baumanagement GmbH (2002) C-208/00, ECR I-9919. 34Thomas Burri, “Free Movement of Algorithms: Artificially Intelligent Persons Conquer the European Union’s Internal Market”, Oxford Law Faculty Blog, 4 January 2018, https://​www.​law.​ox.​ac.​uk/​business-law-blog/​blog/​2018/​01/​free-movement-algorithms-artificially-intelligent-persons-conquer, accessed 1 June 2018.


pages: 164 words: 57,068

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, bonus culture, British Empire, call centre, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, falling living standards, future of work, G4S, greed is good, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, late capitalism, mass immigration, megacity, mittelstand, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Veblen good, Walter Mischel

We can not only buy books online, we can publish our own, should we wish to write any. We need no longer go anywhere near a physical bank; we can even start our own by creating a crowd-funding site. Kickstarter, one of the leading sites, began in 2009 and opened in Britain in 2012. You can, should you wish to take the risk, start your own currency. Bitcoin, Peercoin and Primecoin already exist as internet currencies with a defined amount whose value varies according to the demand, although the risk quickly overtook a couple of the early Britcoin exchanges. Or you can turn banker yourself via a peer-to-peer lending platform. You don’t have to leave home to go to university any more.


Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore

Airbnb, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, call centre, chief data officer, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, data science, Diane Coyle, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, G4S, hype cycle, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, loose coupling, M-Pesa, machine readable, megaproject, minimum viable product, nudge unit, performance metric, ransomware, robotic process automation, Silicon Valley, social web, The future is already here, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture

As Pete Pachal wrote, Kodak was ‘too scared to cannibalize its own business to progress’.27 Successful digital transformation required taking calculated risks when times were good. Kodak didn’t. As this book was being finished in early 2018, Kodak decided to launch both its own cryptocurrency and a machine that you rent from the company for mining bitcoins. Some technology commentators blasted the idea as a ‘scam’ and a ‘desperate attempt to stay relevant’. Time will tell. Governments are different. Some people argue, persuasively, that the internet presents a genuinely existential threat to what we traditionally imagine ‘the state’ to be. The giants of the web are operating like mini-governments in many developing nations, and there is no reason to think their role will diminish.


pages: 230 words: 61,702

The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data by Michael P. Lynch

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Mechanical Turk, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, Firefox, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, Internet of things, John von Neumann, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patient HM, prediction markets, RFID, sharing economy, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

Not everything about Google-knowing is new, however. And that itself is important to appreciate. One humorous illustration of this came in 2013, when the website College Humor asked: what if Google was a guy? The ensuing video was hilarious and a bit disturbing. The questions we ask our search engines (“Hedgehog, cute,” “Bitcoin unbuy fast,” “college girls?”) seem all the more ridiculous (and creepy) once we imagine asking them of an actual person—like an amiable but overworked bureaucrat behind a desk. But it also reminds us of a fact about how we treat Google and other search engines—a fact that is obvious enough but often overlooked.


Demystifying Smart Cities by Anders Lisdorf

3D printing, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bike sharing, bitcoin, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion pricing, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Google Glasses, hydroponic farming, income inequality, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, Masdar, microservices, Minecraft, OSI model, platform as a service, pneumatic tube, ransomware, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, smart cities, smart meter, software as a service, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

Once a transaction has been stored in the distributed ledger, it can no longer be disputed or reversed in any way, and it is free and open for anyone to see that it has been done. This is why block chain is good for problems where trust and validating data is an issue. As a general storage option, it has serious drawbacks because it is very slow. From the time a transaction is made until it is validated by the block chain, it can take minutes. For the original Bitcoin block chain, it was around 10 minutes. Other block chains have been developed that are faster, but it will never be able to compete with any other storage technology in terms of latency. It is also very costly in terms of processing, since all nodes in the distributed ledger need to process everything and generate new blocks.


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Throughout his early partnership years, Buffett embodied what Peter Kaufmann referred to during the 2018 Daily Journal Corporation meeting as the “five aces” of money management (figure 10.1). FIGURE 10.1 “Five Qualities of Investment Advisors” by Peter Kaufman. Source: “Charlie Munger on Bitcoins, Banking, AI, and Life,” Safal Niveshak (blog), February 17, 2018, https://www.safalniveshak.com/charlie-munger-bitcoins-banking-life/. Fund managers (who, in essence, are operating in a fiduciary role for their clients) should view themselves first and foremost as risk managers. As such, they should follow the key principles of prudent insurance underwriting, outlined in Buffett’s 2001 shareholder letter: They accept only those risks that they are able to properly evaluate (staying within their circle of competence) and that, after they have evaluated all relevant factors including remote loss scenarios, carry the expectancy of profit….


pages: 241 words: 70,307

Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era? by David de Cremer

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bitcoin, blockchain, business climate, business process, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, future of work, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, race to the bottom, robotic process automation, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, Turing test, work culture , workplace surveillance , zero-sum game

In light of this movement of algorithms into a role of managing (some may say monitoring) others, an interesting application in this area concerns the potential employment of blockchain technology to manage work relations in organizations. Blockchain is mostly known as the underlying technology of applications, such as Bitcoin. At the same time, the technology is also increasingly being seen as a way of changing how our companies work. One specific application that was pointed out in a recent Deloitte survey is to use this technology to perform the basic functions of management as well as motivating employees more specifically.¹⁰³ This survey revealed that among 1,386 senior executives in 12 nations, 83% saw compelling ways for blockchain to be used by their organizations.


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Later revised by Moore to a doubling every two years, Moore’s Law has been a remarkably accurate forecast of the growth of the semiconductor industry over the last forty years. As computing has become faster, cheaper, and better at automating a variety of tasks, financial institutions have been able to greatly increase the scale and sophistication of their services. The emergence of automated, algorithmic, and online trading, mobile banking, crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, crowdfunding, and financial robo-advisers are all consequences of Moore’s Law. Technological innovation has always been intimately interconnected with financial innovation, a coevolutionary process in which adaptations in one domain have influenced innovation in the other. New stamping and printing processes, used to prevent coin clipping, counterfeiting, and other forms of financial fraud, led directly to the modern system of paper banknotes and token coinage.

., 46–47 Australopithecus, 153 autism, 110–111 Automated Proprietary Trading (APT), 236, 237, 240 automated teller machines (ATMs), 400 automobile safety, 205 aviation safety, 85, 321, 379–383 Avnaim-Pesso, Liora, 166, 167 Awakenings (Sacks), 88 Azar, Pablo, 372 Bachelier, Louis Jean-Baptiste Alphonse, 18–20, 21, 234 back testing, 285 Ball, Lucille, 395 Bamberger, Gerry, 235–236 Bankers Trust, 320, 344 Bank of America, 386–387 Bank of England, 366–367 bank runs, 176 Barings Bank, 61 Barnea, Amir, 161 Baron-Cohen, Simon 111 Barrett, Majel, 396 Bartra, Oscar, 100 BATS Global Markets, 360 Bear Stearns, 304, 305, 307, 308, 309, 316, 317 Bechara, Antoine, 106 behavioral economics, 3, 6–7, 51, 71, 92, 220 Behavioral Investment Allocation Strategy (BIAS), 90 behavioral risk, 388–394 Beinhocker, Eric, 218 bell curve (Gaussian distribution), 22, 273 Benner, Samuel, 29 Benner’s Prophecies of Future Ups and Downs in Prices, 29 Benyamine, David, 60 Bernanke, Ben, 300 Bernoulli, Daniel, 57 Berns, Gregory, 97, 98 Berra, Yogi, 415 beta (measure), 232, 249, 251, 252, 268–269, 282 Between a Rock and a Hard Place (Ralston), 118 Beutler, Ernest, 419 Bezear Homes, 325 Biham, Eli, 238 Billio, Monica, 376 binary choice model, 190–199, 201–202, 220, 362 biodiversity, 148–149 biofeedback, 93 biological determinism, 170–172 Biological Economics (Lo and Zhang), 218 biotechnology, 401–410 birthday problem, 67–68 Bismarck, Otto von, 417 Biston betularia (peppered moth), 138–140, 141 Bitcoin, 356 Black, Fischer, 27, 97, 260, 274, 276, 356–357 Black-Scholes/Merton option pricing formula, 10, 27, 97, 211, 260, 356–357 Blinder, Alan, 7, 310 block trading, 235 Bloomberg terminals, 360 Bocskocsky, Andrew, 69 Bogle, John C., 6, 263–264, 265, 397, 398 bonds, 259, 409; for biotechnology, 407; government, 242, 249–250, 292; index funds for, 265 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 322 Bonner, John, 371 bonobo, 162 bonuses, 303–305 Bossaerts, Peter, 101 bounded rationality, 36, 208, 215; Adaptive Markets Hypothesis likened to, 188; applications of, 185, 217; criticisms of, 181–182, 209, 213–214; informational limits acknowledged by, 34; optimization contrasted with, 180, 183 Boyle, Danny, 118 bracketology, 64–65 brain size, 152–53 brainstem, 81 Breiter, Hans, 88–89 Brennan, Tom, 182, 190, 196–197, 198, 203, 220, 362, 369 Brexit referendum, 377 Brodmann, Korbinian, 76 broker-dealers, 304–308, 311, 376 Bronze Age, 163 Brosnan, Sarah F., 337 Brownian motion, 19, 211 Buck v.


pages: 993 words: 318,161

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

Ada Lovelace, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, bitcoin, blockchain, cloud computing, coherent worldview, computer vision, crisis actor, crossover SUV, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, demographic transition, distributed ledger, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, fake news, false flag, game design, gamification, index fund, Jaron Lanier, life extension, messenger bag, microaggression, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, no-fly zone, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, short selling, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, tech bro, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, The Hackers Conference, Turing test, Works Progress Administration

And when the hoax was discovered and quashed, all of them would be tracked down by vengeful Miasma sleuths and all of them would probably tell a similar story: they had been recruited by a production company working on a low-budget indie thriller, they had gone to certain soundstages and recited certain lines. They and the production crew had all been paid in some untraceable way, through Bitcoin or whatever, and they’d moved on to the next job. A text came through from Laurynas: We found the people who made the mushroom cloud sim—a CGI house in the Philippines. He Googled Moab hoax and found a basically infinite amount of stuff already posted. Much of it was right for the wrong reasons.

The Moab Project investigated and documented the operational details of the hoax in forensic detail, right up to the point where each separate trail of evidence dead-ended in perfect cryptographic anonymity. The total budget for the hoax was estimated to have been less than one million dollars. The networks had actually paid out more than that for the privilege of airing fake footage supplied by the hoaxers. Those payments, made in Bitcoin, had gone to anonymous overseas accounts presumably controlled by the hoaxers. Between that and short-selling various affected stocks on Wall Street, it appeared that they had paid for the exploit many times over. Which was a mere detail when set against the thirty-one deaths and the direct economic losses, which were way into the tens of billions.

The scripts and other written material, such as fake blogs and social media postings, seemed to have been written by native English speakers. More people than just Corvallis began to suspect Elmo Shepherd of being the mastermind. He was a major shareholder, or a member of the board of directors, of more than one company that would profit from what came next. He was libertarian minded, a Bitcoin advocate. And he was from Utah, with a lot of local practical knowledge of conditions on the ground there. And so one school of thought said that he must have done it. The opposing school of thought said simply “nah.” Simply “nah.” It was too ridiculous—too far-fetched. The connection to El’s home state was a mere coincidence, or a deliberate scheme to cast suspicion on him.


pages: 252 words: 75,349

Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime-From Global Epidemic to Your Front Door by Brian Krebs

barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, cashless society, defense in depth, Donald Trump, drop ship, employer provided health coverage, independent contractor, information security, John Markoff, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, pirate software, placebo effect, ransomware, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stuxnet, the payments system, transaction costs, web application

To create these safeguards, most established crime forums require new applicants to list at least two existing and trusted forum members as references or “vouches,” signaling that one or more existing members of the forum can vouch for the applicant’s skills and integrity and have invited the novice to apply for membership. New applicants generally also must proffer a nonrefundable deposit, usually in the form of a digital currency such as WebMoney or bitcoins. Assuming the applicant’s references confirm that members know him and can vouch for his skills, the applicant is granted limited access to the forum, which he can then use to introduce himself to the broader community, plead his case for membership, and list any unique talents that his full membership would bring to the forum.


pages: 256 words: 75,139

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

The planet and its human inhabitants are too complex for there to be a sudden shift to a global government in which nation states are dissolved and the world is the ‘province of all mankind’. The demise of the nation state is frequently forecast for a variety of reasons: globalization, federal superstructures such as the EU, the rise of city states and, most recently, by the rise of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. And yet the nations and the states keep surviving. What’s more, the world of nation states that we live in has, for all its flaws, brought with it relative stability. We have come a long way, even if there is further to go. Measure the post-Second-World-War era against the seventy-five years prior to it and you can see how much progress we’ve made.


pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Musk, Gates, and other tech titans have expressed interest in the policy christened the “social vaccine of the twenty-first century,” “a twenty-first-century economic right,” and “VC for the people.” Increasingly, that interest is turning into action. There are now “basic income create-a-thons,” for programmers to get together, talk UBI, and hack poverty. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are looking into a Bitcoin-backed basic-income program. A number of young millionaire tech founders are funding a basic-income pilot among the world’s poorest in Kenya. The start-up accelerator Y Combinator is sending no-strings-attached cash to families in a few states as part of a research project. And Chris Hughes, a founder of Facebook, has plowed $10 million into an initiative to explore UBI and other related policies, something he is calling the Economic Security Project.


pages: 352 words: 80,030

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

* The rapid development of new technologies is also a significant difficulty to address, in terms of trying to predict the impact these will have in the coming years – and working out how to prepare accordingly for a world where artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, machine learning, Blockchain, Ethereum and more will change the way we live, love, work and communicate. Then there are cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which, while exciting for digital pioneers, seem most obviously of interest to those who seek to keep their transactions secure and away from prying eyes – including those who deal in illicit substances or goods, or who prefer to keep potentially taxable revenue away from the authorities. Ironically, the impact of decentralised digital currencies might prove more important for states seeking to continue to engage in trade in the face of pressures – such as sanctions – where the dominance of the dollar, euro and the yen in international transactions makes large-scale trade in other currencies impractical, inconvenient or impossible.


pages: 232 words: 78,701

I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual by Luvvie Ajayi

affirmative action, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, clean water, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, glass ceiling, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Skype, Snapchat, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, upwardly mobile

Nevertheless, I am a big believer in the notion that we’ve each got to look outside ourselves and figure out what we’re going to do to make this world a little bit less terrible. Even though I check Craigslist several times a week to see if Mars has gotten its shit together and is looking for new roommates, we’re currently all stuck here on Earth together. (I figure if Bitcoin exists, then surely we must be close to creating a colony on the red planet.) So while we’re here on the planet with water and perfect conditions that allow us to exist, what are we doing to contribute to it? What are we doing to ensure that the third rock from the sun isn’t a hellhole where everything sucks?


pages: 366 words: 76,476

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) by Christian Rudder

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data science, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, Howard Zinn, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, p-value, power law, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, race to the bottom, retail therapy, Salesforce, selection bias, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, two and twenty

Thank you to Michael Tapper and Ben Murray for reading drafts, and to Sean Mathey at Mathey & Tree, Eric Brown at Franklin, Weinrib, Rudell & Vassallo, and John Therien at Smith Anderson for legal work. Thank you to Doug Demay for advice that was no less wise for being informal. Finally, thank you to Jed McCaleb and Justin Rice, who, from d20s to bitcoin to Dylan to Ulysses, have taught me so much. My life and this book are much richer for your friendship. Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abrams, J. J. abstractions, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 12.1 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Africa, 9.1, 9.2n, 9.3, 12.1 African Americans, 12.1, nts.1 jokes about, 8.1n, 8.2, 9.1 as political candidates, 8.1, 8.2 on Twitter, 13.1, nts.1 see also racism aging AIDS, 9.1, 9.2 algorithms, itr.1, 4.1, 6.1, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1n, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 11.1, 12.1, 13.1, 13.2, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3 Ali, Muhammad, 8.1, nts.1 Amazon, itr.1, bm2.1, nts.1 American Institute of Public Opinion American Political Science Association (APSA) Anderson, Benedict, 12.1, nts.1 Anderson, Pamela Anonymous collective anorexia Apple, 3.1, 14.1 apps, itr.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 12.1, 13.1, 14.1, nts.1 Arab Spring, n Aristotle, 10.1, nts.1 Arizona State University, 3.1, nts.1 Asians, itr.1, 6.1, 8.1, 10.1 atheism, 5.1, 7.1 attractiveness, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 7.1, nts.1, nts.2 aging and disparities in, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 jobs and, 7.1, 7.2 of men to women, 1.1, 2.1, 5.1, 6.1 race and, 6.1, 6.2 satisfaction and, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 sex and, itr.1, 1.1, 2.1, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, bm2.1 of women to men, 1.1, 5.1 Atwater, Lee, 8.1, nts.1 Backstrom, Lars, 4.1, nts.1, nts.2 ballads, 3.1, 10.1 Ballou, Sullivan, 3.1, 3.2, nts.1, nts.2 Bass Ale, 13.1, 13.2, nts.1 Baywatch (TV series), 6.1, nts.1 Beatles, 10.1, 13.1 beauty, itr.1, 1.1, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1n definition of, 2.1, nts.1 divisiveness of, itr.1, 7.1 effects of imperfection and, 2.1, 2.2 Beauty Myth, The (Wolf) behavior research Big Data, itr.1, itr.2, 6.1 Big Lead, The (blog) biology: evolutionary marine, 9.1, nts.1 bisexuality, itr.1, 11.1n, nts.1 male vs. female, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 message exchanges and, 11.1, 11.2 vocabulary typical of, 11.1 Bisexual Resource Center blindness, 6.1, nts.1 blogs, itr.1, 3.1, 5.1, 6.1, 13.1, bm2.1 body-image Blumenbach, Johann books, 3.1n, 3.2, 8.1, 12.1 Boston, Mass., 6.1, 11.1 Boston Globe, 6.1, 9.1, 11.1, nts.1, nts.2, nts.3 Boston Marathon bombing, 14.1, nts.1 Bradley effect, 8.1, nts.1 brain, itr.1, 2.1, 7.1 Brand Called You, The (Montoya) “Brand Called You, The” (Peters) brands, 9.1, 13.1, nts.1 personal, 13.1, 13.2, nts.1 product, 13.1, 13.2, nts.1, nts.2 Breitbart, Andrew British Trademark Registration Act Bujalski, Andrew Burns, Ken BuzzFeed, 9.1, nts.1 calculus, 4.1, 9.1 California, 8.1, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3 cancer Carnegie, Andrew Carnegie, Dale, 13.1, 13.2, nts.1 Carver, Raymond celebrities, 9.1, 11.1, 13.1, 14.1 gay Census, US, 1.1, 10.1, nts.1, nts.2 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Chicago, Ill., 8.1, 12.1, 12.2 children, itr.1, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, bm2.1 birth of raising of, 1.1, 2.1, 7.1 teenage, 1.1, 2.1, 3.1, 7.1, 7.2, 9.1, 10.1, 12.1, 13.1 China Christianity, 7.1, 13.1 Chungking Express (film) Civil War, The (TV series) Civil War, US, 3.1, 3.2 Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clovis people Coldest Winter Ever, The (Sister Souljah) Columbia University communication, 3.1, 5.1, 9.1, 13.1, 14.1 connections fostered by, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 13.1 identifying sources of momentous changes in, 3.1, 3.2 communities, itr.1, 12.1, 13.1 movement of virtual Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) computers, itr.1, itr.2, 5.1, 6.1, 8.1, 13.1 cookies on hard drives on laptop, itr.1, 13.1 limitations of science of, 4.1, 13.1, 14.1 sitting at software for, 4.1, 4.2, 6.1, 9.1, 11.1, 12.1, 14.1, 14.2 storage of data on, itr.1, 1.1, 3.1, 14.1 use of mouse with Condor, 9.1, 9.2 Congress, US, 9.1, 12.1 approval ratings of, itr.1, nts.1 see also House of Representatives, US Constitute project conversation, itr.1, 4.1, 7.1, 8.1 in-depth on-line, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 on race Cornell University, 11.1, 12.1 Craigslist, itr.1, 12.1, nts.1 maps of, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3 “Missed Connections” section on, 12.1, 12.2 Crawford, Cindy Crick, Francis criminal justice system, 6.1, 7.1 black vs. white defendants in, 6.1, 8.1 Cronkite, Walter cross dressing Cuban Missile Crisis culturomics, 3.1, 3.2n curves, itr.1, itr.2, 7.1, 7.2, 9.1, bm2.1, nts.1 bell beta, itr.1, nts.1 customer relations management (CRM) customers contradictory behavior of Cyrus, Miley data, itr.1, 9.1, bm2.1 actor vs. acted upon in analysis of, itr.1, 1.1, 2.1, 4.1, 6.1, 14.1, bm2.1 collection of, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, itr.4, itr.5, 1.1, 1.2, 8.1, 12.1, 14.1 commercial use of, itr.1, 14.1, 14.2 corporate use of, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3 cross-referencing of deletion of, 14.1, 14.2 digital, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, 6.1, bm2.1 emotional shading behind extrapolations from, 6.1, 8.1, 14.1 governmental surveillance of, itr.1, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, nts.1 hacking of, 12.1, 14.1, 14.2, nts.1 of human interaction, itr.1, itr.2 human story behind, itr.1, itr.2 lack of location longitudinal message, 3.1, 6.1 personal pollution of, 11.1n, 12.1 privacy issue and, itr.1, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, 14.4, nts.1 robust, 5.1, 10.1 selection bias and selling of, 14.1, 14.2 storage of, itr.1, 1.1, 3.1, 14.1 as storytelling terabytes of, itr.1, 2.1 truth of, 13.1, 14.1 unprecedented deluge of, itr.1, 4.1, 14.1, 14.2 use of color with, itr.1, 3.1, bm1.1 visualization of, 1.1n, 14.1 as windows on our lives databases, itr.1, 1.1, 3.1, 8.1 dataclysm.org/relationshiptest, 4.1 DateHookup, itr.1, 6.1, 6.2 dating, 1.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, nts.1 attractiveness and satisfaction in, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 racism and, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5 see also websites, dating Dazed and Confused (film), 1.1, 12.1 death “and taxes,” death penalty Democratic Party, 5.1, 8.1, 13.1 demographics, itr.1, 1.1, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 10.1 depression, 8.1, 11.1 Description of a Slave Ship Digital OnLine Life and You (DOLLY Project), 12.1, nts.1 disease, 4.1, 14.1, bm1.1 epidemics of, 8.1, 8.2, 14.1, nts.1 “Dittoheads,” dogfooding Don’t Look Back (film) Dowdell, James, 4.1, nts.1 drugs, 8.1, 11.1 side effects of Dylan, Bob, itr.1, itr.2 Earth, itr.1, 2.1, 10.1, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3 age of, 9.1, 9.2 as viewed from space earthquakes, 7.1, 12.1, 12.2, nts.1 eating disorders economics, 1.1, 8.1, 13.1 Economist, 9.1, nts.1 education, 1.1, 5.1, 6.1 college, itr.1, 4.1, 6.1, 10.1, 13.1, 14.1 exchange programs in high school, itr.1, 3.1, 6.1, 9.1, 12.1, 13.1 Egypt, 9.1, 9.2, 13.1 Einstein, Albert, 10.1, 13.1, 13.2, 14.1 elections, US black candidates in, 8.1, 8.2 district gerrymandering and exit polls in of 1952 of 1982 of 2008, 8.1, 8.2, nts.1, nts.2 of 2012 e-mail, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 5.1, 12.1, 14.1 embeddedness, 4.1, 4.2 employment, 6.1, 6.2 search for, 7.1, 7.2 see also jobs English language, 3.1, 3.2, 10.1 Enlightenment era, 4.1, 6.1 Escher, M.


pages: 300 words: 77,787

Investing Demystified: How to Invest Without Speculation and Sleepless Nights by Lars Kroijer

Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, BRICs, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, compound rate of return, credit crunch, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, fixed income, high net worth, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, John Bogle, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, market bubble, money market fund, passive investing, pattern recognition, prediction markets, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

In a really nasty world scenario those cash holdings could prove invaluable and ensure survival longer than many governments. To ensure that you actually own those underlying stocks you would need an ETF to be physical instead of synthetic, where you take credit risk with the issuer. 2 The emergence of virtual currencies/commodities like Bitcoin may provide financial shelter in the future and a potential alternative to gold. These currencies are still in the nascent stages, but if they end up as a recognised asset that can be stored securely I would not be surprised to see its value go up at times of turmoil and stress in the financial markets.


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

There are numerous examples of good technology being used badly and little reason to think gene drives would be an exception.8 NEW COMPUTING APPROACHES The world of computing is highly innovative, and there are many emerging technologies that may prove influential over the next thirty-five years. These range from distributed ledger technology (block chain) as used by Bitcoin and other digital currencies, through virtual reality and the Internet of Things to cerebral interfaces. Two areas which may prove to be fundamental are quantum computing and the development of AI: first narrow AI – the use of artificial intelligence to solve tightly defined problems such as image recognition – and, ultimately, full AI.


pages: 277 words: 70,506

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News by Eliot Higgins

4chan, active measures, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, anti-globalists, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Bellingcat, bitcoin, blockchain, citizen journalism, Columbine, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, fake news, false flag, gamification, George Floyd, Google Earth, hive mind, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, post-truth, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Tactical Technology Collective, the scientific method, WikiLeaks

It is difficult to know how to react: you’re probably just dealing with an idiot who wants to upset you, but the person could intend to harm you. Robert Evans, after writing about the shitposting in the Christchurch gunman’s manifesto, found a post on 8chan of his own face photoshopped into a ‘Wanted’ poster, with a bullet hole in his forehead and the promise of a fifteen-bitcoin bounty – approximately $60,000 at the time. The one-word message was ‘bump’. Another 8chan poster responded: ‘Unironically? For that much it can be done.’ This was probably an empty boast. But 8chan ‘pranks’ have a way of turning into real bloodshed. In another instance, we were investigating Ukrainian neo-Nazis through the Bellingcat Anti-Equality Monitoring group, which studies fascist movements targeting the LGBT community, feminists and ethnic minorities in Ukraine, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Humans are talking animals, and whatever the idiots in the Manosphere have to say (god, men talk A LOT), a doll that appears to be taking an interest in you via voice commands, seems to be necessary to the fantasy of a relationship. As soon as this doll can make her man a sandwich, she’ll be bigger than Bitcoin. In China, doll-buying is becoming more popular and more public. DollMates is a prolific group on Chinese social media. Some men on the site have never had a relationship with a female. Others use the dolls as love-objects while maintaining a human relationship. I think it is likely that the popularity of consoles and gaming in China has influenced wider acceptance of AI-enhanced dolls.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

In every case, the absence of the underlying data gathering has been a hurdle, and official statisticians are gradually adjusting their surveys and other forms of data gathering to fill the gaps. However, there is more to the measurement challenge than just having failed to keep up with needing to know how many people are employed in the videogames industry or what proportion of transactions are taking place in bitcoin. Economic statistics fit the world into a philosophical framework. The current System of National Accounts has been described as the ‘one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century’. The invention of GDP (or rather its predecessor GNP) has even been credited with helping the Allies win the Second World War by providing them with a more accurate estimate of the nations’ productive capacity and consumption needs (Lacey 2011).


pages: 342 words: 72,927

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

— Kate Barker Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax System to Make Us Healthier — David Fell A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier — Danny Dorling Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No Transport Policy — Christian Wolmar Travel Fast or Smart? A Manifesto for an Intelligent Transport Policy — David Metz Britain’s Cities, Britain’s Future — Mike Emmerich Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand To Money That Understands Us — David Birch The Weaponization of Trade: The Great Unbalancing of Politics and Economics — Rebecca Harding and Jack Harding Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere? — Christian Wolmar Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery — Andrew Greenway, Ben Terrett, Mike Bracken and Tom Loosemore Gaming Trade: Win–Win Strategies for the Digital Era — Rebecca Harding and Jack Harding The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony — David Birch Catastrophe and Systemic Change: Learning from the Grenfell Tower Fire and Other Disasters — Gill Kernick Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?


pages: 1,409 words: 205,237

Architecting Modern Data Platforms: A Guide to Enterprise Hadoop at Scale by Jan Kunigk, Ian Buss, Paul Wilkinson, Lars George

Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, business intelligence, business logic, business process, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, continuous integration, create, read, update, delete, data science, database schema, Debian, deep learning, DevOps, domain-specific language, fault tolerance, Firefox, FOSDEM, functional programming, Google Chrome, Induced demand, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, job automation, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, level 1 cache, loose coupling, microservices, natural language processing, Network effects, platform as a service, single source of truth, source of truth, statistical model, vertical integration, web application

Large multinational organizations routinely collect data, both intentionally and incidentally, about their customers and employees around the world. When legal frameworks specify that this data should be kept segregated, it is highly likely that the result is multiple clusters. Multiple Clusters and Independent Storage and Compute Computing workloads come in all shapes and sizes. Some workloads, such as bitcoin mining, use huge amounts of CPU but almost no network or disk resources. At the opposite end of the scale, data archiving makes heavy use of disk storage but very little CPU. As multipurpose environments, modern data platforms need to support a wide range of workloads, often simultaneously. We discuss how clusters can vary in terms of their hardware profiles to support a variety of workloads in Chapter 3.

Such accesses include: Network access VPC settings, VPNs, internet gateways, firewalls, security groups Data access Security settings on local or object storage System access Ability to log in to the boxes via SSH or web-based console via accidentally exposed credentials or lax controls A typical case could be criminals using compromised credentials to use computational resources for their own purposes, such as bitcoin mining. Application design Often, real-world cloud deployments include some sort of application or intermediary API layer that accesses cluster services and data. To prevent accidental exposure to data and systems, these applications and APIs need to be carefully designed such that their authentication and authorization controls are at least as strong than those on the cluster.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Department of Commerce, “Commerce Adds China’s SMIC to the Entity List”; “Addition of Entities to the Entity List, Revision of Entry on the Entity List, and Removal of Entities From the Entity List.” 184production capacity at the 14 nm node: “About Us,” Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, 2022, captured by the Internet Archive February 1, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20220201031506/https://www.smics.com/en/site/about_summary; Khan, Mann, and Peterson, The Semiconductor Supply Chain, 21, 23; Anton Shilov, “China to Ramp Up High-Volume Production Using 14nm Node by End of 2022,” Tom’s Hardware, June 23, 2021, https://www.tomshardware.com/news/china-hopes-to-ramp-up-14nm-production-in-2022. In July 2022, SMIC was revealed to have developed a quasi-7 nm chip for bitcoin mining. Majeed Ahmad, “The truth about SMIC’s 7nm chip fabrication ordeal,” EDN Asia, August 26, 2022, https://www.ednasia.com/the-truth-about-smics-7nm-chip-fabrication-ordeal/; TechInsights, 7nm SMIC MinerVa Bitcoin Miner, 2022. 184expansive new restrictions: “Additional Export Controls: Certain Advanced Computing and Semiconductor Manufacturing Items; Supercomputer and Semiconductor End Use; Entity List Modification,” document no. 2022-21658 (October 13, 2022), https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2022-21658/additional-export-controls-certain-advanced-computing-and-semiconductor-manufacturing-items. 184China announced a $1.4 trillion investment: “China’s Got a New Plan to Overtake the U.S. in Tech,” Bloomberg, May 20, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-20/china-has-a-new-1-4-trillion-plan-to-overtake-the-u-s-in-tech. 185slow to develop a strategy for competing in AI hardware: Christopher Darby and Sarah Sewall, “The Innovation Wars: America’s Eroding Technological Advantage,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-02-10/technology-innovation-wars; Matt Pottinger, “Beijing’s American Hustle,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/2021-08-23/beijings-american-hustle; Ben Buchanan, “The U.S.


pages: 303 words: 81,071

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

The consensus seemed to be it was of military or intelligence agency origin, and regardless of where it had come from there was no doubting it was meant to be a weapon. Rush had seen countless ransomware tools come and go over the decades, viruses designed to seize and infect systems, to paralyze them until their desperate, money-hemorrhaging users coughed up the requested bitcoins to get their data and businesses back. But this was different. There wasn’t even any pretense of making money here, no attempt to inform or give warning to users. This just broke stuff. It just stopped shit working. At the very least, after it had spread itself to anything else it could find, it disconnected what it infected from the network.


pages: 286 words: 87,401

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

You need to have some humility when breaking rules and recognize that you might not understand all the consequences. It’s not always cheating to break the rules, but it is always a high-beta activity, hence the need for caution and compassion. A present-day example of a field where there are both ethical and unethical pirates is the rapid development of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and initial coin offerings (ICOs) as a financing tool. The start-ups that are creating currencies and holding ICOs are operating in a legal gray area and likely breaking rules. Some of these start-ups are ethical pirates who are working to change the rules for everyone. Others are sociopathic criminals who are simply trying to collect as much money as possible before the window closes and devil take the hindmost.


pages: 302 words: 85,877

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Then he convinced Boston software entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, inventor of the modern electronic spreadsheet, and libertarian engineer John Gilmore to join him in founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Gilmore would soon host the Cypherpunks mailing list, which would be home to the most public-spirited cryptographers of the next two decades, along with hackers, assorted freethinkers, and the probable inventor of Bitcoin.) The trio’s long-term goal was to extend the freedom of the press, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and as many other rights as possible to the digital realm. The short-term goal was to defend hackers who were merely exploring from the full consequences of zealous prosecution, starting with Neidorf.


pages: 309 words: 81,975

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Moreover, as you put money into that machine, you and its other users have a say in what snacks it will order and how often it should be cleaned. It has no managers, all of those processes were pre-written into code.” Developers, leveraging what they have learned in creating cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, are pioneering a new generation of decentralized applications that allow organizations to operate like that magical vending machine. Through a series of rules called smart contracts, founders can create, fund, and operate an entire organization independent of hierarchical management.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

But this disregards a key feature of quantum theory, the wave function’s amplitude. This determines the probability of observing a particular outcome. Though many worlds says that all quantum possibilities are realized, that doesn’t mean we can just ignore amplitudes and probabilities. Imagine another quantum slot machine. I put in my Bitcoin, push the button, and it makes a quantum measurement to decide whether I win. There’s a 1 in a million chance of hitting the jackpot. In other words, there is a world branch in which I win and another in which I lose. Both branches are real but evidently one is “realer.” I am 999,999 times more likely to find myself in the loser world than the jackpot world.


pages: 315 words: 85,791

Technical Blogging: Turn Your Expertise Into a Remarkable Online Presence by Antonio Cangiano

23andMe, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, bitcoin, bounce rate, cloud computing, content marketing, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, revision control, Ruby on Rails, search engine result page, slashdot, software as a service, web application

Another problem with donations is that if you try to earn money from your blog with ads, sponsorships, and affiliate offers, very few readers will feel like donating to you. And if you get rid of those revenue channels, you generally won’t be able to make up for them with donations alone. I have tried a variety of donation-related approaches, including accepting Bitcoins and receiving micropayments via Flattr and Readability.[93] Earnings were abysmal when compared to other revenue sources. One donation approach that I have seen work many times is having infrequent fund-raising posts,[94] in which the blogger outlines the expenses and time commitment required to keep up the blog and requests (perhaps once a year) that readers to chip in to reach a specific amount of money.


pages: 324 words: 80,217

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

In the meantime, the only unifying force in such a disunited Europe, the equivalent of bishops and monastics taking over for Roman governance in late antiquity, might be corporate powers—the tech companies above all, based in the United States or China, which would continue to hang the necessary satellites and extract the necessary Bitcoin or Libra payments from natives and migrants alike, maintaining a kind of virtual connection to a former world that had otherwise passed away. Meanwhile, other world powers would endure the way Byzantium endured the twilight of the classical world—as a redoubt, a fortress, in which the forces driving state collapse are held at bay by walls both figurative and literal, and perhaps by the power of surveillance above all.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

When the economic cycle is on the upswing, the prices of financial assets like stocks and shares start increasing. Investors buy these securities, expecting the good times to continue for the foreseeable future. When lots of investors buy the same asset, the price rises. Think, for example, about the increase in the price of Bitcoin, which was driven by expectations about the crypto-currency’s future value almost entirely divorced from its utility. As investors experience several periods of strong returns, they start borrowing greater sums to invest. Banks also tend to lend more to businesses when the economy is doing well. More money enters the financial system, pushing up asset prices even further and creating a self-reinforcing cycle of optimism-driven asset price inflation.


pages: 326 words: 84,180

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, British Empire, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, disinformation, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, ghettoisation, Google Glasses, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, lifelogging, machine readable, mass incarceration, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, r/findbostonbombers, Scientific racism, security theater, sexual politics, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, US Airways Flight 1549, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Works Progress Administration

The root word -veillance is differently applied and invoked, for example, with the terms “überveillance” (often defined as electronic surveillance by way of radio-frequency identification or other devices embedded in the living body), “redditveillance” (the crowdsourcing of surveillance through publicly accessible CCTV feeds, photographs uploaded to online image sharing platforms such as Flickr, and online discussion forums, such as Reddit and 4chan), and “dataveillance,” to name a few.51 Lyon has outlined the “potency of dataveillance” in a surveillance society, which, he writes, is marked by “a range of personal data systems, connected by telecommunications networks, with a consistent identification scheme.”52 The prefix data- signals that such observing is done through data collection as a way of managing or governing a certain population, for example, through the use of bar-coded customer loyalty cards at point of sale for discounted purchases while also collecting aggregate data on loyalty cardholders, or vehicles equipped with transponders that signal their entry and exit on pay-per-use highways and roads, often replacing toll booths. The Guardian newspaper named “surveillance” and “sousveillance” as the words that mattered in 2013 alongside “Bitcoin,” “Obamacare,” and “binge-watching.”53 For Steve Mann, who coined the term “sousveillance,” both terms—sousveillance and surveillance—fall under the broad concept of veillance, a form of watching that is neutral. Mann situates surveillance as the “more studied, applied and well-known veillance” of the two, defining surveillance as “organizations observing people” where this observing and recording is done by an entity in a position of power relative to the person or persons being observed and recorded.54 Such oversight could take the form of red-light cameras that photograph vehicles when drivers violate traffic laws, or the monitoring of sales clerks on shop floors with CCTV, as well as, for example, punch clocks that track factory workers’ time on the floor to more ubiquitous forms of observation, productivity monitoring, and data collection, such as remote desktop viewing or electronic monitoring software that tracks employees’ non-work-related Internet use.


pages: 291 words: 80,068

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

In other cases, new frames peacefully coexist with the old. Einsteinian and Newtonian physics both have their place in explaining motion, just as proprietary software and open-source code can flourish. Places like Britain, Belgium, Bhutan, and Thailand can meld democracy and monarchy. Central banks manage fiat currencies but people still barter or use Bitcoin. Yet in all cases, reframing an issue allows us to see it from a new perspective, which reveals alternatives that we might not otherwise have imagined. That, in turn, helps us make good decisions and achieve better outcomes. A place where a useful reframing took place was the city of Camden in southern New Jersey.


pages: 282 words: 85,658

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

I happened to pick a banking example to demonstrate Build vs. Die in action. It’s hard to imagine an industry more immune to disruption, given the high stakes (people’s money!) and the byzantine regulations involved. Yet even banking is becoming a software industry. I’m not even talking about the potential impacts of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency; I’m just talking about the basics of how to run a retail bank, acquire customers, and keep them happy. These dynamics are playing out in every industry, all around the world: in Munich, at Allianz, the world’s biggest insurer; in the United States, at Domino’s, Target, and U-Haul.


pages: 257 words: 80,698

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, Bellingcat, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Downton Abbey, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Global Witness, John Bercow, Julian Assange, light touch regulation, lockdown, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, surveillance capitalism, the High Line, WikiLeaks

When I was in Gibraltar I had a long chat with Albert Isola, minister for digital and financial services, who was surprisingly hip-looking with an open-necked shirt and multicoloured thread bracelet. He was keen to talk about the peninsula’s new proposal for attracting business to the Rock, which is to introduce regulations for companies that use blockchain, a mechanism by which financial or other transactions are recorded in a decentralised way and which underpins crypto-currencies like Bitcoin. From Gibraltar’s perspective, it is acting in a nimble way to take advantage of a new business opportunity, and it is perfectly possible that the companies that submit to the peninsula’s regulators will prove beneficial to the world. It is also, however, perfectly possible that this new technology will act like a twenty-first-century shell company, and help crooks and tax dodgers hide their wealth from democratic scrutiny.


pages: 306 words: 82,909

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

Traditionally, this scheme involved calling potential investors on the telephone. Today, it more often involves online trading message boards, social media groups, and spam emails. Whether it’s ringleaders on the Reddit finance forum r/WallStreetBets pushing retail investors to send GameStop’s price “to the moon” or Elon Musk tweeting about his bitcoin buys to millions of online followers, investors can use online communications to manipulate investor expectations and produce asset bubbles for their own profit (and others’ loss) with unprecedented speed and scale. The advent of online trading has made this particular hack even more profitable. Mostly, pump-and-dump is illegal, and there are heavy fines if you get caught.


pages: 302 words: 87,776

Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter by Dr. Dan Ariely, Jeff Kreisler

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Burning Man, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, endowment effect, experimental economics, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, impact investing, invisible hand, loss aversion, mental accounting, mobile money, PalmPilot, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, the payments system, Uber for X, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

That’s why the more we understand our flaws and limitations now, the better equipped we’ll be to deal with them in the future. No one can predict the future: not about our investments, health, and jobs, nor about world events, celebrity presidents, and wine-drinking robots.* What we do know is that the future will make our spending decisions even more challenging. From Bitcoin to Apple Pay, retinal scanners, Amazon preferences, and drone delivery, more and more modern systems are designed to make us spend more, more easily, and more often. We are in an environment that is ever more hostile to making thoughtful, well-reasoned, rational decisions. And because of these modern tools, it’s only going to get more difficult for us to make choices that serve our long-term best interests.


Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Food sovereignty, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, late capitalism, means of production, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, Philip Mirowski, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, shareholder value, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, young professional, zero-sum game

Certainly, neoliberalism ushers in a new order of economic reason, a new governing rationality, new modes and venues of commodification, and of course, new features of capitalism C h a r t in g N eo l ib e r a l P o l i t i c a l R at i o n a l i t y 75 and new kinds of capital — from sharing economies to Bitcoin, from derivatives to human capital — but its systematic imperatives cannot be reduced to any of these things. These imperatives can be radically refashioned and reorganized (as financialization itself makes clear), and they are not matters of instinct or of hydraulics, yet they are fundamental life drives no less fierce than those of a living being.


pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

But, as always, what began with an attempt to create and share new kinds of sounds ended up triggering other revolutions in other domains. The first true peer-to-peer networks for sharing information were designed specifically for the swapping of musical files. It is still too early to tell, but this innovation may turn out to be as influential as those piano keyboards and pinned cylinders, if in fact peer-to-peer platforms like Bitcoin eventually become an important part of the global financial infrastructure, as many people believe. It is entirely possible that the most significant advance in the history of money since the invention of a government-backed currency will end up having its roots in teenagers sharing Metallica songs.


pages: 312 words: 91,835

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, place-making, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, stakhanovite, trade route, transfer pricing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

As the world becomes more integrated, many more such revisions will affect the basic economic tools we use. I have already mentioned that national accounts will become less relevant and that monetary policy may no longer be conducted by states. (And one can think in addition of the role that private monies such as Bitcoin may play.) But even essential economic concepts like comparative advantage, which is based on an implicit assumption of methodological nationalism, that is, of national accounting and immobility of some factors of production, may have to be revised. In a single market both wine and cloth would be, as in David Ricardo’s famous example, produced in Portugal because workers and machines would all move there (and none would stay in England).


pages: 340 words: 91,745

Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married by Abby Ellin

Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Burning Man, business intelligence, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, content marketing, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, double helix, dumpster diving, East Village, fake news, feminist movement, forensic accounting, fudge factor, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, John Darwin disappearance case, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk, telemarketer, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Questions about why this is happening: Why do we keep hearing these types of stories now? Is it because, as a culture, we talk more about deception than we used to? Or are there more pathological liars lurking about now? Is it simply Fear of Missing Out that propels people to do whatever they want, others be damned? Does the Internet, with its alibi networks and untraceable Bitcoin and disposable, prepaid credit cards, make it easier to pretend to be someone else? With all of this deceit swirling around us, where does our avowed value of honesty come from? And why do we even expect it from others? And then there are questions about how it’s happening: How do people pull it off, psychologically and logistically?


pages: 336 words: 93,672

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists by Gary Marcus, Jeremy Freeman

23andMe, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, bioinformatics, bitcoin, brain emulation, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, Drosophila, epigenetics, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, Google Glasses, ITER tokamak, iterative process, language acquisition, linked data, mouse model, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, twin studies, web application

Once one realizes what a GPU can do, and realizes that a GPU is just a different kind of computer, the notion that the brain might somehow not be a computer loses all its force. Many pathways in the visual cortex, for instance, seem to perform transformations on representations of visual scenes, for example, extracting, in parallel edges across a scene. Digital designs like ASICs that are dedicated to specific tasks (like BitCoin mining) show that programs are optional, too; up to certain limits, many programs that might be loaded into memory and executed sequentially can be translated into parallel circuitry that is hardwired and run without a stored program. In my own view, it is obvious that brains (especially those of vertebrates) are computers, in the sense of being systems that operate over inputs and manipulate information systematically.


pages: 293 words: 88,490

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction by Richard Bookstaber

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, data science, disintermediation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, epigenetics, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, geopolitical risk, Henri Poincaré, impact investing, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market clearing, market microstructure, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, the map is not the territory, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, yield curve

My first attempt, in the 1980s, was a thriller that portrayed a world without physical currency, where all transactions were done on a system called transNet, and where the central plot revolved around a group bent on destroying the records of that system, throwing the world into chaos. (In other words, Bitcoin gone rogue on a global scale.) There was a backup copy of transNet held in vaults deep under the mountains in Utah (where Mormons keep copies of their genealogical records), but the plot included the erasure of those records once they surfaced. If anyone is interested, I could dust it off and try to finish it, but now the plot would not be so original.


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

Smartphones, cups of coffee, steel girders, and most other products are owned by the people or companies that bought them. The companies that produced these things are also owned by people. Many shares of Apple, Starbucks, US Steel, and other public companies are held by mutual funds, pension funds, and hedge funds, but all these funds are themselves ultimately owned by people. Most houses, cars, land, gold, Bitcoin, and other assets are also owned by people rather than the government. Voluntary exchange. The phrase most closely associated with capitalism is voluntary exchange. People can’t be forced to buy specific products, take a certain job, or move across the country. Companies don’t have to sell themselves if they don’t want to.


pages: 324 words: 93,606

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, American Legislative Exchange Council, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, effective altruism, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, germ theory of disease, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Hollis, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school choice, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators

., ‘From Blueprint to Scale’, 16. 33Eleanor Whitehead, ‘Africa: Aiding Business’, All Africa, 5 January 2012; my discussion in this section is drawn from Linsey McGoey, ‘The Philanthropic State: Market-State Hybrids in the Philanthrocapitalist Turn’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 1 (2014), 109–25. Comments on Vodafone’s tax avoidance drawn from Richard Brooks, The Great Tax Robbery (London: Oneworld, 2014). 34Katie Collins ‘Africa’s First Bitcoin Wallet Launches in Kenya’, Wired, 9 July 2013. 35William Lazonick and Mazzucato Marinna “The Risk-Reward Nexus in the Innovation-Inequality Relationship: Who Takes the Risks? Who Gets the Rewards?’, Industrial and Corporate Change, 22, no. 4 (2013), 1093–128, 1099; see also Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs.


pages: 307 words: 88,745

War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, school choice, side project, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

That’s why its political incarnation seems so radical, and also why it is so hard to imagine Traditionalism ever operating within the institutions of contemporary democratic politics. * * * BANNON AND I had been speaking for nearly an hour and a half when the door to his apartment opened and his next guest, early bitcoin investor Jeffrey Wernick, entered the room. I took my leave, rode the elevator down to the hotel lobby, passed the dapper bar to the right, and wended my way out to the street. How surreal it all was. Bannon was well-read and quick-thinking. Brilliant, even. And yet our conversation also left me curious and unnerved.


pages: 295 words: 89,441

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley by Atsuo Inoue

Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, Apple II, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, business climate, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, fixed income, game design, George Floyd, hive mind, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Masayoshi Son, off grid, popular electronics, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TikTok, Vision Fund, WeWork

‘Whoever controls AI controls the future; the future of humankind lies in AI,’ Son declared, once again stating his intent to invest in technological advances and that going forward the SoftBank Group would seek to simultaneously both attack as well as defend its position. Responding to a question put to him by Andrew Ross Sorkin (DealBook editor and CNBC presenter) at the DealBook Online Summit organised by the New York Times held on 17 November 2020 concerning his failed stake in Bitcoin, Son stated, ‘I was told to look into it, so I did, but now I don’t bother with it any more.’ He would also talk about the optimistic outlook he has for ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company), as the SoftBank Vision Fund is a major investor. Furthermore, he spoke about the extensive monetisation operation under way, stating the SoftBank Group had ‘80 billion dollars (approximately 8.32 trillion yen, inclusive of deals such as the sale of ARM, which should be concluded by March 2022) in cash in hand.


pages: 292 words: 94,660

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back by Jacob Ward

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

Facebook is so proud of its ability to deliver outcomes to its advertising customers, rather than just eyeballs, that by 2018, a senior executive there told me, the majority of its advertising contracts were written on that basis. This is a function of scale, of course. When two billion people are spending at least an hour a day on average on your platform, you can learn enough about them to deliver the ones that would want to buy a cheese knife or subscribe to a newsletter about Bitcoin. But it’s also a function of pattern recognition, and of putting a price on those patterns. If we wanted to learn the value of a potentially compulsive gambler to a social casino gaming company, we’d only need to know how much Facebook charges social casino companies each time a customer downloads an app.


pages: 420 words: 94,064

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

A passenger stands up in his seat on an airplane, asking for and receiving a show of hands: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” Especially for a generation whose formative years included the global financial crisis, Wall Street’s advice had a credibility problem. These were the people who had told them or their parents that “subprime is contained,” that bitcoin was too speculative, and that they should be happy making 8 percent a year in mutual funds. Peers and wealthy influencers from outside the traditional financial sphere, such as Silicon Valley executives Elon Musk and Chamath Palihapitiya, are seen as far more reliable than the man with a nice suit in a brokerage commercial.


pages: 302 words: 92,206

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The group’s first venture, a floating charter city in French Polynesia, stalled at the planning stage due to negative reaction from the French Polynesians, concerned about pollution, disruption and environmental damage. One Tahitian TV host compared the situation to the evil Galactic Empire in Star Wars imposing on the innocent Ewoks, while secretly building the Death Star.21 Undeterred, Bitcoin tycoon Chad Elwartowski and his partner, Supranee Thepdet, built a Seastead cabin off the coast of Phuket in Thailand in 2019. However, the Thai government charged them with violating national sovereignty, which carries the death penalty, and the couple fled, escaping Thai naval police by minutes.


pages: 301 words: 100,597

My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture by Guy Branum

bitcoin, different worldview, G4S, Google Glasses, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, pets.com, plutocrats, Rosa Parks, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, tech billionaire, telemarketer

On most trips, I boarded the van with a book and we all politely listened to late-1990s indie pop as we crossed America’s fruited plains, but as time wore on, our collective need for socialization crept high enough that van-wide talk began. There was a jaded conspiracy theorist who probably ended up buying a lot of Bitcoin early on; there was a bearded chemical engineer I assumed was in his mid-thirties but was actually eighteen. A Mennonite historian, a Muslim Kansan girl whose dad owned three Dairy Queens, a dazzlingly intelligent, medium-handsome architecture student, a thirty-seven-year-old who enrolled in classes at the university only so he could play quiz bowl, and a zaftig freshman girl from North Dakota who dressed and behaved exactly as though she were an eighth-grade boy.


pages: 572 words: 94,002

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy by David Sawyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Cal Newport, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, Desert Island Discs, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, index card, index fund, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, knowledge worker, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart meter, Snapchat, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, The 4% rule, Tim Cook: Apple, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, work culture , Y Combinator

In Section 3 of the FIRE Triumvirate, I reveal the secret weapon in your journey to early retirement. A simple, transparent, set-and-forget approach to investing that allows you to focus on what’s important in life: being happier. Chapter 30 Section 3: Investing (Options, Interest and the SWR) IT’S TUESDAY FEBRUARY 7TH 2018. I’m writing this sentence after the bitcoin bubble has burst and our portfolio has dropped 7% in the space of a week. I have friends who have converted their defined contribution pensions to cash and are running for the hills. Panic reigns. Yet I’m saying you should consider placing your life savings in the stock market. Is he mad? you’re thinking.


pages: 332 words: 100,601

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

In Sweden, you can buy a magazine from a homeless vendor, or make a donation in a church, and pay with your credit card.14 PayPal, was an early pioneer in online payments, and services like Square, Paytm, MobiKwik, Apple Pay and Ezetap (founded by our former UIDAI colleague Sanjay Swamy) offer a multitude of electronic payment options to the consumer, whether it’s turning your phone into a mobile terminal that can process credit card payments, or letting you pay by simply tapping your phone against a point-of-sale terminal in a store. Smartphones like Apple’s iPhone 6 now come equipped with fingerprint readers so that adding your fingerprint data to every online transaction increases the security and reliability of such payment systems. Taking things further, we have systems like Bitcoin that operate on ‘digital currency’—not issued or controlled by any government—where users can transfer money completely free of regulatory oversight. Lest one think that all of these innovations are confined to developed nations, consider M-Pesa, a mobile payment system operational in Kenya and Tanzania that’s run by Safaricom and Vodacom, subsidiaries of the telecom giant Vodafone.


pages: 323 words: 100,923

This Is Not Fame: A "From What I Re-Memoir" by Doug Stanhope

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, bitcoin, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, obamacare, pre–internet, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Stephen Hawking, telemarketer, traveling salesman

Sauce and cocktail straws. I’d told Hennigan weeks before the tour ended that I was done with doing stand-up comedy as soon as we got home. I meant it. I’ve told him from the plotting of my first book that I would never write another book as well. My word is worth the exchange rate of dog shit to bitcoin. I’ve been compared to Bill Hicks quite often in the later years of my career, almost exclusively and repeatedly in the UK where he is revered. At first this didn’t bother me. I was flattered and somewhat scared as though I had to somehow live up to and fill his big dead shoes. It didn’t start to annoy me until I’d see people online shitting on me for thinking I was the next Bill Hicks.


pages: 305 words: 98,072

How to Own the World: A Plain English Guide to Thinking Globally and Investing Wisely by Andrew Craig

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, bonus culture, book value, BRICs, business cycle, collaborative consumption, diversification, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Future Shock, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, passive income, pensions crisis, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, smart cities, stocks for the long run, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

New York: Dutton, 2003. Frieden, Jeffry A., and David A. Lake. International Political Economy: Perspectives on Global Power and Wealth. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Friedman, Thomas L. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Frisby, Dominic. Bitcoin: The Future of Money? Unbound, 2014. ———. Life after the State. Unbound, 2013. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. ———. Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. New York: Free Press, 1996. Funnell, Warwick, Jane Andrew, and Robert E.


Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Newman, “Power Laws, Pareto Distributions and Zipf’s Law,” Contemporary Physics 46, no. 5 (2005): 323–51; Dimitrios Rafailidis and Yannis Manolopoulos, “The Power of Music: Searching for Power-Laws in Symbolic Musical Data,” working paper, Department of Informatics, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2008. 20. Stephen Gandel, “Beware, Bitcoin Buffs, Bubbles Often Bite,” Bloomberg, Sep. 29, 2017. 21. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006). 22. Paul Krugman, “Is This (Still) the Age of the Superstar?,” New York Times, Jun. 13, 2013. 23. Author’s calculation using information from the Pollstar Boxoffice Database. 24.


pages: 379 words: 99,340

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

They symbolized a starched-collar kind of mastery, and they meant to impress. Even the lowest-ranking person in these organizations, the names implied, had risen far above the masses. The digital age loves self-mocking names, which are a way to puncture the formal stiffness of the established order: “Yahoo,” “Google,” “Twitter,” “reddit,” “Flickr,” “Photobucket,” “Bitcoin.” Without having asked the people in question, I feel reasonably sure that the founders of Google never contemplated naming their company “National Search Engine Corporation” and Mark Zuckerman of Facebook never felt tempted by “Social Connections Center of America.” It wasn’t the style. The names of two popular political blogs from the early days of blogging, Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, poked fun at the pretentiousness of the news business.


pages: 346 words: 97,330

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

And, much like we found among other workers, LeadGenius’s team members end their shifts and meet up with fellow workers who live in their local communities. LeadGenius pays workers every other Tuesday, by noon California time (that’s where the startup’s headquarters are based), using digital payment services PayPal, Payoneer, and even Bitcoin. But, as with MTurk and UHRS, getting paid requires direct deposit, so workers must take a leap of faith and connect their bank account to accept a global transfer from a company headquartered on the other side of the planet, operated by people they may never meet or speak to in person. Working for LeadGenius, Zaffar saved enough money for his marriage ceremony and to take almost a month off from work.


pages: 342 words: 101,370

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle

Apollo 11, bitcoin, Boeing 737 MAX, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, crew resource management, crewed spaceflight, D. B. Cooper, Dennis Tito, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, game design, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, overview effect, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, time dilation, trade route, twin studies, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

She and Moses formed a potent intellectual duo, needling each other like only married aerospace engineers could. “I used to say that his program was just the truck that got me there,” said Beth. “He used to say that, without his truck, all my spacewalk hardware was just very expensive scuba gear.” She hosted Bitcoin hardware in their garage. We shared a roomy booth. He drank craft beer. She sipped a fluorescent cocktail from a martini glass. Beth was used to being the black sheep in a male-dominated world. Virgin’s pilots, engineers, and techs were overwhelmingly male. Historically, women have accounted for 20 percent of all engineering majors.


pages: 599 words: 98,564

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

The doctor who ran this clinic, Eric Scott Sills, was later arrested and charged with murdering his wife and business partner.4 * * * When Ascendance Biomedical launched their new website, http://ascendance.io, in December 2017, they invited the public to “Help Us Choose Our Next Experiments.” Tristan Roberts designed the front end of the website, plus a back-end cryptocurrency infrastructure that would enable anyone to invest in the project, undetected by the government. Rather than Bitcoin, the best-known cryptocurrency, the group was banking on Ethereum, a newer currency that was growing exponentially in value. One coin (known as an “ether”) was valued at $299 in early November 2017, and the price skyrocketed to $821 just before Christmas. Ascendance offered a diverse menu of options on their website.


pages: 335 words: 100,154

Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath by Bill Browder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist lawyer, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Clive Stafford Smith, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, estate planning, fake news, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, power law, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon

His office was indicting 12 Russian GRU officers (the GRU is Russia’s military intelligence wing), accusing them of hacking the Democratic National Committee and interfering in the election to help Trump win. The indictment was devastating. Mueller had gained access to secret emails between Russian intelligence officers. He’d also found Bitcoin payments, which are supposed to be untraceable by their nature, that the Russians had used to fund their operations in the United States. It looked like the US government would secure iron-clad convictions—if these 12 Russian officers could ever be brought before a US court. Whatever had been on Trump’s and Putin’s agenda before, the Mueller indictment would now be front and center, no matter how awkward it would be for both sides.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Out of the ruins, he predicts, will come a system where all loans have to be backed by cash in the bank, known as ‘100 per cent reserve banking’, together with a new Gold Standard. This will require a massive one-off hike in the price of gold, as the value of all the gold in the world has to rise to make it equal to the world’s wealth. (A similar rationale stands behind the Bitcoin movement, which is an attempt to create a digital currency, not backed by any state and with a limited number of digital coins.) This proposed new world of ‘real’ money would come at a massive economic cost. If bank reserves have to match loans made, there can be no expansion of the economy through credit, and there can be little space for derivatives markets, where complexity – in normal times – aids resilience to problems such as drought, crop failure, the recall of faulty motor cars etc.


pages: 518 words: 107,836

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Following this line of thought, Glushkov included in his initial OGAS draft proposal a noteworthy provision to eliminate all paper currency, providing in its place wireless money transfers, or a “moneyless system of receipts” over the OGAS network.31 Although modern readers may be tempted to see in his proposal a prototype of the modern-day ATM, e-commerce digital money transfers, PayPal, or BitCoin, Glushkov framed paperless money transfers in the politics of his time and place, calling it the fulfillment of a Marxian prophecy of a future Communist society without hard currency. Read backward in presentist terms, as historians are loath to do, the proposal, if realized, would have transformed the Soviet Union into, in Vladislav Zubok’s phrase, “a computerized socialist utopia, the motherland of the Internet and also possibly the ATM.”32 I maintain that the historical lesson is that whatever our present-day language and whatever the future imaginations of hard currency, the past brims with a variety of visionaries who thought about the future of money as virtual, when as history instructs, the dominant form of currency has already always been, since ancient Mesopotomia, the arithmetic matter of credit and debit—itself a form of expectant funds, or money transfers made virtual across time, not space.33 After reviewing the proposal, Keldysh, then president of the Soviet Academy of Science and a major supporter of Glushkov, asked to meet with Glushkov privately and urged Glushkov to strike from his original OGAS proposal the recommendation of a networked society without hard currency out of fear that it would raise “unneeded emotions.”


pages: 300 words: 106,520

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie

"there is no alternative" (TINA), banking crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, gentrification, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, North Sea oil, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, rent control, retail therapy, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, surveillance capitalism, The Chicago School, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent

The pale, thin, beautiful lad and girl in their branded red Radisson hoodies and Converses looked at me as if I’d asked for an antimacassar or an elephant gun. ‘We don’t do room service,’ they explained. ‘Everyone uses Just Eat and Deliveroo … on their phones, y’know …’ The information was relayed in the same hesitant tone of voice they might employ to explain Bitcoin to a hundred-year-old Bolivian villager. This morning, I left my room to head to the museum, having with some awkwardness hung a sign on the doorknob featuring a pouting young woman in John Lennon glasses bearing the legend: ‘Shh! Don’t tell my Mum but please tidy my room.’ This without any apparent irony.


Bit Rot by Douglas Coupland

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, bitcoin, Burning Man, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, index card, jimmy wales, junk bonds, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, McJob, Menlo Park, nuclear paranoia, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, young professional

Let’s not forget that people are demanding more from their currency these days. The new Canadian twenty is a high-tech marvel: one-quarter transparent, it contains no culturally offensive references of any kind, and features a stern photo of the Queen contemplating having to eat Christmas dinner at the Middletons’. And then there’s bitcoin. Should it ever get fully off the ground in a material way, all I ask is that they focus-group a little bit and then, having gone through the motions, just put Elvis on the damn thing. Grexit Okay, just look at the following words: Grexit. Syriza. Tsipras. Merkel. Austerity. At first glance they don’t even look like words; they resemble, I don’t know…launch codes—or maybe the names of recently FDA-approved osteoporosis medications—and yet at the moment these words are some of the most freighted in the language.


pages: 401 words: 109,892

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon

airline deregulation, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, commoditize, crack epidemic, cross-subsidies, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flag carrier, Ford Model T, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, law of one price, liquidity trap, low cost airline, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

JPMorgan Chase & Co. recently announced that it will require its asset management analysts to learn to use Python, a powerful and flexible coding language. This is not to say that all fintech ideas are great. There is a lot of hype and buzzword use. “Big” data is just data. “Machine learning” often simply means running a large number of nonlinear regressions on large data sets. Most of the transactions in Bitcoins involve drugs, pornography, and weapons. But there are also some genuinely useful ideas. A clear winner is the market for remittances. Remittances are the transfers of money by a foreign worker back to their home country. Poor households have been ripped off for decades by a highly concentrated banking industry.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The very same week that Google’s $90 million Andy Rubin sex scandal hit the papers, there was news of another and perhaps even more telling debacle: 125 Android apps and websites were subject to a multimillion-dollar scam. Essentially, fraudsters acquired legitimate apps—many targeted at kids, including a number of popular games, a selfie app, a flashlight app, and more—from their developers (paid for in Bitcoin) and sold them to shell companies in Cyprus, Malta, the British Virgin Islands, Croatia, Bulgaria, and elsewhere. Unbeknownst to the users, these apps had been loaded up with bots programmed to capture their every click, scroll, and swipe—then mimic that behavior to artificially boost traffic to the apps’ ads and collect bigger payouts from advertisers, even as they increased the risk of compromising the data of the real human beings who were being duped.


pages: 403 words: 110,492

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments by Andrew Henderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, birth tourism , bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, capital controls, car-free, content marketing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Elon Musk, failed state, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, intangible asset, land reform, low interest rates, medical malpractice, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, peer-to-peer lending, Pepsi Challenge, place-making, risk tolerance, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, too big to fail, white picket fence, work culture , working-age population

Instead, it allows you to harness the systems that are in place with total transparency to build a life of greater freedom and prosperity for yourself, your posterity, and the many other people you care about. However, if you are still bound and determined to achieve anonymity, cryptocurrency is about the only way to obtain some anonymity in your financial dealings. The US recently issued an edict making Bitcoin unfavorable from a capital gains perspective, but at least you can maintain some anonymity. If you are looking for anonymous banking, the first step you should consider is renouncing your citizenship. There are benefits to not having citizenship in a populous, bankrupt country when it comes to availing yourself of bank secrecy laws.


pages: 387 words: 106,753

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

In each instance, VCs poured huge amounts of capital into scores of ventures in some hot new sector. Then, the flow of capital suddenly stopped, and startups, starved for capital, struggled to survive. Boom-bust investment cycles do not always impact entire industry sectors. Sometimes they are limited to certain segments, like meal delivery services, virtual reality, pet care, bitcoin/blockchain, direct-to-consumer brands, robo-investing, autonomous vehicles, and so forth. Investment bubbles typically start when entrepreneurs and investors recognize a big, new opportunity, often triggered by technology breakthroughs, like machine learning, gene editing, or voice recognition software (e.g., Jibo).


pages: 357 words: 107,984

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster by Nick Timiraos

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, fear index, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, moral hazard, non-fungible token, oil shock, Phillips curve, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Rishi Sunak, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Skype, social distancing, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

Louis Fed.11 Policymakers had committed not to make the same mistakes from the past. Were they about to make new ones? One obvious source of concern was all the easy money sloshing around in markets. When Biden’s stimulus was approved, the S&P 500 had risen about 75 percent from its pandemic low on March 23, 2020. The price of Bitcoin, the speculative cryptocurrency, was a staggering ten times higher than just a year earlier. Home prices were booming. Investors were pouring cash into newfangled investments, including something called special-purpose acquisition companies—essentially big pools of cash listed on an exchange, prowling for private companies to buy and take public.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

It seems that efforts to recreate a maritime version of Galt’s Gulch, the fictitious libertarian community where the entrepreneurs of a dystopian statist US take refuge in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (a bible for libertarians who follow her pseudo-philosophy known as objectivism), have a tendency to disappoint. Land-based versions fare little better. A community called Galt’s Gulch was actually founded in 2012 in Chile’s wine country. Its official currency was Bitcoin. But it too has failed to achieve its utopian intentions following disputes among its wealthy American founders who later described each other as “drunks, liars, and sociopaths”.2 The community is currently in limbo and, in a most un-libertarian fashion, is facing a myriad of lawsuits. If economics was a religion, libertarians would be its Jehovah’s Witnesses; an almost comically extreme cult based around a utopian worship of individualism that invariably descends into self-destructive selfishness.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

Strassheim, I. (2014) ‘Zeit statt Geld fürs Alter sparen’, Migros-Magazin, 1 September 2014. www.zeitvorsorge.ch/#!/DE/24/Medien.htm 59. DEVCON1 (2016) Transactive Grid: a decentralized energy management system. Presentation at Ethereum Developer Conference, 9–13 November 2015, London, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq8RPbFz5UU 60. Seaman, D. (2015) ‘Bitcoin vs. Ethereum explained for NOOBZ’, published 30 November 2015, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEJKLFH8q5c 61. Trades Union Congress (2012) The Great Wages Grab. London: TUC. https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/tucfiles/TheGreatWagesGrab.pdf 62. Mishel, L. and Shierholz, H. (2013) A Decade of Flat Wages.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

His reckoning was that competition between money providers would favour the most stable of the currencies in circulation. The same competition would also enforce self-regulation. The work was widely derided. Milton Friedman pointed out that there was nothing in current law to prevent bilateral trade using any medium of exchange accepted by all parties. Curiously, the recent rise of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, which are digital currencies that can be used to make purchases on the internet, are an example of non-governmental money. Nevertheless, Hayek’s body of work had made an impression on the politicians who would introduce free-market economics into the British and American economies in the 1980s.


pages: 425 words: 112,220

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

NEVER BEING FINISHED CONTINUING TO LEARN IS AN ELIXIR TO LIFE. holds more than $600 billion: “Warren Buffett: Latest Portfolio,” Warren Buffett Stock Portfolio, February 14, 2018, http://warrenbuffettstockportfolio.com. Buffett publicly stated: Henry Blodget, “Here’s the Real Reason Warren Buffett Doesn’t Invest in Technology—Or Bitcoin,” Business Insider, March 26, 2014, www.businessinsider.com/why-buffett-doesnt-invest-in-technology-2014-3. one of Apple’s largest: Chuck Jones, “Apple Is Now Warren Buffett’s Largest Investment,” Forbes, February 15, 2018, www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/02/15/apple-is-now-warren-buffetts-largest-investment/#35e572fb4313.


pages: 453 words: 114,250

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

Dozens of VPN apps and proxy services were also banned.52 Popular Google services, including Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive and the reCAPTCHA security tool, reported disruptions.53 One business owner estimated that he was losing over $32,000 a day due to the disruptions, while others predicted total losses to the economy could quickly reach $1 billion.54 Smart TVs, airline ticket sales, bike rentals, Bitcoin mining, online gaming and mobile wifi were among the many services reportedly affected by the mass IP blocking.55 Soon enough, there were signs the pressure was working. Early on in Telegram’s fight against the ban, Durov publicly thanked “Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft – for not taking part in political censorship”.


pages: 444 words: 118,393

The Nature of Software Development: Keep It Simple, Make It Valuable, Build It Piece by Piece by Ron Jeffries

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, bitcoin, business cycle, business intelligence, business logic, business process, c2.com, call centre, cloud computing, continuous integration, Conway's law, creative destruction, dark matter, data science, database schema, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fault tolerance, Firefox, Hacker News, industrial robot, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kubernetes, load shedding, loose coupling, machine readable, Mars Rover, microservices, Minecraft, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, OSI model, peer-to-peer lending, platform as a service, power law, ransomware, revision control, Ruby on Rails, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software is eating the world, source of truth, SQL injection, systems thinking, text mining, time value of money, transaction costs, Turing machine, two-pizza team, web application, zero day

These have their own authentication mechanisms and default admin passwords. The whole world got a vivid wake-up call in the early days of 2017, when somewhere north of 20,000 MongoDB installations were taken hostage. The databases had default credentials and were exposed to the Internet. Attackers took the data, wiped the database out, and replaced it with a demand for bitcoin. (Note that MongoDB, the company, has a thorough guide for securing the database;[61] it’s unfortunate that the default installation at the time was not secured.) Remember the install script is the first step in installation, not the last. Another common security misconfiguration relates to servers listening too broadly.


pages: 482 words: 121,672

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition) by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, framing effect, George Santayana, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, Teledyne, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

John Carswell, the author of an excellent history, The South Sea Bubble, wrote of John Blunt, a director and one of the prime promoters of the securities of the South Sea Company, that “he continued to live his life with a prayer-book in his right hand and a prospectus in his left, never letting his right hand know what his left hand was doing.” Across the Channel, another company was formed by an exiled Englishman named John Law. Law’s goal in life was to replace metal as money and create more liquidity through a national paper currency. (Bitcoin promotors are following a long tradition.) To further his purpose, Law acquired a derelict concern called the Mississippi Company and proceeded to build a conglomerate that became one of the largest capital enterprises ever to exist. The Mississippi Company attracted speculators and their money from throughout the Continent.


pages: 621 words: 123,678

Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need by Grant Sabatier

8-hour work day, Airbnb, anti-work, antiwork, asset allocation, bitcoin, buy and hold, cryptocurrency, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, drop ship, financial independence, fixed income, follow your passion, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, lifestyle creep, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, side hustle, Skype, solopreneur, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, TaskRabbit, the rule of 72, time value of money, uber lyft, Vanguard fund

This is all meant to say, be cautious with your individual stock investments, and if you are just starting out, don’t invest more than 5 percent of your net worth into individual stocks. What is not included in the chart opposite are a few stocks that I lost money on and sold during this period (these amounted to less than $5,000 in losses), my investment in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency (which is highly speculative, and I don’t recommend investing any more than 1 percent of your net worth in any cryptocurrency), or any of my real estate investments. Investments 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 Index Funds Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund (shares) 520 4894 6903 9821 12552 14616 price per share (as of last day of year) $31.57 $31.30 $35.65 $46.69 $51.60 $50.79 Total Value $16,416 $153,182 $246,092 $458,542 $647,683 $742,347 Vanguard Total International Stock Index (shares) 1892 2785 3218 3449 price per share (as of last day of year) $25.05 $28.01 $26.00 $24.24 Total Value $47,395 $78,008 $83,668 $83,604 Individual Stocks Amazon (shares) 30 200 200 300 300 400 price per share (as of last day of year, adjusted for splits) $180.00 $173.10 $250.87 $398.79 $310.35 $675.89 Total Value $5,400 $34,620 $50,174 $119,637 $93,105 $270,356 Facebook (shares) 800 900 900 1070 price per share (as of last day of year, adjusted for splits) $25.91 $54.65 $78.02 $104.66 Total Value $20,728 $49,185 $70,218 $111,986 Apple (shares) 100 100 100 300 300 400 price per share (as of last day of year, adjusted for splits) $41.46 $52.05 $69.00 $74.57 $104.86 $101.70 Total Value $4,146 $5,205 $6,900 $22,371 $31,458 $40,680 Total Income $43,000 $294,000 $233,000 $248,000 $239,000 $271,000 Savings Rate 53.49% 40.68% 55.97% 68.10% 57.45% 60.48% Total Invested Each Year $23,000 $119,610 $130,402 $168,895 $137,317 $163,901 Total invested in Portfolio $23,000 $142,610 $273,012 $441,907 $579,224 $743,125 Total Percentage Growth 12.88% 35.34% 36.00% 64.68% 59.89% 68.07% Portfolio Total $25,962 $193,007 $371,289 $727,743 $926,132 $1,248,973 CONCLUSION The more you invest, the more your money will grow.


pages: 531 words: 125,069

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

AltaVista, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, hygiene hypothesis, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microaggression, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, Wayback Machine

Many of them came from local radical anarchist groups that call themselves “antifascists,” or “Antifa.”4 UC Berkeley officials claimed5 that only about 150 of the protesters were responsible for the vandalism and violence that ensued—knocking down a light generator;6 shooting commercial-grade fireworks7 into buildings8 and at police officers;9 smashing ATMs;10 setting fires;11 dismantling barricades12 and using them (as well as bats)13 to break windows; throwing rocks at police officers;14 and even hurling Molotov cocktails.15 The property damage (exceeding $500,000 for the university and town combined)16 was less chilling, however, than the physical attacks on students and others who attempted to attend the speech. One man carrying a sign saying “The First Amendment is for everyone” was hit in the face, leaving him bloody.17 Others also suffered bloodying blows to the face and head as protesters attacked with fists, pipes, sticks, and poles.18 Recorded on video, a young woman sporting a red MAKE BITCOIN GREAT AGAIN baseball cap told a reporter, “I’m looking to make a statement by just being here, and I think the protesters are doing the same. Props to the ones who are doing it non-violently, but I think that’s a very rare thing indeed.” As she turned, the camera caught a black-gloved hand pepper-spraying her in the face.19 Masked Antifa protesters clad in black used flagpoles to batter a woman and her husband as they were pinned against metal barriers, unable to get away.


pages: 516 words: 116,875

Greater: Britain After the Storm by Penny Mordaunt, Chris Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, accelerated depreciation, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, failed state, fake news, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, impact investing, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Live Aid, lockdown, loss aversion, low skilled workers, microaggression, mittelstand, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ocado, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, quantitative easing, remote working, road to serfdom, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, transaction costs, transcontinental railway

It is about to happen again.25,26 Another effect of the internet is that the control of money has passed from central banks to other, less recognisable, and perhaps less reliable, providers. This creates an unprecedented opportunity for those who wish to ‘get off the grid’, for compliance or criminal reasons, for instance. This is the case with new digital technologies such as bitcoin, which use blockchain security. Blockchain offers an ultimate lock for a transaction, providing transparency and clarity as to the provenance and destination of funding. In this instance, it could be argued that one of the reasons that banking has been slow to adopt technologies like this is precisely because it provides the ultimate in terms of transparency.


pages: 466 words: 116,165

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History by Casey Michel

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, forensic accounting, Global Witness, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Jeffrey Epstein, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, too big to fail

Hundreds of American steelworkers have fallen prey to Kolomoisky’s designs, but as journalist Todd Prince reported in 2020, Kolomoisky may no longer need them. One of the remaining plants, located in western Kentucky, reportedly laid off the entirety of its workforce—and proceeded to turn into a “Bitcoin-mining operation,” with “a warehouse full of computers that are churning out cryptocurrency,” while the plant itself remains idle. Todd Prince, “Layoffs, Cryptocurrency, and Uncertainty at a Ukrainian Tycoon’s Kentucky Factory,” RFE/RL, 10 December 2020, https://www.rferl.org/a/layoffs-cryptocurrency-and-uncertainty-at-a-ukrainian-tycoons-kentucky-factory/30993969.html. 26. 


pages: 431 words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

‘That’s what a lot of VCs look for,’ he nodded. I left Shannin to cook his next batch of edibles and returned to the kitchen, where I found Berkeley, an earnest twenty-six-year-old in a plaid shirt with cropped hair and a neat beard. Berkeley helped run 20Mission. He’d made his money doing something with the virtual currency Bitcoin that I pretended to understand but didn’t. We began talking about the role of government, and collective projects for the common good, and it quickly became clear he was deeply sceptical. ‘It’s kind of a weird thing, when people say we need to do things for the common good,’ he said. ‘Tech companies made it so that I could get a ride anywhere in the city for five dollars, door to door, and split it with two people.


pages: 420 words: 130,503

Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards by Yu-Kai Chou

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, functional fixedness, game design, gamification, growth hacking, IKEA effect, Internet of things, Kickstarter, late fees, lifelogging, loss aversion, Maui Hawaii, Minecraft, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, software as a service, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs

The first place would win the equivalent of $6,200 - about 6-month’s salary for an average new college graduate, while the second place would win $1,300, and subordinate prizes scaling all the way down to $7. Because of this “Uniform Invoice Lottery” system, consumers are now demanding receipts and invoices from businesses, preventing the businesses from evading taxes by exchanging cash under the table (or possibly purchasing things with Bitcoins). In addition, consumers are more likely to spend more since each time they make a purchase they can become a winner, boosting the economy in the process. Even my grandmother has won many of the small $7 and $31 awards over the past two decades, just by doing what she already does – buying groceries and essentials.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

If Facebook is important because of its size, WeChat is important because of its generality. WeChat is the Swiss army knife of social networks. You can do almost anything on it. You can book a train, find a hotel, pay bills, message friends, share photos, order food, transfer money, hail a cab, shop, send out your dry cleaning, exchange bitcoin, invest in stocks, donate to charity, play video games, watch movies, and read the news, just to name a few. It’s essentially Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Uber, Venmo, and the whole App Store combined. The thing about WeChat is that the Great Firewall (China’s national firewall that blocks websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube) allowed it to develop a network effect free from Facebook’s competitive network, while simultaneously preserving its second-mover advantage.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

The $26 trillion in debt owed by the American government to the Federal Reserve bank should be wiped away without any additional payments being made. Money should not be controlled by the government… or the central banks. Nothing should be controlled by the governments and central banks. Begin using private cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Monero. No more banks. No more IRS. No more government indoctrination camps. Rewrite the history books with accurate information, not slanted stories about American heroism and empire- building talking points. No more government healthcare system. Throw Big Pharma out of the public schools with their forced vaccination programs, psychotropic drugging of children, and the intentional dumbing-down of American society through the use of their products.


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

Grimm, “A Long Time Coming,” German Law Journal 21, no. 5 (2020): 944–49. 21. A. Tooze, “The Death of the Central Bank Myth,” Foreign Policy, May 13, 2020. 22. J. Goldstein, “A Gold Bug’s Moment in the Political Sun,” Planet Money, NPR, January 23, 2012. R. Paul, End the Fed (Grand Central Publishing, 2009). R. Sharma, “Will Bitcoin End the Dollar’s Reign?” Financial Times, December 9, 2020. M. Stoller, “How the Federal Reserve Fights,” Naked Capitalism, December 12, 2011. 23. Two leading examples are www.positivemoney.eu/ and dezernatzukunft.org/tag/geldpolitik/. 24. P. Tucker, Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State (Princeton University Press, 2018). 25.


pages: 439 words: 131,081

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Prominent investors in the venture-capitalist class announced that the Valley was at war with a dishonest national media looking to punish them for their success. (“We get it: you hate us. And you’re competitors,” one tweeted.) Some sought to fight back, urging Valley-wide bans on cooperating with news outlets or, in one case, offering to pay users in Bitcoin to harass critical reporters online. A few weeks after Zuckerberg’s “wartime” declaration, Facebook held a meeting to consider retooling its algorithm to elevate serious news outlets. This might restore trust in Facebook, some executives argued. But it was opposed by Joel Kaplan, the former Bush administration official and lobbyist.


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

The true meanings of “genocide” and “apartheid” and “Holocaust,” and the supremacist mindset that makes them all possible. Those words we need, as sharp as possible, to name and combat what is rapidly taking shape in the Mirror World—which is an entire cosmology built around claims of superior bodies, superior immune systems, and superior babies, bankrolled by supplement sales, bitcoin, and prenatal yoga. It all would be so ridiculous—if it weren’t so serious. 9 THE FAR RIGHT MEETS THE FAR-OUT When the election date was set and the sign wars began, our son, T., cheered every time we passed an orange placard with his dad’s name on it. I mentioned to Avi and his team that the research I was doing on the Mirror World could have some relevance to their campaign, but this was the summer of 2021 and they brushed it off as a U.S. breed of batshit.


pages: 562 words: 153,825

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State by Barton Gellman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, active measures, air gap, Anton Chekhov, Big Tech, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, Debian, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, financial independence, Firefox, GnuPG, Google Hangouts, housing justice, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, off-the-grid, operational security, planetary scale, private military company, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Robert Gordon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, standardized shipping container, Steven Levy, TED Talk, telepresence, the long tail, undersea cable, Wayback Machine, web of trust, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

There was no bigger story in the world at the moment, and he was the mystery figure at its heart. More than half the questions I brought collided with boundaries that Snowden set around his privacy, security, or concept of what my story should be about. What were his living conditions? “Unnecessary question,” he said. Supporters in Silicon Valley had donated “enough bitcoins to live on until the fucking sun dies,” but he did not want to name any sources of his support. “You know this is off the record, and it has nothing to do with the substance,” he said about something else. “You’re showing bad faith.” Did he talk to his girlfriend? “Don’t jerk me around,” he said.


We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

The investors have explicitly agreed to this in their investment terms,” he wrote. “Nothing like this has ever been done before.” The post had a disclaimer at its top: “CAVEAT: KEEP IN MIND THAT THIS PLAN COULD TOTALLY FAIL.” * * * The year 2014 was a turnaround year for cryptocurrency; major retailers such as Overstock, Microsoft, and Dell began accepting Bitcoin, and to payments-startup insiders, some of the hottest scrappy San Francisco upstarts—Coinbase, Ripple—were in digital currency. Wong thought, if anything could manage his vision for distributing tiny fractions of dollars to Redditors, the blockchain might work. He hired a cryptocurrency engineer, Ryan X.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Instead they stored them on the hard drives of millions of users across the Internet. Andy Oram, one of the editors at my publishing company, made the point to me that the architectural implications of these programs were more important than their business implications. (This is a history that has repeated itself fifteen years later with bitcoin and the blockchain.) This was a kind of decentralization beyond even the World Wide Web. It was becoming clear that the future demanded even more extreme rethinking of what the Internet could become as a platform for next-generation software applications and content. Nor was this future limited to file sharing.


pages: 561 words: 163,916

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

“So if you weren’t moving to that sweet setup with the free donuts, and things hadn’t really taken off after you connected with Carmack, what would you have done? Like: where would you be living?” “Well,” Luckey said, “I would have taken the job at Sony.” “Ah, that makes sense . . .” “But I did have a backup plan. My backup plan was that I would sell some of my Bitcoins, purchase my own trailer, and move to the Inland Empire and live in a trailer park there.” “And keep making virtual reality headsets?” “Something like that . . .” On that note—and over the course of several Pei Wei meetups throughout July—the guys got to talking about VR. “So I checked out your Oculus website, and I loved what you wrote about Oculus being ‘your tilt’ to bring VR to the ‘average person.’


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

In February 1999, Levchin attended the International Financial Cryptography Association conference. Hosted in Anguilla, a sliver of a Caribbean island, the annual gathering drew the leading players in academic cryptography and digital currencies. (To this day, Thiel, who attended the 2000 conference, harbors a theory that Satoshi Nakamoto—the mysterious founder of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin—was among the attendees.) At the conference, Levchin wanted to test the waters for his idea of a cashless, all-digital, PalmPilot-based money system. The academics were unimpressed—they had been thinking about this problem for a long time. “It is hard to understate the degree of anger and resentment that the people felt,” Thiel said.


pages: 651 words: 162,060

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Then came the timber companies, clear-cutting the forests that supply much of the reindeer’s food. Then came the mining companies. Then, in this century, came the wind turbines, chewing away further at the Sámi’s ancestors’ lands – this time to provide super-discounted ‘green’ electricity for Facebook servers and Bitcoin mining. And we got away with nearly all of it. Sweden stole the Sámi’s land, we stole their sacred places and artefacts, we stole their religion, we stole their forests and other natural resources. And this theft continues today. As we learned from Elin Anna Labba in Part Three, as climate change makes the conditions for reindeer herding increasingly difficult, it is becoming harder and harder for the Sámi people to maintain their traditional way of life.


pages: 725 words: 168,262

API Design Patterns by Jj Geewax

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, cognitive load, continuous integration, COVID-19, database schema, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, imposter syndrome, Internet of things, Kubernetes, lateral thinking, loose coupling, machine readable, microservices, natural language processing, Paradox of Choice, ride hailing / ride sharing, social graph, sorting algorithm

Or it might make more sense to simply shut down the noncompliant API entirely given the potential risks and fines involved in GDPR violations. It should go without saying that security patches and other changes in that category are often mandated, although not always by lawyers. While there are cases that it’s simply impossible to be completely compliant with all laws (e.g., it’s rumored that the bitcoin blockchain has metadata storing material that’s illegal in most countries, and blockchains are built specifically so that you cannot alter past data), it’s almost always possible to make changes to comply with relevant laws. The question, really, is one of how best to make these mandated changes (often coming from lawyers or other primarily nontechnical people) without causing undue amounts of stress on API users.


pages: 558 words: 175,965

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach by Ashlee Vance

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, fake it until you make it, Google Earth, hacker house, Hyperloop, intentional community, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, lockdown, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off-the-grid, overview effect, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, Rainbow Mansion, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, TikTok, Virgin Galactic

He sat there with the other bodyguards, all of whom had their gun satchels resting on their laps. They shot the shit in their bodyguard zone while the rest of the clients and I ate. If, say, you wanted to smoke a joint and not think about Putin coming for your land for a bit, you zipped over to the dark-web site called Hydra, picked out your weed, paid with Bitcoin, and received some GPS coordinates. You then traveled to the specified location and dug in the ground and—boom—there was the contraband with a “buried on” date and all.* Or maybe you felt like shooting a pig with a bazooka. That was also possible, especially if you knew Polyakov.* Be it nurture or nature, Polyakov thrived in the environment and seemed to know exactly how to navigate it.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Now, major risks are taken by hedge funds, by insurance institutions, by equity funds, and by other institutions that are part of “shadow banking” and that largely escape official supervision. Also, the control of the growth of the money supply has come to be considered less meaningful in a world in which the meaning of “money” seems to have changed dramatically and the creation of virtual money (bitcoins) is frequently discussed. In the future monetary policy may become totally different than it is today. These changes are likely to have increased systemic risk. Termites in Stabilization Role 243 The campaign some decades ago to make central banks politically independent had been based on the belief that the goals of central banks were the aforementioned ones.


pages: 586 words: 186,548

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

Whether we’re going to have to have some kind of universal basic income, or just see the economy working in a different way, I don’t know about that, and I’m certainly no expert on that, but I think that AI researchers should be part of that conversation. Another conversation that’s a much larger and much more urgent one is climate change. We don’t know what the future of human-caused climate change is like, but we do know that AI researchers are increasingly contributing to it. Whether it’s AI or Bitcoin mining, just look at what computers are being increasingly used for, and the massive and accelerating energy consumption. I think we as AI researchers should think about the ways in which what we’re doing is actually contributing to climate change, and ways we might contribute positively to solving some of those problems.


pages: 1,331 words: 183,137

Programming Rust: Fast, Safe Systems Development by Jim Blandy, Jason Orendorff

bioinformatics, bitcoin, Donald Knuth, duck typing, Elon Musk, Firefox, fizzbuzz, functional programming, mandelbrot fractal, Morris worm, MVC pattern, natural language processing, reproducible builds, side project, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Turing test, type inference, WebSocket

For static method calls, you can supply the type parameter explicitly using the turbofish ::<> notation: let mut q = Queue::<char>::new(); But in practice, you can usually just let Rust figure it out for you: let mut q = Queue::new(); let mut r = Queue::new(); q.push("CAD"); // apparently a Queue<&'static str> r.push(0.74); // apparently a Queue<f64> q.push("BTC"); // Bitcoins per USD, 2017-5 r.push(2737.7); // Rust fails to detect irrational exuberance In fact, this is exactly what we’ve been doing with Vec, another generic struct type, throughout the book. It’s not just structs that can be generic. Enums can take type parameters as well, with a very similar syntax.


pages: 583 words: 182,990

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cakes and ale, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cryptocurrency, dark matter, decarbonisation, degrowth, distributed ledger, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, fiat currency, Food sovereignty, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, High speed trading, high-speed rail, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, land reform, liberation theology, liquidity trap, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, megastructure, Modern Monetary Theory, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rewilding, RFID, Robert Solow, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, synthetic biology, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, wage slave, Washington Consensus

It was an old idea, he said, studied by the Potsdam Institute at one point, and the conclusions of their study had been bleak; the amount of electrical power needed to pump that much water up onto the east Antarctic ice cap came to about seven percent of all the electricity generated by all of global civilization. “It’s too energy intensive,” Bob concluded. Slawek snorted. “Energy is the least of it. Since one percent of all electricity created is burned to make bitcoins, seven percent for saving sea level could be seen as a deal. But the physical problems are the stoppers. Have you run the numbers?” “No?” “Say sea level goes up one centimeter. That’s three thousand six hundred cubic kilometers of water.” Adele and Bob glanced at each other, startled. Griffen was just smiling.


pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

The philosopher Thomas Scanlon suggests that instead of ‘In God We Trust’, Americans might inscribe on their coins the words ‘In Tolerance We Trust’.103 (As he also points out, one would have to be careful not to speak the first two words too fast, making it ‘intolerance we trust . . .’.) ‘In Tolerance We Trust’ seems to me the best motto for the Bitcoin of cosmopolis. We should have no illusions. Religion will continue to be one of the most difficult areas for free speech. Tolerance is difficult. Even for someone who does not feel impelled to challenge frontally the religious beliefs of others, finding the right mix of tact and honesty, imaginative sympathy and steadfastness is a daily challenge.


pages: 825 words: 228,141

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

SECTION 4 MAKE THE MOST IMPORTANT INVESTMENT DECISION OF YOUR LIFE CHAPTER 4.1 THE ULTIMATE BUCKET LIST: ASSET ALLOCATION * * * Never test the depth of the river with both feet. —WARREN BUFFETT Say you’ve got your money machine cranking: your boss just gave you an unexpected $10,000 bonus, or perhaps you suddenly came into a $100,000 inheritance. What would you do with it? Would you put it in your savings account or your IRA? Invest in a virtual pocketful of Bitcoin? Bid on a case of vintage wine on eBay? Fly to Vegas and bet it all on a roll of the dice? Or maybe buy 100 shares of Apple stock? Would you put it all in one place or spread it around? The answer to that last question is the key to your financial future. Asset allocation is the most important investment decision of your lifetime, more important than any single investment you’re going to make in stocks, bonds, real estate, or anything else.


J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2022: For Preparing Your 2021 Tax Return by J. K. Lasser Institute

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, asset allocation, bike sharing, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, distributed generation, distributed ledger, diversification, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, sharing economy, TaskRabbit, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs, zero-coupon bond

There is also an exception for gold, silver, platinum, or palladium bullion held by the IRA trustee, provided the fineness of the metal meets commodity market standards. If bullion is stored with a company other than the IRA trustee, the investment is subject to the deemed distribution rule for collectibles. To date, the IRS has not ruled on whether Bitcoin or other digital currency can be held in an IRA. Restrictions on traditional IRAs. Excess contributions (8.7) are penalized. You may withdraw funds from a traditional IRA at any time, but if you take money out before the date you reach age 59½ or become disabled, you are subject to a penalty unless an exception applies (8.12).

Proc. 2020-45, 2020-46 IRB 1016 (inflation adjusted amount for 2021) Rev. Proc. 2019-44, 2019-47 IRB 1093 (inflation adjusted amount for 2020) Rev. Proc. 2018-57, 2018-49 IRB 827 (inflation adjusted amount for 2019) 5 REPORTING PROPERTY SALES 5.1 GENERAL TAX RULES FOR PROPERTY SALES IRC §1(h) * IRS Publication 544 Bitcoin treated like property Notice 2014-21,2014-16 IRB 938 5.2 HOW PROPERTY SALES ARE CLASSIFIED AND TAXED IRC §1(h) IRC §1221(capital asset defined) IRC §1222 (short-term, long-term, net capital gain defined) * IRS Publication 544 Down payment's tax treatment when a sale falls through CRI-Leslie, LLC, 147 TC No. 8 (2016) Self-created musical works IRC §1221(b)(3) 5.3 CAPITAL GAINS RATES AND HOLDING PERIODS IRC §1(h) IRC §1222 (long-term, short-term net capital gain defined) IRC §1223 (holding period) Zero rate starting in 2008 IRC §1(h)(1)(B) 5.4 CAPITAL LOSSES AND CARRYOVERS IRC §1211 IRC §1212 IRC §1222(10) Reg. §1.1222-1 Taking a capital loss on property you don't own Pamela Lynn Brooks, TC Memo 2013-141 Carryover loss if taxable income is negative IRC §1212(b)(2)(B) Loss must be considered even if no tax benefit is realized Rev.


pages: 1,544 words: 391,691

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice by Pierre Vernimmen, Pascal Quiry, Maurizio Dallocchio, Yann le Fur, Antonio Salvi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, ASML, asset light, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, book value, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, delta neutral, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, discrete time, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, impact investing, implied volatility, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, performance metric, Potemkin village, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk/return, shareholder value, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, vertical integration, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Robert Merton and Zvi Bodie have isolated six essential functions of a financial system: means of payment; financing; saving and borrowing; risk management; information; reducing or resolving conflict. 1. A financial system provides means of payment to facilitate transactions. Cheques, debit and credit cards, electronic transfers, bitcoins, etc. are all means of payment that individuals can use to facilitate the acquisition of goods and services. Imagine if everything could only be paid for with bills and coins! 2. A financial system provides a means of pooling funds for financing large, indivisible projects. A financial system is also a mechanism for subdividing the capital of a company so that investors can diversify their investments.