cryptocurrency

153 results back to index

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.

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).

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.

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.

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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