cryptocurrency

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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

evolution of, Electronic Systems and Trust Internet of Things (IoT), permissioned ledger implementations of blockchain, Internet of Things interoperability between different blockchains, Interoperability Interplanetary File System (IPFS), Web 3.0 issuance trust, Electronic Systems and Trust IT systems, permissioned ledger uses, IT Ixcoin, Altcoins J Java, Corda language JPMorgan, JPMorganinterbank payments using permissioned ledger, Payments jurisdiction over cryptocurrency exchanges, Jurisdiction K Keccak-256 hash algorithm, Hashes Know Your Customer (KYC) rules, Banking Risk, DAIon centralized and decentralized exchanges, Know your customer crypto laundering and, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering implementation in Novi wallet, Novi in Singapore, Singapore stablecoins requiring/not requiring, KYC and pseudonymity L LBFT consensus protocol, How the Libra Protocol Works Ledger wallet, Wallets ledgers, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks, Databases and LedgersCorda, Corda ledger distributed verifiable, key properties of, Key Properties of Distributed Verifiable Ledgers Hyperledger Fabric technology, Hyperledger permissioned ledger uses of blockchain, Permissioned Ledger Uses-Payments Ripple, Ripple legal industry, permissioned ledger uses, Legal legal requirements, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology skirting the laws, Skirting the Laws lending services (DeFi), Lending less than 5% rule, Counterparty Risk Libra, Libra-Summaryborrowing from existing blockchains, Borrowing from Existing Blockchains centralization challenges, Novi how the Libra protocol works, How the Libra Protocol Works-Transactionsblocks, Blocks transactions, Transactions Libra Association, The Libra Association Novi wallet and other third-party wallets, Novi Lightning, Lightning, Lightningfunding transactions, Funding transactions nodes and wallets, Lightning nodes and wallets off-chain transactions, Off-chain transactions solving scalability issues on Blockchain, Lightning Liquid multisignature wallet, Liquid liquidity, Arbitrageor depth in a market, Hunting for Bart Litecoin, Litecoin longest chain rule, The mining process lottery-based consensus, Alternative methods M MaidSafe, Understanding Omni LayerICO for, Use Cases: ICOs Maker project's DAI, DAIsavings rates for DAI, Savings Malta, regulatory arbitrage, Malta man in the middle attacks, Zero-Knowledge Proof margin/leveraged products, Derivatives market capitalization, low, cryptocurrencies with, Whales market depthconsiderations in cryptocurrency trading, Basic Mistakes lacking in cryptocurrency market, Cryptocurrency Market Structure market infrastructure, Market Infrastructure-Summaryanalysis, Analysis-Hunting for Bartfundamental cryptocurrency analysis, Fundamental Cryptocurrency Analysis-Tools for fundamental analysis technical cryptocurrency analysis, Technical Cryptocurrency Analysis-Hunting for Bart arbitrage trading, Arbitrage Trading-Float Configuration 3 cryptocurrency market structure, Cryptocurrency Market Structure-Transaction flowsaribtrage, Arbitrage counterparty risk, Counterparty Risk market data, Market Data-Transaction flows depth charts, Depth Charts derivatives, Derivatives exchange APIs and trading bots, Exchange APIs and Trading Bots-Market Aggregatorsmarket aggregators, Market Aggregators open source trading tech, Open Source Trading Tech rate limiting, Rate Limiting REST versus WebSocket APIs, REST Versus WebSocket testing trading bot in sandbox, Testing in a Sandbox exchanges, The Role of Exchanges-The Role of Exchanges order books, Order Books regulatory challenges, Regulatory Challenges-Basic Mistakes slippage in cryptocurrency trading, Slippage wash trading, Wash Trading ways to buy and sell cryptocurrency, Evolution of the Price of Bitcoin whales, Whales market size, Order Books Mastercoin, Mastercoin and Smart Contracts, Tokenize EverythingEthereum and, Ethereum: Taking Mastercoin to the Next Level raising cryptocurrency funds to launch a project, Use Cases: ICOs Meetup.com, Information mempool, unconfirmed transactions on Bitcoin, Transaction life cycle Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST), Privacy Merkle roots, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks, The Merkle Root-The Merkle Rootin block hashes, Block Hashes Merkle trees, The Merkle Root MetaMask wallet, ConsenSys, Walletsusing in writing smart contracts, Writing a smart contract Middleton, Reggie, Skirting the Laws Mimblewimble, Mimblewimble, Beam, and Grin mining, Mining-Block Generation, Evolution of the Price of BitcoinBitcoin, problems with, Ripple and Stellar block generation, Block Generation GAW Miners, Skirting the Laws impacts on market data, Slippage incentives for, Mining Is About Incentives miners discovering new block at same time, The mining process process on Bitcoin for block discovery, The mining process Scrypt, Altcoins transactions confirmed by miner on Bitcoin, Transaction life cycle mint-based currency model, The Whitepaper minting, Important Definitions MKR token, DAI mobile wallets, Wallet Type Variations Moesif’s binary encoder/decoder, Custody and counterparty risk Monero, Monero, Ring Signatures, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering, Blockchains to Watchhow it works, How Monero Works-How Monero Works money laundering, Banking Risk(see also Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules) evolution of crypto laundering, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering-The Evolution of Crypto Laundering Money Services Business (MSB) standards, The FATF and the Travel Rule MoneyGram, Ripple Mt.

BTC price over the past decade Over the course of cryptocurrency’s history, there have been a number of ways to buy and sell it: Person-to-person Buying and selling cryptocurrency is done in face-to-face transactions. Buying or selling products/services A person acquires or spends cryptocurrency in exchange for something. Cryptocurrency ATMs Kiosks dispense cryptocurrency for cash. They can also accept crypto for fiat. Mining By contributing computing power to a network, miners are rewarded with transaction fees as well as newly minted cryptocurrency. Exchanges Crypto is traded on purpose-built websites that act similarly to stock exchanges, with a few nuances.

The open source nature of Bitcoin and the community that grew around it also supported its early adoption. The fundamental aspects of cryptocurrencies come from Bitcoin—we’ll explore these in the next chapter. Chapter 2. Cryptocurrency Fundamentals Like many emerging technologies, cryptocurrencies have ushered in a new way of thinking—about finance, in this case. As a result, new ways of storing value are being considered. Cryptocurrency has some similarities to fiat money, stocks, and bonds, as well as to precious assets such as gold. But the methods of acquiring, transferring, and storing cryptocurrency, or crypto for short, are very different from other assets.


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

But that’s not what the proponents of this technology foresee—especially those in the cryptocurrency sector. They believe that decentralization is just getting started and that the centralized economic and political establishments—even governments and nation-states, those ultimate centralized loci of power—will be disrupted by it. If so, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology could ride that wave triumphantly. A phrase from Mastercoin’s David Johnston that some in the cryptocurrency community call Johnston’s law could come true: “Everything that can be decentralized will be decentralized.” This especially optimistic view of cryptocurrency technology’s potential runs up against the many obstacles that it faces.

Consumer-focused digital-wallet, payment-processing, and bitcoin-depository services such as Coinbase, Bitreserve, Circle Internet Financial, and Xapo are making it easier to use cryptocurrencies and safer for the general public, trying to erase the lingering memory of Mt. Gox. But little evidence suggests that they’ve managed to reach people beyond the small groups of tech-minded early adopters and cryptocurrency enthusiasts currently using it. Perhaps cryptocurrency’s reputation has been forever ruined by bad press. Add to that public image the headache of capital-gains-tax tracking now required in the United States, as well as the regulatory burdens that make it hard for cryptocurrency providers to seamlessly reach ordinary consumers, and it’s possible that this new form of money will never gain appeal.

Well, keeping our imagination hats on, we could foresee a set of international standards to define what governments can and can’t do with digital money, maybe some sort of international board of cryptocurrency regulators to align rules and regulations that pertain to independent cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. But given that nation-states have trouble keeping control of decentralized, leaderless cryptocurrencies, it’s fair to say international law would be even harder to impose. After all, there is no fully endorsed international criminal court; the one in The Hague isn’t recognized by Washington. The international realm exists in a state of quasi anarchy—a perfect fit for borderless cryptocurrencies. Some international agreements do stick, such as the Bretton Woods system of pegged currencies established in 1944 amid the crisis of World War II (and ended when President Nixon squelched the gold standard in 1971).


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

In keeping with cryptocurrency parlance, I note that a coin (such as Bitcoin) is a cryptocurrency that can operate independently and has its own unique platform, while a token is a cryptocurrency that depends on another cryptocurrency as a platform to operate. The vast majority of tokens operate on the Ethereum network. The distinction between coins and tokens will become pertinent as one surveys the wide and in many ways wacky world of cryptocurrencies that operate beyond Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency ATM, Hong Kong, near Wan Chai metro station, April 2018 The proliferation of cryptocurrencies and related financial products has raised concerns about financial shenanigans perpetrated by their promoters and the consequences for investors.

Even with the emergence of a large number of alternatives that endeavor to patch specific shortcomings, it remains the cryptocurrency with the largest market capitalization by far. During 2020 and through the first quarter of 2021, it accounted for roughly two-thirds of the market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies put together. Even after a surge in other cryptocurrency prices in April–May 2021, its share was over 40 percent and its market capitalization exceeded that of the next twenty cryptocurrencies combined. Still, the churning and wild marketplace for the myriad other cryptocurrencies, to which we turn next, can be fascinating to watch. CHAPTER 5 Crypto Mania The hotṛ (priest) had put forward enigmas.

Rather than creating disillusionment with cryptocurrencies, though, Bitcoin’s failings spawned a variety of alternative cryptocurrencies that aimed to fix each of these issues. With this came the recognition that no single cryptocurrency could do everything that Bitcoin aspired to do. Of course, it is worth keeping in mind that the creator of Bitcoin, whoever or whatever group that might be, had lesser ambitions for the cryptocurrency than its eventual devotees who came to view it as a visionary financial asset rather than just a medium of exchange. In surveying the broader world of cryptocurrencies and how they have attempted to overcome the deficiencies of Bitcoin, we must draw an important distinction.


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

See Bitcoin, exchange rate of See also blockchain; cryptocurrency; Nakamoto, Satoshi Bitcoin Fog (mixer service), 172, 289–91 Bitcoinica (cryptocurrency exchange): theft from, 55 Bitcoin Kamikaze (online gambling service), 42 Bitcointalk (online forum), 48, 55, 107–8, 132 Bitdefender, 186 Bitfinex (cryptocurrency exchange), 324 Bit Gold, 29 Bithumb (cryptocurrency exchange), 244, 252 BitPay, 189, 290 Bitstamp (cryptocurrency exchange), 10–11, 13–14, 42, 54 Bridges, Shaun, and, 136, 326 Force, Carl, and, 11–13, 66, 75, 81n Black Market Reloaded (dark web market), 58–60 BlackNet, 29, 33 blockchain: AlphaBay and, 169–70 analysis of.

When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian resistance groups and the country’s government itself had raised tens of millions of dollars in international cryptocurrency donations, even as payment services like PayPal and Patreon froze their accounts. Gladstein pointed to the potential for cryptocurrency in Xinjiang, China, where ethnic Uyghurs have been made to live in a panopticon, and Hong Kong, where protesters line up to buy subway tokens in cash for fear that Xi Jinping’s government will track their credit card or digital payments. And he argued that even the Kim regime’s use of cryptocurrency in North Korea would backfire, that the country’s citizens would eventually figure out that cryptocurrency is not merely a hacking target and a means to evade sanctions but also a way to defy their own government’s economic controls.

The trillion-dollar infrastructure funding bill signed by President Joe Biden in November 2021 included two provisions—designed, in theory, to help pay for the bill’s spending—that passed despite their radioactive unpopularity in the cryptocurrency world. These new rules require vaguely defined cryptocurrency “brokers”—or, for that matter, any cryptocurrency business doing a transaction worth more than $10,000—to report the Social Security number of the person on the other side of the transaction to the IRS. “It basically makes it effectively impossible to transact anonymously,” says Marta Belcher, a cryptocurrency-focused attorney and special counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It’s a total disaster for civil liberties.”[*] Then in March of 2022, President Biden signed an executive order on “Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets” that also—with little specificity—called for new rules to prevent the use of cryptocurrency for illicit purposes, from human trafficking to terrorism.


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

South Korean police and tax authorities raided two of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, and the country’s regulators said they were planning greater oversight on trading platforms. China, which had already banned cryptocurrency exchanges in 2017, said it would escalate its crackdown as alternative trading venues continued to pop up. In India, the finance minister said the government would take measures to eliminate the use of cryptocurrencies in the payments system because they are not legal tender. A record $500 million heist at Japanese exchange Coincheck further spooked the market. Facebook banned cryptocurrency ads and US banks cut off credit card purchases of cryptocurrencies.

,” TechCrunch, June 7, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/07/what-the-hell-is-happening-to-cryptocurrency-valuations/. 5. said in a July 25 statement: US Securities and Exchange Commission, “Report of Investigation Pursuant to Section 21(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934: The DAO,” news release no. 81207, July 25, 2017, https://www.sec.gov/litigation/investreport/34-81207.pdf. 6. of the Filecoin ICO: Stan Higgins, “$257 Million: Filecoin Breaks All-Time Record for ICO Funding,” CoinDesk, September 7, 2017, updated September 8, 2017, https://www.coindesk.com/257-million-filecoin-breaks-time-record-ico-funding. 28: Futures and Cats 1. first half of 2018: Hugh Son, Dakin Campbell, and Sonali Basak, “Goldman Is Setting Up a Cryptocurrency Trading Desk,” Bloomberg News, December 21, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/goldman-is-said-to-be-building-a-cryptocurrency-trading-desk. 2. algorithmic trading: “Cryptocurrency Investment Fund Industry Graphs and Charts,” Crypto Fund Research, https://cryptofundresearch.com/cryptocurrency-funds-overview-infographic/. 3. million, at the peak: Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum address, Etherscan, https://etherscan.io/address/0xab5801a7d398351b8be11c439e05c5b3259aec9b#analytics. 29: The Crash 1. selling digital assets: “SEC Cyber Enforcement Actions,” US Securities and Exchange Commission, https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-actions. 2. to manipulate crypto markets: “Tether Response to Flawed Paper by Griffin and Shams,” Tether, November 7, 2019, https://tether.to/tether-response-to-flawed-paper-by-griffin-and-shams/. 3. as much as 95 percent: “Market Surveillance Report—August 2018,” Blockchain Transparency Institute, https://www.bti.live/report-august2018/. 4. were Christmas cards: Matt Robinson, “SEC Issues Subpoenas in Hunt for Fraudulent ICOs,” Bloomberg News, February 28, 2018, updated March 1, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-01/sec-is-said-to-issue-subpoenas-in-hunt-for-fraudulent-icos. 5. groundbreaking technology: Camila Russo, “Bitcoin Speculators, Not Drug Dealers, Dominate Crypto Use Now,” Bloomberg News, August 7, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-07/bitcoin-speculators-not-drug-dealers-dominate-crypto-use-now. 6. forcing it back to earth: “ICO Treasury Balances,” Diar, https://diar.co/ethereum-ico-treasury-balances/. 7. cases were dropped: Joseph Menn, “Bitcoin Foundation Hit by Resignations over New Director,” Reuters, May 16, 2014, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitcoin-foundation-resignations/bitcoin-foundation-hit-by-resignations-over-new-director-idUSBREA4F02B20140516. 30: The Party 1. and clapped along: CoinDesk, “Devcon 4—Ethereum’s Big Sing-a-long,” YouTube, uploaded October 31, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Bitcoin was its first application, but the same principles can be used to create different types of networks. In the case of Bitcoin, “Bitcoin” is the name of both the blockchain and of the cryptocurrency itself (uppercase “B” is used for the network, lowercase “b” is used for the cryptocurrency), while ether is the coin that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. There will be some blockchains that don’t even have their own corresponding cryptocurrency, and there is no one, single blockchain. Each chain will have its own unique characteristics, which is why the term “on the blockchain” that’s used ad nauseam should immediately be met with the follow-up question, “Which one?”


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

If you would like to donate to the author, you can do so with the following QR code: Bitcoin Address: 3Bi1fhng5LfoDzue5MTfGw9PgHNKKgRkVt Disclaimer: Although I have attempted to make this book as accurate as possible, cryptocurrencies are complex and constantly evolving. So it is worth mentioning right off the bat: do your own research—things can change from month to month and week to week. I also make no claim to the legitimacy of the companies mentioned in this book, as their status can change at any time. Keywords altcoin: Short for “alternative cryptocurrency”; another cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin. There are more than a thousand altcoins currently in existence; most are nearly exact copies of more successful cryptocurrencies, but some very innovative ones have been produced as well.

Bitcoin 2.0 projects, as they are often called, can involve Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. The main idea behind these projects is that the blockchain and blockchain technologies can be used to transfer and keep track of holdings of valuables other than Bitcoin or other digital currencies. Even if a 2.0 project is not built off of Bitcoin, like Ethereum, increased investment and interest in cryptocurrencies as a whole tend to increase Bitcoin’s value as well. Since Bitcoin is currently the most successful, secure, and popular cryptocurrency, any increased interest in cryptocurrencies as a whole has a positive effect on Bitcoin’s price.

Anonymous coins, asset-creating Bitcoin 2.0 coins, and intriguing technologies such as Ethereum will all play some role in our future economy. 1 Farivar, Cyrus. “Behold Arscoin, Our Own Custom Cryptocurrency!” Ars Technica. March 5, 2014. Accessed June 21, 2015. http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/behold-arscoin-our-own-custom-cryptocurrency/. 2 Hutchinson, Lee. “Farewell to Arscoin: Preparing to Kill Our Cryptocurrency.” Ars Technica. April 7, 2014. Accessed June 21, 2015. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/farewell-to-arscoin-preparing-to-kill-our-cryptocurrency/. 3 “Dogecoin to Sponsor Josh Wise at Talladega.” NASCAR.com. May 22, 2014. Accessed June 22, 2015. http://www.nascar.com/en_us/news-media/articles/2014/5/22/josh-wise-dogecoin-sponsorship-talladega-sprint-fan-vote.html. 4 Davidson, Kavitha A.


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

There are several efforts under way to support students learning about and using cryptocurrencies on university campuses. The student-founded Campus Cryptocurrency Network counts 150 clubs in its network as of September 2014 and is a primary resource for students interested in starting campus cryptocurrency clubs. In the future, this network could be the standard repository for templated Campuscoin applications. Likewise, students founded and operate theBitcoin Association of Berkeley and organized their first hackathon in November 2014. MIT, with the MIT Bitcoin Project, has made a significant commitment to encourage the use and awareness of cryptocurrency among students, and it plans to give half a million dollars’ worth of Bitcoin to undergraduates.

“PayPal Takes Baby Step Toward Bitcoin, Partners with Cryptocurrency Processors.” Forbes, September 23, 2014. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/09/23/paypal-takes-small-step-toward-bitcoin-partners-with-cryptocurrency-processors/. 38 Bensinger, G. “eBay Payments Unit in Talks to Accept Bitcoin.” The Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2014. http://online.wsj.com/articles/ebay-payment-unit-in-talks-to-accept-bitcoin-1408052917. 39 Cordell, D. “Fidor Bank Partners with Kraken to Create Cryptocurrency Bank.” CryptoCoins News, updated November 2, 2014. https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/fidor-bank-partners-kraken-create-cryptocurrency-bank/. 40 Casey, M.J.

The concept and operational details are described in a concise and readable white paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”7 Payments using the decentralized virtual currency are recorded in a public ledger that is stored on many—potentially all—Bitcoin users’ computers, and continuously viewable on the Internet. Bitcoin is the first and largest decentralized cryptocurrency. There are hundreds of other “altcoin” (alternative coin) cryptocurrencies, like Litecoin and Dogecoin, but Bitcoin comprises 90 percent of the market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies and is the de facto standard. Bitcoin is pseudonymous (not anonymous) in the sense that public key addresses (27–32 alphanumeric character strings; similar in function to an email address) are used to send and receive Bitcoins and record transactions, as opposed to personally identifying information.


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

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Roberts, Jeff John, author. Title: Kings of crypto : one startup’s quest to take cryptocurrency out of Silicon Valley and onto Wall Street / Jeff John Roberts. Description: Boston, MA : Harvard Business Review Press, [2020] | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020036284 (print) | LCCN 2020036285 (ebook) | ISBN 9781647820183 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781647820190 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Armstrong, Brian, 1983- | Cryptocurrencies. | Cryptocurrencies–United States. | Money–United States. | Currency question. Classification: LCC HG1710.3 .R85 2020 (print) | LCC HG1710.3 (ebook) | DDC 332.4–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036284 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036285 ISBN: 978-1-64782-018-3 eISBN: 978-1-64782-019-0 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives Z39.48-1992.

I also interviewed many other influential figures in the cryptocurrency world, including academics, investors, and those close to Coinbase’s competitors. Most of the accounts in this book, including nearly all of the quotes attributed to people at Coinbase, are from those interviews. I have also drawn extensively on secondary material, including news reports from Wired, the New York Times, Forbes, and Coindesk. The reporting in Kings of Crypto also makes use of the excellent first generation of cryptocurrency histories, including Digital Gold, The Age of Cryptocurrency, and Blockchain Revolution. When I have relied on material directly from these sources for my own narrative, I’ve made every effort to identify them accordingly.

I came out to New York and got my ass handed to me by old-school traders.” Adam’s mission had failed. Coinbase’s campaign to crack the heart of Wall Street would have to wait another day. Meanwhile, other bankers were similarly dismissive of cryptocurrency. The most famous figure in American banking—JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon—made clear what he thought of cryptocurrency, flatly telling the press that bitcoin would not survive. But even as the lords of Wall Street sneered at cryptocurrency, not all their soldiers were so skeptical. At Coinbase, a growing pile of job applicants listed New York firms as their current employer. At Dimon’s own firm, in a high-profile defection, senior executive Blythe Masters left to run a blockchain startup called Digital Asset.


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

The compound provides loans for certain cryptocurrencies such as Housing (DAI), Ether (ETH), USD Coin (USDC), Ox (ZRX), Tether (USDT), Wrapped BTC (WBTC), and Basic Featured Token (ATM), Augur (REP), and Sai (SAI). Any cryptocurrency owner or hodler can lend and borrow cryptocurrency directly without wasting time, effort, and money spent communicating with traditional financial intermediaries. If you own the cryptocurrencies mentioned above, you can send, block, deposit, and borrow. They all mean the desired amount for the compound protocol. Locking cryptocurrency with Compound is the same as putting money in a savings account, but it uses a blockchain-based decentralized protocol.

Let's talk about each one of the categories one by one besides MakerDAO that we just mentioned. Stable-coin Stable-coin is a cryptocurrency designed to reduce fixed-priced Bitcoins' volatility compared to "fixed" asset baskets or assets. Stable-coin can be linked to cryptocurrency, fiat currency, or commodities (e.g., precious or industrial metals). Soluble stables in currency, commodities, or fiat currency are known to be hedged, and the stables associated with the algorithm are called seigniorage (non-backed). Stable-coins are cryptocurrencies linked to an asset outside of the cryptocurrency community, for instance, the dollar or euro. The main objective here is to stabilize the price.

Locking cryptocurrency with Compound is the same as putting money in a savings account, but it uses a blockchain-based decentralized protocol. Instead of depositing money in the bank, they send cryptocurrencies to wallets. You start earning interest in cryptocurrency instantly, just like you're lending to a bank. The rate of return is indicated by the same symbol as borrowed. In other words, sending BAT earns interest on BAT, and sending DAI earns DAI. The cryptocurrency you send is added to a huge fund from the same sign of The Compound Protocol's smart contracts sent by thousands of others worldwide. On the other side of the equation is the loan. Blocking cryptocurrency in Compound allows you to get a loan on it. Some platforms do not require credit checks, so anyone in the world with cryptocurrency can apply for loans and get instant approval when the applicant meets certain conditions.


pages: 161 words: 44,488

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

Luckily, within a pure Bitcoin world, that potential global bank is you, if you are armed with a cryptocurrency wallet. A local cryptocurrency wallet skirts some of the legalities that existing banks and bank look-alikes (cryptocurrency exchanges) need to adhere to, but without breaking any laws. You take “your bank” with you wherever you travel, and as long as that wallet has local onramps and bridges into the non-cryptocurrency terrestrial world, then you have a version of a global bank in your pocket. This backdrop about the evolution of consumer-based cryptocurrency trading is important, because it demonstrates that we can achieve another form of connectedness by virtue of the blockchain itself, achieving a SWIFT-like3 effect.

Sometimes it is represented by a token, which is another form of related representation of an underlying cryptocurrency. One of the challenging issues with cryptocurrencies is their price volatility, which is enough to keep most consumers away. In a 2014 paper describing a method for stabilizing cryptocurrency, Robert Sams quoted Nick Szabo: “The main volatility in bitcoin comes from variability in speculation, which in turn is due to the genuine uncertainty about its future. More efficient liquidity mechanisms do not help reduce genuine uncertainty.” As cryptocurrency gains more acceptance and understanding, its future will be less uncertain, resulting in a more stable and gradual adoption curve.

Financial Services Marketplace Money is at the heart of cryptocurrency-based blockchains. When cryptocurrency is treated like any currency, it can become part of a financial instrument, leading to the development of a variety of new financial products. Blockchains offer an incredible innovation environment for the next generation of financial services. As cryptocurrency volatilities subside, these will become popular. Derivatives, options, swaps, synthetic instruments, investments, loans, and many other traditional instruments will have their cryptocurrency version, therefore creating a new financial services trading marketplace. 9.


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

The crucial role of this framework will be to separate the concepts of digital currency and cryptocurrency. They are related, of course, but they are not the same thing at all. The tree of e-cash has evolved to the point where, in essence, the meta-technology means that anyone can now use cryptocurrency to create their own digital money. It is time to get into the nuances before we look at how we might use the technology of the former to implement the latter. My general view is that we are going to get digital money, but it almost certainly will not be cryptocurrency. However, it almost certainly will use the technologies of cryptocurrency, just not as they are used now.

A recent United Nations report estimates that North Korea has generated some $2 billion for its weapons of mass destruction programmes using ‘widespread and increasingly sophisticated’ cyberattacks to steal from banks and cryptocurrency exchanges. It makes you nostalgic for the days when hackers were stealing credit card numbers to access porn. Iran The recent economic sanctions imposed by America on Iran have had the effect of shrinking the Iranian economy by some 10–20%, which, naturally, has stimulated the country’s interest in cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is apparently used by both the government and the public there to evade legal barriers. Iran has a complicated position with regard to cryptocurrency. The government encourages Bitcoin mining, but Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies are illegal (and are seen as a threat to capital controls).

However, it almost certainly will use the technologies of cryptocurrency, just not as they are used now. So, let us start with the big question: will a Prime or a Patrician digital currency be a cryptocurrency? The answer is most likely no, but we might use cryptocurrency as a base layer and create a digital currency on top of it, thanks to the magic of tokens (which we shall discuss presently). Kevin Werbach has set out a useful taxonomy, saying that (Werbach 2018) there is cryptocurrency, i.e. the idea that networks can securely transfer value without central points of control; there is blockchain, i.e. the idea that networks can collectively reach consensus about information across trust boundaries; and there are cryptoassets, i.e. the idea that virtual currencies can be ‘financialized’ into tradable assets.


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

CHAPTER 3 MONEY PRINTER GO BRRR For skeptics like Jacob and me, there was one corporation that reigned supreme when it came to our suspicions about the cryptocurrency industry: the “stablecoin” company Tether and its assorted entities such as the exchange Bitfinex. Tether was arguably the most important cryptocurrency of them all: At the time, 70 percent of all transactions in cryptocurrency were conducted in it, more than in either Bitcoin or Ethereum. Founded in 2014, Tether claims to be the first stablecoin ever created. (A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency pegged to an actual currency such as the US dollar.) On the crypto exchanges, one Tether (USDT) equals one US dollar.

It was a wonderful experience. While our discussion covered some fairly esoteric ground, to me it felt like home; just some obsessive dudes nerding out over how the cryptocurrency markets appeared rife with fraud. As one does. The episode was nominally about celebrities shilling cryptocurrencies and the insanity of the Super Bowl ad campaigns. I pointed out something I had been mulling over internally for weeks: If you acknowledged that crypto-currency markets resembled a Ponzi, then everything about the massive marketing campaigns made sense. If the entire crypto market was predicated on getting more regular folks to gamble via exchanges like eToro, Crypto.com, FTX, and Coinbase, then the exchanges had to go all out for the biggest TV audience of the year to reach the most potential customers.

Bank Raises Questions,” New York Times, November 23, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/23/business/ftx-cryptocurrency-bank.html. 234 SBF was arrested in the Bahamas: CFTC complaint against FTX, United States District Court (Southern District of New York), December 21, 2022, https://www.cftc.gov/media/8021/enfftxtradingcomplaint122122/download. 237 In January 2023: Giulia Heyward, “Cryptocurrency giant Coin-base strikes a $100 million deal with New York regulators,” NPR, January 4, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/01/04/1146915338/coinbase-settlement-cryptocurrency-exchange-new-york-dfs. CHAPTER 13: PREACHER’S FATHER 243 a story about his dad, Hal: Multiple interviews with David Henson in 2022; reporting trip to Henson family and church in Hendersonville, North Carolina, November 2022; screenshots, texts, bank statements, and other documents about Hal Henson’s crypto purchases provided by David Henson. 247 addiction services: Interview with Lin and Aaron Sternlicht, Fall 2022.


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

(Ameer Rosic) https://blockgeeks.com/guides/ethereum-gas/ The trillion-dollar case for ETH (Lucas Campbell) https://bankless.substack.com/p/the-trillion-dollar-case-for-eth-eb6 Ethereum: The Digital Finance Stack (David Hoffman) https://medium.com/pov-crypto/ethereum-the-digital-finance-stack-4ba988c6c14b Ether: A New Model for Money (David Hoffman) https://medium.com/pov-crypto/ether-a-new-model-for-money-17365b5535ba Chapter Four: Ethereum Wallets A wallet is a user-friendly interface to the blockchain network. It manages your private keys, which are basically keys to the lock on your cryptocurrencies’ vault. Wallets allow you to receive, store and send cryptocurrencies. ~ Custodial vs Non-Custodial There are two kinds of wallets, custodial and non-custodial wallets. Custodial wallets are wallets where third-parties keep and maintain control over your cryptocurrencies on your behalf. Non-custodial wallets are wallets where you take full control and ownership of your cryptocurrencies. This is similar to the mantra espoused by many people in the blockchain industry to “be your own bank”.

This may be convenient as you do not need to worry about private key security but you only have to worry about account credentials security just like how you would have to protect your email account. However, by trusting a third party with your cryptocurrencies, you open yourself up to the risk of the custodian losing your cryptocurrencies through mismanagement or hacks. There have been numerous incidents of custodial wallets losing their cryptocurrencies with the most prominent example being Mt. Gox lost over 850,000 bitcoin worth over $450 million in 2014. By using a non-custodial wallet, you trust no external party and only yourself to ensure that your cryptocurrencies are safe. However, by using a non-custodial wallet, you pass the burden of security to yourself and you have to be fully equipped to store your private keys safely.

It is useful as it helps buyers and sellers to access an instant market without the need of intermediaries. C Cryptocurrency Exchange (Cryptoexchange) It is a digital exchange that helps users exchange cryptocurrencies. For some exchanges, they also facilitate users to trade fiat currencies to cryptocurrencies. Custodian Custodian refers to the third party to have control over your assets. Fiat-collateralized stablecoin A stablecoin that is backed by fiat-currency. For example, 1 Tether is pegged to $1. Crypto-collateralized stablecoin. A stablecoin that is backed by another cryptocurrency. For example, Dai is backed by Ether at an agreed collateral ratio.


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

Ethereum’s pitch has always been ridiculously aspirational. It’s a “smart contracts platform,” it’s a “worldwide distributed computer,” at one point Wikipedia called it “Web 3.0,” at another a “publishing platform.” Anything other than a cryptocurrency. To this day, drive-by editors occasionally swing by the Ethereum article in Wikipedia to remove the word “cryptocurrency.” Of course, the cryptocurrency is overwhelmingly the main use, and that the cryptocurrency will go to the moon is the main hope. Ethereum has a block time of around 14 to 16 seconds (Bitcoin’s is 10 minutes). How do blocks make it across the network in that time? Well, often they don’t (though blocks only being a few kilobytes helps298).

Consensus model: How you choose who gets to write the next block. Bitcoin uses Proof of Work, which is hugely wasteful. Craig Wright: Not Satoshi Nakamoto. Crypto: in this context, an abbreviation for cryptocurrency or crypto asset. In non-cryptocurrency use, the term is short for “cryptography.” Crypto asset: the general class of cryptographic things that aren’t necessarily cryptocurrency, but can be traded like it, e.g. tokens in a smart contract running on Ethereum. Cryptocurrency: Bitcoin and its various copies. Cypherpunks: a mailing list for cryptography enthusiasts against the forces of oppression, i.e. any government anywhere.

By October 2016, Bitcoin regularly had around 40,000 unconfirmed transactions in the mempool at any time, and in May 2017 it peaked at 200,000.197 The possible solutions are: Increase the block size, which will increase centralisation even further – big blocks take longer to propagate, and the blockchain becomes even more unwieldy. (Though that ship really sailed in 2013). Sidechains: bolt on a completely different non-Bitcoin cryptocurrency, and do all the real transactions there. (This is presently vapourware.) It is unclear why anyone would create a usable alternate cryptocurrency then peg it to Bitcoin, rather than just use it in its own right. The Lightning Network: bolt on a completely different non-Bitcoin network, and do all the real transactions there. (This is also vapourware.) Use a different cryptocurrency that hasn’t clogged yet. (The darknets are exploring this option.) The Bitcoin community is now sufficiently dysfunctional that even such a simple proposal as “OK, let’s increase the block size to two megabytes” led to community schisms, code forks, retributive DDOS attacks, death threats,198 a split between the Chinese miners and the American core programmers … and plenty of other clear evidence that this and other problems in the Bitcoin protocol will never be fixed by a consensus process.


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

Some of that money went to hire people like Mike Hearn, a once prominent Bitcoin developer who dramatically turned his back on the cryptocurrency community with an “I quit” blog post complaining about the bitter infighting. R3 also hired Ian Grigg—who later left to join EOS—another prominent onetime rebel from the cryptocurrency space. Leading its research team was the ever-thoughtful and well-regarded full-time IBM blockchain guru Richard Gendal-Brown. These were serious engineering hires. Before their arrival, R3 had also signed on Tim Swanson as research director. Swanson was a distributed ledger/blockchain analyst who was briefly enthused by Bitcoin but who later became disillusioned with the cryptocurrency’s ideologues.

*For background on the Cypherpunk movement from the San Francisco Bay Area and the role it played in the development of cryptocurrencies, see our previous book, The Age of Cryptocurrency. *A noteworthy caveat is that, if and when scientists create a truly functioning quantum computer, this level of cryptography could indeed be crackable. But that idea is not only a long way off; if it were to arrive, it would render all cybersecurity systems, not just Bitcoin’s, unworkable. Nonetheless, cryptocurrency designers are already working on quantum-proof systems that, in theory, will resist quantum attacks.

Not to be outdone, Bitcoin, the granddaddy of the cryptocurrency world, has continued to reveal strengths—and this has been reflected in its price. Despite a bitter fight between developers and the “miners” that validate transactions on the Bitcoin network, a feud that led the currency to split into two separate coins with different software codes, bitcoin’s price surged to a record high of $11,323 in late November 2017, taking its market capitalization to almost $190 billion according to CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index. That marks a price gain of more than 4,800 percent since The Age of Cryptocurrency was published in January 2015 and a return of almost 19 million percent since bitcoin was first tradable on a semi-liquid exchange in July 2010.


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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

For example, as of December 31, 2020, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) draft proposal requires reporting on form 1040 of any receipt of cryptocurrency (for free) including airdrop or hard fork; exchange of cryptocurrency for goods or services; purchase or sale of cryptocurrency; exchange of virtual currency for other property, including for another virtual currency; and acquisition or disposition of a financial interest in a cryptocurrency. Moving virtual currency from one wallet to another is not included. The regulations also make it clear that a form W2 is required for cryptocurrency payments made in exchange for work.30 While the DeFi regulatory landscape continues to be actively explored, with new regulatory decisions being made daily such as that allowing banks to custody cryptocurrency,31 the market outlook is hazy with many existing problems yet to be navigated.If the regulatory environment in any one country (or state) is too harsh, innovation will move offshore (or a different state).

These new currencies can adjust their parameters such as inflation and mechanism for consensus via their underlying blockchain to create different value propositions. We will discuss blockchain and cryptocurrency in greater depth later on but for now will focus on a particular cryptocurrency with special relevance to DeFi. ETHEREUM AND DeFi Ethereum (ETH) is currently the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap ($260b). Vitalik Buterin introduced the idea in 2014, and Ethereum mined its first block in 2015. Ethereum is in some sense a logical extension of the applications of Bitcoin because it allows for smart contracts – which are code that lives on a blockchain, can control assets and data, and define interactions between the assets, data, and network participants.

Validators in PoS commit some capital (the stake) to attest that the block is valid and make themselves available by staking their cryptocurrency. Then, they may be selected to propose a block, which needs to be attested by many of the other validators. Validators profit by both proposing a block and attesting to the validity of others’ proposed blocks. PoS is much less computationally intensive and requires vastly less energy. CRYPTOCURRENCY The most popular application of blockchain technology is cryptocurrency, a token (usually scarce) that is cryptographically secured and transferred. The scarcity is what assures the possibility of value and is itself an innovation of blockchain.


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

Since then, he’d written extensively about Bitcoin, had paused college to travel and hang out with the global Bitcoin community, had become an owner of Bitcoin Magazine, and had worked as a freelance cryptocurrency developer. After several months in Europe and Israel, plus a pit stop in Los Angeles, he was in San Francisco, working out of the office of a cryptocurrency exchange called Kraken and staying in the cofounder and CEO Jesse Powell’s apartment. But the problems he saw with blockchain technology, which make cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin possible, gnawed at him. Bitcoin was built for payments. The Bitcoin white paper was subtitled “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”1 Developers were now realizing Bitcoin’s underlying technology could also be used to create things like a decentralized domain name system or to underpin more complex contracts like bets.

But he made his pitch—that Ethereum was taking a different strategy from other cryptocurrencies, not building specific features but instead creating a programming language. “Out of this one building block, this one single Lego brick of cryptocurrency, you can make pretty much anything,” he said. Not only that, but these applications could potentially be, like Bitcoin, decentralized—meaning, they could, if structured correctly, be impossible for anyone or any government to shut down. Although many Bitcoin knockoffs existed, at least one audience member sensed this was the first time a cryptocurrency idea wasn’t just a variation on Bitcoin and was instead something significant in its own right.

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.


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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

While Dogecoin had its flaws, it continues to exist and has taught the cryptocurrency space valuable lessons about gathering community support in an Internet era. AURORACOIN: ICELAND’S NATIONAL CRYPTOCURRENCY? Much like the anonymous Satoshi, Auroracoin’s creator also had a fictitious name: Baldur Friggjar Óðinsson. Baldur created Auroracoin based on Litecoin’s code and decided to “air-drop” the cryptocurrency to Icelanders with the intent of providing 50 percent of all auroracoin in existence to residents. The hope was that such a distribution would jump-start national use of the cryptocurrency. A key to Baldur’s plan was his access to the government’s national identification system, which led speculators to believe mistakenly that Auroracoin was sponsored by the Icelandic government.

As a result, beers in Iceland were being purchased for auroracoin,43 and many other retail establishments began to utilize the cryptocurrency. Then a scandal hit and the prime minister was forced to resign because of his involvement with the Panama Papers.44 This led to the growth in popularity of a political party known as the Pirate Party, which had a favorable view on cryptocurrencies.45 Suddenly there was speculation46 that Iceland could revisit the potential for Auroracoin and its role as a national cryptocurrency.47 As acceptance grows and politics change, it will be interesting to watch what happens next for the Icelandic cryptocurrency. Auroracoin is a cautionary tale for both investors and developers.

See specific topics Cryptocommodities cryptoassets as, 108 cryptotokens and, 51–65 cryptotokens and cryptocurrencies, 32–33 CryptoCompare.com, 195, 200, 207–209, 286 Cryptocurrencies, xxv, 11, 188 cryptocommodities and cryptotokens as, 32–33 in Iceland, 44–45 Millennials and, 281–282 Ripple as, 41–43 Cryptoeconomics, 183 Cryptographers, 56 Cryptographics, 47 Cryptography, 14 transactions with, 15 CryptoNote, 46, 47 Cryptotokens, 108 cryptocommodities and, 51–65 cryptocurrencies and cryptocommodities, 32–33 dApps and, 59, 296n7 C/T Assets. See Consumable/Transformable Assets Culture, 175, 272 Currency, 13, 42. See also Cryptocurrencies as asset class, 112 of Dutch Republic, 143 evolution of, 33–34 as fiat, 127, 128, 129 purpose of, 32 Currency pair diversity, 124, 127, 128 for ether, 200 Custody, 222–224 Daily percent price changes, 94, 98 The DAO, 175 Hack of, 29, 61 ICO for, 256 rise and fall of, 60–63 venture capital and, 255 DAOs.


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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

According to coinmarketcap.com, an authority on all matters crypto, the total value of cryptocurrencies in circulation is around $765 billion. That’s not bad considering crypto kicked off only in 2009. And while its adoption as a method of payment has been more limited than the enthusiasts hoped, cryptocurrencies have profoundly reshaped the debate about money and paying. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the Bitcoin founders should feel flattered (in addition to wealthy). Everyone from BigTech to banks to central banks is now looking to issue their own cryptocurrency. A dizzying 5,500 cryptocurrencies are in circulation, many of which aren’t even currencies in the strict sense – they are coins issued through ICOs.

The top four of those 5,500 currencies represent 85 per cent of their total value, and together they demonstrate the different things one can do with a cryptocurrency. So, let’s take a look at them, one by one. Bitcoin The original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin remains by far the biggest game in town. On 1 January 2021 its value stood at around $540 billion, representing well over two-thirds of the total value of all cryptocurrencies (see Table 4). Table 4. Largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation. Rank Currency Market value ($ billions) Share of market cap (%) 1 Bitcoin 540 71 2 Ethereum (Ether) 85 11 3 Tether (THT) 21 3 4 Ripple (XRP) 10 1 Source: coinmarketcap.com, 1 January 2021.

According to Tether, the outstanding stock of THT is fully backed by accounts that it maintains with banks (although this claim has been disputed). Tether is certainly active: the daily trading volume in THT is around $20–30 billion, higher than any other cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin. So, THT is liquid; that’s good. Why? Well, Tether’s currency is used for trading against other cryptocurrencies – it is the US dollar of the crypto world, if you will. It’s been suggested that much of Tether’s usage consists of avoiding currency controls on the Chinese yuan. So it’s good if you are either into cryptocurrencies as assets or you face difficulties getting your yuan out of mainland China. Not so good is the fact that most of THT’s trading happens ‘off the chain’ through book entry at several large exchanges that maintain accounts for their customers.8 First, this comes at a cost and involves risk; second, these exchanges use trading platforms that allow ‘dark trading’, which means you don’t get full transparency on pricing.


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

Also, an introduction of formal Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) is also being recommended to addresses issues related to money laundering. Experts are recommending Howey Test as some criteria for any ICO to be considered a security. Another difference is that ICOs by design usually require investors to invest using cryptocurrencies and payouts are paid using cryptocurrencies, most commonly this is the new token (a new cryptocurrency) introduced by the ICO. This can also be Fiat currency, but most commonly cryptocurrency is used. For example, in the Ethereum crowdfunding campaign a new token, Ether was introduced. The name token sale for crowdfunding is also quite popular and both terms are used interchangeably. ICO are also called crowd sales.

In addition to Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3, or Tier X in the future, the following represents my own vision of what blockchain technology eventually could become as this technology advances: Blockchain 1.0: This tier was introduced with the invention of Bitcoin, and it is primarily used for cryptocurrencies. Also, as Bitcoin was the first implementation of cryptocurrencies, it makes sense to categorize this first generation of blockchain technology to include only cryptographic currencies. All alternative cryptocurrencies as well as Bitcoin fall into this category. It includes core applications such as payments and applications. This generation started in 2009 when Bitcoin was released and ended in early 2010.

Smart contracts can be programmed to perform any actions that blockchain users need and according to their specific business requirements. Transferring value between peers: Blockchain enables the transfer of value between its users via tokens. Tokens can be thought of as a carrier of value. Generation of cryptocurrency: This feature is optional depending on the type of blockchain in use. A blockchain can create cryptocurrency as an incentive to its miners who validate the transactions and spend resources to secure the blockchain. We will discuss cryptocurrencies in great detail in Chapter 5, Introducing Bitcoin. Smart property: It is now possible to link a digital or physical asset to the blockchain in such a secure and precise manner that it cannot be claimed by anyone else.


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

I also wrote a piece with recommendations for PR professionals working in crypto (“Mainstream PR, Meet Cryptocurrency”) as if I were a grizzled veteran rather than someone figuring out if I could make a living in the space. Through one of Eileen’s contacts at the venture capital firm Redpoint, I won my first crypto account, a well-known and respected early cryptocurrency wallet company called BitGo. Their CEO, Mike Belshe, was a sharp pioneer in the space. I impressed him with my knowledge of the cryptocurrency universe, which by that time was extensive, up to a certain technical point. He brought me aboard to work on an upcoming launch.

Although I write in detail about my experiences in cryptocurrency and other financial and business matters, this is a memoir and a commentary rather than a book of business advice. Readers who are seeking information and advice about business matters should consult resources other than this book. As a style point, throughout this book I capitalize Bitcoin and Ethereum when I refer to their blockchains. I do not capitalize bitcoin and ether when I refer to these currencies. Prologue When the Financial Times interviewed me for a story about cryptocurrency millionaires in March 2018, I told them the unvarnished truth: “I invested because I wanted the underdogs to win, for once—losers like me who didn’t make the rules and didn’t have the money… We’d been forced to tweet corporate philanthropy hashtags, and we weren’t going to take it anymore.”

Throughout my career, escape was always on my mind, though I had limited means to achieve it. Then I discovered Bitcoin and Ethereum, technologies based on an entirely new organizing principle. A priesthood of true believers said cryptocurrencies could disrupt the banks, corporations, and other organizations that ran society. Or at least provide an alternative to them. I could fund these networks by buying bitcoin and ether, the cryptocurrencies that power their blockchains. I could help change the world and get rich ... not necessarily in that order. The Onion has created a helpful guide to this new technology. It begins with a simple Q&A: Q: What is Blockchain?


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

cryptography, Cryptography-Conclusionsasymmetric (see public key cryptography) defined, Cryptography Ethereum addresses and, Ethereum Addresses-Detecting an error in an EIP-55 encoded address hash functions, Cryptographic Hash Functions-Which Hash Function Am I Using? keys and addresses, Keys and Addresses public key cryptography and cryptocurrency, Public Key Cryptography and Cryptocurrency-Public Key Cryptography and Cryptocurrency public keys, Public Keys-Elliptic Curve Libraries CryptoRoulette honey pot, Real-World Examples: OpenAddressLottery and CryptoRoulette Honey Pots currency units, Ether Currency Units D DAG (directed acyclic graph), Ethash: Ethereum’s Proof-of-Work Algorithm Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm, Ethash: Ethereum’s Proof-of-Work Algorithm DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), Ethereum’s Four Stages of Development, The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (The DAO)-Timeline of the DAO Hard Forkabout, The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (The DAO) and Ethereum Classic origins, Ethereum Classic (ETC) defined, Quick Glossary hard fork, The DAO Hard Fork-Timeline of the DAO Hard Fork reentrancy attack, Real-World Example: The DAO, DApp governance Dapp, Testing Smart Contracts dapp.tools, dapp.tools DApps (decentralized applications), Decentralized Applications (DApps)-ConclusionsAuction DApp example, A Basic DApp Example: Auction DApp-From App to DApp(see also Auction DApp) backend (smart contract), Backend (Smart Contract) data storage, Data Storage decentralized message communication protocols, Decentralized Message Communications Protocols defined, Quick Glossary elements of, What Is a DApp?

The term “ommer” is the preferred gender-neutral term for the sibling of a parent node, but this is also sometimes referred to as an “uncle.” Parity One of the most prominent interoperable implementations of the Ethereum client software. Private key See “secret key.” Proof of stake (PoS) A method by which a cryptocurrency blockchain protocol aims to achieve distributed consensus. PoS asks users to prove ownership of a certain amount of cryptocurrency (their “stake” in the network) in order to be able to participate in the validation of transactions. Proof of work (PoW) A piece of data (the proof) that requires significant computation to find. In Ethereum, miners must find a numeric solution to the Ethash algorithm that meets a network-wide difficulty target.

It uses a blockchain to synchronize and store the system’s state changes, along with a cryptocurrency called ether to meter and constrain execution resource costs. The Ethereum platform enables developers to build powerful decentralized applications with built-in economic functions. While providing high availability, auditability, transparency, and neutrality, it also reduces or eliminates censorship and reduces certain counterparty risks. Compared to Bitcoin Many people will come to Ethereum with some prior experience of cryptocurrencies, specifically Bitcoin. Ethereum shares many common elements with other open blockchains: a peer-to-peer network connecting participants, a Byzantine fault–tolerant consensus algorithm for synchronization of state updates (a proof-of-work blockchain), the use of cryptographic primitives such as digital signatures and hashes, and a digital currency (ether).


pages: 275 words: 84,980

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

— ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ (2008) Having said earlier that the iconic technology of money is the plastic card, right now the iconic money of the future seems to be cryptocurrency. Spurred on by the widespread interest in Bitcoin, there are many people looking at the concept and wondering whether cryptocurrency – money that depends on cryptography rather than the belief of a community – might be a feature in the emerging money landscape. There are, of course, cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies that are yet to be invented (Birch 2015), but if we use Bitcoin as the case study then it seems the jury is out. Stefan Brands, a leading cryptographer and one of the pioneers of digital currency, describes Bitcoin as ‘clever’ and is loath to denigrate it, but he believes that, fundamentally, it is structured like ‘a pyramid scheme’ that rewards early adopters (Wallace 2011) – a charge also levelled by other observers of the financial markets (Robinson 2014).

The post-industrial economy needs a new kind of money, not one devised by representatives of the status quo, and it won’t be the single galactic currency of science fiction imagination (we can’t even make a single currency work between Germany and Greece, let alone between Ganymede and Gamma Centauri) but thousands, even millions, of currencies. Crypto-alternatives Not only will there be cryptocurrencies beyond Bitcoin and not only will they be better – more powerful and more efficient – there will also be a great many of them as the cost of launching a digital currency falls. Without launching into a treatise on cryptocurrencies, I think it would be useful to take a quick look at a couple of the newer cryptocurrencies on the block (pun intended) to give a sense of the spectrum of possibilities. Ethereum Ethereum is comparable to Bitcoin, in that it uses a blockchain, but it was designed to provide a better platform for shared ledger applications.

Rather than target consumers, Ripple targets banks, positioning itself as an efficient intermediary for payments, remittances and cross-border exchanges. It makes payments using its native cryptocurrency, ‘the ripple’ (XRP), by having users make digitally signed updates to its ledger and leaves the users to determine which other users they do or not trust for the purposes of consensus. Zcash As I write, at the end of 2016, the newest kid on the block is Zcash: a cryptocurrency with the added special sauce of genuine anonymity, rather than the pseudonymity that got some people into trouble when they used the Satoshi system for various nefarious purposes.


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

In addition, these platforms (with the exception of the Epic Games Store) do not allow games that accept cryptocurrencies as a form of payment, or that use cryptocurrency-based virtual goods (that is, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs). Though this is sometimes portrayed as a protest against the energy used to power blockchains, such claims don’t hold up to scrutiny. Sony’s music label has invested in NFT start-ups, and created its own NFTs, while Microsoft’s Azure offers blockchain certifications and its corporate venture arm has made numerous start-up investments. Apple CEO Tim Cook has admitted that he owns cryptocurrencies and considers NFTs “interesting.” It’s more likely that these platforms refuse blockchain games because they simply do not work with their revenue models.

What’s more, it’s impossible to imagine how a platform might justify taking a 30% commission from the purchase or selling a multi-thousand- or million-dollar NFT—and if such commissions did apply, the entirety of the NFT’s value would be devoured if it traded hands enough times. Apple’s efforts to support cryptocurrencies even as it protects its app store gaming revenue has produced more confusion. 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.

So why is a decentralized database or server architecture seen as the future? It helps to put aside the idea of NFTs, cryptocurrencies, fears of record theft, and the like. What matters is that blockchains are programmable payment rails. 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).


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

If Bitcoin volatility continues to decrease, this trend may give Bitcoin a significant advantage over future cryptocurrencies: Because Bitcoin is guaranteed to be the oldest cryptocurrency, new currencies might be unable to catch up in this “volatility race,” and Bitcoin will always remain less volatile than upstarts. If Bitcoin maintains advantages in terms of network effects and volatility, it may make sense for new cryptocurrencies to use pegging to link themselves to the Bitcoin network instead of trying to replace the Bitcoin network entirely. Recently, two well-known cryptocurrency developers and entrepreneurs, Adam Back and Austin Hill, have suggested that the value of new cryptocurrencies could be directly linked one-to-one with the value of a bitcoin by using cryptography to allow coins to “ jump” between block-chains using clever algorithms.

However, three main reasons exist to believe that Bitcoin may be able survive the onslaught of newcomers: network effects, the nature of cryptocurrency volatility, and the recent development of cryptocurrency-pegging technology. The network effect is the simple concept that people want to use a currency only if other people will accept it as payment. The more users a currency has, the more useful it is. This creates a natural barrier for the adoption of new currencies (and certainly has hindered the adoption of Bitcoin relative to traditional currencies in its first few years). Currently, Bitcoin has the largest adoption of any cryptocurrency, so newer ones would need to have easily distinguishable advantages over Bitcoin to overcome its network advantage.

If the side chain idea (or a similar peg-based idea) is successful, future cryptocurrencies would benefit from Bitcoin’s existence and even augment it rather than replace it. For these reasons, Bitcoin might never be entirely replaced by other cryptocurrencies. That being said, if a cryptocurrency is created that really is so much better than Bitcoin that we all switch, that wouldn’t really be a bad outcome, would it? Now that we’ve discussed the existential risks, let’s explore what Bitcoin’s future might look like. What Role Might Bitcoin Play in the Future? The two main uses of a currency are as a means of storing savings and as a payment mechanism.


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

While some markets centred in London have achieved great efficiencies in terms of liquidity and scale (for instance, in foreign exchange trading), the network of city-based financial institutions, as well as law and accounting firms, has been essential to making possible schemes that play a key role in regulatory arbitrage, tax avoidance and money laundering. Cryptocurrencies have the potential to become ‘super tax havens’.6 In fact evidence suggests that they already are. To date there exist no effective enforcement mechanisms to track the online movement of bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies. According to one estimate, if even 1 per cent of funds currently sitting in offshore accounts were transferred into bitcoin, the value of this virtual currency would grow exponentially. Since the number of bitcoins in circulation is currently capped at twenty-one million, if these billions of offshore dollars migrate to that cryptocurrency, the worth of a single bitcoin could rise to nearly $3m.7 E-wallets exist in no physical location, are not subject to taxation at the source, and do not require the assistance of expensive financial intermediaries such as Mossack Fonseca to administer.

Is it not what free-market capitalism is all about? The problem with bitcoin and other copycat cryptocurrencies, Kaminska argues, lies in the security/access paradox. ‘If the sector is easily accessible (highly competitive) it’s not secure, and if it’s secure it’s not easily accessible. Put differently, the more entrants there are, the easier it is for criminal enterprises to exploit the sector for their own ends.’15 And that is exactly what is happening in the cryptocurrency space. Or worse. Serious crime, such as child pornography, and drugs and arms trading, are attracted to cryptocurrencies because of its efficiency, secrecy and speed. Petty crime, like selling medicine online or ghost-writing essays for inept students, also uses crypto for secrecy.16 Blockchain-based innovations have become the favourite method of payment in the criminal underworld.

In one survey of more than 2,000 American cryptocurrency owners some 57 per cent of respondents said they’d realized gains on their crypto investments, that is, profits the IRS considers taxable.20 Fifty-nine per cent of Americans said they had never reported any such gains to the IRS.21 Data from one popular tax preparation service shows that only a minuscule proportion – just 0.04 per cent – of US tax filers reported cryptocurrency gains or losses to the IRS in the first half of 2018. That’s far fewer than the 7 per cent of Americans who are estimated to own bitcoin or another cryptocurrency, and who are likely to owe taxes to the IRS on those investments.22 There are several ways in which bitcoin is used for tax evasion purposes.


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

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. Where governments have the greatest leverage is in regulating how financial institutions interact with cryptocurrencies. In China, although trading in cryptocurrencies between individuals is legal at present, financial institutions are proscribed from buying, selling, and insuring these currencies or any derivative products.

They have deep conviction that with encrypted digital currencies like Bitcoin, someday no one will have to trust banks, either. For true believers in the promise of cryptocurrencies, trying to find ways of improving the current system, as this book aims to do, is a waste of time. Better to fast-forward to the brave new world where governments are no longer in the payments picture and no longer even control the unit of account. With all due respect to promising security advances offered by public ledger technology and the ingenious algorithms embodied in some of the new “currencies,” the view that Bitcoin—or any other cryptocurrency—is going to replace the dollar anytime soon is quite naive. As currency innovators have learned over the millennia, it is hard to stay on top of the government indefinitely in a game where the latter can keep adjusting the rules until it wins.

In the extreme, the quantitative effect of a Bencoin on banks’ lending capacities could be absolutely as dramatic as the Chicago plan (chapter 6) that effectively forces all private money substitutes to be 100% backed by government debt. Much would depend on regulation, however, including what alternatives private financial institutions were allowed to offer. CRYPTOCURRENCIES AND PRIVACY You might be wondering why I have framed the discussion of cryptocurrencies in terms of their security protocol and not their privacy features. It is true that much of the early publicity for Bitcoin surrounded dodgy retail merchants or underworld marketplaces, such as Silk Road, but the landscape is constantly evolving. For example, for many years, people regarded Bitcoin as a way to do anonymous transactions that the government can never detect.


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

Alternative Cryptocurrencies Bitcoin copycats were inevitable. Bitcoin is a free and open-source software, which means that the software is free to download and open to view by anybody. On multiple occasions, Bitcoin has resisted fundamental changes to its rulebook from developers that were out of consensus with the majority of Bitcoin users. Alternative versions of cryptocurrency to Bitcoin emerged, whether copied directly, tweaked, or reimagined. If ideas better than Bitcoin existed, capital would gravitate toward these alternatives and away from Bitcoin. So far, however, no cryptocurrency has challenged BTC over any sustained duration, measured in both market value and hashpower.

In 2013, the price of BTC/USD exploded, rising above $1,000 and giving the network a total market value of $10 billion. The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg started publishing articles about Bitcoin and the growing cryptocurrency industry with regularity, and Bitcoin’s brand started to gain recognition. Government officials likely belittled the idea of decentralized cryptocurrency because Bitcoin’s lack of a central issuer had stoked a discussion about the separation between money and governments. Bitcoin officially gained recognition in the eyes of the United States government in 2014, progressing toward legitimacy and past the ugly brushstrokes left by the Silk Road era.

BTC also acts as a monetary constraint on lower layers of its own pyramid because it’s unforgeable, but this doesn’t prevent the issuance of second-layer BTC or any other digital asset. Whether classified as copycats or money-grabs, a volcano of cryptocurrencies erupted after the early success of Bitcoin. Exchanges added cryptocurrencies to their platforms which notably traded against BTC, not USD, as their base currency. A new asset class of digital token-based currencies is here, and BTC functions as the final form of settlement within that digital realm. BTC will never be alone as a digital asset; it will always have both ancillary and auxiliary assets. But it is the one unit of account on which others in the digital universe can rely on for incorruptibility.


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

Other issuers give much less assurance. Many cryptocurrencies follow ad hoc rules that put no cap on the supply of coins, exposing value to serious debasement, worse and faster than any fiat currency. Full faith and credit could become a joke. Investors in the crypto space use leverage, up to one hundred times capital on some exchanges, meaning small fluctuations can wipe out positions. 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.

Will monetary unions such as the eurozone foster prosperity or eventual collapse? Will the US dollar retain its global reserve currency status or be replaced by the Chinese renminbi or other arrangements now that the dollar is increasingly weaponized? Will cryptocurrencies replace all traditional currencies, or will central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) prevail and displace cryptocurrencies? Will high costs and inefficiencies doom venerable financial institutions and usher in decentralized finance built with blockchain technology? Or will centralized fintech—rather than DeFi—challenge traditional banks and financial institutions?

Chains of digital signatures create electronic coins and validate transactions with them. Successive owners transfer coins by digitally signing each one twice, to indelibly mark the previous and the new transaction on a permanent public blockchain. Despite manic swings in value, the overall market for cryptocurrencies has accelerated enormously. Miami mayor Francis X. Suarez drew wide attention when he declared that he would take a paycheck in cryptocurrency. Mayor-elect Eric Adams in New York City responded in late 2021 by declaring that he would take his first three paychecks in crypto form, never mind the inconvenient fact that New York cannot at present pay salaries in a currency other than dollars.19 The government of El Salvador officially adopted Bitcoin as a national currency in 2021 in spite of serious advice against it by many institutions, including the IMF, because the country needs a financial bailout given its unsustainable debts.


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

Much as The Accidental Billionaires and The Social Network strove to tell the story of Facebook’s founding—that first year of inception and adoption—Bitcoin Billionaires is an origin story, both of the characters within these pages, and of the cryptocurrency itself. We’ve watched Facebook grow and change over the past decade, and similarly, it will be interesting to see where Bitcoin goes. In my opinion, the story of this new era of cryptocurrencies is just beginning. One of the greatest strikes against cryptocurrencies has always been their volatility, which the past year has only served to highlight. Since I started writing this book, the price of Bitcoin has declined more than seventy percent; at the same time, the crypto industry has grown by leaps and bounds, with new companies aimed at servicing, profiting from, and building on this novel technology that springs up every day.

There’s no inside baseball, no insider information, it’s all open-source and democratic. And this new system of money is based on math, not humans.” Azar refilled his glass from one of the bottles on the table between them. “It’s called Bitcoin,” he finished, holding his glass up to the sun. “It’s a form of cryptocurrency.” “Cryptocurrency,” Cameron repeated, from his daybed. “It sounds criminal. Is it legal?” “I don’t think the word applies. That’s part of Bitcoin’s brilliance. It functions without government approval. There’s no headquarters to raid, and it can’t be stopped without stopping the internet itself.” Stopping the internet?

Ironic, how fast technology could turn on its head, how a revolution could suddenly become what it was supposed to be fighting against—the Establishment—a centralized monopoly, a data cartel, holding the world’s data hostage. “There are important counter-trends to this—like encryption and cryptocurrency—that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.…” Encryption and cryptocurrency—the type of counter-trends, digital barbarians at the gate that could dismantle empires. But the truth was, revolutions were a lot like entrepreneurial ideas.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

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

The blockchain is an open, distributed, unhackable ledger devised in 2008 by the unknown person (or perhaps group) known as “Satoshi Nakamoto” to support his cryptocurrency, bitcoin. Buterin’s meteoric rise was such that soon after the Asilomar conference the central bank of Singapore announced that it was moving forward with an Ethereum-backed currency, and other central banks, including those of Canada and Russia, are investigating its potential as a new foundation for money transactions and smart contracts. But Buterin’s vision for the blockchain has long been broader than cryptocurrency. Ethereum’s contribution, its co-founder Joe Lubin predicts, will be an Internet without “a single powerful entity that controls the system or controls gatekeeping into the system.”15 Wired magazine speculated in 2014 that smart contracts, such as Buterin designed Ethereum to facilitate, “could lead to the creation of autonomous corporations—entire companies run by bots instead of humans.”16 If you were convening a summit of futuristic technologists in 2017, it would have been hard to avoid inviting the prophetic protagonist of Ethereum.

Stinchcombe amply showed that blockchains and smart contracts do not obviate the need for trust, regulation, law enforcement, government, or trusted intermediaries. I cannot say that he is wrong in these rather obvious assertions. In a previous article, he grandly proposed that after ten years of experiments and ambitious claims there are still no viable “use-cases” for cryptocurrencies or blockchains. Even Ripple, despite many advertisements of its blockchain and cryptocurrency XRP, does not actually use these devices for most of its ongoing currency exchanges, wrote Stinchcombe. Ripple prefers to resort to more liquid and simpler, less volatile and cumbersome dollars, yen, yuan, and euros. Likewise, all the other blockchain or hashchain prophets—from Dan Larimer at EOS to David Sønstebø at IOTA to Leemon Baird at Hashgraph and Mike Hearn at R3—deploy trusted third parties, elected “witnesses,” delegated stakeholders, “reputable institutions,” corporate consortia, mining pools, righteous regulators, or intervening “coordinators” somewhere to make the system work.

The New York Times blames most of the ailments of our economy—slow GDP growth, low productivity, even declining childbirth—on the diversion of resources into cryptocurrencies.3 But crypto-innovation addresses the entrepreneurial doldrums signified by declining business starts and IPOs and the immense diversion of resources represented by the $5.1 trillion a day of otiose currency trading. It addresses the security crisis with a new Internet architecture. By disintermediating transactions, cryptocurrencies also offer a remedy for the hypertrophy of finance—up near 40 percent of business profits—that has also coincided with the decline of GDP growth.4 Companies are abandoning hierarchy and pursuing heterarchy because, as the Tapscotts put it, “blockchain technology offers a credible and effective means not only of cutting out intermediaries, but also of radically lowering transaction costs, turning firms into networks, distributing economic power, and enabling both wealth creation and a more prosperous future.”5 Bitcoin aimed to burst the overstuffed $5.1 trillion daily piñata of modern currencies and unleash a crypto-copia.


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

I don’t think our current banking system is perfect, but if these cryptocurrencies really take off it will create a lot of problems. First, it would be harder for government to raise income tax at source. At the very least it would mean an increase in self-assessment, which usually means a diminished tax return, partly due to confusion and difficulty with monitoring.7 There would surely be an increase in tax evasion too, along with a rise in money laundering, since it could be done using cryptocurrencies without the hassle of legal business fronts or official bank accounts.8 (Bitcoin has a public ledger but other cryptocurrencies, like Monero and Dash are even harder to follow.)

At the very least it would mean an increase in self-assessment, which usually means a diminished tax return, partly due to confusion and difficulty with monitoring.7 There would surely be an increase in tax evasion too, along with a rise in money laundering, since it could be done using cryptocurrencies without the hassle of legal business fronts or official bank accounts.8 (Bitcoin has a public ledger but other cryptocurrencies, like Monero and Dash are even harder to follow.) Who knows? Some businesses might put themselves entirely on a blockchain, and be paid entirely with untraceable cryptocurrency. Authorities in various countries have started to look more closely into how to tax cryptocurrencies – although at the moment this has mostly concerned capital gains rather than income or spending taxes.9 If history is anything to go by, the most crypto-savvy will be able to engage in all sorts of spectacular and untraceable tax evasion, and a greater burden will fall on an increasingly aggrieved and angry middle class. Given the scale of the social challenges we already face – regarding healthcare, environmental change, crime, welfare – diminishing a democracy’s tax-raising powers at this point is not a smart move.

(The calculation is actually incorrect: when I asked him, May explained that Cyphernomicon was only a first draft, and that he’d never got round to checking it as carefully as he would have liked.) 4 As explained in Attack of the 50-Foot Blockchain by David Gerard (CreateSpace, 2017), Szabo has studied law, and seems to take quite a cautious approach to this issue, unlike others. 5 Kelly Murnane, ‘Ransomware as a Service Being Offered for $39 on the Dark Net’, www.forbes.com, 15 July 2016. 6 See Gerard, Attack of the 50-Foot Blockchain for an excellent discussion of this issue. 7 Annie Nova, ‘“Wild west” days are over for cryptocurrencies, as IRS steps up enforcement’, www.cnbc.com, 17 January 2018. 8 ‘A Simple Guide to Safely and Effectively Tumbling (Mixing) Bitcoin’, https://darknetmarkets.org, 10 July 2015. ‘Can the taxman identify owners of cryptocurrencies? www.nomoretax.eu, 7 September 2017. 9 IRS is going after Coinbase, ordering it last year to hand over details of 14,000 people who carried out big transactions; Robert Wood, ‘Bitcoin Tax Troubles Get More Worrisome’, www.forbes.com, 4 December 2017. 10 Amanda Taub ‘How Stable Are Democracies?


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

Coinmarketcap.com is a useful site to introduce yourself to the altcoins. It gives you price information about the hundred biggest cryptocurrencies, as well links to their sites. For those with an interest in finance, I would also single out cryptocomposite.com. Its CC10 Index measures the performance of the top ten cryptocurrencies in real time. It’s almost certain to become the benchmark when tracker funds, ETFs and other financial vehicles eventually arrive to play the price of cryptocurrencies. As for vehicles to invest in block chain tech, they are coming – of that you can be sure – but they have not yet arrived.

The People’s Money Appendix I: A Beginner’s Guide to Buying Bitcoins Appendix II: Who Is Satoshi? The Usual Suspects Acknowledgements Bibliography Notes Subscribers Author’s Note I have called this book Bitcoin: The Future of Money? Really, I should have called it Cryptocurrency: The Future of Money? Bitcoin is just one of many cryptocurrencies (don’t worry, I’ll explain what that means). It is, arguably, not even the first. But it is the first that works. And it is the one that has caught everyone’s attention. Rather as people say ‘Scotch tape’ or ‘Sellotape’ instead of ‘sticky-back plastic’, Bitcoin is the name everybody knows – hence my choice of title.

So, while the community discussed ideas, few changes were made. Instead, coders began to develop alternative cryptocurrencies, aping some aspects of Bitcoin but changing others. These were known as altcoins. There are now 300 or more kinds of altcoin. Many of them are scams and get-rich-quick schemes. Many of them are simply experiments. Most of them will amount – or already have amounted – to nothing. But some of them are quite legitimate. At present, they comprise just a few per cent of the entire cryptocurrency market cap. At $500 a coin, the market cap of Bitcoin stands at around $6.5 billion. All the other altcoins combined amount to about $350,000.


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

Bitcoin is therefore considered pseudonymous (Beigel 2015): it is not fully anonymous, since every transaction is recorded, but determining the true identities of those involved in the transactions requires more information than is directly available in the network. The possibility of identifying those true identities and the potential methods for obscuring them altogether are live topics of discussion in the cryptocurrency community (see, e.g., Meiklejohn and Orlandi 2015). The Bitcoin software does not exist in a single physical location, or in one virtual “cloud” location: it is not hosted by a company like Level 3 or, for that matter, Amazon or Google. Instances of the Bitcoin software run on thousands or tens of thousands of computers all over the world.

This fact alone has raised significant questions about Bitcoin’s claim to “democratize” or “decentralize” currency operations, in part because the system is exposed to the “51 percent problem”: if one entity controls more than 51 percent of the mining operations at any one time (something which was at one point unthinkable, but which now has happened at least once), it could, at least theoretically, “change the rules of Bitcoin at any time” (Felten 2014; also see Otar 2015). The amount of power consumed by blockchain operations is large enough that it has suggested to some that Bitcoin itself is “unsustainable” (Malmo 2015). The use of cryptographic techniques is what gives Bitcoin and other technologies like it the descriptive term cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin program is currently “capped,” permitting only twenty-one million coins to be “mined.” It is limited in this way because its developers believe that the total number of coins in circulation has an impact on the value of the currency. This is an economic rather than a computer science argument, and it is one with which few economists agree.

One could scarcely ask for a more textbook example of not just inflation but hyperinflation: the fast and brutal destruction of value for those who hold the instrument. There is nothing mysterious about this: gold itself (like all other commodities, whether limited in supply or not) routinely inflates and deflates, without regard to the total amount of the metal available. Yet Bitcoin advocates continue to advertise the cryptocurrency as if it is immune from inflation, discounting the hard evidence before their own eyes. Quite a few apparently responsible pieces (e.g. Vigna and Casey 2015) have made claims like this at the same time that Bitcoin has been experiencing not just inflation but hyperinflation of exactly the sort Federal Reserve “critics” claim to fear most.


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

True to its roots, digital fabrication is helping us work out the shape of the future, one experiment at a time. We remain at the proof-of-concept stage: we now know that in principle, these things can be done. But all the social and intellectual heavy lifting begins now. 5 Cryptocurrency The computational guarantee of value All written accounts of the technological development we know as “the blockchain” begin and end the same way. They note its origins in the cryptocurrency called Bitcoin, and go on to explain how Bitcoin’s obscure, pseudonymous, possibly even multiple inventor “Satoshi Nakamoto” used it to solve the problems of trust that had foxed all previous attempts at networked digital money.

While formally open to anyone, a DAO presents would-be investors with barriers to entry only a little less onerous than those of participation in the traditional equities market. One invests in a DAO by purchasing “vote tokens” denominated in whatever cryptocurrency the organization runs on, in most cases Ether, and this means going through all the steps of downloading and setting up a suitable wallet. Once purchased, tokens allow the investor to share in profits realized by the DAO, also denominated in cryptocurrency, and they carry voting rights to a degree proportional to the magnitude of the investment. The tokens themselves would fluctuate in value on the open market, in principle appreciating like any other equity should the DAO’s ventures meet with success.

Peter Sloterdijk Contents Introduction: Paris year zero 1.Smartphone: The networking of the self 2.The internet of things: A planetary mesh of perception and response 3.Augmented reality: An interactive overlay on the world 4.Digital fabrication: Towards a political economy of matter 5.Cryptocurrency: The computational guarantee of value 6.Blockchain beyond Bitcoin: A trellis for posthuman institutions 7.Automation: The annihilation of work 8.Machine learning: The algorithmic production of knowledge 9.Artificial intelligence: The eclipse of human discretion 10.Radical technologies: The design of everyday life Conclusion: Of tetrapods and tactics—radical technologies and everyday life Acknowledgements Notes Index Introduction Paris year zero It’s a few moments before six in Paris, on a damp evening in early spring.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

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

Because the infrastructure lacks the much-needed security, we often have little choice but to treat the middlemen as if they were deities. A decade later in 2008, the global financial industry crashed. Perhaps propitiously, a pseudonymous person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto outlined a new protocol for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system using a cryptocurrency called bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies (digital currencies) are different from traditional fiat currencies because they are not created or controlled by countries. This protocol established a set of rules—in the form of distributed computations—that ensured the integrity of the data exchanged among these billions of devices without going through a trusted third party.

Maintaining the integrity of the system has other monetary benefits: the more reputation points you have, the more markets you can make, and thus the more fees you can charge. In Augur’s words, “our prediction markets eliminate counterparty risks, centralized servers, and create a global market by employing cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, ether, and stable cryptocurrencies. All funds are stored in smart contracts, and no one can steal the money.”83 Augur resolves the issue of unethical contracts by having a zero-tolerance policy for crime. To Augur’s leadership team, human imagination is the only practical limit to the utility of prediction markets.

They could also require financial institutions to hold reserves at the central bank in these nonstate currencies. These holdings would enable a central bank to perform their monetary role in both fiat and cryptocurrencies. Sounds prudent, right? When considering financial stability relative to monetary policy, Wilkins said, “The implications [for monetary policy] of electronic money depend on how it’s denominated.” She suggested in a recent speech that “e-money,” as she called it, could be denominated by a government in a national currency or as a cryptocurrency.49 A digital currency denominated in Canadian dollars would be easy to manage, she said. If anything, it would help a central bank to respond more quickly.


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

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. Cryptocurrencies can be electronically stolen, and there is no recourse for the individual.

In this example, silver is undervalued and primed for acquisition. Cryptocurrencies Cryptocurrency is a decentralized digital cash system that uses cryptography to secure transactions. Considered to be the money of the future, it has become a global phenomenon, not only in the tech industry but also in the investment sector. Cryptocurrency is not issued by any central authority, which renders it immune to any government interference or manipulation. They regulate themselves and are governed by the laws of mathematics. 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.

Cryptocurrencies can be electronically stolen, and there is no recourse for the individual. Other ways to invest in cryptocurrencies include either mining them or participating in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) of new crypto coins. Investing in cryptocurrencies, like all Momentum investments, means higher potential returns and higher potential losses. There’s a lot of volatility, which creates trading opportunities. And there’s been a big market run-up. Yet, cryptocurrencies will continue to have significant long-term potential. For more information on cryptocurrencies, visit 5DayWeekend.com. Code: P12 Wrap Up In conclusion, I want to stress that you should reinvest all proceeds from Momentum investments back into cash flow–optimized Growth investments that pay a steady cash flow.


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

There is no reason why you shouldn’t have almost perfectly secure transfer of money with traceability. Cryptocurrency and digital currency are here to stay. And it will get more powerful, not less.” So what will be the future digital currency landscape? When I think of cryptocurrencies, I think of the search engines of the 1990s—WebCrawler, AltaVista, Lycos, Infoseek, Ask Jeeves, MSN Search, Yahoo!—and wonder if there is a Google among them. I think the vast majority of the cryptocurrencies in circulation today will disappear to nothing, but the category will endure. I think that the cryptocurrency that breaks out (whether it is Bitcoin or another) will shed its cryptolibertarian roots and embrace the responsibilities that come with being economically significant.

Bitcoin, a new transnational currency released in the midst of the financial crisis in 2008–2009, offers a case study for the future of currency as the code-ification of money intensifies. Bitcoin is a “digital currency”—a currency that is stored in code and traded online. It is also a “cryptocurrency,” a term that is often used interchangeably with “digital currency” but signifies that the currency uses cryptographic methods in an attempt to make it secure. Bitcoin has become the world’s first cryptocurrency to gain widespread use. Although there are dozens of cryptocurrencies, it is currently the largest and most influential. At first glance, Bitcoin looks kind of like PayPal in that it offers a way to pay for goods online, with no physical interaction needed.

Ripple is backed by Marc Andreessen’s VC firm Andreessen Horowitz and Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund. Most Silicon Valley figures push back whenever another cryptocurrency is mentioned. Investor Chamath Paliyipatiya believes Bitcoin will continue to dominate the space. “I don’t want to comment on other currencies because they’re all irrelevant,” he says. “It’s about Bitcoin, so we should talk about Bitcoin.” Former CEO John Donahoe of eBay, one of the first companies to establish a trust-based commerce network online, said, “I don’t know what Bitcoin will look like ten years from now, but I do think cryptocurrency and digital currency are growing technologies with tremendous potential.


pages: 611 words: 130,419

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

The borders of such narrative constellations may be redrawn from time to time, with a particular narrative borrowing contagion from other currently contagious narratives. As we’ve seen, cryptocurrencies are backed by a constellation of related narratives, with a few main stars and thousands or millions of smaller stars. As of 2018, nearly two thousand cryptocurrencies competed with the original Bitcoin. Each of these cryptocurrencies is a story of entrepreneurship, of eager developers with an idea. But the largest constellation of cryptocurrency stories focuses on Bitcoin-related stories. In one narrative, the popular singer Lily Allen turned down an offer in 2009 to do one performance and be paid in Bitcoin.

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. In 2009, the first cryptocurrency, called Bitcoin, was launched based on ideas in that paper. Cryptocurrencies are computer-managed public ledger entries that can function as money, so long as people value these entries as money and use them for purchases and sales. There is an impressive mathematical theory underlying cryptocurrencies, but the theory does not identify what might cause people to value them or to believe that other people will also think they have value. Often, detractors describe the valuation of Bitcoin as nothing more than a speculative bubble.

It was not solely created for the sake of improving financial technology. But some people adulterate this truth. In reality, Bitcoin was meant to function as a monetary weapon, as a cryptocurrency poised to undermine authority.5 Most Bitcoin enthusiasts might not describe their enthusiasm in such extreme terms, but this passage seems to capture a central element of their narrative. Both cryptocurrencies and blockchains (the accounting systems for the cryptocurrencies, which are by design maintained democratically and anonymously by large numbers of individuals and supposedly beyond the regulation of any government) seem to have great emotional appeal for some people, kindling deep feelings about their position and role in society.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

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

One explanation, advanced by Daniel Krawisz of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, was that the hacker could have made approximately $3 million by shorting ethers in one of the cryptocurrency exchanges operating online, correctly betting that once the hack became public, the ether’s value would plummet. But the important questions were not about the hacker’s motivations. They were instead about the vulnerabilities of cryptocurrencies and smart contracts revealed by the exploit. The Nakamoto Institute’s withering assessment was that Ethereum was “doomed.” Its combination of poor programming and terms of use that essentially made this lousy programming legally binding spelled disaster.

The government there had a long tradition of overseeing its financial institutions closely and sometimes intervening in them directly, and this kind of activity seems fundamentally at odds with the cryptocurrency dream of complete freedom from government meddling. Having control over Bitcoin and the blockchain behind the great firewall of China, many felt, would turn the dream into a nightmare. The Technologies of Disruption . . . The troubles experienced by The DAO and the Bitcoin-mining network highlight a fundamental question about the rise of cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, powerful platforms, and other recent digital developments. The question, which we posed at the start of this chapter, is a simple one: Are companies becoming passé?

.‡ So Nakamoto proposed, with considerable ambition, to create an entirely new and completely independent digital currency, called Bitcoin. Because it relied heavily on many of the same algorithms and mathematics as cryptography (the art and science of making and breaking codes), Bitcoin came to be known as a “cryptocurrency.” American dollars, Japanese yen, Turkish lira, Nigerian naira, and all the other money issued by nations around the world, meanwhile, are called “fiat currencies” because they exist by government fiat, or order; governments simply declare them to be legal tender.§ Existing combinations of “crypto” code and math helped Nakamoto solve the tough problem of identifying who owned Bitcoins as they got used over time and all over the web to pay for things.


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

They set up a presence on the clearweb, advertising their wares and services on Reddit and in cryptocurrency forums. They had a culture of being responsive to member suggestions and requests and were proactive in messaging members about scams. One Silk Road member said, ‘The admins over at Atlantis are very flexible, and they have implemented almost all the reasonable suggestions that people have made to the admins here. I think in a year’s time the road will either adapt, or die.’ Instead of bitcoin, Atlantis initially accepted only litecoin, a new form of cryptocurrency. It was odd that the site didn’t accept bitcoin, which by now had become widely used not only on the black markets but increasingly for legitimate purposes.

Soon afterwards, Wordpress closed the gateway and any attempts to access it returned an error message: ‘silkroad420.wordpress.com is no longer available. This site has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service.’ Altoid also registered and posted in the bitcoin discussion forums at bitcointalk.org. Bitcoin at the time was a fledgling cryptocurrency, virtually worthless, and the forum’s members were debating whether it could be used to enable online commerce anonymously. Specifically, they were considering whether it was viable to facilitate buying and selling heroin. In a lengthy thread called ‘A Heroin Store’, on 29 January 2011 altoid (who had only registered that day) helpfully chimed in: What an awesome thread!

Pretty much the only guarantee in the online vending world going, also no way to prove you paid – all transactions are decentralized and anonymous.’ Maxvendor mentioned that payment would be made by bitcoin. Bitcoin is the preferred method of payment for goods and services on the dark web. Known as a ‘cryptocurrency’, it is a digital currency that uses cryptography for security. It exists only in cyberspace. Online multiplayer games such as Second Life use a virtual currency that has value and can be exchanged for real things outside of the game. Bitcoin is similar, but far more sophisticated. It wasn’t until 1 March 2011 that a thread brazenly and blatantly advertising Silk Road was started in the bitcoin forums by a user known as ‘silkroad’; the thread was called ‘Silk Road anonymous marketplace: feedback requested’.


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

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. As a result, many extremists have resorted to anonymous cryptocurrencies such as Monero, ‘which best maintains our privacy’, as neo-Nazi hacker Weev put it.

Available at https://www.forbes.com/sites/billybambrough/2018/08/06/bitcoin-donations-to-neo-nazis-are-climbing-ahead-of-this-weekends-unite-the-right-rally/#3e1fb0c769ac. 11Nikita Malik, ‘Terror in the Dark: How Terrorists Use Encryption, the Dark Net and Cryptocurrencies’, Henry Jackson Society, April 2018. Available at https://henryjacksonsociety.org/publications/terror-in-the-dark-how-terrorists-use-encryption-the-darknet-and-cryptocurrencies/. And David Carlisle, ‘Cryptocurrencies and Terrorist Financing: A Risk, But Hold the Panic’, RUSI, March 2017. Available at https://rusi.org/commentary/cryptocurrencies-and-terrorist-financing-risk-hold-panic. 12Ibid. 8: follow q 1In this chapter, my conversations with roughly a dozen QAnon adherents were synthesised into a just few characters for better readability. 2For more information about these classic conspiracy theories see C.

The alternative crowdsourcing platform was used to fund anti-democratic projects such as the maintenance of the world’s biggest neo-Nazi platforms Daily Stormer and Stormfront and hacking activities of the white supremacist Weev (see pp. 217–26). For example, Weev received $1.8 million cryptocurrency donations to his visible wallet address, which was tracked by Bambenek. He may have accumulated additional sums in his non-public wallets.10 Likewise, jihadists have attracted large sums through cryptocurrency donations. 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.


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

A certain style of evangelistic piety prevails in the Bitcoin “space,” as participants in the burgeoning industry tend to call it. (From the “wallet” software used to manage accounts to the “coins” in virtual circulation, cryptocurrency jargon relies on the most physical of metaphors.) Optimism is the dominant idiom among enthusiasts, but at times it has seemed to rest less on any genuine belief than on an anxiety not to see their bitcoins further depreciate. “Some of the New York Bitcoin Center guys are pretty religious,” said Tim Swanson, an early analyst who had written two self-published e-books on cryptocurrencies. Before that, while living in China, he built his own graphics-chip miners. But Swanson grew increasingly skeptical that Bitcoin would unsettle the existing finance megaliths.

At first he shut himself away in a house in Catalonia, but when that became too restrictive, he left for France, where he’d be farther from the Spanish police and less recognizable in public. With not much else to do, he began learning all he could about cryptocurrencies. Friends of his had already been building Bitcoin-related software. Calafou had been a center for Bitcoin development; Vitalik Buterin spent time there while developing the ideas behind Ethereum. But Duran noticed the market-adulating speculation that tended to pervade the cryptocurrency scene and wondered whether the technology could be used for better ends. “I was thinking about how to hack something like this to fund the Integral Revolution,” he recalled.

The more that local cooperatives became part of the network and used its tools, the more faircoins would be worth in cryptocurrency markets, where wide adoption helps make a coin valuable. To build the community, therefore, was simultaneously to finance it. If the price of faircoins reached the price of bitcoins now, for instance, Duran’s initial investment would be worth billions. The plan has since far out-earned his bank loans. At the end of our time together, Duran sent me some faircoin to cover his share of the apartment we stayed in; during the cryptocurrency boom of 2017, with shady ICOs and crypto-millionaires blowing up everywhere, that reimbursement multiplied to one hundred times its original value.


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 you tell me about one or two popular altcoins? How are they different? Will they replace bitcoin? Answer: Litecoin is the second most popular cryptocurrency. It is based on a different algorithm from bitcoin, and it has an infinite inflation rate. Others include Namecoin, Dogecoin, Worldcoin, Peercoin, Primecoin, and Feathercoin. All have unique properties and some appeal to people for specific reasons. The Indian nation of Lakota, for example, uses its own coin called Mazacoin. 41 The cryptocurrency market is still in its infancy. There is no way to predict its precise direction. However, the technology is there and its growth has been absolutely phenomenal to behold, as if development had been truncated by 100 years of government control.

That means that anyone without a card or a bank or a certified identity that a third party trusts cannot get involved. They are excluded. So far as anyone knows, this could be somewhere between 2.5 and 4 billion people in the world. This is where cryptocurrency comes in. It restores money as real property. It moves on a ledger system that requires no trust relationship and no third party certification. It works entirely peerto-peer. Remember the case I mentioned in the beginning, the one in which I bought a cup of coffee with cash? Cryptocurrency allows that type of property exchange to take place between any two parties anywhere in the world. The entire chargeback system that has been constructed by government becomes completely irrelevant.

It is necessarily disruptive to traditional forms of power. This radical vision of what’s possible is only hinted at in many of the emerging commercial relationships he discusses in this book. These technologies point to a future very different from what we’ve known. Tucker returns often to the example of cryptocurrency. Money as an institution has been largely held captive by public authority for hundreds of years, if not a thousand years or even more. But in 2009, we saw a break from this long history with “blockchain” technology that lives on a distributed network, is managed by open-source code, and can potentially operate as a marketbased currency for the world.


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

The legalese revolving around cryptocurrencies is even more complicated in the US, where it differs according to how it is being used (does it fall under the purview of the SEC, the CFTC, or FinCEN?), where it is being used (depends on the state. NY, for example, has begun providing a business license (BitLicense), which obliges virtual currency companies to adhere to a specific licensing regime), and who is using it (miners, banks, users, exchanges…). In other countries, the situation is the same and at present there is no legal consensus as to the status of cryptocurrencies.15 The definition and legal acceptance of cryptocurrencies is a primary impairment to its widescale use.

In other countries, the situation is the same and at present there is no legal consensus as to the status of cryptocurrencies.15 The definition and legal acceptance of cryptocurrencies is a primary impairment to its widescale use. Apart from these two impediments, there are also other differences between cryptocurrencies and state fiat. Staying with the legal angle, it is the acceptance of legal tender that determines the use of a currency. Central banks already compete with currencies issued by other central banks within their own states and, to a domestic central bank, a private money is essentially a foreign currency as its monetary policy is governed by an entity that is outside the domestic government’s jurisdiction (Andolfatto, 2016).

This lack of scalability is due to the following: 1.the significant computational energy that is expended in the proofs-of-work process (which helps manage the ledger and makes double-spending attacks excessively expensive), as it has to broadcast results on the network 2.the fixed supply: this provides little or no flexibility for policy aimed at controlling its volatility As the Bank of England asked “whether central banks should themselves make use of such technology to issue digital currencies,” researchers from University College London responded by creating RSCoin, a cryptocurrency framework that separates the generation of the money supply from the maintenance of the transaction ledger. This framework is different from other cryptocurrencies in that the supply is centralized. Thus, the model is ideal for adoption by central banks and in line with the proposals that have been made in this chapter. Some of the stated benefits of RSCoin include: Unlike traditional fiat money, RSCoin provides the government with a transparent transaction ledger, a distributed system for maintaining it, and a globally visible monetary supply.


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

What You Cannot Expect from This Book The book is deliberately agnostic to the application of the blockchain. While cryptocurrencies in general and Bitcoin in particular are prominent applica- tions of the blockchain, this book explains the blockchain as a general tech- nology. This approach has been chosen in order to highlight generic concepts and technical patterns of the blockchain instead of focusing on a specific and narrow application case. Hence, this book is: • Not a text specifically about Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency • Not a text solely about one specific blockchain application • Not a text about proofing the mathematical foundations of the blockchain • Not a text about programming a blockchain • Not a text about the legal consequences and implications of the blockchain • Not a text about the social, economic, or ethical impacts of the blockchain on our society or humankind in general However, some of these points are addressed to some extent at appropriate points in this book.

The Bitcoin system not only manages ownership of the new digital money in a purely distributed peer-to-peer system but it also compensates its peers with the money to whose integrity they contribute. Due to the fact that the blockchain relies heavily on cryptography, this new kind of money is also called cryptographic money or cryptocurrency for short. As a rule of thumb, you could say that Bitcoin and many other cryptographic currencies are like bakeries that pay their employees with the bread they produce, with the dif- ference being that the bread they produce is actually a new digital currency. Outlook This step highlighted the importance of the instrument of payment used to compensate the peers of the blockchain.

• The instrument of payment used to compensate peers has an impact on major aspects of the blockchain such as: • Integrity • Openness • The distributed nature • The philosophy of the system 188 Chapter 20 | Paying for Integrity • Desirable properties of an instrument of payment for compensating peers are: • Being available in digital form • Being accepted in the real world • Being accepted in all countries • Not being the subject to capital movement restrictions • Being trustworthy • Not being controlled by one single central organization or state • A cryptocurrency is an independent digital currency whose ownership is managed by a blockchain that uses it as an instrument of payment for compensating its peers for maintaining the integrity of the system. S T E P 21 Bringing the Pieces Together More than just the sum of its pieces This step is the summit of this book’s intellectual journey toward an understanding of the blockchain.


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

While Satoshi never discussed anything personal in these e-mails, he would banter with Martti about little things. In one e-mail, Satoshi pointed to a recent exchange on the Bitcoin e-mail list in which a user referred to Bitcoin as a “cryptocurrency,” referring to the cryptographic functions that made it run. “Maybe it’s a word we should use when describing Bitcoin. Do you like it?” Satoshi asked. “It sounds good,” Martti replied. “A peer to peer cryptocurrency could be the slogan.” As the year went on they also worked out other details, like the Bitcoin logo, which they mocked up on their computers and sent back and forth, coming up, finally, with a B with two lines coming out of the bottom and top.

Bobby showed up at the company’s makeshift offices in a converted three-bedroom apartment a day after the company announced the $25 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz. Charlie Lee didn’t need to work another day of his life. Litecoin, his alternative cryptocurrency, which was a slightly faster, lightweight version of Bitcoin, had now become the second-most-popular cryptocurrency in what was becoming an increasingly crowded field of Bitcoin knockoffs. In part because of Charlie’s transparency in launching Litecoin, people trusted it and were betting that it would be, as Charlie had intended, the silver to Bitcoin’s gold.

Why would people store their wealth in Bitcoin if they knew the value was going to fluctuate so violently? Krugman asked. Cowen, meanwhile, argued that Bitcoin was going to have difficulty sustaining its value as new and better-designed cryptocurrencies came along and drew users away from it. Some people were, indeed, already choosing to hold Litecoin, Charlie Lee’s creation, and a hip, younger cryptocurrency, Dogecoin. But a deeper strain lurking beneath these critiques was an awareness that one of the fundamental premises that had driven Bitcoin’s popularity seemed, increasingly, to have been disproved. Many early Bitcoiners, particularly in the libertarian camp, had believed that the Federal Reserve’s efforts to stimulate the economy in the wake of the financial crisis, by pumping lots of new money into banks, would devalue the dollar and lead to high inflation, similar to what had happened in Argentina.


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

Drawing from the history of the legal code of capital, it might be good advice for the social utopists among the digital coders to watch out for the lead coders and monitor their relationships with the most resourceful among the legacy investors. Cryptocurrencies The alchemy of money has bedeviled fortune hunters forever, and the coders of cryptocurrencies are no exception. Bitcoin, a digital cryptocurrency based on blockchain technology, was one of the hottest assets in 2017. When it was launched in 2009, it was lauded as a new form of money without a state, and its most fervent advocates were crypto-anarchists who wished to create a new world beyond big finance and the corruptibility of state power.

Yet, this limit on the money supply also seems to be fraying around the edges. New variants of the original cryptocurrencies can be coined by creating a hard fork in the original protocol; they may not be identical with the original Bitcoin, but they still create new money. It has even become possible to buy fractions of Bitcoin, which creates the illusion of an expanding pie, even when the only change is the size of each slice. Returning to the question whether Bitcoin is money, it is certainly true that the cryptocurrency has shown that artificial scarcity combined with a dearth of alternative assets that promise superlative returns (if only temporarily) can create huge demand.

See http://appft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html (last accessed August 1, 2018). 56. Mark A. Chen, Qinxi Wuy, and Baozhong Yang, “How Valuable Is FinTech Innovation,” ssrn.com/abstract=3106892 (2018); see especially figures 4 and 5B. 57. See Chuan Tian, “Goldman Sachs Granted ‘SETLcoin’ Cryptocurrency Patent,” July 13, 2017, available online at https://www.coindesk .com/goldman -sachs-granted-setlcoin-cryptocurrency-patent/ (last accessed September 1, 2017); Christine Kim, “Barclays Seeks Twin Blockchain Patents for Banking Services,” July 19, 2018; and Kim, “Mastercard Wins Patent for Speeding Up Crypto Payments,” July 17, 2018; both available at www.coindesk .com (last accessed August 1, 2018). 58.


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

Good money would drive out the bad, he predicted. Any bank that offered too little interest would lose clients.15 The advent of cryptocurrencies has the potential to realize Hayek’s vision. Cryptocurrencies are already lent on various platforms (one of which calls itself ‘Compound’). Interest on crypto loans is charged at suspiciously high rates, suggesting the existence of Ponzi schemes, and the early history of cryptocurrencies has been marked by seamy behaviour and uncertainty regarding their true scarcity. Still, it’s possible that one day a cryptocurrency may emerge which is safe to store, efficient for transactions and limited in supply.

Its market price was too volatile to serve as a store of value, a key function of money. The cryptocurrency resembled the gold prospectors’ fabled tin of sardines that was good for trading but not for eating. This mania was born of monetary conditions as much as technological developments. Without computers there could have been no blockchain or digital encryption. Without the internet, the enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies could not have spread like wildfire. Yet as fans of this ‘digital gold’ argued, the debasement of currencies by central banks meant a new type of money was needed. Cryptocurrencies were popular with millennials, not just because they were tech savvy but because low prospective returns on conventional investments forced them to go for broke.

You Forgot Your Password’, Wall Street Journal, 19 December 2017. 24. Daniel Shane, ‘A Crypto Exchange May Have Lost $145 Million after its CEO Suddenly Died’, CNN Business, 5 February 2019. 25. Jon Sindreu, ‘Bitcoin Buzz Inspires Joke Cryptocurrencies – and Investors are Diving In’, Wall Street Journal, 17 January 2018. 26. Eric Lam, ‘Hooters Franchisee Surges 41% on Cryptocurrency Rewards Program’, Bloomberg, 3 January 2018; Kevin Dugan, ‘CEO of Porn Cryptocurrency Disappears with Investor Money’, New York Post, 8 January 2018. The share price of Chanticleer, a Hooters franchisee based in Charlotte, North Carolina, rose 41 per cent after announcing a blockchain-based customer loyalty programme. 27.


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

Uniquely Virulent and Deadly Diseases Runaway Climate Change Other Planetary-Scale Natural Disasters Exotic Physics and Miscellaneous Space Phenomena Unimpeded Rise of Totalitarian Regimes Global Thermonuclear War Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse Ghosts, Bigfoot, and the Coming Robot Apocalypse The Scourge of Extraterrestrials Looking Beyond Doomsday Part II: The Prepared Lifestyle Chapter 5: Mind Over Matter Chapter 6: Building a Rainy-Day Fund Finding Ways to Save Compartmentalizing the Funds Dealing with Debt Knowing Where to Stop Chapter 7: Safeguarding Your Savings The History of Currencies Debt as a Currency The Age of Coin Fractional Reserve Banking and Fiat Money Cryptocurrencies Revisiting Dangers to Liquidity and Capital Loss of Access to Bank Accounts Adverse Judgments Gradual Inflation Hyperinflation Confiscation of Wealth The (Monetary) Zombie Apocalypse Methods for Mitigating Risk Physical Cash Diversified Bank Deposits Bonds Simple Currency Hedges Equities Stock Options and Commodity Futures Options Precious Metals Real Estate Physical Collectibles Cryptocurrencies and NFTs Insurance Policies and Separation of Assets Portfolio Design Strategies Chapter 8: Engineering a Doomsday-Proof Career Chapter 9: Staying Alive Defensive Driving Working at Heights The Enemy in the Medicine Cabinet Alcohol and Recreational Drugs Workshop and Power Tool Safety Fireproofing the Homestead Other Dangers in and Around the Home Chapter 10: Protecting Oneself in the Digital and Physical Realm Dealing with Online Fraud Maintaining Privacy on the Internet Minimizing the Impact of Burglaries Responding to Muggings and Home Invasions Fending Off Pickpockets A Word on Kindness Chapter 11: Getting in Shape The Folly of Miracle Cures Establishing a “No Diet” Diet Calorie Restriction vs.

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.

For example, I would be nervous owning an expensive painting in a house with young kids. Insurance policies can help, but they aren’t always cheap. Cryptocurrencies and NFTs There’s a reason the traditional classes of assets outlined earlier in the chapter are considered the benchmarks for investors: they’re more accessible, safer, cheaper, and more reliable than most alternatives. But there’s no shortage of more exotic choices, and at least two of them deserve some note. The first are cryptocurrencies. We discussed their mechanics before, but the lingering question is whether they have a place in a diversified portfolio.


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

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!—than about real usefulness. Cryptocurrencies have a large market valuation, but they’re overwhelmingly being held as a speculative play, not because they’re useful as mediums of exchange.

Meanwhile, people gradually shifted away from cash transactions, first toward payments by check, then to credit and debit cards and other digital methods. Set against this history, the enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies seems very odd, because it goes exactly in the opposite of the long-run trend. 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.

., with estimates suggesting that foreigners hold more than half of U.S. currency. Clearly, cryptocurrencies are in effect competing for some of the same business: very few people are using Bitcoin to pay their bills, but some people are using it to buy drugs, subvert elections, and so on. And the examples of both gold and large-denomination banknotes suggest that this kind of demand could support a lot of asset value. So does this mean that crypto, even if it isn’t the transformative technology its backers claim, may not be a bubble? Well, this is where tethering—or, more precisely, its absence for cryptocurrencies—comes in. In normal life, people don’t worry about where the value of green pieces of paper bearing portraits of dead presidents comes from: we accept dollar notes because other people will accept dollar notes.


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

With help from specialized data forensic firms and organizations, such as the Blockchain Alliance, a light can be shined into some of Bitcoin’s and other cryptocurrencies’ darker corners. Whereas traditional money laundering purposefully distorts paper trails by channeling money through many banks, legal entities, and jurisdictions, blockchains are a one-stop shop that transparently documents a complete ledger of transactions. If suspected illicit funds trade with known addresses, such as those of cryptocurrency exchanges, it’s like leaving the flashers on an illegally parked car. It might as well shout out to law enforcement, “I’m committing a crime, and I’m right here!”

Chapter 4: Growth 7Robert Breedlove, “Bitcoin and the Tyranny of Time Scarcity” The Bitcoin Times online (December 19, 2019). 8Evelyn Cheng, “Bitcoin debuts on the world’s largest futures exchange, and prices fall slightly” CNBC: Markets online (December 17, 2017). 9Ryan Brown, “New York Stock Exchange owner launches futures contracts that pay out in bitcoin” CNBC: Cryptocurrency online (September 23, 2019). Chapter 5: Innovation 10Vildana Haijric, “Bitcoin’s 9,000,000% Rise this Decade Leaves the Skeptics Aghast” Bloomberg: Cryptocurrencies online (December 31, 2019). 11“Bitcoin’s Security Model: A Deep Dive” CoinDesk online (November 13, 2016; updated February 22, 2019). Chapter 6: Resilience 12Accredited to Robert Metcalfe in regard to Ethernet, Metcalfe’s law was presented in 1980.

Given how that same trust was broken mere decades ago, we would be foolish to make that same mistake again. 8.4 Bitcoin Versus Crypto “If you think cryptography is the answer to your problem, then you don’t know what your problem is.” Peter G. Neumann, Computer Scientist “Crypto” is short for cryptography, but these days the term is more commonly known as a reference to the financial markets of blockchain-based digital assets. These are also sometimes referred to as “cryptocurrencies” or “cryptoassets.” There’s a wide array of initiatives in crypto, and their potential applications are limited only by the imaginations of their developers. Some of the more well-known examples include Litecoin,15 which aspired to be the silver to Bitcoin’s digital gold, and sometimes moonlights as a testnet for 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

No one has done more than Andreas Antonopoulos to get them over that hurdle. Read him. It will make you wiser. — Michael J. Casey, co-author The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order Foreword By Don Tapscott In early 2014, my son Alex and I began the research for our book Blockchain Revolution. I had been working on the 20th anniversary edition of The Digital Economy and reflecting on the last two decades and what’s next, I had become fascinated by Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Meanwhile, Alex was an executive with the investment bank Canaccord Genuity. He noticed the growing enthusiasm of early stage bitcoin and blockchain companies in 2013 and began leading his firm’s efforts in the space.

Less than 8 percent of these currencies exist in physical form; the rest is bits on ledgers. But the fundamental difference is that these ledgers are controlled by centralized organizations, whereas in bitcoin, they’re not. Bitcoin has a decentralized network, an open network. "Bitcoin isn’t a digital currency. It’s a cryptocurrency. It’s a network-centric money." Bitcoin isn’t a digital currency. It’s a cryptocurrency. It’s a network-centric money. I really like the idea of a network-centric money. A network that allows you to replace trust in institutions, trust in hierarchies, with trust on the network. The network acting as a massively diffuse arbiter of truth, resolving any disagreements about transactions and security in a way where no one has control. 3.7.

It’s a language by which we communicate our expectations and desires of value, and now that we can do it on such a massive scale, now that everyone can create currency, our choices will really matter. We’re past the zero-sum game. This isn’t about nation-states anymore. This isn’t about who adopts bitcoin first or who adopts cryptocurrencies first, because the internet is adopting cryptocurrencies, and the internet is the world’s largest economy. It is the first transnational economy, and it needs a transnational currency. "This isn’t about nation-states anymore. The internet is the world’s largest economy. It is the first transnational economy, and it needs a transnational currency." 7.7.


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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

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. (Lazy Nana, posing as a groundhog killer!) Time will tell. But cryptocurrency enthusiasts have their heads in the right place. Cryptocurrencies are thought of as insurance policies against the failure of central bankers.

Because of its ubiquitous and systematic nature, you can't just diversify that risk away with groupings of things that supposedly won't experience such loss simultaneously. And remember this: A safe haven isn't so much a thing or an asset. It is a payoff, one that can take many different forms. It might be a chunk of metal, a stock selection criterion, a crypto‐currency, or even a derivatives portfolio. Whatever forms they may take, it is their function that makes safe havens what they are: They preserve and protect your capital. They are a shelter from financial storms. So safe haven investing is risk mitigation. To me, these two terms are synonymous, and I will be using them interchangeably throughout this book.

Cryptocurrencies are thought of as insurance policies against the failure of central bankers. This, by extension, has also given them the presumed role of being an insurance policy against economic crises—since, at this point, that would entail the failure of current monetary policy. Cryptocurrencies are a most significant technology platform (the blockchain). They are like secure, virtual safety deposit boxes that only you can access. The box is the thing that's so cool and impressive, and worthy of our respect. It will change the world. 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.


pages: 267 words: 82,580

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

‘The Bitcoin Foundation says, “Oh we need to make it better for the consumers.” No we don’t! What these people forget is that Satoshi himself was political.’ Satoshi Tim May and the cypherpunks hadn’t invented digital crypto-currencies, but they’d seen what they might do. The honour goes to a cryptographer called David Chaum. Although he never attended a meeting, his work on anonymous payment systems was an inspiration for many cypherpunks, including May. The basic principle of a crypto-currency is that each unit of the currency is a string of unique numbers that users can send one another online. But strings of numbers can be easily copied and spent several times over, which makes them valueless.

Chapter 3 Into Galt’s Gulch We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. Eric Hughes, ‘A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto’ (1993) A LARGE ABANDONED Pizza Express in north London is an unusual place to start a revolution. But seventy of us have turned up to hear a computer coder named Amir Taaki explain how the crypto-currency Bitcoin will change the world. We share the space with a dozen slightly confused-looking squatters who have recently taken up residence here. Cans of lager are being passed around, and there is a fug of cigarette smoke in the air, which gives the whole event a rebellious edge, especially for the non-smoking sedentary audience members like me.

The list quickly grew to include hundreds of subscribers who were soon posting every day: exchanging ideas, discussing developments, proposing and testing cyphers. This remarkable email list predicted, developed or invented almost every technique now employed by computer users to avoid government surveillance. Tim May proposed, among other things, secure crypto-currencies, a tool enabling people to browse the web anonymously, an unregulated marketplace – which he called ‘BlackNet’ – where anything could be bought or sold without being tracked, and a prototype anonymous whistleblowing system. The cypherpunks were troublemakers: controversial, radical, unrelenting, but also practical.


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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

Indictment filed February 25, 2022, US District Court, Southern District of California [https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.casd.727918/gov.uscourts.casd.727918.1.0_1.pdf]; press release [https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/bitconnect-founder-indicted-global-24-billion-cryptocurrency-scheme]. 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.

In February 2022, the US government charged Satish Kumbhani with five counts of criminal fraud, carrying a maximum sentence of seventy years. He was thought to be living in India at the time. 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.

But when these sorts of minor deceptions become business as usual—when millions of people are exposed to made-up quotations, distorted history, or fictitious scientific results—our collective trust in what should be nonfiction declines, and that adversely impacts our ability to reach rational conclusions.20 Even schemes that do take our money can be surprisingly banal at their core. FTX was a popular trading platform for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and it was backed by top-tier venture capitalists and attracted users with celebrity endorsements and Super Bowl ads. Its customer agreement said, “Title to your Digital Assets shall at all times remain with you.” But when FTX filed for bankruptcy in November 2022, it was discovered that it had been sending customer deposits to a sister company called Alameda Research, which used them to fund its own trading and investment activities—that is, FTX was simply making promises and doing the opposite.21 Examples like these show that knowing when we should pause to check and what we should check for are not obvious.


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

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.

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. Kaspersky Lab Global Research and Analysis Team, “Lazarus Under the Hood,” report, April 3, 2017; Dmitry Volkov, “Lazarus Arisen Architecture, Techniques, and Attribution,” Group-IB Threat Intelligence Department, May 30, 2017; Kate Kochetkova, “What Is Known About the Lazarus Group: Sony Hack, Military Espionage, Attacks on Korean Banks and Other Crimes,” Kaspersky Daily, February 24, 2016. 20.

Beginning at the end of March 2016, the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency tied to the blackout operations in Ukraine, got in on the action. The NSA and broader cybersecurity community had watched these hackers for years, too.10 The GRU’s efforts were well organized, with clear division of labor. Some units focused on developing malicious code, while others focused on gaining access to targets. Still others focused on mining cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, which the GRU used to pay for online hacking infrastructure that made operations harder to trace. Other units focused on public-facing efforts, which would soon be quite important.11 Whether the GRU knew of the other Russian intelligence activity against the DNC is uncertain.12 The GRU began an operation against the Democratic Party, targeting the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, which helps Democrats win elections to the House of Representatives.


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

In recent years, Cao de Benós counted among his achievements hosting North Korea’s first cryptocurrency conference. 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.

Adrian also kicked off a new fundraising strategy inspired by the global fascination with cryptocurrencies that the group had been working on for months. Their perceived anonymity could be a benefit to groups such as Free Joseon, he believed. In March, they debuted a “Post-Liberation Blockchain G-VISA” that would allow any holder to visit the country of “Free Joseon” established after the fall of North Korea. The announcement even included an authentic-looking visa from the Provisional Government of Free Joseon. The stunt wasn’t a wild success. Blockchain records show it earned only about $30,000 worth of cryptocurrency. In an echo of Adrian’s discussions with businesses about buying permits to work in “Free Joseon,” the rules for the visa asked for anyone seeking “to establish commercial activities” to contact the group via its encrypted email address.

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. In April 2021, U.S. prosecutors charged Cao de Benós with conspiring with Griffith and another cryptocurrency expert to help North Korea evade sanctions. Cao de Benós was also the proprietor of Pyongyang Cafe in his hometown of Tarragona, which sells Korean food, coffee, and beer but acts mostly as the headquarters for the original Korean Friendship Association. That’s where he was spending most of his time, occasionally donning a uniform covered in medals with gold lapels and denying, to anyone who would listen, that North Korea conducts executions or violates anyone’s human rights.


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

If Musk’s tweets were for sale and compensating him for them directly were legal, they would fetch multiples of what people helping to hawk handbags and energy drinks receive because value can be created and turned into cash instantly in the stock or cryptocurrency markets. That can make even inadvertent statements by Musk market-shaking events. When he made a comment on Saturday Night Live that Dogecoin, which he had touted, was “a hustle,” tens of billions of dollars in value evaporated in the cryptocurrency market, and Robinhood’s trading system was overwhelmed the next day with activity. Even the most innocuous social media post was dynamite around the time of the meme-stock squeeze.

If you were to have bought a benchmark ten-year Treasury note for $1,000 at its nadir in March 2020, then a decade later you would have gotten your money back and have made a measly thirty-two bucks. The flip side of zero-interest rates is that it didn’t just make stocks or even more speculative cryptocurrencies the only game in town but also allowed brave investors to juice their returns more cheaply with margin debt—loans that use your account’s holdings as collateral so that you can increase your buying power. Some brokers catering to more seasoned traders with large accounts were offering margin borrowing for as low as 0.75 percent, but even Robinhood made the terms tempting—with its own “zero price effect” twist, allowing Robinhood Gold users to rack up margin debt of up to $1,000 free of charge.

As Gill had predicted, GameStop defied expectations and stayed alive for the next console cycle, with Sony and Microsoft unable to satisfy demand for their latest hardware during the pandemic. In theory, there were far easier pickings for short sellers than GameStop, with so many unprofitable companies commanding stratospheric valuations. In practice, though, many of them were no longer tethered to reality—more like Beanie Babies or cryptocurrencies than corporations that were supposed to have some intrinsic value. Relentless buying of many stocks popular with retail investors had made selling their shares short a good way to lose money in a hurry. It seemed safer to keep betting against a name from yesteryear like GameStop that everyone knew was headed for the scrap heap, a theater chain like AMC bleeding cash as its venues sat empty because of the pandemic, or an anachronism like BlackBerry, even if it was going to take a while.


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

I think it is more generally applicable, and want to end this book by briefly discussing one sphere in which that is most definitely the case, and another in which I think the approach may be applicable (but in which further research is needed to know exactly how). The sphere to which material political economy unequivocally applies is decentralized cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum. (The issues are different for cryptocurrencies such as Facebook’s proposed Libra, which, if it is launched, will be run, at least initially, in a centralized fashion; I don’t propose to discuss those currencies here.) 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.

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. Indeed, bitcoin’s main rival, ethereum, was designed to be, in the terminology of the field, ASIC resistant. The hashing algorithm for ethereum was designed to make it hard to develop ASICs that are much more efficient than ordinary computers in ethereum’s equivalent of bitcoin mining. Trying to make a cryptocurrency ASIC resistant is quintessential material political economy, reminiscent (as I’ve said) of the defense of hand-milling, even if in the case of ethereum the effort was less than fully successful.

As far as possible, I tried to check what one person told me against what others had said. I also supplemented the interviewing by attending six traders’ conferences (two in London, two in Chicago, and two in Amsterdam), along with an algorithmic-trading training course in New York, three events focusing on cryptocurrencies (see chapter 7), and a meeting attended by many employees of governments’ debt-management offices. At such gatherings, it was often possible to chat informally with people whom I could not interview formally. I was also taken on tours of trading floors, including the two that still had genuinely significant roles: the main trading room of the New York Stock Exchange, which is important during the NYSE’s daily opening and closing auctions, and the section of the trading floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange which trades options on the Standard & Poor’s 500 share-price index.


pages: 492 words: 141,544

Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson

artificial general intelligence, basic income, blockchain, Brownian motion, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Ken Thompson, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, megacity, Neil Armstrong, precariat, quantum entanglement, Schrödinger's Cat, seigniorage, strong AI, Turing machine, universal basic income, zero-sum game

How many Americans were part of this takeback of their federal government from global finance was unclear, but the Householders’ Union now claimed two hundred million active members. Meanwhile, back in China, John said, individual savings accounts were shifting at such a rate to carboncoin and other cryptocurrencies that withdrawals from the state-owned banks had been temporarily banned, as well as all traffic in cryptocurrencies of any kind. But stopping speculation in these currencies didn’t actually stop people from using them for exchanges. All this was now only a sideshow to the widespread street demonstrations, but possibly more important in the end. Demonstrations came and went, but law remained, money remained.

T-bill prices were falling, dragging down the dollar and the markets, and all to an accelerating degree—right at a moment when one would have thought that financial stability would be high on both governments’ lists of priorities. The dollar’s troubles weren’t really helping the renminbi, or any of the other national currencies or cryptocurrencies that China had stockpiled in its half century of trade surpluses. On the contrary, every sector of world finance seemed to be suffering except for the cryptocurrency called carboncoin, which was some kind of money created by a confirmable history of carbon drawdown or equivalent environmental actions, valid for subsistence spending only. What this virtual currency would come to in the real world no one could know, and the fact that millions of people had withdrawn their savings from normal seigniorage currencies to invest in such a murky new form of money, meaning, in the end, value and trust and exchangeability, was just another frightening destabilization to add to all the rest.

But he had no reason to do it.” “Not that we know of. These two might have gotten caught up in something, you never know. There’s a lot of IP theft still going on, also a lot of pay-to-play. Sometimes those payola deals go sour.” “I know.” Val had been sent to the moon precisely to look into just such a problem. A cryptocurrency called “US Dollars” was being offered in the black cloud, supposedly redeemable in real dollars, and there was evidence suggesting some of the monster servers involved were located on the moon. Only the Chinese had such powerful computers up here, or so it was believed, so it was a tricky situation, smacking of cyberwarfare, and Valerie had been sent up to see if she could discover anything on station, using her Chinese language ability and her fiscal skills, and the expertise she could call on back home.


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

He recently said that “many of the ideas that we ended up doing at Apple came out of the MIT Media Lab.”40 As many of Negroponte’s predictions came true, the world became digital and computers empowered people and things to connect to each other effectively, cheaply, and in a sophisticated way; the world became more open, networked, and complex, pushing the Lab into new fields such as social networks, big data, economics, civics, cities, cryptocurrencies, and other areas that became more concrete and accessible as the Internet, computers, and devices opened these domains to new thinking and innovation. Meanwhile, the Internet and computers also dramatically lowered the cost of invention, sharing, collaboration, and distribution, which substantially increased the places where interesting work was going on and the interconnectedness of this work.

The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.” He may have embedded another comment on his motivation for creating the cryptocurrency into the genesis block, in a parameter that reads, “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”22 Just days after the creation of the genesis block, which produced fifty bitcoins, Satoshi released the first version of the open-source Bitcoin software platform. Written in C++, it was, according to Dan Kaminsky, the Internet security guru, nearly impenetrable.

In fact, Andresen believes that one of the reasons Satoshi stepped away from the project in April 2011 was that his desire to control the code was incompatible with building the community of developers it needed, some of whom have contributed enormously to the source code in the past five years. (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.


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

‘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.’ Jeff Greene reflects that the internet has ended up in a very strange place – though not necessarily one that’s bad for his business.

In December 2017, suspicions were raised when traffic destined for Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple and others was briefly re-routed – for around three minutes at a time – via Russia, in a move which would have represented a test of a proof-of-concept attack (or could have been a mistake, of course).15 In April 2018, an attacker managed to re-route a selection of IP addresses operated by an Amazon service and use them to defraud people of around $150,000 in cryptocurrencies.16 And in that July, a day before the country was due to be hit by street protests, traffic for the popular encrypted messaging app Telegram was re-routed via Iran.17 The YouTube/Pakistan incident is now more than ten years in the past, and nothing has changed with BGP, and nothing seems likely to.

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.


pages: 272 words: 76,154

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

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.

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. The application of blockchain that has been the subject of the most heated debate in recent years is, of course, cryptocurrencies. These currencies promise to fill the gaps in the traditional financial arena.

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. Even so, it is hard to see how cryptocurrencies could replace or challenge the dollar, euro, or yen in a way that today’s boardrooms should be worried about. Although cryptocurrencies appeal in certain circumstances, there are reasonable doubts about their universal application. In addition to examining technological opportunities for revenue growth, cost cutting, and efficiencies, boards must ensure operational resilience and safety in the face of technological change.


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

Index Abortion, 64 Abstraction, 10 aesthetics and, 83, 87–112 arbitrage and, 161 Bogost and, 49, 92–95 capitalism and, 165 context and, 24 cryptocurrency and, 160–180 culture machines and, 54 (see also Culture machines) cybernetics and, 28, 30, 34 desire for answer and, 25 discarded information and, 50 effective computability and, 28, 33 ethos of information and, 159 high frequency trading (HFT) and imagination and, 185, 189, 192, 194 interfaces and, 52, 54, 92, 96, 103, 108, 110–111 ladder of, 82–83 language and, 2, 24 Marxism and, 165 meaning and, 36 money and, 153, 159, 161, 165–167, 171–175 Netflix and, 87–112, 205n36 politics of, 45 pragmatist approach and, 19–21 process and, 2, 52, 54 reality and, 205n36 Siri and, 64–65, 82–84 Turing Machine and, 23 (see also Turing Machine) Uber and, 124–126, 129 Wiener and, 28–29, 30 work of algorithms and, 113, 120, 123–136, 139–149 Adams, Douglas, 123 Adams, Henry, 80–81 Adaptive systems, 50, 63, 72, 92, 174, 176, 186, 191 Addiction, 114–115, 118–119, 121–122, 176 AdSense, 158–159 Advent of the Algorithm, The (Berlinski), 9, 24 Advertisements AdSense and, 158–159 algorithmic arbitrage and, 111, 161 Apple and, 65 cultural calculus of waiting and, 34 as cultural latency, 159 emotional appeals of, 148 Facebook and, 113–114 feedback systems and, 145–148 Google and, 66, 74, 156, 158–160 Habermas on, 175 Netflix and, 98, 100, 102, 104, 107–110 Uber and, 125 Aesthetics abstraction and, 83, 87–112 arbitrage and, 109–112, 175 culture machines and, 55 House of Cards and, 92, 98–112 Netflix Quantum Theory and, 91–97 personalization and, 11, 97–103 of production, 12 work of algorithms and, 123, 129, 131, 138–147 Agre, Philip, 178–179 Airbnb, 124, 127 Algebra, 17 Algorithmic reading, 52–56 Algorithmic trading, 12, 20, 99, 155 Algorithms abstraction and, 2 (see also Abstraction) arbitrage and, 12, 51, 97, 110–112, 119, 121, 124, 127, 130–134, 140, 151, 160, 162, 169, 171, 176 Berlinski on, 9, 24, 30, 36, 181 Bitcoin and, 160–180 black boxes and, 7, 15–16, 47–48, 51, 55, 64, 72, 92–93, 96, 136, 138, 146–147, 153, 162, 169–171, 179 blockchains and, 163–168, 171, 177, 179 Bogost and, 16, 33, 49 Church-Turing thesis and, 23–26, 39–41, 73 consciousness and, 2, 4, 8, 22–23, 36–37, 40, 76–79, 154, 176, 178, 182, 184 DARPA and, 11, 57–58, 87 desire and, 21–26, 37, 41, 47, 49, 52, 79–82, 93–96, 121, 159, 189–192 effective computability and, 10, 13, 21–29, 33–37, 40–49, 52–54, 58, 62, 64, 72–76, 81, 93, 192–193 Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm and, 163 embodiment and, 26–32 encryption, 153, 162–163 enframing and, 118–119 Enlightenment and, 27, 30, 38, 45, 68–71, 73 experimental humanities and, 192–196 Facebook and, 20 (see also Facebook) faith and, 7–9, 12, 16, 78, 80, 152, 162, 166, 168 gamification and, 12, 114–116, 120, 123–127, 133 ghost in the machine and, 55, 95 halting states and, 41–46 high frequency trading (HFT) and, 151–158, 168–169, 177 how to think about, 36–41 ideology and, 7, 9, 18, 20–23, 26, 33, 38, 42, 46–47, 54, 64, 69, 130, 144, 155, 160–162, 167, 169, 194 imagination and, 11, 55–56, 181–196 implementation and, 47–52 intelligent assistants and, 11, 57, 62, 64–65, 77 intimacy and, 4, 11, 35, 54, 65, 74–78, 82–85, 97, 102, 107, 128–130, 172, 176, 185–189 Knuth and, 17–18 language and, 24–28, 33–41, 44, 51, 54–55 machine learning and, 2, 15, 28, 42, 62, 66, 71, 85, 90, 112, 181–184, 191 mathematical logic and, 2 meaning and, 35–36, 38, 44–45, 50, 54–55 metaphor and, 32–36 Netflix Prize and, 87–91 neural networks and, 28, 31, 39, 182–183, 185 one-way functions and, 162–163 pragmatist approach and, 18–25, 42, 58, 62 process and, 41–46 programmable culture and, 169–175 quest for perfect knowledge and, 13, 65, 71, 73, 190 rise of culture machines and, 15–21 (see also Culture machines) Siri and, 59 (see also Siri) traveling salesman problem and Turing Machine and, 9 (see also Turing Machine) as vehicle of computation, 5 wants of, 81–85 Weizenbaum and, 33–40 work of, 113–149 worship of, 192 Al-Khwārizmī, Abū ‘Abdullāh Muhammad ibn Mūsā, 17 Alphabet Corporation, 66, 155 AlphaGo, 182, 191 Amazon algorithmic arbitrage and, 124 artificial intelligence (AI) and, 135–145 Bezos and, 174 Bitcoin and, 169 business model of, 20–21, 93–94 cloud warehouses and, 131–132, 135–145 disruptive technologies and, 124 effective computability and, 42 efficiency algorithms and, 134 interface economy and, 124 Kindle and, 195 Kiva Systems and, 134 Mechanical Turk and, 135–145 personalization and, 97 physical logistics of, 13, 131 pickers and, 132–134 pragmatic approach and, 18 product improvement and, 42 robotics and, 134 simplification ethos and, 97 worker conditions and, 132–134, 139–140 Android, 59 Anonymous, 112, 186 AOL, 75 Apple, 81 augmenting imagination and, 186 black box of, 169 cloud warehouse of, 131 company value of, 158 effective computability and, 42 efficiency algorithms and, 134 Foxconn and, 133–134 global computation infrastructure of, 131 iOS App Store and, 59{tab} iTunes and, 161 massive infrastructure of, 131 ontology and, 62–63, 65 physical logistics of, 131 pragmatist approach and, 18 product improvement and, 42 programmable culture and, 169 search and, 87 Siri and, 57 (see also Siri) software and, 59, 62 SRI International and, 57, 59 Application Program Interfaces (APIs), 7, 113 Apps culture machines and, 15 Facebook and, 9, 113–115, 149 Her and, 83 identity and, 6 interfaces and, 8, 124, 145 iOS App Store and, 59 Lyft and, 128, 145 Netflix and, 91, 94, 102 third-party, 114–115 Uber and, 124, 145 Arab Spring, 111, 186 Arbesman, Samuel, 188–189 Arbitrage algorithmic, 12, 51, 97, 110–112, 119, 121, 124, 127, 130–134, 140, 151, 160, 162, 169, 171, 176 Bitcoin and, 51, 169–171, 175–179 cultural, 12, 94, 121, 134, 152, 159 differing values and, 121–122 Facebook and, 111 Google and, 111 high frequency trading (HFT) and, 151–158, 168–169, 177 interface economy and, 123–131, 139–140, 145, 147 labor and, 97, 112, 123–145 market issues and, 152, 161 mining value and, 176–177 money and, 151–152, 155–163, 169–171, 175–179 Netflix and, 94, 97, 109–112 PageRank and, 159 pricing, 12 real-time, 12 trumping content and, 13 valuing culture and, 155–160 Archimedes, 18 Artificial intelligence (AI) adaptive systems and, 50, 63, 72, 92, 174, 176, 186, 191 Amazon and, 135–145 anthropomorphism and, 83, 181 anticipation and, 73–74 artificial, 135–141 automata and, 135–138 DARPA and, 11, 57–58, 87 Deep Blue and, 135–138 DeepMind and, 28, 66, 181–182 desire and, 79–82 ELIZA and, 34 ghost in the machine and, 55, 95 HAL and, 181 homeostat and, 199n42 human brain and, 29 intellectual history of, 61 intelligent assistants and, 11, 57, 62, 64–65, 77 intimacy and, 75–76 job elimination and, 133 McCulloch-Pitts Neuron and, 28, 39 machine learning and, 2, 15, 28, 42, 62, 66, 71, 85, 90, 112, 181–186 Mechanical Turk and, 12, 135–145 natural language processing (NLP) and, 62–63 neural networks and, 28, 31, 39, 182–183, 185 OS One (Her) and, 77 renegade independent, 191 Samantha (Her) and, 77–85, 154, 181 Siri and, 57, 61 (see also Siri) Turing test and, 43, 79–82, 87, 138, 142, 182 Art of Computer Programming, The (Knuth), 17 Ashby, Ross, 199n42 Asimov, Isaac, 45 Atlantic, The (magazine), 7, 92, 170 Automation, 122, 134, 144, 188 Autopoiesis, 28–30 Babbage, Charles, 8 Banks, Iain, 191 Barnet, Belinda, 43–44 Bayesian analysis, 182 BBC, 170 BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos (Netflix), 89–90 Berlinski, David, 9, 24, 30, 36, 181, 184 Bezos, Jeff, 174 Big data, 11, 15–16, 62–63, 90, 110 Biology, 2, 4, 26–33, 36–37, 80, 133, 139, 185 Bitcoin, 12–13 arbitrage and, 51, 169–171, 175–179 blockchains and, 163–168, 171–172, 177, 179 computationalist approach and cultural processing and, 178 eliminating vulnerability and, 161–162 Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm and, 163 encryption and, 162–163 as glass box, 162 intrinsic value and, 165 labor and, 164, 178 legitimacy and, 178 market issues and, 163–180 miners and, 164–168, 171–172, 175–179 Nakamoto and, 161–162, 165–167 one-way functions and, 162–163 programmable culture and, 169–175 transaction fees and, 164–165 transparency and, 160–164, 168, 171, 177–178 trust and, 166–168 Blockbuster, 99 Blockchains, 163–168, 171–172, 177, 179 Blogs early web curation and, 156 Facebook algorithms and, 178 Gawker Media and, 170–175 journalistic principles and, 173, 175 mining value and, 175, 178 Netflix and, 91–92 turker job conditions and, 139 Uber and, 130 Bloom, Harold, 175 Bogost, Ian abstraction and, 92–95 algorithms and, 16, 33, 49 cathedral of computation and, 6–8, 27, 33, 49, 51 computation and, 6–10, 16 Cow Clicker and, 12, 116–123 Enlightenment and, 8 gamification and, 12, 114–116, 120, 123–127, 133 Netflix and, 92–95 Boolean conjunctions, 51 Bosker, Bianca, 58 Bostrom, Nick, 45 Bowker, Geoffrey, 28, 110 Boxley Abbey, 137 Brain Pickings (Popova), 175 Brain plasticity, 38, 191 Brand, Stewart, 3, 29 Brazil (film), 142 Breaking Bad (TV series), 101 Brin, Sergei, 57, 155–156 Buffett, Warren, 174 Burr, Raymond, 95 Bush, Vannevar, 18, 186–189, 195 Business models Amazon and, 20–21, 93–94, 96 cryptocurrency and, 160–180 Facebook and, 20 FarmVille and, 115 Google and, 20–21, 71–72, 93–94, 96, 155, 159 Netflix and, 87–88 Uber and, 54, 93–94, 96 Business of Enlightenment, The (Darnton) 68, 68 Calculus, 24, 26, 30, 34, 44–45, 98, 148, 186 CALO, 57–58, 63, 65, 67, 79, 81 Campbell, Joseph, 94 Campbell, Murray, 138 Capitalism, 12, 105 cryptocurrency and, 160, 165–168, 170–175 faking it and, 146–147 Gawker Media and, 170–175 identity and, 146–147 interface economy and, 127, 133 labor and, 165 public sphere and, 172–173 venture, 9, 124, 174 Captology, 113 Carr, Nicholas, 38 Carruth, Allison, 131 Castronova, Edward, 121 Cathedral and the Bazaar, The (Raymond), 6 Cathedral of computation, 6–10, 27, 33, 49, 51 Chess, 135–138, 144–145 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 3, 16, 33, 35–36, 42, 104 Church, Alonzo, 23– 24, 42 Church-Turing thesis, 23–26, 39–41 Cinematch (Netflix), 88–90, 95 Citizens United case, 174 Clark, Andy, 37, 39–40 Cloud warehouses Amazon and, 135–145 interface economy and, 131–145 Mechanical Turk and, 135–145 worker conditions and, 132–134, 139–140 CNN, 170 Code.

The root of the algorithmic sea change is the reimagination of value in computational terms. Chapter 5 leads with the flash crash in 2010 and the growing dominance of algorithmic trading in international markets (described by journalist Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys, among others) to frame a reading of Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies. By defining the unit of exchange through computational cycles, Bitcoin fundamentally shifts the faith-based community of currency from a materialist to an algorithmic value system. Algorithmic arbitrage is forcing similar transitions in the attribution of value and meaning in many spaces of cultural exchange, from Facebook to journalism.

It will suggest when to leave for the next meeting, factoring in traffic, creating an intimate, personal reminder system arbitraging public and private data. As we come to grips with the consequences of the deep interlacing of cultural value and algorithmic arbitrage, the ideals of anonymity and untraceable commerce have become more and more appealing. Cryptocurrency Google’s expanding role as a kind of central utility for arbitrage and cultural valuation online has brought some of the dot-com era’s fondest dreams to life, but in an unexpectedly quiet, backroom way. The futurists Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden offered one of the best-known expressions of that era’s visions in 1997 with “The Long Boom,” published in that bulletin of the digital revolution, Wired magazine.23 Schwartz offered many predictions centered on five waves of technological change, but a persistent pivot point for the transcendental Wired future was a new kind of computational arbitrage for capitalism that freed commerce from the historical relics of bureaucratic regulation, physical specie, and sovereign control.


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

The identity of Bitcoin owners would be anonymous, except for one wrinkle: the vast majority of Bitcoin owners buy their currency from cryptocurrency exchanges. Exchanges such as Coinbase and Crypto allow people to use dollars or other state-sponsored fiat money (euros, shekels, lires) to buy cryptocurrency. These exchanges are subject to special regulations to prevent money laundering, known as KYC, for “know your customer.” Opening an account on cryptocurrency exchanges is like opening a bank account. Customers have to provide their Social Security numbers, government-issued identification, and other personal identifying information.

By ensuring that the true identity of a Bitcoin holder is known to exchanges, law enforcement can learn the identity of bad actors that use Bitcoin as part of malicious activities. Law enforcement can also force exchanges to exclude these actors from their platforms. Indeed, the United States has started to sanction cryptocurrency exchanges for laundering ransomware proceeds. The Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the cryptocurrency exchange SUEX a sanctioned entity. U.S. citizens and financial institutions are generally banned from doing business with sanctioned entities. OFAC also warned U.S. entities that they can be sanctioned if they pay ransomware to sanctioned entities, even if they are unaware that the entities are sanctioned.

Consider “market” cybercrimes—the online sale of contraband such as Social Security numbers, identity documents, credit card information, prescription drugs, illicit drugs, weapons, malware, child sexual abuse materials, body parts, and sex. Participation in these illicit markets merely requires knowing how to use a Tor Browser and a cryptocurrency wallet. Similarly, hacking plays no role in garden-variety online fraud, such as advance-fee schemes, eBay scams, spear phishing, whaling, and catfishing. Security theorists call these types of crimes “cyber-enabled”—they are traditional crimes facilitated by computers. Cyber-enabled crimes are distinguished from “cyber-dependent” crimes—such as unauthorized access, spamming, DDoS-ing, and malware distribution—which can only be perpetrated with computers.


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

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.

After tumbling in the Covid-pandemic crash, bitcoin rallied in 2021, hitting an all-time high of $67,801 in November. But in 2022, as the Fed began to crank rates higher, it and other cryptocurrencies collapsed, wiping roughly $2 trillion from the broader crypto market. As bitcoin plunged, one crypto billionaire was marshaling his forces—and his billions—to salvage it. Sam Bankman-Fried, the thirty-year-old titan of a sprawling crypto empire, started snapping up struggling crypto exchanges from Canada to Japan. Seeking to boost popular interest in crypto, the mercurial CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX Trading appeared in magazine ads alongside supermodel Gisele Bündchen and shelled out millions for a pro-crypto commercial featuring Larry David during the 2022 Super Bowl.

Elon Musk had been a master of bubbles, becoming a billionaire in the early 2000s just as the dot-com bubble was bursting. His coup? Selling PayPal—Musk was the largest shareholder with about 12 percent of the stock—to eBay for $1.5 billion. With Tesla, he was riding what Sornette called the Green Energy Bubble (Musk was one of its principal creators, Sornette believed). Musk was also dabbling in cryptocurrencies—another bubble, thought Sornette. Sornette’s monthly Global Bubble Status Report in February 2020 noted: “As the dragonhead of the Electrical Automobile companies, Tesla has persuaded many people that it is a new ‘APPLE’ of the coming decade and all other petrol-fuel mechanical car companies are just like ‘Nokia.’ ” Calling Musk a “clever CEO with many creative marketing strategies,” the report said Tesla is reminiscent of dot-com bubble stocks and “very dangerous for short-sellers.”


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

fn3 You’ve probably heard of this pseudonymous digital cash because it was, and still is, the currency of choice on the illegal online drugs markets. fn4 And increasingly, I predict, politics. Although no political parties – save the occasional fringe party – have given any thought to what crypto-currencies might mean. What does a modern centre-left party think of crypto-currency, or of blockchain decentralisation? They have no idea. Orwell I’ve interviewed many of the people in the frontline of the battle, the people behind the extraordinary innovation currently taking place. They see the question of online privacy as the digital front in a battle over individual liberty: a rejection of internet surveillance and censorship that they believe has come to dominate modern life online.

An alternative way of organising the internet is being built as we speak, an internet where no one is in control, where no one can find you or shut you down, where no one can manipulate your content. A decentralised world that is both private and impossible to censor. 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’.


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

The development of these theorems provides us with simple constructs we can use to compartmentalize and analyze more complex phenomena. Cryptocurrency [37] emerged from crypto-anarchy and free market economics, but since then has outgrown its own roots and become a contemporary entity with peculiar characteristics. This has forced us to revisit our own ideas and assumptions about how these disciplines interrelate. This new field of study is termed cryptoeconomics. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin represent money which is simultaneously global, uncensored, and open access for everybody, for the first time in human history. There are also great advances being made in anonymization technology, not only for cryptocurrency but for other financial instruments and human activity.

There are also great advances being made in anonymization technology, not only for cryptocurrency but for other financial instruments and human activity. Cryptocurrency is therefore a unique phenomenon with its own characteristics worthy of study. The importance of economics lies in giving us a window to understand the activities of human beings. This means we can make plans about where to apply our resources and our technical knowledge. The current generation of crypto companies lack this strategic dimension and will not be prepared to take advantage of new geopolitical trends. Presently there is too much divergence in focus – the crypto industry is not selective enough. Concepts from evolutionary theory can help us to predict which kind of organizational strategies will win-out in the longer term.

He combines intense practical knowledge with a strong theoretical underpinning and a deep interest and knowledge in politics and economics. Eric’s unique insights into fundamental concepts provide us with a vital framework to guide the future direction of the cryptoeconomics field. He rigorously applies rational economic theory to cryptocurrency, and ventures beyond the financial to explain how human activity shapes this future. Preface This started as a way to avoid retyping the same ideas, 140 characters [43] at a time. In keeping with that environment, topics were as short as possible, and informal. I did not intend to write a book, and still could not.


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. Because I think it’s hilarious, I’m going to use Dogecoin1 as the glue for the rest of this chapter.

With everything now inside of a class, we can instantiate a currency converter with this: API_KEY = os.environ.get("OPX_KEY") c = CurrencyConverter(['CAD', 'USD'], API_KEY) Converting values now just requires us to use the .convert method. 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.


pages: 241 words: 81,805

The Rise of Carry: The Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Suppression and the New Financial Order of Decaying Growth and Recurring Crisis by Tim Lee, Jamie Lee, Kevin Coldiron

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, currency risk, debt deflation, disinformation, distributed ledger, diversification, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Flash crash, global reserve currency, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, market bubble, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, negative equity, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, risk/return, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, yield curve

The claim that this should not be allowed to happen is rooted in the idea that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but it could be said to be also tied up with the notion that money is, at core, based on trust. Existing cryptocurrencies do not have the property of being linked to the economy’s asset base in any way. The provenance of a holding 212 THE RISE OF CARRY of crypto­currencies is instead achieved through the distributed ledger rather than as a financial claim. But cryptocurrencies do have a significant cost of production, meaning that the contention that they will develop into an alternative or even a superior form of money cannot be dismissed out of hand.

In such an anti-carry regime, there would still be fiat money, and presumably there would still be central banks, Beyond the Vanishing Point 211 or at least some arm of government with monopoly power over the creation of money. Spiraling inflation, however, could lead to the further development of alternative monies, which would ultimately replace fiat money. The emergence of cryptocurrencies has been an early sign that the fundamental, long-run monetary instability that lies behind the financial carry regime is already undermining trust in fiat money. Classically, the three functions that money fulfills are as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account, the store of value being the crucial attribute in this respect.

It would eliminate the possibility of bank runs, in exchange for each currency holder accepting a small amount of day-to-day variability in purchasing power depending on the performance of the particular assets that the currency holder owns. With modern, liquid, electronic financial markets, such a solution may now be technologically possible. It could be implemented through a distributed ledger like cryptocurrencies, or through competing centralized private “banks” (which would be something between mutual funds and banks as understood today), or even through a service provided by a government monopoly. At the moment such a solution seems unlikely to be widely accepted, as both the status quo and revealed preferences of the public seem to favor taking the risk of runs and crises over accepting floating purchasing power in normal conditions.


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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

None the less, it is worth remarking just how much the humble bitcoin has achieved in a world where it has no intrinsic value whatsoever, which bodes well for future crypto-currencies online. There are now more than three hundred rival online crypto-currencies competing with bitcoins – altcoins, they are called – and though none has yet gained anything like the market share of bitcoin, it may only be a matter of time. Just imagine what might happen if decentralised crypto-currencies really do take off. If people started putting their savings in them, and financial firms started offering interesting crypto-currency-based products, governments would find their room for manoeuvre much diminished.

He started printing money in Iraq, but the quality was poor, counterfeiting was easy and the quantity was too high, causing inflation. However, the Swiss-made dinars remained in circulation, and began to diverge in value from the local ones. Since there were no more being made, people saw them as a store of value and they held their value against the dollar. And then came bitcoins. The implications of crypto-currencies, and their recent evolution, are profound; they go well beyond the subject of money. They give us a glimpse of the future evolution of the internet itself. 16 The Evolution of the Internet Nothing can be made from nothing – once we see that’s so, Already we are on the way to what we want to know: What can things be fashioned from?

In general I remain optimistic that the forces of evolution will outwit the forces of command and control, and the internet will continue to provide a free space for all. But only because of human ingenuity staying one step ahead of the dirigistes. Perhaps the most profoundly important of the internet’s offspring will be digital currencies independent of government: bitcoin, or the crypto-currencies that will come after it. ‘I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. The one thing that’s missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash,’ said Milton Friedman. And it is not just e-cash; it is the technology behind bitcoin that could finally decentralise not just the internet but society too.


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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

Finally, the system is transparent because everyone on the network can see every transaction on the network—which is how the double-spend problem was actually solved. The real innovation, though, is how transactions are recorded in the ledger. In normal financial exchanges, when money is moved around, a trusted third party is needed: If I cut you a check, it’s a third party, typically a bank, who ensures I have the cash to cover it. But cryptocurrencies remove the middleman from the exchange, instead validating transactions with every computer on the network. Once deemed valid, the record of that transaction is bundled with other records into a “block,” then added to the record of all prior blocks (the “chain”). By cutting out the middleman and bringing accounting into the digital age, blockchain is doing to banks what the internet did to traditional media: gutting them.

AI is also on the rise, with investments climbing from $5.4 billion in 2017 to $9.3 billion in 2018. And biotechnology experienced a similar boom, rising from $11.8 billion in 2017 to $14.4 billion in 2018. Yet, when it comes to raising staggering sums of money in an eyeblink, little can compare with initial coin offerings (or ICOs). Emerging out of the cryptocurrency realm, ICOs are a new form of crowdfunding underpinned by blockchain technology. Startups can raise capital by creating and selling their own virtual currency—called either “tokens” or “coins.” These tokens give you ownership in the company (or, at least, voting power) and the promise of future profits, or can take the form of a security, representing fractional ownership of a piece of real estate or the like.

The first $135 million was raised in the first hour alone. Yet they didn’t even have a working product. Far from an isolated incident, one month prior to Filecoin’s success, Tezos, a self-governing currency (billed as a Bitcoin-update), raised $232 million in just thirteen days. Then there’s the EOS token, one of the most popular cryptocurrencies trading today, which brought in a record-breaking $4 billion from its yearlong ICO. And these token trends are not slowing down. The number of ICOs per quarter has also ballooned, from roughly a dozen during the first quarter of 2017, to over a hundred by the last quarter of 2017, and there’s been even more activity since.


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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

In December, Vachon-Desjardins was indicted on computer fraud charges in federal court in Florida, where one of his first victims, a telecommunications company, was headquartered. When Canadian authorities, who were also investigating him, searched his cryptocurrency wallets in January 2021, they found $40 million in Bitcoin—the largest cryptocurrency seizure in Canadian history. He was arrested and extradited to the United States. * * * By mostly avoiding direct attacks on patient care, the ransomware gangs that agreed to Lawrence’s truce may have forgone some revenue. They compensated for this by attacking another vital and vulnerable sector: schools.

But some attackers make blunders, cut corners, or underestimate their adversaries. That’s when the team pounces. * * * Ransomware is kidnapping updated for the digital age. Using ploys such as phishing—sending deceptive emails with malicious attachments—hackers infiltrate computers. Once inside, they detonate the ransomware and hold the computers hostage for cryptocurrency, much as kidnappers seize human beings and extract payment to release them. Such crimes can be traced back to as early as 75 BC, when pirates captured Julius Caesar and asked for 20 talents. According to Plutarch, Caesar was insulted by what he considered a low valuation of his worth and insisted on a ransom of 50 talents instead.

Lawrence first learned of ransomware in 2012 from victims of a strain called ACCDFISA, an abbreviation for Anti Cyber Crime Department of Federal Internet Security Agency. This fictional agency was notifying people that child pornography had infected their computers, and so it was blocking access to their files unless they paid $100. Since cryptocurrency was not yet widely used, attackers instructed victims to use prepaid cards to text the payment to a specified phone number. At the time, prepaid cards were anonymous and untraceable, though they stored only small sums. Lawrence was able to decrypt the first version of ACCDFISA. When a later version baffled him, he reached out to an acquaintance, Fabian Wosar, the creative force behind the antivirus company Emsisoft


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

., when the transaction is recorded on the distributed ledger), provided you have dominion and control over the cryptocurrency so that you can transfer, sell, exchange, or otherwise dispose of the cryptocurrency. If you receive cryptocurrency in a transaction facilitated by a cryptocurrency exchange, the value of the cryptocurrency is the amount that is recorded by the cryptocurrency exchange for that transaction in U.S. dollars. If the transaction is facilitated by a centralized or decentralized cryptocurrency exchange but is not recorded on a distributed ledger or is otherwise an off-chain transaction, then the fair market value is the amount the cryptocurrency was trading for on the exchange at the date and time the transaction would have been recorded on the ledger if it had been an on-chain transaction.

A hard fork occurs when a cryptocurrency undergoes a protocol change resulting in a permanent diversion from the legacy distributed ledger. This may result in the creation of a new cryptocurrency on a new distributed ledger in addition to the legacy cryptocurrency on the legacy distributed ledger. If your cryptocurrency went through a hard fork, but you did not receive any new cryptocurrency, whether through an airdrop (a distribution of cryptocurrency to multiple taxpayers’ distributed ledger addresses) or some other kind of transfer, you don’t have taxable income. Filing Tip Classifying Cryptocurrency Income If you mine for virtual currency, this is not investment income. Instead, it is treated as self-employment income (see 40.01).

Instead, it is treated as self-employment income (see 40.01). If you earn interest on cryptocurrency sitting in a wallet, you have interest income (see 4.12). If a hard fork is followed by an airdrop but you receive new cryptocurrency, you have taxable income in the year you receive that cryptocurrency. When you receive cryptocurrency from an airdrop following a hard fork, you have ordinary income equal to the fair market value of the new cryptocurrency when it is received (i.e., when the transaction is recorded on the distributed ledger), provided you have dominion and control over the cryptocurrency so that you can transfer, sell, exchange, or otherwise dispose of the cryptocurrency.


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’ve commented on everything under the sun: Interest rates, valuation multiples, earnings calls, Federal Reserve policies, tax code changes, housing prices, credit spreads, innovation and technology, consumer confidence, trading strategies, small business ownership, macroeconomics, microeconomics, emerging markets, index funds, active management, shareholder activism, real estate investment trusts, volatility, private equity, venture capital, initial public offerings, oil and gas prices, technical analysis, value investing, momentum stocks, smart beta factors, socially responsible investing, social media, biotechnology and drug approvals, presidential elections, geopolitics, natural disasters, defense contractors, gold and silver, cryptocurrency, high frequency trading, Occupy Wall Street, insider trading, analyst upgrades and downgrades, sectors and industries, long-term investing, day trading, hedge funds, mutual funds, exchange traded funds, gaming companies, sports business, show business, startups, bankruptcies, mergers and acquisitions, and I even interviewed 50 Cent.

Therefore, I am more interested in investing in markets that are less efficient and where information advantages can be easily and legally gained. Examples of these types of markets are: real estate (all sub-asset classes), privately held operating businesses, venture capital, fine art, fine wine and spirits, watches, collectible automobiles, antiques, antiquities, rare earth metals, and cryptocurrencies. Warren Buffett famously said, “invest in what you know.” I take it one step further and assert “invest in things you love to own and that you are obsessed with researching and gaining knowledge about.” I have a strong preference for investing in tangible hard assets—even better if I can also get some sort of use or enjoyment in my life from the assets.


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

In the next chapter, we will look into the role that market size and dynamics played in the success of billion-dollar startups. 9 MARKET When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens. —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.

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. Coinbase focused its efforts on being compliant with government regulations and tax laws.

His co-founder, John Zimmer, had a degree in hotel administration from Cornell. Both saw the early potential of ridesharing. Although Green had learned to code and was able to build initial prototypes, they had to bring on senior and junior engineers to develop the complicated back-end systems required for ridesharing. On the other side, Coinbase, an early cryptocurrency exchange, was started by two technical founders. Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam had both studied computer science and economics as undergraduates; Armstrong would go on to get a master’s degree in computer science. Before founding Coinbase, Armstrong had worked as a software engineer at Airbnb, and Ehrsam had worked as a trader at Goldman Sachs.


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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

Harney (31 Mar 2016), “Scary new scam could swipe all your closing money,” Chicago Tribune, http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/realestate/ct-re-0403-kenneth-harney-column-20160331-column.html. 75Turns out that the answer is: plenty: Brian Krebs (12 Oct 2012), “The scrap value of a hacked PC, revisited,” Krebs on Security, https://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/10/the-scrap-value-of-a-hacked-pc-revisited. 75Botnets can be used for all sorts of things: Dan Goodin (2 Feb 2018), “Cryptocurrency botnets are rendering some companies unable to operate,” Ars Technica, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/cryptocurrency-botnets-generate-millions-but-exact-huge-cost-on-victims. 75Hackers use bots to commit click fraud: White Ops (20 Dec 2016), “The Methbot operation,” https://www.whiteops.com/hubfs/Resources/WO_Methbot_Operation_WP.pdf. 76“The CaaS model provides easy access”: Rob Wainwright et al. (15 Mar 2017), “European Union serious and organized crime threat assessment: Crime in the age of technology,” Europol, https://www.europol.europa.eu/activities-services/main-reports/european-union-serious-and-organised-crime-threat-assessment-2017. 76They sell hacking tools: Nicolas Rapp and Robert Hackett (25 Oct 2017), “A hacker’s tool kit,” Fortune, http://fortune.com/2017/10/25/cybercrime-spyware-marketplace.

Adam Maida (18 Jul 2017), “Online and on all fronts: Russia’s assault on freedom of expression,” Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/07/18/online-and-all-fronts/russias-assault-freedom-expression. Kenneth Rapoza (16 Oct 2017), “Russia fines cryptocurrency world’s preferred messaging app, Telegram,” Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2017/10/16/russia-fines-cryptocurrency-worlds-preferred-messaging-app-telegram. 195and China: Benjamin Haas (29 Jul 2017), “China blocks WhatsApp services as censors tighten grip on internet,” Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/19/china-blocks-whatsapp-services-as-censors-tighten-grip-on-internet. 196If a company like Apple received: Mallory Locklear (23 Oct 2017), “FBI tried and failed to unlock 7,000 encrypted devices,” Engadget, https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/23/fbi-failed-unlock-7-000-encrypted-devices. 196“Any measure that weakens encryption”: Fred Upton et al. (20 Dec 2016), “Encryption working group year-end report,” House Judiciary Committee and House Energy and Commerce Committee Encryption Working Group, US House of Representatives, https://judiciary.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/20161220EWGFINALReport.pdf. 196“My personal view is that we should”: Steve Cannane (9 Nov 2017), “Cracking down on encryption could ‘make it easier for hackers’ to penetrate private services,” ABC News Australia, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-10/former-mi5-chief-says-encryption-cut-could-lead-to-more-hacking/9136746. 196If Apple adds a backdoor: Lily Hay Newman (21 Apr 2017), “Encrypted chat took over.

This is not a universally held position. There is strong pressure to weaken encryption, not only from totalitarian governments that want to spy on their citizens but from politicians and law enforcement officials in democracies, who see encryption as a tool used by criminals, terrorists, and—with the advent of cryptocurrencies—people who want to buy drugs and launder money. I, and many security technologists, have argued that the FBI’s demands for backdoors are just too dangerous. Of course, criminals and terrorists have used, are using, and will continue to use, encryption to hide their plots from the authorities, just as they will use many other aspects of society’s capabilities and infrastructure.


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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

In the 7 weeks following its peak, it fell by 65 per cent, reaching $6,698 in February 2018. After a temporary recovery, it collapsed again. On 17 December 2018, exactly one year after its peak, one bitcoin was valued at $3,332 – a fall of 83 per cent.5 Other cryptocurrencies fared even worse: Invictus Capital’s CRYPTO20 index, which tracked the value of the 20 largest cryptocurrencies, fell by over 93 per cent.6 The bubble triangle presents a framework that applies just as well to the 2017 cryptocurrency bubble as it does to any of the financial bubbles over the past 300 years. But how good will it be at predicting future bubbles? The three sides of the bubble triangle all need to be present for a bubble to happen.

Although levels of speculation appeared to be relatively low, the bubble triangle suggested that a spark could change this very quickly. 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. 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.


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

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.

He was feeling his way toward a kind of grand unified system he’d tentatively started referring to as “Thielism.” This had arisen out of Silicon Valley libertarianism, he said, and encompassed a range of convictions about technology and the human future. A belief in monopoly capitalism. The mining and exploitation of personal data. Radical extension of life spans through technological means. Cryptocurrency as a method of evading both government regulation and the taxation on which nation-states depended. Above all, a belief in the emergence of a new “sovereign individual.” “It’s about radical individualism,” he explained. “It’s survival-of-the-fittest, a belief in the rights of the wealthiest and most powerful among us to do whatever the fuck they want, including living forever.

(The neck and shoulders of this T-shirt were stippled with dandruff in such a way that it seemed to depict the cosmos itself, a heavenly firmament of flaked skin.) As discreetly as I could, I slipped my phone from my trouser pocket and entered the address into its browser, and I found myself on the website of a cryptocurrency founded by Mars Society members who had intended it to act both as a source of funding for Mars colonization projects and as the eventual colony’s de facto currency. “Marscoin,” I read, “is dedicated to supporting the colonization of Mars and other space-related projects intended to get humans living and thriving off of planet earth.


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

The biographical details about Mario Draghi, and details surrounding his “whatever it takes” speech, come from the Bloomberg News story “3 Words and $3 Trillion: The Inside Story of How Mario Draghi Saved the Euro,” by Jana Randow and Alessandro Speciale. Chapter 15 Digital Gold, by Nathaniel Popper, and The Age of Cryptocurrency, by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey, are useful overviews of the story of bitcoin and cryptocurrency. This Machine Kills Secrets, by Andy Greenberg, is a good telling of the cypherpunk story. David Chaum published “Security Without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete” in Communications of the ACM. Chaum described his early life to me in a phone interview.

The big blockers launched a rival currency, which they called bitcoin cash, that allowed for far more transactions per second than bitcoin. The small blockers stuck with bitcoin. Everybody stayed mad at everybody else. They never worked it out. Over these same years, people launched hundreds of alternative cryptocurrencies. They all ran on blockchains but had their own tweaks. They promised better anonymity or a stable value relative to the dollar. They promised whole new kinds of businesses built on top of the blockchain. Some of these coins developed huge followings and billion-dollar valuations. Most failed and became known as shitcoins.

In other words, a technology originally conceived to “make Big Brother obsolete” was now being advanced by a company built on gathering immense amounts of data on billions of people, and a state built on surveillance of its citizens. But as of early 2020, neither Facebook nor China had launched a digital currency. This new universe was expanding, but bitcoin remained at the center, far more valuable than any other cryptocurrency. By the beginning of 2020, Chinese miners had grown so large that they controlled most of the processing power on the bitcoin network. And the way the code for bitcoin was written gave them control over the system. The people who controlled those computers in China weren’t algorithms. They were human beings with feelings and egos, and they could direct the future of bitcoin.


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

For almost five years, the Bitcoin network and its pool of bitcoins grew, while users exchanged bitcoins for products such as thumb drives, alpaca socks, and, yes, drugs. The fact that people transact through cryptographic keys instead of names or e-mail addresses lets them make purchases anonymously. Since there’s no credit-card statement at the end of the month listing the illicit goods and services someone may have purchased, cryptocurrency became popular on black markets and earned a reputation as money for criminals. Then in late 2013, something interesting, if all too predictable, happened. Whether in response to the high-profile bust of an illicit online bitcoin-based marketplace known as the Silk Road or to the growing participation of Chinese users, Wall Street suddenly seized on bitcoins as a new instrument for speculative investing.

MONEY IS A VERB As creatures of a digital age, our first impulse is often to apply some algorithm, computer program, or other technological solution to a problem. Bitcoin is just such an approach, turning the massive processing power of distributed personal computers to verifying the exchange of value. In using such a technology, we learn to trust the cryptocurrency’s open-source algorithms over the bankers and authorities who may have abused that privilege in the past. In blockchain we trust. Of course, the underlying assumption is that people can’t trust one another enough to transact directly without the constant threat of double-dealing, fraud, or nondelivery of services.

Money alone won’t buy security, and everyone is going to have to learn how to invest through work, active participation, and assets other than cash. Not to worry: this isn’t all happening so fast. As disappointing as it may be to the revolutionaries among us, the traditional debt-based investment economy is not flipping into a real-time, distributed, peer-to-peer, cryptocurrency marketplace overnight. Those of us with jobs and families and mortgages ignore the investment markets at our own peril. And there are still ways to invest plain old money that capitalize on the current economic transition without overly compromising our potential for a more equitable economic future.


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

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.

It might not allow one to perfectly hedge away market risks affecting options, but it is useful in getting close to the ideal and is therefore still used on a large scale in the financial industry.5 This book focuses on algorithmic trading in the context of alpha generating strategies. Although there are more sophisticated definitions for alpha, for the purposes of this book, alpha is seen as the difference between a trading strategy’s return over some period of time and the return of the benchmark (single stock, index, cryptocurrency, etc.). For example, if the S&P 500 returns 10% in 2018 and an algorithmic strategy returns 12%, then alpha is +2% points. If the strategy returns 7%, then alpha is -3% points. In general, such numbers are not adjusted for risk, and other risk characteristics, such as maximal drawdown (period), are usually considered to be of second order importance, if at all.

All these trading strategies can be classified as mainly alpha seeking strategies, since their main objective is to generate positive, above-market returns independent of the market direction. Canonical examples throughout the book, when it comes to financial instruments traded, are a stock index, a single stock, or a cryptocurrency (denominated in a fiat currency). The book does not cover strategies involving multiple financial instruments at the same time (pair trading strategies, strategies based on baskets, etc.). It also covers only strategies whose trading signals are derived from structured, financial time series data and not, for instance, from unstructured data sources like news or social media feeds.


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

We can foresee a time when digital platforms and associated ecosystems will be the way we organize new information technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, the Internet of things, health care information, and even quantum computing. We can also see peer-to-peer transaction platforms replacing or competing with traditional businesses, especially as the “sharing” or “gig” economy expands and new technologies diffuse. Use of blockchains (distributed ledger technology that is extremely secure though not unbreakable) and cryptocurrencies (digital money, usually independent of banks and governments) may greatly reduce the need for many different services, from traditional banks to supply-chain contracts and monitoring. Yet another hot topic as we write this book is increasing demand for governments to rethink data-privacy laws, antitrust laws, and other regulations that could rein in the most powerful platform businesses.

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.


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

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.

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. Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency, however, even though it has the most exchange value in traditional currencies, and has certainly been the most widely promoted. Innumerable rivals exist, based on slight variations of the Bitcoin code, going by names like Litecoin and Quarkcoin. Many of these are opportunistic rivals driven by speculators.

They are little better than traditional stock market pump-and-dump scams, in which a few promoters talk up the value of a company so that others will bid up its price, and then sell off their own holdings before the suckers realize what’s happening. For the purposes of this chapter, however, the most interesting cryptocurrency is the one that is generally regarded as a silly joke: Dogecoin. In its rise and fall we can see a promising mechanism that may have been introduced prematurely into a society that was not ready for it. Dogecoin takes its name from a viral Internet meme featuring a picture of a Shiba Inu dog surrounded by enthusiastic, ungrammatical exclamations.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

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

Aspirations to self-sufficiency and invulnerability help explain why, after so many scandals, failures, exposes, and scams, florid varieties of cryptocurrency enthusiasm continue unabated.13 The crypto narrative fulfills deep psychological needs for security and independence. 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.

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. As Keynes explained, the individually rational (saving money) can be collectively harmful (contracting economic exchange that gradually puts people out of work). As that Keynesian parable suggests, aspects of MMT are decades old—and some of its oft-repeated insights are older than that.

the CEO asked, worried that his mercenaries might eventually revolt.17 Rushkoff had no real answer, because there is none, except perhaps a Robinson Crusoe idyll of totally self-sufficient isolation (which would become decidedly less idyllic the moment one needed modern hospital care). Full automation of force merely promises a comforting delusion: that killer robots would never be sabotaged, and that they could be maintained without extensive supply chains of parts and software upgrades. The twin fantasies of total, automated control of one’s money (via cryptocurrency) and one’s security (via robotic force) are, sad to say, behind much of the enthusiasm for substitutive robotics and AI in the realms of force and finance. They promise a final end to arms races and competition for power, while actually just redirecting them toward another field: hacking, including both decryption and socially engineered attacks.18 A final “win” in the arms races of either force or finance would be a Pyrrhic victory, because it would portend a world so simple and so well-controlled that human freedom, agency, and democracy would become relics of a distant past.


pages: 268 words: 64,786

Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away by Julien Saunders, Kiersten Saunders

barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, digital divide, diversification, do what you love, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, index fund, job automation, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lifestyle creep, Lyft, microaggression, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, passive income, passive investing, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, side hustle, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, work culture , young professional

One of the biggest problems with the myth of full confidence isn’t that it exists; it’s that it creates a culture where we insist on taking big risks just to prove that we are courageous. In other words, we become people who would rather swing big and miss than bunt every day and run the bases until they win. In part, this explains why millions of beginner investors threw caution to the wind in 2021, choosing to bet big on cryptocurrency and options trading, rather than less volatile and more proven approaches to investing. The Dwayne Johnson effect also creates the impression that there’s no need to tap into courage unless your back is against the wall or your life is hanging in the balance. In most cases it artificially inflates the stakes and makes them unnecessarily high.

Tech entrepreneurs and digitally savvy people understand the moment we’re in. They know the internet has made it easier than ever before to earn money, and they’re taking full advantage of these advances in technology to build life-changing wealth every single day. Whether it’s blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, NFTs, or virtual reality, the tech savvy among us aren’t waiting to explore the future of wealth, they’re creating it. Ways to Make Your Own Money Today, there are thousands of ways you can stop waiting on your boss to promote you and, instead, take the reins to your own life to earn money outside your normal 9-to-5.

Don’t pat yourself on the back when things go remarkably well, and don’t shoot yourself in the foot when things are going poorly. Take calculated risks. As you accumulate more wealth, you’re in a better position to take on more risk. This means investment opportunities such as cryptocurrencies, IPOs, and individual stock holdings can and should occupy a greater percentage of your total wealth. As we explained in chapter 3, once your income has fulfilled its purpose of providing flexibility, a good rule of thumb is to begin allocating 5 percent of your net worth to invest in emerging or riskier asset classes.


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

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.

., 201 corporate raiders, 82, 84, 88, 89, 94, 96, 103–4, 360 as activist investors, 104, 106, 360 in Pretty Woman, 98, 100–102 see also hostile takeovers credit: five c’s of, 13, 42, 205 spreadsheets used for analysis in, 19–20, 24 worthiness, 22 credit cards, 233 in e-commerce, 232–33, 244, 245 Credit Suisse, 263–64, 273–74, 340 Crisanti, Jim, 203 cryptocurrencies, 245–46, 308 Culligan, 164–68, 182 currency(ies), 245–46 cryptocurrencies, 245–46, 308 phone minutes as, 245 Cutler, Carol, 207 Daily Stormer, 304 Danni’s Hard Drive, 226, 227, 231–33 data centers, 224–25, 227–28, 231 Equinix, 228, 230–31, 237–47 “naked woman in the server room” story and, 223–26, 232 security at, 225 Davis, Mark, 156–58, 165, 166, 221–22 DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), 31–33, 34, 39, 40 Deasy, John, 351 DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), 227–28 defense and aerospace companies, see aerospace and defense companies Defense Department, 124 Denham, Bob, 324 Denny’s, 154 Depression, Great, 51, 189 derivatives, 316–19, 324 de Vries, Peter, 81 Diamond, Neil, 321 diamond and gold wholesalers, see jewelry industry Diamond Club, 15 Dii Group, 213 Dimon, Jamie, 196, 197 Disney, 81–90, 85, 86, 111, 304 Eisner at, 88, 89, 109 Epcot Center, 86 films, 88, 102, 148–49 Steinberg’s hostile takeover attempt, 81–84, 86–91, 98, 102–4, 111 Touchstone Pictures, 88, 102 Disney, Roy, 85 Disney, Walt, 84–86, 87, 103, 112 Disney Channel, 299, 301, 302 Disneyland, 84, 85, 103, 112, 148, 288–90, 314 author’s career at, 4, 5, 10, 11–13, 40, 45, 61, 71, 81–85, 89–90, 106–12, 148, 158, 289, 290 Café Orleans at, 81, 106–12, 289 in Pretty Woman, 106 privilege and, 289–90 Disney World, 85–86 Dominguez, Bernardo, 132 Dominica, 285, 286 dotcom bubble, 175, 211, 214, 228–31, 233–34, 236, 238, 240, 243, 244, 267, 322 Doughty, Caitlin, 301 Douglas, Michael, 98 Drexel Burnham Lambert, 91–96, 188 author’s offer from, 91, 93, 94–95 bankruptcy of, 96 Milken at, 91–94 Ducasse, Alain, 168, 169 Dunkin’ Donuts, 294 earthquake, Whittier Narrows, 34–35 eBay, 233 Ebbers, Bernie, 212, 238 e-commerce, 232–33, 244, 245 Economic Consequences of the Peace, The (Keynes), 280 Economist, 245 Eisner, Michael, 88, 89, 109 Elmassian, George, 25, 31, 32, 34, 38 Elmassian, Richard, 25, 31–33, 38 Enron, 171, 177 Epcot Center, 86 Equinix, 228, 230–31, 237–47 Escobar, Pablo, 39 Euripides, 9 Evoqua, 182 exchange-traded funds (ETFs), 105 F9 mistake, 127 Facebook, 294, 305 Family Ties, 97–98 Fargo, William, 230 Federal Reserve, 370 FedEx, 127 Feuerstein, Don, 57 FICO score, 22 Finance Leaders Fellowship program, 371 financial crisis of 2008, 1–2, 7, 76, 211, 215, 259, 307 Equinix and, 242 financial supermarkets and, 211 see also Great Recession financial supermarkets, 204, 214–15, 361 financial crisis and, 211 Weill’s model of, with Citi, 189–90, 195, 196, 200, 209, 211 financial system, financial industry, 6, 328–30 causes of society’s dysfunctional relationship with money, 359–63 citizens’ disconnection from government finance, 328–29, 343–44, 351, 353, 362 clashes sparked by financial unrest and collapse, 355–58 compensation in, see compensation complexity of, 260–61, 277 estimated worth of financial instruments in the world, 209 net financial burden, 329–30 people’s feelings about working in, 277 preppers and, 306 see also Wall Street financial system, reform of, 363–64 accountability for public officials, 369 action items for banking system and investment management, 364–66 action items for each of us, 368–70 action items for government, 366–68 changing compensation structures to align incentives with investment horizons, 364 community engagement, 369–70 creating federal-level oversight or review board for pension systems, 366–67 creating independent review processes, 364–65 education in financial and economic matters, 368 forming culture or values committees, 365–66 requiring finance background for treasurers and other financial officers, 367 simplicity of regulations, 367–68 Fiorina, Carly, 190, 194–95 Fitzgerald, F.

The Economist covered the phenomenon in a 2013 piece: “Unlike mobile money, airtime’s value does not rely directly on a government’s stability or ability to hold down inflation by, say, showing restraint printing money.” Money doesn’t have to be money anymore. And a lot of that evolution has been fueled by a loss of trust in government and our financial institutions. Consider the rise of cryptocurrencies. 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.


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.

In this context, the aim of this chapter is to set the scene for the rest of the book by sketching the consequences of the tide’s going out: showing that the world has run out of breath economically and run out of patience politically, and that in places the long-term expectations of wealth and income are tapering downward and the established rules of the road for our world are being undercut. “The Pace of Change Has Never Been This Fast” The reader might respond by asking, Won’t technology solve all of these problems? Today, there is such a dazzling array of new problem-solving technologies—from gene editing and digital health care to sleep masks to cryptocurrencies to lifestyle apps—that we might consider most of our material problems to be solvable. For instance, French author Nicolas Santolaria has written a book, Comment j’ai sous-traité ma vie (How I outsourced my life), in which he describes his attempt to outsource as many chores and lifestyle tasks as possible to apps, including dating apps that let him pay to have someone “pre–chat up,” if that’s the right phrase, partners he is interested in dating.

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. Moreover, technology has manifestly been the enabler of enormous structural changes in retail and consumer goods and in the rise of new financial assets from exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to cryptocurrencies. Keynes’s snapshot gives a sense of what globalization is: the increasing interdependence and integration of economies, markets, nations, and cultures. It also shows up the parallels between the world of the first wave of globalization and the world of today. In this respect, it is worth journeying back in time to see how globalization first formed and—importantly, given the threats to it today—how it ended and what lessons we can learn.


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.

There was a lot of hugging and hand-holding during the interview. As I gained their trust, Aaron intimated that he was conducting experiments in his own body, using human growth hormone and microdoses of psychedelic drugs like mescaline and Ecstasy. When I asked about the warning from the FDA, Aaron told me about his plans to evade the government with a cryptocurrency infrastructure. “I just don’t think that it is very viable for them to stop the supply chain” for the DIY gene therapy, he said. After we ordered a meal, he explained his business plan. Ascendance Biomedical would generate income by offering people genetic enhancements—like bigger muscles or blue eyes—to fund projects with humanitarian aims.

See coronavirus pandemic Crick, Francis (geneticist) DNA research of Nobel Prize awarded to crip (crippled) Crips in Space supercrips See also ableism; disability CRISPR approval of first clinical trial (June 2016) CRISPR-Cas9 discovery of “editing” metaphor and ethics and first edited babies (Lulu and Nana, October 2018) first edited human embryo (April 2015) function of how-to guide human reproduction and limited effectiveness in adults military uses of mutations and off-target genetic damage power of price of profit-driven experiments unpredictability of See also Charpentier, Emmanuelle; Church, George; Doudna, Jennifer; He, Jiankui; Huang, Junjiu; ICSI; in vitro fertilization CRISPR Sperm Bank (artwork) CRISPR Therapeutics cryptocurrency “Cyborg Manifesto” (Haraway) cystic fibrosis Daisy, Mike (storyteller) Daley, George (molecular biologist) Darnovsky, Marcy (policy advocate) Darwin, Charles (biologist) Davis, Machiavelli (biohacker) Deem, Michael (physicist and bioengineer) co-author of Nature manuscript CRISPR experiment involvement mentor to Jiankui He not charged with crime Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Deng, Xiaoping (paramount leader, People’s Republic of China, 1982–1987) Derrida, Jacques (philosopher) de Vries, Hugo (biologist) Dialectic of Sex, The (Firestone) Dikötter, Frank (historian) Direct Genomics (Jiankui He start-up) disability abortion and enhancement and euthanasia and X-Men and See also ableism; crip; Down Syndrome disability rights Disability Visibility Project Discourse of Race in Modern China, The (Dikötter) diversity biodiversity CRISPR and disability and genetic testing and human neurodiversity science and sexual DNA building block of life databases GenBank history of discovery as a language mutations to police use of Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) See also genes; gene therapy; genetic testing; sequencing genes DNA Dreams (documentary) Doctorow, Cory (science fiction author) Dolezal, Rachel (former NAACP chapter president) double-stranded break (in DNA), described.


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

FACT: In the Book of Revelation [13:16-17], written about 2000 years ago, the Bible warned about being branded with an ID code: “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark”. FACT: Microsoft owns International patent #060606 (#666) which is a cryptocurrency system using humans who have been chipped as the “Miners”. Surveillance capitalism is of course in line with 1984 – a George Orwell hit written 71 years ago which should have prepared the public for the reality of a Big Brother dystopia, but clearly did not. Especially if one looks at the ease with which the Coronavirus has, seemingly overnight, enabled governments all over the world to implement mass totalitarian surveillance under the auspice of creating weapons against disease.

As these dollars come flooding home, the massive influx will kill the value of the dollar and plunge the United States into a 3rd World country almost immediately. With no one forcing foreign governments to hold dollars specifically to buy oil, they will choose an alternative method that better fits the needs of their countries such as a different currency, a basket of currencies, gold, silver, or possibly cryptocurrencies. Besides the financial reasons for ditching the dollar, governments around the world will take that opportunity to give the United States a taste of their own medicine by turning their back on them and helping to destroy the dollar as payback for all of the times they have done it to other countries.

• China spends more on education and training as a percentage of GDP than any other country in the world, right around 4%, and its education system is the largest in the world.95 • There are more Chinese university students than in both the United States and Western Europe combined. The “One Belt. One Road” plan to connect Europe and Asia, in conjunction with the rise in cryptocurrencies, is setting the stage for major global disruption and a paradigm shift away from taxes, tariffs, and threats, and into open markets, sound money, and cooperative trade through multiple continents. The United States should be feeling threatened by these new developments, not because they actually fear China, but because China is making them look bad by comparison.


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

This was the first commercially viable computer chip—the silicon that made Silicon Valley. The Apollo program would buy hundreds of thousands of Fairchild-designed chips, setting off an economic boom up and down the San Francisco Peninsula that ultimately led to personal computers, websites, cryptocurrencies, smart watches, and really all of twenty-first-century capitalism. Fairchild employees, a PayPal Mafia before the PayPal Mafia, fanned out across the Valley, starting many of the most important tech companies and venture capital firms. In the popular imagination—colored by the successes that have come since, especially those of Steve Jobs—the story of the Traitorous Eight has come to represent the spirit of rebellion that is said to pervade the tech industry.

I heard of an early Thiel Fellow who seemed to be wrestling with mental health issues and drug addiction, but, according to two early fellows, administrators were slow to intervene. Another Thiel Fellow was quietly removed from the program, but only after police showed up at a house he shared with a few other fellows. The two fellows said that San Francisco police told them they were investigating his involvement with a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme. Many fellows described feeling like second-class citizens within Thiel’s orbit. They were told that Founders Fund would not, as a rule, invest in any Thiel Fellows out of fear that that would create the perception of picking favorites. But the policy was always shifting—a handful of companies raised small sums—and Thiel himself put $2 million into Hello, a manufacturer of a $149 alarm clock and sleep tracker founded by James Proud, who entered the fellowship at age nineteen and whom Thiel said “stood out from the start.”

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.


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

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. The global attention to cryptocurrencies suggested that people saw a benefit in them that they were not finding elsewhere, whether that was privacy, ease of transfer and convertibility, fad appeal, potential for illicit use and tax evasion, or something else entirely. Central banks around the world had begun moving forward with development of their own digital money.

She made it clear that creating a digital dollar would be a serious process, one that would probably require buy-in from Congress, since it wasn’t clear if the Federal Reserve Act allowed it to issue a digital currency. She was outlining first, careful steps. The urgency to keep up with digital innovation only intensified as the months passed, though. Internet-famous “meme” stocks took off in 2021, and so did cryptocurrencies, with everyday investors and major banks alike piling on. Stablecoins, private-sector digital tokens that were backed by a bundle of currencies or other assets, were growing exponentially as that happened, in large part because people used them to transact in and out of the new crop of crypto offerings.

The Fed wanted to move slowly and contemplatively, but the world was not giving it that option. In May 2021, Powell—who had long sounded closer to Quarles than to Brainard in his comments on the matter—released a surprise announcement. “Today we are in the midst of a technological revolution that is fundamentally changing our world,” he began, speaking in a prerecorded video. Cryptocurrencies and stablecoins had quickly grown and evolved, he noted, and “as stablecoins’ use increases, so must our attention to the appropriate regulatory and oversight framework.” It wasn’t just regulation that the Fed was preparing to adjust. The central bank was taking comments on whether it should issue a digital currency.


pages: 444 words: 84,486

Radicalized by Cory Doctorow

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, G4S, high net worth, information asymmetry, Kim Stanley Robinson, license plate recognition, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, old-boy network, public intellectual, satellite internet, six sigma, Social Justice Warrior, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit

She prodded a headline and learned that Boulangism had been a ghost ship for at least six months because that’s how long security researchers had been contacting the company to tell it that all its user data—passwords, log-ins, ordering and billing details—had been hanging out there on the public internet with no password or encryption. There were ransom notes in the database, records inserted by hackers demanding cryptocurrency payouts in exchange for keeping the dirty secret of Boulangism’s shitty data handling. No one had even seen them. Boulangism’s share price had declined by 98 percent over the past year. There might not even be a Boulangism anymore. When Salima had pictured Boulangism, she’d imagined the French bakery that was on the toaster’s idle-screen, dusted with flour, woodblock tables with serried ranks of crusty loaves.

Social media exploded with the personal lives of these four guys, who were, to put it mildly, basic as fuck. They had bullshit jobs: jobs that no one, not even them, thought worth doing. One was a management consultant. One was a customer service manager for a call center. One was an ad-tech programmer. One was a marketing specialist for cryptocurrency startups. All shared one trait: they’d watched the slow death of an insured loved one who’d been denied coverage. In an earlier age, they’d have stewed in private misery, become alcoholics, shot themselves. Instead, they’d followed simple online instructions for starting a message board and hosting it on a bulletproof server accessible only via the Tor network.

Instead, he stopped at a CVS and bought four different kinds of over-the-counter sleeping pills, and drew up a chart on some scrap printer paper from the guest room and kept track, looking for a pill that gave him the most sleep with the least hangover. What he really wanted was some Ambien, which he’d tried a couple times in college when he was too wound up to sleep and a buddy had helped him out. There were lots of places to get Ambien cheap and prescription-free, using darkweb markets. He even had some cryptocurrency he’d speculated on when it seemed like it wouldn’t ever stop rising. Might as well spend it now before it was completely worthless. But of course, he couldn’t remember the obscure .onion addresses for the marketplaces, and the only one he knew by heart was Fuckriff’s, and before he could stop himself or even remember that the site had gone down, he was logging in.


pages: 409 words: 112,055

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

Yet, at the same time, attackers are looking at how they can use these tools as well. Quantum computing could provide both impossible-to-break protection for data and the ability to crack all current forms of encryption. Blockchain, which many technologists think could lead to fundamentally more secure protection of data, has for the time being found its biggest use in cryptocurrency, a technology that is decidedly giving an advantage to attackers by allowing criminals to move their ill-gotten gains around anonymously. These technology trends could shift the balance in either direction. It is up to us to determine which way the scales will tip. The Pentagon has long identified four primary domains of conflict: land, sea, air, and space.

With a wink and a nod, it reads: MY OTHER COMPUTER IS . . . YOURS. Stealing computing resources from universities, corporations, and individuals used to be common practice, even among the “gray hat” hacking world that was more interested in research and less in criminal profit. While cyber criminals still use stolen computer resources for mining cryptocurrencies and for carrying out DDoS attacks, when they need real computing power or to hide their tracks, they turn to the same company that you do for your socks and kitchen supplies: Amazon. With a stolen credit card or a compromised account, criminals can spin up a virtual server on Amazon as easily as you can buy an ebook.

You can lose everything on your device by slipping up just once. (Remember the gullible employee, Dave, from chapter 4? Don’t be Dave.) When your device becomes compromised, the attacker can use your computer’s power to participate in a flood attack on another network, or secretly steal your computational power to mine cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. So, while they are not stealing data, files, or money from you, they are nonetheless hurting somebody somewhere with your computer. Without your knowing it, your machine is being used to do bad things. Every Move You Make, Every Step You Take It may or may not be a security risk, but it is more than a little creepy to think that somebody is watching you.


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

Over time, you’ll also get more comfortable taking calculated risks to make even more money. You can invest in a wide variety of things like art, wine, commodities, currencies, cryptocurrencies, domains, furniture, collectibles, businesses, and tons of other things. While you can make money investing in any of these things, for the purposes of this chapter, we’re not going to focus on investing in physical assets (like art, wine, or collectibles) or speculative financial instruments (like cryptocurrencies). Never invest in anything you don’t understand. Don’t put your money in investments that your friends or family or a financial advisor or someone you just met told you to invest in without understanding exactly what you are investing in and what the risk/reward trade-off is.

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.

., 61, 132, 159, 175, 179, 205 housing and real estate in, 64–65, 67, 146, 271, 274, 279 clothing, 77, 122–23, 159, 180, 188 expenses and, 52, 58–59, 62, 65, 120, 127, 133, 136, 142–43 compounding, 59, 85, 176, 305 expenses and, 59, 75, 138 investing and, 22–23, 33, 35, 43–44, 46–49, 72–75, 84, 94, 96, 100, 108,114, 143, 169, 210, 237, 246–47, 258, 265, 285, 289–91, 296 job hacking and, 162, 169 money growth and, 2, 21–23, 33, 35, 76 retiring and, 21–24, 39, 43–44, 46–49, 61, 74 side hustles and, 108, 111, 185 your number and, 55–56, 59, 72–74 consulting, 21, 107, 123, 192, 194 cost of living, 63–65, 278, 312 credit, credit scores, 21, 85, 151, 190, 268–69, 271, 273–74, 307 credit cards, 7, 16, 51, 120, 130, 306 daily habits and, 89–90 net worth and, 77, 81–82 and paying down debt, 84–85 of Sabatier, 151–52, 214 side hustles and, 190, 192 transportation and, 148, 150–52 cryptocurrencies, 211, 256 daily habits, 17, 216, 305 expenses and, 54, 88–90, 135 riches and, 88–92 of Sabatier, 11, 90–91, 135 debts, debt, 15–16, 51, 57, 130, 307–8 investing and, 276–77 net worth and, 76–82, 91 paying down, 83–86, 88–89, 91–92 of Sabatier, 7–8, 84 your number and, 13, 36, 51 dependent care FSAs, 250–51 digital marketing, 20, 109, 124, 175, 181–82, 191, 193–94, 207 dividends, 22, 25, 46, 111, 220, 232, 235, 238, 252, 255, 264, 292, 297 dog walking, 104, 110, 133, 179, 181, 183–84, 188–89, 197–99, 201–2, 208 domain name flipping, 20, 109, 181–82 donations, 2–3, 52, 62, 65, 307, 316 down payments: low, 268–69, 271–72, 274 real estate investing and, 147, 263, 265–66, 268–74, 279, 285 education, 6, 12, 133, 181–82 expenses and, 55–56, 130, 147 investing and, 251, 278 living richer life and, 313–15 net worth and, 77, 81–82 and paying down debt, 84–85 side hustles and, 193–96, 209 student loans and, 8, 55–56, 77, 81–82, 84–85, 130, 147, 313 emergency funds, 43, 214, 273 emotions, 38, 86–89, 91–92, 207, 285, 316 employment, 1, 3, 5–11, 63, 77, 298 benefits of, 9, 14, 105–7, 156–61, 173, 177, 302 bonuses and, 159, 161, 163, 169, 259, 262 enterprise mindset and, 104–10, 119 equity in, 105, 160–61 full-time, 104–11, 113, 119, 122, 155–80, 183, 187, 191, 193–96, 203, 208, 250, 278, 290, 300 future-optimization framework and, 301–3 incomes and, 122–25, 139, 153, 179, 193, 203 investing and, 16, 21, 26, 86, 92, 156, 158, 214, 224, 226–28, 239–40, 245–46, 250, 259, 262, 271, 278, 287–88, 290 job hacking and, 14, 105–7, 155–78 lifestyle and, 57–58, 60–61 living richer life and, 312–15, 317 long-term strategy for, 174–77 and meanings of financial freedom, 15, 18 part-time, 36, 39, 61, 108, 297 promotions and, 58, 105, 161 raises and, 11, 14, 105, 107, 159, 162–73, 177–78, 300–302, 315, 317 and relationship between time and money, 32–34 retiring and, 19–21, 26, 29–31, 34–35, 39, 47, 60–61, 68 of Sabatier, 5–10, 33, 35–36, 58, 104, 124, 148, 151, 162, 175–76 Sabatier’s parents and, 28–29 savings and, 20–21, 26, 30, 95, 313, 315 short-term strategies for, 156–73 side hustles and, 104, 108–10, 179–80, 183, 187, 191–96, 203, 208, 300 and thinking about money before buying, 128–29, 131 transportation and, 147–48 unemployment and, 5, 7–8 working remotely and, 11, 14, 106–7, 156, 158–60, 165–66, 177, 187, 315 your market value and, 163–67, 169–71, 173–74, 177–78 your number and, 13, 36 and your value to your company, 163–64, 167–70, 173, 177–78 Enron, 231 enterprise mindset, 103–19, 155, 300 employment and, 104–10, 119 entrepreneurship and, 104, 108, 110–13, 119 investing and, 103–4, 106, 113–19, 180 side hustles and, 104, 108–13, 119, 180 entertainment, 53, 62, 65, 142–43, 189 entrepreneurship, 2, 10, 20 enterprise mindset and, 104, 108, 110–13, 119 side hustles and, 104, 110–13, 119, 189–90, 194, 200, 207 equity, 309 job hacking and, 105–6, 160–61 real estate and, 266, 268, 270, 273, 276–78 exchange traded funds (ETFs), 222, 226, 229, 232, 234, 237, 243, 258 expenses, 3, 11, 16, 31–32, 35–40, 96–103, 124–54, 300 affordability and, 17–18, 21, 25, 57, 63, 67, 105, 126–31, 139 budgeting and, 13, 140, 143, 147, 152 building wealth and, 93–94, 118 comparing price percentages and, 131–32, 134, 139 for convenience, 133–35, 139 daily habits and, 54, 88–90, 135 enterprise mindset and, 103, 105, 111, 118 future-optimization framework and, 306–8 and future value of money, 136–37, 139 happiness and, 125–27, 138–39 housing and, 3, 9–10, 21, 25, 52, 54, 58–61, 63–67, 127, 130–31,133–34, 140–47, 154 incomes and, 21, 50, 124, 127–33, 135, 142–44 inflation and, 24–25, 45 investing and, 47, 51, 59, 128, 131, 133, 136–37, 141–44, 214, 263, 267, 271–72, 276, 280–82, 284–85, 287, 289–92, 295, 297, 313 job hacking and, 105, 156, 168 lifestyle and, 17–18, 21, 57–63 living richer life and, 313, 315–17 net worth and, 83, 130 onetime future, 55–56 and paying down debt, 84–85 and per-use costs of items, 135–36, 139 purchasing power and, 24–27, 45, 127 recurring, 50, 54–55, 135, 138 retiring and, 21, 24–28, 39–40, 42–43, 45, 47–56, 60–61, 69–70, 74 of Sabatier, 7, 17–18, 38, 42–43, 58, 61–62, 132–36, 138, 307–8, 311–12 savings and, 42–43, 74, 96–101, 120–21, 126–28, 130, 132–33, 137–38, 140–44, 153–54 side hustles and, 14, 69–70, 188–90, 192, 199, 207, 209 and thinking about money before buying, 120–21, 125–39 trading and, 132–33, 139 value and, 120, 126–27 your number and, 13, 36–38, 50–57, 59–60, 62–66, 68–70, 75, 135, 137, 276 Facebook, 58, 189, 196, 304 investing in, 228, 256–57 Fidelity, 228, 232–33, 252 fiduciaries, 212 financial advisors, 11–12, 50, 87, 131 fees of, 225–28, 260, 296, 309 investing and, 210–12, 225–28, 235, 260, 296 financial freedom: levels of, 16–17 meanings of, 15–18, 36 529 plans, 251 flexible spending accounts (FSAs), 156–57, 177, 250–51 food, 2, 30, 38, 83, 180 expenses and, 25, 52, 54–55, 58, 61–62, 65–66, 132–36, 140–43, 151–54 inflation and, 25, 35 of Sabatier, 5–7, 132, 135, 153 savings and, 142–43, 152–54 your number and, 52, 54–55 foreclosures, 283, 286 four fund investments, 235–36 401(k) accounts: employer contributions to, 21, 26, 86, 92, 156, 158, 239–40, 245–46 fees of, 224, 226–29 investing in, 79, 216, 218, 223–24, 226–29, 236–47, 249–51, 254,258–59, 262, 293–95, 298–99, 301–2 job hacking and, 105, 156–58 retiring and, 20–21, 26–28, 45 savings rates and, 95, 118 403(b) accounts, 224, 228–29, 236–37, 241–46, 249, 254, 262, 293, 295, 298 457(b) accounts, 241–45, 251, 254, 293, 298 frugality, 28, 35, 38, 314 future-optimization framework, 300–310 chilling and hustling in, 309–10 executing consistently in, 305–8, 310 focusing intensely and learning to say no in, 303–5, 310 just getting started in, 301–3, 310 principles of, 301–9 sharing and asking for help in, 308–10 geographic arbitrage, 67 Glassdoor, 21, 165, 177 gold, investing in, 229, 237, 262 Google, 9, 107, 149, 161, 166, 175 investing and, 233, 237, 284 side hustles and, 182, 189, 200 Graham, Benjamin, 255 Hamptons, N.Y., 63 health, healthcare, 1–2, 8, 19, 25, 33, 64, 297, 316 expenses and, 53, 58, 65, 142 insurance and, 53, 105, 156–57, 247 investing and, 234, 241, 243, 246–47, 250–52 job hacking and, 156–57, 177 of Sabatier, 309–10 your number and, 53, 56 health savings accounts (HSAs), 156–57, 177, 241, 243, 246–47, 250–52, 293, 298 hobbies, 34, 53, 189, 191, 195–96 home inspectors, 284, 286 homes, housing, 2, 9–11, 30, 38, 179 affordability of, 49, 270–75 and cost of living, 63–65 expenses and, 3, 9–10, 21, 25, 52, 54, 58–61, 63–67, 127, 130–31, 133–34, 140–47, 154 hacking of, 145–47, 154, 264, 285 inflation and, 25, 35, 45, 67 investing and, 213, 263–64, 270–75, 279, 283–84 lifestyle and, 58–60, 62–63, 65–66 living rent-free and, 144–47 living richer life and, 313–15 location and, 63–67 net worth and, 76, 79, 83, 91 renting vs. buying of, 266–68, 302 retiring and, 45, 49, 52, 54, 56, 60, 144 of Sabatier, 5–7, 9–10, 61, 63–64, 84, 143–44, 147, 274–75 savings and, 63, 67, 141–47, 154 your number and, 52, 54, 66–67 see also real estate house-sitting, 58, 63, 145–47, 154 incomes, 1–3, 7–17, 26–39, 86–87, 90–119, 148, 300 building wealth and, 93–94, 118 compounding and, 94, 111, 108 daily habits and, 90, 92 employment and, 122–25, 139, 153, 179, 193, 203 enterprise mindset and, 103–19 expenses and, 21, 50, 124, 127–33, 135, 142–44 food and, 152–53 future-optimization framework and, 303, 306–10 housing and, 143–44, 146–47 investing and, 8, 16, 30, 43, 82–83, 91, 104, 114–19, 179, 181, 210–16, 218, 220, 224–25, 230, 233–35, 237, 239–41, 243–54, 258–60, 262, 270–71, 275–80, 285, 287–94, 296–98, 314 job hacking and, 14, 105–6, 155–57, 159–60, 162–80 lifestyle and, 57, 59–60 living richer life and, 312–15, 317–18 net worth and, 77, 83, 91 passive, 14–15, 34, 39, 43, 74, 109, 111–14, 119, 188–89, 192, 209–10,260, 278, 289, 298, 306–7 real hourly rates of, 121–25, 129, 134–35, 139, 307 recurring, 68–70, 75, 109 and relationship between time and money, 32–34 rental, 43, 68–69, 83, 111, 147, 189, 266, 271, 276–79, 288–89, 306 retiring and, 20–21, 24, 26–28, 30, 35, 39, 42–43, 46, 50, 60–61, 69, 74 of Sabatier, 1–2, 7–10, 17, 20, 30, 38, 42–43, 103–4, 118, 124, 135, 175–76, 181, 183, 194, 202, 205, 214, 217, 220, 302, 307–9, 311 savings and, 20–21, 24, 26–28, 33, 94–101, 108, 115–18, 170, 258, 312–13, 315 side hustles and, 9, 14, 42, 68–70, 74, 95, 104, 108–13, 119, 122, 153, 175–76, 179–84, 187–209, 216, 220, 289–91, 298, 306 your number and, 36–39, 68–70, 74, 82–83, 91, 169, 180, 189 index funds, 24, 230–38 building your own, 236–38, 261 dividends of, 232, 235, 238 fees of, 225–26, 228, 232, 234–36, 238 international, 235–36 investing in, 215, 222–23, 225–26, 228, 232–38, 254–57, 261–62 large-cap, 236–38 mid-cap, 236–38 most popular, 232–33, 237 returns of, 215, 222–23 small-cap, 236–38 socially responsible, 234–35 individual retirement accounts (IRAs), 28, 95, 118 investing in, 223, 226, 228, 237, 241–43, 246–49, 254–55, 262, 293, 295–96, 298–99, 302 opening and maxing out of, 247–49 see also specific individual retirement accounts inflation: housing and, 25, 35, 45, 67 investing and, 22, 25, 35, 39–42, 46, 114, 138, 213–14, 219, 264, 290 lifestyle and, 57, 62 retiring and, 24–28, 40–42, 45–46, 94 savings and, 8–9, 24–28 and value of money, 25–27, 35, 43, 88 your number and, 36, 56 insurance, 313 expenses and, 52–53, 62, 65, 142, 148 healthcare and, 53, 105, 156–57, 247 housing and, 65, 273–74 investing and, 267, 273–74 job hacking and, 105, 156–57, 177 Intelligent Investor, The (Graham), 255 interest, 88–89, 131, 147, 313 compounding and, 22–23, 55, 59, 73–74, 169, 176 investing and, 85–86, 108, 115–17, 179, 214–15, 220–23, 239–40, 266, 268–76, 281 net worth and, 77–82 and paying down debt, 84–86, 89, 92 retiring and, 24, 26, 28, 45, 47–49, 51 savings and, 88, 143–44 your number and, 51, 55–56 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 49n, 213, 248, 268, 293 internet, 30, 52, 103, 109, 123, 156, 181 investments, investing, 2–3, 8–12, 14, 30–31, 33–37, 90, 184, 210–302 automation and, 216–17, 258–59, 262, 302, 307, 312 compounding and, 22–23, 33, 35, 43–44, 46–49, 72–75, 84, 94, 96, 100, 108, 114, 169, 210, 237, 246–47, 258, 265, 285, 289–91, 296 determining target asset allocation in, 217–24, 261 dividends and, 22, 25, 46, 111, 220, 232, 235, 238, 252, 255, 264, 292, 297 emergency funds and, 43, 214 emotions and, 86–88, 285 enterprise mindset and, 103–4, 106, 113–19, 180 expenses and, 47, 51, 59, 128, 131, 133, 136–37, 141–44, 214, 263, 267, 271–72, 276, 280–82, 284–85, 287, 289–92, 295, 297, 313 fast-track strategy for, 210–62 fees of, 211–12, 224–38, 252, 260–61, 267, 296, 300, 307 figuring out how much money you have for, 216–17, 260–61 financial freedom levels and, 16–17 future-optimization framework and, 301–2, 306–8 gambling vs., 210–11 how to contribute to, 244–51 inflation and, 22, 25, 35, 39–42, 46, 114, 138, 213–14, 219, 264, 290 international, 216, 229–30, 235–36 job hacking and, 106, 156–58, 161–62, 168–69 lifestyle and, 57, 59–61, 259, 267, 278 living off them, 287–99, 312, 314 living richer life and, 312–17 long-term, 22, 213, 216, 230–32, 253–55, 260, 275–78, 286, 289 maxing out of, 211, 213, 239–51, 262 net worth and, 76–79, 82–83, 91, 108, 146, 223, 256, 268, 273, 276 and paying down debt, 84–86, 88, 92 rates of, 216–18, 259, 262, 302 real estate and, 2, 43, 119, 131, 146–47, 212–13, 237, 256, 260,262–86, 289, 300, 302 rebalancing of, 223–24, 236, 238, 261, 307 retiring and, 8–9, 21–28, 39–44, 46–51, 54–56, 60–61, 74–75, 179, 212, 215–22, 226, 229, 239, 242, 244–48, 251, 275, 287–92, 294–99 returns of, 22, 43–44, 46, 211, 213, 215, 222–23, 228, 239–40, 243, 245–46, 252, 254–55, 257–62, 264–66, 271–72, 274, 280, 285, 289–92, 294, 296, 300, 312–13 of Sabatier, 9–10, 30, 36, 95, 108, 114–18, 144, 181–83, 213–14,216–17, 220, 236, 256–57, 274–75, 285–86, 308 savings and, 95, 114–19, 143–44, 153–54, 213–17, 225, 239, 254, 258, 267–68, 273, 285, 287 selection of, 228–31, 254–55, 261–62 short-term, 213–16, 230, 260, 275, 286 side hustles and, 69–70, 95, 108, 113, 179–83, 187–88, 190, 192, 208, 216, 218, 220, 249–50, 259, 262, 264, 289–91, 298 taxes and, 46, 114, 211–15, 218, 224, 228, 232, 237, 239–55, 260, 262–68, 270–72, 275–77, 281–82, 285, 288, 291–300, 315 withdrawals from, 39–44, 46–49, 51, 54–56, 61, 66, 68–70, 239–45, 247–48, 251–54, 260, 262, 287–99 your number and, 37, 47, 49–51, 54–56, 66, 68–70, 72–74, 82–83, 91, 137, 179, 181, 210, 213, 216, 221, 259–60, 275–76, 287–89 see also under bonds; brokerage accounts; incomes; stocks, stock market iShares, 232, 234 Kelly, Brian (The Points Guy), 192 lawyers, law firms, 95, 144, 167, 193–94, 205, 224, 280, 313–14 website building for, 181–82, 194, 202 liabilities, 76–82, 91, 265 lifestyle, 28, 74, 158 expenses and, 17–18, 21, 57–63 housing and, 58–60, 62–63, 65–66 investing and, 57, 59–61, 259, 267, 278 of Sabatier, 9, 61–62 side hustles and, 111, 113, 191, 207–9 your number and, 15, 37, 59–60, 62 limited liability companies (LLCs), 179, 189–90, 309 load fees, 224 loans, 89, 151, 215 expenses and, 130–31, 147 investing and, 260, 263–64, 268–69, 271, 273, 279, 281, 285–86 net worth and, 77, 81–82 paying down, 84–85 preapproved, 281, 286 to students, 8, 55–56, 77, 81–82, 84–85, 130, 147, 313 Los Angeles, Calif., 148, 159, 271–72, 282 loss aversion, 88 Millennial Money, 11, 107, 146, 156, 164, 166, 168–69, 182 model portfolios, 229 Money Talk Cards, 305, 308 mopeds, 20, 109, 148, 182 mortgages, 52, 58, 66, 81–84, 131, 151 adjustable rate (ARMs), 268–70 fifteen–year, 269–70, 274 fixed rate (FRMs), 268–69, 274 investing and, 263–64, 266–77, 281, 283, 285–86 net worth and, 77, 81–82 preapproved, 281, 286 savings and, 146, 154 thirty-year, 269–70 mutual funds, 226, 229, 241, 243, 258 net worth, 13, 76–83, 122, 300, 312 calculation of, 76–77, 91 definition of, 82–83, 91 future-optimization framework and, 305–6, 308 investing and, 76–79, 82–83, 91, 108, 146, 223, 256, 268, 273, 276 negative, 82, 130–31 real estate and, 77–79, 83, 146 of Sabatier, 9–10, 82, 108, 114 savings and, 76, 79, 82, 146 side hustles and, 77, 108 and thinking about money before buying, 130–31, 137 your number and, 82–83, 91 New York City, 15, 150, 152, 166 housing and real estate in, 63–67, 271, 282, 315 1 percent rule, 281–82 passions, 2–3, 9, 33–35, 127 analysis of, 191–94, 209 in retirement, 297, 299 side hustles and, 11, 188, 191–96, 209 present value formula, 55–56 private mortgage insurance (PMI), 273–74 real estate: affordability of, 267, 270–75 and being prepared to walk away from deals, 285–86 buying and holding, 275, 286 case for, 264–66 criteria to follow for, 280–81, 285–86 finding properties and, 280–86 flipping of, 275–76, 286 with high rent appreciation potential, 281–82, 286 investing and, 2, 43, 119, 131, 146–47, 212–13, 237, 256, 260, 262–86, 289, 300, 302 net worth and, 77–79, 83, 146 refinancing of, 268, 270, 273 scaling in, 278–80, 286 test driving neighborhoods and, 284, 286 and thinking about money before buying, 127, 130–31, 133 see also homes, housing real estate agents, 182, 194, 283 real estate investment trusts (REITs), 237, 262 Realtors, 194, 279, 281–83, 286 recruiters, recruiting, 163, 165–66, 170, 173, 177, 192 retiring, retirement, 1, 8–12, 18–31, 34–36, 38–56, 308, 310 housing and, 45, 49, 52, 54, 60, 144 how much money actually needed for, 44–49 inflation and, 24–28, 40–42, 45–46, 94 investing and, 8–9, 21–28, 39–44, 46–51, 54–56, 60–61, 74–75, 179, 212, 215–22, 226, 229, 239, 242, 244–48, 251, 275, 287–92, 294–99 with less money at thirty than at sixty, 38–39, 47, 54 lifestyle and, 60–61, 74 living richer life and, 313, 315–16 and money for rest of your life, 42–44 and paying down debt, 84, 86 rewriting of, 28–31 of Sabatier, 8, 35, 45, 275 savings and, 8–9, 11, 20–22, 24–30, 38–40, 44–49, 51, 54–56, 60–61, 74, 94–96, 141, 144, 251 side hustles and, 43–44, 61, 69–70, 74, 179, 188, 192 time and, 19, 27, 45–47, 49n, 297–99 Trinity study and, 39–44 your number and, 36, 49–56, 68–70, 72–74 ride-sharing, 52, 109, 148 side hustles and, 183, 187, 190 risks, risk, 10, 16, 40, 49, 309 daily habits and, 89, 91–92 emotions and, 87–88 investing and, 14, 87, 106, 113–14, 211, 213, 215, 217–23, 229–30, 235, 237–38, 255–56, 260–61, 263–64, 269, 271, 279, 285, 289–91, 301, 317 side hustles and, 108, 112–13, 194, 202, 204 Robin, Vicki, 1–3, 32 robo-advisors, 212 Roth 401(k) accounts, 241, 243–45, 294, 298 Roth IRA accounts: conversion ladder for, 295, 298–99 investing in, 79, 95, 214, 218, 228, 241, 243–44, 247–49, 251, 258, 294–96, 298–99, 302 Rule of 72, 59, 75 Run the Trap, 191 S&P 500, 228, 232–38, 261 San Francisco, Calif., 64, 271, 282 savings, saving, 3, 5–11, 140–54 building wealth and, 93–94, 118 compounding and, 55, 59, 72, 94, 96, 143 daily habits and, 88–90 emotions and, 87–88 enterprise mindset and, 103, 107, 113–17 expenses and, 42–43, 74, 96–101, 120–21, 126–28, 130, 132–33, 137–38,140–44, 153–54 financial freedom levels and, 16–17 food and, 142–43, 152–54 future-optimization framework and, 301, 303, 305–6 housing and, 63, 67, 141–47, 154 inflation and, 8–9, 24–28 investing and, 95, 114–19, 143–44, 153–54, 213–17, 225, 239, 254, 258, 267–68, 273, 285, 287 job hacking and, 107, 159–60, 163, 170, 177 lifestyle and, 57–58, 60–61 living richer life and, 312–17 net worth and, 76, 79, 82, 146 rates of, 11, 13, 20–21, 24, 26–28, 33, 89, 94–101, 108, 114–19, 141,143, 213, 216–18, 256–58, 260, 300, 302–3, 305–6, 312–15, 317 retiring and, 8–9, 11, 20–22, 24–30, 38–40, 44–49, 51, 54–56, 60–61, 74, 94–96, 141, 144, 251 of Sabatier, 5–7, 9–11, 30, 45, 63, 95, 138, 143–44, 148, 151–53, 216–17, 256–57, 300, 302, 311–12 side hustles and, 113, 179 time and, 32–33, 94, 96–101, 118 transportation and, 141–43, 147–52, 154 your number and, 36–37, 39, 51, 54–56, 59, 68, 70–75, 94–95, 97–101, 118, 137, 141 see also health savings accounts saying no, 127, 208, 303–5, 310, 312 Charles Schwab, 232–33, 252 search engine optimization (SEO) projects, 175, 182 sequence-of-returns risk, 290–91 short sales, 283, 286 side hustles, 11, 14, 90, 153, 179–209, 300, 317 benefits of, 109–10, 185, 189 competitive analysis for, 200–203, 205, 209 enterprise mindset and, 104, 108–13, 119, 180 evaluation framework for, 190–209 in evenings, 186 figuring out what to charge for, 201–4, 209 future-optimization framework and, 301–3, 306 getting your first sale and, 204–6 hiring others for, 109, 111–13, 119, 206–7 in in-between moments, 187–89 incomes and, see under incomes investing and, 69–70, 95, 108, 113, 179–83, 187–88, 190, 192, 208, 216, 218, 220, 249–50, 259, 262, 264, 289–91, 298 job hacking and, 156, 160, 175 and knowing when to scale, 206–9 LLCs and, 179, 189–90 in mornings, 185 net worth and, 77, 108 retiring and, 43–44, 61, 69–70, 74, 179, 188, 192 of Sabatier, 9, 20, 58, 95, 104, 108–9, 175–76, 181–83, 185–86, 188, 194–95, 202–3, 205, 207–8 skills and, 109, 119, 175, 190–97, 201–2, 209 supply and demand for, 179, 182, 189, 194, 197–204, 206, 209 taxes and, 189–90, 249 time and, 108, 111, 180–87, 190, 199–200, 202–3, 207–9, 303 transportation and, 148, 187, 189, 192–93, 196, 208 on weekends, 186 and working for someone else vs. for yourself, 183–84, 207–9 your number and, 69–70, 179–81, 189, 209 your story in, 204–5 simplified employee pension individual retirement accounts (SEP IRAs), 79, 218, 228, 241, 243, 249–51 skills, 10, 51, 104, 133 analysis of, 191–94, 209 job hacking and, 14, 105, 156, 159, 164–66, 169, 174–78 learning new ones, 195–96, 209 retiring and, 34, 44 side hustles and, 109, 119, 175, 190–97, 201–2, 209 Social Security, 8, 26, 45n, 249, 269 expenses and, 53, 128, 141–42 Solo 401(k) accounts, 241, 243, 249–50 stocks, stock market, 160 buying individual, 254–57 compounding and, 22, 72 dividends paid by, 22, 25, 46, 111 emotions and, 86–87 international, 216, 229–30, 235–36 investing in, 2, 9, 17, 24–26, 34, 39–42, 46–47, 84, 86–87, 104, 114, 119, 162, 211–26, 228–38, 241–42, 244, 252–58, 260–62, 264–65, 273–79, 285, 287, 289–91, 297 past performance of, 222–23 and paying down debt, 84–86 retiring and, 39–44, 46–49 selection of, 228–29, 230–31, 255, 261 your number and, 36, 72 target date funds, 228–29, 238 taxes, 59, 64, 77, 83–84, 88, 102, 143 deductions and, 84, 128, 189–90, 240–42, 245–52, 254, 266–68, 276, 294,296–98 enterprise mindset and, 103, 114, 118 future-optimization framework and, 307–9 inflation and, 25, 45 investing and, 46, 114, 211–15, 218, 224, 228, 232, 235, 237, 239–55, 260, 262–68, 270–72, 275–77, 281–82, 285, 288, 291–99, 300, 315 job hacking and, 157–58 real hourly income rates and, 122–25, 129 retiring and, 19, 27, 45–47, 49n, 297–99 of Sabatier, 7–8 savings rates and, 95–96, 118 side hustles and, 189–90, 249 and thinking about money before buying, 120, 127–30 your number and, 52–53, 68–69 1031 exchanges, 264–65, 275 three fund investments, 235–36 time, 2, 10, 63, 153 compounding and, 22, 33, 305 daily habits and, 90–91 enterprise mindset and, 103, 105–6, 108, 111, 118–19, 300 expenses and, 32, 75, 129–30, 133–39 future-optimization framework and, 301, 303–5, 307–10 investing and, 33–34, 118, 133, 210, 212, 214–15, 224, 239, 283, 308 job hacking and, 105–6, 155–56, 160–64, 166–68, 170–73, 177–78 living richer life and, 312, 314–17 real hourly income rates and, 121–25, 129, 134–35, 139, 307 relationship between money and, 19, 32–35, 106, 111, 113, 121, 129, 133, 184, 188, 207–10, 303–4, 307–8, 310 retirement and, 19, 27, 45–47, 49n, 297–99 savings and, 32–33, 94, 96–101, 118 side hustles and, 108, 111, 180–87, 190, 199–200, 202–3, 207–9, 303 transportation and, 32–33, 148 Top Five Regrets of the Dying, The (Ware), 29–30 total stock market funds, see index funds trading, 132–33, 139 transportation, 32–35, 64, 91, 213, 297, 299, 313 expenses and, 25, 52, 54, 58–59, 61–62, 65–66, 75, 127, 140–43, 147–52, 154 housing and, 65–66, 145 job hacking and, 156–60 lifestyle and, 58–59, 61–62 real hourly income rates and, 122–25, 139 of Sabatier, 148, 151–52 savings and, 141–43, 147–52, 154 side hustles and, 148, 187, 189, 192–93, 196, 208 time and, 32–33, 148 travel-hacking and, 148–52, 154 your number and, 52, 54, 59 Trinity study, 39–44 vacations, 6, 9, 17, 28, 34, 52, 91, 105, 156, 187, 192, 278 expenses and, 130–31, 147 valuables, 52, 77–79, 83 value investing, 255 Vanguard, 212, 215, 234, 252 500 Index Fund Admiral Shares (VFIAX), 232–33 500 Index Fund Investor Shares (VFINX), 228, 232–33 Total Stock Market ETF (VTI), 222, 226, 232 Total Stock Market Index Fund (VTSAX), 228, 232–33, 257 Volkswagen (VW) campers, 8, 109, 182 Wang, Jim, 192 Ware, Bronnie, 29–30 wealth, 2–3, 16, 28, 38, 230 building of, 6, 11–12, 76, 86, 88, 93–94, 103, 118 daily habits and, 88–90 emotions and, 86, 88 job hacking and, 155, 162 net worth and, 76, 82 website building, 20, 58, 104, 175, 194–95, 201–3, 205, 207 for law firms, 181–82, 194, 202 We Need Diverse Books, 314–15 Your Money or Your Life (Robin and Dominguez), 2–3, 32 your number, 77, 307 breaking it down into smaller goals, 70–76 calculation and recalculation of, 13, 15, 44, 49–57, 66–69, 72, 75–76,82–83, 288–89, 300 definition of, 13, 82, 91 expenses and, 13, 36–38, 50–57, 59–60, 62–66, 68–70, 75, 135, 137, 276 housing and, 52, 54, 66–67 incomes and, 36–39, 68–70, 74, 82–83, 91, 169, 180, 189 investing and, 37, 47, 49–51, 54–56, 66, 68–70, 72–74, 82–83, 91, 137, 179, 181, 210, 213, 216, 221, 259–60, 275–76, 287–89 job hacking and, 155, 169, 174 lifestyle and, 15, 37, 59–60, 62 living richer life and, 312, 316 net worth and, 82–83, 91 of Sabatier, 12–13, 36 savings and, 36–37, 39, 51, 54–56, 59, 68, 70–75, 94–95, 97–101, 118, 137, 141 side hustles and, 69–70, 179–81, 189, 208 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ABOUT THE AUTHOR Grant Sabatier, called "The Millennial Millionaire" by CNBC, is the Founder of MillennialMoney.com, which has reached over 10 million readers.


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

He pauses, then talks about Usenet, a distributed message board system. He attributes the demise of Usenet to what he calls bad actors—essentially, jerks. He continues, “That’s always been the problem with society. Society has always had the issue of assholes ruining it for everybody.” The sentiment he shares is common among cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiasts—a cynical view of human nature, where people are selfish and untrustworthy. The idea that life is “nasty, brutish, and short” comes from the political and moral philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who argued that a strong, authoritarian government is needed to curb the selfish instinct that lives in all of us.

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. Hardin’s original essay in 1968 used the example of the medieval commons, a place where peasants grazed their cows.

Years ago, I would have gotten an enormous thrill from this conference: the light-filled rooms, the eccentric but well-dressed audience who jet around from Berlin to San Francisco with casual, glittering affluence, after-parties with good drugs at plush lofts, and most of all, the way changing the world seems to be just a keystroke away. A few people here are “blockchain bros,” young men hyped on internet culture and the promise of blockchain. Some of them are ready to pitch their companies at any given moment. More recently, popular support for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency has oscillated between feverish excitement and wariness about its electricity consumption—it requires more electricity annually than Switzerland. By creating a system based on the assumption that humans are destructive and selfish, you only end up making those assumptions reality: a self-fulfilling prophecy.


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

A version of this system is being implemented by a social network called Akasha, based on the increasingly prominent Ethereum cryptocurrency.48 QV fits with the framework of cryptocurrencies, which require formal governance rules to allow for the decentralized management they rely on, so using it also for social aggregation in such a context is natural. However, the exact implementation is unclear at the time of this writing, and not available to the public; much in the world of cryptocurrencies is secretive. However, we hope that broader use of QV in these contexts will provide a more powerful test than political polling of how QV would work if adopted in social settings where norms and values would adapt to its use.

Steel and, 174 Monopoly (game), 43 monopsony, 190, 199–201, 223, 234, 238–41, 255 Moore’s Law, 286–87 mortgages, 65–66, 70, 74–75, 130, 157 Morton, Fiona Scott, 191 Mullainathan, Sendhil, 114 Musk, Elon, 30 Muslims, 129, 131 mutual funds, 181–82, 193 Myerson, Roger, 50–51, 66, 69 Naidu, Suresh, 240 Napster, 212 National Health Service, 291 Nationalist revolution, 46 Nazis, 93–94 neoliberalism, 5, 9, 11, 24, 255 Nepal, 151–53, 157 Netflix, 221, 289–91, 314n17 network effects, 211, 236, 238, 243 neural networks, 214–19 New Deal, 176, 200 New World, 136 New Zealand, 10, 159 Nielsen, Jakob, 212 Nielsen ratings, 230 Niemöller, Martin, 94 Nobel Prize, xxi, 40, 49–50, 57, 66–68, 92, 97, 236, 278 Obamacare, 114–15, 116 Occupy Wall Street, 3 oligopsony, 234 Oman, 158 one-person-one-vote (1p1v) system, 82–84, 94, 109, 119, 122–24, 304n36, 306n51 open markets, 21–22, 24 OpenTrac, 30–31, 30–32 opt-out rules, 194, 274 Orange Is the New Black (TV series), 221 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 141, 147–49, 159–61, 171 ownership: banking industry and, 183, 184; capitalism and, 34–36, 39, 45–49, 75, 78–79; common, 31, 41–42, 49, 52, 54–55, 61, 147, 187–88, 253 (see also common ownership self-assessed tax [COST]); competition and, 20–21, 41, 49–55, 79; control and, 178–81, 183–85, 193; democracy and, 81–82, 89, 101, 105, 118, 124; developers and, 26, 30–33, 105; efficiency and, 34–38, 43, 48–52, 55, 58–60, 67, 69, 73; entrepreneurs and, xiv, 35, 39, 129, 144–45, 159, 173, 177, 203, 209–12, 224, 226, 256; feudalism and, 16, 34–35, 37, 41, 61, 68, 136, 230–33, 239; holdout risk and, 33, 62, 71–72, 88, 299n28; homeowners and, 17, 26, 33, 42, 56–57, 65; inequality and, 42, 45, 75, 79, 253; intellectual property and, 26, 38, 48, 72, 210, 212, 239; labor and, 146–47, 245, 247; land, 31–33, 38–39, 41, 68, 105, 173; landlords and, 37, 43, 70, 136, 201–2; liberalism and, 17–19, 26–27; liquidity and, 31, 69, 177–79, 194, 301n49; partial common, 52, 298n7; partnerships and, 52–54, 57, 174; peasants and, 35–37, 61, 136; property as monopoly and, 30–34, 37–44, 48–62, 65, 68, 72, 77, 79; public goods and, 253 (see also public goods); Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 105; Radical Markets and, 170, 173, 177–90, 193, 195, 199–200; self-assessment and, 31, 55–56, 61–62, 70, 72, 258, 260, 270, 302n63; shareholders and, 118, 170, 178–84, 189, 193–95; Smith on, 17–18; state, 19, 39, 42, 48 Page, Larry, 211 Pandora, 289, 292 Pareto efficiency, 110 partnerships, 52–54, 57, 174 PayPal, 212 Peloponnesian War, 83 pencils, 278–79 pensions, 157, 181 phalanx system, 83 Philosophical Radicals, 4, 16, 20, 22–23, 95 Pierson, Paul, 191 PNC Bank, 183, 184 Poland, 47 polls: elections and, 13, 111; Likert surveys and, 111–16, 120, 306n53; market research and, 111–16; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 111–16, 118, 303n17; Trump and, 296n20 pollution, 44, 65, 98–105, 137, 299n28 populism, 3, 12–14, 146, 261, 265, 296n16 portfolio theory, 180 poverty, xv; COST and, 259; extreme, 164; Galbraith on, 125; George on, 36–37, 43, 250; migrants and, 166; peasants and, 35–37, 61, 136; serfs and, 35, 48, 231–32, 236, 255; slavery and, xiv, 1, 19, 23, 37, 96, 136, 255, 260; slums and, xiii, xviii, 17; prices: auctions and, xv–xix, 49–51, 70–71, 97, 99, 147–49, 156–57, 300n34; common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) and, 62–63, 67–77, 256, 258, 263, 275, 300n43, 317n18; competition and, 20–22, 25, 173, 175, 180, 185–90, 193, 201, 204, 244; computers and, 21; controls for, 132; democracy and, 92, 97–102; indexing and, 185–91, 302n63; Internet and, 21; labor and, 132, 156, 207, 212, 221, 235, 243–44; liberalism and, 7, 8, 17–22, 25–27; markets and, 278–80, 284–85; markup, 7, 8, 60; monopoly, 58–59, 179, 258, 300n43; property and, 31–42, 47–64, 67–77; public leases and, 69–72; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 263, 275; Radical Markets and, 170–75, 179–80, 185–90, 193, 201, 204; resale price maintenance and, 200–201 private goods, 97, 99, 110, 122–24, 253, 262, 264, 271–72, 303n17 privatization, xiv, 9 “Problem of Social Cost, The” (Coase), 48 productivity, 9–10, 16, 38, 57, 73, 123, 240–41, 247, 254–55, 258, 278 profits: common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) and, 275, 300n43; democracy and, 99; human capital and, 258; inequality and, 6–7; labor and, 163, 208–9, 234, 258, 260; liberalism and, 6–7, 17–18; lobbyists and, 262; moral values and, 271; ownership and, 33, 59–60, 68, 78, 299n28; Radical Markets and, 171, 178–79, 185–89, 193, 199, 201 programmers, 163, 208–9, 214, 217, 219, 224 Progress and Poverty (George), 36–37, 43, 250 Progressive movement, 45, 137, 174–75, 200, 203, 262 property, xiv; capitalism and, 34–36, 39, 45–49, 75, 78–79; central planning and, 39–42, 46–48, 62; common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) and, 31, 61–79, 271–74, 300n43, 301n47; competition and, 41, 49–55, 79; democracy and, 83, 88, 96, 99; developers and, 26, 30–33, 105; efficiency and, 34–38, 43, 48–52, 55, 58–60, 67, 69, 73; eminent domain and, 33, 62, 89; feudalism and, 16, 34–35, 37, 41, 61, 68, 136, 230–33, 239; freedom and, 34–39; George on, 36–37, 42–46, 49, 51, 59, 66; gift of nature and, 40; hoarding of, 255; holdout risk and, 33, 62, 71–72, 88, 299n28; homeowners and, 17, 26, 33, 42, 56–57, 65; inequality and, 42, 45, 75, 79, 253; investment in, 33, 35, 37, 43, 49–54, 58–61, 66–67, 71, 73, 76–78, 255, 299n28; labor and, 34–39, 45, 67, 73–79, 136, 147, 210, 212, 239; laissez-faire and, 253; landlords and, 37, 43, 70, 136, 201–2; landowners and, 31–33, 38–39, 41, 68, 105, 173; liberalism and, 17–18, 25–28; liquidity and, 31, 69, 177–79, 194, 301n49; markets and, 40–45, 282; monopolies and, 34–39; ownership and, 30–34, 37–44, 48–62, 65, 68, 72, 77, 79; partnerships and, 52–54, 57, 174; peasants and, 35–37, 61, 136; prices and, 31–42, 47–64, 67–77; private, 25, 28, 34–42, 48–52, 61–62, 68, 76, 78, 99, 177, 253, 271–72, 299n28, 301n46; public goods and, 41, 73, 253; public leases and, 69–72; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 273; Radical Markets and, 173, 177, 272; reform and, 35, 37, 39, 46; regulations and, 46–48, 299n27; right of way and, 32–33; rights of, 35, 48–49, 51–52, 88, 173, 210; self-assessment and, 31, 55–56, 61–62, 70, 72, 258, 260, 270, 302n63; socialism and, 37–42, 45–49; taxes and, 28, 31, 42–44, 51, 55–70, 73–76, 301n36; turnover rate and, 58–61, 64, 76; United States and, 36, 38, 45, 47–48, 51; wealth and, 36, 38, 40, 45, 55, 61, 73–79 Proposition 8, 89 “Protection and Real Wages” (Stolper and Samuelson), 142 psychology, 67, 78, 111, 114, 233, 238, 248, 290 public goods: collective decisions and, 98; common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) and, 256; democracy and, 28, 97–100, 107, 110, 120, 123, 126; globalization and, 265; labor and, 147; markets and, 271; property and, 41, 73, 253; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 110, 120, 123–26, 256, 264, 272; selfishness and, 270; Smith on, 16 public leases, 69–72 “Pure Theory of Public Expenditure, The” (Samuelson), 97 Qatar, 158 Qin dynasty, 46 Quadratic Voting (QV): 1p1v and, 82–84, 94, 109, 119, 122–24, 304n36, 306n51; Arrow’s Theorem and, 303n17; auctions and, xvii–xix; broader application of, 118–19, 273–74; collective decisions and, 110–11, 118–20, 122, 124, 273, 303n17, 304n36; common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) and, 123–25, 194, 261–63, 273, 275, 286; competition and, 304n36; corporate governance and, 194; cryptocurrencies and, 117–18; democracy and, 105–22; efficiency and, 110, 126, 256; elections and, 115, 119–21, 268, 306n52; equality and, 264; free-rider problem and, 107–8; globalization and, 266–69; governance and, 117, 122, 266–69; growth and, 123; happiness and, 108–10, 306n52; immigrants and, 261, 266–69, 273; inequality and, 264; legal issues and, 267, 275; liberalism and, 268; Likert surveys and, 111–16, 120, 306n53; markets and, 122–23, 256, 272, 286, 304n36; methodology of, 105–10; monetizing, 263–64; monopolies and, 272; nature of currency and, 122–23; optimality and, 108–9, 120, 286; ownership and, 105; Pareto efficiency and, 110; political effects of, 261–64; polls and, 111–16, 118, 303n17; prices and, 263, 275; property and, 273; proportional, 106–7; public goods and, 110, 120, 123–26, 256, 264, 272; Radical Markets and, 82–126, 194, 272; rating and, 117–18; reform and, 95, 105–6; scope of trade and, 122–23; social aggregation and, 117–18; society and, 272–73; software flaw and, 305n44; square root function and, 82; taxes and, 263, 275; technology and, 264; testing of, 111, 114–18; voice credits and, 80–82, 105, 113, 117, 119, 121–23, 251, 263–64, 267, 269; wealth and, 256–57, 261–64, 267–68, 272–73, 275, 286 Quarfoot, David, 114 reCAPTCHA, 235–36 Reddit, 117 Red Queen phenomenon, 176–77, 184 Red Terror, 93 reform: academics and, 2–3; antitrust policies and, 23, 48, 174–77, 180, 184–86, 191, 197–203, 242, 255, 262, 286; auctions and, xv–xvii, 49–51, 70–71, 97, 99, 147–49, 156–57; common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) and, 298n7; George and, 23; globalization and, 255; immigrants and, 129, 153; labor and, 129, 153, 240, 247, 255; liberalism and, 2–4, 23–25, 255; property and, 35, 37, 39, 46; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 105 (see also Quadratic Voting [QV]); Radical Markets and, 95, 105–6, 181, 191; regulations and, 239–45 (see also regulations); taxes and, 274–75; United Kingdom and, 95–96 Reform Act of 1832, 95 refugees, 130, 140, 145 regulations: banking, 98–99; capitalism and, 262; Coase on, 299n27; competition and, 262; democracy and, 98–100, 123; deregulation and, 3, 9, 24; discrimination and, 272; elitism and, 3; environmental, 265, 291; labor and, 138, 155–56, 165, 239–45, 266; liberalism and, 3, 9, 18, 24; property and, 46–48, 299n27; Radical Markets and, 176, 180, 189, 191, 194, 197, 203 religion, 15, 17, 19, 55, 78, 81, 85–90, 94, 129, 145, 272 resale price maintenance, 200–201 revolutions, 36, 41, 46, 86, 88, 90–92, 95, 224, 255, 273, 277 Ricardo, David, 133 Rio de Janeiro, xiii–xiv, 105 robber barons, 175, 199–200 Robinson Crusoe (DeFoe), 132 robots, 222, 248, 251, 254, 287 Rockefeller, John D., 174–75 Roemer, John, 240 Roman Catholic Church, 85, 94 Roman Republic, 84 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 176 Roosevelt, Theodore, 175 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 86 Russia, 12, 13, 46 same-sex marriage, 89 sample complexity, 218 Samuelson, Paul, 97–98, 106–7, 142–43 Sanders, Bernie, 12 Satterthwaite, Mark, 50–51, 66, 69 Saudia Arabia, 158–59 savings: growth and, 6; labor and, 150–51; mercantilism and, 132; Radical Markets and, 169, 172, 181; retirement, 171–72, 260, 274; squandering, 123 Schmalz, Martin, 189 Schumpter, Joseph, 47 Segal, Ilya, 52 self-assessment, 31, 55–56, 61–62, 70, 72, 258, 260, 270, 302n63 self-driving cars, 230 serfs, 35, 48, 231–32, 236, 255 Shafir, Eldar, 114 Shalizi, Cosma, 281 shallow nets, 216–19 shareholders, 118, 170, 178–84, 189, 193–95 Sherman Antitrust Act, 174, 262 Show Boat (film), 209 Silicon Valley, 211 Silk Road, 131 Singapore, 160 siren servers, 220–24, 230–41, 243 Siri, 219, 248 Skype, 155, 202 slavery, xiv, 1, 19, 23, 37, 96, 136, 255, 260 slums, xiii, xviii, 17 Smith, Adam, xix–xx, 4; capitalism and, 34–35; competition and, 17; diamond-water paradox and, 224–25; efficiency and, 37; immigrants and, 132–33; inequality and, 22; markets and, 16–17, 21–22; monopolies and, 173; Wealth of Nations and, 22 social aggregation, 117–18 Social Democratic Party, 45 social dividend, 41, 43, 49, 73–75, 147, 256–59, 263, 269, 298n13, 302n63 socialism: central planning and, 39–42, 47, 277, 281; George and, 37, 45, 137, 250, 253; German right and, 94; industry and, 45; irrationality of capitalism and, 39 (see also capitalism); labor and, 137, 299n24; laissez-faire and, 250, 253; markets and, 277–78, 281; Marx and, 137, 277; property and, 37–42, 45–49; radical democracy and, 94; Radical Markets and, 293; Sanders and, 12; Schumpeter on, 47; von Mises and, 278; workers’ cooperatives and, 299n24 social media, 251–52; data and, 202, 212, 231, 233–36; democracy and, 117, 126; Facebook, xxi, 28, 50, 117, 202, 205–9, 212–13, 220–21, 231–48, 289; Instagram, 117, 202, 207; Reddit, 117; Twitter, 117, 221; WhatsApp, 202; Yelp, 63, 117 Social Security, 274 Southwest, 191 sovereignty, 1, 16, 86, 131–32 Soviet Union, 1, 19, 46–47, 277–78, 281–82, 288 spam, 210, 245 special interest groups, 25, 98, 256 Spense, A.


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

About which society is both entranced and skeptical. Over time, by constantly making disorienting predictions about the future, we have trained society to handle these predictions the only way they know how: to wait and see. Futurism has become a dangerous game. In the ’90s, I was at Wired magazine. They predicted the future would have cryptocurrency, virtual reality, video chat, smart watches, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, robots, movie streaming, Mars rovers, solar power, carbon recycling, social networks, corporate space rockets, and a drastic reduction in infant mortality worldwide. All of that happened. Some of it took a while.

It was reddish and hard. It looked real. If you sent it to a lab they would tell you it was real. Of course, no one agreed on what would happen. Investors didn’t know what to make of it, so they decided to wait. Matthew is not the guy who waits for others. He created PembiCoin and ICO’d the world’s first rhino horn cryptocurrency. They raised less than a hundred dollars. Alex and Nick wanted to save the cows. Mike and Brian wanted to free the tuna. “This is the DNA of woolly mammoth collagen.” Alex held an Eppendorf tube between his thumb and index finger. “Whaaaat?!” I said. “How’d you get it?” “Public data sets.

Ninety-nine percent of the “new industry” jobs created since 2010 have gone to people with a graduate degree. Virtual reality is a future industry; it doesn’t need many physical laborers. Nuclear fusion is a future industry; it will need fewer jobs than the coal and gas industry it replaces. Cryptocurrency and blockchain don’t create jobs. These technologies just make it easier to get paid in fractions of pennies. Even biotech is rapidly adopting robots to replace lab techs. All of the future industries will follow the Power Law, which is VC speak for “winners take all.” You can’t point to a single deep-tech field and argue, “That’s going to create a lot of jobs for everyone.”


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

In this sense, the ecosystem is what is going to be offered, offering individuals, collectives, cooperatives, and social companies a set of tools for connecting with and supporting each other and anyone aiming to make real, radical social change. FairCoop does not have a legal entity at the moment, so there is not a legal basis for ownership. FairCoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency based in free software, so in that sense nobody owns it; everyone who has some faircoins and runs the wallet software is part of the decentralized ownership of the currency system. Governance takes place in an open, participatory process through online assemblies every month and open discussions that can be accessed at the Fair.Coop site.

However, to deliver the AI-powered features that near-future users will demand, applications will need to draw upon sophisticated industrial-strength AI software services and harness powerful clusters of data-mining server farms. This stuff doesn’t come cheap. Free, open, and radically decentralized AI isn’t a thing yet, but blockchain-based platforms like Ethereum and Backfeed could offer decentralized alternatives to the corporate cloud. More libre but not gratis, as you’ll pay for decentralization with cryptocurrency. In its infancy, Ethereum is far more expensive than the Amazon cloud but with laughable performance and capability by comparison. Can you afford to wait for the decentralized solution or do you accept that a corporate cloud is presently your only viable high-performance and affordable option?

One example is the European Commission’s CAPS program, which has invested around €60 million on collaborative and open platforms to pilot bottom-up, citizen-led projects with strong social impact such as the D-CENT project (http://dcentproject.eu), developing distributed and privacy-aware tools for direct democracy and cryptocurrencies for economic empowerment. Initiatives like these can help ensure that the data produced by platforms, devices, sensors, and software doesn’t get locked down in corporate silos, but becomes available for the public good. Investing public resources for piloting innovative, cooperative platforms is necessary to enable credible alternatives to the current data paradigms exploited by the dominant platforms—integrating economy, technology, society, and policy, which would otherwise remain fragmented and lead to market concentration and regulatory breakdowns.


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

Dave Asprey, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Bulletproof Diet “You may think you’ve heard all there is to know about the dramatic changes to come in our digital future. Well, prepare to have your mind blown... again. In a crowded field of prognosticators, Brett King stands out for his clearly articulated vision of how technology is changing who we are.” Michael J. Casey, author of The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order “As one of the world’s most followed and provocative voices in digital finance, Brett King has once again thrown down the gauntlet. Brett’s vision of the future should be required reading for governments, think-tanks, investors, or basically anyone wondering how transformational technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, Bitcoin and gene-editing may impact our society.”

Money is vitally important, if not central, to commerce in society, but when presented with the concept that cash might disappear or that the use of physical currency is in decline, you will get passionate responses from large swathes of the population diametrically opposed to even the thought of such a shift. When a new cryptocurrency like Bitcoin emerges, you’ll likewise have those who are passionate in their belief that Bitcoin will replace all existing currencies on the planet and eliminate the need for a conventional banking system, as opposed to those who think Bitcoin is purely an instrument for geeks and/or criminals who want total cross-border anonymity for their transactions.

Shells were used by many nations in the Americas, Asia and Pacific. The ancient Greeks, however, were the first to mint actual coins back around 600 to 650 BC, and by the 1st century such coins were increasingly the most standard form of monetary value exchange around the world. Making Money More Efficient Today, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are emerging as a type of next generation currency. While classifying Bitcoin as a currency is the most logical characterisation for most of the public at large, it is by design something that is more efficient than traditional currency, resembling more closely something like the digital equivalent of the shekel in terms of mechanics or valuation.


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

In fact they work well under zero intelligence—a zero‐intelligence crowd, under the right design, works better than a Soviet‐style management composed of maximally intelligent humans. Which is why Bitcoin is an excellent idea. It fulfills the needs of the complex system, not because it is a cryptocurrency, but precisely because it has no owner, no authority that can decide on its fate. It is owned by the crowd, its users. And it now has a track record of several years, enough for it to be an animal in its own right. For other cryptocurrencies to compete, they need to have such a Hayekian property. Bitcoin is a currency without a government. But, one may ask, didn't we have gold, silver, and other metals, another class of currencies without a government?

In my assessment, a global monetary return to gold might be the most significant threat to Bitcoin, yet it is both unlikely to happen and unlikely to destroy Bitcoin completely. Another possibility for derailing Bitcoin would be through the invention of a new form of sound money that is superior to Bitcoin. Many seem to think that the other cryptocurrencies that mimic Bitcoin could achieve this, but it is my firm belief that none of the coins that copy Bitcoin's design can compete with Bitcoin on being sound money, for reasons discussed at length in the next section of the chapter, primarily: Bitcoin is the only truly decentralized digital currency which has grown spontaneously as a finely balanced equilibrium between miners, coders, and users, none of whom can control it.

Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, AL. 2008 (1922). _____. The Theory of Money and Credit, 2nd ed. Irvington‐on‐Hudson, New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1971. Nakamoto, Satoshi. Bitcoin: A Peer‐to‐Peer Electronic Cash System (n.p., 2008). Narayanan, Arvind et al. Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction. Princeton University Press, 2016. Paar, Christof, Bart Preneel and Jan Pelzl. Understanding Cryptography: A Textbook for Students and Practitioners. Springer, 2009. Philippon, Thomas, and Ariell Reshef. “An International Look at the Growth of Modern Finance.”


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.

Ltd in 1998, 16 ZF (Zeppelin Foundation) presence in, 16, 18 Chinese Century of Humiliation (1840), 56 Chinese Dream (China), 184 Chinese economy African ties (2020s) with, 69–70 Belt and Road Initiative, 100 carbon neutrality goal of the, 62–63 the “China effect” of, 70–72 economic growth (2000s–present) of, 18 emerging global markets interacting with, 63–66, 70–72 energy demands, 62–63 environmental degradation and growth of the, 72 FDI investors setting up businesses in SEZs, 57–58, 61 Gini Indices on global income inequality impact of, 37fig–38, 226 historic Silk Road of ancient, 99, 100 IMF forecast on 2020 economic growth of, 71 increased total debt–to–GDP ratio, 62 increasing national income inequality in, 40 IT and Internet revolution role in expanding, 137 oil imports to, 64 post-World War II, 6 the price of progress, 61–63 private sector's percentage of GDP, 172 Reform and Opening Up policy (1979), 15, 18, 36, 57, 59, 72 state capitalism model of the, 171, 172–173 Christian–Democrats (CDU) [Germany], 78, 79 Christian–Democrats political parties (Europe), 83, 188 Civil Rights Act (US), 226 Civil society to advance interest, meaning, or purpose to members, 179 advocacy groups, 243–246 consumer rights groups, 239–240 the international community and, 237–238 as key stakeholders, 178 modern labor unions, 240–243 NGOs as part of the, 183, 197 NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), 183, 197, 214, 237 plagued by inequality and unsustainability, 3 Cleveland (Ohio), 159 Climate Action Tracker, 191 Climate change Anthropocene label on human responsibility for, 161 Fridays for Climate strikes (2018), 149, 250 Greta Thunberg's activism on, 52, 86, 147–150, 250 megatrends driving, 159–162 Paris Agreement (2015) on, 150, 165, 182, 183, 189, 198 reasons for lack of progress in fighting, 150–159 School Strike for Climate (2018), 147, 148–149 searching for solutions to, 165–168 UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) [2015], 150 UN Earth Summit (Rio de Janeiro, 1992) on, 150 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 51, 149 See also Global warming; Greenhouse gases; Pollution Climate change megatrends changing societal preferences, 162–165 demographic changes, 160–161 technological progress, 161–162 urbanization, 159–160 Club of Rome, 12–13, 47–48, 149–150 CO2 emissions, 160, 161, 165–166, 182, 200, 202, 203, 207 Cold War Berlin Wall (1961) during the, 75–76, 88, 89 collapse of Soviet Union ending the, 16, 98 fall of the Iron Curtain ending, 77, 80 Soviet sphere of influence during, 6, 7, 8, 75–77 Collective bargaining decline during the 1980s, 14 European promotion of (1950-1970), 10 Ravensburger Pact's impact on, 17 Colombia, 188 Colonialization (19th century), 104 Columbia University, 11, 22 Columbus, Christopher, 97, 101 Communism collapse (1990s–2000s) Soviet Union, 16, 98 Communist Party of China (CPC), 56–57 ideological battle between capitalism and, 7 Soviet Union's promotion of economic model of, 6, 7, 8 Communist Party of China (CPC), 56–57 Compagnie de Suez (France), 94 Companies aim to generate profits and value creation, 179 at the center point of its stakeholders, 175fig checks and balances within, 185, 193–198 collective bargaining with, 10, 14, 17 global stakeholder model role of, 180fig as key stakeholders, 178 re-emerging post-World War II, 6–7 society demanding that a social purpose be served by, 215–216 Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics to measure goals of, 193, 214–215, 249, 250–251 See also specific company; Stakeholder companies Competition EU's anti-competition ruling against Microsoft, 139–140, 141 Milton Friedman doctrine on, 209 Thiel's editorial on problem of, 208–209 See also Monopolies “Competition is for Losers” Wall Street Journal editorial (Thiel), 208–209 Connective technologies description and importance of, 177 government focus on improving digital connectivity, 225, 227–228, 232 Consumer International, 238 Consumer rights groups, 239–240 Cook, Tim, 211–212 Corporate social responsibility (CSR) Mærsk projects in, 206 Milton Friedman's rejection (1970s) of, 14 Costa Rica, 188 Côte d'Ivoire, 70 COVID-19 pandemic “all of society” approach to the, 224 changing travel habits during the, 164 China's total debt–to–GDP ratio impacted by, 62 economies of ASEAN nations and, 66, 67fig female government leadership found to do better during, 224 global economic impact of, 108 globalization allowing rapid spread of, 107 impact on interest rates by, 31 India's economic growth impacted by, 66, 67, 68–69 inequalities revealed by the, 3–4, 43, 73, 227 as litmus test, 250 New Zealand's successful response to, 219–224, 236 protests over governmental responses to, 87 public debt increase during, 19, 29–30 as reminder of interconnectedness of people, 177 response in Sweden to the, 220 SARS–CoV–2 vaccines developed to combat the, 248 Singapore response to the, 232–233 social disruption due to, 247, 248 South Africa's economic impact due to, 70 Spain and Italy as worst hit economies by, 68 stakeholders working for well-being of people during, 248 US society ill-prepared for the, 186 well-managed response in Germany to, 79 Coyle, Diane, 25, 191, 234 Crabtree, James, 40, 125 Crazy Rich Asians (film), 228 CRRC (China), 142 Cryptocurrencies, 161 Cuban Missile Crisis, 76 Czech Republic, 41 D Dale, Spencer, 49 Dansk Metal (Denmark), 115, 117 Darvas, Zsolt, 36, 37, 112, 113 “Data as a property right” initiative, 239 Data Dividend Project, 239 Davos Manifesto (1973), 13–14, 88, 213 Davos Manifesto (2020), 191–192, 213 Davos meetings.

See also specific country Subsidiarity principle, 181–183 Suez Canal, 103, 200 Sustainable Development Goals (UN), 189, 206, 207, 250 Swabia (Germany), 4, 8, 19, 251 Sweden COVID-19 pandemic response by, 220 stakeholder concept adopted in, 174 vote for right-wing populist parties (2000, 2017–2019), 84fig Swiss Federation, 181 Switzerland continued trust in public institutions in, 196 history of direct democracy in, 195 precious stones/metals imported to China through, 64 T Tabula rasa, 237 Taiwan, 59, 98 See also Asian Tigers Tanzania, 70 TaskRabbit (US), 237 Tata Consulting Services (TCS) [India], 68 Tata Steel (India), 141 Taxation French Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) protests over, 86–87 high Danish rate of, 119 OECD's efforts to create fair global tax rules for Internet, 212 San Francisco's Proposition C proposing tax to help the homeless, 212–213 Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics prosperity pillar on, 214, 249 Teacher Corps, 135 Tech Mahindra [India], 68 Technological disruption changing business landscape, 126–129 Dansk Metal's industrial robots, 115, 117 labor market and challenge of automation, 115–126 Singapore job displacement due to, 125–126 steam engine as, 102, 116, 130–131 See also Digital economy Technological revolutions First Industrial Revolution (19th century), 56, 71, 108, 116, 119, 130–134, 135, 161 First Technological Revolution, 45fig–46 Second Industrial Revolution (1945–early 1970s), 8, 18, 45fig, 105–106, 116, 119, 134–136, 204 Third Industrial Revolution, 15, 45, 116, 137–142 Fourth Industrial Revolution, 18, 45, 68, 71, 116, 122, 125, 142–145, 161–162, 177, 186, 201, 208, 212, 213, 237, 239 Technologies artificial intelligence (AI), 143–144, 145, 161 automation, 115–126 China's “maker movement” of tech start-ups, 55 climate change and technological process, 161–162 connective, 177, 225, 227–228 cryptocurrencies, 161 Dansk Metal's industrial robots working with employees, 115 general-purpose technologies (GPTs), 143 Internet and digital connectivity, 225, 227–228, 232 Internet of Things, 18, 72, 161 Kuznets Wave on income inequality fluctuation and, 45fig–46 shaping positive vs. negative applications of, 144–145 Shenzhen (China) known for homegrown tech companies, 55, 57–61 tech unicorns of ASEAN nations, 66, 67fig workers who oppose automation, 115–116 The Technology Trap (Frey), 116, 135 Tech unicorns (ASEAN nations), 66, 67fig Tencent (US), 55, 60, 143 Tesla (US), 201 Tett, Gillian, 216 Thailand economic recession (1997) in, 97–98 predicted economic growth (2020–2021) in, 65–66 rubber exports to China, 64 Thaker, Jagadish, 223 Thatcher, Margaret, 122 Theodul Glacier, 51 Thiel, Peter, 208–209 Third Industrial Revolution, 15, 45, 116, 137–142 Thompson, Nicholas, 128 3D printing, 107, 108, 116 Thunberg, Greta, 52–53, 86, 147–150, 168, 250 ThyssenKrupp, 141 Tik Tok, 61 TIME Magazine, 172 Tindall, Stephen, 221 Tokopedia (Indonesia), 97 Total (France), 95 “Trade in the Digital Era” report (2019) [OECD], 107 Traveloka (Indonesia), 97 Treaty of Versailles (1919), 5–6 Trente Glorieuses, 110 Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity (Rushkoff), 210 Trust loss of trust in public institutions, 196 rebuilding of public trust in business sector, 210–212 Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management, 225–226 Tuberculosis sanatorium treatments, 11 Twain, Mark, 133 21st century stakeholder capitalism.


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.

Ltd in 1998, 16 ZF (Zeppelin Foundation) presence in, 16, 18 Chinese Century of Humiliation (1840), 56 Chinese Dream (China), 184 Chinese economy African ties (2020s) with, 69–70 Belt and Road Initiative, 100 carbon neutrality goal of the, 62–63 the “China effect” of, 70–72 economic growth (2000s–present) of, 18 emerging global markets interacting with, 63–66, 70–72 energy demands, 62–63 environmental degradation and growth of the, 72 FDI investors setting up businesses in SEZs, 57–58, 61 Gini Indices on global income inequality impact of, 37fig–38, 226 historic Silk Road of ancient, 99, 100 IMF forecast on 2020 economic growth of, 71 increased total debt–to–GDP ratio, 62 increasing national income inequality in, 40 IT and Internet revolution role in expanding, 137 oil imports to, 64 post-World War II, 6 the price of progress, 61–63 private sector's percentage of GDP, 172 Reform and Opening Up policy (1979), 15, 18, 36, 57, 59, 72 state capitalism model of the, 171, 172–173 Christian–Democrats (CDU) [Germany], 78, 79 Christian–Democrats political parties (Europe), 83, 188 Civil Rights Act (US), 226 Civil society to advance interest, meaning, or purpose to members, 179 advocacy groups, 243–246 consumer rights groups, 239–240 the international community and, 237–238 as key stakeholders, 178 modern labor unions, 240–243 NGOs as part of the, 183, 197 NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), 183, 197, 214, 237 plagued by inequality and unsustainability, 3 Cleveland (Ohio), 159 Climate Action Tracker, 191 Climate change Anthropocene label on human responsibility for, 161 Fridays for Climate strikes (2018), 149, 250 Greta Thunberg's activism on, 52, 86, 147–150, 250 megatrends driving, 159–162 Paris Agreement (2015) on, 150, 165, 182, 183, 189, 198 reasons for lack of progress in fighting, 150–159 School Strike for Climate (2018), 147, 148–149 searching for solutions to, 165–168 UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) [2015], 150 UN Earth Summit (Rio de Janeiro, 1992) on, 150 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 51, 149 See also Global warming; Greenhouse gases; Pollution Climate change megatrends changing societal preferences, 162–165 demographic changes, 160–161 technological progress, 161–162 urbanization, 159–160 Club of Rome, 12–13, 47–48, 149–150 CO2 emissions, 160, 161, 165–166, 182, 200, 202, 203, 207 Cold War Berlin Wall (1961) during the, 75–76, 88, 89 collapse of Soviet Union ending the, 16, 98 fall of the Iron Curtain ending, 77, 80 Soviet sphere of influence during, 6, 7, 8, 75–77 Collective bargaining decline during the 1980s, 14 European promotion of (1950-1970), 10 Ravensburger Pact's impact on, 17 Colombia, 188 Colonialization (19th century), 104 Columbia University, 11, 22 Columbus, Christopher, 97, 101 Communism collapse (1990s–2000s) Soviet Union, 16, 98 Communist Party of China (CPC), 56–57 ideological battle between capitalism and, 7 Soviet Union's promotion of economic model of, 6, 7, 8 Communist Party of China (CPC), 56–57 Compagnie de Suez (France), 94 Companies aim to generate profits and value creation, 179 at the center point of its stakeholders, 175fig checks and balances within, 185, 193–198 collective bargaining with, 10, 14, 17 global stakeholder model role of, 180fig as key stakeholders, 178 re-emerging post-World War II, 6–7 society demanding that a social purpose be served by, 215–216 Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics to measure goals of, 193, 214–215, 249, 250–251 See also specific company; Stakeholder companies Competition EU's anti-competition ruling against Microsoft, 139–140, 141 Milton Friedman doctrine on, 209 Thiel's editorial on problem of, 208–209 See also Monopolies “Competition is for Losers” Wall Street Journal editorial (Thiel), 208–209 Connective technologies description and importance of, 177 government focus on improving digital connectivity, 225, 227–228, 232 Consumer International, 238 Consumer rights groups, 239–240 Cook, Tim, 211–212 Corporate social responsibility (CSR) Mærsk projects in, 206 Milton Friedman's rejection (1970s) of, 14 Costa Rica, 188 Côte d'Ivoire, 70 COVID-19 pandemic “all of society” approach to the, 224 changing travel habits during the, 164 China's total debt–to–GDP ratio impacted by, 62 economies of ASEAN nations and, 66, 67fig female government leadership found to do better during, 224 global economic impact of, 108 globalization allowing rapid spread of, 107 impact on interest rates by, 31 India's economic growth impacted by, 66, 67, 68–69 inequalities revealed by the, 3–4, 43, 73, 227 as litmus test, 250 New Zealand's successful response to, 219–224, 236 protests over governmental responses to, 87 public debt increase during, 19, 29–30 as reminder of interconnectedness of people, 177 response in Sweden to the, 220 SARS–CoV–2 vaccines developed to combat the, 248 Singapore response to the, 232–233 social disruption due to, 247, 248 South Africa's economic impact due to, 70 Spain and Italy as worst hit economies by, 68 stakeholders working for well-being of people during, 248 US society ill-prepared for the, 186 well-managed response in Germany to, 79 Coyle, Diane, 25, 191, 234 Crabtree, James, 40, 125 Crazy Rich Asians (film), 228 CRRC (China), 142 Cryptocurrencies, 161 Cuban Missile Crisis, 76 Czech Republic, 41 D Dale, Spencer, 49 Dansk Metal (Denmark), 115, 117 Darvas, Zsolt, 36, 37, 112, 113 “Data as a property right” initiative, 239 Data Dividend Project, 239 Davos Manifesto (1973), 13–14, 88, 213 Davos Manifesto (2020), 191–192, 213 Davos meetings.

See also specific country Subsidiarity principle, 181–183 Suez Canal, 103, 200 Sustainable Development Goals (UN), 189, 206, 207, 250 Swabia (Germany), 4, 8, 19, 251 Sweden COVID-19 pandemic response by, 220 stakeholder concept adopted in, 174 vote for right-wing populist parties (2000, 2017–2019), 84fig Swiss Federation, 181 Switzerland continued trust in public institutions in, 196 history of direct democracy in, 195 precious stones/metals imported to China through, 64 T Tabula rasa, 237 Taiwan, 59, 98 See also Asian Tigers Tanzania, 70 TaskRabbit (US), 237 Tata Consulting Services (TCS) [India], 68 Tata Steel (India), 141 Taxation French Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) protests over, 86–87 high Danish rate of, 119 OECD's efforts to create fair global tax rules for Internet, 212 San Francisco's Proposition C proposing tax to help the homeless, 212–213 Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics prosperity pillar on, 214, 249 Teacher Corps, 135 Tech Mahindra [India], 68 Technological disruption changing business landscape, 126–129 Dansk Metal's industrial robots, 115, 117 labor market and challenge of automation, 115–126 Singapore job displacement due to, 125–126 steam engine as, 102, 116, 130–131 See also Digital economy Technological revolutions First Industrial Revolution (19th century), 56, 71, 108, 116, 119, 130–134, 135, 161 First Technological Revolution, 45fig–46 Second Industrial Revolution (1945–early 1970s), 8, 18, 45fig, 105–106, 116, 119, 134–136, 204 Third Industrial Revolution, 15, 45, 116, 137–142 Fourth Industrial Revolution, 18, 45, 68, 71, 116, 122, 125, 142–145, 161–162, 177, 186, 201, 208, 212, 213, 237, 239 Technologies artificial intelligence (AI), 143–144, 145, 161 automation, 115–126 China's “maker movement” of tech start-ups, 55 climate change and technological process, 161–162 connective, 177, 225, 227–228 cryptocurrencies, 161 Dansk Metal's industrial robots working with employees, 115 general-purpose technologies (GPTs), 143 Internet and digital connectivity, 225, 227–228, 232 Internet of Things, 18, 72, 161 Kuznets Wave on income inequality fluctuation and, 45fig–46 shaping positive vs. negative applications of, 144–145 Shenzhen (China) known for homegrown tech companies, 55, 57–61 tech unicorns of ASEAN nations, 66, 67fig workers who oppose automation, 115–116 The Technology Trap (Frey), 116, 135 Tech unicorns (ASEAN nations), 66, 67fig Tencent (US), 55, 60, 143 Tesla (US), 201 Tett, Gillian, 216 Thailand economic recession (1997) in, 97–98 predicted economic growth (2020–2021) in, 65–66 rubber exports to China, 64 Thaker, Jagadish, 223 Thatcher, Margaret, 122 Theodul Glacier, 51 Thiel, Peter, 208–209 Third Industrial Revolution, 15, 45, 116, 137–142 Thompson, Nicholas, 128 3D printing, 107, 108, 116 Thunberg, Greta, 52–53, 86, 147–150, 168, 250 ThyssenKrupp, 141 Tik Tok, 61 TIME Magazine, 172 Tindall, Stephen, 221 Tokopedia (Indonesia), 97 Total (France), 95 “Trade in the Digital Era” report (2019) [OECD], 107 Traveloka (Indonesia), 97 Treaty of Versailles (1919), 5–6 Trente Glorieuses, 110 Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity (Rushkoff), 210 Trust loss of trust in public institutions, 196 rebuilding of public trust in business sector, 210–212 Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management, 225–226 Tuberculosis sanatorium treatments, 11 Twain, Mark, 133 21st century stakeholder capitalism.


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

Wikipedia and Waze reimagine the organization of the traditional production function, away from supply chains and onto platforms. 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.

Platform Scale explains the design of a family of emerging digital business models that enables today’s startups to achieve rapid scale: the platform business model. The many manifestations of the platform business model - social media, the peer economy, cryptocurrencies, APIs and developer ecosystems, the Internet of things, crowdsourcing models, and many others - are becoming increasingly relevant. Yet, most new platform ideas fail because the business design and growth strategies involved in building platforms are not well understood. Platform Scale is a builder’s manual for anyone building a platform business today.


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

As well as everything else, the Silk Roads acted as ‘gene corridors’ for humans and for flora and fauna alike.6 Then there is new research that links the origins of Yiddish with commercial exchange across Asia and claims that its evolution was connected to measures designed to protect the security of transactions by devising a language that could only be understand by a select few.7 This has obvious resonance in the world of the twenty-first century, where crypto-currencies and blockchain technology seek to solve the problem of how to enable traders to complete transactions securely. Or there is the startling evidence from new-generation ice-core technology that can be used to shed fresh light on the devastating impact of the Black Death by showing the extent of the collapse in metal production in the mid-fourteenth century.8 Documents declassified in 2017 recording meetings held between the British minister in Washington in 1952, Sir Christopher Steel, and the assistant secretary of state Henry Byroade to discuss a coup to depose the prime minister of Iran help us gain a clearer understanding of how the ill-fated plans took shape.9 The release of previously secret US nuclear strike plans from the early part of the Cold War likewise help reveal important insights into American military and strategic planning – and contemporary assessments of how best to neutralise the Soviet Union in the event of war.10 These are just a small number of examples to show how historians continue to use different techniques to refine and improve their understanding of the past.

* 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.

Peter Frankopan Oxford, September 2018 Index Abbas, Mahmoud here Abbasi, Shahid Khaqan here Abdrakhmanov, Kairat here Abdulkodirzoda, Saidmukarram here Ablyazov, Mukhtar here Abramovich, Roman here Afghan Heritage Mapping Partnership here Afghanistan here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here China and here US policy and here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also TAPI pipeline Africa China and here, here, here, here US policy and here, here African Standby Force here Agni-V missiles here Ahmed, Abiy here Airbus here airline pilots, shortage of here Albright, Madeleine here Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) here Altmaier, Peter here aluminium prices here Angola here Aral Sea here Araqi, Hamidreza here Armenia here, here, here artificial intelligence here, here, here, here Ashgabat agreement here Asian Development Bank here, here Asif, Khawaja here al-Assad, Bashar here, here Astana International Financial Centre here Australia here, here, here, here, here, here Azerbaijan here, here, here, here Bahgeri, Mohammad here Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway here Balochistan, murder of schoolteachers here Bambawale, Gautam here Bangalore here Bangladesh here Bannon, Steve here Beishembiev, Erik here Belarus here, here Berdymukhamedov, Gurbanguly here Berlin Wall, fall of here, here big data here bin Laden family here Black Death here Boeing here, here, here Bolton, John here, here Boucher, Richard A. here boxing, banned in Tajikistan here Brahmaputra River hydrology here Brexit here, here, here, here, here Britain First here Brunson, Andrew here Bryant, Kobe here Byroade, Henry here Cambodia here, here, here, here ‘carrier-killer’ missiles here Carter, General Sir Nick here CASA-1000 power project here Caspian Sea here, here, here, here, here Çavuşoğlu, Mevlüt here, here, here Chabahar port here Chen Xiaodong here Cheng Quanguo here China access to IT here ageing population here and artificial intelligence here Belt and Road Initiative, development here Belt and Road Initiative, reservations here, here economic weakness here, here economic development here, here end of One Child policy here energy projects here environmental problems here, here and European Union here football, in Han-dynasty here ‘great wall of iron’ here intellectual property theft here, here joins WTO here maritime expansion here, here, here, here military exercises here and overseas debt levels here relations with India here, here, here relations with Iran here, here, here relations with Pakistan here relations with Russia here, here relations with Saudi Arabia here retail market here rivalry with US here, here, here science programme here security concerns here seeks global leadership role here sensitivity over Taiwan here Siberian land purchases here telecoms here urbanisation here, here US corporations and here China Development Bank here China–Pakistan Economic Corridor here, here, here Chinese army here climate change here, here, here, here, here Clinton, Bill here Clinton, Hillary here Coats, Dan here Cohn, Gary here Collins, Michael here Columbus, Christopher here commercial courts here Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMSCA) here Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) here Congo here Crimea, annexation of here, here, here, here, here cryptocurrencies here, here Davidson, Admiral Philip D. here Dawood, Abdul Razak here de Klerk, F. W. here Deng Xiaoping here, here, here Desai, Lord here dictatorial leaders here Djibouti here Doklam Plateau here Dominican Republic here, here donkeys here drones here, here, here, here Duan, Rachel here Dunford, General Joseph here Duterte, Rodrigo here Dzagaryan, Levan here East China Sea here East Jerusalem Hospital Network here El Salvador here, here, here Ellena, Jean-Claude here Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip here, here, here, here, here and annexation of Crimea here Essar Oil here Eurasian Economic Union here, here, here European Monetary Fund here European Union (EU) here, here, here, here, here Exxon here Facebook here, here Fernandes, Tony here Fiat Chrysler here Fierravanti-Wells, Concetta here FinTech here Foges, Clare here football here, here Fox, Vincente here Franz Ferdinand, Archduke here freedom of speech here Gabriel, Sigmar here Galkynysh gas field here, here Gama, Vasco da here Gao Feng here, here General Electric here, here General Motors here Germany here, here, here, here Ghadir-class submarines here Ghani, Ashraf here, here Gilmour, Andrew here Giuliani, Rudy here, here Goldberg, Jeffrey here Google here, here Gorazde massacre here Gove, Michael here Grand Tours here ‘Great Game’ here Grenell, Richard here Guam here Gul, Abdulhamit here Gülen, Fethullah here Gulf War here Gwadar port here, here, here, here Haase, Richard here Hagel, Chuck here Hahn, Johannes here Haiti here Haley, Nikki here, here Hamas here, here Hambantota port here, here Harris, Admiral Harry B. here, here Haspel, Gina here heroin here Hezbollah here Hillman, Jonathan here Hitler, Adolf here Hong Kong here, here Hook, Brian here Hu Lianhe here Hun Sen here hydrated magnesium silicate here hydroelectric projects here, here India economic development here Eurasian trade here intimidation of journalists here military exercises here relations with China here, here, here relations with Iran here, here relations with Pakistan here, here relations with Russia here and US–Turkey crisis here water resources here US policy and here, here see also TAPI pipeline Indian Ocean here Indonesia here, here Infosys Technologies here intellectual property theft here, here International Atomic Agency here, here International Wushu competition here International Yoga Day here Iran electricity exports here foreign interventions here nuclear deal here, here, here, here relations with Russia here relations with Saudi Arabia here street protests here US policy and risk of escalation here, here Iraq here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here ISIS here, here Israel–Palestine conflict here, here, here Ivanov, Gjorge here Jahangiri, Es’haq here Japan here, here, here Jerusalem here Jiang Shigong here Jin Liqun here Johnson, Boris here Juncker, Jean-Claude here, here Karimov, Islam here Kashmir here, here Kazakhstan here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here relations with China here Kelly, John here Kelly, Tom here Kenyatta, Uhuru here Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali here, here, here Khan, Imran here Khan, Khurram Dastgir here Khorgos ‘dry port’ here Kiam, Victor here Kim Jong-un here, here, here King of Zhao here Kipling, Rudyard here Kishanganga dam here Kissinger, Henry here, here, here Koolhaas, Rem here Korean War here Ku Klux Klan here Kushner, Jared here Kyrgyzstan here, here, here, here, here, here, here Lagarde, Christine here, here, here Lahore metro here Lake Baikal here Laos here, here, here Lapis Lazuli corridor here Latin America, China and here Lavrov, Sergei here, here, here, here Le Maire, Bruno here Le Pen, Marine here Le Yucheng here Li Keqiang here, here Li Yonghong here Libya here Lighthizer, Robert here, here Lisbon Treaty here Liu He here Ma, Jack here Maas, Heiko here, here McKenzie, Lt General Kenneth F. here McMaster, H.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Perhaps following in the footsteps of Henry Ford’s model city, Fordlandia, built in the Brazilian state of Pará, Microsoft purchased twenty-five thousand acres in Arizona to build the City of the Future, while Page has invested in research on the feasibility of privately owned city-states.26 More recently Jeffrey Berns, a cryptocurrency millionaire, bought a chunk of land in Nevada bigger than Reno to build a Utopian blockchain community. Berns believes that blockchains—decentralized, distributed, public digital ledgers facilitated by autonomous, peer- to-peer networks—will give people rather than companies or governments power: “I don’t know why,” says Berns.

O’Gieblyn, “Ghost in the Cloud.” 23. Ullman, Life in Code, 295. 24. Losse, The Boy Kings, 201–2. 25. See John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation website, https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 26. On Fordlandia, see Grandin, Fordlandia. 27. Popper, “A Cryptocurrency Millionaire Wants to Build a Utopia in Nevada.” 28. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 39. 29. For a crisp discussion of technology, fiction, and cyborg visions, see McCracken, “Cyborg Fictions.” 30. Fowler’s letter appears on her blog and is entitled “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” February 19, 2017.

“Welcome to the Experience Economy.” Harvard Business Review, July–August 1998. Polletta, Francesca. It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pollin, Robert. “De-Growth vs. A Green New Deal.” New Left Review 112 (July– August 2018). Popper, Nathaniel. “A Cryptocurrency Millionaire Wants to Build a Utopia in Nevada.” New York Times, November 1, 2018. Posner, Eric A., and E. Glen Weyl. “Want Our Personal Data? Pay for It.” Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2018. Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Vintage, 2011, Kindle edition. Price, Catherine.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

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

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. 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.

class Clinton, Hillary Coase, Ronald cognition cognitive dissonance cognitive efficiency cognitive strengths Collison, Patrick and John compensating differential conspiracy theories control firms co-ops copyright corporations attempts to sway public opinion downside of personalization public dislike of Countrywide “creative destruction” credit cards credit card information credit card system privacy and crony capitalism business influence on government class and multinational corporations overview privilege and state monopoly status quo bias See also capitalism cryptocurrencies See also Bitcoin Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Curry, Stephen CVS cybersecurity “daily effective experiences” See also Kahneman, Daniel; Krueger, Alan Daley, William Damaske, Sarah Damore, James daycare defense spending DejaNews Democratic Party Desan, Mathieu Deutsche Bank discrimination Dollar General Dow Scrubbing Bubbles Dream of the Red Chamber DuckDuckGo Dying for a Paycheck (Pfeffer) eBay education email employment/unemployment European Union ex post Exxon eyeglass companies Facebook advertising and AI and “anti-diversity memo” censorship and China and competition and complaints about employees “filter bubble” income inequality and information and innovation and monopoly and News Feed politics and privacy and Russian-manipulated content venture capital and See also Zuckerberg, Mark facial recognition technology “fake news” See also media Fama, Eugene fast-food Fehr, Ernst Ferguson, Niall financial crisis financial sector America as tax and banking haven American stock performance banks “too big” global importance of US growth information technology and intermediation overview venture capital and American innovation Financial Times fintech flow Ford Motor Company Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Foroohar, Rana fraud, businesses and CEOs in laboratory games comparative perspective cross-cultural game theory nonprofits vs. for-profits overview research on corporate behavior spread of information and tax gap trust and free trade French, Kenneth Friedman, Milton Friendster Fritzon, Katarina fundraising Gabaix, Xavier Gates, Bill GDP General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade General Electric General Motors Gilens, Martin Glass-Steagall Act Gmail Goetzmann, William N.


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

New forms of universal basic income are being tested for their ability to provide for our basic human needs while also encouraging us to use and share our gifts—through entrepreneurship, service, and community. New forms of currency and means of exchange provide alternatives to the current model of borrowing money lent at interest. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies enable massively distributed collaboration via decentralized autonomous organizations and other alternatives to traditional incorporation or partnership. A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels. —Albert Einstein Is a future like that even possible?

And yet one study of cooperatives in Western Europe, the United States, and Latin America found that worker cooperatives are already more productive than conventional businesses. And what if your mission is to create an organization that isn’t incorporated or centralized at all? That ambition is at the heart of an emerging class of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which leverage blockchain and cryptocurrencies to create products and services without central control. The best explanation of this controversial new form of organization comes from Cointelegraph, an independent online publication that covers the future of money. “Imagine a vending machine that not only takes money from you and gives you a snack in return but also uses that money to automatically re-order the goods.

This machine also orders cleaning services and pays its rent all by itself. 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: 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

Relationships that used to be carried out over coffee are continued over social networks. When crime, terror, and war all move to virtual space, the troops become automatons that do not bleed. Private citizens and military groups alike have access to intercontinental cyber-missiles carrying nuclear cyber-bombs. Crypto-currencies like BitCoin and the Ether may displace the coins and bills that are issued by nations. Games that used to be played on boards or on ballfields get moved to virtual space with participants from all over the world. Virtual teams play MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), slaying monsters and dragons.

Bots can be used to recruit thousands of online devices to flood targeted websites with so many messages that they are overwhelmed and can no longer service customers. Companies from Airbnb and Amazon to Starbucks, Twitter, Visa, and Zillow have been victims of these “denial of service” attacks. Then there are ransomware attacks, in which viruses seize control of computers and encrypt user files unless the user is willing to pay a ransom in a cryptocurrency. In some cases, malware can direct the system to shut down and erase itself, or, as in the case of Stuxnet, speed up until it destroys itself. Cyber weapons can disrupt or shut down power grids and communication, transportation, and financial networks, and bring commercial operations to a standstill.

See commercial entities Craigslist, 62, 87 credit cards: cash contrasted with, 41–42 cost of and security risk with, 74–76 cyber/mobile payment systems replacing, 10, 76–77, 81–82, 171, 186 emergence and scale timeline of, 82 information equivalents for, 76–77 credit rating agencies, 118–119, 126, 130 crowd-sourcing, 70–71 cryptocurrency. See cyber currencies cultural lag, 38, 181, 187, 189–190, 192 cultural norms: of Agricultural Revolution, 151–152 Autonomous Revolution’s requirement of new, 151, 153–157, 159 of Industrial Revolution, 152–153, 182–183 customers/consumers: algorithmic prisons for, 126, 127 data collection protections for, 127–128 industrial robots in relation to, xii information equivalences for, 43–44 as products, 120–123.


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

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.

Department of Justice, March 20, 2018, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/iranian-national-arrested-scheme-evade-us-economic-sanctions-illicitly-sending-more-115. 38 banking regulators froze the bank’s accounts: John O’Donnell, “Malta freezes Pilatus bank’s operations after chairman’s arrest,” Reuters, March 22, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/22/reuters-america-malta-freezes-pilatus-banks-operations-after-chairmans-arrest.html. 39 Apple was allowed to repatriate the money: Simon Bowers, “What to look for from Apple’s big updates this month.” 40 to form limited liability partnerships: Miles Weiss, “New Hedge-Fund Tax Dodge Triggers Wild Rush Back Into Delaware,” Bloomberg, February 14, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-14/new-hedge-fund-tax-dodge-triggers-wild-rush-back-into-delaware. 41 money laundering in the years prior to his election: Peter Fritsch and Glenn R. 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.

., 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: 154 words: 47,880

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

It is dangerous to believe that the top executives of corporations headquartered in the United States have a special allegiance to America. In July 2019, the U.S. Senate held hearings on Facebook’s planned cryptocurrency, Libra. Facebook executives cautioned that the firm must be allowed to create this currency or “some other country [that is, China] will.” But Facebook’s motive had nothing whatever to do with stopping China or any other country from creating its own cryptocurrency. Like JPMorgan, Facebook wants to be free to make as much money as it can, wherever it can. After all, Facebook has spent much of the last decade trying to curry favor with the Chinese in hopes of getting permission to operate Facebook apps there.


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

You can also throw in terms like “innovation,” “experiment,” “surprising,” “trend,” “leading-edge,” “weird,” “strange,” “creative idea,” “new phenomenon,” “scientific study.” Another strategy is to ask people you know what new things they’re seeing in the world that excite or worry them. Sometimes I post on social media questions like this: “What’s the weirdest or most surprising thing going on in cryptocurrency right now?” “I’m looking for leading-edge projects and ideas in the future of voting—what can you share with me?” “What’s happening in the world that you wish more people were paying attention to?” My students have started signals-sharing groups, in person or online. They organize monthly signals-trading snack or coffee breaks.

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.

Try to have a bit of balance in your list—at least one of the forces you pick should feel like a risk to you, and at least one should feel like an opportunity: the climate crisis post-pandemic trauma social justice movements increasing economic inequality social and political tensions caused by refugee crises and mass migration automation of work decreasing birthrates in Western countries and a “youth boom” in Africa shifting religious majorities and increasing theological diversity the global switch to renewable energy sources alternatives to capitalism and market-based economies social media–driven misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories rise of authoritarianism and loss of faith in democracy widespread adoption of facial recognition and surveillance technologies digital currencies, cryptocurrency, and programmable money universal basic income and direct cash transfers internet shutdowns mandated by government or law enforcement the “right to disconnect” movement and four-day workweeks lifelong learning and “reskilling” at the workplace job guarantees regenerative design and the circular economy genomic research and CRISPR genetic modification the Internet of Things augmented and virtual reality satellite networks and space internet If there’s something on the institute’s list above that you don’t know anything about at all, this is the perfect opportunity to go find your first clue.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Equally, research should be revived on what postcapitalism might look like in practice. Beyond a few outdated classics, very little research has been done to think through an alternative economic system – even less so in the wake of emerging technologies like additive manufacturing, self-driving vehicles and soft AI.68 What role, for instance, could non-state cryptocurrencies have? How does one measure value if not by abstract or concrete labour? How can ecological concerns be fully accounted for in a postcapitalist economic framework? What mechanism can replace the market and overcome the socialist calculation problem?69 And what are the likely effects of the possible tendency for the rate of profit to fall?

Additive manufacturing and the automation of work portend the possibility of production based on flexibility, decentralisation and post-scarcity for some goods. The rapid automation of logistics presents the utopian possibility of a globally interconnected system in which parts and goods can be shipped rapidly and efficiently without human labour. Cryptocurrencies and their block-chain technology could bring forth a new money of the commons, divorced from capitalist forms.27 The democratic guidance of the economy is also accelerated by emerging technologies. Famously, Oscar Wilde once said that the problem with socialism was that it took up too many evenings.

Index 1968, 16–7, 63, 188n33 15M, 11, 22 abstraction, 10, 15, 36, 44, 81 additive manufacturing, 110, 143, 150, 182 affect, 7–8, 113–4, 140–1 afro-futurism, 139, 141 AI (artificial intelligence), 110, 143 alienation, 14–5, 82 algorithmic trading, 111 Allende, Salvador, 148, 149 alternativism, 194n95 Althusser, Louis, 81, 141–2 anti-globalisation, 3, 159, 162 anti-war, 3, 5, 22, 162 Apple, 146, Arab Spring, 131, 159 Argentina, 37–9, 173 authenticity, 10–1, 15, 27, 82, 180 automation, 1–2, 86, 88–9, 94–5, 97–8, 104–5, 109–17, 122, 127, 130, 143, 150–1, 167, 171–4, 181–2, 203n15, 212n121, 214n161, 215n9, 218n45 banking, 43–6, 61, 147 Beveridge Report, 118 big data, 110, 111 Bolshevik Revolution, 131 Bolsheviks, 137 Russian Revolution, 139 Brazil, 75, 119, 147, 157, 169 Bretton Woods, 61–2 Brown, Michael, 173 care labour, 113–4 Chicago School, 51, 59–60 Chile, 52, 62, 148, 149, 150 China, 87, 89, 97, 170 class, 14, 16–7, 20–1, 25, 53, 64–5, 87, 91, 96–102, 116, 120, 122–3, 126–7, 132–3, 155–62, 170, 173–4, 189n1, 206n44, 233n119, 233n4, 233n5, 234n18 Cleaver, Eldridge, 91–2 climate change, 13–4, 116 colonialism, 73, 75–6, 96–7, 225n3 common sense, 9–11, 21–2, 40, 54–5, 58–60, 63–7, 72, 131–7 communisation, 92, 225n5 competitive subjects, 63–5, 99, 124 complex systems, 13–4, conspiracy theories, 14–5 cosmism, 139 Critchley, Simon, 72 cryptocurrencies, 143, 182 Cybersyn, 149–150 debt, 9, 22, 35–6, 94 demands, 6–7, 30, 33, 107–8, 130, 159–62, 167 no demands, 7, 34–5, 107, 186n3 non-reformist demands, 108 transitional demands, 215n5 democracy, 31–3, 182 direct democracy, 27–9, 31–3, 164, 190n8 direct action, 6, 11, 27–9, 35–6 education, 64, 99, 104, 141–5, 165–6 Egypt, 32–4, 190n21 energy, 2, 16,19,41, 42–43, 116, 147, 148, 150–51, 164, 171, 178, 179, 182, 183 Engels, Friedrich, 79 Erhard, Ludwig, 57 ethics, 42 work ethic, 124–6 evictions, 8, 12, 36 feminism, 18–21, 122, 138, 161 Fisher, Antony, 58–9, 196n34 food miles, 42–3 fracking, 8 France, 17, 62, 149, 167 free time, 80, 115–6, 120–1, 167, 219n50 freedom, 63–5, 120–1, 126–7, 180–1 negative freedom, 79 synthetic freedom, 78–83 Friedman, Milton, 56, 59–61 full employment, 98–100 future, 1, 71–5, 175–8, 181–3 G20, 6, 94 gender, 21, 41, 90, 122 Germany, 45, 56–7 ghettos, 95–6 Gramsci, Antonio, 132, 165 Graeber, David, 33 grand narratives, 73–4 Great Depression, 46, 65, 99–101, 114–5 Harvey, David, 135 Hayek, Friedrich, 54–6 Holzer, Jenny, 175, 178 horizontalism, 18, 26–39 housing, 8, 28, 35, 48, 77, 80, 95, 96, 148, 159, 167, 168, humanism, 81–3, 180–1 hyperstition, 74–5, 138–9 Iceland, 34, 164 idleness, 85–6 immediacy, 10–1 immigration, 101–2, 161 India, 87, 97–8, 130 inequality, 22, 80, 93–4 informal economy, 95–8, 203n10, 206n44, 210n95 Institute of Economic Affairs, 58–9 Iranian Revolution, 131 Jameson, Fredric, 14, 92, 198n10 Japan, 147 Jimmy Reid Foundation, 117 jobless recovery, 94–5 Jobs, Steve, 179 Johnson, Boris, 172 Kalecki, Michał, 120 Krugman, Paul, 118 labour, 2, 3,9, 17, 20, 21, 33, 38, 48, 52, 58, 61–3, 74, 79, 81, 83, 85–143, 148, 150, 151, 156–8, 161, 163–181, 182 Laclau, Ernesto, 155, 159 Lafargue, Paul, 115, language, 81, 132, 160, 164–5 leisure, 85–6 Leninism, 17, 131, 188n33 Live Aid, 8 localism, 40–6 locavorism, 41–2 Lucas Aerospace, 147 Luxemburg, Rosa, 15 Lyotard, Francois, 73, 74 Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, 58, 59 marches, 6, 30, 49 Marikana massacre, 170 Marinaleda, 48 Marx, Karl, 73, 79, 85, 86, 92, 115, 119, 121, 122, 132, 142, 156, 158, 180 Mattick, Paul, 92, 118 media, 2, 7–8, 31, 36, 52, 58, 60, 63, 67, 88, 118, 125–6, 129, 133–5, 163–5, 176, 182 Mirowski, Philip, 66 modernity, 23, 63, 69–85, 86, 131, 176, 181 modernisation, 23, 60, 63, 137, 174 Mont Pelerin Society, 54, 86, 134, 164, 166 MPS, 55, 56, 58, 66, 67, 134 Move Your Money, 44 Murray, Charles, 59 Musk, Elon, 179 National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, 172 negative solidarity, 20, 37 neoliberalism, 3, 12, 20–3, 47, 49, 51–67, 70, 72, 108, 116, 117, 119, 121, 124, 134, 141, 142, 148, 156, 176, 179, 183 neoliberal, 7, 9, 14–16, 20, 21, 37, 47, 49, 73, 93, 99, 118, 126, 127, 129, 131–2, 134, 135, 162, 169, 174, 176, 181 New Economics Foundation, 117, 144 new left, 18–22 New Zealand, 151 occupations, 5, 7, 10, 11, 29–31, 34, 49, 94, 172 Occupy Wall Street, 3, 6, 7, 11, 18, 22, 26, 29–38, 126, 133, 158, 159, 160, 162, 189n1 ordoliberals, 54, 57 organic intellectual, 165–6 Overton Window, 134, 139 Partido dos Trabalhadores, 169 parties, political, 2, 10, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 30, 34, 39, 46, 59, 105, 116, 118, 124, 129, 162, 164, 168, 169 personal savings, 94 Piketty, Thomas, 140 Plan C, 117 planning, 1, 15, 56, 141, 142, 149, 151, 182 Plant, Sadie, 82 Podemos, 159, 160, 169 police, 6, 30, 33, 36, 37, 102, 133, 161, 168, 171, 173 postcapitalism, 17, 38, 130, 143, 145, 150, 151, 158, 168, 178, 180 postcapitalist, 12, 15, 16, 32, 34, 83, 109, 115, 126, 136, 143, 145, 150, 152, 153, 157, 179, 180 Post-Crash Economic Society, 143 post-work, 23, 69, 83, 85, 86, 105, 107–127, 129, 130, 138, 140, 141, 153, 155, 156, 158, 161, 163, 164, 167, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178 Pou Chen Group, 170 power, 1, 2, 7, 9, 10, 14, 15, 18–21, 26, 28–30, 33, 36, 43, 46, 48, 49, 59, 61, 62, 65, 73, 78, 79, 80, 81, 87, 88, 93, 100, 108, 111, 116, 120, 123, 127, 130–5, 146, 148, 151, 153, 155–74, 175, 176, 179, 180, 182 precarity, 9, 86, 88, 93, 94, 95, 98, 104, 121, 123, 126, 130, 156, 157, 166, 167, 173, 174 precarious, 2, 64, 117, 129, 167 Precarious Workers Brigade, 117 premature deindustrialisation, 97, 98 primitive accumulation, 87, 89, 90, 96, 97 prison, 90, 102, 103, 119, 133 incarceration, 102, 103, 104, 105, 161 productivity, 74, 88, 97, 110–17, 125, 150, 167 progress, 21, 23, 46, 71–5, 77, 107, 114, 115, 120, 126, 131, 138, 179, 180 protests, 1, 7, 18, 22, 28, 31, 37, 49, 66, 153, 164 psychopathologies, 64 radio-frequency identification, 110 race, 14, 31, 90, 102, 103, 140, 156, 171, 172 Reagan, Ronald, 60, 62, 66, 70 Republican Party (US), 135 resistance, 2, 5, 12, 15, 30, 35, 46–8, 49, 69, 72, 74, 83, 114, 124, 134, 158, 173, 181 Rethinking Economics, 143 Robinson, Joan, 87 Roboticisation, 110, 209n69 mechanisation, 95, 101 Rolling Jubilee, 9 Samuelson, Paul, 142 second machine age, 111 secular stagnation, 143 self-driving cars, 110, 111, 113, 173 shadow work, 115 slavery, 74, 90, 95, 103 slow food, 41, 42 slum, 86, 96–8, 102, 104 social democracy, 3, 17, 46, 66, 70, 167, 176 social democratic, 10, 13, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22, 47, 57, 72, 80, 98, 100, 108, 123, 127, 168 social media, 1, 8, 182 South Africa, 119, 157, 170 Spain, 12, 22, 34, 35, 45, 159, 164 stagflation, 19, 27, 61, 65, 100 Stalinist, 17, 18, 137 strategy, 12, 20, 26, 49, 56, 67, 117, 127, 131–3, 136, 148, 153, 156, 163, 164 strategic, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 25, 28, 29, 35, 49, 52, 55, 66, 70, 77, 108, 116, 131, 135, 157, 162, 163, 164, 170, 171, 173, 174 strikes, 9, 10, 28, 36, 37, 116, 120, 157, 167, 170–3 suicide, 94 surplus populations, 40, 86, 88–94, 96–97, 101–3, 104, 105, 120, 130, 166–7, 173, 203n10 Syriza, 159, 160 tactics, 6, 10, 11, 15, 18, 19, 26, 28, 39, 40, 49, 157, 164, 171–4 Tahrir Square, 32, 34 Taylorism, 152 technology, 1, 3, 72, 81, 88, 89, 98, 109, 110, 111, 129, 136, 137, 145–8, 150–3, 178, 179, 182 Thatcher, Margaret, 59, 60, 62, 66, 70, 72, 100 think tanks, 16, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 63, 67, 117, 134, 135, 165 trade unions, 10, 27, 47, 59, 61, 62, 71, 105, 116, 117, 124, 129, 148, 162, 166 labour unions, 16, 171 unions, 17, 18, 20, 27, 30, 44 UK Uncut, 126 unemployment, 20, 56, 60, 79, 86–98, 99, 100, 101, 101, 102, 115, 116, 118, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 147, 159, 161, 168, 170, 173, 207n44 United Automobile Workers, 170 United Kingdom UK, 8, 20, 40, 42, 45, 52, 54, 56, 58, 61, 62, 92, 93, 94, 117, 118, 126, 144, 147, 151, 172 United States, 8, 18, 29, 36, 44, 45, 59, 62, 78, 92, 95, 103, 114, 118, 123, 133, 135, 138, 167 America, 6, 16, 30, 38, 47, 56, 62, 76, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 110, 164 universal basic income, 108, 118, 123, 127, 140, 143 basic income, 80, 108, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 129, 130, 140, 143, 164, 165, 167 universalism, 69, 70, 75–8, 83, 119, 132, 175, 197n1, 199n40 USSR, 62, 63, 79, 139 Soviet Union, 57, 70, 74, 139 utopia, 3, 28, 32, 35, 48, 54, 58, 60, 66, 69, 70, 72, 108, 113, 114, 132, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 145, 146, 150, 153, 177, 179, 181, 182 vanguard functions, 163 Venezuela, 169 wages, 2, 71, 87, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 98, 101, 111, 120, 122, 125, 156, 166, 167 welfare, 14, 38, 57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 71, 73, 90, 100, 101, 103, 105, 118, 119, 122, 124 Wilde, Oscar, 182 withdrawal, 11, 47, 48, 69, 131, 182 exit, 47, 48, 181 escape, 3, 9, 11, 38, 69, 107, 114, 139, 165, 178 work, 1, 2, 16, 17, 23, 32, 36, 41, 44, 47, 64, 71, 85, 86, 90–6, 98, 100, 101, 103–5, 108, 109, 110–7, 120–7, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 150, 151, 152, 157, 163, 165, 166, 170, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 181 wage labour, 74, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 103, 104, 105, 120, 136, 141, 180 job, 2, 38, 41, 47, 48, 63, 64, 79, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 110, 111, 113, 114–23, 124, 125, 126, 129, 147, 148, 161, 166, 167, 171 worker-controlled factories, 38, 39 workfare, 59, 100, 104 World Trade Organisation, 6 World War II, 46, 54, 56, 57, 115, 156 Zapatistas, 11, 22, 26, 35 zero-hours contracts, 93 Žižek, Slavoj, 140 Zuccotti Park, 31, 32


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

He had done a lot of work for the US government over the years and didn’t think it would hand over one of its citizens—particularly a military veteran—to a foreign country. 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.

(The prosecution countered that although jumping bail isn’t a crime in Japan, assisting someone to jump bail is.) As the weeks passed, the evidence linking the Taylors to the escape kept piling up. 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.

See also Suhail Bahwan Automobiles (SBA) bail requests, 193, 195–96, 199, 217–18, 224–25 Beauty Yachts, 149–50 Bebbane, Etienne, 122 Becker, Scott, 101 Beirut property (pink house) Carole prevented from entering, 192–93 Carole’s return to, 216 as Ghosn and Carole’s home, 163–64 Ghosn settling in after escape, 255 Nada raiding, 186–87 Zi-A Capital’s purchase of, 110 Blair, Cherie, 120, 122 Bolloré, Thierry, 200, 212–13 Bombardier Global Express, 237–38, 239 Brasilensis (offshore company), 127, 130, 147–48, 186 Brazil, rubber trade in, 7–10 Breton, Thierry, 77–79 Carnival, Nissan-sponsored float for, 159 CEO Reserve, 94–95, 132 Chahid-Nouraï, Behrouz, 34–35, 37 Chrysler Corporation, 48–49 Clermont-Ferrand, France, 33 Coddict, 235 Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange platform, 262 Collège Notre-Dame de Jamhour, 19–20 Collège Stanislas de Paris, 22–23 compensation/salaries for Ghosn comprehensive package, 87 currency protection agreement, 88, 91 executive pay disclosure rules overhaul and, 99–101 Ghosn’s view of, 2 Kelly and, 172, 174 media interest in, 156–57 Nissan disclosing “official,” 102 pay reduction, 100–101, 107–8, 160 postponed renumeration, 108 postretirement payday, 158–59, 174, 181–82 response to disclosure, 102–3 secret remuneration, 160, 172–73, 174 Shinsei Bank and, 88–89 sideline salary, 102 Zi-A Capital and, 104, 107 contribution rewards, 108 court proceedings.


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.

“Trusted third parties are security holes.” Nick Szabo TW: @NickSzabo4 unenumerated.blogspot.com NICK SZABO is a polymath. The breadth and depth of his interests and knowledge are truly astounding. He’s a computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer best known for his pioneering research in digital contracts and cryptocurrency. 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

Here are some approaches that have helped: I started saying no to all external meeting requests as a rule of thumb. External meetings should be initiated by me (doesn’t happen that often) and not initiated by others. Saying no to all involvements outside of my startup, such as being an advisor to some other startup or project, investing in or trading some crypto­currency where I have domain expertise, etc. There is only one job/role that I can think about. No exceptions. Letting other people on my team deal with external invitations, calls, meetings, events, etc. Build strong connections with your team and stay updated on things through them. In other words, the team members are a filter for all the invitations and distractions.


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

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.

“E-Commerce Speeds Up, Hits Record High Share of Retail Sales,” MarketWatch (blog), August 15, 2014, http://blogs.marketwatch.com/capitolreport/2014/08/15/e-commerce-speeds-up-hits-record-high-share-of-retail-sales/. 3.Susan Vranica, “The Secret about On-Line Ad Traffic, One-Third is Bogus,” Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304026304579453253860786362. 4.Nick Szabo, “Macroscale Replicator,” October 19, 1995. 5.Szabo’s blog, Unenumerated, is published online by Forbes.com. All the quotations here are from the Unenumerated archive. 6.Richard Vigilante, personal communication. CHAPTER 8: WHERE “HAYEKS” GO WRONG 1.Ferdinando M. Ametrano, “Hayek Money: The Cryptocurrency Price Stability Solution,” Social Science Research Network, revised July 5, 2015, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2425270, 54. Ametrano’s paper was shortlisted as a finalist for the Blockchain Awards, category Visionary Academic Paper, at the Bitcoin Foundation Conference 2014, but it lost to Nakamoto’s original breakthrough paper. 2.Ibid., 5–6. 3.Ibid., 10. 4.Ibid., 20; and Friedrich A.


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

In the same way, for her as an investigative journalist, Blur (bitcoin) evolved into a love of Radiohead (blockchain). But Radiohead (blockchain) was adopted too quickly by those who then compromised the likeability of the entire Indy genre (cryptocurrency). It was time consequently to turn to drum and bass (private blockchains). But drum and bass was being cross-polluted by Indy rock enthusiasts (cryptocurrency enthusiasts) so it became time to embrace something totally radical and segregated, i.e. go backwards to an ironic appreciation of Barry Manilow abandoning all refs to modern musical phenomena (Distributed Ledger Technology).


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

Wong knew it would be tough to pull off; he posted an explainer of how he hypothesized his latest strange financial decision might work. “We are thinking about creating a cryptocurrency and making it exchangeable (backed) by those shares of reddit, and then distributing the currency to the community. 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.

” * * * 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. Charles, to execute this vision for giving 10 percent of ad revenue back to millions of anonymous users, a project users joked should be called “creddits,” but would become known as Reddit Notes. These hypothetical “notes”—for which a labyrinthine new blockchain system was to be developed by Charles and project manager Daniel Lim—were perhaps doomed from their inception.

Alex Angel in Portland was told that Wong’s offer to work remotely was no longer valid; she would need to move to San Francisco. Angel, the former rocket scientist who’d transformed her life and career to work for Reddit ever since that day at the Colbert rally when she was just a college kid in her alien T-shirt, said no. She had a life in Portland. She resigned and took the severance. Also dismissed: cryptocurrency engineer Ryan X. Charles, who later said he was given no reasonable opportunity to pitch to the new administration his digital creation harnessing blockchain technology, which Wong had hired him to develop. There were others. Every few weeks, someone would not show up to the Wednesday all-hands meeting, and stop appearing on online chat—and everyone else would be left to speculate what happened.


pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

A few weeks after Burning Man, they flew from south Texas to New York for the Met Gala, the costume extravaganza that Grimes relished. They stayed with Maye in her small apartment in Greenwich Village. Musk had just sent his plane to pick up a Shiba Inu dog he had just bought, named Floki, the breed that is the face of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. He also brought his other dog, Marvin, who did not get along with Floki. Neither were housebroken. Maye’s apartment became a two-bedroom circus. The outfit Grimes assembled for the Gala was an homage to the sci-fi novel and movie Dune: a sheer gown, a gray-and-black cape, a silver face mask, and a sword.

But he believed that Twitter was important. “It’s a real-time news service, and there’s nothing really like it,” he told me. “If you agree it’s important for a democracy, then I thought it was worth making an investment in it.” One person who was eager to be in the deal was Sam Bankman-Fried, the soon-to-be-disgraced founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who believed that Twitter could be rebuilt on the blockchain. He claimed to be a supporter of effective altruism, and the founder of that movement, William MacAskill, texted Musk to try to arrange a meeting. So did Michael Grimes, Musk’s primary banker at Morgan Stanley, who was working to put together the financing.

Grimes replied that Bankman-Fried “would do the engineering for social media blockchain integration” and put $5 billion in the deal. He was available to fly to Austin the next day, if Musk was willing to meet with him. Musk had discussed with Kimbal and others the possibility of using the blockchain as a backbone for Twitter. But despite the fun he had with Dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies, he was not a blockchain acolyte, and he felt it would be too sluggish to support fast-paced Twitter postings. So he had no desire to meet with Bankman-Fried. When Michael Grimes persisted by texting that Bankman-Fried “could do $5bn if everything vision lock,” Musk responded with a “dislike” button.


Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

The sharpest source of financial pressure came from Jonah’s board. It still included allies, like Will Porteous, the early investor, and Chris Dixon, the Andreessen Horowitz appointee. But Porteous and his firm RRE had now been invested in BuzzFeed far longer than a venture capitalist prefers. Dixon’s attention was elsewhere, on the cryptocurrency business, which would turn him into a venture capital superstar. NBC, which had once seen BuzzFeed as its bridge to the future, now believed that the giant media company’s future was not the web but a streaming video service, and NBC’s representative on our board had begun to worry that it wouldn’t be getting its $400 million investment back.

He’d come to believe that BuzzFeed News and I had taken a hard line on one of his companies, a failed insurance startup called Zenefits, specifically in order to prove our independence from him. The thought hadn’t crossed our minds; we hadn’t thought, or realized, he was that important, though by 2022 his and Chris Dixon’s massive investments in cryptocurrency had made them both even larger players in American life. Others who had gotten on the bandwagon a little late had regrets too. Carlos Watson faced investigations by the SEC and FBI for the fakery his company, Ozy, had pulled on its way to becoming the next new media darling—something I’d wound up exposing in the Times.

., 32, 41, 44, 102, 284 Business Insider, 61, 149, 269 BusinessWeek, 66 BuzzFeed and AOL’s purchase of Huffington Post, 149 “Buzz Detection” tool, 74 BuzzFeed News feature, 238, 247, 299 and competition with old media, 145 and devaluation of traffic, 264–70 Disney purchase negotiations, 195–202 and Facebook’s political content, 238–40, 244–45 and Gawker’s competition, 139 and Gionet, 297 and growth of Twitter, 115 launch of BuzzFeed Politics, 165 layoffs and labor tensions, 279–85 and meetings with New York Times board, 219–20, 223 news and social content, 157–64, 165–69, 172–73 origins of, 72–76 and product marketing, 287–89 and Ratter’s launch, 217 relationship with Huffington Post, 78–79, 107 reliance on Google searches, 151–54, 154–56 and revival of legacy media, 228–30 and right-wing media, 185–88, 190–94, 290–94 rivalry with Gawker, 170–71, 174 and social engagement on Facebook, 271–77 SPAC deal, 300–303, 324n302 and splintering of internet media, 299 and the Steele Dossier, 247, 249, 250–52, 254, 256–57, 260 and tech financing boom, 147 and “the Dress” viral post, 209–12 traffic growth, 122–27, 129–30, 203–12 and Upworthy, 179–83 Zuckerberg’s purchase offer for, 160–62, 165 “BuzzFeed Meme Machine” (memo), 123 C cable networks, 127–28, 269 Calacanis, Jason, 216 Cambridge Analytica, 242, 261 Camp, Garrett, 150–51 Campbell, Pamela, 231 Camp Bowery, 19, 54, 138 Canada, 226 Canvas Networks, 127 Carlson, Nicholas, 84–85, 120 Carson, Ben, 240 Case, Steve, 25 censorship, 211, 296–97 Cerami, Kassie, 112, 114 Charles, Michael, 188 Charlottesville rally, 294 Chartbeat, 204 Chateau Marmont, 199 Chatroulette, 151 Cheney, Dick, 71 Chinese Communist Party, 211 Chomsky, Noam, 4 Christie, Chris, 239 Claremont Middle School, 5 clickbait, 182–83 “click meter” tool, 105 Clinton, Bill, 27, 32, 94, 110, 119 Clinton, Hillary Rodham and Facebook’s political content, 239–42, 244–45 and Gionet, 293 presidential primary campaign, 102–3, 106 and the Steele Dossier, 248, 250, 253–54 support from women’s media, 94 and Weiner scandal, 144 WikiLeaks email controversy, 254, 259 Clooney, George, 56 CNET News, 41 CNN, 127–28, 167, 243, 249–51, 253 Coen, Jessica and author’s background, 246 and Denton’s parties, 53–56 and Denton’s wedding, 174 and Durst sex tape scandal, 63–64 and Gawker’s sexual content, 140 and Huffington Post’s traffic, 68–69 influence at Gawker, 53–56 and Jezebel’s style and content, 87, 95 Cohen, Michael, 250 Colbert, Stephen, 152 Coleman, Greg, 266 College Preparatory School, 5 Columbia Journalism School, 53 Comcast, 269 Comey, James, 249 Complex, 300 Comscore, 150, 179, 287 Condé Nast, 54, 88, 94, 156, 218 Conspiracy (Holiday), 234, 262 conspiracy theories and websites, 184, 258 Contagious Media, 27–28, 47–51, 71–72, 103 content management systems, 82 Conway, Ron, 285–86 Coppins, McKay, 166 Cormier, Anthony, 254, 257 Couric, Katie, 3–4, 8 COVID-19 pandemic, 299 Cox, Ana Marie, 29–31 Cox, Chris, 162–63, 206, 211 CPM (cost per thousand views) measure, 22–23, 45, 83, 169 Craigslist, 281 Cronkite, Walter, 28 CrowdTangle, 275 Cruz, Ted, 239, 240 Crying while Eating meme, 49, 50 cryptocurrency, 283, 299 Cuban, Mark, 216 Cube, the, 2, 11, 47 culture jamming, 9, 27 curiosity gap, 181, 205. See also clickbait Cusack, John, 34, 44, 60, 61, 68, 72, 80 Cutler, Jessica, 31 Cutts, Matt, 154 “Cyborg Manifesto” (Haraway), 7 D Daily Kos, 29 Daily Mail, 117, 118, 274 Daily Show, 98 Daily Stormer, 296 Daily Telegraph, 14 Daulerio, AJ background at Gawker, 137–38 and BuzzFeed–Gawker rivalry, 172 and Coen’s background, 55–56 and decline of Gawker, 214–15 and Denton’s wedding, 213 gambling blog at Gawker, 55–56 and Gawker’s sexual content, 137–43 and Huffington Post’s launch, 44 influence at Gawker, 174–76 and lawsuit against Gawker, 214–15, 217, 231–35 and New York blogging scene, 19 and Ratter site, 215–17 and right-wing media, 290 David, Larry, 44 David, Laurie, 32 Deadspin, 138, 141–43 Dean, Howard, 29, 31, 108 Death Row Records, 221 Defamer, 38 DeGeneres, Ellen, 44, 88 Delivr.net, 48–49 Demand Media, 118, 153 Democratic Party and Breitbart’s political influence, 41–42, 133–34, 145, 178 and BuzzFeed’s political content, 243 and Huffington’s influence, 60, 119, 149 and Obama’s online presence, 108, 114 and political content at Wonkette, 29–31 presidential primary, 94, 106 and responses to Trump’s election, 243 and the Steele Dossier, 248–49, 253–54, 256 demonetization, 278, 295 Denton, Geoffrey, 12–13, 107 Denton, Marika, 13 Denton, Nick and anti-NRA efforts, 28–29 and author’s background, 246–47 and backlash against media companies, 217–18 and Breitbart’s background, 38 and Breitbart’s growing influence, 133 and Contagious Media Showdown, 49–51 and Daulerio’s influence at Gawker, 174–76 and devaluation of traffic, 268 and digital labor strategies, 83–85 and early internet pranks, 24 early side ventures, 15–16 education, 13–14 family background, 12–13 and Gawker book release, 76 and Gawker’s decline, 213–16, 299 and Gawker’s sexual content, 137–43 and Huffington Post’s launch, 45–47 and Huffington Post’s political content, 108 and Huffington Post’s traffic, 69 and Huffington’s influence, 34 and Jezebel’s style and content, 87, 89–91, 94–98 journalism background, 14–15, 308n14 and lawsuit against Gawker, 231–36 life after Gawker, 260–63 and Moreover, 17–20 and New York blogging scene, 21–23 parties hosted by, 52–60 and Peretti’s arrival in New York, 10–11 and Peretti’s role at BuzzFeed, 126, 128 and political content at Wonkette, 29–31 and political engagement, 102 and right-wing media, 290 and rise of New York tech companies, 61–66 rivalry with Peretti, 170–72, 177, 206, 315n126 and sale of Huffington Post, 150 and shape of today’s internet media, 303 and the Steele Dossier, 247–48, 252, 258–59 and Thinking and Drinking controversy, 100 and Thomas’s journalism, 85–86 and Thompson’s role at Huffington Post, 79–80 and traffic monitoring tools, 72 and 2008 financial crisis, 120 wedding, 213–14, 235 deplatforming, 278, 295 Diamond and Silk, 278 dick pics, 137, 139–42, 144, 215–17 Digg, 66, 70, 72, 74, 102–4, 107–8 digital labor, 83 Disney, 116–18, 129, 195–202, 268, 272 Dixon, Chris, 127, 201, 283, 299 DLive, 295 Dobkin, Jake, 18, 20 Dodd, Chris, 189 Dodo, 283 “Dog Island” project, 48 Dolnick, Sam, 221, 225, 229 Dorsey, Jack, 115, 132 DoubleClick, 22, 105–6, 169 Douglas, Nick, 55, 64–65 Dowd, Maureen, 186 doxxing, 46 “The Dress” (viral post), 209–12, 253 Drop.io, 160 Drudge, Matt and author’s background, 158 and Breitbart’s background, 35–43 and Breitbart’s death, 178–79 and Breitbart’s influence, 132–34, 177 and Gawker book release, 76–77 and Huffington Post’s political content, 107–8 influence on Huffington Post, 68–69 and origin of political blogs, 33 and Weiner scandal, 146 Drudge Report, 33–34, 36, 39, 67, 68–69, 185–86 drug use, 56, 99–100, 175, 231–32 Durham, John, 257 Durst, Fred, 63–64, 140, 214 Duterte, Rodrigo, 243 E Eagle Room, 224 Eastern philosophy, 6 Eat, Sleep, Publish (blog), 221 Economist, 17 Egan, Tracie, 92, 97–98, 98–100, 139, 184, 290 890 Fifth Avenue Partners, 300 Elder, Miriam, 251, 253, 255 Elle, 91 Ellison, Larry, 65 Engadget, 147 English, Scott, 152 Entertainment Weekly, 91 ESPN, 140 Esquire, 137 Etsy, 61 Eyebeam, 10, 18, 27–28, 49, 51, 68, 76, 126 F Facebook and ad tech advances, 169 and advertising revenues, 279 and author’s background, 247 and backlash against media companies, 217 and Benny Johnson’s media background, 190 and BuzzFeed–Gawker rivalry, 171 and BuzzFeed’s competition, 260–61 and BuzzFeed’s design, 73 and BuzzFeed’s news and social content, 160–64, 167 and BuzzFeed’s role in social media, 269–70 and BuzzFeed’s traffic, 130, 151–54, 195, 203–12 and Gionet, 291, 293–94 and Huffington Post’s traffic, 116 and invasions of privacy, 141–42 and LilyBoo, 173 and “meaningful social engagement,” 272–75, 284 as model for BuzzFeed, 125 News Feed feature, 115, 152, 160–62, 182–83, 205, 211, 216, 273 and Obama campaign, 177 and origin of social media politics, 109–15 political content on, 237–45 and progressive activism, 131–32 and reBlog, 28 and revival of legacy media, 230 and right-wing media, 192–93 and shape of today’s internet media, 304 and shifting media environment, 84–85, 128 social engagement metrics at, 271–76, 278 and Thinking and Drinking controversy, 101 and Trump’s social media summit, 278 and Upworthy, 179–84 and video content, 264–67 and Weiner scandal, 146 Zuckerberg’s purchase offer to BuzzFeed, 160–62, 165 The Facebook Effect (Kirkpatrick), 113 Fanography, 154 FARC, 112–13 fark.com, 70 fashion industry, 88, 90–94 Fast Company, 181 Favre, Brett, 63, 142, 143 Federal Bureau of Investigation, 255, 257–58, 286, 296, 299 feminism, 7, 50, 88–90, 92, 94–95, 97–100, 140, 184, 260.


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

No doubt some Robinhood users have discovered the attractions of comparatively safe long-term investing via index funds thanks to the app’s simplified interface. But Robinhood’s vision of the stock market they want to democratise isn’t a world of buy-and-hold but a world of nonstop trading where leverage is easy to obtain and fortunes are to be made and lost in hours and minutes. Users trading Dogecoin cryptocurrency alone contributed a whopping 6 percent of the company’s entire revenue during the first quarter of 2021. To Robinhood, the stock market is a game, and they want everyone to play.57 Since Robinhood offers commission-free trading, it uses another way to make money called “payment for order flow” (PFOF).58 This mechanism is not especially unusual, but because PFOF means Robinhood gets paid whenever a user makes a trade, the company is strongly incentivised to encourage its users to make as many trades as possible.59 Perhaps this is why the secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts charged Robinhood for the “use of strategies such as gamification to encourage and entice continuous and repetitive use of its trading application” in late 2020.60 Robinhood and gamification have been linked many times, and one of the most influential was in a memo for members of the House Financial Services Committee preceding their February 2021 hearing.61 The reason for the hearing?

You should not be here to gain experience points, create your own reality, play mind games with others, or engage in satisfying your taste for single combat.”91 Yet though the burden is on us to remember the world isn’t a game, frequent-flyer programs, Chartbeat, Robinhood, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and now cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and decentralised finance (DeFi) platforms are trying their damnedest to convince us otherwise. In an interview with The Information, Raj Gokal, chief operating officer of Solana, a DeFi company that raised $314 million in 2021, made the comparison explicit: “I think what happened in the last year is that the traditional capital markets for large enterprises started to look like games, too.

In 2021, California passed a bill requiring warehousing companies like Amazon to disclose productivity quotas and algorithms to workers upon hiring, along with giving them the right to request their own productivity figures.11 The bill could serve as a model for other industries and for federal legislation, but again, it remains to be seen how it will be enforced. In the world of finance, we need retail investors to be aware of the risks of volatile, gamified, social media–driven markets, especially those involving cryptocurrencies, decentralized autonomous organisations (DAOs), and NFTs. Entrepreneurs and artists are increasingly gamifying NFTs with leaderboards, quests, experience points, and collectible sets in order to increase adoption and trading volume.12 We should consider regulating these markets in the same way we regulate securities and gambling, before too many lose more than they can afford.


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

., most products return little, but some go big). Pros: Full ownership. Personal satisfaction. Can create a valuable brand. Cons: Very labor intensive. No guarantee of payoff. What About Gold, Crypto, Art, Etc? A handful of asset classes did not make the above list for the simple reason that they don’t produce income. Gold, cryptocurrency, commodities, art, and wine have no reliable income stream associated with their ownership, so I have not included them in my list of income-producing assets. Of course, this does not mean that you can’t make money with these assets. What it does mean is that their valuations are based solely on perception—what someone else is willing to pay for them.

While perception does play a role in how these assets are priced, cash flows should anchor their valuations, at least in theory. For this reason, the bulk of my investments (90%) are in income-producing assets, with the remaining 10% spread out among non-income-producing assets such as art and various cryptocurrencies. Final Summary Here is a summary table of the information covered in this chapter, for better comparison purposes. Asset Class Annual Compounded Return Pros Cons Stocks 8%–10% High historic returns. Easy to own and trade.


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

And they’re far from done: Today, PayPal alumni have taken as a mission everything from cataloging the world’s genealogical records to restoring three billion acres of forest ecosystems to “scaling love”—bringing their PayPal experience to bear in each case. They’ve also been at the center of the biggest social, cultural, and political controversies of our age, including bitter fights over free speech, financial regulation, privacy in technology, income inequality, the efficacy of cryptocurrency, and discrimination in Silicon Valley. For its admirers, PayPal’s founders are a force to be emulated. For its critics, the group represents everything wrong with big tech—putting historically unprecedented power into the hands of a small clutch of techno-utopian libertarians. Indeed, it is hard to find a lukewarm opinion about PayPal’s founders—they are either heroes or heathens, depending on who offers the judgment

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.

Roybal stayed with the company for eight years; Cervantes for fourteen. “You know when you meet magnanimous, charismatic, genius people that you want to be around them?” Cervantes asked. “That’s kind of how everybody felt in the office.” John Kothanek, who now oversees global investigations for the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, echoed her sentiment. “I was just hooked,” he admitted. “Wild horses could not have drug me out of that profession.” Even Levchin could look back on that which almost killed the company as a formative part of his PayPal experience. He recalled an infamous email he had written to Musk bearing the subject line: “Fraud is love,” a sardonic inside joke.


pages: 484 words: 114,613

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Frank Gehry, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Zipcar

If they wanted to leave in a huff at the slightest suggestion of making the investment worth it, after Zuckerberg had made them both billionaires, then good riddance. “I find attacking the people and company that made you a billionaire, and went to an unprecedented extent to shield and accommodate you for years, low-class,” David Marcus, the Facebook executive in charge of a new cryptocurrency initiative, later wrote publicly. “It’s actually a whole new standard of low-class.” It showed what could happen if, as an acquired company, you didn’t realize you were still beholden to Facebook’s needs. But Systrom and Krieger felt like they’d been much more reasonable. Besides their ad business, they’d suffered all those IGTV meetings and talks of “cannibalization.”

He had been waging battles to improve the product’s look and feel. He also happened to be good at Instagram, with an account full of aesthetically pleasing cityscapes and nature shots. They needed someone new on product. Kevin Weil, whom Systrom recruited in from Twitter in 2016, had left to join Facebook’s new cryptocurrency group, Libra, which would try to develop a global form of money to rival the U.S. dollar. So Systrom and Krieger recruited Mosseri to replace Weil. Instagram employees were skeptical of their choice and wondered if the Instagram cofounders had had a choice at all. Amid the tension with Facebook, nobody was sure if the founders really wanted Mosseri, or if they’d been forced to bring him in so that Instagram could be more tightly controlled by Facebook.

News, 154, 192 escapism, 23, 209, 217, 239, 241 Escobar, Pablo, 238 Eswein, Liz, 43–44, 48, 82 Everson, Carolyn, 120–21 Eye Candy, 242 Facebook, xviii, 7, 10, 19, 39, 111, 181, 217, 222, 227, 246, 248, 253 advertising agencies’ relationship with, 120–21, 124 advertising business of, 75, 77, 91–92, 94, 96, 105, 118–19, 125, 149–50, 163, 217, 224 algorithmic personalization approach of, 91, 103, 128, 162, 163, 208, 209, 210–12, 215, 221, 224, 259 board of, 57, 63, 125, 191 business model of, 258–59 business team at, 222 Cambridge Analytica scandal at, 258, 259, 267 celebrity outreach of, 127–28, 156 Communications Decency Act and, 41 communications team at, 211, 222 “connect the world” goal of, 91, 149, 162 content policing at, 43, 97, 259, 260–61 Creative Labs at, 124 Creative Labs Skunk Works at, 191 cryptocurrency initiative at, 257, 263 data collection by, 89, 90, 91–92, 93, 122, 125, 143, 149, 258–59 dominance of, in social network world, 78, 88, 121, 124, 151, 209, 253, 255 early IG acquisition interest of, 28 edge stories of, 209–10 employee handbook of, 65, 93, 106, 228 engineering team at, 60, 62 ephemeral sharing on, 191, 193, 214, 215–16, 217 fake news scandal at, 210–11, 224–25, 234, 250–51, 255 “family of apps” bundled together with, 255–56, 259, 267–68, 277, 279 as friend-based network, 20, 31, 80 “friend coefficient” of, 91 global partnerships team at, 148 Gowalla acquired by, 51 growth as overarching goal at, xvii, 9, 91–92, 96, 150–51, 160, 209, 276 growth team at, 90, 92, 93, 95, 122, 177, 223, 260, 268 hackathons hosted by, 124, 187 hacker culture at, 93, 102 hierarchy reshuffle at, 255–56 hyperlinks on, 80, 210 as ideological echo chamber, 220–21 IG photo sharing to, 37 IG’s access to infrastructure and resources at, 96, 159, 162, 225, 249–50 IG’s access to infrastructure and resources denied by, 262, 268–69 IG’s cannibalization of, as issue at, 223, 226, 227–28, 257, 280 IG seen as threat to, xvii, 38, 57, 63–64, 77–78, 90, 95, 252–53, 270 IG’s growing resentment of, 254, 262, 263, 274 IG’s independence at, 54, 63, 65, 67, 89, 96, 106, 118, 121, 124, 209, 222–23 IG’s integration at, 100–101, 114, 223 IG users’ mistrust of, 100, 197 integrity team at, 259–60, 271 Internet.org division of, 124 IPO of, 56, 58, 74, 84, 128, 150 leadership team at, 222 link added from IG to, 228, 257 link to IG removed from, 228, 269 live video on, 261 lockdowns at, 108, 256, 269–70 Lookalike Audience tool of, 213 Menlo Park headquarters of, 66–68, 179, 200, 203, 210, 254 Mentions app of, 156 mobile advertising of, 105, 150 mobile troubles of, 93, 98 Mobile Uploads album on, 28 mounting tensions between IG and, 262, 263, 274 network effects of, 77–78 news feed on, 81, 91, 94, 96, 163, 211–12, 215, 259, 263, 264, 269 Nextstop acquired by, 32 Onavo acquired by, 122, 123, 181 1-billion-user milestone reached by, 88, 265 operations team at, 225 Palo Alto office of, 15, 88, 107 Paper app of, 156 partnerships team at, 50, 148, 200 photos launched by, 7 Poke app of, 115–16, 124, 191 policy team at, 211, 225, 232 politics and, 209–13 privacy issues at, 54, 92, 94, 264 privacy scandals at, 28, 154, 255, 267 public policy team at, 211 Riffs app of, 191 Saverin and, 15 scale and, 98, 103, 143, 225, 265 Slingshot app of, 191 tagging friends on, 7, 90 technology team at, 24, 26, 95, 214 trending topics module of, 207, 210 2-billion-user milestone reached by, 252 video on, 109, 215, 253–54 virality on, 162, 209, 211, 215, 251, 260 WhatsApp acquired by, 125, 202, 255 Yahoo!


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

A transaction log can be made tamper-proof by periodically signing it with a hardware security module, but that does not guarantee that the right transactions went into the log in the first place. It would be interesting to use cryptographic tools to prove the integrity of a system in a way that is robust to a wide range of hardware and software issues, and even poten‐ tially malicious actions. Cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and distributed ledger tech‐ nologies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Stellar, and various others [71, 72, 73] have sprung up to explore this area. I am not qualified to comment on the merits of these technologies as currencies or mechanisms for agreeing contracts. However, from a data systems point of view they contain some interesting ideas.

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). Outside of the hype of cryptocurrencies, certif‐ icate transparency is a security technology that relies on Merkle trees to check the val‐ idity of TLS/SSL certificates [75, 76]. 532 | Chapter 12: The Future of Data Systems I could imagine integrity-checking and auditing algorithms, like those of certificate transparency and distributed ledgers, becoming more widely used in data systems in general.

The opposite of bounded. 558 | Glossary Index A aborts (transactions), 222, 224 in two-phase commit, 356 performance of optimistic concurrency con‐ trol, 266 retrying aborted transactions, 231 abstraction, 21, 27, 222, 266, 321 access path (in network model), 37, 60 accidental complexity, removing, 21 accountability, 535 ACID properties (transactions), 90, 223 atomicity, 223, 228 consistency, 224, 529 durability, 226 isolation, 225, 228 acknowledgements (messaging), 445 active/active replication (see multi-leader repli‐ cation) active/passive replication (see leader-based rep‐ lication) ActiveMQ (messaging), 137, 444 distributed transaction support, 361 ActiveRecord (object-relational mapper), 30, 232 actor model, 138 (see also message-passing) comparison to Pregel model, 425 comparison to stream processing, 468 Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (see AMQP) aerospace systems, 6, 10, 305, 372 aggregation data cubes and materialized views, 101 in batch processes, 406 in stream processes, 466 aggregation pipeline query language, 48 Agile, 22 minimizing irreversibility, 414, 497 moving faster with confidence, 532 Unix philosophy, 394 agreement, 365 (see also consensus) Airflow (workflow scheduler), 402 Ajax, 131 Akka (actor framework), 139 algorithms algorithm correctness, 308 B-trees, 79-83 for distributed systems, 306 hash indexes, 72-75 mergesort, 76, 402, 405 red-black trees, 78 SSTables and LSM-trees, 76-79 all-to-all replication topologies, 175 AllegroGraph (database), 50 ALTER TABLE statement (SQL), 40, 111 Amazon Dynamo (database), 177 Amazon Web Services (AWS), 8 Kinesis Streams (messaging), 448 network reliability, 279 postmortems, 9 RedShift (database), 93 S3 (object storage), 398 checking data integrity, 530 amplification of bias, 534 of failures, 364, 495 Index | 559 of tail latency, 16, 207 write amplification, 84 AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol), 444 (see also messaging systems) comparison to log-based messaging, 448, 451 message ordering, 446 analytics, 90 comparison to transaction processing, 91 data warehousing (see data warehousing) parallel query execution in MPP databases, 415 predictive (see predictive analytics) relation to batch processing, 411 schemas for, 93-95 snapshot isolation for queries, 238 stream analytics, 466 using MapReduce, analysis of user activity events (example), 404 anti-caching (in-memory databases), 89 anti-entropy, 178 Apache ActiveMQ (see ActiveMQ) Apache Avro (see Avro) Apache Beam (see Beam) Apache BookKeeper (see BookKeeper) Apache Cassandra (see Cassandra) Apache CouchDB (see CouchDB) Apache Curator (see Curator) Apache Drill (see Drill) Apache Flink (see Flink) Apache Giraph (see Giraph) Apache Hadoop (see Hadoop) Apache HAWQ (see HAWQ) Apache HBase (see HBase) Apache Helix (see Helix) Apache Hive (see Hive) Apache Impala (see Impala) Apache Jena (see Jena) Apache Kafka (see Kafka) Apache Lucene (see Lucene) Apache MADlib (see MADlib) Apache Mahout (see Mahout) Apache Oozie (see Oozie) Apache Parquet (see Parquet) Apache Qpid (see Qpid) Apache Samza (see Samza) Apache Solr (see Solr) Apache Spark (see Spark) 560 | Index Apache Storm (see Storm) Apache Tajo (see Tajo) Apache Tez (see Tez) Apache Thrift (see Thrift) Apache ZooKeeper (see ZooKeeper) Apama (stream analytics), 466 append-only B-trees, 82, 242 append-only files (see logs) Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), 5, 27 for batch processing, 403 for change streams, 456 for distributed transactions, 361 for graph processing, 425 for services, 131-136 (see also services) evolvability, 136 RESTful, 133 SOAP, 133 application state (see state) approximate search (see similarity search) archival storage, data from databases, 131 arcs (see edges) arithmetic mean, 14 ASCII text, 119, 395 ASN.1 (schema language), 127 asynchronous networks, 278, 553 comparison to synchronous networks, 284 formal model, 307 asynchronous replication, 154, 553 conflict detection, 172 data loss on failover, 157 reads from asynchronous follower, 162 Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), 285 atomic broadcast (see total order broadcast) atomic clocks (caesium clocks), 294, 295 (see also clocks) atomicity (concurrency), 553 atomic increment-and-get, 351 compare-and-set, 245, 327 (see also compare-and-set operations) replicated operations, 246 write operations, 243 atomicity (transactions), 223, 228, 553 atomic commit, 353 avoiding, 523, 528 blocking and nonblocking, 359 in stream processing, 360, 477 maintaining derived data, 453 for multi-object transactions, 229 for single-object writes, 230 auditability, 528-533 designing for, 531 self-auditing systems, 530 through immutability, 460 tools for auditable data systems, 532 availability, 8 (see also fault tolerance) in CAP theorem, 337 in service level agreements (SLAs), 15 Avro (data format), 122-127 code generation, 127 dynamically generated schemas, 126 object container files, 125, 131, 414 reader determining writer’s schema, 125 schema evolution, 123 use in Hadoop, 414 awk (Unix tool), 391 AWS (see Amazon Web Services) Azure (see Microsoft) B B-trees (indexes), 79-83 append-only/copy-on-write variants, 82, 242 branching factor, 81 comparison to LSM-trees, 83-85 crash recovery, 82 growing by splitting a page, 81 optimizations, 82 similarity to dynamic partitioning, 212 backpressure, 441, 553 in TCP, 282 backups database snapshot for replication, 156 integrity of, 530 snapshot isolation for, 238 use for ETL processes, 405 backward compatibility, 112 BASE, contrast to ACID, 223 bash shell (Unix), 70, 395, 503 batch processing, 28, 389-431, 553 combining with stream processing lambda architecture, 497 unifying technologies, 498 comparison to MPP databases, 414-418 comparison to stream processing, 464 comparison to Unix, 413-414 dataflow engines, 421-423 fault tolerance, 406, 414, 422, 442 for data integration, 494-498 graphs and iterative processing, 424-426 high-level APIs and languages, 403, 426-429 log-based messaging and, 451 maintaining derived state, 495 MapReduce and distributed filesystems, 397-413 (see also MapReduce) measuring performance, 13, 390 outputs, 411-413 key-value stores, 412 search indexes, 411 using Unix tools (example), 391-394 Bayou (database), 522 Beam (dataflow library), 498 bias, 534 big ball of mud, 20 Bigtable data model, 41, 99 binary data encodings, 115-128 Avro, 122-127 MessagePack, 116-117 Thrift and Protocol Buffers, 117-121 binary encoding based on schemas, 127 by network drivers, 128 binary strings, lack of support in JSON and XML, 114 BinaryProtocol encoding (Thrift), 118 Bitcask (storage engine), 72 crash recovery, 74 Bitcoin (cryptocurrency), 532 Byzantine fault tolerance, 305 concurrency bugs in exchanges, 233 bitmap indexes, 97 blockchains, 532 Byzantine fault tolerance, 305 blocking atomic commit, 359 Bloom (programming language), 504 Bloom filter (algorithm), 79, 466 BookKeeper (replicated log), 372 Bottled Water (change data capture), 455 bounded datasets, 430, 439, 553 (see also batch processing) bounded delays, 553 in networks, 285 process pauses, 298 broadcast hash joins, 409 Index | 561 brokerless messaging, 442 Brubeck (metrics aggregator), 442 BTM (transaction coordinator), 356 bulk synchronous parallel (BSP) model, 425 bursty network traffic patterns, 285 business data processing, 28, 90, 390 byte sequence, encoding data in, 112 Byzantine faults, 304-306, 307, 553 Byzantine fault-tolerant systems, 305, 532 Byzantine Generals Problem, 304 consensus algorithms and, 366 C caches, 89, 553 and materialized views, 101 as derived data, 386, 499-504 database as cache of transaction log, 460 in CPUs, 99, 338, 428 invalidation and maintenance, 452, 467 linearizability, 324 CAP theorem, 336-338, 554 Cascading (batch processing), 419, 427 hash joins, 409 workflows, 403 cascading failures, 9, 214, 281 Cascalog (batch processing), 60 Cassandra (database) column-family data model, 41, 99 compaction strategy, 79 compound primary key, 204 gossip protocol, 216 hash partitioning, 203-205 last-write-wins conflict resolution, 186, 292 leaderless replication, 177 linearizability, lack of, 335 log-structured storage, 78 multi-datacenter support, 184 partitioning scheme, 213 secondary indexes, 207 sloppy quorums, 184 cat (Unix tool), 391 causal context, 191 (see also causal dependencies) causal dependencies, 186-191 capturing, 191, 342, 494, 514 by total ordering, 493 causal ordering, 339 in transactions, 262 sending message to friends (example), 494 562 | Index causality, 554 causal ordering, 339-343 linearizability and, 342 total order consistent with, 344, 345 consistency with, 344-347 consistent snapshots, 340 happens-before relationship, 186 in serializable transactions, 262-265 mismatch with clocks, 292 ordering events to capture, 493 violations of, 165, 176, 292, 340 with synchronized clocks, 294 CEP (see complex event processing) certificate transparency, 532 chain replication, 155 linearizable reads, 351 change data capture, 160, 454 API support for change streams, 456 comparison to event sourcing, 457 implementing, 454 initial snapshot, 455 log compaction, 456 changelogs, 460 change data capture, 454 for operator state, 479 generating with triggers, 455 in stream joins, 474 log compaction, 456 maintaining derived state, 452 Chaos Monkey, 7, 280 checkpointing in batch processors, 422, 426 in high-performance computing, 275 in stream processors, 477, 523 chronicle data model, 458 circuit-switched networks, 284 circular buffers, 450 circular replication topologies, 175 clickstream data, analysis of, 404 clients calling services, 131 pushing state changes to, 512 request routing, 214 stateful and offline-capable, 170, 511 clocks, 287-299 atomic (caesium) clocks, 294, 295 confidence interval, 293-295 for global snapshots, 294 logical (see logical clocks) skew, 291-294, 334 slewing, 289 synchronization and accuracy, 289-291 synchronization using GPS, 287, 290, 294, 295 time-of-day versus monotonic clocks, 288 timestamping events, 471 cloud computing, 146, 275 need for service discovery, 372 network glitches, 279 shared resources, 284 single-machine reliability, 8 Cloudera Impala (see Impala) clustered indexes, 86 CODASYL model, 36 (see also network model) code generation with Avro, 127 with Thrift and Protocol Buffers, 118 with WSDL, 133 collaborative editing multi-leader replication and, 170 column families (Bigtable), 41, 99 column-oriented storage, 95-101 column compression, 97 distinction between column families and, 99 in batch processors, 428 Parquet, 96, 131, 414 sort order in, 99-100 vectorized processing, 99, 428 writing to, 101 comma-separated values (see CSV) command query responsibility segregation (CQRS), 462 commands (event sourcing), 459 commits (transactions), 222 atomic commit, 354-355 (see also atomicity; transactions) read committed isolation, 234 three-phase commit (3PC), 359 two-phase commit (2PC), 355-359 commutative operations, 246 compaction of changelogs, 456 (see also log compaction) for stream operator state, 479 of log-structured storage, 73 issues with, 84 size-tiered and leveled approaches, 79 CompactProtocol encoding (Thrift), 119 compare-and-set operations, 245, 327 implementing locks, 370 implementing uniqueness constraints, 331 implementing with total order broadcast, 350 relation to consensus, 335, 350, 352, 374 relation to transactions, 230 compatibility, 112, 128 calling services, 136 properties of encoding formats, 139 using databases, 129-131 using message-passing, 138 compensating transactions, 355, 461, 526 complex event processing (CEP), 465 complexity distilling in theoretical models, 310 hiding using abstraction, 27 of software systems, managing, 20 composing data systems (see unbundling data‐ bases) compute-intensive applications, 3, 275 concatenated indexes, 87 in Cassandra, 204 Concord (stream processor), 466 concurrency actor programming model, 138, 468 (see also message-passing) bugs from weak transaction isolation, 233 conflict resolution, 171, 174 detecting concurrent writes, 184-191 dual writes, problems with, 453 happens-before relationship, 186 in replicated systems, 161-191, 324-338 lost updates, 243 multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), 239 optimistic concurrency control, 261 ordering of operations, 326, 341 reducing, through event logs, 351, 462, 507 time and relativity, 187 transaction isolation, 225 write skew (transaction isolation), 246-251 conflict-free replicated datatypes (CRDTs), 174 conflicts conflict detection, 172 causal dependencies, 186, 342 in consensus algorithms, 368 in leaderless replication, 184 Index | 563 in log-based systems, 351, 521 in nonlinearizable systems, 343 in serializable snapshot isolation (SSI), 264 in two-phase commit, 357, 364 conflict resolution automatic conflict resolution, 174 by aborting transactions, 261 by apologizing, 527 convergence, 172-174 in leaderless systems, 190 last write wins (LWW), 186, 292 using atomic operations, 246 using custom logic, 173 determining what is a conflict, 174, 522 in multi-leader replication, 171-175 avoiding conflicts, 172 lost updates, 242-246 materializing, 251 relation to operation ordering, 339 write skew (transaction isolation), 246-251 congestion (networks) avoidance, 282 limiting accuracy of clocks, 293 queueing delays, 282 consensus, 321, 364-375, 554 algorithms, 366-368 preventing split brain, 367 safety and liveness properties, 365 using linearizable operations, 351 cost of, 369 distributed transactions, 352-375 in practice, 360-364 two-phase commit, 354-359 XA transactions, 361-364 impossibility of, 353 membership and coordination services, 370-373 relation to compare-and-set, 335, 350, 352, 374 relation to replication, 155, 349 relation to uniqueness constraints, 521 consistency, 224, 524 across different databases, 157, 452, 462, 492 causal, 339-348, 493 consistent prefix reads, 165-167 consistent snapshots, 156, 237-242, 294, 455, 500 (see also snapshots) 564 | Index crash recovery, 82 enforcing constraints (see constraints) eventual, 162, 322 (see also eventual consistency) in ACID transactions, 224, 529 in CAP theorem, 337 linearizability, 324-338 meanings of, 224 monotonic reads, 164-165 of secondary indexes, 231, 241, 354, 491, 500 ordering guarantees, 339-352 read-after-write, 162-164 sequential, 351 strong (see linearizability) timeliness and integrity, 524 using quorums, 181, 334 consistent hashing, 204 consistent prefix reads, 165 constraints (databases), 225, 248 asynchronously checked, 526 coordination avoidance, 527 ensuring idempotence, 519 in log-based systems, 521-524 across multiple partitions, 522 in two-phase commit, 355, 357 relation to consensus, 374, 521 relation to event ordering, 347 requiring linearizability, 330 Consul (service discovery), 372 consumers (message streams), 137, 440 backpressure, 441 consumer offsets in logs, 449 failures, 445, 449 fan-out, 11, 445, 448 load balancing, 444, 448 not keeping up with producers, 441, 450, 502 context switches, 14, 297 convergence (conflict resolution), 172-174, 322 coordination avoidance, 527 cross-datacenter, 168, 493 cross-partition ordering, 256, 294, 348, 523 services, 330, 370-373 coordinator (in 2PC), 356 failure, 358 in XA transactions, 361-364 recovery, 363 copy-on-write (B-trees), 82, 242 CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), 134 correctness, 6 auditability, 528-533 Byzantine fault tolerance, 305, 532 dealing with partial failures, 274 in log-based systems, 521-524 of algorithm within system model, 308 of compensating transactions, 355 of consensus, 368 of derived data, 497, 531 of immutable data, 461 of personal data, 535, 540 of time, 176, 289-295 of transactions, 225, 515, 529 timeliness and integrity, 524-528 corruption of data detecting, 519, 530-533 due to pathological memory access, 529 due to radiation, 305 due to split brain, 158, 302 due to weak transaction isolation, 233 formalization in consensus, 366 integrity as absence of, 524 network packets, 306 on disks, 227 preventing using write-ahead logs, 82 recovering from, 414, 460 Couchbase (database) durability, 89 hash partitioning, 203-204, 211 rebalancing, 213 request routing, 216 CouchDB (database) B-tree storage, 242 change feed, 456 document data model, 31 join support, 34 MapReduce support, 46, 400 replication, 170, 173 covering indexes, 86 CPUs cache coherence and memory barriers, 338 caching and pipelining, 99, 428 increasing parallelism, 43 CRDTs (see conflict-free replicated datatypes) CREATE INDEX statement (SQL), 85, 500 credit rating agencies, 535 Crunch (batch processing), 419, 427 hash joins, 409 sharded joins, 408 workflows, 403 cryptography defense against attackers, 306 end-to-end encryption and authentication, 519, 543 proving integrity of data, 532 CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), 44 CSV (comma-separated values), 70, 114, 396 Curator (ZooKeeper recipes), 330, 371 curl (Unix tool), 135, 397 cursor stability, 243 Cypher (query language), 52 comparison to SPARQL, 59 D data corruption (see corruption of data) data cubes, 102 data formats (see encoding) data integration, 490-498, 543 batch and stream processing, 494-498 lambda architecture, 497 maintaining derived state, 495 reprocessing data, 496 unifying, 498 by unbundling databases, 499-515 comparison to federated databases, 501 combining tools by deriving data, 490-494 derived data versus distributed transac‐ tions, 492 limits of total ordering, 493 ordering events to capture causality, 493 reasoning about dataflows, 491 need for, 385 data lakes, 415 data locality (see locality) data models, 27-64 graph-like models, 49-63 Datalog language, 60-63 property graphs, 50 RDF and triple-stores, 55-59 query languages, 42-48 relational model versus document model, 28-42 data protection regulations, 542 data systems, 3 about, 4 Index | 565 concerns when designing, 5 future of, 489-544 correctness, constraints, and integrity, 515-533 data integration, 490-498 unbundling databases, 499-515 heterogeneous, keeping in sync, 452 maintainability, 18-22 possible faults in, 221 reliability, 6-10 hardware faults, 7 human errors, 9 importance of, 10 software errors, 8 scalability, 10-18 unreliable clocks, 287-299 data warehousing, 91-95, 554 comparison to data lakes, 415 ETL (extract-transform-load), 92, 416, 452 keeping data systems in sync, 452 schema design, 93 slowly changing dimension (SCD), 476 data-intensive applications, 3 database triggers (see triggers) database-internal distributed transactions, 360, 364, 477 databases archival storage, 131 comparison of message brokers to, 443 dataflow through, 129 end-to-end argument for, 519-520 checking integrity, 531 inside-out, 504 (see also unbundling databases) output from batch workflows, 412 relation to event streams, 451-464 (see also changelogs) API support for change streams, 456, 506 change data capture, 454-457 event sourcing, 457-459 keeping systems in sync, 452-453 philosophy of immutable events, 459-464 unbundling, 499-515 composing data storage technologies, 499-504 designing applications around dataflow, 504-509 566 | Index observing derived state, 509-515 datacenters geographically distributed, 145, 164, 278, 493 multi-tenancy and shared resources, 284 network architecture, 276 network faults, 279 replication across multiple, 169 leaderless replication, 184 multi-leader replication, 168, 335 dataflow, 128-139, 504-509 correctness of dataflow systems, 525 differential, 504 message-passing, 136-139 reasoning about, 491 through databases, 129 through services, 131-136 dataflow engines, 421-423 comparison to stream processing, 464 directed acyclic graphs (DAG), 424 partitioning, approach to, 429 support for declarative queries, 427 Datalog (query language), 60-63 datatypes binary strings in XML and JSON, 114 conflict-free, 174 in Avro encodings, 122 in Thrift and Protocol Buffers, 121 numbers in XML and JSON, 114 Datomic (database) B-tree storage, 242 data model, 50, 57 Datalog query language, 60 excision (deleting data), 463 languages for transactions, 255 serial execution of transactions, 253 deadlocks detection, in two-phase commit (2PC), 364 in two-phase locking (2PL), 258 Debezium (change data capture), 455 declarative languages, 42, 554 Bloom, 504 CSS and XSL, 44 Cypher, 52 Datalog, 60 for batch processing, 427 recursive SQL queries, 53 relational algebra and SQL, 42 SPARQL, 59 delays bounded network delays, 285 bounded process pauses, 298 unbounded network delays, 282 unbounded process pauses, 296 deleting data, 463 denormalization (data representation), 34, 554 costs, 39 in derived data systems, 386 materialized views, 101 updating derived data, 228, 231, 490 versus normalization, 462 derived data, 386, 439, 554 from change data capture, 454 in event sourcing, 458-458 maintaining derived state through logs, 452-457, 459-463 observing, by subscribing to streams, 512 outputs of batch and stream processing, 495 through application code, 505 versus distributed transactions, 492 deterministic operations, 255, 274, 554 accidental nondeterminism, 423 and fault tolerance, 423, 426 and idempotence, 478, 492 computing derived data, 495, 526, 531 in state machine replication, 349, 452, 458 joins, 476 DevOps, 394 differential dataflow, 504 dimension tables, 94 dimensional modeling (see star schemas) directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), 424 dirty reads (transaction isolation), 234 dirty writes (transaction isolation), 235 discrimination, 534 disks (see hard disks) distributed actor frameworks, 138 distributed filesystems, 398-399 decoupling from query engines, 417 indiscriminately dumping data into, 415 use by MapReduce, 402 distributed systems, 273-312, 554 Byzantine faults, 304-306 cloud versus supercomputing, 275 detecting network faults, 280 faults and partial failures, 274-277 formalization of consensus, 365 impossibility results, 338, 353 issues with failover, 157 limitations of distributed transactions, 363 multi-datacenter, 169, 335 network problems, 277-286 quorums, relying on, 301 reasons for using, 145, 151 synchronized clocks, relying on, 291-295 system models, 306-310 use of clocks and time, 287 distributed transactions (see transactions) Django (web framework), 232 DNS (Domain Name System), 216, 372 Docker (container manager), 506 document data model, 30-42 comparison to relational model, 38-42 document references, 38, 403 document-oriented databases, 31 many-to-many relationships and joins, 36 multi-object transactions, need for, 231 versus relational model convergence of models, 41 data locality, 41 document-partitioned indexes, 206, 217, 411 domain-driven design (DDD), 457 DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device), 153 drift (clocks), 289 Drill (query engine), 93 Druid (database), 461 Dryad (dataflow engine), 421 dual writes, problems with, 452, 507 duplicates, suppression of, 517 (see also idempotence) using a unique ID, 518, 522 durability (transactions), 226, 554 duration (time), 287 measurement with monotonic clocks, 288 dynamic partitioning, 212 dynamically typed languages analogy to schema-on-read, 40 code generation and, 127 Dynamo-style databases (see leaderless replica‐ tion) E edges (in graphs), 49, 403 property graph model, 50 edit distance (full-text search), 88 effectively-once semantics, 476, 516 Index | 567 (see also exactly-once semantics) preservation of integrity, 525 elastic systems, 17 Elasticsearch (search server) document-partitioned indexes, 207 partition rebalancing, 211 percolator (stream search), 467 usage example, 4 use of Lucene, 79 ElephantDB (database), 413 Elm (programming language), 504, 512 encodings (data formats), 111-128 Avro, 122-127 binary variants of JSON and XML, 115 compatibility, 112 calling services, 136 using databases, 129-131 using message-passing, 138 defined, 113 JSON, XML, and CSV, 114 language-specific formats, 113 merits of schemas, 127 representations of data, 112 Thrift and Protocol Buffers, 117-121 end-to-end argument, 277, 519-520 checking integrity, 531 publish/subscribe streams, 512 enrichment (stream), 473 Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), 134 entities (see vertices) epoch (consensus algorithms), 368 epoch (Unix timestamps), 288 equi-joins, 403 erasure coding (error correction), 398 Erlang OTP (actor framework), 139 error handling for network faults, 280 in transactions, 231 error-correcting codes, 277, 398 Esper (CEP engine), 466 etcd (coordination service), 370-373 linearizable operations, 333 locks and leader election, 330 quorum reads, 351 service discovery, 372 use of Raft algorithm, 349, 353 Ethereum (blockchain), 532 Ethernet (networks), 276, 278, 285 packet checksums, 306, 519 568 | Index Etherpad (collaborative editor), 170 ethics, 533-543 code of ethics and professional practice, 533 legislation and self-regulation, 542 predictive analytics, 533-536 amplifying bias, 534 feedback loops, 536 privacy and tracking, 536-543 consent and freedom of choice, 538 data as assets and power, 540 meaning of privacy, 539 surveillance, 537 respect, dignity, and agency, 543, 544 unintended consequences, 533, 536 ETL (extract-transform-load), 92, 405, 452, 554 use of Hadoop for, 416 event sourcing, 457-459 commands and events, 459 comparison to change data capture, 457 comparison to lambda architecture, 497 deriving current state from event log, 458 immutability and auditability, 459, 531 large, reliable data systems, 519, 526 Event Store (database), 458 event streams (see streams) events, 440 deciding on total order of, 493 deriving views from event log, 461 difference to commands, 459 event time versus processing time, 469, 477, 498 immutable, advantages of, 460, 531 ordering to capture causality, 493 reads as, 513 stragglers, 470, 498 timestamp of, in stream processing, 471 EventSource (browser API), 512 eventual consistency, 152, 162, 308, 322 (see also conflicts) and perpetual inconsistency, 525 evolvability, 21, 111 calling services, 136 graph-structured data, 52 of databases, 40, 129-131, 461, 497 of message-passing, 138 reprocessing data, 496, 498 schema evolution in Avro, 123 schema evolution in Thrift and Protocol Buffers, 120 schema-on-read, 39, 111, 128 exactly-once semantics, 360, 476, 516 parity with batch processors, 498 preservation of integrity, 525 exclusive mode (locks), 258 eXtended Architecture transactions (see XA transactions) extract-transform-load (see ETL) F Facebook Presto (query engine), 93 React, Flux, and Redux (user interface libra‐ ries), 512 social graphs, 49 Wormhole (change data capture), 455 fact tables, 93 failover, 157, 554 (see also leader-based replication) in leaderless replication, absence of, 178 leader election, 301, 348, 352 potential problems, 157 failures amplification by distributed transactions, 364, 495 failure detection, 280 automatic rebalancing causing cascading failures, 214 perfect failure detectors, 359 timeouts and unbounded delays, 282, 284 using ZooKeeper, 371 faults versus, 7 partial failures in distributed systems, 275-277, 310 fan-out (messaging systems), 11, 445 fault tolerance, 6-10, 555 abstractions for, 321 formalization in consensus, 365-369 use of replication, 367 human fault tolerance, 414 in batch processing, 406, 414, 422, 425 in log-based systems, 520, 524-526 in stream processing, 476-479 atomic commit, 477 idempotence, 478 maintaining derived state, 495 microbatching and checkpointing, 477 rebuilding state after a failure, 478 of distributed transactions, 362-364 transaction atomicity, 223, 354-361 faults, 6 Byzantine faults, 304-306 failures versus, 7 handled by transactions, 221 handling in supercomputers and cloud computing, 275 hardware, 7 in batch processing versus distributed data‐ bases, 417 in distributed systems, 274-277 introducing deliberately, 7, 280 network faults, 279-281 asymmetric faults, 300 detecting, 280 tolerance of, in multi-leader replication, 169 software errors, 8 tolerating (see fault tolerance) federated databases, 501 fence (CPU instruction), 338 fencing (preventing split brain), 158, 302-304 generating fencing tokens, 349, 370 properties of fencing tokens, 308 stream processors writing to databases, 478, 517 Fibre Channel (networks), 398 field tags (Thrift and Protocol Buffers), 119-121 file descriptors (Unix), 395 financial data, 460 Firebase (database), 456 Flink (processing framework), 421-423 dataflow APIs, 427 fault tolerance, 422, 477, 479 Gelly API (graph processing), 425 integration of batch and stream processing, 495, 498 machine learning, 428 query optimizer, 427 stream processing, 466 flow control, 282, 441, 555 FLP result (on consensus), 353 FlumeJava (dataflow library), 403, 427 followers, 152, 555 (see also leader-based replication) foreign keys, 38, 403 forward compatibility, 112 forward decay (algorithm), 16 Index | 569 Fossil (version control system), 463 shunning (deleting data), 463 FoundationDB (database) serializable transactions, 261, 265, 364 fractal trees, 83 full table scans, 403 full-text search, 555 and fuzzy indexes, 88 building search indexes, 411 Lucene storage engine, 79 functional reactive programming (FRP), 504 functional requirements, 22 futures (asynchronous operations), 135 fuzzy search (see similarity search) G garbage collection immutability and, 463 process pauses for, 14, 296-299, 301 (see also process pauses) genome analysis, 63, 429 geographically distributed datacenters, 145, 164, 278, 493 geospatial indexes, 87 Giraph (graph processing), 425 Git (version control system), 174, 342, 463 GitHub, postmortems, 157, 158, 309 global indexes (see term-partitioned indexes) GlusterFS (distributed filesystem), 398 GNU Coreutils (Linux), 394 GoldenGate (change data capture), 161, 170, 455 (see also Oracle) Google Bigtable (database) data model (see Bigtable data model) partitioning scheme, 199, 202 storage layout, 78 Chubby (lock service), 370 Cloud Dataflow (stream processor), 466, 477, 498 (see also Beam) Cloud Pub/Sub (messaging), 444, 448 Docs (collaborative editor), 170 Dremel (query engine), 93, 96 FlumeJava (dataflow library), 403, 427 GFS (distributed file system), 398 gRPC (RPC framework), 135 MapReduce (batch processing), 390 570 | Index (see also MapReduce) building search indexes, 411 task preemption, 418 Pregel (graph processing), 425 Spanner (see Spanner) TrueTime (clock API), 294 gossip protocol, 216 government use of data, 541 GPS (Global Positioning System) use for clock synchronization, 287, 290, 294, 295 GraphChi (graph processing), 426 graphs, 555 as data models, 49-63 example of graph-structured data, 49 property graphs, 50 RDF and triple-stores, 55-59 versus the network model, 60 processing and analysis, 424-426 fault tolerance, 425 Pregel processing model, 425 query languages Cypher, 52 Datalog, 60-63 recursive SQL queries, 53 SPARQL, 59-59 Gremlin (graph query language), 50 grep (Unix tool), 392 GROUP BY clause (SQL), 406 grouping records in MapReduce, 406 handling skew, 407 H Hadoop (data infrastructure) comparison to distributed databases, 390 comparison to MPP databases, 414-418 comparison to Unix, 413-414, 499 diverse processing models in ecosystem, 417 HDFS distributed filesystem (see HDFS) higher-level tools, 403 join algorithms, 403-410 (see also MapReduce) MapReduce (see MapReduce) YARN (see YARN) happens-before relationship, 340 capturing, 187 concurrency and, 186 hard disks access patterns, 84 detecting corruption, 519, 530 faults in, 7, 227 sequential write throughput, 75, 450 hardware faults, 7 hash indexes, 72-75 broadcast hash joins, 409 partitioned hash joins, 409 hash partitioning, 203-205, 217 consistent hashing, 204 problems with hash mod N, 210 range queries, 204 suitable hash functions, 203 with fixed number of partitions, 210 HAWQ (database), 428 HBase (database) bug due to lack of fencing, 302 bulk loading, 413 column-family data model, 41, 99 dynamic partitioning, 212 key-range partitioning, 202 log-structured storage, 78 request routing, 216 size-tiered compaction, 79 use of HDFS, 417 use of ZooKeeper, 370 HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System), 398-399 (see also distributed filesystems) checking data integrity, 530 decoupling from query engines, 417 indiscriminately dumping data into, 415 metadata about datasets, 410 NameNode, 398 use by Flink, 479 use by HBase, 212 use by MapReduce, 402 HdrHistogram (numerical library), 16 head (Unix tool), 392 head vertex (property graphs), 51 head-of-line blocking, 15 heap files (databases), 86 Helix (cluster manager), 216 heterogeneous distributed transactions, 360, 364 heuristic decisions (in 2PC), 363 Hibernate (object-relational mapper), 30 hierarchical model, 36 high availability (see fault tolerance) high-frequency trading, 290, 299 high-performance computing (HPC), 275 hinted handoff, 183 histograms, 16 Hive (query engine), 419, 427 for data warehouses, 93 HCatalog and metastore, 410 map-side joins, 409 query optimizer, 427 skewed joins, 408 workflows, 403 Hollerith machines, 390 hopping windows (stream processing), 472 (see also windows) horizontal scaling (see scaling out) HornetQ (messaging), 137, 444 distributed transaction support, 361 hot spots, 201 due to celebrities, 205 for time-series data, 203 in batch processing, 407 relieving, 205 hot standbys (see leader-based replication) HTTP, use in APIs (see services) human errors, 9, 279, 414 HyperDex (database), 88 HyperLogLog (algorithm), 466 I I/O operations, waiting for, 297 IBM DB2 (database) distributed transaction support, 361 recursive query support, 54 serializable isolation, 242, 257 XML and JSON support, 30, 42 electromechanical card-sorting machines, 390 IMS (database), 36 imperative query APIs, 46 InfoSphere Streams (CEP engine), 466 MQ (messaging), 444 distributed transaction support, 361 System R (database), 222 WebSphere (messaging), 137 idempotence, 134, 478, 555 by giving operations unique IDs, 518, 522 idempotent operations, 517 immutability advantages of, 460, 531 Index | 571 deriving state from event log, 459-464 for crash recovery, 75 in B-trees, 82, 242 in event sourcing, 457 inputs to Unix commands, 397 limitations of, 463 Impala (query engine) for data warehouses, 93 hash joins, 409 native code generation, 428 use of HDFS, 417 impedance mismatch, 29 imperative languages, 42 setting element styles (example), 45 in doubt (transaction status), 358 holding locks, 362 orphaned transactions, 363 in-memory databases, 88 durability, 227 serial transaction execution, 253 incidents cascading failures, 9 crashes due to leap seconds, 290 data corruption and financial losses due to concurrency bugs, 233 data corruption on hard disks, 227 data loss due to last-write-wins, 173, 292 data on disks unreadable, 309 deleted items reappearing, 174 disclosure of sensitive data due to primary key reuse, 157 errors in transaction serializability, 529 gigabit network interface with 1 Kb/s throughput, 311 network faults, 279 network interface dropping only inbound packets, 279 network partitions and whole-datacenter failures, 275 poor handling of network faults, 280 sending message to ex-partner, 494 sharks biting undersea cables, 279 split brain due to 1-minute packet delay, 158, 279 vibrations in server rack, 14 violation of uniqueness constraint, 529 indexes, 71, 555 and snapshot isolation, 241 as derived data, 386, 499-504 572 | Index B-trees, 79-83 building in batch processes, 411 clustered, 86 comparison of B-trees and LSM-trees, 83-85 concatenated, 87 covering (with included columns), 86 creating, 500 full-text search, 88 geospatial, 87 hash, 72-75 index-range locking, 260 multi-column, 87 partitioning and secondary indexes, 206-209, 217 secondary, 85 (see also secondary indexes) problems with dual writes, 452, 491 SSTables and LSM-trees, 76-79 updating when data changes, 452, 467 Industrial Revolution, 541 InfiniBand (networks), 285 InfiniteGraph (database), 50 InnoDB (storage engine) clustered index on primary key, 86 not preventing lost updates, 245 preventing write skew, 248, 257 serializable isolation, 257 snapshot isolation support, 239 inside-out databases, 504 (see also unbundling databases) integrating different data systems (see data integration) integrity, 524 coordination-avoiding data systems, 528 correctness of dataflow systems, 525 in consensus formalization, 365 integrity checks, 530 (see also auditing) end-to-end, 519, 531 use of snapshot isolation, 238 maintaining despite software bugs, 529 Interface Definition Language (IDL), 117, 122 intermediate state, materialization of, 420-423 internet services, systems for implementing, 275 invariants, 225 (see also constraints) inversion of control, 396 IP (Internet Protocol) unreliability of, 277 ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), 284 isolation (in transactions), 225, 228, 555 correctness and, 515 for single-object writes, 230 serializability, 251-266 actual serial execution, 252-256 serializable snapshot isolation (SSI), 261-266 two-phase locking (2PL), 257-261 violating, 228 weak isolation levels, 233-251 preventing lost updates, 242-246 read committed, 234-237 snapshot isolation, 237-242 iterative processing, 424-426 J Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) distributed transaction support, 361 network drivers, 128 Java Enterprise Edition (EE), 134, 356, 361 Java Message Service (JMS), 444 (see also messaging systems) comparison to log-based messaging, 448, 451 distributed transaction support, 361 message ordering, 446 Java Transaction API (JTA), 355, 361 Java Virtual Machine (JVM) bytecode generation, 428 garbage collection pauses, 296 process reuse in batch processors, 422 JavaScript in MapReduce querying, 46 setting element styles (example), 45 use in advanced queries, 48 Jena (RDF framework), 57 Jepsen (fault tolerance testing), 515 jitter (network delay), 284 joins, 555 by index lookup, 403 expressing as relational operators, 427 in relational and document databases, 34 MapReduce map-side joins, 408-410 broadcast hash joins, 409 merge joins, 410 partitioned hash joins, 409 MapReduce reduce-side joins, 403-408 handling skew, 407 sort-merge joins, 405 parallel execution of, 415 secondary indexes and, 85 stream joins, 472-476 stream-stream join, 473 stream-table join, 473 table-table join, 474 time-dependence of, 475 support in document databases, 42 JOTM (transaction coordinator), 356 JSON Avro schema representation, 122 binary variants, 115 for application data, issues with, 114 in relational databases, 30, 42 representing a résumé (example), 31 Juttle (query language), 504 K k-nearest neighbors, 429 Kafka (messaging), 137, 448 Kafka Connect (database integration), 457, 461 Kafka Streams (stream processor), 466, 467 fault tolerance, 479 leader-based replication, 153 log compaction, 456, 467 message offsets, 447, 478 request routing, 216 transaction support, 477 usage example, 4 Ketama (partitioning library), 213 key-value stores, 70 as batch process output, 412 hash indexes, 72-75 in-memory, 89 partitioning, 201-205 by hash of key, 203, 217 by key range, 202, 217 dynamic partitioning, 212 skew and hot spots, 205 Kryo (Java), 113 Kubernetes (cluster manager), 418, 506 L lambda architecture, 497 Lamport timestamps, 345 Index | 573 Large Hadron Collider (LHC), 64 last write wins (LWW), 173, 334 discarding concurrent writes, 186 problems with, 292 prone to lost updates, 246 late binding, 396 latency instability under two-phase locking, 259 network latency and resource utilization, 286 response time versus, 14 tail latency, 15, 207 leader-based replication, 152-161 (see also replication) failover, 157, 301 handling node outages, 156 implementation of replication logs change data capture, 454-457 (see also changelogs) statement-based, 158 trigger-based replication, 161 write-ahead log (WAL) shipping, 159 linearizability of operations, 333 locking and leader election, 330 log sequence number, 156, 449 read-scaling architecture, 161 relation to consensus, 367 setting up new followers, 155 synchronous versus asynchronous, 153-155 leaderless replication, 177-191 (see also replication) detecting concurrent writes, 184-191 capturing happens-before relationship, 187 happens-before relationship and concur‐ rency, 186 last write wins, 186 merging concurrently written values, 190 version vectors, 191 multi-datacenter, 184 quorums, 179-182 consistency limitations, 181-183, 334 sloppy quorums and hinted handoff, 183 read repair and anti-entropy, 178 leap seconds, 8, 290 in time-of-day clocks, 288 leases, 295 implementation with ZooKeeper, 370 574 | Index need for fencing, 302 ledgers, 460 distributed ledger technologies, 532 legacy systems, maintenance of, 18 less (Unix tool), 397 LevelDB (storage engine), 78 leveled compaction, 79 Levenshtein automata, 88 limping (partial failure), 311 linearizability, 324-338, 555 cost of, 335-338 CAP theorem, 336 memory on multi-core CPUs, 338 definition, 325-329 implementing with total order broadcast, 350 in ZooKeeper, 370 of derived data systems, 492, 524 avoiding coordination, 527 of different replication methods, 332-335 using quorums, 334 relying on, 330-332 constraints and uniqueness, 330 cross-channel timing dependencies, 331 locking and leader election, 330 stronger than causal consistency, 342 using to implement total order broadcast, 351 versus serializability, 329 LinkedIn Azkaban (workflow scheduler), 402 Databus (change data capture), 161, 455 Espresso (database), 31, 126, 130, 153, 216 Helix (cluster manager) (see Helix) profile (example), 30 reference to company entity (example), 34 Rest.li (RPC framework), 135 Voldemort (database) (see Voldemort) Linux, leap second bug, 8, 290 liveness properties, 308 LMDB (storage engine), 82, 242 load approaches to coping with, 17 describing, 11 load testing, 16 load balancing (messaging), 444 local indexes (see document-partitioned indexes) locality (data access), 32, 41, 555 in batch processing, 400, 405, 421 in stateful clients, 170, 511 in stream processing, 474, 478, 508, 522 location transparency, 134 in the actor model, 138 locks, 556 deadlock, 258 distributed locking, 301-304, 330 fencing tokens, 303 implementation with ZooKeeper, 370 relation to consensus, 374 for transaction isolation in snapshot isolation, 239 in two-phase locking (2PL), 257-261 making operations atomic, 243 performance, 258 preventing dirty writes, 236 preventing phantoms with index-range locks, 260, 265 read locks (shared mode), 236, 258 shared mode and exclusive mode, 258 in two-phase commit (2PC) deadlock detection, 364 in-doubt transactions holding locks, 362 materializing conflicts with, 251 preventing lost updates by explicit locking, 244 log sequence number, 156, 449 logic programming languages, 504 logical clocks, 293, 343, 494 for read-after-write consistency, 164 logical logs, 160 logs (data structure), 71, 556 advantages of immutability, 460 compaction, 73, 79, 456, 460 for stream operator state, 479 creating using total order broadcast, 349 implementing uniqueness constraints, 522 log-based messaging, 446-451 comparison to traditional messaging, 448, 451 consumer offsets, 449 disk space usage, 450 replaying old messages, 451, 496, 498 slow consumers, 450 using logs for message storage, 447 log-structured storage, 71-79 log-structured merge tree (see LSMtrees) replication, 152, 158-161 change data capture, 454-457 (see also changelogs) coordination with snapshot, 156 logical (row-based) replication, 160 statement-based replication, 158 trigger-based replication, 161 write-ahead log (WAL) shipping, 159 scalability limits, 493 loose coupling, 396, 419, 502 lost updates (see updates) LSM-trees (indexes), 78-79 comparison to B-trees, 83-85 Lucene (storage engine), 79 building indexes in batch processes, 411 similarity search, 88 Luigi (workflow scheduler), 402 LWW (see last write wins) M machine learning ethical considerations, 534 (see also ethics) iterative processing, 424 models derived from training data, 505 statistical and numerical algorithms, 428 MADlib (machine learning toolkit), 428 magic scaling sauce, 18 Mahout (machine learning toolkit), 428 maintainability, 18-22, 489 defined, 23 design principles for software systems, 19 evolvability (see evolvability) operability, 19 simplicity and managing complexity, 20 many-to-many relationships in document model versus relational model, 39 modeling as graphs, 49 many-to-one and many-to-many relationships, 33-36 many-to-one relationships, 34 MapReduce (batch processing), 390, 399-400 accessing external services within job, 404, 412 comparison to distributed databases designing for frequent faults, 417 diversity of processing models, 416 diversity of storage, 415 Index | 575 comparison to stream processing, 464 comparison to Unix, 413-414 disadvantages and limitations of, 419 fault tolerance, 406, 414, 422 higher-level tools, 403, 426 implementation in Hadoop, 400-403 the shuffle, 402 implementation in MongoDB, 46-48 machine learning, 428 map-side processing, 408-410 broadcast hash joins, 409 merge joins, 410 partitioned hash joins, 409 mapper and reducer functions, 399 materialization of intermediate state, 419-423 output of batch workflows, 411-413 building search indexes, 411 key-value stores, 412 reduce-side processing, 403-408 analysis of user activity events (exam‐ ple), 404 grouping records by same key, 406 handling skew, 407 sort-merge joins, 405 workflows, 402 marshalling (see encoding) massively parallel processing (MPP), 216 comparison to composing storage technolo‐ gies, 502 comparison to Hadoop, 414-418, 428 master-master replication (see multi-leader replication) master-slave replication (see leader-based repli‐ cation) materialization, 556 aggregate values, 101 conflicts, 251 intermediate state (batch processing), 420-423 materialized views, 101 as derived data, 386, 499-504 maintaining, using stream processing, 467, 475 Maven (Java build tool), 428 Maxwell (change data capture), 455 mean, 14 media monitoring, 467 median, 14 576 | Index meeting room booking (example), 249, 259, 521 membership services, 372 Memcached (caching server), 4, 89 memory in-memory databases, 88 durability, 227 serial transaction execution, 253 in-memory representation of data, 112 random bit-flips in, 529 use by indexes, 72, 77 memory barrier (CPU instruction), 338 MemSQL (database) in-memory storage, 89 read committed isolation, 236 memtable (in LSM-trees), 78 Mercurial (version control system), 463 merge joins, MapReduce map-side, 410 mergeable persistent data structures, 174 merging sorted files, 76, 402, 405 Merkle trees, 532 Mesos (cluster manager), 418, 506 message brokers (see messaging systems) message-passing, 136-139 advantages over direct RPC, 137 distributed actor frameworks, 138 evolvability, 138 MessagePack (encoding format), 116 messages exactly-once semantics, 360, 476 loss of, 442 using total order broadcast, 348 messaging systems, 440-451 (see also streams) backpressure, buffering, or dropping mes‐ sages, 441 brokerless messaging, 442 event logs, 446-451 comparison to traditional messaging, 448, 451 consumer offsets, 449 replaying old messages, 451, 496, 498 slow consumers, 450 message brokers, 443-446 acknowledgements and redelivery, 445 comparison to event logs, 448, 451 multiple consumers of same topic, 444 reliability, 442 uniqueness in log-based messaging, 522 Meteor (web framework), 456 microbatching, 477, 495 microservices, 132 (see also services) causal dependencies across services, 493 loose coupling, 502 relation to batch/stream processors, 389, 508 Microsoft Azure Service Bus (messaging), 444 Azure Storage, 155, 398 Azure Stream Analytics, 466 DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model), 134 MSDTC (transaction coordinator), 356 Orleans (see Orleans) SQL Server (see SQL Server) migrating (rewriting) data, 40, 130, 461, 497 modulus operator (%), 210 MongoDB (database) aggregation pipeline, 48 atomic operations, 243 BSON, 41 document data model, 31 hash partitioning (sharding), 203-204 key-range partitioning, 202 lack of join support, 34, 42 leader-based replication, 153 MapReduce support, 46, 400 oplog parsing, 455, 456 partition splitting, 212 request routing, 216 secondary indexes, 207 Mongoriver (change data capture), 455 monitoring, 10, 19 monotonic clocks, 288 monotonic reads, 164 MPP (see massively parallel processing) MSMQ (messaging), 361 multi-column indexes, 87 multi-leader replication, 168-177 (see also replication) handling write conflicts, 171 conflict avoidance, 172 converging toward a consistent state, 172 custom conflict resolution logic, 173 determining what is a conflict, 174 linearizability, lack of, 333 replication topologies, 175-177 use cases, 168 clients with offline operation, 170 collaborative editing, 170 multi-datacenter replication, 168, 335 multi-object transactions, 228 need for, 231 Multi-Paxos (total order broadcast), 367 multi-table index cluster tables (Oracle), 41 multi-tenancy, 284 multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), 239, 266 detecting stale MVCC reads, 263 indexes and snapshot isolation, 241 mutual exclusion, 261 (see also locks) MySQL (database) binlog coordinates, 156 binlog parsing for change data capture, 455 circular replication topology, 175 consistent snapshots, 156 distributed transaction support, 361 InnoDB storage engine (see InnoDB) JSON support, 30, 42 leader-based replication, 153 performance of XA transactions, 360 row-based replication, 160 schema changes in, 40 snapshot isolation support, 242 (see also InnoDB) statement-based replication, 159 Tungsten Replicator (multi-leader replica‐ tion), 170 conflict detection, 177 N nanomsg (messaging library), 442 Narayana (transaction coordinator), 356 NATS (messaging), 137 near-real-time (nearline) processing, 390 (see also stream processing) Neo4j (database) Cypher query language, 52 graph data model, 50 Nephele (dataflow engine), 421 netcat (Unix tool), 397 Netflix Chaos Monkey, 7, 280 Network Attached Storage (NAS), 146, 398 network model, 36 Index | 577 graph databases versus, 60 imperative query APIs, 46 Network Time Protocol (see NTP) networks congestion and queueing, 282 datacenter network topologies, 276 faults (see faults) linearizability and network delays, 338 network partitions, 279, 337 timeouts and unbounded delays, 281 next-key locking, 260 nodes (in graphs) (see vertices) nodes (processes), 556 handling outages in leader-based replica‐ tion, 156 system models for failure, 307 noisy neighbors, 284 nonblocking atomic commit, 359 nondeterministic operations accidental nondeterminism, 423 partial failures in distributed systems, 275 nonfunctional requirements, 22 nonrepeatable reads, 238 (see also read skew) normalization (data representation), 33, 556 executing joins, 39, 42, 403 foreign key references, 231 in systems of record, 386 versus denormalization, 462 NoSQL, 29, 499 transactions and, 223 Notation3 (N3), 56 npm (package manager), 428 NTP (Network Time Protocol), 287 accuracy, 289, 293 adjustments to monotonic clocks, 289 multiple server addresses, 306 numbers, in XML and JSON encodings, 114 O object-relational mapping (ORM) frameworks, 30 error handling and aborted transactions, 232 unsafe read-modify-write cycle code, 244 object-relational mismatch, 29 observer pattern, 506 offline systems, 390 (see also batch processing) 578 | Index stateful, offline-capable clients, 170, 511 offline-first applications, 511 offsets consumer offsets in partitioned logs, 449 messages in partitioned logs, 447 OLAP (online analytic processing), 91, 556 data cubes, 102 OLTP (online transaction processing), 90, 556 analytics queries versus, 411 workload characteristics, 253 one-to-many relationships, 30 JSON representation, 32 online systems, 389 (see also services) Oozie (workflow scheduler), 402 OpenAPI (service definition format), 133 OpenStack Nova (cloud infrastructure) use of ZooKeeper, 370 Swift (object storage), 398 operability, 19 operating systems versus databases, 499 operation identifiers, 518, 522 operational transformation, 174 operators, 421 flow of data between, 424 in stream processing, 464 optimistic concurrency control, 261 Oracle (database) distributed transaction support, 361 GoldenGate (change data capture), 161, 170, 455 lack of serializability, 226 leader-based replication, 153 multi-table index cluster tables, 41 not preventing write skew, 248 partitioned indexes, 209 PL/SQL language, 255 preventing lost updates, 245 read committed isolation, 236 Real Application Clusters (RAC), 330 recursive query support, 54 snapshot isolation support, 239, 242 TimesTen (in-memory database), 89 WAL-based replication, 160 XML support, 30 ordering, 339-352 by sequence numbers, 343-348 causal ordering, 339-343 partial order, 341 limits of total ordering, 493 total order broadcast, 348-352 Orleans (actor framework), 139 outliers (response time), 14 Oz (programming language), 504 P package managers, 428, 505 packet switching, 285 packets corruption of, 306 sending via UDP, 442 PageRank (algorithm), 49, 424 paging (see virtual memory) ParAccel (database), 93 parallel databases (see massively parallel pro‐ cessing) parallel execution of graph analysis algorithms, 426 queries in MPP databases, 216 Parquet (data format), 96, 131 (see also column-oriented storage) use in Hadoop, 414 partial failures, 275, 310 limping, 311 partial order, 341 partitioning, 199-218, 556 and replication, 200 in batch processing, 429 multi-partition operations, 514 enforcing constraints, 522 secondary index maintenance, 495 of key-value data, 201-205 by key range, 202 skew and hot spots, 205 rebalancing partitions, 209-214 automatic or manual rebalancing, 213 problems with hash mod N, 210 using dynamic partitioning, 212 using fixed number of partitions, 210 using N partitions per node, 212 replication and, 147 request routing, 214-216 secondary indexes, 206-209 document-based partitioning, 206 term-based partitioning, 208 serial execution of transactions and, 255 Paxos (consensus algorithm), 366 ballot number, 368 Multi-Paxos (total order broadcast), 367 percentiles, 14, 556 calculating efficiently, 16 importance of high percentiles, 16 use in service level agreements (SLAs), 15 Percona XtraBackup (MySQL tool), 156 performance describing, 13 of distributed transactions, 360 of in-memory databases, 89 of linearizability, 338 of multi-leader replication, 169 perpetual inconsistency, 525 pessimistic concurrency control, 261 phantoms (transaction isolation), 250 materializing conflicts, 251 preventing, in serializability, 259 physical clocks (see clocks) pickle (Python), 113 Pig (dataflow language), 419, 427 replicated joins, 409 skewed joins, 407 workflows, 403 Pinball (workflow scheduler), 402 pipelined execution, 423 in Unix, 394 point in time, 287 polyglot persistence, 29 polystores, 501 PostgreSQL (database) BDR (multi-leader replication), 170 causal ordering of writes, 177 Bottled Water (change data capture), 455 Bucardo (trigger-based replication), 161, 173 distributed transaction support, 361 foreign data wrappers, 501 full text search support, 490 leader-based replication, 153 log sequence number, 156 MVCC implementation, 239, 241 PL/pgSQL language, 255 PostGIS geospatial indexes, 87 preventing lost updates, 245 preventing write skew, 248, 261 read committed isolation, 236 recursive query support, 54 representing graphs, 51 Index | 579 serializable snapshot isolation (SSI), 261 snapshot isolation support, 239, 242 WAL-based replication, 160 XML and JSON support, 30, 42 pre-splitting, 212 Precision Time Protocol (PTP), 290 predicate locks, 259 predictive analytics, 533-536 amplifying bias, 534 ethics of (see ethics) feedback loops, 536 preemption of datacenter resources, 418 of threads, 298 Pregel processing model, 425 primary keys, 85, 556 compound primary key (Cassandra), 204 primary-secondary replication (see leaderbased replication) privacy, 536-543 consent and freedom of choice, 538 data as assets and power, 540 deleting data, 463 ethical considerations (see ethics) legislation and self-regulation, 542 meaning of, 539 surveillance, 537 tracking behavioral data, 536 probabilistic algorithms, 16, 466 process pauses, 295-299 processing time (of events), 469 producers (message streams), 440 programming languages dataflow languages, 504 for stored procedures, 255 functional reactive programming (FRP), 504 logic programming, 504 Prolog (language), 61 (see also Datalog) promises (asynchronous operations), 135 property graphs, 50 Cypher query language, 52 Protocol Buffers (data format), 117-121 field tags and schema evolution, 120 provenance of data, 531 publish/subscribe model, 441 publishers (message streams), 440 punch card tabulating machines, 390 580 | Index pure functions, 48 putting computation near data, 400 Q Qpid (messaging), 444 quality of service (QoS), 285 Quantcast File System (distributed filesystem), 398 query languages, 42-48 aggregation pipeline, 48 CSS and XSL, 44 Cypher, 52 Datalog, 60 Juttle, 504 MapReduce querying, 46-48 recursive SQL queries, 53 relational algebra and SQL, 42 SPARQL, 59 query optimizers, 37, 427 queueing delays (networks), 282 head-of-line blocking, 15 latency and response time, 14 queues (messaging), 137 quorums, 179-182, 556 for leaderless replication, 179 in consensus algorithms, 368 limitations of consistency, 181-183, 334 making decisions in distributed systems, 301 monitoring staleness, 182 multi-datacenter replication, 184 relying on durability, 309 sloppy quorums and hinted handoff, 183 R R-trees (indexes), 87 RabbitMQ (messaging), 137, 444 leader-based replication, 153 race conditions, 225 (see also concurrency) avoiding with linearizability, 331 caused by dual writes, 452 dirty writes, 235 in counter increments, 235 lost updates, 242-246 preventing with event logs, 462, 507 preventing with serializable isolation, 252 write skew, 246-251 Raft (consensus algorithm), 366 sensitivity to network problems, 369 term number, 368 use in etcd, 353 RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), 7, 398 railways, schema migration on, 496 RAMCloud (in-memory storage), 89 ranking algorithms, 424 RDF (Resource Description Framework), 57 querying with SPARQL, 59 RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access), 276 read committed isolation level, 234-237 implementing, 236 multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), 239 no dirty reads, 234 no dirty writes, 235 read path (derived data), 509 read repair (leaderless replication), 178 for linearizability, 335 read replicas (see leader-based replication) read skew (transaction isolation), 238, 266 as violation of causality, 340 read-after-write consistency, 163, 524 cross-device, 164 read-modify-write cycle, 243 read-scaling architecture, 161 reads as events, 513 real-time collaborative editing, 170 near-real-time processing, 390 (see also stream processing) publish/subscribe dataflow, 513 response time guarantees, 298 time-of-day clocks, 288 rebalancing partitions, 209-214, 556 (see also partitioning) automatic or manual rebalancing, 213 dynamic partitioning, 212 fixed number of partitions, 210 fixed number of partitions per node, 212 problems with hash mod N, 210 recency guarantee, 324 recommendation engines batch process outputs, 412 batch workflows, 403, 420 iterative processing, 424 statistical and numerical algorithms, 428 records, 399 events in stream processing, 440 recursive common table expressions (SQL), 54 redelivery (messaging), 445 Redis (database) atomic operations, 243 durability, 89 Lua scripting, 255 single-threaded execution, 253 usage example, 4 redundancy hardware components, 7 of derived data, 386 (see also derived data) Reed–Solomon codes (error correction), 398 refactoring, 22 (see also evolvability) regions (partitioning), 199 register (data structure), 325 relational data model, 28-42 comparison to document model, 38-42 graph queries in SQL, 53 in-memory databases with, 89 many-to-one and many-to-many relation‐ ships, 33 multi-object transactions, need for, 231 NoSQL as alternative to, 29 object-relational mismatch, 29 relational algebra and SQL, 42 versus document model convergence of models, 41 data locality, 41 relational databases eventual consistency, 162 history, 28 leader-based replication, 153 logical logs, 160 philosophy compared to Unix, 499, 501 schema changes, 40, 111, 130 statement-based replication, 158 use of B-tree indexes, 80 relationships (see edges) reliability, 6-10, 489 building a reliable system from unreliable components, 276 defined, 6, 22 hardware faults, 7 human errors, 9 importance of, 10 of messaging systems, 442 Index | 581 software errors, 8 Remote Method Invocation (Java RMI), 134 remote procedure calls (RPCs), 134-136 (see also services) based on futures, 135 data encoding and evolution, 136 issues with, 134 using Avro, 126, 135 using Thrift, 135 versus message brokers, 137 repeatable reads (transaction isolation), 242 replicas, 152 replication, 151-193, 556 and durability, 227 chain replication, 155 conflict resolution and, 246 consistency properties, 161-167 consistent prefix reads, 165 monotonic reads, 164 reading your own writes, 162 in distributed filesystems, 398 leaderless, 177-191 detecting concurrent writes, 184-191 limitations of quorum consistency, 181-183, 334 sloppy quorums and hinted handoff, 183 monitoring staleness, 182 multi-leader, 168-177 across multiple datacenters, 168, 335 handling write conflicts, 171-175 replication topologies, 175-177 partitioning and, 147, 200 reasons for using, 145, 151 single-leader, 152-161 failover, 157 implementation of replication logs, 158-161 relation to consensus, 367 setting up new followers, 155 synchronous versus asynchronous, 153-155 state machine replication, 349, 452 using erasure coding, 398 with heterogeneous data systems, 453 replication logs (see logs) reprocessing data, 496, 498 (see also evolvability) from log-based messaging, 451 request routing, 214-216 582 | Index approaches to, 214 parallel query execution, 216 resilient systems, 6 (see also fault tolerance) response time as performance metric for services, 13, 389 guarantees on, 298 latency versus, 14 mean and percentiles, 14 user experience, 15 responsibility and accountability, 535 REST (Representational State Transfer), 133 (see also services) RethinkDB (database) document data model, 31 dynamic partitioning, 212 join support, 34, 42 key-range partitioning, 202 leader-based replication, 153 subscribing to changes, 456 Riak (database) Bitcask storage engine, 72 CRDTs, 174, 191 dotted version vectors, 191 gossip protocol, 216 hash partitioning, 203-204, 211 last-write-wins conflict resolution, 186 leaderless replication, 177 LevelDB storage engine, 78 linearizability, lack of, 335 multi-datacenter support, 184 preventing lost updates across replicas, 246 rebalancing, 213 search feature, 209 secondary indexes, 207 siblings (concurrently written values), 190 sloppy quorums, 184 ring buffers, 450 Ripple (cryptocurrency), 532 rockets, 10, 36, 305 RocksDB (storage engine), 78 leveled compaction, 79 rollbacks (transactions), 222 rolling upgrades, 8, 112 routing (see request routing) row-oriented storage, 96 row-based replication, 160 rowhammer (memory corruption), 529 RPCs (see remote procedure calls) Rubygems (package manager), 428 rules (Datalog), 61 S safety and liveness properties, 308 in consensus algorithms, 366 in transactions, 222 sagas (see compensating transactions) Samza (stream processor), 466, 467 fault tolerance, 479 streaming SQL support, 466 sandboxes, 9 SAP HANA (database), 93 scalability, 10-18, 489 approaches for coping with load, 17 defined, 22 describing load, 11 describing performance, 13 partitioning and, 199 replication and, 161 scaling up versus scaling out, 146 scaling out, 17, 146 (see also shared-nothing architecture) scaling up, 17, 146 scatter/gather approach, querying partitioned databases, 207 SCD (slowly changing dimension), 476 schema-on-read, 39 comparison to evolvable schema, 128 in distributed filesystems, 415 schema-on-write, 39 schemaless databases (see schema-on-read) schemas, 557 Avro, 122-127 reader determining writer’s schema, 125 schema evolution, 123 dynamically generated, 126 evolution of, 496 affecting application code, 111 compatibility checking, 126 in databases, 129-131 in message-passing, 138 in service calls, 136 flexibility in document model, 39 for analytics, 93-95 for JSON and XML, 115 merits of, 127 schema migration on railways, 496 Thrift and Protocol Buffers, 117-121 schema evolution, 120 traditional approach to design, fallacy in, 462 searches building search indexes in batch processes, 411 k-nearest neighbors, 429 on streams, 467 partitioned secondary indexes, 206 secondaries (see leader-based replication) secondary indexes, 85, 557 partitioning, 206-209, 217 document-partitioned, 206 index maintenance, 495 term-partitioned, 208 problems with dual writes, 452, 491 updating, transaction isolation and, 231 secondary sorts, 405 sed (Unix tool), 392 self-describing files, 127 self-joins, 480 self-validating systems, 530 semantic web, 57 semi-synchronous replication, 154 sequence number ordering, 343-348 generators, 294, 344 insufficiency for enforcing constraints, 347 Lamport timestamps, 345 use of timestamps, 291, 295, 345 sequential consistency, 351 serializability, 225, 233, 251-266, 557 linearizability versus, 329 pessimistic versus optimistic concurrency control, 261 serial execution, 252-256 partitioning, 255 using stored procedures, 253, 349 serializable snapshot isolation (SSI), 261-266 detecting stale MVCC reads, 263 detecting writes that affect prior reads, 264 distributed execution, 265, 364 performance of SSI, 265 preventing write skew, 262-265 two-phase locking (2PL), 257-261 index-range locks, 260 performance, 258 Serializable (Java), 113 Index | 583 serialization, 113 (see also encoding) service discovery, 135, 214, 372 using DNS, 216, 372 service level agreements (SLAs), 15 service-oriented architecture (SOA), 132 (see also services) services, 131-136 microservices, 132 causal dependencies across services, 493 loose coupling, 502 relation to batch/stream processors, 389, 508 remote procedure calls (RPCs), 134-136 issues with, 134 similarity to databases, 132 web services, 132, 135 session windows (stream processing), 472 (see also windows) sessionization, 407 sharding (see partitioning) shared mode (locks), 258 shared-disk architecture, 146, 398 shared-memory architecture, 146 shared-nothing architecture, 17, 146-147, 557 (see also replication) distributed filesystems, 398 (see also distributed filesystems) partitioning, 199 use of network, 277 sharks biting undersea cables, 279 counting (example), 46-48 finding (example), 42 website about (example), 44 shredding (in relational model), 38 siblings (concurrent values), 190, 246 (see also conflicts) similarity search edit distance, 88 genome data, 63 k-nearest neighbors, 429 single-leader replication (see leader-based rep‐ lication) single-threaded execution, 243, 252 in batch processing, 406, 421, 426 in stream processing, 448, 463, 522 size-tiered compaction, 79 skew, 557 584 | Index clock skew, 291-294, 334 in transaction isolation read skew, 238, 266 write skew, 246-251, 262-265 (see also write skew) meanings of, 238 unbalanced workload, 201 compensating for, 205 due to celebrities, 205 for time-series data, 203 in batch processing, 407 slaves (see leader-based replication) sliding windows (stream processing), 472 (see also windows) sloppy quorums, 183 (see also quorums) lack of linearizability, 334 slowly changing dimension (data warehouses), 476 smearing (leap seconds adjustments), 290 snapshots (databases) causal consistency, 340 computing derived data, 500 in change data capture, 455 serializable snapshot isolation (SSI), 261-266, 329 setting up a new replica, 156 snapshot isolation and repeatable read, 237-242 implementing with MVCC, 239 indexes and MVCC, 241 visibility rules, 240 synchronized clocks for global snapshots, 294 snowflake schemas, 95 SOAP, 133 (see also services) evolvability, 136 software bugs, 8 maintaining integrity, 529 solid state drives (SSDs) access patterns, 84 detecting corruption, 519, 530 faults in, 227 sequential write throughput, 75 Solr (search server) building indexes in batch processes, 411 document-partitioned indexes, 207 request routing, 216 usage example, 4 use of Lucene, 79 sort (Unix tool), 392, 394, 395 sort-merge joins (MapReduce), 405 Sorted String Tables (see SSTables) sorting sort order in column storage, 99 source of truth (see systems of record) Spanner (database) data locality, 41 snapshot isolation using clocks, 295 TrueTime API, 294 Spark (processing framework), 421-423 bytecode generation, 428 dataflow APIs, 427 fault tolerance, 422 for data warehouses, 93 GraphX API (graph processing), 425 machine learning, 428 query optimizer, 427 Spark Streaming, 466 microbatching, 477 stream processing on top of batch process‐ ing, 495 SPARQL (query language), 59 spatial algorithms, 429 split brain, 158, 557 in consensus algorithms, 352, 367 preventing, 322, 333 using fencing tokens to avoid, 302-304 spreadsheets, dataflow programming capabili‐ ties, 504 SQL (Structured Query Language), 21, 28, 43 advantages and limitations of, 416 distributed query execution, 48 graph queries in, 53 isolation levels standard, issues with, 242 query execution on Hadoop, 416 résumé (example), 30 SQL injection vulnerability, 305 SQL on Hadoop, 93 statement-based replication, 158 stored procedures, 255 SQL Server (database) data warehousing support, 93 distributed transaction support, 361 leader-based replication, 153 preventing lost updates, 245 preventing write skew, 248, 257 read committed isolation, 236 recursive query support, 54 serializable isolation, 257 snapshot isolation support, 239 T-SQL language, 255 XML support, 30 SQLstream (stream analytics), 466 SSDs (see solid state drives) SSTables (storage format), 76-79 advantages over hash indexes, 76 concatenated index, 204 constructing and maintaining, 78 making LSM-Tree from, 78 staleness (old data), 162 cross-channel timing dependencies, 331 in leaderless databases, 178 in multi-version concurrency control, 263 monitoring for, 182 of client state, 512 versus linearizability, 324 versus timeliness, 524 standbys (see leader-based replication) star replication topologies, 175 star schemas, 93-95 similarity to event sourcing, 458 Star Wars analogy (event time versus process‐ ing time), 469 state derived from log of immutable events, 459 deriving current state from the event log, 458 interplay between state changes and appli‐ cation code, 507 maintaining derived state, 495 maintenance by stream processor in streamstream joins, 473 observing derived state, 509-515 rebuilding after stream processor failure, 478 separation of application code and, 505 state machine replication, 349, 452 statement-based replication, 158 statically typed languages analogy to schema-on-write, 40 code generation and, 127 statistical and numerical algorithms, 428 StatsD (metrics aggregator), 442 stdin, stdout, 395, 396 Stellar (cryptocurrency), 532 Index | 585 stock market feeds, 442 STONITH (Shoot The Other Node In The Head), 158 stop-the-world (see garbage collection) storage composing data storage technologies, 499-504 diversity of, in MapReduce, 415 Storage Area Network (SAN), 146, 398 storage engines, 69-104 column-oriented, 95-101 column compression, 97-99 defined, 96 distinction between column families and, 99 Parquet, 96, 131 sort order in, 99-100 writing to, 101 comparing requirements for transaction processing and analytics, 90-96 in-memory storage, 88 durability, 227 row-oriented, 70-90 B-trees, 79-83 comparing B-trees and LSM-trees, 83-85 defined, 96 log-structured, 72-79 stored procedures, 161, 253-255, 557 and total order broadcast, 349 pros and cons of, 255 similarity to stream processors, 505 Storm (stream processor), 466 distributed RPC, 468, 514 Trident state handling, 478 straggler events, 470, 498 stream processing, 464-481, 557 accessing external services within job, 474, 477, 478, 517 combining with batch processing lambda architecture, 497 unifying technologies, 498 comparison to batch processing, 464 complex event processing (CEP), 465 fault tolerance, 476-479 atomic commit, 477 idempotence, 478 microbatching and checkpointing, 477 rebuilding state after a failure, 478 for data integration, 494-498 586 | Index maintaining derived state, 495 maintenance of materialized views, 467 messaging systems (see messaging systems) reasoning about time, 468-472 event time versus processing time, 469, 477, 498 knowing when window is ready, 470 types of windows, 472 relation to databases (see streams) relation to services, 508 search on streams, 467 single-threaded execution, 448, 463 stream analytics, 466 stream joins, 472-476 stream-stream join, 473 stream-table join, 473 table-table join, 474 time-dependence of, 475 streams, 440-451 end-to-end, pushing events to clients, 512 messaging systems (see messaging systems) processing (see stream processing) relation to databases, 451-464 (see also changelogs) API support for change streams, 456 change data capture, 454-457 derivative of state by time, 460 event sourcing, 457-459 keeping systems in sync, 452-453 philosophy of immutable events, 459-464 topics, 440 strict serializability, 329 strong consistency (see linearizability) strong one-copy serializability, 329 subjects, predicates, and objects (in triplestores), 55 subscribers (message streams), 440 (see also consumers) supercomputers, 275 surveillance, 537 (see also privacy) Swagger (service definition format), 133 swapping to disk (see virtual memory) synchronous networks, 285, 557 comparison to asynchronous networks, 284 formal model, 307 synchronous replication, 154, 557 chain replication, 155 conflict detection, 172 system models, 300, 306-310 assumptions in, 528 correctness of algorithms, 308 mapping to the real world, 309 safety and liveness, 308 systems of record, 386, 557 change data capture, 454, 491 treating event log as, 460 systems thinking, 536 T t-digest (algorithm), 16 table-table joins, 474 Tableau (data visualization software), 416 tail (Unix tool), 447 tail vertex (property graphs), 51 Tajo (query engine), 93 Tandem NonStop SQL (database), 200 TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), 277 comparison to circuit switching, 285 comparison to UDP, 283 connection failures, 280 flow control, 282, 441 packet checksums, 306, 519, 529 reliability and duplicate suppression, 517 retransmission timeouts, 284 use for transaction sessions, 229 telemetry (see monitoring) Teradata (database), 93, 200 term-partitioned indexes, 208, 217 termination (consensus), 365 Terrapin (database), 413 Tez (dataflow engine), 421-423 fault tolerance, 422 support by higher-level tools, 427 thrashing (out of memory), 297 threads (concurrency) actor model, 138, 468 (see also message-passing) atomic operations, 223 background threads, 73, 85 execution pauses, 286, 296-298 memory barriers, 338 preemption, 298 single (see single-threaded execution) three-phase commit, 359 Thrift (data format), 117-121 BinaryProtocol, 118 CompactProtocol, 119 field tags and schema evolution, 120 throughput, 13, 390 TIBCO, 137 Enterprise Message Service, 444 StreamBase (stream analytics), 466 time concurrency and, 187 cross-channel timing dependencies, 331 in distributed systems, 287-299 (see also clocks) clock synchronization and accuracy, 289 relying on synchronized clocks, 291-295 process pauses, 295-299 reasoning about, in stream processors, 468-472 event time versus processing time, 469, 477, 498 knowing when window is ready, 470 timestamp of events, 471 types of windows, 472 system models for distributed systems, 307 time-dependence in stream joins, 475 time-of-day clocks, 288 timeliness, 524 coordination-avoiding data systems, 528 correctness of dataflow systems, 525 timeouts, 279, 557 dynamic configuration of, 284 for failover, 158 length of, 281 timestamps, 343 assigning to events in stream processing, 471 for read-after-write consistency, 163 for transaction ordering, 295 insufficiency for enforcing constraints, 347 key range partitioning by, 203 Lamport, 345 logical, 494 ordering events, 291, 345 Titan (database), 50 tombstones, 74, 191, 456 topics (messaging), 137, 440 total order, 341, 557 limits of, 493 sequence numbers or timestamps, 344 total order broadcast, 348-352, 493, 522 consensus algorithms and, 366-368 Index | 587 implementation in ZooKeeper and etcd, 370 implementing with linearizable storage, 351 using, 349 using to implement linearizable storage, 350 tracking behavioral data, 536 (see also privacy) transaction coordinator (see coordinator) transaction manager (see coordinator) transaction processing, 28, 90-95 comparison to analytics, 91 comparison to data warehousing, 93 transactions, 221-267, 558 ACID properties of, 223 atomicity, 223 consistency, 224 durability, 226 isolation, 225 compensating (see compensating transac‐ tions) concept of, 222 distributed transactions, 352-364 avoiding, 492, 502, 521-528 failure amplification, 364, 495 in doubt/uncertain status, 358, 362 two-phase commit, 354-359 use of, 360-361 XA transactions, 361-364 OLTP versus analytics queries, 411 purpose of, 222 serializability, 251-266 actual serial execution, 252-256 pessimistic versus optimistic concur‐ rency control, 261 serializable snapshot isolation (SSI), 261-266 two-phase locking (2PL), 257-261 single-object and multi-object, 228-232 handling errors and aborts, 231 need for multi-object transactions, 231 single-object writes, 230 snapshot isolation (see snapshots) weak isolation levels, 233-251 preventing lost updates, 242-246 read committed, 234-238 transitive closure (graph algorithm), 424 trie (data structure), 88 triggers (databases), 161, 441 implementing change data capture, 455 implementing replication, 161 588 | Index triple-stores, 55-59 SPARQL query language, 59 tumbling windows (stream processing), 472 (see also windows) in microbatching, 477 tuple spaces (programming model), 507 Turtle (RDF data format), 56 Twitter constructing home timelines (example), 11, 462, 474, 511 DistributedLog (event log), 448 Finagle (RPC framework), 135 Snowflake (sequence number generator), 294 Summingbird (processing library), 497 two-phase commit (2PC), 353, 355-359, 558 confusion with two-phase locking, 356 coordinator failure, 358 coordinator recovery, 363 how it works, 357 issues in practice, 363 performance cost, 360 transactions holding locks, 362 two-phase locking (2PL), 257-261, 329, 558 confusion with two-phase commit, 356 index-range locks, 260 performance of, 258 type checking, dynamic versus static, 40 U UDP (User Datagram Protocol) comparison to TCP, 283 multicast, 442 unbounded datasets, 439, 558 (see also streams) unbounded delays, 558 in networks, 282 process pauses, 296 unbundling databases, 499-515 composing data storage technologies, 499-504 federation versus unbundling, 501 need for high-level language, 503 designing applications around dataflow, 504-509 observing derived state, 509-515 materialized views and caching, 510 multi-partition data processing, 514 pushing state changes to clients, 512 uncertain (transaction status) (see in doubt) uniform consensus, 365 (see also consensus) uniform interfaces, 395 union type (in Avro), 125 uniq (Unix tool), 392 uniqueness constraints asynchronously checked, 526 requiring consensus, 521 requiring linearizability, 330 uniqueness in log-based messaging, 522 Unix philosophy, 394-397 command-line batch processing, 391-394 Unix pipes versus dataflow engines, 423 comparison to Hadoop, 413-414 comparison to relational databases, 499, 501 comparison to stream processing, 464 composability and uniform interfaces, 395 loose coupling, 396 pipes, 394 relation to Hadoop, 499 UPDATE statement (SQL), 40 updates preventing lost updates, 242-246 atomic write operations, 243 automatically detecting lost updates, 245 compare-and-set operations, 245 conflict resolution and replication, 246 using explicit locking, 244 preventing write skew, 246-251 V validity (consensus), 365 vBuckets (partitioning), 199 vector clocks, 191 (see also version vectors) vectorized processing, 99, 428 verification, 528-533 avoiding blind trust, 530 culture of, 530 designing for auditability, 531 end-to-end integrity checks, 531 tools for auditable data systems, 532 version control systems, reliance on immutable data, 463 version vectors, 177, 191 capturing causal dependencies, 343 versus vector clocks, 191 Vertica (database), 93 handling writes, 101 replicas using different sort orders, 100 vertical scaling (see scaling up) vertices (in graphs), 49 property graph model, 50 Viewstamped Replication (consensus algo‐ rithm), 366 view number, 368 virtual machines, 146 (see also cloud computing) context switches, 297 network performance, 282 noisy neighbors, 284 reliability in cloud services, 8 virtualized clocks in, 290 virtual memory process pauses due to page faults, 14, 297 versus memory management by databases, 89 VisiCalc (spreadsheets), 504 vnodes (partitioning), 199 Voice over IP (VoIP), 283 Voldemort (database) building read-only stores in batch processes, 413 hash partitioning, 203-204, 211 leaderless replication, 177 multi-datacenter support, 184 rebalancing, 213 reliance on read repair, 179 sloppy quorums, 184 VoltDB (database) cross-partition serializability, 256 deterministic stored procedures, 255 in-memory storage, 89 output streams, 456 secondary indexes, 207 serial execution of transactions, 253 statement-based replication, 159, 479 transactions in stream processing, 477 W WAL (write-ahead log), 82 web services (see services) Web Services Description Language (WSDL), 133 webhooks, 443 webMethods (messaging), 137 WebSocket (protocol), 512 Index | 589 windows (stream processing), 466, 468-472 infinite windows for changelogs, 467, 474 knowing when all events have arrived, 470 stream joins within a window, 473 types of windows, 472 winners (conflict resolution), 173 WITH RECURSIVE syntax (SQL), 54 workflows (MapReduce), 402 outputs, 411-414 key-value stores, 412 search indexes, 411 with map-side joins, 410 working set, 393 write amplification, 84 write path (derived data), 509 write skew (transaction isolation), 246-251 characterizing, 246-251, 262 examples of, 247, 249 materializing conflicts, 251 occurrence in practice, 529 phantoms, 250 preventing in snapshot isolation, 262-265 in two-phase locking, 259-261 options for, 248 write-ahead log (WAL), 82, 159 writes (database) atomic write operations, 243 detecting writes affecting prior reads, 264 preventing dirty writes with read commit‐ ted, 235 WS-* framework, 133 (see also services) WS-AtomicTransaction (2PC), 355 590 | Index X XA transactions, 355, 361-364 heuristic decisions, 363 limitations of, 363 xargs (Unix tool), 392, 396 XML binary variants, 115 encoding RDF data, 57 for application data, issues with, 114 in relational databases, 30, 41 XSL/XPath, 45 Y Yahoo!


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

A transaction log can be made tamper-proof by periodically signing it with a hardware security module, but that does not guarantee that the right transactions went into the log in the first place. It would be interesting to use cryptographic tools to prove the integrity of a system in a way that is robust to a wide range of hardware and software issues, and even potentially malicious actions. Cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and distributed ledger technologies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Stellar, and various others [71, 72, 73] have sprung up to explore this area. I am not qualified to comment on the merits of these technologies as currencies or mechanisms for agreeing contracts. However, from a data systems point of view they contain some interesting ideas.

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). Outside of the hype of cryptocurrencies, certificate transparency is a security technology that relies on Merkle trees to check the validity of TLS/SSL certificates [75, 76]. I could imagine integrity-checking and auditing algorithms, like those of certificate transparency and distributed ledgers, becoming more widely used in data systems in general.

batch processing, Relational Model Versus Document Model, Batch Processing-Summary, Glossarycombining with stream processinglambda architecture, The lambda architecture unifying technologies, Unifying batch and stream processing comparison to MPP databases, Comparing Hadoop to Distributed Databases-Designing for frequent faults comparison to stream processing, Processing Streams comparison to Unix, Philosophy of batch process outputs-Philosophy of batch process outputs dataflow engines, Dataflow engines-Discussion of materialization fault tolerance, Bringing related data together in the same place, Philosophy of batch process outputs, Fault tolerance, Messaging Systems for data integration, Batch and Stream Processing-Unifying batch and stream processing graphs and iterative processing, Graphs and Iterative Processing-Parallel execution high-level APIs and languages, MapReduce workflows, High-Level APIs and Languages-Specialization for different domains log-based messaging and, Replaying old messages maintaining derived state, Maintaining derived state MapReduce and distributed filesystems, MapReduce and Distributed Filesystems-Key-value stores as batch process output(see also MapReduce) measuring performance, Describing Performance, Batch Processing outputs, The Output of Batch Workflows-Key-value stores as batch process outputkey-value stores, Key-value stores as batch process output search indexes, Building search indexes using Unix tools (example), Batch Processing with Unix Tools-Sorting versus in-memory aggregation Bayou (database), Uniqueness in log-based messaging Beam (dataflow library), Unifying batch and stream processing bias, Bias and discrimination big ball of mud, Simplicity: Managing Complexity Bigtable data model, Data locality for queries, Column Compression binary data encodings, Binary encoding-The Merits of SchemasAvro, Avro-Code generation and dynamically typed languages MessagePack, Binary encoding-Binary encoding Thrift and Protocol Buffers, Thrift and Protocol Buffers-Datatypes and schema evolution binary encodingbased on schemas, The Merits of Schemas by network drivers, The Merits of Schemas binary strings, lack of support in JSON and XML, JSON, XML, and Binary Variants BinaryProtocol encoding (Thrift), Thrift and Protocol Buffers Bitcask (storage engine), Hash Indexescrash recovery, Hash Indexes Bitcoin (cryptocurrency), Tools for auditable data systemsByzantine fault tolerance, Byzantine Faults concurrency bugs in exchanges, Weak Isolation Levels bitmap indexes, Column Compression blockchains, Tools for auditable data systemsByzantine fault tolerance, Byzantine Faults blocking atomic commit, Three-phase commit Bloom (programming language), Designing Applications Around Dataflow Bloom filter (algorithm), Performance optimizations, Stream analytics BookKeeper (replicated log), Allocating work to nodes Bottled Water (change data capture), Implementing change data capture bounded datasets, Summary, Stream Processing, Glossary(see also batch processing) bounded delays, Glossaryin networks, Synchronous Versus Asynchronous Networks process pauses, Response time guarantees broadcast hash joins, Broadcast hash joins brokerless messaging, Direct messaging from producers to consumers Brubeck (metrics aggregator), Direct messaging from producers to consumers BTM (transaction coordinator), Introduction to two-phase commit bulk synchronous parallel (BSP) model, The Pregel processing model bursty network traffic patterns, Can we not simply make network delays predictable?


pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Dan Froomkin, “ ‘Wealth Defense Industry’ NOTES TO PAGES 56–60 245 Protects 1% from the Rabble and Its Taxes,” Huffi ngton Post (blog), December 13, 2011, http://www.huffi ngtonpost .com /dan-froomkin /wealth-defense -industry-p_b_1145825.html. 214. Omri Marian, “Are Cryptocurrencies Super Tax Havens?,” Michigan Law Review First Impressions 112 (2013): 38–48. Available at http://www.michigan lawreview.org/articles/are-cryptocurrencies-em-super-em-tax-havens. 215. Frank Pasquale, “Grand Bargains for Big Data: The Emerging Law of Health Information,” Maryland Law Review 72 (2013): 682–772. 216. On the new economy as a system of social control and modulation, see Julie Cohen, Configuring the Networked Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 217.

It does not address the real problems of invasive data collection or unfair data use. 56 THE BLACK BOX SOCIETY Full-Disclosure Future Even if absolute secrecy could somehow be democratized with a universally available cheap encryption tool, would we really want it? I don’t think I want the NSA blinded to real terrorist plots. If someone developed a fleet of poison-dart drones, I’d want the authorities to know. I wouldn’t want so-called “cryptocurrencies” hiding ever more money from the tax authorities and further undermining public finances.214 Biosurveillance helps public health authorities spot emerging epidemics. Monitoring helps us understand the flow of traffic, energy, food, and medicines.215 So while hiding—the temptingly symmetrical solution to surveillance—may be alluring on the surface, it’s not a good bet.


pages: 444 words: 124,631

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay by Jonathan Shapiro, James Eyers

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple Newton, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, book value, British Empire, clockwatching, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial deregulation, George Floyd, greed is good, growth hacking, index fund, Jones Act, Kickstarter, late fees, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, managed futures, Max Levchin, meme stock, Mount Scopus, Network effects, new economy, passive investing, payday loans, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Rainbow capitalism, regulatory arbitrage, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, short squeeze, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, tech bro, technology bubble, the payments system, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

Social media was primed for the next meme trade. It didn’t have to be a stock. In fact, most millennials and Gen Zs preferred trading cryptocurrencies. Elon Musk, rapper Snoop Dogg and former porn star Mia Khalifa encouraged their followers to buy one called Dogecoin, which was created not to be taken too seriously. The price went up 800 per cent. There was a lot of money to be made. Serious investors could make money by latching themselves onto millennial trends, and the most lucrative was cryptocurrencies. Increasingly, institutional investors became converts, and pitched the asset class to their clients. Mark Carnegie, who had spent the pandemic in a bolthole in New Zealand, told the AFR that investors should allocate 1 to 2 per cent of their net worth to crypto as a hedge against inflation risk.

Jones 231 Bailey, Harley 55 Baillie Gifford 236 Bain, Iona 320 Baker, Craig 55 Bancroft, Cameron 197 banking sector bank bashing 139–40, 250 banking code of conduct 324 business model 336–7 Hayne Royal Commission 140, 141, 195, 205, 215, 218 innovation, slow to adopt 219 Beadle, Tom 252, 255, 299, 314 Beard, Phil ‘Scoop’ 132–3,134 Beard, Sandy 99 Bell, Colin 134 Bell Potter 107, 113, 121, 132, 184, 251 Bensimon, Albert 48 Berkman, David 50 Berkshire Hathaway 125, 234 BHP 70–1 Bill Me Later 77, 81 Blackrock 293, 294 Bligh, Anna 195, 217 Blockley, Lance 222 Bloomfield, George 9 Bolton, Faye 3 bond rates 186, 266, 333–4, 335 tech-stock valuations and 334–5 Bortoli, Luke 236, 264, 288, 289 Bos, Wayne 30 Boudrie, Nick 168 Bragg, Andrew 249–50, 251, 286, 296, 297, 300, 302, 304, 329 Brenner, Catherine 199 Brierley, Ron 17, 18, 24, 26–7, 33, 36 Afterpay 83, 117 Brierley Investments 27 child pornography possession 259 GPG see Guinness Peat Group (GPG) IEL see Industrial Equity Limited (IEL) Weiss and 26 Brierley Mercantile 117 Brighte 201, 325 Brinkman, Wens 61 British Fashion Council 323 Brody, Gerard 144, 148, 201, 286, 329 Bryan, Mark 113, 223 Bryett, Wez 76, 77 Buckingham, William 43 Buckingham’s 43 Buffet, Warren 125, 178–9 bushfires 2019-2020 260, 261 Business Review Weekly 7 buy now, pay later (BNPL) sector banks’ attitude towards 217 birth of industry 48 code of conduct 224, 286, 298, 324–6 definition 48 different models 317–18, 322 ‘no-surcharge’ rules 254, 255, 262, 301, 302, 341 regulation see regulation of BNPL sector 201 retail payment economy, proportion 264 self-regulation 223, 224, 286, 298–9 Cahill, Antony 216 Caledonia 127 Caliburn 22, 23, 24, 63 Calvert-Jones, John 59, 60, 62, 84 Campbell, Rob 19, 35 Cannon-Brookes, Mike 101, 156, 201, 277, 281 Carnegie, Mark 14, 39, 40, 99, 311–12 Carr, Tony 109 Catalina restaurant 305, 306 Cato, Sue 199 Cato & Clegg 199, 200, 242 Centennial Funds Management 95 Certegy 48, 49–50, 201 Certegy-Ezi-Pay 52 consumer groups and regulators 50 Freedom Australia deal 48 jewellery sector 48–9 Chandra, Ashwini 169–70 Change Up 116 Chanos, Jim 177, 178 Chappelli Cycles 100 Charlton, Andrew 196, 200, 208, 209, 249 Chen, Francis Sy Lei 5 Chester, Karen 340 China 275–6 Chippendale, Phillip 175, 246 Chung, Juliet 295 Cisco 98 Citibank 168, 169, 184, 251 Clearpay 184, 280, 322, 323 London Fashion Week 323 Cleeve, Adrian 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 69, 111 ATC Capital 65, 116, 159, 267 Cleevecorp 115–16, 159 death 111, 115 TAFMO 64, 65 Touchcorp IPO 58, 59, 67–8, 94 Cleeve, Audrey 69 Cleeve, Damien 59, 66, 69 Cleeve, estate of Adrian Afterpay Touch shareholding 118 legal proceedings 159, 267 Cleeve, Keith 58, 59, 60, 62, 69 Cleeve, Laurence 59, 66, 69 Cleeve, Linley 69 Cleeve, Terence 69, 116 Cleevecorp 115–16, 159 Clegg, Brett 199, 211, 242 CNN Money 15, 16 Coats 31–3 Coatue Management 234–5, 257, 258, 282, 295, 335 Coburn, Niall 142 code of conduct 224, 286, 298, 324–8 ASIC input 327 consumer groups and 326, 328–9 credit checks 327–8 politicians’ response 329 Coleman, Charles Payson Chase 234, 295 Commonwealth Bank 216–17 BNPL scheme, creation of own 338, 339 CommSec 318 Hayne Banking Royal Commission 215, 337 Klarna investment 247–8, 337–8 money-laundering allegations 151–2, 217–18 Comyn, Matt 215, 217–18, 247, 337 Connal, Simon 149 Connolly, Paul 55 Consumer Action Law Centre 144, 148, 201, 286, 329 consumer people power 311 Consumer’s Federation of Australia 328 Coppleson, Richard 134–5, 136–7, 165–6, 167, 193, 225 The Coppo Report 134 Cordukes, James 339 Costello, Peter 21 Council of Small Business Organisations Australia 262 Course, Phil 61, 62, 63, 65 COVID-19 260–1, 269 Centrelink lines 269, 271 ecommerce during 278 emergency health response plan 265 government response 269–71 JobKeeper 271 share market reactions 265–7 Team Australia 269, 300–1 US Federal Reserve 273 Cox, Karen 249, 328–9 Creasy, Stella 322 credit 42 Bankcards 46, 120, 218 big retailers and 44–5 cash orders 43, 44 consumer leases 50 credit cards 40, 41, 46 instalments, purchases by 42 interest-free loans 50, 51 lay-by 41, 44, 45, 46–7 millennials and credit cards 40, 41, 52, 73, 208, 217, 222 Transax 47 credit cards 40, 41, 46 Bankcards 46, 120, 218 ‘card not present’ fraud 119 chargeback 119 fraud 119 history in Australia 218–19 millennials and 40, 41, 52, 73, 208, 217, 222 regulation of 220–2 virtual cards 279 Crennan, Daniel 143 Cribb, Tom 58, 66, 67, 168, 169, 184 Crosby, Lynton 340 Crutchfield, Philip 101 cryptocurrencies 311 Cue Group 87, 88, 113, 130 Cureton, Graeme 63, 71, 83 CVC Capital 84, 99, 117 Cyan Investment Management 95, 107 Daly, Tony 11 David Jones 20, 44 Davies, Enno 55 Davis, Jim Woodson 238, 295 Davis, Melissa 243 day traders 278–9, 308–10 De Carvalho, Fabio 76, 77, 86, 87, 89 de Smet, Jan 61, 63 Debelle, Guy 266 Dey, Sujit 162–4, 167 Diamond, Larry 100, 211, 270, 279 Dish 153 Dogecoin 311 Don, Gil 246 Donoghue, Jon 289 Douglass, Hamish 96, 181 Druckenmiller, Stan 233 Drummond, Shaun 101, 103 Eastern Suburbs Rugby Club 11 eBay 13, 14, 77, 98, 157, 180, 240, 263 ecommerce 47 EFTPOS direct-debit system 46, 219 Einhorn, David 177, 178 Eisen, Anita 19, 21 Eisen, Anthony Mathew 13, 14, 17, 19, 24, 52, 133, 341–2 Adrian Cleeve and 58, 63 Afterpay see Afterpay background 19, 20 Byron Bay house 194, 303 early career 21 education 21 fortune, personal 277, 333 GPG 19, 25, 30, 35–6, 37, 63 Molnar, meeting 39, 52 Eisen, Malcolm 19, 20, 21, 24 Eisen, Samantha 24 Eley Griffiths 104, 105, 107, 187, 293 Ellerston 241 Emerson, Craig 209–10 Enron 177 Everaardt, Tineka 151 Ezra, Adam 131, 279 FAANG stocks 182 Facebook 98, 102, 122, 263, 289 factoring 181 Fahour, Ahmed 257 Fairfax 126–7 ‘fallacy of composition’ 254 Farmers 44 Farquhar, Scott 101–2, 277, 281 fashion retail sector 306 fast fashion 307 Feit, Alon 246 Fergie, Dean 95, 107 Ferrington, Rebecca 55 financial deregulation 119 Find the Moat blogger 121–2, 125 Fink, Larry 302 Firetrail 272, 292 First Sentier 292 Fisher, Emma 335 FlexiGroup 117, 325 FlexiRent 50, 51 Floyd, George 277 Forrest, Andrew 294 Fortescue Metals Group 294 Frydenberg, Josh 251, 261, 300–1, 326 G20 meetings 250, 261 Gabriele, Mario 313 Galloway, Scott 285, 289 Gamble, Duncan 187 Gamble, Neil 23 GameStop 308–10, 311, 319 Garg, Akash 242, 243 Gates, Bill 302 Gavin, Tim 11 Gazard, David 200, 214 Ge, Xin 242, 243 GE Finance 51, 100 General Pants 87, 103, 106, 107, 111 Gibbs, Tony 34, 35 Gill, Keith 309 Gillard, Julia 196 Gillezeau, Natasha 307 Ginges, Agnes 6 Ginges, Berel 6, 9 Ginges, Max 9–10 Glass, Max 20 Glen, John 322 Global Financial Crisis 33, 34, 52, 74 Gniwisch, Isaac 15, 16 Gniwisch, Julie 15 Gniwisch, Shmuel (Sam) 14–15, 16, 40 Godfreys 49–50 Gold, Fred 10 Gold, Gitta 10 Goldman Sachs 33, 66, 67, 105, 251–2, 274 Good Shepherd Microfinance 201, 204–6 Google 54, 92, 102, 127, 182, 240, 263, 289 Goot, Robert 4 Grace Bros 44 Graf, Ervin 9 Grant, Luke 210 Gray, Peter 100, 315, 316, 318 Great Depression 44 Greenberg, Paul 77–8, 83, 114, 129, 188 Online Retailer Conference & Expo 86 Greenspan, Alan 180 Grimshaw, Tracy 151 Gross, Bill 15, 16 Guinness Peat Group (GPG) 17, 18, 24, 28, 60 assets of, realising 35–7 Coats 31–3 Eisen hiring 30 history 28–9 late 1995-2005, activities 29–35 TAFMO, sale of 64 Guscic, John 112 Guthrie, Fiona 328, 338 Hakoah Club, Bondi 5 Hallas, Peter 8 Hallas, Yvonne 8 Halvorsen, Andreas Ole 235 Hammond, John 9 Hancock, David 52, 53, 73, 74, 108, 120, 130, 133, 229, 236 Hanneman, Gerhard 55 Harris, Richard 74, 75, 87, 108, 160–1 Harry, Troy 84, 85, 117, 125–6, 273 Hartzer, Brian 259 Harvey, Gerry 50, 149, 225 Harvey Norman 50, 51, 100 Hatton, Lee 339 Hawkins, Alan 28 Hayne, David 173 Hayne, Kenneth 141 Hayne Royal Commission 140, 141, 195, 205, 215, 218, 287 hedge funds 231, 295, 310–11 Hempton, John 191–2 Henry, Ken 141, 206, 216 Higgins, Jonathon 279, 291 Hodge, Michael 141 Hodgens, Patrick 272 Hogan, Sean 84 Holmes à Court, Robert 18, 27, 70 Holocaust 2, 5, 6, 8 Howard, John 21 Hughes, Anthony 18 Hughes, Sean 297, 298 Hui, Gary 119, 120 Hume, Jane 211–12, 213, 329 Hungary, post-war 2 Hunt, Peter 23 Hurrigan, Mr 3, 5 Ice Online 16, 39, 40, 55, 307, 311 The Iconic 134, 135 Immelt, Jeff 51 Industrial Equity Limited (IEL) 26, 27, 28 initial public offers (IPOs) 98–9 Innovative Payments 53 instalments, purchases by 42 instore retail 113, 130 Intellect 60, 63 point of sale terminals 60 TAFMO 61, 63 interest rates, low 180, 185 International Monetary Fund 261 Investors Mutual 127, 128, 291–2 Jackson, Shaun 55 Jacob, Ashok 71, 84, 112 Jacobsson, Victor 190 Jasper, Leigh 155 Jeans, Neil 258 Jefferies, Mike 30, 54, 58, 60, 66 Afterpay 83, 84 TAFMO 63, 64 Touchcorp CEO 116 Touchcorp shares 65, 67, 68 Jetstar 135 Jewish community financial success of 7–8, 9 Hungarian Jewish immigrants 5, 8 Melbourne 5, 8 Polish Jewish immigrants 5, 8 rag trade 9, 19 Sydney 3, 5, 7–8 Jewish Welfare Society 2 Johnson, Mark 35 Johnson, Steven 288 Jones, Alfred Winslow 231 Jones, Stephen 329 J.P.


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

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. Interview with author. 27. Gregory Harutunian, “Harvard Motorola Site in Forfeit by Justice Department,” McHenry Chronicle, 7 November 2018, https://chronicleillinois.com/news/mchenry-county-news/harvard-motorola-site-forfeited-by-justice-department/. 28. 


pages: 237 words: 74,109

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

Years prior, we had conducted an off-again, on-again, casual noncommitment, which had mostly consisted of him explaining things and then apologizing. “Email is about as secure as a postcard,” he’d remind me, as we wandered between families at the farmers market in Fort Greene Park. “You don’t expect your mailman to read it, but he could.” I had listened patiently as he tried to teach me about cryptocurrencies and the promise of the blockchain, the shortcomings of two-factor authentication, the necessity of end-to-end encryption, the inevitability of data breaches. The romance didn’t last, but in its wake we had fallen into a rhythm of exchanging insecure emails on niche topics, like 1980s interface design, binary code, and public-domain art, and occasionally meeting for chaste, geriatric cultural activities.

While the interface could be intimidating to people who were not programmers, the public product was still used and abused like any other social technology that relied on free, user-generated content. The Terms of Service team handled copyright takedowns, trademark infringement, and spam; user deaths and COPPA violations. We took over the work of the Hazmat group, evaluating threats of violence, cryptocurrency scams, phishing sites, suicide notes, and conspiracy theories. We puzzled over reports of Great Firewall circumvention. We ran emails claiming to be from the Russian government through translation software and passed them to Legal with spinning question-mark emojis. We sifted through reports of harassment, revenge porn, child porn, and terrorist content.


pages: 301 words: 85,263

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.

., 139 Commission on Government Secrecy, 169 complex systems about, 2–3 aggregation of, 40 high-frequency trading, 14, 106–7, 108, 122, 124 complicity computational logic, 184–5 Freedom of Information, 161–2, 165, 192 global mass surveillance, 179–80 Glomar response, 165, 186 public key cryptography, 167–8 computation calculating machines, 27 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), 27, 27–30, 33 flight trackers, 35–6, 36 IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), 30, 30–2, 31, 146 opaqueness of, 40 computational logic, 184–5 computational thinking about, 4 evolution of, 248 importance of, 44–5 Concorde, 69, 70, 71 conspiracy chemtrails, 192–5, 206–8, 214 conspiracy theories, 195, 198–9, 205 contrails, 196–8, 197, 214 global warming, 73, 193, 214 9/11 terrorist attacks, 203–4, 206 ‘Conspiracy as Governance’ (Assange), 183 contrails, 196–8, 197, 214 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (COP15), 199 Cowen, Deborah, 132 Credit Suisse, 109 cryptocurrency, 63 Cumulus homogenitus, 195–6 cyborg chess, 159 D Dabiq (online magazine), 212 Dallaire, Roméo, 243 darkness, 11–2 “Darkness” (poem), 201–2 dark pools, 108–9 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), 33 Darwin, Charles, 78 data abundance of, 83–4, 131 big, 84 importance of, 245–6 realistic accounting of, 247 thirst for, 246 data dredging, 90–1 Debord, Guy, 103 DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), 33 Decyben SAS, 110 Deep Blue, 148–9, 157–60 DeepDream, 153, 154–5 DeepFace software, 140 defeat devices, 120 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 33 de Solla Price, Derek, 91–2, 93 Diffie-Hellman key exchange, 167 digital culture, 64–5 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), 33 digital networks, mapping, 104 digitisation, 108 ‘Discussion of the Possibility of Weather Control’ lecture, 26 diurnal temperature range (DTR), 204 DNA sequencing, 93 D-Notices, 179 domain name system, 79 doomsday vault, 52–3 Dow Jones Industrial Average, 121–2 drones, 161–2 drug discovery/research, 94–5 DTR (diurnal temperature range), 204 Duffy, Carol Ann, 201 Dunne, Carey, 194–5 E Elberling, Bo, 57 electromagnetic networks, 104 Electronic Computer Project, 27 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 177 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), 27, 27–30, 33 Elements of Chemistry (Lavoisier), 208–9 Elkins, Caroline, 183–4 Ellis, James, 167 encoded biases, 142 ‘End of Theory’ (Anderson), 83–4, 146 Engelbart, Douglas, 79 ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), 27, 27–30, 33 Enlightenment, 10 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 119–20 EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), 119–20 Epagogix, 130 epidemic type aftershock sequence (ETAS) model, 145–6 Epimetheus, 132–4 Equinix LD4, 104 Eroom’s law, 86, 93–6 ETAS (epidemic type aftershock sequence) model, 145–6 Euronext Data Center, 104, 105, 106 Evangelismos Hospital, 130–1 evolution, theory of, 78 exploitation, 229–30 Eyjafjallajökull, eruption of, 200–1, 202 F Facebook, 39–40, 156–7 facial recognition, 141 Fairchild Semiconductor, 80 Farage, Nigel, 194 Fat Man bomb, 25 Fermi, Enrico, 250 Ferranti Mark I, 78 fiat anima, 19–20 fiat lux, 19–20 Finger Family, 221–2, 224, 227 ‘Five Eyes,’ 174 Flash Boys (Lewis), 111–2 flash crash, 121–2, 130–1 FlightRadar24, 36, 189, 191 flight trackers, 35–6, 36 ‘Fourteen Eyes,’ 174 Fowler, R.H., 45 Frankenstein (Shelley), 201 fraud, 86–8, 91 Freedom of Information, 161–2, 165, 192 Friends’ Ambulance Unit, 20 Fuller, Buckminster, 71 Futurama exhibit, 30–1 ‘Future Uses of High Speed Computing in Meteorology’ lecture, 26 G Gail, William B., 72–3 Galton, Francis, 140 game developers, 130 Gates’s law, 83 GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), 167, 174, 176–9, 189 genocide, 243 ghost cars (Uber), 118–9 G-INFO, 190 global mass surveillance, 179–80 Global Positioning System (GPS), 36–7, 42–3 Global Seed Vault, 54 global warming, 73, 193, 214 Glomar response, 165, 186 Godard, Jean-Luc, 143 Google, 84, 139, 230, 242 Google Alerts, 190 Google Brain project, 139, 148, 149, 156 Google Earth, 35–6 Google Home, 128–9 Google Maps, 177 Google Translate, 147–8, 156 Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), 167, 174, 176–9, 189 GPS (Global Positioning System), 36–7, 42–3 Graves, Robert, 159 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 128 gray zone, 212–4 Great Nōbi Earthquake, 145 Greenland, 57–8 Green Revolution, 53 Greyball programme, 119, 120 guardianship, 251–2 H Hankins, Thomas, 102 Haraway, Donna, 12 Harvard Mark I machine, 30 Hayek, Friedrich, 156–7 The Road to Serfdom, 139 The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology, 138–9 HealthyFoodHouse.com (website), 231–2 Heller, Joseph Catch-22, 187–8 Hermes, 134 Hersh, Seymour, 164 Hewlett-Packard, 143 hidden technological processes, 120 high-frequency trading, 14, 106–7, 108, 122, 124 high-throughput screening (HTS), 95–6 Hillingdon Hospital, 110–1, 111 Hippo programme, 32 Hofstadter, Douglas, 205–6 Hola Massacre, 170 homogenitus, 195, 196 Horn, Roni, 50, 201 How-Old.net facial recognition programme, 141 ‘How the World Wide Web Just Happened’ lecture, 78 HTS (high-throughput screening), 95–6 Hughes, Howard, 163 Hughes Glomar Explorer, 163–5 human genome project, 93 Human Interference Task Force, 251 human violence, 202 Humby, Clive, 245, 246 Hwang Woo-suk, 86–8 hyperobjects, 73, 75, 76, 194 hypertext, 79 I IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), 30, 30–2, 31, 146 ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation), 68 ICARDA (International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas), 53–4, 55 ICT, 60–2 image recognition, 139–40 Infinite Fun Space, 149–50, 156 information networks, 62 information superhighway, 10 Infowars (Jones), 207 In Place of Fear (Bevan), 110 Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences, 26 integrated circuits, 79, 80 Intel, 80 International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), 53–4, 55 International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), 68 International Cloud Atlas, 195 Internet Research Agency, 235, 237 Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, 199 The Invisibles (Morrison), 196–7 Isaksen, Ketil, 54 ISIL, 212–3 J Jameson, Fredric, 205 Jelinek, Frederick, 146–7 Jones, Alex Infowars, 207 Joshi, Manoj, 68–9 journalism, automated, 123–4 just-in-time manufacturing, 117 K K-129, 162–3 Karma Police operation, 175 Kasparov, Garry, 148–9, 157–8 Keeling Curve, 74, 74 Kennedy, John F., 169–70 Kinder Eggs, 215–6 Kiva robots, 114 Klein, Mark, 176–7 Kodak, 143 Krakatoa, eruption of, 202 Kunuk, Zacharias, 199, 200 Kuznets curve, 113 L Large Hadron Collider, 93 Lavoisier, Antoine, 78 Elements of Chemistry, 208–9 Lawson, Robert, 175–6 LD4, 104, 105 Leave Campaign, 194 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 78 Levy, David, 158, 159 Lewis, Michael Flash Boys, 111–2 LifeSphere, 125 literacy in systems, 3–4 Lockheed Ocean Systems, 163 Logan, Walt (pseudonym), 165 Lombroso, Cesare, 140 London Stock Exchange, 110–1 Lovecraft, H.P., 11, 249 ‘low-hanging fruit,’ 93–4 M Macedonia, 233–4 machine learning algorithms, 222 machine thought, 146 machine translation, 147 magnetism, 77 Malaysian Airlines, 66 manganese noodles, 163–4 Manhattan Project, 24–30, 248 Mara, Jane Muthoni, 170 Mark I Perceptron, 136–8, 137 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, 128–9 Matthews, James Tilly, 208–10, 209 Mauro, Ian, 199 McCarthy, Joe, 205 McGovern, Thomas, 57–8 McKay Brothers, 107, 110 memex, 24 Mercer, Robert, 236 Merkel, Angela, 174 metalanguage, 3, 5 middens, 56 migrated archive, 170–1 Minds, 150 miniaturisation principle, 81 Mirai, 129 mobile phones, 126 The Modern Prometheus (Shelley), 201 monoculture, 55–6 Moore, Gordon, 80, 80, 83 Moore’s law, 80–3, 92–4 Mordvintsev, Alexander, 154 Morgellons, 211, 214 Morrison, Grant The Invisibles, 196–7 Morton, Timothy, 73, 194 Mount Tambora, eruption of, 201 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 169 Munch, Edvard The Scream, 202 Mutua, Ndiku, 170 N NarusInsight, 177 NASA Ames Advanced Concepts Flight Simulator, 42 Natanz Nuclear Facility, 129 National Centre for Atmospheric Science, 68–9 National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, 243 National Health Service (NHS), 110 National Mining Association, 64 National Reconnaissance Office, 168, 243 National Security Agency (NSA), 167, 174, 177–8, 183, 242–3, 249–50 National Security Strategy, 59 natural gas, 48 neoliberalism, 138–9 network, 5, 9 networks, 249 Newton, Isaac, 78 NewYorkTimesPolitics.com, 221 New York World’s Fair, 30–1 NHS (National Health Service), 110 9/11 terrorist attacks, 203–4, 206 ‘Nine Eyes,’ 174 1984 (Orwell), 242 NORAD (North American Air Defense Command), 33 North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), 33 ‘The Nor’ project, 104 Not Aviation, 190–1 NSA (National Security Agency), 167, 174, 177–8, 183, 242–3, 249–50 nuclear fusion, 97–8, 100 nuclear warfare, 28 Numerical Prediction (Richardson), 45 Nyingi, Wambugu Wa, 170 Nzili, Paulo Muoka, 170 O Obama, Barack, 180, 206, 231 Official Secrets Act, 189 Omori, Fusakichi, 145 Omori’s Law, 145 Operation Castle, 97 Operation Legacy, 171–2 Optic Nerve programme, 174 Optometrist Algorithm, 99–101, 160 O’Reilly, James, 185–6 Orwell, George 1984, 242 ‘Outline of Weather Proposal’ (Zworykin), 25–6 P Paglen, Trevor, 144 ‘paranoid style,’ 205–6 Patriot Act, 178 Penrose, Roger, 20 Perceptron, 136–8, 137 permafrost, 47–9, 56–7 p-hacking, 89–91 Phillippi, Harriet Ann, 165 photophone, 19–20 Pichai, Sundar, 139 Piketty, Thomas Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 112 Pincher, Chapman, 175–6 Pitt, William, 208 Plague-Cloud, 195, 202 Poitras, Laura, 175 Polaroid, 143 ‘predictive policing’ systems, 144–6 PredPol software, 144, 146 Priestley, Joseph, 78, 208, 209 prion diseases, 50, 50–1 PRISM operation, 173 product spam, 125–6 Project Echelon, 190 Prometheus, 132–4, 198 psychogeography, 103 public key cryptography, 167–8 pure language, 156 Putin, Vladimir, 235 Pynchon, Thomas Gravity’s Rainbow, 128 Q Qajaa, 56, 57 quality control failure of, 92–3 in science, 91 Quidsi, 113–4 R racial profiling, 143–4 racism, 143–4 ‘radiation cats,’ 251 raw computing, 82–3 Reagan, Ronald, 36–7 Reed, Harry, 29 refractive index of the atmosphere, 62 Regin malware, 175 replicability, 88–9 Reproducibility Project, 89 resistance, modes of, 120 Reuter, Paul, 107 Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, 181 Richardson, Lewis Fry, 20–1, 29, 68 Numerical Prediction, 45 Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, 21–3 Richardson number, 68 The Road to Serfdom (Hayek), 139 Robinson, Kim Stanley Aurora, 128 robots, workers vs., 116 ‘Rogeting,’ 88 Romney, Mitt, 206–7 Rosenblatt, Frank, 137 Roy, Arundhati, 250 Royal Aircraft Establishment, 188–9 Ruskin, John, 17–20, 195, 202 Rwanda, 243, 244, 245 S Sabetta, 48 SABRE (Semi-Automated Business Research Environment), 35, 38 SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), 33, 34, 35 Samsung, 127 Scheele, Carl Wilhelm, 78 Schmidt, Eric, 241–5 The Scream (Munch), 202 Sedol, Lee, 149, 157–8 seed banks, 52–6 Seed Vault, 55 seismic sensors, 48 self-excitation, 145 ‘semantic analyser,’ 177 Semi-Automated Business Research Environment (SABRE), 35, 38 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 33, 34, 35 semiconductors, 82 The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology (Hayek), 138–9 Shelley, Mary Frankenstein, 201 The Modern Prometheus, 201 SIGINT Seniors Europe, 174 simulation, conflating approximation with, 34–5 Singapore Exchange, 122–3 smart products, 127–8, 131 Smith, Robert Elliott, 152 smoking gun, 183–4, 186 Snowden, Edward, 173–5, 178 software about, 82–3 AlphaGo, 149, 156–8 Assistant, 152 AutoAwesome, 152 DeepFace, 140 Greyball programme, 119, 120 Hippo programme, 32 How-Old.net facial recognition programme, 141 Optic Nerve programme, 174 PredPol, 144, 146 Translate, 146 Solnit, Rebecca, 11–2 solutionism, 4 space telescopes, 168–9 speed of light, 107 Spread Networks, 107 SSEC (IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator), 30, 30–2, 31, 146 Stapel, Diederik, 87–8 Stapledon, Olaf, 20 steam engines, 77 Stellar Wind, 176 Stewart, Elizabeth ‘Betsy,’ 30–1, 31 Steyerl, Hito, 126 stock exchanges, 108 ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’ lecture series, 17–9 Stratus homogenitus, 195–6 studios, 130 Stuxnet, 129–30 surveillance about, 243–4 complicity in, 185 computational excesses of, 180–1 devices for, 104 Svalbard archipelago, 51–2, 54 Svalbard Global Seed Vault, 52–3 Svalbard Treaty (1920), 52 Swiss National Bank, 123 Syed, Omar, 158–9 systemic literacy, 5–6 T Taimyr Peninsula, 47–8 Targeted Individuals, 210–1 The Task of the Translator (Benjamin), 147, 155–6 TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), 79 technology acceleration of, 2 complex, 2–3 opacity of, 119 Teletubbies, 217 television, children’s, 216–7 Tesco Clubcard, 245 thalidomide, 95 Thatcher, Margaret, 177 theory of evolution, 78 thermal power plants, 196 Three Guineas (Woolf), 12 Three Laws of Robotics (Asimov), 157 Tillmans, Wolfgang, 71 tools, 13–4 To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light exhibition, 143 totalitarianism, collectivism vs., 139 Toy Freaks, 225–6 transistors, 79, 80 Translate software, 146 translation algorithms, 84 Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), 79 Tri Alpha Energy, 98–101 Trinity test, 25 trolling, 231 Trump, Donald, 169–70, 194–5, 206, 207, 236 trust, science and, 91 trusted source, 220 Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula, 49 turbulence, 65–9 tyranny of techne, 132 U Uber, 117–9, 127 UberEats app, 120–1 unboxing videos, 216, 219 United Airlines, 66–7 Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-collection and Online Monitoring Act (USA FREEDOM Act), 178 USA FREEDOM Act (2015), 178 US Drug Efficacy Amendment (1962), 95 V van Helden, Albert, 102 Veles, objectification of, 235 Verizon, 173 VHF omnidirectional radio range (VOR) installations, 104 Vigilant Telecom, 110–1 Volkswagen, 119–20 von Neumann, John about, 25 ‘Can We Survive Technology?


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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.

So far, blitzscaling has been concentrated in software and the Internet, but it’s likely to reshape our physical infrastructure or even our bodies in the future. Artificial intelligence will soon be ubiquitous, thanks to self-driving vehicles and better machine learning. Technology innovations in the life sciences, such as CRISPR gene editing, may change the fabric of life itself. Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology may change the role of governments and corporations in global finance and commerce. New technologies are emerging rapidly and promise to change everything—again. These new technologies will enable new business models, which in turn will create new industries. In the history of high tech, platform shifts, such as the move from mainframes to client-server or the move from the Web to mobile, have represented huge opportunities.


pages: 265 words: 80,510

The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption - Endangering Our Democracy by Frank Vogl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, corporate governance, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Global Witness, Greensill Capital, income inequality, information security, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Londongrad, low interest rates, market clearing, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, profit maximization, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stock buybacks, too big to fail, WikiLeaks

Kleptocrats and their associates want their cash to produce a good rate of financial return, but they are not inclined to take large risks. Cryptocurrencies, which until now have tended to have highly volatile valuations, are unlikely for the time being to be the investments of choice for them, although they may have more appeal for organized crime groups that seek to shift funds rapidly and secretly across the world. The value of these currencies as investment assets for kleptocrats may well increase as markets expand and become more stable. The FBI has started to monitor cryptocurrency transactions as best it can to detect money-laundering operations. Currently, its focus is on organized crime, but in time it may embrace efforts to monitor transactions by corrupt public officials.


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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

That ranges from Bitcoin—a currency specifically designed to create money that couldn’t be controlled by dough-printing central banks—to Ethereum, a way of creating “smart contracts” that, its adherents hope, would allow commerce so frictionless and decentralized that even lawyers wouldn’t be necessary: The instant someone performed the service you’d contracted them to do for you, the digital cash would arrive in their digital wallet. One survey of people in the cryptocurrency community found that fully 27 percent called themselves libertarian, more than double the rate Pew Research Center found in the general population. At first blush, it’s not hard to figure out why there’d be a strong Venn overlap between coders and libertarians. Both inhabit realms where first principles and logic are heavily touted.

COBOL and BASIC were the targets back then—but today, that snobbishness is leveled at the web languages so many newbies and underrepresented coders use as their on-ramp: JavaScript, HTML, CSS. As the pink-collar ghetto emerges in the front end, the self-appointed alpha nerds flee it. These days, they’re less and less interested in web or app development and are moving into emerging areas like blockchain—Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies—or machine learning. They’re fields that are newly technically challenging; serious machine-learning work requires some genuinely mathematical thinking (and, if you practice it at a high level, formal computer science education). And these coders know that these skills are the most lucrative, because they’re necessary for the hot venture-capital-soaked fields like robotics and self-driving cars.

one person, Bobby Murphy: Alex Hern, “Snapchat Boss Evan Spiegel on the App That Made Him One of the World’s Youngest Billionaires,” Guardian, December 5, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/05/snapchat-boss-evan-spiegel-on-the-app-that-made-him-one-of-the-worlds-youngest-billionaires. the pseudonymous “Satoshi Nakamoto”: Joshua Davis, “The Crypto-Currency,” New Yorker, October 10, 2011, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/the-crypto-currency. first-person shooter video games: Chris Kohler, “Q&A: Doom’s Creator Looks Back on 20 Years of Demonic Mayhem,” Wired, December 10, 2013, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.wired.com/2013/12/john-carmack-doom.


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.

And in all these cases investors lost very large amounts of money as greater realism finally set in. 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.

., 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?’


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

A decade later, as asset prices reached new highs across markets, in our Asset Allocation Committee we constantly asked ourselves, “Where’s the excess speculation, the latent risk?” In other words, where’s the bubble? The answer isn’t obvious. The postcrisis rally in risk assets has been largely supported by fundamentals. Investors have become more cautious. Some refer to this rally as an unloved bull market. There was a bubble in cryptocurrencies, but it’s been deflating somewhat slowly and, so far, without systemic consequences. However, we do worry about latent risks such as the unprecedented levels of government debt and 0% interest rates outside the United States. As the events related to the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 continue to unfold, pundits like to compare this crisis with the 2008 financial crisis.

Yet its impact is greater than anything we’ve discussed so far. Once revealed, it becomes obvious and intuitive. 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.


pages: 146 words: 34,934

The Latte Factor: Why You Don't Have to Be Rich to Live Rich by David Bach, John David Mann

cryptocurrency, financial independence, late fees, time value of money

“You know that expression about how you eat an elephant?” Zoey took a sip of her latte and nodded. “One bite at a time.” “Well, that’s exactly how you build a fortune. One dollar at a time. But here’s how most people think you get rich: you win the lottery. You get lucky, and a friend gives you a tip on a new cryptocurrency or great tech stock no one else knows about yet.” Zoey thought of Jeffrey and his surefire plan to launch the next Instagram. “Or you get an inheritance. A piano falls on that accident-prone great-aunt.” (Good memory, Zoey thought with a smile.) “Or maybe you find buried treasure in your backyard.


pages: 139 words: 35,022

Roads and Bridges by Nadia Eghbal

AGPL, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, Debian, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, GnuPG, Guido van Rossum, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, leftpad, Marc Andreessen, market design, Network effects, platform as a service, pull request, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software is eating the world, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Tragedy of the Commons, Y Combinator

Although today it is a standard, of its origins, Christopher writes: As the co-author of TLS I would not have predicted 15 years later that over half of the Internet would be using an implementation of TLS maintained by a 1/4 time engineer. This lack of support led to the infamous Heartbleed bug. I tell my cryptocurrency colleagues this story today to warn them that their leading edge crypto today may be “boring” in a decade and suffer the same fate as it will no longer be exciting and their future hard work may be compromised.[99] Finally, the stability of our software potentially relies upon the good faith and cooperation of hundreds of developers, which introduces significant risk.


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

Netflix, Amazon, and, even to a certain extent, Apple, who are relative newcomers to the entertainment business, are no longer content being the uncontested leaders in the video streaming market; now they are also dominant content producers, becoming in effect TV and movie studios, spending billions of dollars (in the case of Netflix and Amazon) on original television programming,42 a move that has left the previous titans of the entertainment business scrambling to match them (hence the recent massive industry mergers of AT&T and Time Warner). Google has lurched into the transportation business with its bid to create a self-driving car, and Facebook is trying to launch its own finance system with the creation of a bespoke cryptocurrency, Libra (Apple has already teamed up with Goldman Sachs on a credit card). Big Tech, in other words, doesn’t just want to become a leader in one sector. It wants to become the platform for everything, the operating system for your life. This is arguably something that Amazon has done best so far.

“Will Big Tech’s involvement in finance lead to a more diverse and competitive financial system, or to new forms of concentration, market power, and systemic importance?” he asked. “Is the expansion of Big Tech powered by efficiency gains? Or by the cost advantage of circumventing the current regulatory system?” It’s a question that is ever more pressing as Facebook attempts to launch its own cryptocurrency. The jury is still out on whether Big Tech will destabilize global finance. Meanwhile, Carstens and regulators in both the United States and Europe are looking carefully at whether the predictive algorithms and machine learning offered up by Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and others moving into the finance business are increasing or decreasing stability in the financial sector.


pages: 344 words: 104,522

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

According to British corporate historians Leonardo Davoudi, Christopher McKenna, and Rowena Olegario chartered companies in the Old World waged wars with their own private armies and fleets, built forts and infrastructure, conquered territories, negotiated treaties, and, in the case of the Dutch East India Company, even minted their own corporate currency.4 I heard echoes of the Dutch East India Company’s voice in Mark Zuckerberg’s statement in 2020 that he wanted Facebook to launch its own cryptocurrency. At the same time, the Dutch East India Company also pursued philanthropic causes back at home, like donating funds to relieve poverty, build hospitals, and establish schools. And they were assiduous about noting those charitable activities in the company minutes. It wasn’t just a matter of generating good PR; it was fundamentally to “assuage core cultural concerns of the era and demonstrate their dedication to improving their societies.”5 The philanthropic activities of the Dutch East India Company and its exercise of state-like political power were two sides of the same coin.

He’s built a sterling reputation for himself by publicly criticizing social media companies for “ripping apart society” while becoming a part owner of the Golden State Warriors and a Silicon Valley celebrity on the back of his appreciated ownership in Facebook.1 I haven’t heard him publicly float his onetime idea about starting a private militia for Facebook… not a great look for a newly woke capitalist. While doing research for this book, I was struck to learn that the Dutch East India Company once wielded its own militia, behaving as though it were a sovereign entity in its own right. It also had its own currency—not dissimilar from the cryptocurrency that Facebook wanted to launch. Today Silicon Valley represents the reincarnation of the Dutch East India Company in the twenty-first century—except this time firmly on American soil, after its companies sidestepped the safeguards in our system that were designed to protect against exactly that result.


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

However, I predict that the next wave will be what I call Digital Nomad 2.0: businesses that are not only location independent, but government independent as well. These businesses will not rely on any one country, nor be burdened or rendered uncompetitive by one country’s rules or tax policies. There are some who believe in moving their entire net worth into digital cryptocurrencies and storing ‘survival food’ in their basement to become government independent. However, we still have borders, and borders still matter. Planting flags as we will discuss in the chapters to come is, in my opinion, the best way to be free. Takeaway: Those of us that live by principles of self-reliance, entrepreneurship, and global diversification will not only prosper, but prosper on a far more consistent basis than those who have tied themselves to one economy.

This is a mindset that does not go looking for anonymity and secrecy and numbered bank accounts so you can do whatever you want without anyone knowing. 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.


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

One of Liberland’s largest donors is thirty-seven-year-old multimillionaire Roger Ver. Like Vit, Roger considers himself an anarcho-capitalist. He left the United States and renounced his citizenship a decade ago after being convicted of selling firecrackers on eBay, and subsequently made money in Silicon Valley start-up companies, and then became a very early investor in the cryptocurrency bitcoin. (Roger plans to be cryonically frozen by Alcor when he dies, like Zoltan.) He now lives in Tokyo running a bitcoin-based business and donates $10,000 a month to Liberland.13 ‘I know it’s a long shot,’ Roger told me via Skype, ‘but the minute I’m assured the Croatian police aren’t going to destroy any investment I make there, yeah, sign me up!

4 If, as a growing number of scientists now believe, breakthroughs in gerontology mean life expectancy will significantly extend within a generation? Or when, within the next couple of decades, health services and pension plans become financially unsustainable, requiring dramatic tax increases, just as more and more people start using untraceable cryptocurrencies?5 And what if all these things happen at roughly the same time? I don’t have the answer. The radicals in this book might not either. But the more experiments in collective living, the more new ways of looking at problems, the more we encourage radical thinking, the greater our chances of improving the way we live together.


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.


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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.

Buccleuch, Henry Scott, 3rd Duke of budget deficits and austerity Burns, Arthur Burns, Mary business cycle theory Fisher Hayek Schumpeter Callaghan, James Cambridge School see also Keynes, John Maynard; Marshall, Alfred; Robinson, Joan Cambridge University Girton College Kings College Newnham College St Johns and women Canon capital accumulation capital investment capitalism in aftermath of 2008 financial crisis and communism derivation of term and Engels and the financial crisis of 2008 free-market and Hayek inequality and capitalist economies laissez-faire see laissez-faire and Marx and the Occupy movement and Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’ socialism vs welfare state capitalism car industry Carney, Mark Carter, Jimmy Case, Elizabeth central banks Bank of England Bank of Japan European Central Bank Fed see Federal Reserve forward guidance macroprudential policy monetary policy tools see also quantitative easing (QE) Chamberlin, Edward Chicago School see also Friedman, Milton Chile China 1949 revolution asset management companies banking system Beijing Consensus Communist Party corporate debt Cultural Revolution domestic innovation economic transformation ‘effect’/‘price’ employment system entrepreneurs exports Five Year Plan (1953) foreign direct investment (FDI) and Germany industrialization and reindustrialization inequality innovation challenge legal institutions manufacturing Maoism and Marx national debt openness ‘paradox’ poverty reduction privatization R&D investment regional free trade agreement renminbi (RMB) as second largest economy services sector shadow banking smartphones social networks trade-to GDP ratio and the USSR wage increases women Churchill, Winston class Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England and Marx middle see middle class and Ricardo wage earner class Classical School of economics see also Mill, John Stuart; Ricardo, David; Smith, Adam Clinton, Bill Clinton, Hillary cloth clothing Coase, Ronald Cold War Collectivist Economic Planning collectivization Collier, Paul Columbia University communism Bolshevik Party and capitalism Chinese Communist League First International Marxism see Marxism and Robinson Socialist/Second International Third International USSR see Soviet Union Vietnamese vs welfare state capitalism Communist League comparative advantage theory competition ‘competing down’ (Schumpeter) imperfect between money providers perfect and Robinson wages and competitiveness computers Conard, Ed construction consultancy firms consumerism consumption and comparative advantage theory consumer spending and marginal utility analysis convergence hypothesis corn, free trade in Corn Laws repeal and Ricardo corporate debt Cowles Commission Crafts, Nicholas crafts credit crunch credit default swaps (CDS) credit rating Crimean War crypto-currencies currency crises first-generation second-generation third-generation currency stability Cyprus death duties debt Chinese corporate debt-deflation spiral and government bonds indexation and protection from and Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis mortgage debt national see national debt private corporate as share of GDP decentralization defence deflation debt-deflation spiral Fisher and combating deflation Japan self-fulfilling deindustrialization and globalization premature reversing/reindustrialization and trade US Deng Xiaoping depression see Great Depression (1930s); Long Depression (1880s); recession/depression diminishing returns to capital distributive lag model Douglas, David, Lord Reston Douglas, Janet DuPont East Asian ‘tiger’ economies see also Hong Kong; Singapore; South Korea; Taiwan eastern Europe Eastman Kodak Econometric Society Econometrica economic development challenges and Beijing Consensus financial/currency crises and institutions and Lewis model Myanmar and North and path dependence poverty eradication/reduction South Africa Sustainable Development Goals Vietnam and Washington Consensus economic equilibrium economic freedom economic growth and austerity barriers convergence hypothesis development challenges see economic development challenges drivers of 2 see also innovation; institutions; public investment; technology endogenous growth theories inclusive growth through investment Japan’s growth and Japan’s ‘lost decades’ Lewis model mercantilist doctrine of and new technologies policy debates on raising and poverty reduction and productivity debate/challenge slow growth and the future Solow model UK government’s renewed focus on and unemployment Economic Journal economic rent Ricardo’s theory of economies ‘animal spirits’ of crises see financial crises deflation see deflation emerging see emerging economies equilibrium in GDP see gross domestic product global macroeconomic imbalances growth of see economic growth inequality and capitalist economies inflation see inflation and international trade and investment see investment; public investment national debt see national debt QE see quantitative easing rebalancing of recession see recession/depression services economy see services sector and stagnant wages state intervention Economist education higher role in reducing inequality universal Eliot, T.


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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

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.

(By comparison, the great Brinks heist of 1950, in Boston’s North End, swept up only about $2.7 million, worth about ten times that in modern currency.) After the Sony hacks, the North had good reason to believe that any retaliation for their cyber exploits would be minimal, and they were right. There was no penalty for the Bangladesh bank attack, or cryptocurrency heists that followed. “Cyber is a tailor-made instrument of power for them,” Chris Inglis, a former deputy director of the National Security Agency, told me. “There’s a low cost of entry, it’s largely asymmetrical, there’s some degree of anonymity and stealth in its use. It can hold large swaths of nation-state infrastructure and private-sector infrastructure at risk.


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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

It is safe to assume that e-gold was deliberately targeted, not because it allowed terrorists to collect money (US dollars work much better for that), rather, because it was a viable digital currency. The use of anti-money-laundering regulations and the PATRIOT Act to attack a digital currency is, I'd claim, a good indicator of how seriously the currency threatens to succeed. The same year that e-gold died, its successor popped up in the form of BitCoin, the first credible crypto-currency. While e-gold based its denomination on the tangible value of gold coins, BitCoin is backed by nothing more than mathematics. This has led people to accuse it of being a pyramid scheme, destined for collapse. BitCoin works by "mining" new coins as a side effect of doing the cryptographic bookkeeping for other people, processing the so-called "transaction chains."

If the BitCoin network survives the different attacks that seem inevitable -- and I give it a 50-50 chance of surviving -- the crypto currency will get a natural monopoly for on-line commerce. At a certain point buying or selling BitCoin for dollars or Euros will not be so important: people will simply hold and spend BitCoin. If the network does not survive the attack, the currency will die, and other crypto-currencies will take its place. Either way, the Spider will lose this particular fight, and the Para-state will eventually (it may take decades) find itself facing a truly independent financial system. Licensed to Make a Killing When I see sustained, multilateral action against systems as organic and valuable as Hawala and BitCoin, my first response is to slice up the official story and look for the lies.


pages: 391 words: 112,312

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, business cycle, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, full employment, George Floyd, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, mouse model, Nate Silver, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, QAnon, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, the scientific method, TikTok, transcontinental railway, zoonotic diseases

Rigano, who was not otherwise identified on the show except as the author of the paper, was a thirty-four-year-old lawyer from Long Island. He had recently started several blockchain funds that aimed to “cheat death” and “end Alzheimer’s.” What brought him to Ingraham’s attention was a document he self-published on Google Docs with his co-author, James Todaro, a medical school graduate who is also a cryptocurrency investor. Ingraham quoted from the document, which claimed that the drugs were “effective in treating Covid-19,” and could be used as a prophylactic to prevent contracting the disease. Rigano spoke about a study, yet to be published, of thirty patients, half of whom received hydroxychloroquine and the other half a placebo.

Davis, “In the early days of the pandemic, the U.S. government turned down an offer to manufacture millions of N95 masks in America,” Washington Post, May 9, 2020. “I saw him as the key”: Andrew Cuomo, American Crisis, p. 122. “cheat death”: Daniel Bates, “ ‘Gift from God’ coronavirus ‘cure’ touted by Donald Trump is promoted by a FAKE Stanford University ‘researcher’ who is actually a cryptocurrency-hustling Long Island lawyer whose bogus science paper was removed by Google,” MailOnline, March 23, 2020. “My hobby”: Nick Robins-Early, “The Strange Origins of Trump’s Hydroxychloroquine Obsession,” The Huffington Post, May 13, 2020. “We know how to cure”: Scott Sayare, “He Was a Science Star.


pages: 444 words: 117,770

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

It’s the computational equivalent of moving from a flat, black-and-white film into full color and three dimensions, unleashing a world of algorithmic possibility. Quantum computing has far-reaching implications. For instance, the cryptography underlying everything from email security to cryptocurrencies would suddenly be at risk, in an impending event those in the field call “Q-Day.” Cryptography rests on the assumption that an attacker will never have sufficient computing power to try all the different combinations needed to break it and unlock access. With quantum computing that changes. A fast and uncontained rollout of quantum computing could have catastrophic implications for banking or government communications.

The EU heavily restricts genetically modified organisms in the food supply. Yet in the United States genetically modified organisms are a routine part of agribusiness. China, on the face of it, is a regulatory leader of sorts. The government has issued multiple edicts on AI ethics, seeking to impose wide-ranging restrictions. It proactively banned various cryptocurrencies and DeFi initiatives, and limits the time children under eighteen can spend on games and social apps to ninety minutes a day during the week, three hours on the weekend. Draft regulation of recommendation algorithms and LLMs in China far exceeds anything we’ve yet seen in the West. China is slamming on the brakes in some areas while also—as we’ve seen—charging ahead in others.


pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

The solution—and an opportunity to grab a space in the net paradigm shift—came in an email to Zuckerberg from one of his favorite executives, David Marcus, who headed the Messenger team. On his 2017 Christmas break, Marcus had been on a family vacation in the Dominican Republic. He was musing about cryptocurrencies, which was not such a stretch for a former PayPal executive. A technology called blockchain had the potential to lock down the security of digital currencies, but so far the electronic currencies in circulation were more objects of speculation than exchange. Marcus felt that Facebook could change this.

Notably missing were other tech giants, who might have removed the stigma of a plan so closely associated with one company. Still, Facebook’s Libra project was genuinely worth discussion, as the company had tackled hard problems and come up with some innovative approaches to the serious issue of the rising trend of cryptocurrencies. But before those issues could be seriously discussed, one had to deal with the giant woolly mammoth in the room. This was Facebook doing this. Facebook! When Marcus first revealed the Libra plan to me in May 2019—I was the first journalist briefed on the plan—he acknowledged the challenge of “trying . . . to create a public utility from a place of a great deal of skepticism because it’s coming from Facebook.”

Herndon, “Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon and Facebook,” New York Times, March 8, 2019. Facebook named the currency Libra: The Libra Association, “An Introduction to Libra: White Paper,” June 18, 2019. Marcus first revealed: I wrote about the Libra launch (with Greg Barber) in “The Ambitious Plan Behind Facebook’s Cryptocurrency, Libra,” Wired, June 18, 2019. Marcus testified: Daniel Uria, “Head of Facebook Libra Grilled by Skeptical U.S. Senators,” UPI, July 16, 2019. The hearing began: I wrote about the testimony in “Mark Zuckerberg Endures Another Grilling on Capitol Hill,” Wired, October 23, 2019. One can view clips on YouTube or the entire day on the House Committee on Financial Services website.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

In the decade after the financial crisis, running from 2009 to 2019, the tally of U.S. venture investors more than doubled, and so did the number of startups that they funded.[4] Now more than ever, the industry’s lineup was complete, offering tailored investments for any size or sort of startup. There were avuncular angels, factory-batch incubators, entrepreneur-centric early-stage sponsors, and data-driven growth investors. There were venture capitalists who specialized in everything from artificial intelligence to biotech to cryptocurrencies, not to mention agtech, big data, and cloud software. While Wall Street recovered painfully from the crisis of 2008, its wings clipped by regulators aiming to forestall a repeat taxpayer bailout, the West Coast variety of finance expanded energetically along three axes: into new industries, into new geographies, and along the life cycle of startups.

Chinese consumers’ habit of conducting every aspect of life via smartphones generated an extraordinary density of data, and low-cost Chinese labor allowed for the data’s laborious tagging; combined, these two factors gave China an advantage in the race to train artificial intelligence systems. In 2017, much of Silicon Valley was consumed with excitement about cryptocurrency, despite its unproven utility. Meanwhile, Chinese startups rushed ahead in AI, developing applications from instant loans delivered via smartphones to recommendation algorithms to facial recognition.[46] That same year, China overtook the United States as the top source of venture returns.[47] It did not feel like a coincidence.

See also specific companies Cayman law and, 231–33, 243 geopolitics of venture capital, 392–95, 399–403 Tiger Global, 278–88 Uber in, 362–63, 364 venture fundraising, 413, 446n ChinaHR, 235 Chinese Communist Party, 225, 231, 402 Chinese immigrants, 400–401 Christensen, Clayton, 82 Chu, Allen, 234 Cisco Systems, 109–19, 230 background of founders, 109–10 Cerent acquisition, 10 firing of Lerner, 116–17 founding of, 111–12 Granite acquisition, 174 Nicira and, 294 Sequoia Capital’s investment, 113–19, 131, 158, 161, 434n Citibank, 225 Citicorp, 72 City of Hope Hospital, 75, 77–78 Claremont McKenna College, 110 Clarium Capital, 208 Clark, Jim, 144–48, 237 cleantech, 2–5, 276, 381, 460n Kleiner Perkins investments, 2–3, 262–66, 271–72, 276, 450n Clifford, Matt, 221, 300 climate change, 381 Clinton, Bill, 133 Clubhouse, 14, 388 CNBC, 177 Coase, Ronald, 12–13, 15 Coatue, 337 Cohler, Matt, 254–60, 368–69, 370 Coleman, Chase, 278–79 China bets, 281, 283–86, 452n Facebook, 288 Collison, Patrick and John, 317–20, 455n Columbia University, 224 Commercial Road, 42 Compaq, 106, 123 Compaq 286, 120–21 Compton, Karl, 419n Compton, Kevin, 265–66 CompuServe, 137 Confinity, 201–4, 207 “confirmation bias,” 310 Convergent, 99 Conway, Ron, 175, 181, 183, 199, 302, 441n “coopetition,” 95, 107–9 coronavirus pandemic, 14, 311–12, 333, 383, 391 Corrigan, Wilfred, 97 counterculture, 18, 19, 20–21, 83, 153 Cox, Howard, 99 Cox family, 341 Coyle, Alfred “Bud,” 32–35, 38, 78 Crawford, Gordon, 425n, 426n CRED, 324 Crisp, Peter, 86–87, 88–89, 91 Crosby, Bing, 26–27 CrowdStrike, 451n cryptocurrencies, 303, 393 Ctrip, 233, 238–39, 243, 285–86 currency trading, 199–200 Curry, Steph, 302 customer acquisition cost (CAC), 323 Cypress Semiconductor, 107, 109, 434n D DAG Ventures, 343 Dambrackas, William, 97 Damodaran, Aswath, 359 Data General, 94 Davidow, Bill, 427n Davis, Tommy, 44–51, 68, 88, 100 Davis, Wally, 102 Davis & Rock, 44–51 financial and legal structure of, 44–46, 397, 422n investment strategy of, 46–48, 51, 68, 382 SDS, 48–50, 423n defense contracts, 18–19, 394–95, 417n Dell, Michael, 184 Dennis, Reid, 26–27 derivatives, 177, 336–37 De Rycker, Sonali, 451n DeVos family, 341 Dianping, 244–48 Didi Kuaidi, 245, 362, 363, 364, 448n Digital Equipment Corporation, 28–29, 94 ARD investment, 28–29, 31, 36–37, 45, 419n, 420n Digital Sky Technologies (DST) Facebook, 276–77, 452n Tiger Global and, 276–77, 287, 452n WeWork, 373 Zynga, 288–89, 298 Dimon, Jamie, 343–44 diversification, 40, 46, 172, 334 diversity deficit, 14–15, 384–85, 412, 461n DJI Technology, 393, 395 Doerr, John, 264–65, 266, 303, 416n Amazon investment, 179–80, 263 China investments, 239–40, 266 cleantech investments, 262–63, 271–72 Forbes Midas List, 263, 449n gender issues, 267–72 GO Corp. investment, 122–28 Google investment, 179–88, 263, 328, 379, 442n Martha Stewart investment, 179, 185 Netscape investment, 146–48, 167, 179, 437n Silicon Compilers and Ungermann-Bass, 107–8, 433n UUNET investment, 135–36 “Don Valentine tartan,” 307 DoorDash, 330 Doriot, Georges, 28–31, 36–37, 98, 419n background of, 28 Digital Equipment investment, 28–29, 31, 36–37, 45, 419n financial and legal structure of ARD, 30–31, 41, 45, 51–52 as founding father of venture capital, 29–31 Harvard management class of, 42, 67 dot-com bubble, 152–53, 171, 176–78, 184–85, 190–91 Dracopoulos, Andreas, 341 Draper, Gaither & Anderson, 44, 422n Draper, Tim, 150, 152, 233, 341 Draper, William “Bill,” 42–43, 98 Apple and, 82 capital gains taxes, 91–92 Electroglas investment, 42–43, 421n Illumitronic investment, 42 Qume investment, 66–67 SBIC format, 42–43 Yahoo investment, 149–52 Draper, William Henry, Jr., 422n Drive Capital, 391 Dropbox, 311, 315–16 Druckenmiller, Stanley, 213, 445n Drucker, Peter, 40–41, 43, 44, 52, 55 DST.


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

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


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

Just weeks before his death, Davis appeared on CBS news and announced that he had sent Snowden a World Passport. When Roger Ver travels, he makes a point of wearing his favorite item of clothing: a green T-shirt with a globe and the phrase “borders are imaginary lines” silk-screened on the front. But when I met Ver, the world’s most vocal supporter of the crypto-currency Bitcoin, near his beachfront apartment at the Marriott hotel on St. Kitts last February, he was learning the hard way that however imaginary these lines might be in his mind, they matter a great deal in practice—even for a young white tech investor from California. Ver was born American in 1979.


pages: 461 words: 125,845

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

Its author: David Chaum, a man who would come to be known as the prophet and godfather of digital anonymity. Chaum, a bearish, bearded, and white-maned academic, today heads a foundation devoted to secure voting, and spent a decade pitching an anonymous transactions system called eCash. Despite signing up a few major banks, Chaum’s crypto-currency never quite caught on, a result of what some say is bad luck and others say was Chaum’s overly controlling style of doing business, which may have quashed many of his company’s attempts to find mainstream partnerships. But few in the computer security world doubt Chaum’s sheer cryptographic brilliance—his patents range from physical locks to software security systems to anonymity and pseudonymity mechanisms that would secure his reputation as a computer science and information security powerhouse.

Soon it was running on around two thousand Unix machines around the world, pumping a flow of tens of thousands of anonymous e-mails a day, as close an approximation to Chaum’s ideal Mix Network as ever existed. Meanwhile, anonymous financial transactions were starting to feel like a reality too. Chaum’s own company, called DigiCash, had implemented many of the ideas he outlined in his Communications of the ACM article. The result was eCash, a crypto-currency that would allow buyers to wire money untraceably to a seller. In the mid-nineties, DigiCash botched a series of deals and replaced Chaum with a new CEO before going bankrupt in 1998. But despite its lack of business success, no one doubted that Chaum’s anonymous transactions technology worked—it had even been integrated into a Dutch toll road system that could reliably charge drivers without recording any trace of their identities.


pages: 381 words: 120,361

Sunfall by Jim Al-Khalili

airport security, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bletchley Park, Carrington event, cosmological constant, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Attenborough, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, imposter syndrome, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off grid, pattern recognition, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Turing test

It had begun with home and office appliances linked wirelessly to handheld devices, but eventually everything was networked; sensors, cameras, embedded nano servers and energy harvesters were all ubiquitous and built into the infrastructure of the modern world, from buildings and transport to clothing and household items. Eventually world governments and multinationals woke up to the desperate need for advanced cybersecurity systems, but not before the anonymous hacking of international cryptocurrency banking had brought the world markets crashing down in 2028, followed by the devastating cyberattack six months later on the AI system controlling London, one of the world’s first ‘smart cities’. That onslaught had infected many of the algorithms controlling the city’s transport, commerce and environmental infrastructures, sending ten million people back into the Stone Age for three weeks.

Even before the mass migrations forced by rising sea levels in the early thirties, physical country borders had been getting increasingly blurred. The world was now more noticeably split along economic rather than geographical boundaries and was defined as much by online firewalls set up by multinational companies operating in the Cloud and the movement of cryptocurrencies between them as it was by the old national borders. The hubbub of conversation was cut short by Hogan, who called the meeting to order. ‘Welcome, everybody,’ he said, looking around the table. ‘We will dispense with personal introductions; most of you know everyone already. But of course I want to extend a special welcome to our new member, Dr Sarah Maitlin, a scientist whose expertise is, I am sure, going to be invaluable to us.’


Unknown Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager

3D printing, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, backtesting, barriers to entry, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Brexit referendum, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, diversification, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, fixed income, forward guidance, index fund, Jim Simons, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Nick Leeson, performance metric, placebo effect, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, short squeeze, side project, systematic trading, tail risk, transaction costs

If the stock starts moving down instead of up, or liquidity is declining, or big orders are getting hit on the ask instead of the bid. By the time I buy several percent of a company, I have a pretty good idea of how the stock acts. If the stock starts acting differently, I start reducing my position. A long conversation ensued about cryptocurrencies and Neumann’s positioning in this space. To recap succinctly, he got long very early on based on a chart breakout and held a core position throughout the entire giant upmove that culminated in late 2017. Our discussion turned to why he decided to get out when he did. Did something change atmosphere-wise when you decided to get out?

He liquidated his 3D printing stocks once they become popular enough to be the subject CNBC coverage and widespread chat room conversations. He started scaling out of his Spongetech position once it became the topic of bar conversation among friends who were not stock investors. He liquidated his cryptocurrency holdings based on his “golf course indicator.” You need to stick to your methodology and trading plan. Beware of being enamored by an unplanned trade. Neumann’s biggest loss (in percentage terms) came early in his career when he deviated from the market-making strategy that was generating steady returns to impulsively buy a stock that was soaring based on a good story.


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

“Through a combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system, Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used electronics—and seemingly as safe. 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.

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.


pages: 476 words: 139,761

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis

active measures, Anton Chekhov, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, failed state, fake news, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Julian Assange, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, WikiLeaks

But Kenes was very keen to be perceived as a businessman – no, an entrepreneur – in his own right, not some frontman like, say, the Russian cellist whose $2 billion fortune was more likely related to his close friendship with Putin than business acumen. Angry Birds credit cards, that was one idea, or a cryptocurrency venture. He employed PR experts, such as the Etonian who would arrange for Western journalists to interview him and encourage them to seek his views on Brexit or other pressing matters of the day. These efforts failed to convince everyone, however. Executives from one of the companies in which Kenes had invested asked for a loan from the International Finance Corporation, the arm of the World Bank that supported private businesses.

Rakishev said Kulibayev ‘was my mentor and he teach [sic] me lots of things, good things’ the Russian cellist: Jake Bernstein, Petra Blum, Oliver Zihlmann, David Thompson, Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer, ‘All Putin’s men’, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, April 3, 2016, icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/20160403-putin-russia-offshore-network Angry Birds credit cards: Rakishev interview cryptocurrency venture: ‘Kenes Rakishev issues letter to POG shareholders’, statement to the London Stock Exchange, June 21, 2018, investegate.co.uk/fincraft-holdings/rns/kenes-rakishev-issues-letter-to-pog-shareholders/201806211348151750S arrange for Western journalists: One of them was the author ‘managing the president’s family’s money’: Email of November 26, 2013 from Kai Martin Schmitz of the International Finance Corporation to an executive at Net Element, a company in which Rakishev had invested.


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

While they hadn’t had an easy relationship these past few years, Amaka hated to imagine the pressure that could descend upon the shoulders of his family members, especially his father, who expected the world of him. Even if the video is a fake. The boy bit on his lower lip and pulled his hood back up. Concealing parts of his skin again gave him a little more sense of safety. “I need an advance payment. Cryptocurrency. Also, give me as much detail as you have on the target. I don’t want to waste my time on research.” “Your call, my friend. As for the target…there’s absolutely no way for you to miss him.” The blurred headshot of a man flashed on the projection wall. When the face’s contours solidified into a clear picture, Amaka’s eyes widened.

This could potentially revolutionize machine learning and solve problems that were viewed as impossible before. 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.


pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

Facebook, yet again, made a push to recruit influencers, pledging to spend more than $1 billion on creators and vowing not to take commissions for multiple years. Spotify paid hundreds of millions to recruit podcasters like Joe Rogan, who had used YouTube to build a media powerhouse entirely outside the mainstream. Venture capitalists went wild for “web3,” an internet model based on cryptocurrencies that imagined regular people owning and profiting from their online activity; this was YouTube’s creator economy taken to its next extreme. Sequoia, YouTube’s first investor, minted its 2005 YouTube investment memo as a “non-fungible token,” which a crypto enthusiast purchased for $863,000 in digital coin.

See creators CookieSwirlC channel, 240 cooking videos, 248 coolhunters (community managers) and comment section, 94 curation role of, 56–57 and makeup tutorials, 188–89 and PewDiePie, 221 replaced by algorithms, 99–102, 122, 399–400 “Spotlight” page of, 208 Stapleton’s move to, 207, 208 trends tracking of, 208 Cooper, Anderson, 89 Cooperstein, Ezra, 112 copyright and acquisition offers, 51 and advertising, 108 and Content ID, 74 creators’ evasion of filters, 149 and Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA, 1998), 35, 36, 37 early days of YouTube, 25–26, 52 in Europe, 365, 371 and Johnson’s content, 120 Pozner’s copyright claims, 327 screeners’ involvement in, 319–20, 327 and takedown requests, 33–34 three-strikes rule, 138 and Viacom negotiations/lawsuit, 61, 62, 97–98 Cosmic Panda (website redesign), 158 costumes, popularity of, 305–7 Coulter, Ann, 86 counter-speech, 216, 217 Couric, Katie, 98 COVID-19 pandemic, 374–76, 377–78, 385, 390, 397, 399 Craven, Wes, 101 Creative Artists Agency (CAA), 72 Creative Lab of Google, 147, 207–8 creators and ad-friendly mandate, 267–68, 274, 282–83 and Adpocalypse (boycott), 288–90, 300, 310 ads removed from content of, 267–68 and algorithms of YouTube, 297 analytics dashboard of, 157 anonymous, 172–73 Black creators, 261–62, 293, 338–39, 378 and bullying problem at YouTube, 262–63 burnout of, 385, 392 camaraderie among, 40 and celebrity status, 40–42, 248 (see also stars/celebrities of YouTube) and changes to algorithm, 155, 156–60, 164 and comments removed from kids’ videos, 371 commercial agreements of, 67 complaints from, 268, 332–33 conservative and right-wing, 268–69 control over types of ads, 347 and COVID-19 pandemic, 390 and culture of YouTube, 254–55 data provided to, 117 departures from YouTube, 257, 385–86 difficulty of work for, 254–55, 256–57 dollar-sign indicators for, 268 efforts to organize, 288, 393 and egalitarian claims of YouTube, 393 endemic, 248 flaunting/bending rules, 149 frustrations of, 256 and grants from YouTube, 112, 134 and harassment policies, 366–67 increasing success of, 78–79 lines between persona and performer, 280 mass deletion of accounts (Elsagate), 314 merchandising and sponsorship opportunities, 392 and Originals series of YouTube, 253–54, 261 penalty box for troublesome, 235, 292, 296, 327, 346 people of color as, 40, 159, 339 playbook for, 129 recruited to MCNs, 182–83 rewarding trusted, 368 and “Rewind 2018” video, 351–52 and rights to material, 133 and rival video services, 78 and shooting at San Bruno offices, 331–35 side hustles of, 382 term origins, 130 transgender, 382–83 trust deficit growing in, 160 trust in judgement of, 323–24 video responses between, 39 volume of uploaded material, 6, 49, 140, 215–16, 389 and watch time of users, 157, 158–60 and Wojcicki, 261, 373 women’s experience as, 303 and YouTube Creator Summit, 250–51, 253, 262, 289–90 See also partner program; payment and income of creators; stars/celebrities of YouTube; specific creators “Creators for Change” program, 382 Creator Summit, 250–51, 253, 262, 289–90 Credit Suisse, 51–52 Crowder, Steven, 366, 367, 370 Cruikshank, Lucas (Fred Figglehorn), 65–66, 69, 77–78, 131, 169 “Crush On Obama” (Key of Awesome), 88 Cruz, Ted, 342, 367 cryptocurrencies, 390 Cuban, Mark, 49 curation team. See coolhunters cyberporn, 168 D Daily Mail, 242, 286 The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, 24 The Daily Stormer, 277, 278, 279 Daly, Carson, 40, 49 Damore, James, 301–3 Daniels, Susanne, 280 “Danny Diamond Gay Bar” (Zappin), 106 dating site, early visions of YouTube as, 17–18, 22 Dauman, Philippe, 62, 97 Dawkins, Richard, 223 Dawson, Shane, 119 Day, Mark, 39, 57, 102 DeepMind, 230–31 DeFranco, Philip, 112, 268, 290 de Kerchove, Gilles, 216–17 DeKort, Michael, 87 deletion of videos, 99, 296, 314, 379 “Delicious”/“Nutritious” content, 174–75, 305 Demand Media, 157 “demonetized” creators, 268, 310 denialism, 366, 399 Depardieu, Gérard, 266 detergent pods, consuming, 324 Diamond, Danny.


pages: 193 words: 51,445

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

These are already irritants in our everyday life—security guards, knotty passwords, airport searches, and so forth—but they are likely to become ever more vexatious. Innovations like blockchain, the publicly distributed ledger that combines open access with security, could offer protocols that render the entire internet more secure. But their current applications—allowing an economy based on crypto-currencies to function independently of traditional financial institutions—seem damaging rather than benign. It’s both salutary and depressing to realise how much of the economy is dedicated to activities and products that would be superfluous if we felt we could trust each other. The gaps in wealth and welfare levels between countries show little sign of narrowing.


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

Bogle said the move was designed to achieve three goals: Bring in managers from the “new era” who could return their performance into top results Bring a new speculative growth fund (Ivest Fund) under the Wellington banner. They wanted to gain access into the “rapidly growing investment counseling business.”7 The merger of these two companies was an odd pairing; it would be like Vanguard purchasing a crypto‐currency trading firm today. The following is an excerpt from The Whiz Kids Take Over, an article that appeared in Institutional Investor in 1968: “Wellington was founded in 1928 with a balanced portfolio of common and preferred stocks and high‐grade bonds, with the objective of providing investors with stability, income, and a little low‐risk growth to keep pace with inflation…Ivest, on the other hand, was established in 1961, in effect, to make the most of those very fluctuations that Wellington was originally designed to minimize.”8 The merger turned the Wellington Fund into the antithesis of what led to its long‐standing success.


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

As an open, distributed ledger, it offers security and trust by verifying transactions with consensus instead of through a central authority. Although the blockchain that Bitcoin sits on has never been hacked, transactions are difficult, which has slowed widespread adoption as a payment alternative. In addition to that, storage of Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies (wallets) has been prone to cyberattack or loss, creating a different form of risk. 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.


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

And that a lot of what people say is really techno-babble and a bunch of fantasy-hawkers selling bits of the sky to each other and gullible investors. Entertaining, but not serious. We argue that just because a technology exists, it does not follow that it will be adopted. Technologists, especially those selling blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, tend to forget that. What economists term the “rate of diffusion” – the length of time it takes us to absorb technology in our work practices and lives – is often far more important than the innovation itself. New technologies are rarely adopted overnight. They are constrained by institutions, social norms and costs, and they are always resisted and modified.


pages: 523 words: 143,139

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.”


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

Returning to the Panama Papers, Putin insisted that “officials and state agencies in the United States are behind all this.” 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 Shadow Brokers Preparations for the biggest leak of all picked up speed in mid-July 2016. The operators sorted through lists of high-powered hacking tools—in the form of computer code—stolen from the NSA, deciding what to publish and what to keep. One especially brazen operator had the idea of auctioning off a particularly dangerous set of NSA tools for cryptocurrency, a notion more of provocation than potential profit. The operators bundled the stolen NSA tools into two secure virtual packages, encrypted each of them, wrapped both packages into an even bigger digital package, and called it EQGRP-AUCTION-FILE.ZIP.1 By then U.S. intelligence firms commonly used their own code names to refer to the hacking units of foreign intelligence agencies, such as APT28 or FANCY BEAR for GRU.


Playing With FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early): How Far Would You Go for Financial Freedom? by Scott Rieckens, Mr. Money Mustache

Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, cryptocurrency, do what you love, effective altruism, financial independence, index fund, job satisfaction, lifestyle creep, low interest rates, McMansion, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, remote working, sunk-cost fallacy, The 4% rule, Vanguard fund

I spent hours every night walking around the neighborhood carrying Jovie, which was the only way she would fall asleep and stay asleep. As I did, I listened to podcasts about start-ups and entrepreneurship. Maybe I would start my own media production company. Maybe I could start a “Fulfillment by Amazon,” or FBA, business; those seemed all the rage. I read about cryptocurrency and real estate flipping. For months, I kept searching for my million-dollar idea. I just needed one big lucky break so that we could cash out and start living the stress-free lives we were meant to live. 18 ■ ■ ■ ■ On Monday, February 13, 2017, I woke up, kissed Taylor and Jovie goodbye, and headed out the door for work.


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

The company’s executives knew these challenges were coming, but they became wedded to ‘how things are around here’. 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.


pages: 198 words: 59,351

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

In light of this, one way of understanding the crisis into which the internet has thrust us is that it has deprived us of this character that reading, writing, and communicating naturally share with philosophy (and indeed with hunting) by aggressively metricizing them. One might put this another way and say that whatever is metricized or gamified, whatever keeps itself centered before the user’s mind with the promise of accumulating more points of some currency (likes, faves, followers, up-votes, not to mention also—with the rise of “meme stocks” and cryptocurrency exchanges—real money), has the power to harness and hold the user’s concentration, but not their attention. In its current form it is as if we have had imposed on ourselves a gadget that does nothing more than count the number of ducks we have killed, broadcast that number to the entire world, rank us with that number alongside all other duck hunters, and invite all of them, as well as whatever interlopers feel so inclined, to praise, criticize, or mock us for our ranking.


pages: 223 words: 60,936

Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding From Anywhere by Tsedal Neeley

Airbnb, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discrete time, Donald Trump, future of work, global pandemic, iterative process, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, lockdown, mass immigration, natural language processing, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Silicon Valley, social distancing

JPMorgan Chase, which saw its traders triple their productivity working from home, announced that the company is considering a permanently remote workforce, while UBS already expects as much as one-third of its employees to work remotely on a permanent basis. Groupe PSA, Europe’s second-largest car manufacturer, announced a “new era of agility,” in which its nonproduction staff will shift to remote work. The internet company Box expects more than 15 percent of its workforce to work remotely full-time after the pandemic. Similarly, Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, declared it will become a “remote-first” company, estimating that 20–60 percent of the company will work remotely after restrictions are lifted, with more to follow over time. Nielsen Research in New York City will have its three thousand workers work from home most of the week. Nationwide Insurance, observing no loss in employee performance while avoiding operational costs during lockdown, will be transitioning employees at sixteen of its twenty locations into remote workers.


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

Connective technology has made it possible.23 The last few years have seen the emergence of another technology with potentially far-reaching implications for connectivity and cooperation. This is ‘blockchain’, invented by the mysterious pioneer (or pioneers) Satoshi Nakamoto. It’s best known as the OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 46 FUTURE POLITICS system underpinning the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, launched in 2009. The workings of blockchain are technically complex, but the basic premise can be described simply. Imagine a giant digital ledger (or spreadsheet) of the kind we would previously have put on paper. This ledger contains a record of every transaction that has ever taken place between its users.

Digital currency is perhaps the most obvious use for blockchain technology, but in theory it can be used to record almost anything, from birth and death ­certificates to marriage licences.24 It could also provide solutions to other problems of digital life, such as how to produce and retain control over secure digital ‘wallets’ or IDs.25 Looking further ahead, ∝ This process is overseen by so-called ‘miners’, generally paid in cryptocurrency for their efforts, who turn the information in the latest ‘block’, together with some other information, into a short, seemingly random sequence of letters and numbers known as a ‘hash’. Each hash is unique: if just one character in a block is changed, its hash will change completely. As well as the information in the previous block, miners also incorporate the hash of the last block.


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

Each part impacts the others and would cease to be useful without the full constellation. With today’s technology—and even more so in the future—it’s difficult to tell clearly where the physical world ends and the virtual begins. Money today exists almost entirely virtually, with cash a rarity—and the rise of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin presage an era when there is no physical money at all. As security expert Bruce Schneier says, “Your modern refrigerator is a computer that keeps things cold. Your oven, similarly, is a computer that makes things hot. An ATM is a computer with money inside. Your car is no longer a mechanical device with some computers inside; it’s a computer with four wheels and an engine.

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.


pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Under his direction, the company would, in time, winnow its foreign presence; buy the e-commerce site Jet.com for more than $3 billion—and then shut it down; otherwise rev up its online business by introducing new services and expanding its stable of third-party sellers; unveil a subscription program, akin to Amazon Prime, called Walmart+; build local fulfillment centers—compact warehouses powered by robotics and artificial intelligence—right in its stores; dive into digital advertising; cultivate customers on TikTok, the viral video app; venture into the metaverse and the worlds of cryptocurrency and nonfungible tokens; deliver products by drone and driverless truck; put groceries right into people’s fridges while they weren’t home; open health clinics and offer medical insurance; launch a financial technology startup; buy the menswear company Bonobos; buy and sell the women’s apparel company ModCloth; beef up its fashion brands by hiring a creative director, Brandon Maxwell, who, as Vogue observed, was in a coterie of designers who typically took on engagements in Paris or Milan, not Bentonville; and much, much more.


Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, open borders, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, price mechanism, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, systematic bias, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

The trilingual official site of the Wealth Partaking Scheme is www╉.Â�planocp╉.Â�gov╉.Â�mo. 43╉.Â�In addition to proposals for funding a basic income through the distribution of a Â�legal tender by a national or supranational central bank, Â�there have been proposals to fund a basic income with alternative currencies, especially virtual cryptocurrencies. For example, the Worldwide Globals OrganÂ�ization (www╉.Â�i╉-Â�globals╉.Â�org) wants to “demonstrate how the vast majority of Â�people around the world can collectively create an unconditional universal basic income for themselves” by setting up the following scheme: “Â�Every person on earth over the age of 18 can become a member of the WGO for just 25$ or 25€ for a 4-Â�year membership.

See also Socialist parties Compass (pressure group), 190, 306n72 Condorcet, Antoine Caritat, Marquis de, 63–65, 70, 269n5 Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), 175 Caillé, Alain, 279n2 California, 91, 292n33 Calnitsky, David, 289n15 Canada, 80, 151, 172, 174, 192, 198–199, 269n63, 272n45, 289n15, 290–291n19, 293n35, 296n64, 301–302n20, 304n49, 306n75, 308n82 Capabilities, 109, 117 Capital income, taxation of, 147–148, 147–149, 238, 291nn23,26,30 Capitalism, 65, 96, 113, 122–124, 149, 192, 194, 291n27, 294n50, 309n99 CapÂ�iÂ�talÂ�ist road to communism, 122–128, 126f, 282n27, 286n68, 287n69 Carbon, tax on emissions of, 121, 150, 227–230, 237, 292n33, 322nn46–48 Cardoso, Fernando Enrique, 69, 319n33 Carens, Joseph, 256n50 376 INDEX Considerant, Victor, 77 Consumption tax, 154–158, 295nn51,54–59, 296nn60–61 Congo, DemoÂ�cratic Republic of, 11 Cook, Steven, 309n99 CooÂ�l idge, Calvin, 45 Cooperative justice, 103–104, 217, 228, 279n7, 285n59 Cooperatives, 20, 24, 123, 256n51 Coote, Anna, 48 Cournot, Augustin, 32 Craneveldt, Francis, 52 “Crazies,” 104–105, 116, 117 Croatia, 314n142 Crocker, Geoffrey, 130 Â�Cromwell, Thomas, 55 Cryptocurrencies, 293n43 Czech Republic, 309n107 Duboin, Jacques, 82, 100, 153 Duchâtelet, Roland, 156, 182, 295n56 Duclos, Jean-Â�Yves, 297n64 Duncan-Â�Smith, Ian, 163 Durkheim, Emile, 131 Dworkin, Ronald, 113–119, 284nn43–50 Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), 40–43, 41f, 43f, 92, 262nn24,25 Earth, common ownerÂ�ship of, 71, 73, 119–122, 150, 201, 286nn60–62, 318n30 Easterlin, Richard, 130, 131 Eckstein, Otto, 90 EcolÂ�ogy.


pages: 816 words: 191,889

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, George Floyd, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, positional goods, post-truth, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, special economic zone, TikTok, trade liberalization, transaction costs, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, zero-sum game

Needs to Get in the Standards Game—With Like-Minded Democracies,” Lawfare, April 2, 2020, https://www.lawfareblog.com/us-needs-get-standards-game%E2%80%94-minded-democracies. 82“Take action and fight to the death to win Lenovo’s honor defense war! [行动起来,誓死打赢联想荣誉保卫战!],” WeChat Post, May 16, 2018, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/JDlmQbGFkxu-_D2jsqNz3w. 83Frank Tang, “Facebook’s Libra Forcing China to Step Up Plans for Its Own Cryptocurrency, Says Central Bank Official,” South China Morning Post, July 8, 2019, https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3017716/facebooks-libra-forcing-china- step-plans-its-own. 84Fung and Lam, “China Already Leads 4 of the 15 U.N. Specialized Agencies—and Is Aiming for a 5th”; Raphael Satter and Nick Carey, “China Threatened to Harm Czech Companies Over Taiwan Visit: Letter,” Reuters, February 19, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-czech-taiwan/china-threatened-to-harm-czech-companies-over- taiwan-visit-letter-idUSKBN20D0G3. 85Jack Nolan and Wendy Leutert, “Signing Up or Standing Aside: Disaggregating Participation in China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” Global China: Assessing China’s Growing Role in the World (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2020), https://www.brookings.edu/articles/signing-up-or-standing-aside-disaggregating-participation-in-chinas-belt-and-road-initiative/. 86Xi Jinping [习近平], “Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and Strive for the Great Success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era [决胜全面建成小康社会 夺取新时代中国特色社会主义伟大胜利]”; “China’s National Defense in the New Era [新时代的中国国防],” White Paper [白皮书] (Beijing: 国务院新闻办公室, 2019). 87Taylor Fravel, “China’s ‘World Class Military’ Ambitions: Origins and Implications,” Washington Quarterly 43, no. 1 (2020): 91–92. 88Ibid. 96. 89“China and the World in the New Era [新时代的中国与世界].” 90See the three most recent Defense White Papers: “The Diversified Employment of China’s Armed Forces [中国武装力量的多样化运用],” White Paper [白皮书] (Beijing: State Council Information Office [国务院新闻办公室], 2013); “China’s Military Strategy [中国的军事战略],” White Paper [白皮书] (State Council Information Office [国务院新闻办公室], 2015); “China’s National Defense in the New Era [新时代的中国国防].” 91See the three most recent Defense White Papers: “The Diversified Employment of China’s Armed Forces [中国武装力量的多样化运用]”; “China’s Military Strategy [中国的军事战略]”; “China’s National Defense in the New Era [新时代的中国国防].” 92Xi Jinping [习近平], “To Prevent and Resolve Major Risks in Various Domains, Xi Jinping Has Clear Requirements [防范化解各领域重大风险,习近平有明确要求],” Xinhua [新华网], January 22, 2019, http://www.xinhuanet.com/2019-01/22/c_1124024464.htm; “China’s National Defense in the New Era [新时代的中国国防].” 93Wang Yi, “Wang Yi Address to the CSIS Statesmen Forum” (Washington, DC, February 25, 2016), https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/event/160225_statesmen_forum_wang_yi.pdf.

., “Rising to the China Challenge,” 15–16. 57Ibid., 15–16. 58Brendan Greeley, “How to Diagnose Your Own Dutch Disease,” Financial Times, 2019, https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2019/03/13/1552487003000/How-to-diagnose-your-own-Dutch-disease/. 59Frank Tang, “Facebook’s Libra Forcing China to Step Up Plans for Its Own Cryptocurrency, Says Central Bank Official,” South China Morning Post, July 8, 2019, https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3017716/facebooks-libra-forcing-china-step- plans-its-own. 60Michael E. O’Hanlon, The Senkaku Paradox: Risking Great Power War Over Small Stakes (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2019). 61David Simchi-Levi and Edith Simchi-Levi, “We Need a Stress Test for Critical Supply Chains,” Harvard Business Review, April 28, 2020, https://hbr-org.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/hbr.org/amp/2020/04/we-need-a-stress-test-for-critical-supply-chains; Bill Gertz, “China Begins to Build Its Own Aircraft Carrier,” Washington Times, August 1, 2011. 62“The Importance of International Students to American Science and Engineering” (National Foundation for American Policy, October 2017), http://nfap.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Importance-of-International-Students.NFAP-Policy-Brief.October-20171.pdf.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

They speak to a primal set of basic impulses—to world creating, skill building, achievement, violence, leadership, teamwork, speed, efficiency, status, decision making, and accomplishment. They fall into a whole suite of things that appeal to young men in particular—to me the list would go something like gaming, the stock market, fantasy sports, gambling, basketball, science fiction/geek movies, and cryptocurrencies, most of which involve a blend of numbers and optimization. It’s a need for mastery, progress, competition, and risk. As of last year, 22 percent of men between the ages of 21 and 30 with less than a bachelor’s degree reported not working at all in the previous year—up from only 9.5 percent in 2000.


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.


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

Clojure’s core developers highly prioritize stable code, which means they’re more reluctant to accept changes.72 And Debian has a monolithic, tightly coupled codebase, where green-lighting the wrong maintainer could, indeed, have dire consequences. 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.


pages: 269 words: 70,543

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

Shortly after Alibaba scored its mega IPO in New York in 2014, Alipay’s financial services business was rebranded Ant Financial in a new push into financial services, and then in 2018, Alibaba crawled back in, buying a 33 percent stake in Ant Financial. Alibaba’s fintech affiliate is shaking up the financial sector with internet technology and big data for wealth management, mobile payments, insurance, microloans, money market funds, and blockchain for cryptocurrencies. Its money market fund, Yu’e Bao, promising returns of more than 4 percent, became the world’s largest fund in just four years after its 2013 launch, with $211 billion in assets and 370 million account holders, who needed only 15 cents to open an account. The fund’s assets have since downsized to $168 billion following pressure by Chinese regulators and concerns of systemic liquidity risks to the entire banking market.10 Ant Financial made big news again when it hauled in the largest-ever single fund-raising by a private company: an eye-popping $14 billion investment in 2018 at a valuation of about $150 billion from US private equity firms Carlyle Group, Silver Lake Partners, Warburg Pincus, and General Atlantic, as well as Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC.


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

Also, companies that produce media-manipulation software must consider their ethical responsibilities, building detection tools alongside deception tools.34 One possibility is to have verification data built in, so that each time a video or a photo is taken, metadata is uploaded for easy checks by forensic specialists or social-media platforms.35 The Research & Development team at the New York Times set up a News Provenance Project, testing the possibility of including context and metadata within images, perhaps with a watermark that affirms that the content was verified. They also experimented with publishing photos using blockchain, the technology made famous by cryptocurrencies, where a shared online ledger is updated at each transaction, which prevents tampering.36 Facebook also encouraged researchers to work on the problem, launching a $10 million Deepfake Detection Challenge, whose goal was to find how best to identify synthetic media.37 Deepfakes do not trouble me too much for now.


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

My-wi might leave us as little children are: cared for, fed, safe, watched over, with plenty of fun stuff and free stuff, and with someone else deciding the big stuff. No reason to believe that who decides will always be in human form. AUTHOR’S P. S. On 22 May 2021 I read in the Financial Times that the next big thing for blockchain and cryptocurrencies will be DeFi – standing for decentralised finance – how to bypass intermediaries in financial services transactions. You might want to do this if you are breeding or selling digitally created racehorses (NFTs) … Recently one such horse sold for $125,000. These horses don’t need feeding – but you can race them, bet on them, and yes, breed them using algorithms.


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

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. On our AOL and CompuServe sites, much of our effort had been dedicated to creating communities with our users. One of the early denizens of The WELL, Tom Mandel, was hired to moderate Time’s bulletin boards and emcee our chat rooms.

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.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

With $1,000 a month as his basic income, Santens is now a full-time activist and worker for basic income for everybody. Another initiative associated with basic income is the Grantcoin Foundation’s digital currency grants. In 2016 hundreds of applicants in seventy countries received these so far tiny grants that can be traded electronically. Such cryptocurrency schemes are in their infancy, and it is far too early to say whether they have a significant role to play as a secondary basic income scheme. But they should be watched with interest. In the Air Elsewhere By late 2016, political parties and movements in several countries were proposing basic income pilots.


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

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. Keen to make a good impression, I looked up the owner, Jered Kenna. A small-town Oregonian and U.S. Marine Corps veteran turned Halliburton employee, Kenna found that the life of a mercenary in Afghanistan left him with “a palpable distaste for unethical and fraudulent business practices,” he wrote.


pages: 244 words: 81,334

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality by Laurence Scott

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, colonial rule, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, deepfake, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, Internet of things, Joan Didion, job automation, Jon Ronson, late capitalism, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, Neil Armstrong, post-truth, Productivity paradox, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, SoftBank, technological determinism, TED Talk, Y2K, you are the product

These ICU associations are what we used to call, in less forgiving times, ‘my shit’, and I don’t mention them in order to lobby for the banning of wearables or to cast snide aspersions on those who benefit from them. But isn’t it sometimes hard to deny the miserliness of spirit that our interest in personal data can provoke in all of us? Any fluctuating, quantifiable thing – daily footsteps, calories burnt, number of re-tweets, YouTube views, Airbnb reviews, crypto-currency values – invites an obsessive and solipsistic sort of accountancy. I have certainly cut a crouched, panting figure as I check up on particular stats that are too obscene and mortifying to specify here. We’re regularly provided with new ways to think about our lives numerically, giving us a model for our realities that favours concretion over abstraction, quantity over quality.


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

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.”


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

Christensen emphasized that it is not so much about disruptive products, but more about new business models threatening incumbents. For example, Southwest Airlines treated its planes like buses and created an entire niche for itself. Google created the AdWords business model, which never existed before the advent of web pages. In the near future, micro-transactions, enabled by crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, will create entirely new financial business models that have never existed before. In his 2005 book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson built on the lower cost positioning of the disruptor, noting that pretty much all business models, and certainly those that are information-based, will soon be offered to consumers for free.


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

INDEX 3D printing access and accessibility see also barriers; communication; digital; social media — factors of production — knowledge adoption rates advertising see also marketing; mass media; promotion; television Airbnb Alibaba Amazon antifragility Apple artisanal production creativity audience see also crowd — connecting with — vs target Away from Keyboard (AFK) banking see also crowdfunding; currencies barriers Beck (musician) big as a disadvantage bioengineering biomimicry biotechnology bitcoins blogs borrowed interest brand business strategies change see disruption and disruptive change Cluetrain Manifesto co-creation coffee culture Cold War collaboration collaborative consumption collective sentience commerce, future see also retail and retailers communication see also advertising; promotion; social media; social relationships — channels — tools community vs target competition and competitors component retail computers see also connecting and connection; internet; networks; smartphones; social media; software; technology era; 3D printing; web connecting and connection see also social media; social relationships — home/world — machines — people — things consumerism consumption silos content, delivery of coopetition corporations see also industrial era; retail and retailers; technology era costs see also finance; price co-working space creativity crowd, contribution by the crowdfunding cryptocurrencies culture — hacking — startup currencies see also banking deflation demographics device convergence digital see also computers; internet; music; smartphone; retail and retailers, online; social media; social relationships; technology; web; work — cohorts — era — footprint — revolution — skills — strategy — tools — world disruption and disruptive change DNA as an operating system drones Dunbar's number e-commerce see retail and retailers, online economic development, changing education employment, lifetime see also labour; work ephermalization Facebook see also social media finance, peer to peer see also banking; crowdfunding; currencies Ford, Henry 4Ps Foursquare fragmentation — of cities — industrial — Lego car example gadgets see also computers; smartphone; tools games and gaming behaviour gamification geo-location glass cockpit Global Financial Crisis (GFC) globalisation Google hacking hourglass strategy IFTTT (If this then that) industrialists (capital class) industry, redefining industrial era see also consumerism; marketing; retail and retailers — hacking — life in influencers information-based work infrastructure — changing — declining importance of — legacy innovation intention interest-based groups see also niches interest graphs internet see also access and accessibility; connecting and connection; social media; social relationships; web Internet.org In Real Life (IRL) isolation iTunes see also music Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act (USA) keyboards knowledge economy lab vs factory labour see also work — low-cost language layering legacy — industries — infrastructure — media Lego car project life — in boxes — in gaming future — hack living standards see also life location see place, work making see also artisanal production; retail and retailers; 3D printing malleable marketplace manufacturing see also artisanal production; industrial era; making; product; 3D printing; tools — desktop marketing see also advertising; consumerism; 4Ps; mass media; promotion; retail and retailers — demographics, use in — industrial era — language — mass — metrics — new — post-industrial — predictive — research — target — traditional mass media ; see also advertising; marketing; media; promotion; television — after materialism media see also communication; legacy; mass media; newspapers; niches; television — consumption — hacking — platform vs content — subscription Metcalfe's law MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) Moore's law music Napster Netflix netizens networks see also connecting and connection; media; social media; social relationships newspapers see also media niches nodes nondustrial company Oaida, Raul oDesk office, end of the omniconnection era open source parasocial interaction payment systems Pebble phones, number of mobile see also smartphones photography Pinterest piracy place — of work platforms pop culture power-generating technologies price see also costs privacy see also social media; social relationships product — unfinished production see also industrial era; product; 3D printing — mass projecteer Project October Sky promotion see also advertising; marketing; mass media; media quantified self Racovitsa, Vasilii remote controls RepRap 3D printer retail cold spot retail and retailers — changing — digital — direct — hacking — mass — online — price — small — strategies — traditional rewards robots Sans nation state economy scientific management search engines self-hacking self-publishing self-storage sensors sharing see also social media; social relationships smartphones smartwatch social graphs social media (digitally enhanced conversation) see also Facebook; social relationships; Twitter; YouTube social relationships see also social graphs; social media — digital software speed subcultures Super Awesome Micro Project see Lego car project Super Bowl mentality target tastemakers technology see also computers; digital; open source; social media; smartphones; social relationships; software; 3D printing; work — deflation — era — free — revolution — speed — stack teenagers, marketing to television Tesla Motors thingernet thinking and technology times tools see also artisanal production; communication; computers; digital; making; smartphones; social media; 3D printing — changing — old trust Twitter Uber unlearning usability gap user experience volumetric mindset wages — growth — low — minimum web see also connecting and connection; digital; internet; retail and retailers, online; social media; social relationships — three phases of — tools Wikipedia work — digital era — industrial era — location of — options words see language Yahoo YouTube Learn more with practical advice from our experts WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.wiley.com/go/eula to access Wiley’s ebook EULA.


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: 297 words: 83,528

The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam

Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, driverless car, family office, glass ceiling, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, index card, lockdown, microdosing, nudge theory, post-truth, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, the High Line, TikTok

The outlandish claims by people pretending to be Utopians who say that the labs have successfully cloned a chimpanzee and invented a pocket-size carbon capture machine that cleans the air faster than you can take a selfie. “It’s like winning the lottery,” Jules had said on the bus ride over. “It’s like getting into the Olympics. It’s like turning on your computer and finding a secret cache of cryptocurrency.” “Why don’t we introduce ourselves,” Li Ann says. “I’m the head of innovation here at Utopia.” “Hey, I’m Marco,” says a man with deep-set eyes and a sharply trimmed beard. “I created Obit.ly, a platform that manages all the social and public aspects of death.” A woman with bright pink hair waves hello.


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. Whether they are cooking pizzas or writing insurance policies, renting trucks or delivering tulips—no matter what their business, they’re all becoming software companies.


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

But consider: 99.92 percent of their sellers lose money.36 This Will Go on Your Permanent Record So, you’re too clean (you’re not) for Wall Street, and you’re too smart (you’d be surprised) to fall for multilevel marketing? That’s okay, I’ve got one more. 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.


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.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

The past decade—the period when most business investment took the form of intangible assets—has seen the development of a wide range of so-called alternative finance products aimed at smaller firms reluctant to take on bank debt.43 Some of these arrangements involve lending against things other than financial assets, such as invoice discounting. Others involve lightly regulated equity (such as equity crowdfunding) or unsecured bonds (such as minibonds). And still others involve using cryptocurrencies to finance new businesses or new organisational structures like special purpose acquisition companies. Some of these products look like unimpeachably valuable financial innovations, connecting willing providers of capital to willing firms. Others look more questionable. Some critics have claimed that some consumer bonds and crowdfunding issues offer bad risk–return trade-offs to investors too naive to know better.


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: 259 words: 84,261

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat

3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, AlphaGo, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, OpenAI, optical character recognition, out of africa, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

The list of fascinating tech is endless. Think of the massive flat-screen TVs that keep us entertained. Think of all the medical equipment that scans our bodies and brains, measures our vital signs and keeps us healthy. Think of the e-book reader you may be reading this text on, of electronic trading, credit cards, cryptocurrency and online banking, and how each redefines our relationship with money. Game consoles that alter the very essence of how we play; plastic surgery that reshapes our bodies to conform to our wildest fantasies or to societal pressures. There are endless technological marvels that in the past would have been considered at the very least a luxury, but more likely a fantasy, things even the mightiest of kings would never have dreamed of.


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

One solution is to have systems on networks that detect the presence of these devices and limit their behavior in ways that reduce the hacking threat. So you could imagine your home router being smart enough to recognize IoT devices and block them when they try to do things they’re not supposed to do—like when your refrigerator starts sending spam emails, mining cryptocurrency, or participating in a denial-of-service attack. A third defense is detecting and recovering from a hack after the fact. In 2020, the Russian SVR—that’s its foreign intelligence service—hacked the update servers belonging to a network management software developer named SolarWinds. SolarWinds boasted over 300,000 customers worldwide, including most of the Fortune 500 and much of the US government.


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

Mike moved to become Regional Director for North American Financial Institutions following the formation of Global Transactional Sales in January 2009, before moving to his current role in July 2010. BITCOIN, GLOBAL An interview with Donald Norman, Co-founder of the Bitcoin Consultancy Ltd Bitcoin is one of the first implementations of a concept called crypto-currency, a secure digital currency for exchange by anyone, anywhere globally. Bitcoin is designed around the idea of using cryptography to control the creation and transfer of money, rather than relying on central authorities, and is the first time that such a system has been launched. Although it is stumbling through its early evolution, many believe it could become the currency of the future.


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: 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

Michael Carney, “GitHub CEO Explains Why the Company Took So Damn Long to Raise Venture Capital,” pando.com, June 20, 2013, http://pando.com/2013/06/20/github-ceo-explains-why-the-company-took-so-damn-long-to-raise-venture-capital. 20. “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.


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

The rules and regulations have not been set and opportunities for entrepreneurship are everywhere. As a startup, Africa has the benefit of having little infrastructure or regulations limiting its innovations. Similar to how China was able to skip over land lines and go straight to smartphones, Africa will be able to skip over banks and go right to cryptocurrency. There are many other countries and experiences I have had that might be enlightening, but suffice is to say, world travel has been good for me, and as you become a Startup Hero and as your business expands, I believe it will be good for you too. #70 Read 1000 books For me, reading a lot of books is an aspirational goal.


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

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: 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.


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

As Vitalik Buterin, an influential writer about decentralized peer-to-peer systems and the founder of Ethereum, a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts, noted in a blog post, “the idea of releasing a new currency as a mechanism for funding protocol development is perhaps one of the most interesting economic innovations to come out of the cryptocurrency space.”14 But a critical determinant of success is architecting this distribution of value right.15 It also seems important for the manifestation of this value, the “coin,” to be of continuing value as the platform grows and matures. And what’s also important here is to think of the coin as not just currency, but as a store of value, like shares in a private company.


Learn Algorithmic Trading by Sebastien Donadio

active measures, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, buy and hold, buy low sell high, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, Flash crash, Guido van Rossum, latency arbitrage, locking in a profit, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, martingale, natural language processing, OpenAI, p-value, paper trading, performance metric, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, survivorship bias, transaction costs, type inference, WebSocket, zero-sum game

These protocols are much faster than the FIX protocols because of their limit overhead. These protocols use a fixed offset to specify the tag values. For instance, instead of using 39=2, the OUCH protocol will use a value of 2 at an offset of 20. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) uses UTP Direct, which is similar to the NASDAQ protocols. The cryptocurrency world uses HTTP requests while using the RESTful API or Websocket way of communicating. All of these protocols provide us with different ways to represent financial exchange information. They all have the same goal: price update and order handling. Summary In this chapter, we learned that trading system communication is key to trading.


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

But in August of 2018, a few months after my first contact with him, he took on an additional project that hardly anyone knew about. Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire hostile to the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC), began paying Bannon for “strategic advisory work regarding media investments, marketing and advertising, joint ventures, and cryptocurrencies.” Steve had been a vociferous critic of China for years. For him, the international spread of Chinese money and infrastructure represented a pernicious globalism at war with his vision for a world of sovereign nation-states. The country’s monitoring and repression of spirituality, further, made it a threat to his Traditionalism.


pages: 311 words: 90,172

Nothing But Net by Mark Mahaney

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Burning Man, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial engineering, gamification, gig economy, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), knowledge economy, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, medical malpractice, meme stock, Network effects, PageRank, pets.com, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, subscription business, super pumped, the rule of 72, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

Yellow Pages advertising was the burger for local businesses, some of which might want a few Internet fries to go along with that burger. There’s no doubt where the beef is now. My point is that amazing secular growth opportunities are usually only amazing in hindsight. Which means that some of the skepticism facing current potential secular growth opportunities—virtual reality, cryptocurrency, autonomous vehicles, robotics, commercial space, life longevity, cannabis— may well prove to be misplaced. Just as that skepticism toward Internet opportunities was misplaced. With new amazing secular growth opportunities will come premium growth investment opportunities that need to be analyzed.


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

The conference was a costly gathering of business leaders from around Asia, focused on the latest emerging digital technologies and the strategies to deploy them in the future. Other speakers included the founders of groundbreaking artificial intelligence and robotics start-ups, brilliant professors of computer science, software magnates from all over the world, and even a cryptocurrency billionaire from a former Soviet republic who dressed in a comically maniacal outfit of black turtlenecks and velour blazers and publicly predicted the imminent end of fiat currency every time he opened his mouth. After thirteen hours in the air, I emerged into the arrivals hall of Incheon International Airport, exhausted and rumpled, where a three-foot-tall security robot on wheels greeted me with a digital smile and said in a cheery voice, “Welcome to Seoul.


pages: 302 words: 96,609

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Big Tech, California gold rush, Cape to Cairo, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, energy transition, global supply chain, Google Earth, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, private military company, Scramble for Africa, social distancing, tech baron, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration

When I investigated the matter further, it appeared that Hani’s assertions relating to Lebanese money laundering for terrorist groups had merit. At low levels, it seemed that dirty money was laundered through the Lebanese mineral and diamond trading network, then deposited into banks and even cryptocurrency wallets. At higher levels, there were big companies involved, chief among them a commodity-trading firm based in Kinshasa called Congo Futur, which was run by a Lebanese ally of Arran named Kassim Tajideen. Tajideen happened to be a prominent financial supporter of Hezbollah. The U.S. Treasury Department put Congo Futur under targeted sanctions in 2010, alleging that the firm was part of a network of businesses in the DRC that was laundering millions of dollars for Hezbollah using accounts in the BGFIBank, the same bank used by Joseph Kabila to facilitate crooked transactions with Chinese mining companies.5 According to U.S. ambassador Mike Hammer, the U.S. government is well aware of Lebanese money-laundering networks in the DRC and links to terrorist groups like Hezbollah: “I would say that the U.S. government is concerned about [terrorist] links to specific Lebanese here.


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

But neither of these established approaches works all that well for digital assets. Your mp3 collection isn’t valuable enough to warrant an official system of recordation. 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.


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

Random cheques sent to old addresses that you didn’t know about (yes, really). Payment protection insurance (PPI) claim money. Money in funds you never invested in but were ported over to another investment house when the fund closed down. Shares that are so bad they’ve lost you money. Who knew that was even possible? And – God forbid – cryptocurrencies. And you know what you’ll find when you go through STEP C and come out the other side? Most will be charging you too much for looking after your money. Yes, I did say your money. Many won’t allow you to invest in the funds suggested by RESET. Having your money scattered across a bewildering array of different pots, with a bewildering array of different rules, and a bewildering array of online portals – when they exist – will make your head hurt.


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

We just haven’t yet discovered the political will, economic might, and cultural flexibility to install and activate them, because doing so requires something a lot bigger, and more concrete, than imagination—it means nothing short of a complete overhaul of the world’s energy systems, transportation, infrastructure and industry and agriculture. Not to mention, say, our diets or our taste for Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency now produces as much CO2 each year as a million transatlantic flights. * * * — We think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it.


pages: 340 words: 100,151

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It by Scott Kupor

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, carried interest, cloud computing, compensation consultant, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, family office, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, index fund, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Lean Startup, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Paul Graham, pets.com, power law, price stability, prudent man rule, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, VA Linux, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

But, hey, we VCs celebrate failure—sort of. 20–30 percent of the investments are—to continue with the baseball analogy—“singles” or “doubles.” You didn’t lose all the money (congratulations on that), but instead you made a return of a few times your investment. That $5 million you invested in Cryptocurrency.com returned you $10–$20 million—not bad. However, if you include the 50 percent of the “impaired” investments, the VC is still in trouble—70–80 percent of its invested dollars have yielded a total return of about seventy-five to ninety cents on the dollar. That doesn’t sound like a recipe for success.


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

This, in turn, has a compounding effect on the future of many other technologies adjacent to or directly intersecting with AI: autonomous vehicles, CRISPR and genomic editing, precision medicine, home robotics, automated medical diagnoses, green- and geoengineering technologies, space travel, cryptocurrencies and blockchain, smart farms and agricultural technologies, the Internet of Things, autonomous factories, stock-trading algorithms, search engines, facial and voice recognition, banking technologies, fraud and risk detection, policing and judicial technologies… I could make a list that spans dozens of pages.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

This would help prevent cases like Myanmar, where there was no prior consideration from Facebook on how features could ignite violence in regions of ethnic conflict. 2. A CODE OF ETHICS FOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERS If your child was lost and needed help, whom would you want them to turn to for help? Perhaps a doctor? Or maybe a teacher? What about a cryptocurrency trader or gaming app developer? Our society esteems certain professions with a trustworthy status—doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, architects, and the like—in large part because their work requires them to follow codes of ethics and laws that govern safety. The special place these professions have in our society means that we demand a higher standard of professional conduct and duties of care.


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

Three means of approaching the concept and practice of the ledger are discussed: (1) money, time and the blockchain: an exploration of how the representation of money shifts from material representation within fiat currencies (i.e. those underpinned by governments or precious metals) to the blockchain, the sealed distributed ledger that supports the Bitcoin cryptocurrency; (2) city as ledger: a recovery of the role of time in the production of economic geographies with a focus upon Hägerstrand’s approach to time-geography that accounted for personal and group actions within temporal and spatial frames, and inevitably a recovery of Marx and the obfuscation of histories and geographies; and (3) cognitive and practice-based ledgers: an introduction of the use of filmic storytelling as a cognitive ledger using the Dardennes’ film Two Days and One Night.


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

By laying out the known elements in a way that captured the patterns among them, Mendeleev was able to predict the existence and properties of chemical elements that had not yet been discovered. In short, the periodic table is a highly specific form of data visualization, with a structure that reflects the logic of atomic chemistry. Yet designers create periodic tables of everything under the sun. We’ve seen periodic tables of cloud computing, cybersecurity, typefaces, cryptocurrencies, data science, tech investing, Adobe Illustrator shortcuts, bibliometrics, and more. Some, such as the periodic table of swearing, the periodic table of elephants, and the periodic table of hot dogs, are almost certainly tongue in cheek. Others seem painfully serious: the periodic table of content marketing, the periodic table of digital marketing, the periodic table of commerce marketing, the periodic table of email marketing, the periodic table of online marketing, the periodic table of marketing attribution, the periodic table of marketing signals, the periodic table of marketing strategies, and let’s not forget the periodic table of b2b digital marketing metrics.


pages: 303 words: 100,516

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

In this case, building software internally was crucial to presenting WeWork as a tech company, and finding new ways to make money. They hoped that the member network would allow them to sell various goods and services to members—from health-care plans to discounted software subscriptions—of which WeWork could take a cut. One employee looked into how the company might launch its own cryptocurrency. Data collection was becoming the cornerstone of every fast-growing tech company, and Adam walked in one day to tell the engineers that he wanted to see when and for how long members were using different parts of each WeWork by tracking their phones as they moved through the building. “I don’t think the technology is quite there yet,” one WeWork engineer said.


pages: 418 words: 102,597

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth

AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, backpropagation, carbon-based life, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, GPT-3, GPT-4, John Markoff, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, speech recognition, stem cell, systems thinking, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, TikTok, Turing test

Mysterianism is the idea that there may exist a complete physical explanation of consciousness – a full solution to Chalmers’ hard problem – but that we humans just aren’t clever enough, and never will be clever enough, to discover this solution, or even to recognise a solution if it were presented to us by super-smart aliens. A physical understanding of consciousness exists, but it lies as far beyond us as an understanding of cryptocurrency lies beyond frogs. It is cognitively closed to us by our species-specific mental limitations. What can be said about mysterianism? There may well be things we will never understand, thanks to the limitations of our brains and minds. Already, no single person is able to fully comprehend how an Airbus A380 works.


pages: 340 words: 101,675

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

The rich had always known how to avoid tax in the past—what was going to stop them now? If anything, the basic maximum income would only encourage them. And it’s true that tax avoidance rose sharply, but not to the extent that some had feared. China’s switchover to electronic money was almost complete by the mid-1930s, and strict regulations on cryptocurrencies meant that the rich had few places to hide their money. Where money couldn’t be hidden, it was given away to friends and family or mysteriously converted into physical nonmonetary goods and services before the State Administration of Taxation could track it. In theory, China’s supposedly all-seeing surveillance state would have spotted these kinds of tricks, but the deeply—and deliberately—fragmented nature of those surveillance systems meant there were plenty of opportunities for digital gatekeepers to ignore infractions and manipulate accounts.


pages: 395 words: 103,437

Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights Into North Korea's Enigmatic Young Dictator by Jung H. Pak

anti-communist, Boeing 747, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, new economy, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment

Bossert said the WannaCry attack was “a defining moment” and that “North Korea has demonstrated that they want to hold the entire world at risk, whether it be through its nuclear program or cyberattacks.” Kim’s hackers are undeterred. As detailed in an August 2019 U.N. report, they have become more sophisticated in their manipulation of cyberspace, successfully launching attacks on financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges to generate an estimated $2 billion to date. The Interview was supposed to be funny at Kim Jong Un’s expense. But, as it turned out, the joke was on us. KIM’S SILICON VALLEY Kim’s cyberwarriors and their hit-and-run tactics are indicative of the regime’s intent to wreak havoc and instill fear even outside North Korea, but Kim has been equally focused on developing technologies within the country, even at the risk of unsanctioned information penetrating the people’s consciousness and laying bare the contradictions and falsehoods of state propaganda.


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

Technolibertarians broadly agree with the basic dogmas of the libertarian ideology such as free markets, minimal government, no censorship, and social liberalism, but have a particular fascination with the emancipatory promises of technology. They are major advocates of private space exploration, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, mind uploading, nanotechnology and the extension of human longevity, to name just a few. But they spare little concern for the possible negative consequences should any of these technologies be misused. In fact, nearly all of these technologies are potentially dystopian.


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

“The New Deal gives customers a stake in the new data economy; that will bring first greater stability and then eventually greater profitability as people become more comfortable sharing data.”76 In Pentland’s view of data ownership, certainty machines like blockchain, which relies on complex encryption and algorithms to create a decentralized tamper-proof database, are commandeered to bypass social trust. 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.”

See collaboration; collective decision making cornering, of behavioral surplus supplies, 130–138, 338 corporate action as speech, 109 Cortana (Microsoft digital assistant), 163–164, 165, 255, 400 Costeja González, Mario, 58, 59 counter-declarations (form of resistance/withdrawing social agreement), 345, 489–492. See also regulations; synthetic declarations coup from above, 21, 513–516 Couzens, James, 64 Covisint, 217 creative destruction, 50, 51 credit scores, 172–173, 393 Creemers, Rogier, 393 cryptocurrencies, 442 Cubrilovic, Nik, 159 Cukier, Kenneth, 68 culture, intentional design of, 431 customers: as source of organic capitalist reciprocities, 31–32, 40, 501–504; vs users, 10, 69, 77, 82, 93–94, 96, 129 customization. See personalization cyberlibertarianism, 109 Daily Beast, 42 dark data, 210–211 data: dark data, 210–211; definition of, 65; meta-data, 117–118, 245, 272–273, 275; traffic/transit data, 228–229, 230.


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

What’s more, the information embedded in every Ethereum transaction allows network members to put their values into action in the microgrid market, for example by opting to buy electricity from the nearest or greenest suppliers, or only from those that are community-owned or not-for-profit.59 And this is just one example of its potential. ‘Ethereum is a currency for the modern age,’ says the cryptocurrency expert David Seaman. ‘It’s a platform that could be really important to society down the road in ways that we can’t even predict yet.’60 These very different examples illustrate a few of the myriad possibilities of monetary redesign, involving the market, the state and the commons. But each one makes clear that the way that money is designed – its creation, its character, and its intended use – has far-reaching distributional implications.


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

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.


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.


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

Of course, to build upon ideas, everyone must understand them. Seek people who make the impossible-to-understand more accessible. One of the greater challenges leaders face on the hiring front is evaluating people with a different technical expertise. For example, how do you evaluate the skills of a cryptocurrency expert or a data scientist if you have no expertise in either one? Sure, you can get third-party opinions from others in the industry, but sometimes recruitment is confidential and your candidates have jobs elsewhere, which restricts how many people you can involve in the recruitment process.


pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

Already the online networks had successfully disrupted such businesses as newspaper publishing, taxis, bookstores, and hotels. Truly grand ambition meant thinking about other sectors that could be replaced. How about colleges and universities through online courses? Banks and national treasuries through cryptocurrencies? One of Hoffman’s partners, Simon Rothman, who had founded the car sales division of eBay, dreamed, patiently but constantly, of disrupting the auto industry by giving buyers a way to order custom-built cars online and have them home-delivered. Perhaps the day was coming when even Amazon or Google would have become complacent enough to be disrupted.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

The North Korean cyber army included anywhere between 5,000 and 7,000 troops as of 2016 – all under the direct command of leader Kim Jong-un.18 The importance of this organisation lies not only in its attempts to disrupt South Korean infrastructure, but in its involvement in illegal state activities. The North Korean cyber force has drawn blood with online scams, fraud and attacks on online banks and cryptocurrency exchanges.19 International organised crime and cyber warfare are thought to have fuelled the growth in North Korea’s GDP since 2015.20 A UN report estimated that North Korean cyber experts have illegally ‘raised’ up to $2 billion for the country’s weapons programs. This is a much cheaper form of extraterritorial activity than the traditional modes of warfare – which involve sending troops to the other side 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

That’s why the AI achievements of computers were disappointingly limited when they were single machines, but as soon as the Internet came along remarkable things began to happen. Where machine intelligence will make the most difference is among the machines, not within the machines. It’s already clear that the Internet is the true machine intelligence. In the future, network phenomena like block-chains, the technology behind crypto-currencies, may be the route to the most radical examples of machine intelligence. ANOTHER KIND OF DIVERSITY STEPHEN M. KOSSLYN Psychologist; founding dean, Minerva Schools, Keck Graduate Institute; coauthor (with G. Wayne Miller), Top Brain, Bottom Brain Diversity isn’t just politically sensible, it’s also practical.


pages: 371 words: 122,273

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

These examples of insecurity and instability are no less important issues, and they are related to the state of private renting, but I could not and do not attempt to cover everything here. (I have included suggestions for related topics which can only be addressed briefly in this book in the section on Further Reading.) ‘Evil’ Landlords? Drawing attention to the precarity of the status quo when it comes to housing is contentious; whether they are hedge fund investors, cryptocurrency speculators or landlords, those who speculate to make something out of nothing the world over don’t like to be challenged on the mechanisms which facilitate it. ‘As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed,’ the economist Adam Smith wrote in 1776 in his book The Wealth of Nations, ‘and demand a rent even for its natural produce.’


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

The move was solidified at Facebook’s developer conference in April 2019, when it unveiled the redesign. But the business model implications are unclear. Will Facebook pursue revenues by enabling (and taking a cut of) economic transactions, similar to WeChat? Its development of the Libra cryptocurrency could enable that strategy. Or will it continue to pursue ad revenue? Or both? In an encrypted private network, the content of messages could be encrypted, but metadata about who users talk to, what they like, and what content they engage with would still be available to target ads. Diversifying revenue across business models is one of Facebook’s essential strategic objectives right now, because it’s not clear what consumers and regulators will support, and you can almost feel the market tipping.


pages: 502 words: 132,062

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence by James Bridle

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, experimental subject, factory automation, fake news, friendly AI, gig economy, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, James Bridle, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, music of the spheres, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, recommendation engine, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, speech recognition, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, techno-determinism, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, UNCLOS, undersea cable, urban planning, Von Neumann architecture, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

By making the actual code of software and hardware accessible and legible to all, open-source practices decentralize knowledge and provide the basis for collective and self-education. The field of distributed computing is another example: it has given birth to both the extreme democracy of file-sharing and cryptocurrencies and to scientific initiatives like SETI@home and Folding@home. The former seeks to discover life in outer space, the latter to develop new cures to disease. Both use the power of remote processors provided by volunteers – the computers of the general public, linked by the internet – to churn through complex calculations which would overburden any single supercomputer.


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

Since the massive interventions following the 2008 crisis, these questions had been posed on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, the Fed’s role was questioned by an array of opinions ranging from paleoconservative proponents of the gold standard, via technocratic advocates of monetary policy rules, to left-wing supporters of Modern Monetary Theory and gung ho advocates of cryptocurrencies.22 In Europe too, there was an activist community challenging the ECB to define its mandate and justify its complicity with the ratings agencies and market-based finance.23 Thoughtful central bankers asked these same questions themselves.24 The ruling by the German constitutional court stated out loud what was undeniable: the vastly expanded role that central banks had taken on since 2008 exploded the paradigm of independent central banking that had been established in the 1990s.


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.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

*4 Loeffler, appointed in 2019 to fill an empty seat in Georgia, had been a senator for only eighteen days when she attended that pandemic briefing in January. She’d worked for years for her husband’s company, before and after marrying him, mainly as his head of PR but recently running its new cryptocurrencies division for $3.5 million a year. *5 Right-wing fantasies and misinformation about COVID-19 on Fox News apparently caused unnecessary deaths. “[Sean] Hannity originally dismissed the risks associated with the virus before gradually adjusting his position starting late February,” according to the research by economists in their paper “Misinformation During a Pandemic,” but “[Tucker] Carlson warned viewers about the threat posed by the coronavirus from early February….Greater viewership of Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight is strongly associated with a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the early stages of the pandemic.”


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 technology is attracting a massive amount of attention (and a slightly less massive amount of investment capital), and its financial and technological viability is entirely dependent on the mistaken assumption that the computational resources provided by the Cloud are essentially free—or will eventually be free in some unspecified and indeterminate future. 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.


Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

In 2018 cyber theft cost an estimated $600 billion globally. That’s about as much as the global illicit drug trade.65 If cybercrime were a country, it would rank in the top twenty-five in terms of annual GDP. Many nations steal online, but North Korea is particularly aggressive, targeting financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges to steal billions to fund its illicit nuclear weapons program.66 China’s cyber theft of intellectual property is even more consequential because it is designed to secure national advantage. China is believed to have stolen trillions of dollars of intellectual property,67 including terabytes of data and schematics for the F-35 and F-22 stealth fighter jet programs, two of the most sophisticated aircraft in the U.S. arsenal.68 Targeting industries at the forefront of innovation and commerce, China’s intellectual property theft strikes at the heart of economic power.


pages: 772 words: 150,109

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age by Matthew Cobb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Apollo 11, Asilomar, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Build a better mousetrap, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Higgs boson, lab leak, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, Project Plowshare, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Wayback Machine, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Lenin said, “yesterday was too early, tomorrow it will be too late”.’32 i To the excitement of the media there are even biohackers – hobbyists who think they can easily master complex techniques and ignore ethical guidelines – who say they are going to edit the germline.33 There is one gang of fantasists who mix cryptocurrency funding and transhumanist nonsense in a toxic, nauseating nightmare, claiming that they will use CRISPR germline editing to produce babies who will live to be ‘super-centenarians’ or will ‘grow muscle without weightlifting’. The cunning plan of these attention-seekers involves injecting CRISPR components into the testicles of a male volunteer and then finding a woman to carry the baby.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

Like George Mellor and his peers, many have grown up in a deeply technologized world that already feels foreclosed against them, one where climate change is eroding their future, public goods are converted into privately owned digital commodities, Silicon Valley has accelerated inequality, and legal avenues of recourse seem futile. There is a new readiness to lash out at or reject new technologies and products that did not exist even a decade ago. There are debates about the merits of 2020s tech trends like the metaverse, Web3, and cryptocurrencies. But there’s also a newly insurgent contingent that is unafraid to vocally reject an entire concept or infrastructure outright—to argue not that these technologies should be built carefully, but that they should not be built at all. Or should be dismantled, with a hammer, if necessary. This debate involves workers building technology themselves, too.


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

But busy or not, the gurgle of grumbling stomachs could occasionally be overheard. When Chen returned with the food, everyone moved into the conference room for what the team had started referring to as “family dinners.” As was often the case, this tiny respite of time was spent bonding over fun and nerdy things. Like Batman vs. Superman, the viability of cryptocurrency, and whether or not upcoming games like Wolfenstein: The New Order would “suck” or “rule.” These often heated, laughter-peppered conversations were, at once, both stupid and wonderful—adding up, over time, into a blurred banter that recalled the early days of Oculus. But by virtue of that blur, it became hard to remember who said what exactly, and impossible to tie those comments to specific days.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Galena’s example is worth noting because many examples of revival center around new technologies. Galena’s does not. Indeed, in every developing country I visit, some ministry is putting together a plan to make their country a power in artificial intelligence, robotics, and financial technologies like cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Yet, few have the research base or the human capital to make the plan a success just yet. Far better to figure out realistic strengths as well as gaps, and go about exploiting the strengths and filling in the gaps, much as Galena did. COMMON THEMES IN COMMUNITY REVIVAL There are many examples of communities that have revived, some after the loss of a dominant industry (think Pittsburgh and steel) and others a major employer (the region around Lund and Malmo in Sweden after the Kockums shipyard downsized and closed in the 1980s).9 There are also many failed attempts at revival that we hear very little of.


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

VIX inverted 6/15/20—9/1/20, 316, 317 S&P 500 futures vs. VIX inverted, 6/15/20—9/30/20, 316—317, 318 See also cross-market analysis cross-market trading, 173, 398 See also lead/lag trading crude oil futures, NYMEX, 287—288 Trade at Settlement (TAS) orders, 287 volume by time of day, 288 cryptocurrency, 310—311, 421 curiosity, 35, 89—90 academic performance and, 89 backtesting and, 89—90 as trader attribute, 75, 89-90 cynicism, 103, 259, 454 “Daily Dirtnap, The” (newsletter), 492 Daily FX positioning data, 345 Daily Sentiment Index (J. Bernstein), 234, 345, 425, 443 Daily Sheet, morning prep with, 129-131 Dalio, Ray, 87 Dalton, James F., 294 Dalton, Robert B., 294 data trading, 162-163 day traders daily stop losses and, 367, 368 decisiveness and, 121 success rate, 41-42 tips for in crisis markets, 442 day trading community, decimation of, 476 decision trees, 78 decisiveness, 35, 119-121 continuum, 120-121 as sub-trait of conscientiousness, 56, 119 as trader attribute, 104, 119-121, 484 default mode network (DMN), 382-384 DeSantis, Mark, 66 desk, going off, 133-134 deviation, crisis market and, 443-444 EURUSD vs. deviation from 100-hour MA (9/19-1/20), 443, 444 EURUSD vs. deviation from 100-hour MA (9/19-3/20), 444 deviation from fair value, idea generation and, 392, 398-400, 407 deviation from moving average, 338, 340-341 as overbought/oversold indicator, 337-341 S&P 500 futures with 100-hour MA, 340 skew and, 341 Dillian, Jared, 492 directional bias, 424 discipline.


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

Prominent historical events include the Dutch tulip mania; the South Sea Bubble (during which a mythical company was chartered “for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage but no one to know what it is”); the Roaring Twenties (including the Florida land bubble), followed by the Great Crash of 1929; the “tronics boom” in the 1960s; and the Nifty Fifty in the 1970s. More recent events include the U.S. biotech bubble and Japan’s asset bubble in the 1980s, the tech bubble in the 1990s, the housing bubble in the 2000s, and the cryptocurrency bubble of 2017. In many of these cases, investors believed they were taking part in an adventure that would reinvent the world. (When it comes to investments, the romantic appeal of being a party to a technological revolution or an entirely new industry or invention often dominates profit considerations in investors’ minds.)


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 didn’t plan on Wolf of Wall Streeting the situation because his spirit had been broken and he no longer had that level of fight. But he did want a decent deal, especially since tech companies were in the midst of raising mind-boggling amounts of money. In May 2021, Firefly revealed that it had raised $75 million from a group of investors that included Jed McCaleb, a cryptocurrency billionaire. The company placed McCaleb on its board. It had added a couple of other directors, too, in the form of Deborah Lee James and Robert Cardillo. James had served as secretary of the air force for four years, while Cardillo used to run the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The Ukrainian had been swapped for a military vet and a top spook.


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.


pages: 821 words: 178,631

The Rust Programming Language by Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols

anti-pattern, billion-dollar mistake, bioinformatics, business logic, business process, cryptocurrency, data science, DevOps, duck typing, Firefox, functional programming, Internet of things, iterative process, pull request, reproducible builds, Ruby on Rails, type inference

Through efforts such as this book, the Rust teams want to make systems concepts more accessible to more people, especially those new to programming. Companies Hundreds of companies, large and small, use Rust in production for a variety of tasks. Those tasks include command line tools, web services, DevOps tooling, embedded devices, audio and video analysis and transcoding, cryptocurrencies, bioinformatics, search engines, Internet of Things applications, machine learning, and even major parts of the Firefox web browser. Open Source Developers Rust is for people who want to build the Rust programming language, community, developer tools, and libraries. We’d love to have you contribute to the Rust language.


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

Another brick in the controlocracy, some said of this recorded money; but if the public kept ultimate control of this new global state, by way of people power exerted by the ever more frequent strikes and non-compliances, then the people too would be seeing where all the money was and where it was going, move by move, so that it couldn’t be shuffled into tax havens or otherwise hidden, without becoming inactivated by law. Digital distribution of the total blockchain record through YourLock and other sources meant there was a kind of emerging people’s bank, a direct democracy of money. So now the various old private cryptocurrencies were only being used for criminal activities, and traded at fractions of a penny. Lots of investors who still held these worthless coins were looking for a moment to get out with a minimal haircut. Others had simply cut their losses and sold for mills on the million. Holders of the various cryptocoins owned trillions of them, but trillions multiplied by zero still came to zero, so they were mainly done for; their owners might as well have been holding piles of copper pennies, except copper was more valuable.


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

And cybercriminals continued to ravage American towns and cities with attacks, steadily raising their ransom demands from a few hundred bucks to $14 million. And desperate local officials were paying. In fact, the only adversary that appeared to back off under Trump was North Korea, but only because its hackers were too busy hacking cryptocurrency exchanges. Pyongyang had figured out that by hacking the exchanges that convert Bitcoin into cash, it could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues, mitigate sanctions, and get back to its nuclear weapons. And increasingly, the most destructive threat to our civil discourse, to truth and fact, was coming from inside the White House itself.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

It is a hard problem, how to conduct rational public discourse in a twenty-first century in which communications channels such as Facebook and Twitter are run by those whose business model it is to scare and outrage their readers in order to glue their eyeballs to a screen so they can then be sold fake diabetes cures and cryptocurrencies.8 Perhaps these views are so persistent because they have such deep roots in US history. Abraham Lincoln—a politician and statesman much more committed to the dignity of labor and to the equality of humanity than most—spoke to the issue in an 1858 campaign speech: “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races.


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

In the days of Al Capone’s Prohibition-era racketeering, the Feds’ mantra became “Follow the money,” and it was ultimately tax evasion charges, not murder convictions, that brought down the world’s biggest crime boss of the 1930s. Though “follow the money” has been the core credo in law enforcement ever since, cops may soon have to find a new motto. There are now more than seventy virtual crypto-currency competitors to Bitcoin, such as Ripple, Litecoin, and Dogecoin, and it is estimated nearly $10 billion in virtual currencies were transacted in 2013 alone. Given the vast sums at play, it should come as no surprise that criminals are not only transacting Bitcoin but also targeting the crypto currency for theft.


pages: 716 words: 192,143

The Enlightened Capitalists by James O'Toole

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, business process, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, collective bargaining, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, desegregation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, end world poverty, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, means of production, Menlo Park, North Sea oil, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

KODAK, TOO The lessons to be taken from the decline and fall of Polaroid are muddied by the fact that conventionally managed Kodak underwent a similarly spectacular decline at roughly the same time, and for roughly some of the same reasons. In the late 1980s, Kodak had dominated the photographic film industry, with some 145,000 employees; by 2012, the year it filed for bankruptcy, its workforce had shrunk to 20,000. (For the record, in 2018 a resuscitated remnant of Kodak was back in business, bizarrely selling a photo-based cryptocurrency.) For too long, both Polaroid’s and Kodak’s leaders had convinced themselves that digital technology would never overtake chemical-based processes, and when they finally faced reality, it was too late to catch up with high-tech competitors. It is accurate to say that Polaroid—like countless conventionally managed companies before and since—was the victim of technological change that had been resisted, ignored, or came as a surprise.


pages: 1,380 words: 190,710

Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems by Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer, Paul Blankinship, Ana Oprea, Piotr Lewandowski, Adam Stubblefield

air gap, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, bash_history, behavioural economics, business continuity plan, business logic, business process, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, continuous integration, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, database schema, Debian, defense in depth, DevOps, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, fear of failure, general-purpose programming language, Google Chrome, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, information security, Internet of things, Kubernetes, load shedding, margin call, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, NSO Group, nudge theory, operational security, performance metric, pull request, ransomware, reproducible builds, revision control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, self-driving car, single source of truth, Skype, slashdot, software as a service, source of truth, SQL injection, Stuxnet, the long tail, Turing test, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Valgrind, web application, Y2K, zero day

Sample disaster risk assessment matrix Theme Risk Probability of occurrence within a year Impact to organization if risk occurs Ranking Names of systems impacted by risk Almost never: 0.0 Unlikely: 0.2 Somewhat unlikely : 0.4 Likely: 0.6 Highly likely: 0.8 Inevitable :1.0 Negligible: 0.0 Minimal: 0.2 Moderate: 0.5 Severe : 0.8 Critical: 1.0 Probability x impact Environmental Earthquake Flood Fire Hurricane Infrastructure reliability Power outage Loss of internet connectivity Authentication system down High system latency/ infrastructure slowdown Security System compromise Insider theft of intellectual property DDos/DoS attack Misuse of system resources—e.g., cryptocurrency mining Vandalism/ website defacement Phishing attack Software security bug Hardware security bug Emerging serious vulnerability, e.g., Meltdown/Spectre, Heartbleed Index A AbsInt, Abstract Interpretation absolute time, limiting dependence on, Limit Your Dependencies on External Notions of Time-Limit Your Dependencies on External Notions of Time abstract interpretation, Abstract Interpretation access control lists (ACLs)advanced authorization controls, Using Advanced Authorization Controls data isolation and, Data isolation graceful degradation and, Graceful Degradation key isolation and, Isolation of confidentiality safe proxies and, Safe Proxies in Production Environments access controlsdesigning for recovery, Access Controls Google's corporate network and, Access Controls understandability and, Access control access denials, Diagnosing Access Denials accidental errors, recovery from, Accidental Errors accountability, risk taking and, Culture of Yes ACLs (see access control lists) active entities, defined, Identities activists, as attackers, Activists AddressSanitizer (ASan), Dynamic Program Analysis administrative APIs, Small Functional APIs, Choosing an auditor advanced authorization controls, Using Advanced Authorization Controls, Advanced Controls-Proxiesbusiness justifications, Business Justifications multi-party authorization, Multi-Party Authorization (MPA) three-factor authorization (3FA), Three-Factor Authorization (3FA)-Three-Factor Authorization (3FA) advanced mitigation strategies, Advanced Mitigation Strategies-Post-Deployment Verification, Securing Against the Threat Model, Revisitedbinary provenance, Binary Provenance-What to put in binary provenance code signing, What to put in binary provenance deployment choke points, Deployment Choke Points post-deployment verification, Post-Deployment Verification provenance-based deployment policies, Provenance-Based Deployment Policies-Implementing policy decisions verifiable builds, Verifiable Builds-Unauthenticated inputs adversarial testing, Assessment adversaries, understanding, Understanding Adversaries-Conclusionattacker methods, Attacker Methods-Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures attacker motivations, Attacker Motivations attacker profiles, Attacker Profiles hobbyists, Hobbyists risk assessment considerations, Risk Assessment Considerations-Risk Assessment Considerations vulnerability researchers, Vulnerability Researchers AFL (American Fuzzy Lop), How Fuzz Engines Work Agile development, Initial Velocity Versus Sustained Velocity alternative componentspitfalls, Common pitfalls types, Component Types-Low-dependency components ALTS (Application Layer Transport Security), Authentication and transport security American Fuzzy Lop (AFL), How Fuzz Engines Work amplification attacks, Attacker’s Strategy Android, Use memory-safe languages Android Keystore, Example: Secure cryptographic APIs and the Tink crypto framework Android security team, Example: Embedding Security at Google anonymization, Take Privacy into Consideration Anonymous (hacktivist group), Activists antivirus software, Host agents anycast, Defendable Architecture APIs (application programming interfaces)defined, Small Functional APIs least-privilege-based design, Small Functional APIs-Small Functional APIs secure cryptographic APIs and Tink crypto framework, Example: Secure cryptographic APIs and the Tink crypto framework-Example: Secure cryptographic APIs and the Tink crypto framework third-party insider threats, Third-party insiders usability and understandability, Considering API Usability-Example: Secure cryptographic APIs and the Tink crypto framework App Engine (see Google App Engine) App Security Improvement (ASI), Abstract Interpretation application frameworksdefined, Using Application Frameworks for Service-Wide Requirements for service-wide requirements, Using Application Frameworks for Service-Wide Requirements-Using Application Frameworks for Service-Wide Requirements Application Layer Transport Security (ALTS), Authentication and transport security application logs, Application logs application-level data recovery, Data Sanitization artifact, defined, Concepts and Terminology artificial intelligencecyber attacks and, Automation and Artificial Intelligence protecting systems from automated attacks, Protecting your systems from automated attacks ASan (AddressSanitizer), Dynamic Program Analysis ASI (App Security Improvement), Abstract Interpretation AST pattern matching, Automated Code Inspection Tools-Automated Code Inspection Tools ATT&CK framework, Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures attack surfacebinary provenance and, What to put in binary provenance redundancy and, Reliability Versus Security: Design Considerations attacker methods, Attacker Methods-Tactics, Techniques, and Procedurescategorizing of tactics, techniques, and procedures, Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures Cyber Kill Chain framework for studying, Cyber Kill Chains™ DoS attacks, Attacker’s Strategy threat intelligence framework for studying, Threat Intelligence attacker profiles, Attacker Profilesactivists/hacktivists, Activists criminal actors, Criminal Actors-Protecting your systems from criminal actors governments, Governments and Law Enforcement-Protecting your systems from nation-state actors hobbyists, Hobbyists insiders, Insiders-Designing for insider risk vulnerability researchers, Vulnerability Researchers attackers (see adversaries, understanding) auditingautomated systems, Auditing Automated Systems choosing an auditor, Choosing an auditor collecting good audit logs, Collecting good audit logs least privilege and, Auditing-Choosing an auditor authenticationcredential/secret rotation, Credential and Secret Rotation-Credential and Secret Rotation least-privilege policy framework for, A Policy Framework for Authentication and Authorization Decisions-Avoiding Potential Pitfalls second-factor authentication using FIDO security keys, Example: Strong second-factor authentication using FIDO security keys-Example: Strong second-factor authentication using FIDO security keys understandability and, Authentication and transport security authentication protocol, defined, Identities authorizationadvanced controls, Using Advanced Authorization Controls auditing to detect incorrect usage, Auditing-Choosing an auditor avoiding potential pitfalls, Avoiding Potential Pitfalls business justifications, Business Justifications investing in a widely used authorization framework, Investing in a Widely Used Authorization Framework least-privilege policy framework for, A Policy Framework for Authentication and Authorization Decisions-Avoiding Potential Pitfalls multi-party, Multi-Party Authorization (MPA) temporary access, Temporary Access three-factor authorization (3FA), Three-Factor Authorization (3FA)-Three-Factor Authorization (3FA) authorized_keys file, Handling emergencies directly automated attacks, Automation and Artificial Intelligence automated code inspection tools, Automated Code Inspection Tools-Automated Code Inspection Tools automated response mechanisms, Automated response-Automated responsefailing safe versus failing secure, Failing safe versus failing secure human involvement in, A foothold for humans automated testing, Testing automationcode deployment, Rely on Automation cyber attacks and, Automation and Artificial Intelligence response mechanism deployment, Automated response awareness campaigns, Culture of Awareness awareness, culture of, Culture of Awareness-Culture of Awareness AWS Key Management Service, Example: Secure cryptographic APIs and the Tink crypto framework B batteries-included frameworks, Using Application Frameworks for Service-Wide Requirements BeyondCorp architecture, Isolating Assets (Quarantine)Device Inventory Service tools, Cloud logs location-based trust and, Limitations of location-based trust zero trust networking model, Zero Trust Networking Bigtable, Improve observability binary provenance, Binary Provenance-What to put in binary provenance, Data Sanitization BIOS, Device firmware blameless postmortems, Building a Culture of Security and Reliability, Culture of Inevitably blast radius, controlling, Controlling the Blast Radius-Time Separationfailure domains, Failure Domains-Low-dependency components location separation, Location Separation-Isolation of confidentiality role separation, Role Separation time separation, Time Separation Blue Teams, Special Teams: Blue and Red Teams-Special Teams: Blue and Red Teams, Special Teams: Blue and Red Teams breakglass mechanismcode deployment and, Include a Deployment Breakglass graceful failure and, Graceful Failure and Breakglass Mechanisms least-privilege-based design, Breakglass, Graceful Failure and Breakglass Mechanisms as safety net, Make Safety Nets the Norm budget, for logging, Budget for Logging bug bounties (Vulnerability Reward Programs), Vulnerability Researchers, Background and Team Evolution, External Researchers-External Researchers bugs, compromises versus, Compromises Versus Bugs buildsdefined, Concepts and Terminology verifiable (see verifiable builds) C C++, How Fuzz Engines Workfor publicly trusted CA, Programming Language Choice sanitizing code, C++: Valgrind or Google Sanitizers CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements, Background on Publicly Trusted Certificate Authorities California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Handovers, Culture of Sustainability canaries, Reduce Fear with Risk-Reduction Mechanisms Cantrill, Bryan, Distinguish horses from zebras CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test) systems, Protecting your systems from criminal actors, A DoS Mitigation System CAs (see certificate authorities) CASBs (cloud access security brokers), Cloud logs casting, implicit, Use Strong Types Cellcom, Criminal Actors certificate authorities (CAs)background on publicly trusted CAs, Background on Publicly Trusted Certificate Authorities build or buy decision, The Build or Buy Decision complexity versus understandability, Complexity Versus Understandability data validation, Data Validation design, implementation, maintenance considerations, Design, Implementation, and Maintenance Considerations-Data Validation at Google, Case Study: Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining a Publicly Trusted CA-Conclusion Google's business need for, Why Did We Need a Publicly Trusted CA?


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Ephemeralization never produced the revolution in housing that Fuller wanted, but it came true for virtually everything else, and its damaging effects were often pushed out of sight. As Lloyd Kahn had foreseen, the question of doing more with less had to account for the systems and raw materials on which technological innovations depended, and the invisible costs of a cell phone, lithium battery, or unit of cryptocurrency were even greater than those of the dome. Recent events have only confirmed that Fuller’s idea of emergence through emergency was fundamentally incomplete. He predicted correctly that inequality would cause social disruption, but he focused on disparities between countries, not within them, and the results in America have been disheartening.


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

By way of comparison, merely inviting everything into a “parliament” (of all things) is to ask them to mimic and recite an old-fashioned, even reactionary, kind of political speech, but do strong computational alternatives seem any less arbitrary?71 Is some currency backed by tons of carbon or gigaflops instead of US dollars (or gold or cryptocurrencies) a greater or lesser danger than the failures it would hope to ameliorate? Moreover, where is the limit to the conceptual violence of turning nature itself into a kind of permanent emergency, climate change into its final exception, and global warming into the masterwork of this ambient terrorist?


The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, degrowth, European colonialism, founder crops, Gini coefficient, global village, Hernando de Soto, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, labour mobility, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, public intellectual, Scientific racism, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

As we noted, there are now planetary bureaucracies (public and private, ranging from the IMF and WTO to J. P. Morgan Chase and various credit-rating agencies) without anything that resembles a corresponding principle of global sovereignty or global field of competitive politics; and everything from cryptocurrencies to private security agencies, undermining the sovereignty of states. If anything is clear by now it’s this. Where we once assumed ‘civilization’ and ‘state’ to be conjoined entities that came down to us as a historical package (take it or leave it, forever), what history now demonstrates is that these terms actually refer to complex amalgams of elements which have entirely different origins and which are currently in the process of drifting apart.


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

I took the liberty of getting in touch with one of them, Ben Compton, whom I have stayed friends with.” “Is this the Waterhouse from the weird cyber bank?” Alice asked. “That Waterhouse?” She was referring to one of the local tech philanthropists, an entrepreneur who had been involved in an early cryptocurrency venture that had somehow managed to grow into a serious financial institution. “The same.” “Forgive me for asking a dumb question, but why would a brain institute hire video game programmers?” “Gamification,” Zula said. “Yes,” Corvallis said, “it’s kind of a long story and I would be happy to fill you in.


pages: 1,171 words: 309,640

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini

back-to-the-land, clean water, Colonization of Mars, cryptocurrency, dark matter, friendly fire, gravity well, heat death of the universe, hive mind, independent contractor, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, megastructure, random walk, risk tolerance, time dilation, Vernor Vinge

Heavily armed, able to carry significant numbers of troops, slow to turn given its length. Never operates without support ships. (See also Cruiser.) BEANSTALK: see Space Elevator. BERYL NUTS: edible nuts with gem-like shells used in certain brands of meal packs. Gene-hacked species native to Eidolon. BITS: cryptocurrency dated to Galactic Standard Time (GTS). Most widely accepted form of legal tender across interstellar space. Official currency of the League of Allied Worlds. BLACK NOVA: cultivar of Capsicum chinense, gene-hacked to deposit pure capsaicin in a waxy outer layer. Developed by Ines Tolentira of Stewart’s World prior to winning the Tri-Solar Hot Pepper Bash.


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

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