bitcoin

Bitcoin for the Befuddled
by Conrad Barski
Published 13 Nov 2014

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

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

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

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency
by Ian Demartino
Published 2 Feb 2016

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

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

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

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Jan 2015

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

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

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

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money
by Nathaniel Popper
Published 18 May 2015

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

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

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

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond
by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar
Published 19 Oct 2017

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

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

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

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts
by David Gerard
Published 23 Jul 2017

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

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

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

Bitcoin: The Future of Money?
by Dominic Frisby
Published 1 Nov 2014

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

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

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

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism
by David Golumbia
Published 25 Sep 2016

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

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

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

Magic Internet Money: A Book About Bitcoin
by Jesse Berger
Published 14 Sep 2020

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

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

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

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street
by Jeff John Roberts
Published 15 Dec 2020

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

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

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

The Internet of Money
by Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Published 28 Aug 2016

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

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

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

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy
by Melanie Swan
Published 22 Jan 2014

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

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

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

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking
by Saifedean Ammous
Published 23 Mar 2018

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

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

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

Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts
by Lorne Lantz and Daniel Cawrey
Published 8 Dec 2020

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

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

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

Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies
by Nik Bhatia
Published 18 Jan 2021

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

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

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

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption
by Ben Mezrich
Published 20 May 2019

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

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

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

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency
by Andy Greenberg
Published 15 Nov 2022

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

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

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

Mastering Blockchain, Second Edition
by Imran Bashir
Published 28 Mar 2018

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

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

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

Bitcoin Internals: A Technical Guide to Bitcoin
by Chris Clark
Published 16 Jun 2013

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

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

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

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum
by Camila Russo
Published 13 Jul 2020

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

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

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

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Feb 2018

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

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

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

Cryptoeconomics: Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin
by Eric Voskuil , James Chiang and Amir Taaki
Published 28 Feb 2020

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

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

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

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance
by Eswar S. Prasad
Published 27 Sep 2021

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

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

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

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze
by Laura Shin
Published 22 Feb 2022

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

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

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

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023

In 2019, a surfer from San Diego started handing out small amounts of Bitcoin to locals in the hopes of creating what he called a “Bitcoin circular economy.” His supposed success was cited by Bukele as inspiration for the national Bitcoin policy. El Zonte had been swarmed by Bitcoin influencers, travel bloggers, and TV crews, who dubbed it Bitcoin Beach. Bitcoiners liked to tell me that the town’s adoption of Bitcoin was a crucial proof of concept, a first step on the cryptocurrency’s inevitable path to global acceptance. They seemed a little too excited by the idea that there was finally a store or two where tourists could use their Bitcoins to buy regular stuff.

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“It kind of felt like I was in the future,” one early customer told a reporter after buying 100 micrograms of acid on Silk Road for fifty Bitcoins. Silk Road was Bitcoin’s first commercial application. Drug consumers didn’t set up their own mining rigs before going shopping on the dark web. They bought Bitcoins for cash on rudimentary exchanges. The demand started driving up the price. Bitcoin was so tied to Silk Road that when the site’s founder, Ross Ulbricht, was busted in October 2013, the price crashed. But a month later, Bitcoin’s price mysteriously increased tenfold, past $1,000. Mentions of Bitcoin millionaires started appearing in the news. The Wall Street establishment called it an unsustainable bubble, giving Bitcoin still more attention.

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Was the answer to El Salvador’s problems to go all-in on a volatile digital currency that nobody else in the real world was using? But Bukele really did follow through. He gave thirty dollars in Bitcoin to each citizen—a few days’ wages for a farmworker—plunked down Bitcoin ATMs in every town plaza, and told businesses to accept Bitcoin as payment. And with the country on the edge of a debt crisis, Bukele told off international creditors, saying he’d solve El Salvador’s financial problems with Bitcoin instead. “#Bitcoin is FU money!” he tweeted. El Salvador became a country-sized advertisement for Bitcoin, and many of the crypto enthusiasts I interviewed told me that the plan was such a success that other countries would soon follow suit.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

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

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

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

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

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

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

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

Silk Road
by Eileen Ormsby
Published 1 Nov 2014

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

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

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

Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World
by Jeffrey Tucker
Published 7 Jan 2015

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

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

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

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Jul 2023

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

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

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

The Industries of the Future
by Alec Ross
Published 2 Feb 2016

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

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

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

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank
by Chris Skinner
Published 27 Aug 2013

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

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

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

Stake Hodler Capitalism: Blockchain and DeFi
by Amr Hazem Wahba Metwaly
Published 21 Mar 2021

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

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

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

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing
by Jacob Goldstein
Published 14 Aug 2020

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

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

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

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

Strange allies in the war on cash Roger Ver and his followers began to argue that Bitcoin Cash is the ‘true’ Bitcoin, somewhat like a breakaway sect claiming to maintain the spirit of a heretical prophet while berating the original sect for losing its way. Early Bitcoin had equated itself with digital gold, digital cash, commerce and saving, but the divided community fought over those labels. The Bitcoin community claimed Digital Gold and Saving (‘Bitcoin is digital gold for hoarding’), while Bitcoin Cash claimed Cash and Commerce (‘Bitcoin Cash is digital cash for commerce’). Physical cash – as we saw in Chapter 3 – is the only government money we can hold, our normal digital money being privately issued bank chips.

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Rather than seeing themselves as moving limited-supply numbers around, the system participants are encouraged to imagine themselves moving a type of ‘digital commodity’. The Bitcoin community tries hard to associate the numbers with metal, relying heavily on the visual imagery of Bitcoin’s branding to do this. The numbers come wrapped in pre-packaged imagery of futuristic metallic ‘coins’, an image that is reinforced by the choice of brand-name – Bitcoin. This is why, in the early days of Bitcoin, photojournalists desperate for a physical image to place in news stories flocked to take photos of a metal trinket with the Bitcoin logo on it. Perhaps most importantly, however, a highly vocal community of promoters exert much effort in creating a story about this imagined ‘coin’.

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Likewise, she does not think of money in terms of other money, unless she is crossing a geographic boundary from the British pound system into, say, the South African rand system, within which supermarkets price porridge using a different symbol. There are some obvious features about Bitcoin tokens that allow us to categorise them. First, there is no supermarket in the world in which porridge is priced in Bitcoin tokens.* This means Bitcoin tokens are not participants within the foreign exchange market. Secondly, Bitcoin tokens have come to have a price, denoting the quantity of money someone will outlay to obtain them (indeed, there is a very large amount of trading, and Bitcoin’s price has been a favourite topic discussed in the media and social media over the years). Given that these tokens are not on the foreign exchange market, this must mean they are goods, not dissimilar to items found in a digital supermarket.

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony
by David G. W. Birch
Published 14 Apr 2020

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

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

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

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published 6 Dec 2016

(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.

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

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

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs
by Tim Draper
Published 18 Dec 2017

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

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

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

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

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

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

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

The Dark Net
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 20 Aug 2014

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

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

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

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 14 Oct 2019

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

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

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

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 26 Jun 2017

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

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

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

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology
by William Mougayar
Published 25 Apr 2016

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

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

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

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives)
by David Birch
Published 14 Jun 2017

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

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

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

The Social Life of Money
by Nigel Dodd
Published 14 May 2014

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

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

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

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
by Ed Finn
Published 10 Mar 2017

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

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

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

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America
by Dan Conway
Published 8 Sep 2019

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

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

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

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

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

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

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

Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
by Michael Lewis
Published 2 Oct 2023

One month he might be in Indonesia; the next, Argentina. Zane, like bitcoin, became placeless. As a matter of principle, he lived his entire financial life in bitcoin. He was paid in bitcoin and paid others only with bitcoin. He enjoyed affirming his faith in the movement he had joined. “I did kind of want to take the power of money away from government,” he said. Zane, like Bitcoin, had a code. By 2017 there had been a shift in the spirit of the movement he’d joined. Bitcoin enthusiasts believed that Satoshi had created a replacement for government-­backed money, but government-­backed money wasn’t what Bitcoin most easily replaced. Gambling was.

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Even if you could find a South Korean grad student to front your trades, you still had to find a way to turn won into dollars. Otherwise, you ended up with a bunch of won in South Korea (from the bitcoin you sold on the South Korean exchange) and a bunch of bitcoin you’d bought on some US crypto exchange. You couldn’t complete the trade. Ideally, all at once, you’d sell the bitcoin in South Korea for won, then sell the won for dollars, use those dollars to buy the bitcoin (at a 20 percent discount) in the United Sates, and ship that bitcoin back to South Korea, leaving you with no bitcoin and a 20 percent profit on the trade. But the South Korean government wouldn’t let you sell the won. It wasn’t Sam’s first thought, but he considered buying a jumbo jet and flying it back and forth from Seoul, filled with South Koreans carrying suitcases each holding $10,000 worth of won, to a small island off the coast of Japan.

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RippleNet was a platform created by some crypto entrepreneurs back in 2012 that was making a pitch to play the useful role in everyday financial life that Bitcoin had been meant to play. A big part of the theoretical appeal of Ripple’s coin* was that, unlike bitcoin, which took vast amounts of energy to maintain, it was carbon-­neutral. Ripple’s actual appeal was the same as Bitcoin’s: the price of its coin moved up and down a lot, and so it was fun to gamble on. By late 2017, lots of people traded Ripple on every major crypto exchange. On South Korean exchanges, Ripple was trading at an even greater premium to Ripple on American exchanges than South Korean bitcoin was to American bitcoin. If a bitcoin cost 20 percent more in South Korea than it did in the US, Ripple’s coin cost 25 percent more.

The Scandal of Money
by George Gilder
Published 23 Feb 2016

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

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

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

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

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

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

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

DeFi and the Future of Finance
by Campbell R. Harvey , Ashwin Ramachandran , Joey Santoro , Vitalik Buterin and Fred Ehrsam
Published 23 Aug 2021

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

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

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

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data
by Kevin Mitnick , Mikko Hypponen and Robert Vamosi
Published 14 Feb 2017

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

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

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

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything
by Gottfried Leibbrandt and Natasha de Teran
Published 14 Jul 2021

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

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

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

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

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

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

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

Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and DApps
by Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Gavin Wood Ph. D.
Published 23 Dec 2018

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

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

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

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road
by Nick Bilton
Published 15 Mar 2017

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

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

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

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business
by Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan
Published 28 Jan 2020

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

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

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

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism
by Arun Sundararajan
Published 12 May 2016

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

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

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

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory
by Kariappa Bheemaiah
Published 26 Feb 2017

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

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

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

Blockchain Basics: A Non-Technical Introduction in 25 Steps
by Daniel Drescher
Published 16 Mar 2017

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

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

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

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines
by William Davidow and Michael Malone
Published 18 Feb 2020

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

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

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

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism
by Robin Chase
Published 14 May 2015

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

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

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

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy
by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson
Published 30 May 2016

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

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

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

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner
by Po Bronson
Published 14 Jul 2020

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

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

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

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT first digital asset: Lewis, The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains, 23. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT his white paper: Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” October 31, 2008, bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT has been likened: Lewis, The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains, 132. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT process is random: Jake Frankenfield, “What Is Bitcoin Mining?,” Investopedia, October 11, 2023, investopedia.com/terms/b/bitcoin-mining.asp. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT makes julienne fries: “Slices, Dices, and Makes Julienne Fries,” TV Tropes, tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SlicesDicesAndMakesJulienneFries.

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Technology, nytimes.com/2020/07/08/technology/robinhood-risky-trading.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the first Bitcoins: Though due to a quirk in the code, these particular BTC can’t be spent or traded. “Genesis Block,” Bitcoin Wiki, en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Times of London: Benedict George, “The Genesis Block: The First Bitcoin Block,” CoinDesk, January 3, 2023, coindesk.com/tech/2023/01/03/the-genesis-block-the-first-bitcoin-block [inactive]. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT had inspired Nakamoto: Alan Feuer, “The Bitcoin Ideology,” The New York Times, December 14, 2013, sec. Sunday Review, nytimes.com/2013/12/15/sunday-review/the-bitcoin-ideology.html.

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“Ethereum is an ecosystem for venture capitalists to make bets on the future of computing and, like, Web3 and DeFi and gaming and NFTs and all that shit,” said Levine. “Bitcoin is a place to make bets on future institutional adoption of an economic asset class.” But that doesn’t fully explain the fervently anti-Ethereum attitudes that Buterin encountered. He likened Bitcoin maximalists—who often proclaim that Bitcoin is the only worthwhile cryptocurrency—to religious adherents. “Bitcoin is not really a technology project. Bitcoin is a kind of political, cultural, and religious project where the technology is a necessary evil,” he said. It’s common in the River, a highly secular place, to insult someone’s movement by comparing it to a religion.

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen
by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
Published 14 Jul 2015

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

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

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

The Curse of Cash
by Kenneth S Rogoff
Published 29 Aug 2016

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

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

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

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime
by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden
Published 24 Oct 2022

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

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

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

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free
by Cody Wilson
Published 10 Oct 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality
by Katharina Pistor
Published 27 May 2019

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

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

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

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High
by Mike Power
Published 1 May 2013

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

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

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

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution
by Pieter Hintjens
Published 11 Mar 2013

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

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

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

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
by Brett King
Published 5 May 2016

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

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

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

How to DeFi
by Coingecko , Darren Lau , Sze Jin Teh , Kristian Kho , Erina Azmi , Tm Lee and Bobby Ong
Published 22 Mar 2020

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

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

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

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 12 Jun 2017

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

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

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

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future
by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen
Published 13 Sep 2021

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

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

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

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
by Peter Frase
Published 10 Mar 2015

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

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

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

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks
by Ann Pettifor
Published 27 Mar 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data and the City
by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle
Published 2 Aug 2017

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

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

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

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit
by Aja Raden
Published 10 May 2021

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

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

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

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

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

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

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

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

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

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

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

Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets
by Donald MacKenzie
Published 24 May 2021

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

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

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

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do
by Brett King
Published 26 Dec 2012

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

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

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

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future
by Jeff Booth
Published 14 Jan 2020

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

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

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

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

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

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

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

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis
by Scott Patterson
Published 5 Jun 2023

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

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

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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.

Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel
by Tom Wainwright
Published 23 Feb 2016

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

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

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

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

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

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

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

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency
by Parmy Olson
Published 5 Jun 2012

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

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

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

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
by Matthew Ball
Published 18 Jul 2022

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

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

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

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks
by Joshua Cooper Ramo
Published 16 May 2016

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

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

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

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini
Published 17 Oct 2022

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

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

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

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means
by John Lanchester
Published 5 Oct 2014

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

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

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

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups
by Ali Tamaseb
Published 14 Sep 2021

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

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

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

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy
by Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz
Published 4 Nov 2016

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

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

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

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World
by Michal Zalewski
Published 11 Jan 2022

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

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

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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.

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside
by Xiaowei Wang
Published 12 Oct 2020

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

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

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

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power
by Michel Aglietta
Published 23 Oct 2018

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

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

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

Orwell Versus the Terrorists: A Digital Short
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 12 Feb 2015

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

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

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

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society
by David Wolman
Published 14 Feb 2012

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

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

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

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly
Published 6 Jun 2016

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

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

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

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles
by William Quinn and John D. Turner
Published 5 Aug 2020

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

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

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

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It
by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris
Published 10 Jul 2023

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

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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.

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

Lying for Money: How Fraud Makes the World Go Round
by Daniel Davies
Published 14 Jul 2018

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

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

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

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small
by Steve Sammartino
Published 25 Jun 2014

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

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

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

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

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

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

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

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by Julia Ebner
Published 20 Feb 2020

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

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

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

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet
by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider
Published 14 Aug 2017

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

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

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

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance
by Julia Angwin
Published 25 Feb 2014

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

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

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

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers
by Andy Greenberg
Published 5 Nov 2019

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

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

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

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

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

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

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

Vue.js 2 Cookbook
by Andrea Passaglia
Published 27 Apr 2017

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

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

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

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy
by Mervyn King
Published 3 Mar 2016

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

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

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

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech
by Jamie Susskind
Published 3 Sep 2018

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

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

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

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath
by Nicco Mele
Published 14 Apr 2013

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

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

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

Personal Finance with Python
by Max Humber

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.

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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.

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

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System
by James Rickards
Published 7 Apr 2014

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

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

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

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
by Jerry Kaplan
Published 3 Aug 2015

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

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

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

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

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

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

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

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
Published 19 Feb 2019

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

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

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

Choose Yourself!
by James Altucher
Published 14 Sep 2013

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

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

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

Alpha Trader
by Brent Donnelly
Published 11 May 2021

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

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

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

The Fourth Industrial Revolution
by Klaus Schwab
Published 11 Jan 2016

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

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

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

Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation
by Sebastien Page
Published 4 Nov 2020

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

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

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

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future
by Paul Krugman
Published 28 Jan 2020

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

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

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

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson
Published 26 Mar 2019

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

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

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

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 25 Jun 2024

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 119 Bank for International Settlements, BIS Quarterly Review: International Banking and Financial Market Developments (Bank for International Settlements, December 2022), 16, https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt2212.pdf. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 120 “Top 100 Cryptocurrencies by Market Capitalization,” CoinMarketCap; “Bitcoin Price,” Coinbase, accessed April 20, 2023, https://www.coinbase.com/price/bitcoin. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 121 “Bitcoin Price,” Coinbase. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 122 “Bitcoin Price,” Coinbase. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 123 “Bitcoin Price,” Coinbase. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 124 For more on the growing economic role of influencers, see “How Big Is the Influencer Economy?

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According to the Bank for International Settlements, global foreign exchange trading averaged $7.5 trillion per day in April 2022, and it is likely even higher as this book goes to press.[120] Also, in contrast to most traditional currencies, the value of most cryptocurrencies has been extremely volatile. On January 4, 2012, for example, Bitcoins were trading at $13.43.[121] On April 2 they were up above $130.[122] But interest in cryptocurrency was still largely limited to a technology-minded subculture. Then, after almost five years of relative quiet and stability, Bitcoin started shooting up even higher in 2017. Suddenly ordinary people were hearing about Bitcoins as a surefire investment and buying them up in hopes that they would appreciate further. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with prices hitting $1,354 on April 29 and $18,877 on December 17.[123] But then prices started to fall and people sold their Bitcoins in a panic, trying to get out of the market before their assets lost any more value.

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This became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with prices hitting $1,354 on April 29 and $18,877 on December 17.[123] But then prices started to fall and people sold their Bitcoins in a panic, trying to get out of the market before their assets lost any more value. By December 12, 2018, Bitcoin was back down to $3,360—only to hit $64,899 on April 13, 2021, before another major crash dropped it to $15,460 by November 20, 2022.[124] This volatility poses a major problem for people who want to use Bitcoin as a currency—that is, as a medium for regularly exchanging goods and services. If you believed your dollars would be worth ten times as much within half a year, you’d try to avoid spending them.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

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

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

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

How I Invest My Money: Finance Experts Reveal How They Save, Spend, and Invest
by Brian Portnoy and Joshua Brown
Published 17 Nov 2020

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.

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

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

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again
by Brittany Kaiser
Published 21 Oct 2019

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

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

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

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

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

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

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

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics
by Ben Buchanan
Published 25 Feb 2020

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

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

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

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats
by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake
Published 15 Jul 2019

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

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

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

The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design
by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth
Published 3 Oct 2019

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

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

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

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 3 Sep 2018

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

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

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

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
by Nicole Perlroth
Published 9 Feb 2021

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

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

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

Python for Algorithmic Trading: From Idea to Cloud Deployment
by Yves Hilpisch
Published 8 Dec 2020

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

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

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

Team Human
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 22 Jan 2019

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

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

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

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
by Calum Chace
Published 17 Jul 2016

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

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

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

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

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

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

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
by Tyler Cowen
Published 8 Apr 2019

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

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

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

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization
by Michael O’sullivan
Published 28 May 2019

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

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

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

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank
by John Tamny
Published 30 Apr 2016

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

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INDEX Adapt (Harford), 32, 64–65 The Age of Reagan (Hayward), 49, 169 Allison, John, 119, 152, 172–73 Altig, David, 156 Amazon, 97–98, 108, 125, 143, 155 Ambassador Hotel, 34, 35–36 Apple Computer, 30–31, 125, 143 Apple Music, 9–10 Austin, Texas, 123, 148 Austrian School of economics, 79, 87, 88–89, 90, 91–95, 113–14, 141 See also von Mises, Ludwig Bain Capital, 126 Baker Hughes, 73 Baltimore, Maryland, 135, 139–40, 143 Baltimore Ravens, 17 The Baltimore Sun, 135 banking bank cash reserve and capital requirements, 98–102 federal deposit insurance, 101–2 housing boom and “easy credit,” 113–22 inability of banks to multiply money and credit, 86–92, 96 insolvent banks and necessity of the Fed, 164–65 interbank lending rates, 114–16, 156–58 lending practices, 86–90, 98–102, 109–10 necessity of traditional banks, 105–12 proposed Glass-Steagall reintroduction, 102–3 and Wall Street, 126, 129–31 Bank of America, 89, 103, 108, 120 Bank of Bird-in-Hand, 111 Bank of Japan, 152, 159 Bartley, Robert, 70, 71, 72 Bartley, Robert L., 157–58 The Battle of Bretton Woods (Steil), 95, 169 Bear Stearns, 120 Beatty, Warren, 23–24, 28 Beckworth, David, 138–39 Berkshire Hathaway, 62, 85 Bernanke, Ben, 41–47, 72, 106, 128, 149, 154, 164 Bezos, Jeff, 59, 97–98, 150 Biden, Joe, 59 billion-dollar “unicorn” companies, 28, 148 Biography of the Dollar (Karmin), 100 Bitcoin, 144 Blinder, Alan, 1 Bloomberg news organization, 42 Blumenthal, Michael, 117, 170 Bonnie & Clyde (film), 23 Brady, Tom, 16 Bretton Woods monetary conference, 95, 169 Brookes, Warren, 49, 50, 69, 72, 97 Brown, James, 25 Buffett, Warren, 59, 62, 78, 85, 150 Burns, Arthur, 169, 170 Bush, George W., 71, 72–73, 118–19, 121, 171 cab fares during periods of heavy demand, 11–12 Candy, John, 22 Capital City (Kessner), 30 capitalism credit and crowdsourcing, 110 failure as feature of, 58, 89, 100, 125 and filling of unmet needs, 112, 179 turning scarcity into abundance, 53–54, 81 car companies, 56–57 car manufacturing process, 65–66 Carroll, Pete, 18–20 Carter, Jimmy, 117, 170 Cassel, Gustav, 119 Cato Institute, 135 The CEO Tightrope (Trammell), 123–24 The Changed Face of Banking (Smith), 111, 129 Chinese economy, 94, 96, 118, 135–36, 137, 138 Chinese stock market, 152–53 Citadel hedge fund, 41, 42, 43 Citigroup, 128 Cleveland, Ohio, 137–38 Clinton, Bill, 51–52, 71, 72, 171 Clinton, Hillary, 48, 51–52, 59 coaching and recruiting of college athletes, 15–21, 78–79 Cochrane, John, 102 computer company failures, 57 Congress.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data
by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge
Published 27 Feb 2018

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

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

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

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

In 2014, Gavin Wood, a co-founder of the platform Ethereum, argued that “post-Snowden” it had become clear that it was dangerous to entrust our information to “large organizations and governments” that “routinely attempt to stretch and overstep their authority.” Bitcoin was released as an open-source program in early 2009 by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto (possibly a pseudonym for an individual or group), who said that in the wake of the 2008 crash, he wanted to create a secure currency that would be impervious to manipulation by bankers, politicians, and national monetary policies. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies gained popularity as bitterness over bank bailouts grew and investors welcomed the idea of skirting government and Wall Street control.

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Here’s How Future Polkadot Founder Gavin Wood Explained It in 2014,” Yahoo, Jan. 4, 2022, yahoo.com/​video/​3-future-polkadot-founder-gavin-155942673.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Bitcoin was released: Joshua Davis, “The Crypto-currency,” The New Yorker, Oct. 3, 2011, newyorker.com/​magazine/​2011/​10/​10/​the-crypto-currency. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT spectacular crash of the cryptocurrency exchange: Paul R. La Monica, “Crypto Crash and Gold Sell-Off Show There’s No Place for Investors to Hide,” CNN Business, Nov. 10, 2022, cnn.com/​2022/​11/​10/​investing/​bitcoin-crypto-ftx-gold. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “associations of a thousand” kinds: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans.

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To restore the original spirit of the web and sidestep the tentacles of government and Big Tech, Berners-Lee has proposed a new platform called Solid that would allow individuals to retain ownership and control of their personal information by placing it in secure PODS (personal online data stores); companies would have to request (or be granted) access to that information but could not data mine that information or sell it. Other proponents of a decentralized web or Web3 are proposing a model based on the sort of peer-to-peer technology employed by blockchain (which powers bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies). In theory, such a decentralized architecture would allow users to bypass the control of tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, which currently act as intermediaries, and would also make it more difficult for Big Tech and governments to collect our data and control what we see.

Angrynomics
by Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth
Published 15 Jun 2020

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

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

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

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives
by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Published 22 Apr 2013

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

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

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

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Mar 2014

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

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

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

Engineering Security
by Peter Gutmann

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

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

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

Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History
by Ben Mezrich
Published 6 Nov 2023

The more chaos they could sow, the more bitcoin ended up in cold storage. It was not a business without risks. Creating fake social media accounts to spread comments-for-hire, targeted opinions, and misinformation skated close to crossing any number of laws affecting commerce, advertising, and personal libel; certainly, some of his more controversial campaigns fell into the category of outright fraud. But being a Russian national, operating out of a place like Kazakhstan, had its advantages. It was unlikely his company would ever face any real legal ramifications, especially considering the amount of bitcoin he’d spread to the right people in the judicial and enforcement spheres.

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There was another window set halfway up the doors, its single pane of grimy glass offering a distorted view of the rows of young people sitting at their desks. It wasn’t really rubles on his mind. Nobody in his business worked in fiat currency anymore. The job he’d just agreed to would involve a deposit of bitcoin into a numbered crypto account, which would eventually be transferred to a cold storage device he kept in his apartment in the nicer section of Aktobe, right in the center of the McDonald’s delivery zone. A much more sophisticated process than the old days back in Moscow, when it was suitcases of cash dropped off in the coatroom of a fancy hotel, or duffel bags left in the trunk of a Lada.

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But Fyodr didn’t really care who was behind the job, or what their intentions might be. In a matter of minutes, his team would begin concocting fake accounts—and soon after, over a period of less than three hours, barrage the target platform with a storm of comments fifty thousand deep. In this case, for whatever reason, the client wanted chaos. And as long as the client had bitcoin to spend— Fyodr and his team would happily give them chaos. PART TWO “To anyone who I’ve offended [with my Twitter posts], I just want to say I reinvented electric cars, and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” —ELON MUSK “The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power
by Michael A. Cusumano , Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie
Published 6 May 2019

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

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

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

Getting Started With Ledger
by Rolf Schröder

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

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine
Published 6 Feb 2018

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

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

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

Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook: Top 30 Autoimmune Paleo Recipes Revealed ! (The Blokehead Success Series)
by The Blokehead
Published 11 Dec 2014

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

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat
by John P. Carlin and Garrett M. Graff
Published 15 Oct 2018

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

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

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

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right
by Angela Nagle
Published 6 Jun 2017

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

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

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

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You
by Sangeet Paul Choudary , Marshall W. van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker
Published 27 Mar 2016

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

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

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

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth
by Dan McCrum
Published 15 Jun 2022

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

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

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

The Knowledge Illusion
by Steven Sloman
Published 10 Feb 2017

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

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

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

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism
by John Elkington
Published 6 Apr 2020

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

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

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

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy
by Tom Slee
Published 18 Nov 2015

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

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

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

Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms
by Mark Spitznagel
Published 9 Aug 2021

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

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

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Index A Accuracy: in comparing SPX and safe haven portfolios, 135 with insurance, 93 with Kelly betting strategy, 86 risk mitigation strategy for, 196 and safe haven frontier, 186 Ad hoc hypotheses, 21 Affirming the consequent, 21, 163 Agnostic investing, 144–148 Agriculture: chemical industrial, 77, 154–155 regenerative, 77 Airplane trim tabs, 158 Alpha safe haven: cost‐effectiveness analysis of, 138–142 CTA trend‐following as, 175–178, 182–184 as dominated strategy, 139–140 and median CAGR of SPX portfolio, 132–135 in no‐crash bootstrap, 145–148 portfolio effect when mitigating systematic risk, 128 as prototype, 105–109, 120 reshuffling returns in, 142, 143 risk‐mitigation scoreboard for, 131 standardizing degree of risk in, 134 Also sprach Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 58 Amor fati, 199–201, 204 Aristotle: on blessing and happiness, 111 and deductive reasoning, 18 essentialist thinking of, 100–102, 111 on first principles, 13 as first real scientist, 101 naturalist tools of, 100 on probability, 23 on the whole, 124 Arithmetic average, geometric average vs., 40–41 Arithmetic average returns: arithmetic cost as change in, 136 for CTA returns, 176–178 as ensemble average, 75 geometric average returns vs., 40–42, 53–54, 77, 94–95 with insurance, 88–90, 94–95, 188 and Kelly optimal bet size, 84, 85 and median, 74 with Nietzsche's demon, 66–70 in Petersburg merchant trade, 48 in Petersburg wager, 34–35 reductionist understanding of, 125 of SPX portfolio with safe havens, 131–132 on US Treasuries, 172 when betting less of your stack, 79 Arithmetic cost: as change in arithmetic average returns, 136 in cost‐effectiveness analysis, 136–142 for CTA returns, 176–178 and efficiency, 202 for gold, 181 and Kelly optimal bet size, 84–86, 94 in no‐crash bootstrap, 146 in Petersburg merchant trade, 47 for real‐world safe havens, 184 and safe haven frontier, 186 tradeoff between geometric effect and, 152 when betting less of your stack, 79 when reshuffling returns, 143 Ars Conjectandi (Jacob Bernoulli), 30 Austrian School, 37 Auto racing, 155–157 B Babylonians, 40 Balanced portfolio, 172 Basel, Switzerland, 29 Basis risk, 169 Bastiat, Frédéric, 153–154 Bayesians, 24 Belief, 61 Bernoulli, Daniel: admonition and imperative of, 195 background of, 30–31 and concavity of curve, 54–56 emolumentum medium concept of, 35–39, 198 and geometric average, 39–42 and geometric mean maximization criterion, 81 Latané influenced by, 80 and math of compounding, 52–54 original Saint Petersburg Paradox, 31–34 Paris Academy Grand Prizes for, 31 second Saint Petersburg Paradox, 43–52, 115 Bernoulli, Jacob, 29–30, 67, 70 Bernoulli, Johann, 29–31 Bernoulli, Nicolas, 31–33 Bernoulli function, 37–39, 52 Bernoulli principle, 31 Bernoulli's expected value (BEV): in emolumentum, 38–39 as geometric average, 40–42 with Nietzsche's demon, 73 in Petersburg merchant trade, 48–49 Bias: hindsight, 113 opportunity cost neglect, 153 Biology: classification of living things in, 100–104 phenotypes in, 105 Bitcoin, 181, 182 Black swans, 16 Book value, 104 Bootstrap methodology: checking for blindspots in, 144–148 comparing 25 SPX returns with 25 safe haven returns, 128–132 to counteract naïve empiricism, 127 higher wealth in, 162–163 as nonparametric estimation, 128 for real‐world safe havens, see Real‐world safe havens reshuffling 25 SPX returns and 25 safe haven returns, 142–144 “with replacement,” 128–129 Brachistochrone problem, 29–30 Breiman, Leo, 80 Buffett, Warren: on buying during/after stock market crashes, 149–150 on diversification, 115–116 on losing money, 56 value investing by, 104 Bürgi (Swiss clockmaker), 40 C CAGR, see Compound annual growth rate Calculus of variations, 30 Capital base, 77 Cash, 170–175, 182–184 Casino, 23–24, 30–31, 65, 81–82, 87, 194 you are not a, 76, 82, 200 Cassandras, 111 CEA, see Cost‐effectiveness analysis Central banks, distortions built up by, 11 Change, within species, 102 Chemical industrial agriculture, 154–155 “Cigar butt” companies, 104 Classification: of living things, 100–102 of safe havens, see Taxonomy of safe havens Clinical trials, 129–136 Commodities shipping paradox, 43–52 Commodity trading advisor (CTA) strategies, 108, 175–178, 182–184 Complacency, 114 Compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You
by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Published 2 Apr 2018

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

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

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following
by Gabrielle Bluestone
Published 5 Apr 2021

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

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

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

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment
by Sangeet Paul Choudary
Published 14 Sep 2015

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

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

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

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
by Nadia Eghbal
Published 3 Aug 2020

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

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

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us
by James Ball
Published 19 Aug 2020

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.

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

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

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World
by Dambisa Moyo
Published 3 May 2021

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

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

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

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

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

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

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

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up
by Philip N. Howard
Published 27 Apr 2015

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

…

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

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

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

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

…

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

…

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

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties
by Paul Collier
Published 4 Dec 2018

Marxists, who in practice imposed the most state-centric organization of society ever attempted, have a very different ostensible goal: the state is supposed to ‘wither away’. But the anti-state ideology currently most influential is that of the Libertarians of Silicon Valley. According to them, bitcoin will supplant the state provision of money as users walk away from official currencies. The supermen who own the new e-utilities will each individually determine how best they are used, ignoring or defeating state-imposed regulation. Globally enabled person-to-person connectivity will supplant the spatially bounded society of the nation state.

…

In principle, we could re-engineer our political units to be non-spatial. Presumably some of the techno-geeks of Silicon Valley have such a future as a gleam in the eye: the opt-in, opt-out polity with each individual free to choose regardless of where they happen to be living. Each could have its own currency – to each its own bitcoin. Each could have its own tax rates, welfare benefits, health scheme; there are schemes for floating islands outside any national jurisdiction. Does this sound attractive? If so, try to think what would be likely to happen. Rich people would be likely to opt into those artificial political entities that offered low tax rates.

…

A shell company, established by highly skilled lawyers in a metropolis – typically London or New York – is one whose true ownership is concealed. If such a company opens a bank account in a secrecy haven jurisdiction, the money deposited is shielded from scrutiny by a double wall of obfuscation. This structure has become a major means of protecting corrupt and criminal money from detection. Bitcoin has recently added a further option. As with trade itself, for the potential gains from corporate globalization to be realized, public policy must react. In practice, it hasn’t: the globalization of companies has not been matched by the globalization of regulation. The capacity to tax and regulate remains firmly lodged at the national level.

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything
by Kelly Weill
Published 22 Feb 2022

FEIC founder Robbie Davidson told me he lost money on the 2017 conference, which was sponsored by an obscure wood-burning stove company and a brand of “energy pills” that contained two coffee cups’ worth of caffeine per capsule. (Davidson’s previous employment seems to have been a get-rich-quick scheme in which he raised awareness for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin by driving a Kia Soul covered in Bitcoin decals around the country, trying to get people to buy raffle tickets for the car.) He said he broke even on the 2018 conference, which hosted a large hall of vendors selling conspiracy goods and attracted some six hundred believers, all of whom paid between $199 and $349 for tickets to the two-day extravaganza.

…

He and a handful of others from this secret police force had turned rogue after discovering the wonders that lay at the earth’s edge, and now he was leading expeditions to the end of the world to share the truth of what lay beyond. For his trouble, of course, he needed funding. Specifically $1 million in hard-to-track Bitcoin payments. “You might think that’s a lot of money, but it’s just the cost of ten Tesla Model S cars,” he told viewers in a YouTube clip. “People spend, collectively, way more than this on personal luxuries.” He planned to earn his million by selling ten seats on his expedition for $100,000 each. He never showed his face in his videos, and the avatar he used on Facebook and Twitter had been stolen from a stock-image website.

…

If the swastika is a chart-topping single, the sonnenrad is a deep cut: less mainstream but well known among true fans. Mike’s Big Dipper explanation was particularly obscure; I had to Google it to discern what the hell he was talking about, and even then I only got a few hits, largely from the notorious troll forum 4chan, as well as from a blog called Daily Bitcoin News, where a blogger explained why various Nazi symbols were, in his opinion, actually not racist. I moved on to the next vendor table, where I chatted with the saleswoman about the Flat Earth cover-up. I asked her, Who was bothering to conceal the shape of the earth? “The CIA, the FBI,” she told me.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal
Published 21 Feb 2017

With so much experience in self-organizing”: Peter Hirshberg, From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond ([N.p.]: Off the Common Books, 2014). 22. It’s for this reason that Rosie von Lila: Author interview with Rosie von Lila, July 25, 2016. 23. Burning Man demonstration projects”: Washoe Tribe installing solar panels at seven sites,” Record-Courier, June 8, 2015; “Stained Glass ‘Space Whale’ to Blow Minds at Burning Man,” Reno-Gazette Journal, November 13, 2015; “How a Chat App for Burning Man Turned into a Tool for Revolution,” AdWeek, March 25, 2015. 24. Burning Man didn’t invent the festival: Hirshberg, From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond. 25.

…

While Burners without Borders and Beer for Data mark two of the earliest examples of festival principles being exported into crisis zones, they’re unlikely to be the last. “With so much experience in self-organizing their own municipal infrastructure21 in a hostile environment,” former Apple executive Peter Hirshberg wrote in his book From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond, “Burners are particularly skilled at functioning during chaotic crises when normal services—running water, electricity, communication channels and sanitation systems—are not available. Burners don’t just survive in such an environment; they create culture, art and community there.”

…

See Teafaerie ESADE Business School (Spain), 105–6, 112 Esalen, 77, 78–79, 81, 82, 93, 168, 190, 192 Esalen (Kripal), 79 eschatothesia, 204 EST (Erhard Seminars Training), 79–80, 81 everyday lives: dissemination of innovation in, 174–78 “everything/nothing” dialectic, 217 evolution, 117–19, 134, 215 “experience economy,” 195 Extreme Technology Challenge (XTC), 172–73 facial expressions: and neurobiology, 96–100 Fadiman, James, 49–50, 126 Falling Whistles (Summit project), 171 fats, 212–14 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 183, 192 Fermi, Enrico, 131 Ferriss, Tim, 50, 159 Fifty Shades of Grey (James), 85 film: and Altered States Economy, 30–31 Firechat, 167 The First Earth Battalion Operations Manual (Channon), 190, 191 flow in advertising, 195 and Altered States Economy, 29 benefits of, 43, 74–75 and Carhart-Harris research, 126 categories of, 23–24 and consciousness, 4–5 Csikszentmihalyi research about, 42, 43 definition of, 4, 23 and Google, 27, 28 Navy SEALs and, 25 and neurobiology, 108 and neurotheology, 108 neurotransmitters in, 42 and Pale of the Body, 57 psychology and, 90 and sex, 85 and solving wicked problems, 46–50 and technology, 74–75, 136, 149 transcranial magnetic stimulation and, 48 See also Flow Dojo; Flow Genome Project; group flow; specific topic Flow (Csikszentmihalyi), 42 Flow Dojo, 148–53 Flow Genome Project, 4–6, 46, 135 Fly Ranch (Burning Man site), 163 food industry, 212–14 Ford, Henry, 80 Fortune magazine: and Task Force Delta, 190 France caves in, 140, 143 churches in, 141 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 192 French Revolution, 68 From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond (Hirshberg), 167 Funktion-One (Andrews company), 139, 140, 142, 143, 157 future Channon’s views about, 190 predicting the, 96 and timelessness, 41 See also precognition G Pause (Google mindfulness training), 27–28 gambling, 30 gamma waves, 47–48 Garcia, Jerry, 189 Gates, Bill, 205 genetics, 133 Geneva Convention, 182 geography: and pharmacology, 118, 119, 123, 134, 153 Ginsberg, Allen, 77 God Helmut, 59 Google and altering mental states to enhance performance, 6, 23, 27–28, 32 and Burning Man, 19–22, 27 CEO hiring at, 18–22 communal vocational ecstasy at, 20, 21, 27–28 and ecstasis, 18–22, 23, 25 Flow Dojo and, 149–50, 152 and flow states, 27, 28 and marketing, 197 mindfulness training at, 27–28 See also Brin, Sergey; Page, Larry Google Doodle, 19–20 Googleplex (Mountain View), 6, 23, 27–28 Gore, Al, 35 Graham, Martha, 47 Grateful Dead, 189 Great Awakening, 179 Greece churches in, 141 revolution in, 1–2 Green Berets, U.S., 190–91 Gregg, Melissa, 64–65 Griffiths, Roland, 59, 87–88, 120 Grof, Stanislav, 23, 67, 124 group flow, 11, 23, 103–4, 105–6, 138, 147, 171 Group Genius (Sawyer), 11 gut instinct, 98 Gutenberg, Johannes, 73–74, 75 Hagel, John, 43 hallucinogens, 50, 116.

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves
by Hiawatha Bray
Published 31 Mar 2014

At regular intervals the user would top up the account by adding more money. This could be done at a bank or retail store, but Blumberg prefers the idea of using an anonymous “electronic cash” service like the controversial and little-used Bitcoin system. If an EZ Pass service accepted Bitcoin, a user could add value to the account from any computer, in a manner that would leave behind no trace of his or her identity.30 Aside from the fact that hardly anyone uses Bitcoin, it is difficult to see how this EZ Pass revision would pass muster with police and Homeland Security agencies. They have grown accustomed to using EZ Pass to track down lawbreakers and are not likely to favor a less useful redesign of the system.

…

See Celestial navigation AT&T, 114, 116, 117, 126, 134, 199, 204 AtlasBook, 117 Atomic bombs, 40, 65–66, 79, 153, 154, 157, 159 Atomic clocks, 20, 94–96, 97–98, 100–102, 108, 113, 119 Aubin, Mark, 177 Australia, 17, 140 Automatic Location Identification (ALI) database, 90 Barlow, John Perry, 193–194 Bar-Zeev, Avi, 177 Belgium, 34, 165 Bell Labs, 162 Bellinger, Patrick, 57 Bellini, Ettore, 24 Bellini-Tosi system, 26, 29 Bible, 223–224 Bing Maps, 188 Bitcoin, 227 BlackBerry, 117, 135 Blair, Dennis, 163 Blumberg, Andrew, 227–228 Bohnenberg, Johann Gottlieb Friedrich, 49–50 Bond, Kit, 163 Boot, Henry, 39 Borchers, Bob, 133–134, 135 Boykow, Johann Maria, 64–65 Boyle, William, 162 Brin, Sergei, 178 British Air Ministry, 38 Broadcom, 136, 205 Burke, Arleigh, 79 Bush, George H.

Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth
by Nick Maggiulli
Published 15 May 2022

Asset (1997–2020) Average-In Underperformance Over 12 Months Percentage of 12-Month Periods Where Average-In Underperforms Bitcoin (2014–2020) 96% 65% U.S. Treasury Index 1% 72% Gold 3% 60% Developed Market Stocks 2% 60% Emerging Market Stocks 4% 57% 60/40 U.S. Stock/Bond Portfolio 2% 77% S&P 500 Total Return 3% 74% For example, the table shows us that for an investor Averaging-In to Bitcoin in any 12-month period from 1997 to 2020, while also holding their cash in Treasury bills, the average underperformance against Buy Now was 96% and this strategy of Averaging-In underperformed Buy Now 65% of the time.

…

The table shows how much the Average-In strategy has underperformed Buy Now over all 12-month periods from 1997–2020. Asset (1997–2020) Average-In Underperformance Over 12 Months Percentage of 12-Month Periods Where Average-In Underperforms Bitcoin (2014–2020) 96% 67% U.S. Treasury Index 2% 82% Gold 4% 63% Developed Market Stocks 3% 62% Emerging Market Stocks 5% 60% 60/40 U.S. Stock/Bond Portfolio 3% 82% S&P 500 Total Return 4% 76% U.S.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World
by Jevin D. West and Carl T. Bergstrom
Published 3 Aug 2020

In general, we advocate that a percentage change be reported with respect to the starting value. In this case the starting value was $19,211, so we say bitcoin lost 34 percent of its value over those thirteen days. This can be a subtle issue, however. One would say that bitcoin lost 34 percent of its value over this period, because when we talk about a loss in value, the starting value is the appropriate comparison. But we would also say that bitcoin was apparently overvalued by 52 percent at the start of December 2017, because when we talk about something being overvalued, the appropriate baseline for comparison is our current best estimate of value.

…

Percentages can be particularly slippery when we use them to compare two quantities. We typically talk about percentage differences: “a 40 percent increase,” “22 percent less fat,” etc. But what is this a percentage of? The lower value? The higher value? This distinction matters. In the month of December 2017, the value of the bitcoin digital currency first surged to $19,211 per unit on the seventeenth of the month, and then plummeted to a low of $12,609 per unit thirteen days later. This is a decrease of $6,602 per unit. But what was the percentage change? Should we say it was 34 percent (because $6,602 is 34.3 percent of $19,221), or is it 52 percent (because $6,602 is 52.4 percent of $12,609)?

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work
by Sarah Kessler
Published 11 Jun 2018

Marketing theoretically would be cheaper using social media and digital advertising. The digital infrastructure for a ride-hailing app or a task marketplace, unlike a brick-and-mortar building, could be shared between several different companies. And the emerging blockchain technology, the decentralized ledger-keeping system behind the success of Bitcoin, promises to make transactions between people easier and less costly by making them incredibly secure and transparent without intermediaries. Still, Trebor was often asked: Could a self-funded cooperative really compete with venture-backed startups like Uber? The lobby of Uber’s San Francisco headquarters featured a ceiling-high world map outlined on a black wall, with blue dots sprinkled over most of it, to show where Uber’s service was available.

…

And yes, he’d found real estate gurus online, but none of them had asked him for money the way that Kevin Trudeau had or requested a percentage of each of his transactions, the way Uber had. A $25,000 lawsuit settlement payment from a former employer allowed him to buy his second house and start collecting rent. His plan was to buy one house a year, until he could become “financially free.” In case that didn’t work, he’d started investing in Bitcoin. Donald Trump’s election, Abe believed, boded well for him. Abe had heard that the new president would pass laws beneficial to real estate tycoons. And he liked Trump’s intentions to cut taxes on corporations. The way he saw it, both of these things would benefit him and his mission to become a millionaire.

…

Accenture (professional services company) AFL AFL-CIO Airbnb (hospitality service) Amazon net sales See also Mechanical Turk Arise (customer service company) Artsicle (art rental service) A-Ryde (ride-hailing app) Aspen Institute Atlantic, The (magazine) Attenborough, David automated cars automation baby boom generation Backchannel (tech website) Bahá’í BBS (bulletin board system) Belsky, Scott Bernstein, Michael Better Business Bureau Bezos, Jeff Big Brother (reality television program) Bitcoin Black Car Fund blockchain technology Bloomberg (magazine) Bloomberg, Michael Borzi, Phyllis C. Bravo Brio Restaurant Group Brustein, AJ Bureau of Labor Statistics Burton, Diane Bush, Jeb Camp, Garrett Campbell, Harry Care.com (marketplace for independent caregivers) CB Insights Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, The Chia, Stan churn (customer attrition) Clark, Shelby cleaning services churn (customer attrition) See Handy; Homejoy; Managed by Q Clinton, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton Global Initiative collective action.

CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans
by Henry T. Greely
Published 22 Jan 2021

The consensus (but not unanimous) view is that women, on the other hand, actually make all their eggs before they are born but recruit some to maturity each month during their fertile years. 9. Antonio Regalado, “The DIY Designer Baby Project Funded by Bitcoin,” MIT Technology Review, February 1, 2019, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612838/the-transhumanist-diy-designer-baby-funded-with-bitcoin. Chapter 3 1. A good source for an understandable description of CRISPR and a history of its discovery and development can be found in Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).

…

On the other hand, in February 2019 Antonio Regalado published a piece about another person who was planning to do germline gene editing, not on embryos but through injecting CRISPR into men’s testicles. Antonio Regalado, “The DIY Designer Baby Project Funded with Bitcoin,” MIT Technology Review, February 1, 2019, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612838/the-transhumanist-diy-designer-baby-funded-with-bitcoin. A quick review of the article shows that this effort should not engender serious concern. 53. Ed Yong, “Chinese Project Probes the Genetics of Genius,” Nature (May 14, 2013), https://www.nature.com/news/chinese-project-probes-the-genetics-of-genius-1.12985. 54.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
by Thomas L. Friedman
Published 22 Nov 2016

Earlier this month, cybercriminals attacked a hospital in Los Angeles, then demanded payment in bitcoin to let the hospital regain access to their computers. It’s the most high-profile case yet of cyber-extortion using software known as ransomware. The attack on Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center effectively knocked it offline. As a result, patients had to be diverted to other hospitals, medical records were kept using pen and paper, and staff resorted to communicating by fax. The attackers demanded 9,000 bitcoins—around $3.6 million. After a two-week stand-off, the hospital yesterday paid out $17,000 … “Ransomware has really exploded in the last couple of years,” says Steve Santorelli, a former UK police detective who now works for Team Cymru, a threat intelligence firm based in Florida.

…

“These guys are crazy sophisticated,” says Jake Williams, the founder of cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec … Ross Anderson, a security researcher at the University of Cambridge, says bitcoin has helped cybercriminals to access payments without being caught. “In the old days, collecting ransom was really hard. The police would just put a radio tracker in the carpet bag full of £20 notes, and they would always get the guy. Now it’s possible to collect ransoms by bitcoin. Lots of people are doing it.” Last story: In a February 9, 2016, worldwide threat assessment report to the Senate Armed Services Committee, James Clapper, the U.S. director of national intelligence, added gene editing—for the first time—to a list of threats posed by “weapons of mass destruction and proliferation.”

…

Slowly but surely people are using PayPal to do away with cash. Like all big financial players, PayPal is experimenting with the emerging technology known as “blockchain” for validating and relaying global transactions through multiple computers. Blockchain, which is most famously used by the virtual currency Bitcoin, “is a way of enabling absolute trust between two parties making a financial transaction,” explained Schulman. “It uses Internet protocols to make the transaction go around any nation-state in a way that is visible to all the participants and goes beyond all middlemen and regulatory bodies—and therefore has the promise of lower costs.”

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

–W “I’d rather give an understated good recommendation: be interdisciplinary . . . the interactions between [fields] tend to very often inform strategic and protocol decisions.” Vitalik Buterin TW: @VitalikButerin Reddit: /u/vbuterin VITALIK BUTERIN is the creator of Ethereum. He first discovered blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies through Bitcoin in 2011, and was immediately excited by the technology and its potential. He co-founded Bitcoin magazine in September 2011, and after two and a half years looking at what the existing blockchain technology and applications had to offer, wrote the Ethereum white paper in November 2013. He now leads Ethereum’s research team, working on future versions of the Ethereum protocol.

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H., 343 Alwaleed bin Talal Foundation, 362 Amazon, 101 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 324 America Online (AOL), 101, 345, 346 Anderson, Chris, 41, 407–9 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, 336 AngelList, 31 Aoki, Steve, 519–25 Aoki Foundation, 522 AOL, 101, 345, 346 A Plus, 250 Appiah, Kwame, 57 Apple AirPods headphones, 498 Apple Music, 37 Apple Pencil, 25 Arnold, John, 373–74 Aroma Housewares AHP-303/CHP-303 Single Hot Plate, 386 Aronofsky, Darren, 398–400 Ashley, Maurice, 368–70 Asna, 82 Aspen Institute, 324 Attia, Peter, 514–18 Audible, 133, 245 Authenticity, 81, 273, 344, 370, 530 Ayasdi, 200 B Babauta, Leo, 236–38 Back Buddy, 83 Ballmer, Steve, 59 Balsbaugh, Brian, 533–34 Bar complex, 466 Barkley, Gnarls, 204 Bartók, Béla, 341 Basecamp, 203 Bashō, Matsuo, 275 Bazaarvoice, 64 Be a STAR, 509 The Beastie Boys, 239 Beats Music, 37 Beats Solo headphones, 168–69 Behance, 459, 461–62 Bell, Mark, 309–12 Bell, Mike, 310 Belmont, Veronica, 100–103 Belsky, Scott, 459–62 Beltrame, Lorenzo, 563, 564 Benchmark, 459 Benioff, Marc, 445–50 Bergeron, Ben, 421–23 Bezold, Michael, 369 Big questions, 565 Birdhouse Skateboards, 298 Bitcoin, 153, 382, 507 Bitcoin magazine, 153 BitGold, 382 BitTorrent, Inc., 404 Black List, 277 Blaine, David, 448 Blakely, Sara, 352 Blinkist app, 301 Blockstack, 468, 492 Blogger, 401, 402 Blue Origin, 470 BMG Entertainment, 289 Bodily awareness, 552–53 in decision making, 61, 274 in exercise, 316, 426, 490 in handling overwhelm/lack of focus, 4, 238, 274 in meditation, 559, 560 with music, 57 Body Back Company, 83 Boeree, Liv, 300–304 Bohr, Niels, 39 Bono, 288 Boone, Amelia, xvii–xviii, 127–30 Bose noise-canceling earphones, 158 Botmakers.org, 101 Botwiki.org, 101 Boyle, Hal, 182, 184 Brach, Tara, 540 Brain.fm app, 168–69 Brand, Stewart, 332–34 Branson, Richard, 78, 451 Breakthrough Energy Ventures, 373 Breathing techniques, 99 to create nasal apnea sequence, 338 heart rate variability, 189, 198, 430 in meditation, 89, 559–60 when making decisions, 124 when stressed/overwhelmed/unfocused, 138, 144, 238, 274, 415, 438–39, 491 Bridgewater Associates, 321 Brown, Brené, 232–34, 356 B-School, 451 Bucky neck pillow, 509 Buddhism, 237, 270, 272, 285 Buffett, Warren, 204, 205, 209, 321 BuiltLean, 290 Burry, Mike, 62 Busyness, 26 Buterin, Vitalik, 153–55 Butterfly Petr Korbel table tennis racket, 330 C Cain, Susan, 10–13, 41 Call, Jon, 385–88 Callaway, 284 Cameron, James, 275 Cameron, William Bruce, 206 Campbell, Bill, 65 Campbell, Joseph, 16, 112, 335 Canfield, Jack, 432 Cantley, Lewis, 107–11 Carmichael, Christopher, 259 Carrey, Jim, 138 Carroll, Pete, 412 Carse, James P., 403, 540 Carter, Maverick, 79 Cartier, 75 Case, Jean, 345 Case, Steve, 345–48 Case Foundation, 345 Centaurus Energy, 373 Center for Applied Rationality, 163 The Center for Public Integrity, 211 Centre of Entrepreneurship, 451 Chadha, Richa, 85–90 Chainani, Soman, 70–74 Chanel No. 5, 87 Charell, Ralph, 156 Charitable giving, 202, 262–63, 321, 324, 345 Charyn, Jerome, 330 Chegg, 64 Chesterton, G.

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The phrase and concept of “smart contracts” were developed by Nick with the goal of bringing what he calls the “highly evolved” practices of contract law and practice to the design of electronic commerce protocols between strangers on the Internet. Nick also designed Bit Gold, which many consider the precursor to Bitcoin. * * * What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, explains more about life (including human behavior and myself) than anything else I’ve read. What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”?

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees
by Ben Mezrich
Published 6 Sep 2021

WallStreetBets wasn’t populated by professionals—it was mostly amateurs, gamblers, hell, they called themselves “retards,” “apes,” and “degenerates,” terms that disturbed Gabe, and that he would never use. Some of them appeared to be doing real due diligence—but did they really believe they could dislodge a ticker from a company, somehow turn a stock into some sort of token, like bitcoin or doge? In the deeper corners of Gabe’s mind, maybe he knew that what was spurring him on wasn’t entirely math, but also his competitive nature. He’d never put it like this himself, but plenty of others in the industry would: Gabe was a winner—and these little shits on their couches tossing off angry memes onto Reddit were losers.

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A freshly bored tunnel fitted with electrodynamic suspension rails and linear induction motors, as well as a partially constructed Hyperloop capsule, complete with inlet fan and axial compressor. Elon Musk, CEO and chief techno-king of Tesla; CEO, CTO, and chief designer of SpaceX; dogecoin enthusiast; bitcoin proselytizer; sometime richest man in the world; and the former president of the Galactic Federation of Planets, was moving fast, his legs churning at what felt like a thousand RPMs, as he tore through the twelve-foot-high, mile-long Hyperloop test track. He was breathing hard, fighting for air in the reduced pressure environment of the underground tube, but the state-of-the-art neurolink imbedded in his cerebellum instantly compensated for the lack of oxygen, firing messages down his neural pathways to continuously modify his circulatory and respiratory needs.

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About the Author Ben Mezrich is the New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires (adapted by Aaron Sorkin into the David Fincher film The Social Network) and Bringing Down the House (adapted into the No. 1 box office hit film 21), as well as many other bestselling books. His books have sold over six million copies worldwide. Mezrich’s forthcoming novel, The Midnight Ride, will be published by GCP in early 2022. Also by Ben Mezrich Nonfiction Bitcoin Billionaires Woolly The 37th Parallel Once Upon a Time in Russia Straight Flush Sex on the Moon The Accidental Billionaires Rigged Busting Vegas Ugly Americans Bringing Down the House/21 Standalone Novels Seven Wonders The Carrier (as Holden Scott) Skin Skeptic (as Holden Scott) Fertile Ground Reaper Threshold Middle Grade Charlie Numbers and the Woolly Mammoth (with Tonya Mezrich) Charlie Numbers and the Man in the Moon (with Tonya Mezrich) Bringing Down the Mouse Novellas Q

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose
by Nik Halik and Garrett B. Gunderson
Published 5 Mar 2018

Property leases or rentals. Ongoing income from land or building agreements. Farm or ranch land leases may provide income with little or no work from the owner. Rental property typically requires some involvement by the owner — warehouses or storage units require less, residential housing more. Earning Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency with shares in a mining pool. Frequency of Work: Monitor and maintain. After an agreement is executed there can be an ongoing stream of income. Then the owner has to do little work. Physical Presence: Rarely required. Owning a Business but Not Managing ItNet income from a business that you own fully or partially, but that is managed by someone else.

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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.

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See sharing economy accountability, and healthy inner circle action active income, Active/Passive Income Scale and cash flow and entrepreneurship and freedom and Growth investments and income growth and investment resources and Momentum investments Passive Income Score Sheet and passive vs. active income streams as trap using to fund lifestyle and wealth creation step See also income; passive income Active Income Ratio (AIR) Active/Passive Income Scale administrative fees adventure advertising, and materialism advertising revenues, as entrepreneurial opportunity Airbnb, as entrepreneurial opportunity The Alaska Life (blog) Alexander the Great AliExpress.com alkaline water, and energy amplification amateurism, and purpose Amazon American Psychological Association AnnualCreditReport.com arbitrage opportunities, and Airbnb artificial intelligence Ashe, Arthur auctions.godaddy.com auto insurance, as protective expense automobile expenses, as tax deduction B Bailie, Gil Bank Strategy Bannister, Roger Berkshire Hathaway Berry, Bertice Bitcoin Bittrex.com body energy boom/bust cycles boredom Bradbury breaks, and energy amplification Buffett, Warren business ownership, and economic cycles vs. self-employment business ownership (not managing), and Active/Passive Scale business ownership (working and managing), and Active/Passive Scale business startups, as Momentum investment opportunities buzzsumo.com C Calls to Action, Passive Income Ratio when to begin using Your 5 Day Weekend Plan Contract Your Debt Free Plan Your Entrepreneurial Income Plan Your Freedom Lifestyle Plan Your Investing Plan Your Power Up!

How Democracy Ends
by David Runciman
Published 9 May 2018

They do this to keep the value of their money safe from outside interference. They do not give it up to corporate rivals. Until Google and Facebook have their own currencies, both still have reason to be afraid of the US Federal Reserve. They need the state to provide them with a store of value. Without it, their own value is uncertain. That is why Bitcoin and other digital currencies are so attractive to many technologists – they open up the possibility of liberating them from their dependence on the state. Google and Facebook may well have their own money one day, or at least their own money-like equivalent that can serve as a store of value, unit of account and medium of exchange – it is a far more realistic prospect than either ever acquiring its own army.

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Li’s coalition was made up of the stay-at-homes, who lived off their meagre universal basic income, and the travellers, who moved from state to state looking for part-time work. His support was lowest among the over-80s, who were worried he would substitute their retirement income with dollars. The old had grown attached to their Bitcoins. They needn’t have feared – during the transition the Chair of the Federal Reserve had already explained to the President-Elect that it would be impossible to make paper money forgery-proof. Li had been forced to drop the idea. He was still looking for another one. There was little expectation that Li would be able to get much done, given the Congress that had been elected with him.

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Index A accelerationism, 199–202 Achen, Christopher see Bartels, Larry and Achen, Christopher Ackerman, Bruce, 54–5 advertising, 160 and elections, 158 internet, 157, 159 Afghanistan, 75 Africa, 79 see also Algeria; Zimbabwe Algeria: coup, 41–3 Amazon, 131, 137 anarchism, 192–3, 214 appeasement, 144 Apple, 131, 137 Arendt, Hannah, 85, 86–7, 98 Eichmann in Jerusalem, 84 Argentina, 162 Aristotle, 161 armies see military artificial intelligence (AI), 122–3, 126, 129–30, 189–91 Athens, ancient, 35–8, 142, 161 conspiracy theories, 60 epistocracy, 179 Athens, modern, 27–8; see also Greece austerity, 208 Australia, 162 authoritarianism, 154–5, 171–3 ‘competitive’, 175 pragmatic, 174–5, 176, 177–8, 181, 205 B bankers, 69, 116, 181 banks, 131, 135; see also European Central Bank Bannon, Steve, 13 Bartels, Larry and Achen, Christopher: Democracy for Realists, 184 Bell, David A., 176 Benn, Tony, 58 Bentham, Jeremy, 127, 151, 152 Bermeo, Nancy, 44, 45 bio-engineering, 102–3 Bitcoin, 136 Bostrom, Nick, 105–6 Bourne, Sam (pseudonym): To Kill the President, 57, 58 Brazil, 217 Brennan, Jason: Against Democracy, 183–5, 186–7, 188–9 Bryan, William Jennings, 68–9 bureaucracies, 85, 86–7, 99, 127, 164; see also civil service Burton, Robert, 159–60 Bush, President George W., 12, 55 C Cambridge Analytica (firm), 156, 157, 159 capitalism, 196, 199 Carson, Rachel, 85, 87–8 Silent Spring, 82–3, 89, 90–91, 93 catastrophes, 6, 7, 85–6 environmental, 82–3, 85, 87–93; see also climate change nuclear, 83–4, 97 total, 100 Chicago: violence, 211 China and climate change, 174 Communist Party, 172–3 economy, 172, 208 foreign policy, 30–31 government model, 174 as a meritocracy, 175–6 nationalism, 172 pollution, 89 view of Trump, 173 Churchill, Winston, 8, 75–6, 168–9, 177 civil service, 41, 55–6; see also bureaucracies Clark, Christopher: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, 115 Clemenceau, Georges, 71, 75–6 climate change, 90–93 China and, 174 consciousness raising, 89, 92–93 conspiracy theories, 91–92 incremental nature of, 97 and risk, 101 support for, 108 and uncertainty, 96 see also global warming Clinton, President Bill, 54–5 Clinton, Hillary, 13–15, 16, 198 Cold War, 28–9, 67, 94, 95–6, 106–7, 108–9 communism 194; see also China: Communist Party; Marxism-Leninism; Stalinism consciousness raising, 85, 89, 92–3, 106 conspiracy theories, 60–71 climate change, 91–2 and division, 99 and fake news, 75 France, 69 India, 65–6 nuclear weapons, 96 Poland, 65, 66 and totalitarianism, 98 Turkey, 65, 66 United Kingdom, 62–3 United States, 62, 64–5, 67 and war, 77 conspiracy theorists, 153 Constantine I, king of Greece, 27, 28 consumerism, 166 Corbyn, Jeremy, 58, 94–5, 148–9, 150, 209 corporations, 129–32, 139, 166 coups, 3, 217 Algeria, 41–3 and catastrophes, 85 and clarity, 59 and conspiracies, 7, 60 and counter-coups, 56–7 Cyprus, 33, 38–9 economic conditions for, 31 in fiction, 57–8 Greece, 26–30, 27, 32, 33, 34–5, 38, 40, 45 Luttwak on, 41–2, 46 Turkey, 50–52, 53, 66 varieties of, 44–5 election-day vote fraud, 44 executive, 44 executive aggrandisement, 44, 52, 55 promissory, 44, 47, 50–51 strategic election manipulation, 44 Zimbabwe, 48 crises, 5–6 Cuban missile Crisis (1962), 107–8 mid-life, 5, 8, 169, 218 Cummings, Dominic, 179 currencies, 135 digital, 136 Cyprus: coups, 33, 38–9 D databases, 123 de Gaulle, General Charles, 41, 42 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 142, 187 death, 23–4, 204, 216–17 democracy appeal of, 6, 169–71 audience, 47, 117 direct, 35, 48, 143, 161, 162, 163 failure of, 50 obsolescence, 167–8 plebiscitary, 47 spectator, 47 spread of, 3 strong and weak, 59–60 threats to 6–7, 53–4, 108, 112; see also coups digital revolution, 152, 164, 200–201, 215, 219 dignity collective, 172, 173, 177 and elections, 170, 177 and loss, 175 disruption, 198–9 Dorsey, Jack, 137 Dreyfus, Alfred, 69 dystopias, 90–91, 113, 114, 118–19, 126, 220 E East India Company, 130–31 economic growth, 172, 192 accelerationists and, 200 and populism, 192 United States, 175 Western Europe, 175 Economist (journal), 133 Edgerton, David, 122 education, 109–10, 163–4, 183–4, 185 Eggers, David: The Circle, 139, 140, 141–2, 144 Egypt, 48–50 Eichmann, Adolf, 84, 85–6 elections 4, 218 and advertising, 158–9 computers and, 125 and coups, 44, 45 decision-making process, 188–9 and dignity, 170, 177 and disinformation, 156–7 Egypt, 48–9 France, 148 fraud, 44 Greece, 28, 29, 39, 40, 148 Italy, 148 manipulation of, 44 Netherlands, 148 online, 162 Turkey, 51 United Kingdom, 95 United States see under United States see also vote, right to elites, 75 and climate change, 91–2 corporate, 139 and nuclear disarmament, 95 and populism, 65 power of, 61 see also wealth environmentalists, 200 epistocracy, 178–9, 180, 181–8, 191, 205 equality, 202–3; see also inequality Erdogan, President Recep, 51–3, 66, 149, 213 Estlund, David: Democratic Authority, 185 Ethiopia, 154–5 European Central Bank (ECB), 33, 39, 116–17 European Union (EU) and corporations, 132 and Greece, 30, 32, 116–17 executive aggrandisement, 45–6 military, 55, 56 United States presidents, 92 experts see epistocracy; technocracy ExxonMobil, 92 F Facebook, 131, 132–3, 134–5, 136, 138–9, 140, 141, 145, 150, 157 fascism, 169 financial crash (2008), 79, 110, 116 Forster, E.

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond
by Tamara Kneese
Published 14 Aug 2023

Mourning Residues When people die, their digital remains can encompass a wide range of online possessions, along with the devices they are tied to. The most obvious examples are blogs, email accounts, Second Life avatars, and social media profiles. Digital remains can also include domain names, PayPal accounts, Bitcoin wallets, online banking information, and data attached to wearable technology, personal computers, and smartphones. Smart devices may also be part of an individual’s digital remains, along with old hard drives, floppy disks, and broken laptops left behind in drawers. The truth is that data cannot be detached from hardware systems.

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The living can post and comment on the digital remains of dead users, adding to and altering their legacies through ongoing communicative traces. Digital assets encompass many types of materials from disparate sources. Some have monetary value, while others do not, at least in isolation. Assets may include Bitcoin wallets, PayPal accounts, airline miles, online investment portfolios, or commercial domain names, but they are just as likely to include items of affective significance, such as personal websites, email accounts, digital photo albums, or social media profiles. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are essentially just a record of digital ownership, point to a new possible complication for inheritance.

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Digital inheritance is also democratized or at least more accessible in that digital legacy services are intended to be easy to understand, user-friendly, and affordable. Some of the company founders I spoke to are still targeting people with houses, heteronormative nuclear families, and investment portfolios (or Bitcoin wallets), while others are considering how changing kinship structures are affecting the possibility of inheritance. Anthropologists have tracked how changing technologies and legal structures are impacting definitions and experiences of kinship.54 A nuclear family with 2.5 kids and a dog is not a reality for most people living in the United States.

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 14 Jun 2023

Interview conducted in 2020. 50 ‘Kolos to build world’s largest data center in northern Norway’, press conference in Ballangen, Norway, 18 August 2017. 51 Inspired by the name given to a train cutting through icy landscapes that was imagined in the 1980s by Benjamin Legrand, Jacques Lob, and Jean-Marc Rochette in a science-fiction comic book, later adapted for screen in 2013 by the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho. 52 For creating digital currencies. Read ‘Kolos data centre park in Norway is being acquired by cryptocurrency miners’, Datacenter Dynamics, 28 March 2018. 53 ‘Bitcoin mining consumes 0.5% of all electricity used globally and 7 times Google’s total usage, new report says’, Business Insider India, 7 September 2021. ‘Bitcoin uses more electricity than many countries. How is that possible?’, The New York Times, 3 September 2021. 54 Interview with Christian Andersen, editor-in-chief of Fremover, 2020. 55 Interview with Isabelle Kemlin, Nordics business unit director at CBRE Data Centre Solutions, 2020. 56 ‘Russian personal data localisation requirements’, Microsoft, 30 November 2020. 57 Talk by Olivier Labbé, CEO of Cap Ingelec, at the Data Centre World trade show, 2019. 58 Interview with Ahmed Ahram, director of CAP DC, the French subsidiary of Cap Ingelec, 2020. 59 ‘No one can precisely measure the ecological gains generated by moving data centres closer to end users, but it is substantial’, said Philippe Luce during an interview in 2020. 60 Interview with Christian Déjean, 2019. 61 This number was reported to me by Ian Bitterlin, consulting engineer and formerly visiting professor at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, in an interview given in 2020. 62 Interview with Michiel Steltman, managing director of the digital infrastructure association of the Netherlands (DINL), 2020.

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She’s not wrong: barely had the first stone of the data centre been laid when the cloud company was bought for close to $10 million by the Canadian firm Hive Blockchain. The data-centre project was then morphed into a centre for cryptocurrency ‘mining’ — a booming, energy-intensive industry.52 The world’s best-known cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, itself guzzles 0.5 per cent of the world’s electricity, or the equivalent of Denmark’s energy requirements.53 But such considerations have little bearing when the key premise is to ‘make money fast’, a local journalist told me.54 This didn’t stop the barrage of criticism against what was perceived as a purely speculative transaction.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Published 23 May 2016

Murray, Sarah (2015). “The Safe Cities Index 2015: Assessing Urban Security in the Digital Age.” The Economist Intelligence Unit. London: The Economist. 46. Wile, Rob (2014, June 14). “It’s Clear That the Future of Bitcoin Is Not in the US.” Business Insider. Retrieved from www.businessinsider.com; SourceForge (2015). “Bitcoin.” Retrieved from sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/stats/timeline. 47. International Monetary Fund (2015). “House Price-to-Income Ratio around the World.” Global Housing Watch. Retrieved from www.imf.org/external/research/housing. 48. Allen, Kate and Anna Nicolaou (2015, April 16).

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What they give back to their host city more than makes up for the cost.44 In 2015, The Economist’s Safe Cities Index ranked Toronto “the best place to live” in the world—confounding those who want to argue that immigration is a bad thing.45 Other big cities showing how to become new global crossroads through deliberate design include Mumbai (global offshore services), Lagos (African trade and finance) and Tel Aviv (technology). Smaller cities, if well run, can become major intersections at a niche or regional level. Copenhagen may never challenge New York or London for traditional financial flows, but it is rapidly becoming a hub for crypto-currencies. Per capita, more Bitcoins are used in Scandinavia than anywhere else.46 Regina, a small city in the middle of the Canadian Prairies, in 2010 opened one of Canada’s largest inland ports, a 1,700-acre Global Transportation Hub, to interconnect North America’s major rail and trucking networks. A city in the middle of nowhere is equidistant from everywhere, and as global trade volumes swell, such places can make themselves essential nodes to help balance loads across different transportation systems.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

This balance between hard and easy money, between the necessities of scarcity and prevalence, has been the subject of countless battles over currency. Increases in the money supply have helped unleash contemporary economic growth. But there are always voices of retrenchment and austerity. Like a gold standard, Bitcoin is deflationary by design. As currency becomes harder to mine and thus rarer and dearer, people who hold on to it are supposed to get richer relative to spenders. That is great for those who got in early hoarding gold or cryptocurrency, but its logic is disastrous for economic growth if it becomes a pervasively held ideal.

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Just as encryption buffs celebrate pure mathematics as a bedrock foundation for secrecy and privacy (rather than the social and legal structures that perform the bulk of data protection), cryptocurrency fans promote blockchains as immutable, “censorship resistant” stores of value. A bank may fail; the government may renege on its pension promises; but the perfected blockchain would be embedded into the internet itself, automatically memorialized on so many computers that no one could undermine it.14 Some crypto diehards even imagine Bitcoin or ether as a last currency standing, long after central banks lose credibility. Like the gold bugs of old locking ingots in vaults, they want wealth unaffected by society or politics. They sincerely believe they are developing a currency guaranteed by the cold, reliable efficiency of computing rather than the fickle will of managers and bureaucrats.

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Slate, February 15, 2008, https://slate.com/culture/2008/02/it-is-what-it-is-a-sports-cliche-for-our-times.html. 13. A good recent overview is Nicholas Weaver, “Inside Risks of Cryptocurrencies,” Communications of the ACM 61, no. 6 (2018): 1–5. For broader background, see David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 14. This possibility is expertly critiqued by Angela Walch; see “The Path of the Blockchain Lexicon (and the Law),” Review of Banking and Financial Law 36 (2017): 713–765. 15. Evan Osnos, “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” New Yorker, January 22, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich. 16.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence
by Calum Chace
Published 28 Jul 2015

These teams need high-level support and freedom from the usual metrics of return on investment, at least for a while. The theory is fairly easy but putting it into practice is hard: most will need external help, and many will fail. Of course the disrupters can also be disrupted. A service called La’Zooz (16) is planned, based on the blockchain technology you will have heard about in connection with Bitcoin, which may provide serious competition for Uber. 3.2 – Killer robots It is not only commerce where AI is threatening disruption. Human Rights Watch and other organisations are concerned that within a decade or two, fully autonomous weapons will be available to military forces with deep pockets. (17) They argue that lethal force should never be delegated to machines because they can never be morally responsible.

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lang=en (27) http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-great-forgetting/309516/ (28) https://twitter.com/MFordFuture/status/606939607356219392/photo/1 (29) http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/34u1a9/technostism_the_ideology_of_futurology/People also talk about a financial singularity arriving if and when cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin based on the blockchain technology disrupt traditional banking. Are we perhaps nearing peak singularity, or a singularity singularity? (30) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html (31) http://www.nature.com/news/flashing-fish-brains-filmed-in-action-1.12621 (32) http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/dec/20/research.it (33) http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/is-deep-learning-a-revolution-in-artificial-intelligence (34) http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/21/google-a-step-closer-to-developing-machines-with-human-like-intelligence (35) . https://intelligence.org/2014/05/13/christof-koch-stuart-russell-machine-superintelligence (36) http://uk.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-will-be-here-within-five-years-2014-11#ixzz3XHt6A8Lt (37) I am grateful to Russell Buckley for drawing my attention to this illustration

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
by James Bridle
Published 18 Jun 2018

In response to vast increases in data storage and computational capacity in the last decade, the amount of energy used by data centres has doubled every four years, and is expected to triple in the next ten years. A study in Japan suggested that by 2030, the power requirements for digital services alone would outstrip the entire nation’s current generation capacity.19 Even technologies that make explicit claims to radically transform society are not exempt. The cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which is intended to disrupt hierarchical and centralised financial systems, requires the energy of nine US homes to perform a single transaction; and if its growth continues, by 2019 it will require the annual power output of the entire United States to sustain itself.20 Moreover, these figures reflect processing power, but do not account for the wider network of digital activities empowered by computation.

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Elberling, ‘Permafrost thawing in organic Arctic soils accelerated by ground heat production’, Nature Climate Change 5:6 (2015), 574–8. 13.Elizabeth Kolbert, ‘A Song of Ice’, New Yorker, October 24, 2016, newyorker.com. 14.Council for Science and Technology, ‘A National Infrastructure for the 21st century’, 2009, cst.gov.uk. 15.AEA, ‘Adapting the ICT Sector to the Impacts of Climate Change’, 2010, gov.uk. 16.Council for Science and Technology, ‘A National Infrastructure for the 21st century’. 17.AEA, ‘Adapting the ICT Sector to the Impacts of Climate Change’. 18.Tom Bawden, ‘Global warming: Data centres to consume three times as much energy in next decade, experts warn’, Independent, January 23, 2016, independent.co.uk. 19.Institute of Energy Economics, ‘Japan Long-Term Energy Outlook – A Projection up to 2030 under Environmental Constraints and Changing Energy Markets’, Japan, 2006, eneken.ieej.or.jp. 20.Eric Holthaus, ‘Bitcoin could cost us our clean- energy future’, Grist, December 5, 2017, grist.org. 21.Digital Power Group, ‘The Cloud Begins With Coal – Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power’, 2013, tech-pundit.com. 22.Bawden, ‘Global warming’. 23.Alice Ross, ‘Severe turbulence on Aeroflot flight to Bangkok leaves 27 people injured’, Guardian, May 1, 2017, theguardian.com. 24.Anna Ledovskikh, ‘Accident on board of plane Moscow to Bangkok’, YouTube video, May 1, 2017. 25.Aeroflot, ‘Doctors Confirm No Passengers Are In Serious Condition After Flight Hits Unexpected Turbulence’, May 1, 2017, aeroflot.ru. 26.M.

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Index Locators in bold italic represent images/pictures A AAIB (Air Accidents Investigations Branch), 188–9 ABC Trial, 189 Aberdeen Proving Ground, 28–9 acceleration, 132 AdSense, 218 Advanced Chess, 159–60 Aeroflot, 65 Aero Lease UK, 190–1 AI (artificial intelligence), 139 Air Accidents Investigations Branch (AAIB), 188–9 Airbnb, 127 Air France, 71 air loom, 208, 209, 209 al-Assad, Bashar, 55, 124 Aldrich, Richard, 189–90 algorithms about, 108, 126 reaction speed of, 123 YouTube, 217–8, 229, 232 AlphaGo software, 149, 156–8 Al-Qaeda, 212 Alterman, Boris, 158, 159 ‘Alterman Wall,’ 158 Amash-Conyers Amendment, 178 Amazon, 39, 113–8, 115, 125–7 American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, 64 American Meteorological Society, 26 ‘A National Infrastructure for the 21st century’ report, 59 Anderson, Chris ‘End of Theory,’ 83–4, 146 anthropocene, 203 antiquisation programme, 234 approximation, conflating with simulation, 34–5 Arimaa, 158–9 Arkin, Alan, 188 ‘the ark,’ 52–3 Army Balloon Factory, 188–9 artificial intelligence (AI), 139 AshleyMadison.com (website), 237–8 Asimov, Isaac Three Laws of Robotics, 157 Assange, Julian ‘Conspiracy as Governance,’ 183 Assistant software, 152 Associated Press, 124 ‘As We May Think’ (Bush), 23–4 Aubrey, Crispin, 189 Aurora (Robinson), 128 AutoAwesome software, 152 Automated Insights, 123–4 automated journalism, 123–4 automated trading programs, 124 automation bias, 40, 42–3, 95 aviation, 35–6 B BABYFUN TV, 225 Ballistic Research Laboratory, 28–9 Bank of England, 123 Banks, Iain M., 149–50 Barclays, 109 basic research/brute force bias, 95 Bel Geddes, Norman, 30–1 Bell, Alexander Graham, 19–20 Benjamin, Walter, 144, 156 The Task of the Translator, 147, 155–6 Berners-Lee, Conway, 78 Berners-Lee, Tim, 78–9, 81 Berry, John, 189 ‘better than the Beatles’ problem, 94 Bevan Aneurin, 111 In Place of Fear, 110 big bang, 106 big data, 84 Bilderberg Group, 241 Binney, William, 176, 180, 181 Birther movement, 206 Bitcoin, 63 ‘Black Chamber,’ 249 blast furnace, 77–8 BND, 174 Borges, Jorge Luis, 79–80 Bounce Patrol, 223 branded content, 220 Brin, Sergey, 139 Broomberg, Adam, 143 Bush, George W., 176 Bush, Vannevar ‘As We May Think,’ 23–4 Bush Differential Analyser, 27 on hypertext, 79 Bush Differential Analyser, 27 Byron “Darkness,” 201–2 C Cadwalladr, Carole, 236 calculating machines, 27 calculation p-hacking, 89–91 raw computing, 82–3 replicability, 88–9 translation algorithms, 84 Cambridge Analytica, 236 Campbell, Duncan, 189 ‘Can We Survive Technology?’

Programming TypeScript
by Boris Cherny
Published 16 Apr 2019

Tip If you’re coming from a language with namespaces, note that although namespaces are supported by TypeScript, they’re not the preferred way to encapsulate code; if you’re not sure whether to use namespaces or modules, choose modules. Namespaces abstract away the nitty-gritty details of how files are laid out in the filesystem; you don’t have to know that your .mine function lives in the schemes/scams/bitcoin/apps folder, and instead you can access it with a short, convenient namespace like Schemes.Scams.Bitcoin.Apps.mine.1 Say we have two files—a module to make HTTP GET requests, and a consumer that uses that module to make requests: // Get.ts namespace Network { export function get<T>(url: string): Promise<T> { // ... } } // App.ts namespace App { Network.get<GitRepo>('https://api.github.com/repos/Microsoft/typescript') } A namespace must have a name (like Network), and it can export functions, variables, types, interfaces, or other namespaces.

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Exercise Play around with declaration merging, to: Reimplement companion objects (from “Companion Object Pattern”) using namespaces and interfaces, instead of values and types. Add static methods to an enum. 1 I really hope this joke ages well, and I don’t end up regretting not investing in Bitcoin. Chapter 11. Interoperating with JavaScript We don’t live in a perfect world. Your coffee can be too hot and burn your mouth a little when you drink it, your parents might call and leave you voicemails a little too often, that pothole by your driveway is still there no matter how many times you call the city, and your code might not be completely covered with static types.

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite
by Jake Bernstein
Published 14 Oct 2019

Simpson, “The Business Deals That Could Imperil Trump,” New York Times, April 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/opinion/sunday/trump-business-mueller-money-laundering.html. 42 to make the island a center for cryptocurrencies: Kai Sedgwick, “Malta Prime Minister Welcomes Binance to Its ‘Blockchain Island,’” Bitcoin.com, March 23, 2018, https://news.bitcoin.com/malta-prime-minister-welcomes-binance-to-its-blockchain-island/. 43 collected more than $1.2 billion in evaded taxes: Douglas Dalby and Amy Wilson-Chapman, “Panama Papers helps recover more than $1.2 billion around the world,” ICIJ, April 3, 2019, https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/panama-papers-helps-recover-more-than-1-2-billion-around-the-world/. 44 more than 150 government and corporate inquiries: Will Fitzgibbon and Emilia Diaz-Struck, “Panama Papers have had historic global effects—and the impacts keep coming,” The Center for Public Integrity, December 1, 2016, https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/12/01/20500/panama-papers-have-had-historic-global-effects-and-impacts-keep-coming. 45 In March, Mossfon announced: “Comunicado de Cierre de Operaciones,” Mos-sack Fonseca, March 14, 2018. 46 they couldn’t be found: Olmedo Rodriguez, “Fiscal detiene a siete personas por caso Mossack Fonseca,” La Prensa, May 23, 2018, https://impresa.prensa.com/panorama/Fiscal-detiene-personas-caso-MF_0_5036496409.html. 47 more than a million additional files: Will Fitzgibbon, “New Panama Papers Leak Reveals Firm’s Chaotic Scramble to Identify Clients, Save Business Amid Global Fallout,” ICIJ, June 20, 2018, https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/new-panama-papers-leak-reveals-mossack-fonsecas-chaotic-scramble/. 48 the firm knew the names of the owners: Nicholas Nehamas, “‘A Mickey Mouse operation’: How Panama Papers law firm dumped clients, lost Miami office,” Miami Herald, June 20, 2018, http://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article213423514.html. 49 “I don’t care”: Fitzgibbon, “New Panama Papers Leak Reveals Firm’s Chaotic Scramble to Identify Clients, Save Business Amid Global Fallout.” 50 “we stayed a client”: Email from Johan Van den Braber to Mossack Fonseca & Co.

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The debate over the law cited the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers as a motivating factor. However, questions quickly surfaced about how the territories would respond, how such a law would be enforced, and whether this would simply drive illegal activity further underground. In Malta, Muscat’s government moved forward with plans to make the island a center for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin,42 which many fear has become a new frontier for money laundering. By April 2019, tax authorities worldwide had collected more than $1.2 billion in evaded taxes as a result of the Panama Papers.43 The United Kingdom topped the list, recouping almost $253 million. ICIJ estimated that more than 150 government and corporate inquiries in 79 countries had been launched in the first year alone.44 However, prosecutions in Panama itself presented the biggest personal threat to Jürgen Mossack, Ramón Fonseca, and their employees.

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See Paradise Papers Australia, 43, 127, 147, 154, 161 Austria, 94 Aviva Holdings Limited, 111 Azerbaijan, 261–65, 277–78 Azerbaijan America Alliance, 264–65 Backslash Distributors, 36–38 Báez, Lázaro, 192–94, 217, 269 Bahamas, 29–30, 34, 35–38, 55, 76, 86, 256, 266, 280 mafia in, 29–30 Mossfon operations, 29–30, 35–38, 121, 133 tax havens, 24, 29–30, 35–38, 55, 64, 70, 121, 133 Bahamas Software, 36–38, 77 Baku, 263–65 Bale, Peter, 226–27, 273–74 banking, 47–60, 79 Bank Rossiya network, 90–102 Commerzbank raid, 5–10 Germany, 205–10 HSBC, 47–60, 79, 137–44, 177–81, 186–90, 195–99 Iceland, 118–24, 214–16, 223, 229 offshore credit cards, 70–74 offshore system, 47–60, 68–74, 79, 130–44 Russia and, 88–102, 252, 256 sexism in, 52–53 Swiss Leaks HSBC investigation, 177–81, 186–90, 195–99, 202–4, 216, 224–25 2008 crisis, 116–17, 123–24, 128–29, 184, 197, 214, 215, 229, 239, 257, 258, 261 UBS, 130–32, 135–37 See also specific banks Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), 66–67 Bank Rossiya, 90–102 Barmanbek, Imre, 266 Bayrock Group, 256–61 Bay Street Boys, 30 BBC, 186, 217 bearer shares, 26, 35–36, 115, 132–35, 140, 168, 181, 210 Beijing, 104, 165, 166, 167 Belgium, 53, 198–99, 258 Belize, 24 Belongers, 20–23, 25, 32–33 Bergman, Sven, 216, 228–30, 239 Berke, Richard, 152 Bermuda, 24, 84, 280–81, 283 Bethancourt, Rómulo, 270 Bharara, Preet, 245, 252 Big Tobacco, 149, 164 Birkenfeld, Bradley, 130–31, 249 Bitcoin, 284 Björgólfur family, 119, 122 Blackwater, 202 Blairmore Holdings, 133, 240 Bloomberg News, 164, 245 bluefin tuna industry, 149–51, 157 Blue Ocean Finance Limited, 140–41 Blum, Jack, 66, 67, 70, 72 Bobrov, Vladimir, 102 Boehner, John, 265 Boncamper, Malchus Irvin, 183–84 Bonny Island National Liquefied Gas Project, 55 bootlegging, 29–30 Bordachenko, Edward, 101 Borodin, Pavel, 92–93 Botín, Emilio, 197–98 Bourdon, William, 180, 181 Bo Xilai, 171–73 Bransten, Eileen, 109–10 Brazil, 185 Lava Jato scandal, 284 Mossfon operations, 231–32, 270–71 Brezhnev, Leonid, 262 British Virgin Islands (BVI), 19–33, 34, 35, 50, 54, 55, 90, 95, 99, 166, 233, 268 anti-money-laundering laws, 132–35, 182 bearer shares and, 132–34 Belongers, 20–23, 25, 32–33 double tax treaty, 21–22 drug trade, 27–28 Mossfon operations, 19–33, 41, 42, 56, 80–87, 121–23, 129, 132–45, 161, 169, 182–84, 268, 285 origins as a tax haven, 21–24 Panama Papers and, 268–70 population, 23 public registries law and, 283–84 tax havens and offshore system, 19–33, 41, 42, 56, 72, 80–87, 99, 121–23, 129, 132–45, 161, 169, 182–84, 268 Broadhurst, Nancy, 30–31, 193 Bronstein, Scott, 233 Brooks, Richard, 185, 186, 188 Brooks Trading, 122 Brothelgate, 279 Brothers Circle, 92 Brown & Root, 55 BTA Bank, 260 Buchholz, Dieter, 135–36 Burson-Marsteller, 201–2 Burton, Dan, 264 Bush, George W., 73, 75, 137 Butler, Paul, 21–22 Buzenberg, Bill, 149, 150, 161, 273 BVI Financial Services, 61 Cabra, Mar, 157, 160–65, 173, 177, 179–81, 187, 189, 195–99, 209–10, 213, 217–25, 243, 246–47, 274 Caicos, 24 Caijing, 164–65, 173–75 Camarena, Enrique “Kiki,” 44, 45 Cameron, David, 133, 240 Cameron, Ian, 133, 240 Campagnoli, José María, 192–93 Campbell, Duncan, 149, 152, 158 Canada, 154, 252 Caraballo, Javier, 244, 246, 269–70 Cardona, Christian, 278–79, 282–83 Caro Quintero, Rafael, 44–46 Caruana Galizia, Daphne, 237, 275–79 assassination of, 275, 278–80, 282–83 Caruana Galizia, Matthew, 188, 222, 237, 275, 278–80 Caruana Galizia, Paul, 278 Carvajal, Rigoberto, 157–58, 180–81, 188, 196, 209, 213, 218, 223, 248 Casey, William, 60 Casper, Norman, 63 Castle Bank and Trust Company, 63 Castro, Fidel, 30 Catholic Church, 12, 20 Cavendish International, 54 Cayman Islands, 4, 23, 66, 98, 115, 140 Center for Public Integrity (CPI), 148–52, 161, 187, 225–27 ICIJ independence from, 273–74 Central Bank of Cyprus, 61 Chagall, Marc, 113 Chan, Yuen-Ying, 164–66, 175, 244 Channel Islands, 24, 259 charities, as fake beneficiaries, 44 Charlie Hebdo massacre, 202 Chase Manhattan, 69 Chavarria de Estribi, Adelina Mercedes, 26 Chávez, Hugo, 137 Cheney, Dick, 55–57 Cheney, Lynne, 55 Cherry Group USA LLC, 2–3 China, 29, 31, 48, 50, 68, 104, 162–75, 203 banking, 50, 68, 162–75 China Leaks, 169–75 economy, 163–64, 167 government censorship, 164, 165, 175, 244 Internet, 164, 165, 175 journalism and, 162–75, 244 Mossfon and, 163, 166–75 Offshore Leaks and, 162–75 Opium Wars, 50 Panama Papers and, 244 politics, 170–73 princelings, 164–75 role in secrecy world, 162–75 tax havens and offshore system, 162–75 China Leaks, 169–75 Chittum, Ryan, 228 Chodiev, Patokh, 258 Chowaiki, Ezra, 112–14 Christensen, John, 24, 25, 124–25, 184–85 Christie’s, 105, 108, 110–15 CIA, 9, 58–60, 66, 67, 241 secret bank accounts, 59 tax havens and, 58–60 Citibank, 107 Citicorp Overseas Finance Corporation, 21–22 Clinton, Bill, 154, 165 Clinton, Hillary, 250, 251, 254 CNN, 19 CNN Türk, 266, 267 cobalt mining, 281 cocaine, 17–18 Cohen, Leon, 140–41 Cohen, Mauricio, 140–41 Cohen, Michael, 283 Cold War, 7, 60, 89, 93 Cologne, 7, 20 Colombia, 11, 137, 281 drug trade, 17, 44, 46 Columbia University, 150, 157, 180, 225 Comey, James, 250 Commerzbank, 205–10 commodities trades, 17 Commonwealth, 165, 174, 244 Commonwealth Trust Limited, 145, 155 Communism, 91, 163, 170, 171, 262 Community Action, 11 Congo, 53, 259, 281 Congress, U.S., 17, 29, 69, 75–76, 91, 265 HSBC investigation, 139–44 offshore tax evasion investigations, 65–66, 72–73, 139–44, 245–46, 254 tax cuts of 2017, 283 Trump and, 254–55 Constable, John, The Lock, 115 Contadora, 35 Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions, 57 Cook, Captain James, 31 Cook Islands, 115, 154, 280 copper mining, 281 Cornejo, Sandra de, 77–78, 83, 184, 284 Cornelia Company, 115 Coronel, Sheila, 157, 225, 227 Correa, Rafael, 242–43 Costa Rica, 10, 41, 45, 46, 157, 158, 180 counterfeiting, 36 Microsoft software, 36–38 credit cards, 70–74 Crédit Commercial de France, 52 Crédit Lyonnais, 81–82 Credit Suisse, 137, 170, 182–83 Cross Trading, 32 Crusades, 28 cryptocurrencies, 284 Cuba, 9, 137 communism, 9 mafia, 30 Curatola, Eugenio, 84–85 currency trades, 68 Customs, U.S., 127, 187 Cyprus, 24, 52, 61, 62, 86, 90 banking crisis, 276 Manafort and, 283 tax havens, 24, 92–93, 99–100, 123 Damelo Group, 101 Damiano, Juan Pedro, 240 Daniels, Stormy, 283 Daphne Project, 283 Darfur, 87 Darvishi, Kamal, 264 Davet, Gérard, 181, 187 DEA, 44–46 Degas, Edgar, Danseuses, 107 Degiorgio, Alfred, 279, 282–83 Degiorgio, George, 279, 282 Delaware, 2, 4, 15, 65, 254, 256 tax havens, 15, 20, 22, 31, 35, 68, 104, 125, 285 Deloitte & Touche, 170, 200 Delta State, 32 del Tiempo, Arturo, 199 Deltour, Antoine, 184, 202, 249 Democratic Party, 282 Deng Jiagui, 171 Deng Xiaoping, 170, 171 Denmark, 79, 232 Deripaska, Oleg, 252 Dex, Anabella, 118–24, 201 Dex, Jost, 118–24, 201 diamond trade, 48, 53–54, 143, 198–99 Díaz-Struck, Emilia, 217–18 Disney Company, 200 Doe, Samuel, 166 Doğan, Aydın, 265–67 Doğan Holding, 253, 265–67 Dominican Republic, 199 double tax treaties, 21–22 Doyen Group, 257 drug trafficking, 17–18, 19, 27–28, 44–46, 66, 76, 138, 198–99, 215, 217, 270 Dubai, 274 due diligence procedures, 58, 72, 77–78, 81–83, 120, 128, 182–84, 213, 231, 262, 263 Dunbar, John, 274 Eastern Europe, 29, 94, 256 Economist, 35 Ecuador, 32, 242–43 Panama Papers and, 242–43 Egrant, 277 Egypt, 182, 221 Elf oil company, 116 Elizabeth, Queen of England, 21 Elliott Management, 191–95, 269 Ellsberg, Daniel, 230 Elmaleh, Judah, 53, 138–39, 143 Elmaleh, Mardoche, 138–39, 143 Elmaleh, Meyer, 138–39, 143 El Salvador, 245 Endeavour Resources, 86–87 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 252–53, 256, 265–67 Ernst & Young, 200 Escobar, Ana, 77, 80, 81, 83 Escobar, Pablo, 46 Essential Consultants, LLC, 283 Estera, 281 Ethan Allen, 183–84 Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC), 258–60 Europe, 7–8, 49, 21, 200 European Commission, 189 European Community, 81 European Savings Directive, 79 European Union (EU), 75, 79, 99, 189–90, 199, 200, 272, 276–77 Europol, 272 Excellence Effort Property Development, 171 Facebook, 238, 239 Faisal, King of Saudi Arabia, 66, 223 Falciani, Hervé, 177–81, 186–90, 196, 197, 203 Federal Reserve, U.S., 49 Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 66 FedEx, 185 Fiandor, Miguel, 210 Fidentia, 39, 42–44, 133 FIFA, 224, 240 Finland, 232, 236 Firepower, 147 Firtash, Dmitry, 252 Fischer, David, 59–60 Fitch, 121 Fitzgibbon, Will, 225 Fitz Patrick, Mariel, 218, 242 FKK Acapulco sex club, 278–79 Flax, Keith, 24, 25, 269 Flax, Rosemarie, 25, 80, 269 Fleg Trading, 241 FL Group, 257–58 Florida, 4, 63, 72, 140, 141, 256 real estate, 4, 260–61 Fonseca, Ramón, 6, 10–13, 34, 48, 76, 80, 118, 130, 166, 201, 211, 220, 232, 284 arrest of, 271–72 background, 10–16 law firm beginnings, 5–7, 10, 14–18 meets Mossack, 10, 17 as nominee director, 26 Panama Papers and, 235–39, 244–48, 268–72, 274 retirement of, 211–13 UN career, 14–16 Forbes, 100, 109 Forbidden Stories, 282–83 Ford, F.

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters
by Oliver Franklin-Wallis
Published 21 Jun 2023

Jamie’s crew dug the whale a grave and buried it, to protect it from the gulls – a small act of dignity within an otherwise foul end. Occasionally, landfills are host to even more exotic discards. In 2013, James Howells, a computer engineer in Newport, South Wales, accidentally threw out a memory card containing 8,000 Bitcoin, which ended up in the local landfill. At Bitcoin’s peak, in 2021, the card’s contents were worth nearly half a billion dollars. For the last few years, Howells has been trying to convince the city to dig up the landfill to find the card, offering to share the proceeds if found. So far, they have declined his offers – and so the riches remain buried.

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Aberfan disaster (1966) 277 Accra, Ghana 122–41, 262–72 Adana, Turkey 74–5 aerobic bacteria 33, 160 Agbofah, Yayra 122–8, 131–2, 138–41 Agbogbloshie, Accra 262–71 agriculture 13, 27, 34, 76, 77, 84, 140, 147, 148, 174, 175–6, 261, 274, 284, 286, 297, 300; composting and 197–9, 203–4, 206–8; digestion and 212, 213, 214, 215–16; gleaning 182–93; no-till/regenerative 197 air pollution 31, 51–2, 102, 105, 230 Air Pollution Control 102, 105 Air Spectrum 7 Akbar, emperor 224 Aki India Industries 234–5 Alcoa 253 Ali, Sheikh Akbar 17–18 aluminium 2, 51, 58, 60, 76, 248, 251, 252, 253 Amazon (online retailer) 1, 2, 42, 224, 254, 258, 326 American Can Company 63 American Chemistry Council 64 American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance 66 ammonia 22, 33, 102, 160–1, 163, 204, 205, 335 Amoo, Wisdom 264–5 anaerobic digesters 160, 162, 205, 209, 212–14, 235 Anderson, Gary 59 Animas river, US 291 Anthropocene 23, 67, 316, 333 antibiotics 34, 99, 168 Apeel Sciences 323–4 Apollo program 4 Apple 28, 254, 264, 266; Batterygate 258–9; repair of products 259–60 Arshi, Mohammad 243–6 assimilative capacity 227 Athens, ancient 8 atomic priesthood 313–14 Baia Mare, Romania 275 Bakke, Amager 108 Bangladesh 27, 120, 245, 293 Ban the Bag project 66 Barren Island waste-sorting plant 50 Basel Convention (1992) 85, 90–1, 264 Basti Suraksha Manch 18 Bastide, Françoise 314 bauxite ore 51 Bazalgette, Joseph 152–9, 162, 164–5, 166, 167, 168, 169, 225 Beccarin, Giuseppe 197–8 Beckton sewage works 153, 159, 162–3 Belgrand, Eugène 154 bentonite clay 30, 34, 311, 315 benzene 33, 52, 69 Beyond Plastics 71 Bhagavata Purana 224 Bhattacharya, Professor Bishakh 237–8 Biden, Joe 293 Biffa Polymers 7, 55–8, 69, 83–4, 204 Big Compost Experiment 211 Big Plastic 46, 64 ‘Big Pollution Diseases’ 239–40 Big Waste 83–4, 113, 204 Bilott, Robert 241 Binliners/waste freight 93–5 bins 5, 7, 12, 49–51, 70, 73, 108, 113–16, 117, 118, 170, 171–2, 176, 179, 193, 194, 195, 200, 202, 207, 209, 211, 251–2, 325, 336 biochar 199 biodegradation 5n, 32–3, 207–11, 240, 330 biofuels 212–14 biogas 179, 195, 207, 212, 213, 235 Biogen 212–13 bioplastics 207–9 Bisphenol-A (BPA) 34, 69, 228, 242 Bitcoin 38 Black Friday 93, 100, 129, 328 blame, industry shifts onto consumers 63–4, 284 Blast Beach 55 Blue Planet II 57 Blum, Aaron 249 Bokashi 202 bola boys 128 boomerang theory 239–40 Boone formation 278 bottom ash 104–6 Boundary Farm, Kent 182–4 BP 63 Bradley, Trevor 182 bread 175, 180, 181, 193, 202 Bricobio 314 British East India Company 230 British Standards Institution 206 Brumadinho, Brazil 273–5, 288 Brunel University 69 Burberry 255 Bureau of Indian Affairs 281 burning waste 4, 6, 11, 31, 39, 52, 56–7, 72, 79, 80–1, 92, 93–110, 121, 195, 208, 212, 214, 247, 268, 269; ash waste 104–6; binliners/waste freight and 93–5; burners (home incinerators) 96–7; burning of waste 103–4; Calorific Value (‘CV’) 100; combined heat and power (CHP) plants 108–9; destructor (first municipal garbage incinerator) 95–6; energy-from-waste (EfW) plants 93–100; history of 95–7; incinerator emissions 101–2, 108; London household waste and 107–8; medical waste and 98–9; off-spec waste and 100; practice comes under question 109; private finance initiatives and 107; recycling, competition with 107–8; ‘renewable’, classifying as 106–7 busyness 323 ‘Buy One, Get One Free’ 178 cadaverine 22 cadmium 77, 81, 101, 220, 227, 237, 239, 240, 268, 279, 280 Calder Hall 299 Calorific Value (‘CV’) 100, 108 Camorra mafia 82 Canada 84, 96, 125, 128, 139, 240, 254, 285, 304, 314 carbon dioxide 6, 22, 33, 51, 101–2, 106–7, 108–9, 120, 181, 197, 201, 202, 206, 212, 213, 284, 292–3, 295, 317, 318, 322, 335; farmers 198; footprint 63, 136, 172, 179; sequestration 199 cardboard 2, 11, 42, 44, 45, 46, 69, 73, 172, 203, 286 Cardin 278, 288, 289 Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring 240 Castle Environmental 106 Centers for Disease Control, US 280 Central Park, New York 50 cesspits 27, 146–7, 148, 149, 167 Chadwick, Edwin 48–9, 145–6, 149, 156, 215–16; Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain 48 Charity Retail Association 111 charity shops 111–14, 126, 135, 136, 138, 250 chat 279–84, 286, 287–8, 289, 290, 291–2, 293 Chemical Beach 55 Chemours 241 Chenghai (‘Toy City’), China 76 chengshi kuanchan (‘urban mining’) 77 Chicago, US 155 Chilton, Ben 298, 299, 301–5, 316, 339 China 19, 46, 147, 148; biogas and 213; EfW plants 97, 101–2, 109; e-waste in 249, 253, 259, 261–2, 270–1; exports of waste to 10–11, 75–92, 261–2, 270–1, 319; food waste 174; mining waste and 275, 276; nuclear power in 305, 317; Operation National Sword bans waste imports 11, 78–9, 84–6, 87, 88, 90, 330; recycling in 76–9, 84, 87–92 China Scrap Plastics Association 87 cholera 9, 48, 145–57, 161, 168 Christmas 76–7, 93, 100, 138, 184, 203–4, 251, 287, 328–9 chromium 220, 228n, 231, 231n, 233, 235, 236–7, 244–5; chromium-6 231, 237 Church of England 275 Church Rock, New Mexico 295–6 cigarette filters 4–5 circular economy 40, 42, 57, 69, 113, 141, 148, 321, 324–5, 326, 331 circulatory system 215–16 Civil Nuclear Constabulary 297–8 ‘clamps’ (composting vessels) 204–5 Clean Air Act (1956) 31 Clean Europe Network 64 Clean India campaign 24, 225 Clean Water Act (1972) 226 Clingan, Jonathan 294, 305 Cloaca Maxima 148 Coalhouse Fort 332 coal mining 47, 55, 96, 101, 121, 277, 286 Coca-Cola 5, 56, 63, 64–5, 69–70, 208, 323, 325, 331 cofferdam 164–5, 166 Colombo, Sri Lanka 23 colonialism 6, 85–6, 123–4, 138, 271, 272, 318 combined heat and power (CHP) plants 108–9 compactor 37–8, 129–30 compost 5, 39, 49, 50, 158, 172, 194–216, 243, 320, 322; biochar and 199; Bokashi 202; business/industry 203–4; carbon emissions and 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 206, 212, 213; circle of life and 195–6; compost toilet 200–1, 214–15; ‘compostable’ or ‘biodegradable’ plastics 207–11; Compost John 194–6, 198–202, 205, 211, 214–15; history of 196–7; microplastics and 216; peat compost 201; rates of food waste turned into 195; rotation and 197–8; soil and 196–7; South Korea 207; terroir 211; vermicomposting 198 Compost Association 206 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (Superfund) (1980) 34, 278, 280–1, 282, 287, 293, 333, 338 construction waste 37 consumption levels, reducing 326–9 Container Corporation of America 59 container ships 5, 10, 59, 67, 75, 76, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86–7, 88, 91, 93, 95, 97, 119, 120, 125, 187, 263, 297, 301, 302, 304, 308–10, 311, 318, 322 controlled tipping 31 copper 47, 52, 76, 248, 249, 251, 276, 312 Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine, Brazil 273–4 Cossham, John 170–3, 176–7, 192 Council for Solid Waste Solutions 64 Covid-19 pandemic 18, 22, 27, 29, 46, 87, 123, 150, 161, 222, 237, 238, 243, 245, 263, 267, 299, 307, 322 creosote 47 Crossness pumping station 153, 154 ‘Crying Indian’ advert 63 Cumberlows farm 203–4, 206, 208 Cummings, Alexander 148 Cuyahoga river fires 225–6 Dalit 27, 147 Danke IT Systems 264–5 DDT 229, 240 deadstock 121, 124–6, 254–5 dead zones 197, 227–8 decomposition 6, 8, 22, 23, 48, 54, 55, 162, 196–7, 198, 200, 202, 204, 207–9 DeLillo, Don: Underworld 20, 319, 331, 334 Dell 263, 264, 266 Department of Energy, US 313 destructor 95–6 diamines putrescine 22 diarrhoea 150, 156 Dickens, Charles: Bleak House 9, 48, 145; Little Dorrit 149; Oliver Twist 48; Our Mutual Friend 48, 48n dilution maxim 226–7 dimethyl sulphide 22 dioxins 6, 77, 101, 105, 216, 228n, 242, 268 Dispatches 99 disposables/disposability 9–10, 12, 53–4, 62–4, 122, 256–7, 325, 329 Disraeli, Benjamin 152, 154 Dixie cup 63 Dixit, Kaushlesh 243 Douglas, Mary 85 downcycling 68–70, 68n, 135 DRS (Deposit Return Scheme) 58, 64, 331 DS Smith 43–4, 58, 68–9 ‘dumping’, term 85–6 DuPont 53, 56, 64, 241 dustbin 9, 49 Earl, Harley 257, 258 East African Community 131 East Java, Indonesia 74 East Tilbury 332, 333 Effra 149, 165 EHESS 314 electronic waste.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

Its Early Ads Tell a Different Story,” Vox, January 25, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/1/25/18194953/vape-juul-e-cigarette-marketing. questionable financial products: Max Chafkin and Julie Verhage, “Robinhood Thinks Bitcoin Belongs in Your Retirement Plan,” Bloomberg Businessweek, February 8, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-08/brokerage-app-robinhood-thinks-bitcoin-belongs-in-your-retirement-plan?sref=4ZgkJ7cZ. known as a captcha: The original captchas asked users to read letters that had been slightly distorted; newer versions use pictures. its own conference room: Paul Cox, “PayPal and FBI Team Up to Combat Wire Fraud,” The Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2001, https://www.wsj.com/articles/B992639123888198275.

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If you followed his logic, all manner of gray- and black-market transactions would be impossible for governments to stop, and the fees for those transactions would be revenue to PayPal. It was a real-world version of the wild arguments he’d published in his Stanford Review days. Forget bringing down morally bankrupt university administrators—PayPal had the potential to bring down governments. Two decades later, bitcoin enthusiasts would use a similar logic to pursue the same goal. Thiel made no secret of his revolutionary ambitions, communicating them freely to early employees, as well as investors, who put $3 million into the company using a PalmPilot to send Thiel the money at a press event in July 1999. “Paper money is an ancient technology,” he explained in a meeting later that year.

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They imagined four to eight years of business-friendly tax policy, an embrace of Silicon Valley by the military-industrial complex, and deregulation of the Food and Drug Administration, a potential boon to venture capital‒backed biotech companies. Maybe—and this was really dreaming, but maybe—Trump would embrace cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Even Trump’s anti-China position wasn’t as bad as it might appear. A U.S. crackdown on trade might hurt some factories in the Midwest but could be a boon to tech companies that manufactured domestically, such as Musk’s companies, SpaceX and Tesla Motors, as well as chip companies like Intel. Who knew how far the tech-friendly policies could extend?

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis
by Jeanna Smialek
Published 27 Feb 2023

Clarida’s term would expire in early 2022, and Quarles’s term as vice-chair for supervision would end in 2021, though he could remain on as a governor should he choose. Brainard stuck around the central bank. As she waited to learn whether her years of loyalty would be rewarded with a higher post, she busied herself with the biggest upheaval money had faced since the end of the gold standard more than half a century earlier. Bitcoin had roared onto the financial scene in 2008, and for years it was treated as something of a joke by the financial cognoscenti and by economists in academia and within the Fed system. In the years leading up to 2020, though, it had become clear that people were investing in it as an asset class, at a minimum, and that the technology behind it—distributed ledger—had security characteristics that might have broader uses.

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He usually wore a bandana wrapped around his forehead, but he had ditched the headwear and donned a tie for his Webex with Congress. Gill, along with investors across America, had piled money into the stock of video game store GameStop over the prior months, sending its price on a precipitous rise that eventually gave way to a roller-coaster decline. It and other meme assets—stocks of Bitcoin and the movie theater chain AMC—had drawn lawmaker attention, as had the explosion in small-time trading on the Robinhood app and other platforms. Ordinary investors were carrying out complex transactions involving options, trading on borrowed money, and even staging crowdsourced rebellions against hedge funds.

…

“Joe” Biden: approval rating of, 283; Campbell as part of administration, 342n28; climate policy under, 269–70, 270n; continuation of relief programs under, 256, 260; election of, 253; mask wearing by, 219; racial unemployment gap focus of, 234; renomination of Powell by, 294–8, 299; stimulus checks sent by, 280–3, 281n; transfer of power and transition to, 281, 281n Bies, Susan, 92 Bitcoin, 272, 291 Black Lives Matter protests, 220–3 BlackRock, 189, 208, 209–11, 344–5n11 blockchain technology, 126 Boeing, 248, 248n bonds/Treasury securities: buying by Fed to support economy, 4–5, 20, 21, 22, 72–4, 72n, 93, 113–14, 113n; buying program during 2008 crisis, 7, 7n, 25, 32n, 93, 98, 113n, 285; buying program during pandemic, 33–6, 149–50, 152, 167, 182, 187, 189–90, 210, 263, 285–7, 286n, 301, 335n7; buying program during World War I, 61; consequences of Fed purchases, 5, 113–14; foreign governments’ dumping of Treasury holdings, 197–8; impact of pandemic on market, 141, 147–50, 343n27, 343n35; interest rates and bond-buying program, 32n, 93; low rates on, 115; normal function and activities related to, 146–7; QE programs, 5, 21, 32n, 113–14, 113n, 189–90, 225, 335n7; safety of Treasury securities, 30–2, 147; sales of Treasury securities and the pandemic, 29–35; Salomon Brothers and changes to buying and selling of, 16–17; trade wars and mass bond buying, 8 Bostic, Raphael, 223, 230 Bowman, Michelle, 154, 154n Brady, Nicholas F., 16 Brainard, Lael: background, education, and expertise of, 122–3; bipartisan qualities of, 127, 271, 300; career of, 122–3; climate conference speech of, 268; community outreach events of, 233; digital currency and role of Fed, position on, 270, 272–5; Fed Listens outreach branding by, 132; governor role of, 6, 122, 124–8; influence of, 126–7; loyalty of and higher position for, 271–2; Main Street program role of, 212–14, 247; marriage and family of, 123–4; monetary policy ideology of, 125–8, 297, 297n; opposition to regulatory changes by, 122, 125–6, 127; pandemic rescue program role of, 162, 168, 204, 206; political donation of, 124–5, 342n31; politics of, 122, 124–5, 127, 127n, 268, 270–1; reputation of and respect for, 124–5, 126, 162, 214, 271–2; suspension of bank payments, opinion about, 215; Treasury secretary candidacy potential for, 271; trust between and working relationship of Powell, Quarles, and, 127–8; trust between and working relationship with Powell, 300; vice-chair position of, 6, 299; wealth of, 133 Bretton Woods meeting and monetary system, 75–6 Buffet, Warren, 16, 24 Bullard, James B.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
by Dan Lyons
Published 4 Apr 2016

When Andreessen put money into Rockmelt, a middling start-up with the lame idea of developing a new kind of web browser, the tech press went into a frenzy; a few years later, when Rockmelt was sold for scrap to Yahoo, nobody held Andreessen’s feet to the fire. When Andreessen Horowitz piled money into Bitcoin-related companies, the tech press began writing that Bitcoin was the next big thing. Nobody blinked when two companies in Andreessen’s portfolio, Instagram and Oculus, were acquired by Facebook, where Andreessen sits on the board of directors. These deals were even more remarkable than the Netscape and Loudcloud acquisitions, since while those earlier companies were sold for billions while not turning a profit, Instagram and Oculus were sold for billions without even generating revenue.

…

Because they’re Andreessen Horowitz.” Andreessen is a physically imposing man: six feet, four inches tall and heavyset, with an enormous shaved head. He’s an avid Twitter user, sometimes posting more than one hundred tweets a day, pontificating and picking fights. When Warren Buffett expressed skepticism of Bitcoin, a technology in which Andreessen has invested heavily, Andreessen called Buffet “an old white man crapping on tech he doesn’t understand.” Andreessen was quite literally the poster boy for the first dotcom bubble, posing for a February 1996 Time cover sitting barefoot on a throne, a millionaire boy king, twenty-four years old.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

Alternative currencies have limited acceptance within a small area and, sometimes, a finite expiry date. They are designed to encourage local business and emphasize community values. The rise of bitcoin, originally intended for anonymous payments for online purchases of illicit items, and of other digital or crypto-currencies reflects, in part, increased concern about the monetary system. But bitcoin is subject to price manipulation and fraud. When one bitcoin exchange collapsed, holders seeking to recover their investment discovered belatedly the rationale for state regulation of payment systems. Irrespective of whether alternative currencies succeed or fail, they are testament to a growing distrust of governments, central banks, and the financial system, and they represent a challenge to the authority and apparatus of the state.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
by Martin Kleppmann
Published 17 Apr 2017

The replicas continually check each other’s integ‐ rity and use a consensus protocol to agree on the transactions that should be exe‐ cuted. I am somewhat skeptical about the Byzantine fault tolerance aspects of these technol‐ ogies (see “Byzantine Faults” on page 304), and I find the technique of proof of work (e.g., Bitcoin mining) extraordinarily wasteful. The transaction throughput of Bitcoin is rather low, albeit for political and economic reasons more than for technical ones. However, the integrity checking aspects are interesting. Cryptographic auditing and integrity checking often relies on Merkle trees [74], which are trees of hashes that can be used to efficiently prove that a record appears in some dataset (and a few other things).

…

Since a system failure would be very expensive (e.g., an aircraft crashing and killing everyone on board, or a rocket colliding with the International Space Station), flight control systems must tolerate Byzan‐ tine faults [81, 82]. • In a system with multiple participating organizations, some participants may attempt to cheat or defraud others. In such circumstances, it is not safe for a node to simply trust another node’s messages, since they may be sent with mali‐ cious intent. For example, peer-to-peer networks like Bitcoin and other block‐ chains can be considered to be a way of getting mutually untrusting parties to agree whether a transaction happened or not, without relying on a central authority [83]. However, in the kinds of systems we discuss in this book, we can usually safely assume that there are no Byzantine faults.

…

This page can be found by searching the web for the 23-character string obtained by removing the hyphens from the string allla-mport-spubso-ntheweb. [81] John Rushby: “Bus Architectures for Safety-Critical Embedded Systems,” at 1st International Workshop on Embedded Software (EMSOFT), October 2001. [82] Jake Edge: “ELC: SpaceX Lessons Learned,” lwn.net, March 6, 2013. [83] Andrew Miller and Joseph J. LaViola, Jr.: “Anonymous Byzantine Consensus from Moderately-Hard Puzzles: A Model for Bitcoin,” University of Central Florida, Technical Report CS-TR-14-01, April 2014. [84] James Mickens: “The Saddest Moment,” USENIX ;login: logout, May 2013. [85] Evan Gilman: “The Discovery of Apache ZooKeeper’s Poison Packet,” pagerd‐ uty.com, May 7, 2015. Summary | 317 [86] Jonathan Stone and Craig Partridge: “When the CRC and TCP Checksum Disa‐ gree,” at ACM Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication (SIGCOMM), August 2000. doi: 10.1145/347059.347561 [87] Evan Jones: “How Both TCP and Ethernet Checksums Fail,” evanjones.ca, Octo‐ ber 5, 2015. [88] Cynthia Dwork, Nancy Lynch, and Larry Stockmeyer: “Consensus in the Pres‐ ence of Partial Synchrony,” Journal of the ACM, volume 35, number 2, pages 288– 323, April 1988. doi:10.1145/42282.42283 [89] Peter Bailis and Ali Ghodsi: “Eventual Consistency Today: Limitations, Exten‐ sions, and Beyond,” ACM Queue, volume 11, number 3, pages 55-63, March 2013. doi:10.1145/2460276.2462076 [90] Bowen Alpern and Fred B.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
by Martin Kleppmann
Published 16 Mar 2017

The replicas continually check each other’s integrity and use a consensus protocol to agree on the transactions that should be executed. I am somewhat skeptical about the Byzantine fault tolerance aspects of these technologies (see “Byzantine Faults”), and I find the technique of proof of work (e.g., Bitcoin mining) extraordinarily wasteful. The transaction throughput of Bitcoin is rather low, albeit for political and economic reasons more than for technical ones. However, the integrity checking aspects are interesting. Cryptographic auditing and integrity checking often relies on Merkle trees [74], which are trees of hashes that can be used to efficiently prove that a record appears in some dataset (and a few other things).

…

Since a system failure would be very expensive (e.g., an aircraft crashing and killing everyone on board, or a rocket colliding with the International Space Station), flight control systems must tolerate Byzantine faults [81, 82]. In a system with multiple participating organizations, some participants may attempt to cheat or defraud others. In such circumstances, it is not safe for a node to simply trust another node’s messages, since they may be sent with malicious intent. For example, peer-to-peer networks like Bitcoin and other blockchains can be considered to be a way of getting mutually untrusting parties to agree whether a transaction happened or not, without relying on a central authority [83]. However, in the kinds of systems we discuss in this book, we can usually safely assume that there are no Byzantine faults.

…

[81] John Rushby: “Bus Architectures for Safety-Critical Embedded Systems,” at 1st International Workshop on Embedded Software (EMSOFT), October 2001. [82] Jake Edge: “ELC: SpaceX Lessons Learned,” lwn.net, March 6, 2013. [83] Andrew Miller and Joseph J. LaViola, Jr.: “Anonymous Byzantine Consensus from Moderately-Hard Puzzles: A Model for Bitcoin,” University of Central Florida, Technical Report CS-TR-14-01, April 2014. [84] James Mickens: “The Saddest Moment,” USENIX ;login: logout, May 2013. [85] Evan Gilman: “The Discovery of Apache ZooKeeper’s Poison Packet,” pagerduty.com, May 7, 2015. [86] Jonathan Stone and Craig Partridge: “When the CRC and TCP Checksum Disagree,” at ACM Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication (SIGCOMM), August 2000. doi:10.1145/347059.347561 [87] Evan Jones: “How Both TCP and Ethernet Checksums Fail,” evanjones.ca, October 5, 2015

Where We Are: The State of Britain Now
by Roger Scruton
Published 16 Nov 2017

It is a broker among possible worlds, and resides nowhere among them. Such a business cannot be easily pinned down, and the question where it is, for purposes of taxation, legal accountability, and obedience to sovereign laws and policies may be decidable, but only by convention and without calling upon any basic loyalty of the firm. The arrival of Bitcoin and blockchain may facilitate this mass escape from the grip of sovereign overlords, by making currency itself into a network of freely associating users, outside the control of any state. More and more businesses are built on this model, offering goods and services through networks that ignore national boundaries, coming to earth here and there like Amazon and Ikea, but only temporarily and only where the tax regime is favourable.

…

INDEX Abbé Sieyès here Act of Settlement (1701) here, here Act of Union (1707) here Act of Union (1800) here, here Acton, Lord here Addison, Joseph here adolescents and home here, here, here see also network psyche American Constitution here American Revolution here Amritsar massacre (1919) here Anglers’ Conservation Association here Anglo-American alliance here anonymity and global business conduct here anti-Semitism here ‘anywheres’ and ‘somewheres’, David Goodhart’s here, here, here, here Apostolic Succession here architecture, globalization and here art here, here, here Ashcroft, Lord here Australia here Austro-Hungarian Empire here authority/officialdom, attitudes to here Barnett, Correlli here, here Baudrillard, Jean here Becket, Thomas here Belgium here, here benefits tourism here Benetton here Bernanos, Georges here, here Betjeman, John here Betts, Alexander here Bitcoin and blockchain here Blackman, Alexander here Blair, Tony here, here, here, here, here, here boundaries, countryside land here Bowlby, John here Boyle, Danny here Brexit here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also European Union Britain‘anywheres’ and ‘somewheres’ here attitude to authority/officialdom here bottom-up legal system here, here, here, here, here, here British as ‘subjects of the Queen’ here charitable donations here ‘Christian’ attitude of charitableness here, here Church of England here, here, here collective trust and stability here, here, here, here see also citizenship Common Law/law of the land here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Court of Chancery/civil law here current Royal family here, here, here, here declinist literature here development through private ventures and institutions here, here, here education here, here, here environmental accountability here farm subsidies here ‘free movement of labour’/Treaty of Maastricht (1992) here, here, here see also immigration/immigrants; Islam freedom here, here, here, here, here, here, here housing and planning here, here, here identity here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also citizenship; nationality/nationhood institutions and ‘clubbable’ instinct here interpretations of national history here, here land-ownership here, here, here landscape and countryside here left-wing intellectuals here, here see also Blair, Tony; Labour Party military power here, here, here neighbourhood and home here North-South divide here overcoming oppressive systems here patriotism here, here, here, here perception of European Union here relationship with Commonwealth here religion here, here see also Islam sovereignty and national identity here, here, here sovereignty and the Church here sovereignty and the law here, here, here town-country divide here urban elite/upper classes here, here urbanization – ‘garden cities’ here working classes here, here, here young voters here, here, here see also England; Ireland, Northern; Scotland; United Kingdom; Wales Britten Benjamin here Brown, Gordon here building societies/friendly societies here, here, here Burke, Edmund here, here business and cyberspace here, here Butterfield, Herbert here Byron, Lord here Cadbury family here, here Calvin, John here Cameron, David here Canada here, here capitalism and globalization here Catholic Church here, here Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) here, here Catholic revival, French here charities here Chesterton, G.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

Amazon’s demand for programmers, salespeople, warehouses, and data servers is redrawing Seattle’s skyline. Hundreds of towns from California to Missouri have blocked Walmart from opening stores that threaten their retail outlets, but they can’t stop Amazon from doing the same by delivering straight to one’s door. At the same time, Bitcoin began as a niche crypto-currency, but people increasingly live off it in the “real” world; if it acquires a banking license to issue credit, it could outmaneuver banks in reaching the bottom billions. Mobile transmission technologies are eclipsing the need for giant towers, and more digital payment and e-commerce mean fewer physical coins: Sweden is going cashless and Canada has stopped minting pennies, something the United States might do as well, meaning less consumption of nickel and other metals.

…

Today approximately thirty corporations control 90 percent of world Internet traffic; Google alone manages an estimated 20 percent of the Internet’s content through websites, storage, and enterprise apps. ISPs, the current backbone of the Internet, prefer self-management and self-regulation to heavy state involvement. Furthermore, the publicly accessible Web is but a small fraction of the total Internet. The Dark Web of anonymous Tor-encrypted networks and Bitcoin transactions, the Deep Web of unindexed pages, corporate intranets, and other publicly unsearchable databases make up the vast majority of the Internet’s content. Though the Internet has no central authority, it is moving from its halcyon days as an ungoverned stateless commons with only technical supervision into a geopolitical arena of intense complexity.

…

Palestine and Kurdistan act like virtual states through their Internet servers hosted in friendly territories, illustrating how the Internet enables even stateless communities to conduct elections and manage international diplomatic and economic relations. But alliances can also be illusory in cyberspace. Indeed, cloud communities take on not just governments but also each other, such as when Anonymous declared war on ISIS in 2014 or when a hacker group stole $5 million worth of Bitcoin from Europe’s leading exchange Bitstamp in 2015. The supply chain world’s blending of geopolitical and commercial agendas very much applies to cyberspace as well. The NSA revelations legitimized a surge of techno-nationalism. Particularly in China, where PLA officers were directly named in an American industrial espionage investigation, Microsoft and Cisco were suddenly delisted from government and corporate procurement mandates, replaced by indigenous products such as a Chinese operating system.

How Money Became Dangerous
by Christopher Varelas
Published 15 Oct 2019

People have become so comfortable with alternate forms of currency, while simultaneously disillusioned with our traditional financial structures, that they’re willing to put their money into something that an anonymous entity created and is nearly impossible to use for anything legal other than speculation and trading. Stories are common of people having mortgaged their houses to buy Bitcoin. They may not trust the bank, but they’ll trust sinking their savings into a currency with little history and unproven legitimacy. That’s how cynical we have become, how disconnected we now are from conventional forms of money. A recent trend in Silicon Valley—which capitalizes on the popularity of cryptocurrency—is to issue an initial coin offering (ICO) when raising funding.

…

The startup world is already fraught with risk and inflated promises, and ICOs magnify those problems by injecting the crypto landscape with flimsy new currencies, further corrupting the trust and integrity of that market. A lot of people believe that what will survive the crypto bubble will be the infrastructure, rather than many of the currencies themselves. Blockchain is a digital ledger originally created to record Bitcoin transactions, but it has since found a multitude of other valuable uses. Blockchain, as the infrastructure that allows the majority of cryptocurrencies to operate, is the shovel salesman, just like Equinix was for the internet, while the cryptocurrencies are the gold seekers or the startups. One use of Blockchain that will have a dramatic impact on wealth management and the way we look at value will be the ability to divide an asset into as many parts as desired and sell those to third parties.

…

They don’t know what’s going to precipitate the end of the world as they know it, but they’re worried it’s going to happen; and when it does, they want to make sure that their advantages are protected. It’s pretty scary that the people with the most knowledge—those from Wall Street who built our financial world and those from Silicon Valley who built our technology—are the ones who are most worried that the whole system could melt down. This has inspired the rise of things like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. When people lose faith in their civil society, government, and financial institutions, they begin to invest in alternatives—store up gold, build a compound, buy crypto, assemble a personal arsenal. But what if their strategies are misguided? I have many friends who are preppers.

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz
by Aaron Swartz and Lawrence Lessig
Published 5 Jan 2016

Recently, DNS legend Dan Kaminsky used this to argue that since electronic cash was pretty much the same as naming, Zooko’s triangle applied to it as well. He used this to argue that Bitcoin, the secure, decentralized, human-meaningful electronic cash system was impossible. I have my problems with Bitcoin, but it’s manifestly not impossible, so I just assumed Kaminsky had gone wrong somewhere. But tonight I realized that you can indeed use Bitcoin to square Zooko’s triangle. Here’s how it works: Let there be a document called the scroll. The scroll consists of a series of lines and each line consists of a tuple (name, key, nonce) such that the first N bits of the hash of the scroll from the beginning to the end of a line are all zero.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together
by Thomas W. Malone
Published 14 May 2018

This approach is limited, however, by the number of people who want to voluntarily reduce their emissions in this way. It might also be possible to create additional financial incentives for people to reduce their emissions. For example, several Climate CoLab proposals have suggested using digital currencies (like bitcoin) to buy and sell emission rights.4 It is common for the value of these digital currencies to increase very substantially over time. The value of a bitcoin, for instance, has increased from about $0.30 in 2011 to over $1,200.00 in 2017, and there are structural reasons to expect that such increases may continue.5 In this case, early participants in a voluntary emissions-trading program with a digital currency might receive an initial allocation of emission rights.

…

The contests where people compete to come up with basic ideas for improving things like transportation and electricity are called basic contests. Higher-level contests, where people compete to combine these basic proposals into national and global climate action plans, are called integrated contests. For instance, one of our winning global proposals suggested that a digital currency called solar dollars (based on Bitcoin-like blockchain technology) could be used to encourage emission reductions in countries around the world. This global proposal contained subproposals for how the major countries and regions of the world could contribute to the overall plan (see the following illustration). The subproposal for Europe, for example, suggested that Greece could be used as a test laboratory for renewable energy approaches that could be used all over Europe.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

He advocates systems “that live everywhere and nowhere, protecting and processing the data of millions of people, and executing on millions of internet computers.”77 One important study of Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that relies on blockchain, suggests that such machine solutions both express and contribute to the general erosion of the social fabric in ways that are both consistent with instrumentarianism and further pave the way for its success. Information scholars Primavera De Filippi and Benjamin Loveluck conclude that contrary to popular belief, “Bitcoin is neither anonymous nor privacy-friendly… anyone with a copy of the blockchain can see the history of all Bitcoin transactions… every transaction ever done on the Bitcoin network can be traced back to its origin.”

…

Harvard Business Review Staff, “With Big Data Comes Big Responsibility,” Harvard Business Review, November 1, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/11/with-big-data-comes-big-responsibility. 77. “Who Should We Trust to Manage Our Data?” World Economic Forum, accessed August 9, 2018, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/10/who-should-we-trust-manage-our-data/. 78. Primavera De Filippi and Benjamin Loveluck, “The Invisible Politics of Bitcoin: Governance Crisis of a Decentralized Infrastructure,” Internet Policy Review 5, no. 3 (September 30, 2016). 79. Staff, “With Big Data Comes Big Responsibility.” CHAPTER SIXTEEN 1. “The World UNPLUGGED,” The World UNPLUGGED, https://theworld unplugged.wordpress.com. 2. For an insightful account, see Katherine Losse, The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network (New York: Free Press, 2012). 3.

…

See also instrumentarianism; ubiquitous computing Bing search engine, 95, 162, 163 biomedical telemetry, 205–206 biometrics: in Chinese social credit system, 389, 392; data collected by Sleep Number bed, 236; and Facebook, 251–252; fingerprints, 389, 489; regulation of data collection, 125, 251, 252–253; used in emotion analytics products, 283, 289. See also emotion analytics; facial recognition; voice recognition; wearable technologies Bitcoin, 442 blockchain, 442 Bloomberg, 76–77, 315 Bloomberg Businessweek, 28, 102, 263, 388, 511 Blumenthal, Richard, 146–147 body consciousness, 464 body rendition: through facial recognition, 251–253; through health care apps, 247–251; through location data, 242–245; through wearables, 246–248, 249 Bogost, Ian, 314 Boston Globe, 388 Boston Police Department, 388 Bosworth, Andrew, 457, 505–506 bots, “conversations” with, 164.

Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression
by Geoff Cox and Alex McLean
Published 9 Nov 2012

Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 52. 112. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 113. For example, the P2P virtual currency Bitcoin created in 2009 replaces the centralized bank with the distributed network, thus offering a critique of monopolistic practices. (See http:// www.bitcoin.org/.) 114. Despite being written as a joke, it brought the attention of the FBI, and Kamkar pled guilty to a felony charge of computer hacking, agreeing not to use a computer for three years. Further explanations and press coverage of the Sam Kamkar case are available at http://namb.la/popular/. 115.

The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)
by Phil Thornton
Published 7 May 2014

. • The idea that the price system is the way in which individuals with limited knowledge combine to produce one social outcome underpins the rational expectations hypothesis – that people make choices based on their rational outlook, available information and past experiences. 138 The Great Economists • His thesis that order emerges spontaneously out of apparent chaos is the defining characteristic of the science of complex adaptive systems, which is a key concept in many fields such as biology, financial markets and the study of communities. • His suggestion that currencies should compete against each other may win new supporters in the wake of the advent of private currencies such as Bitcoins and computer-gamesbased money. However, it was Hayek’s ideas on the primacy of individuals’ decisions over central planning as the best way to run an economy that have had a lasting legacy. When economists started to question the impact that Keynesianism was having on modern economies in the 1960s and 1970s they turned to Hayek.

…

Index A Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith, 1759) 2, 5–6 Adelman, Irma 110 American Economic Association 170 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations see The Wealth of Nations anarchism 156 apartheid system in South Africa 199 Ariely, Dan 234 Arrow, Kenneth 191, 213 AT&T 22 austerity versus stimulus debate 43–4, 140–1 Austrian School of Economics 121–2 autarky concept 184 bank bailouts in the financial crisis 162 Bank of England 161 Barro, Robert 43 Barro-Ricardo equivalence 43–4 Becker, Gary (1930– ) 193–216 approach to human behaviour 212–15 building human capital 200–2, 210 early life and influences 195–7 economic perspective on discrimination 196–7, 198–9 Economics of Discrimination (1957) 196–7, 198–9 economics of the family 213–15 family decision making 203–6 key economic theories and writings 197–212 long-term impact 212–15 new home economics 203–6 Nobel Prize (1992) 194, 195–6 on crime and punishment 207–10 on drug addiction 210–12, 215 rational choice model 197, 212– 15, 216 verdict 215–16 Becker–Posner Blog 215 behavioural economics 218–19, 233–6 Bentham, Jeremy 31, 181 Bergmann, Barbara 206 Bergson, Abram 182 Bergson–Samuelson social welfare function 182–3 Bernanke, Ben 77, 159, 162 Bernoulli, Daniel 229 bias in decision making 222–5 in financial decision making 225–32 Bitcoin currency 138 Black, Fischer 187 Blinder, Alan 215 Bloomsbury Group 94 Blunt, Anthony 94 boom and bust cycles see business cycles Bretton Woods agreement 95, 108–9 Brown, Gordon 3, 42 Burgess, Guy 94 Burns, Arthur F. 147 Bush, George H.W. 139 business cycles 57, 65 Hayek’s explanation 123–6 Samuelson’s oscillator model 174–5 Butler, Eamonn 162 Cambridge School of economics 74, 86 Cambridge spy ring 94 capital flow controls 113 capital-intensive goods, effects of increase in wages 33 capitalism exploitation of the working class (Marx) 56–8, 62–3 Index239 ‘fictitious capital’ concept (Marx) 62 seeds of its own downfall (Marx) 56–8, 61–3 capitalist production process (Marx) 54–6 Carlyle, Thomas 33 cartels evil of 10–11 regulation to prevent 21–2 central banks control of economic activity 161 over-expansion of credit 123–4 central state planning, Hayek’s opposition to 134–6, 140 certainty effect 229, 230 ceteris paribus approach to economic analysis 79–80 Chapman, Bruce 19 Chicago School of economic thought 146, 160, 194 China savings and investment imbalance with the US 113 trade imbalance with the US 45 choice architecture 234 Churchill, Winston 98 classical economics 40, 54 Coase, Ronald 73 cognitive biases (Kahneman) 222–5 communism 19, 50 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 52, 58–61 company bailouts in the financial crisis 162 comparative advantage 35–8, 183–4 complex adaptive systems, science of 138 complex financial products 61–2, 187 computer-games-based money 138 confirmation bias 227 consumer demand marginal rate of substitution 180 revealed preference theory 180–1 consumption smoothing concept 149, 163 Corn Laws, attack by Ricardo 33–5 costs of production, relationship to value 75–7 credit expansion, as a driver of boom and bust cycles 123–4 crime and punishment, views of Becker 207–10 Darling, Alistair 112 Das Kapital (Marx) 52, 53–4, 59–61, 62, 67–8 decision making biases and errors in financial decisions 225–32 heuristics and bias in 222–5 Prospect Theory (Kahneman) 228–32, 234 under risk 228–32 demand side economics 127 depression Keynesian interventionist view 92–3, 94, 105–6 see also Great Depression (1930s) dialectic style of analysis 52, 54 Diamond, Peter 179 diminishing marginal utility 82 discrimination economic perspective of Becker 196–7, 198–9 views of Friedman 157 distribution of economic value (Marx) 54–6 division of labour and productivity 11–14 car production 20–1 in daily life 20–1 divorce rates 205 drug addiction, views of Becker 210–12, 215 Dubner, Stephen 234 Eastern Europe, influence of Hayek 140 Ebenstein, Larry 158 Economics: An Introductory Analysis (Samuelson, 1948) 168, 171–3, 188–9 Economics of Discrimination (Becker, 1957) 196–7, 198–9 Efficient Market theory 111, 112, 187 240Index elasticity of demand 82–4 Elizabeth II, Queen 158 emerging markets, offshoring of jobs to 41 endogenous growth 202 endowment effect 232, 234 Engels, Friedrich 52, 58–61 ethical judgements in economics 182–3 European Central Bank 161 exchange rates, impact of trade on 185–6 expected utility theory (EUT) 228, 229–30, 232 externalities 85 factor price equalisation theorem 186–7 Fama, Eugene 160, 187 family decision making economic perspective 183, 203–6, 213–15 welfare decision making 183 fiat currency 152 ‘fictitious capital’ concept (Marx) 62 financial decision making, biases and errors in 225–32 financial economics, work of Samuelson 187 First World War 95 Folbre, Nancy 206 Ford Model-T car, assembly-line production system 21 Foundations of Economic Analysis (Samuelson, 1947) 168, 169–70 Fox, Charles James 23 Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner) 234 free-market mechanism of supply and demand 8–9 free market system view of Adam Smith 13–14, 16–18 view of Hayek 131–3 view of Friedman 155–7 free rider problem in public goods 177–8 Free to Choose (Friedman and Friedman, 1980) 158 free trade, influence of Adam Smith 22–3 Freeman, Richard 201 frictional unemployment 155 Friedman, David 156 Friedman, Milton (1912–2006) 94, 110, 145–64, 190–1, 196 advocate of the free market 155–7 belief in individualism 155–7 criticism of Keynesianism 149–50 early life and influences 147–8 economics in action 160–3 fiat currency 152 Free to Choose (1980 ) 158 influence of the Great Depression (1930s) 148 influence on modern economic theory 158–60 limited role of government in the economy 152, 155–7 long-term legacy 157–63 monetarism 151–2 monetarist rule 152 monetary policy 151–2 ‘natural’ rate of unemployment 153–5 new explanation for the Great Depression 150–1 Nobel Prize in economics (1976) 146, 147–8, 154, 161 non-accelerating inflation of unemployment (NAIRU) 153–5 permanent income hypothesis 148–50 role of money supply in the economy 151–2 verdict 163–4 Friedman, Rose (formerly Rose Director) 147, 148, 157, 158, 160 FTSE-listed plcs 86 Funk, Walter 108 Funk Plan 108 Galbraith, J.K. 159 gambler’s fallacy (misconception of chance) 224 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 40 Index241 general equilibrium theory 8 genetically modified foods 42 geographical effects in economics 84–6 Giffen goods 84 global financial crisis (2007–8) 92, 174 and Keynesianism 111–13 global stimulus package 113 Marxist view 61–3 global free trade influence of Adam Smith 22–3 influence of Ricardo 40–2 global public goods 177–8 global recession (2009) see Great Recession (2009) gold standard, criticism by Keynes 95, 98, 107 government debt and the Great Recession (2009) 43 taxpayer view of (Ricardo) 38–9 government role in the economy anti-central planning view of Hayek 134–6, 140 Keynesian view 92–3, 94, 105–6 view of Adam Smith 9, 10, 16–18 view of Friedman 152, 155–7 Great Crash (1929) 98, 99 Great Depression (1930s) 19, 22–3, 85, 92 explanation of Friedman and Schwartz 150–1 influence on Friedman 148 influence on Keynes 99–100 role of the Federal Reserve 159 Great Recession (2009) 23 and government debt 43 arguments against protectionism 42 austerity versus stimulus debate 43–4, 140–1 Greece, sovereign debt crisis 113–14 Greenspan, Alan 111–12, 235 Grossman, Michael 212 Hansen, Lars Peter 160 Hayek, Friedrich (1899–1992) 110, 111, 119–42 business cycle theory 123–6 clash with Keynes 120, 126–31 collapse of the Soviet Union 140 early life and influences 120 emphasis on individual freedom 134–6, 140 explanation for boom and bust cycles 123–6 First World War 121 focus on supply side economics 127 influence in Eastern Europe 140 influence on George H.W.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2014

But what I think his analysis also makes clear is that the evolution of an alternative to capital would require as a necessary but not sufficient condition a radical reconfiguration of how exchange is organised and the ultimate dissolution of the power of money not only over social life but, as Keynes indicates, over our mental and moral conceptions of the world. Envisaging a moneyless economy is one way to get a measure of what an alternative to capitalism might look like. The possibility of this, given the potentialities of electronic moneys or even substitutes for money, may not be so far off. The rise of new forms of cybercurrency, such as Bitcoin, suggest that capital itself is now on the way to invent new monetary forms. It is opportune and wise, therefore, for the left to frame political ambitions and political thought around this ultimate objective. An alternative monetary politics of this sort becomes more imperative when we consider a particularly dangerous immediate problem.

…

The money form has acquired a good deal of autonomy over the last forty years. Fiat and fictitious values created by the world’s central banks have taken over. This leads us back to some reflections on the relation between the path of technological evolution we have here described and the evolution of monetary technologies. The rise of cyber moneys, like Bitcoin, in some instances seemingly constructed for purposes of money-laundering around illegal activities, is just the beginning of an inexorable descent of the monetary system into chaos. The political problem posed by the question of technology for anti-capitalist struggle is perhaps the most difficult to confront.

…

N., Process and Reality, New York, Free Press, 1969 Wolff, R., Moore, B., and Marcuse, H., A Critique of Pure Tolerance: Beyond Tolerance, Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook, Repressive Tolerance, Boston, Beacon Press, 1969 Wright, M., Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, New York, Routledge, 2006 Index Numbers in italics indicate Figures. 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 271 A Abu Ghraib, Iraq 202 acid deposition 255, 256 advertising 50, 121, 140, 141, 187, 197, 236, 237, 275, 276 Aeschylus 291 Afghanistan 202, 290 Africa and global financial crisis 170 growth 232 indigenous population and property rights 39 labour 107, 108, 174 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 population growth 230 Agamben, Giorgio 283–4 agglomeration 149, 150 economies 149 aggregate demand 20, 80, 81, 104, 173 aggregate effective demand 235 agribusiness 95, 133, 136, 206, 247, 258 agriculture ix, 39, 61, 104, 113, 117, 148, 229, 239, 257–8, 261 Alabama 148 Algerian War (1954–62) 288, 290 alienation 57, 69, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 198, 213, 214, 215, 263, 266–70, 272, 275–6, 279–80, 281, 286, 287 Allende, Salvador 201 Althusser, Louis 286 Amazon 131, 132 Americas colonisation of 229 indigenous populations 283 Amnesty International 202 anti-capitalist movements 11, 14, 65, 110, 111, 162 anti-capitalist struggle 14, 110, 145, 193, 269, 294 anti-globalisation 125 anti-terrorism xiii apartheid 169, 202, 203 Apple 84, 123, 131 apprenticeships 117 Arab Spring movement 280 Arbenz, Jacobo 201 Argentina 59, 107, 152, 160, 232 Aristotelianism 283, 289 Aristotle 1, 4, 200, 215 arms races 93 arms traffickers 54 Arrighi, Giovanni 136 Adam Smith in Beijing 142 Arthur, Brian: The Nature of Technology 89, 95–9, 101–4, 110 artificial intelligence xii, 104, 108, 120, 139, 188, 208, 295 Asia ‘land grabs’ 58 urbanisation 254 assembly lines 119 asset values and the credit system 83 defined 240 devalued 257 housing market 19, 20, 21, 58, 133 and predatory lending 133 property 76 recovery of 234 speculation 83, 101, 179 associationism 281 AT&T 131 austerity xi, 84, 177, 191, 223 Australia 152 autodidacts 183 automation xii, 103, 105, 106, 108, 138, 208, 215, 295 B Babbage, Charles 119 Bangkok riots, Thailand (1968) x Bangladesh dismantlement of old ships 250 factories 129, 174, 292 industrialisation 123 labour 108, 123, 129 protests against unsafe labour conditions 280 textile mill tragedies 249 Bank of England 45, 46 banking bonuses 164 electronic 92, 100, 277 excessive charges 84 interbank lending 233 and monopoly power 143 national banks supplant local banking in Britain and France 158 net transfers between banks 28 power of bankers 75 private banks 233 profits 54 regional banks 158 shell games 54–5 systematic banking malfeasance 54, 61 Baran, Paul and Sweezy, Paul: Monopoly Capitalism 136 Barcelona 141, 160 barrios pobres ix barter 24, 25, 29 Battersea Power Station, London 255 Battle of Algiers, The (film) 288 Bavaria, Germany 143, 150 Becker, Gary 186 Bernanke, Ben 47 Bhutan 171 billionaires xi, 165, 169, 170 biodiversity 246, 254, 255, 260 biofuels 3 biomedical engineering xii Birmingham 149 Bitcoin 36, 109 Black Panthers 291 Blade Runner (film) 271 Blankfein, Lloyd 239–40 Bohr, Niels 70 Bolivia 257, 260, 284 bondholders xii, 32, 51, 152, 158, 223, 240, 244, 245 bonuses 54, 77, 164, 178 Bourdieu, Pierre 186, 187 bourgeois morality 195 bourgeois reformism 167, 211 ‘Brady Bonds’ 240 Braudel, Fernand 193 Braverman, Harry: Labor and Monopoly Capital 119 Brazil a BRIC country 170, 228 coffee growers 257 poverty grants 107 unrest in (2013) 171, 243, 293 Brecht, Bertolt 265, 293 Bretton Woods (1944) 46 brewing trade 138 BRIC countries 10, 170, 174, 228 Britain alliance between state and London merchant capitalists 44–5 banking 158 enclosure movement 58 lends to United States (nineteenth century) 153 suppression of Mau Mau 291 surpluses of capital and labour sent to colonies 152–3 welfare state 165 see also United Kingdom British Empire 115, 174 British Museum Library, London 4 British Petroleum (BP) 61, 128 Buffett, Peter 211–12, 245, 283, 285 Buffett, Warren 211 bureaucracy 121–2, 165, 203, 251 Bush, George, Jr 201, 202 C Cabet, Étienne 183 Cabral, Amilcar 291 cadastral mapping 41 Cadbury 18 Cairo uprising (2011) 99 Calhoun, Craig 178 California 29, 196, 254 Canada 152 Cape Canaveral, Florida 196 capital abolition of monopolisable skills 119–20 aim of 92, 96–7, 232 alternatives to 36, 69, 89, 162 annihilation of space through time 138, 147, 178 capital-labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9 and capitalism 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 centralisation of 135, 142 circulation of 5, 7, 8, 53, 63, 67, 73, 74, 75, 79, 88, 99, 147, 168, 172, 177, 234, 247, 251, 276 commodity 74, 81 control over labour 102–3, 116–17, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 creation of 57 cultural 186 destruction of 154, 196, 233–4 and division of labour 112 economic engine of 8, 10, 97, 168, 172, 200, 253, 265, 268 evolution of 54, 151, 171, 270 exploitation by 156, 195 fictitious 32–3, 34, 76, 101, 110–11, 239–42 fixed 75–8, 155, 234 importance of uneven geographical development to 161 inequality foundational for 171–2 investment in fixed capital 75 innovations 4 legal-illegal duality 72 limitless growth of 37 new form of 4, 14 parasitic forms of 245 power of xii, 36, 47 private capital accumulation 23 privatisation of 61 process-thing duality 70–78 profitability of 184, 191–2 purpose of 92 realisation of 88, 173, 192, 212, 231, 235, 242, 268, 273 relation to nature 246–63 reproduction of 4, 47, 55, 63, 64, 88, 97, 108, 130, 146, 161, 168, 171, 172, 180, 181, 182, 189, 194, 219, 233, 252 spatiality of 99 and surplus value 63 surpluses of 151, 152, 153 temporality of 99 tension between fixed and circulating capital 75–8, 88, 89 turnover time of 73, 99, 147 and wage rates 173 capital accumulation, exponential growth of 229 capital gains 85, 179 capital accumulation 7, 8, 75, 76, 78, 102, 149, 151–5, 159, 172, 173, 179, 192, 209, 223, 228–32, 238, 241, 243, 244, 247, 273, 274, 276 basic architecture for 88 and capital’s aim 92, 96 collapse of 106 compound rate of 228–9 and the credit system 83 and democratisation 43 and demographic growth 231 and household consumerism 192 and lack of aggregate effective demand in the market 81 and the land market 59 and Marx 5 maximising 98 models of 53 in a new territories 152–3 perpetual 92, 110, 146, 162, 233, 265 private 23 promotion of 34 and the property market 50 recent problems of 10 and the state 48 capitalism ailing 58 an alternative to 36 and capital 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 city landscape of 160 consumerist 197 contagious predatory lawlessness within 109 crises essential to its reproduction ix; defined 7 and demand-side management 85 and democracy 43 disaster 254–5, 255 economic engine of xiii, 7–8, 11, 110, 220, 221, 252, 279 evolution of 218 geographical landscape of 146, 159 global xi–xii, 108, 124 history of 7 ‘knowledge-based’ xii, 238 and money power 33 and a moneyless economy 36 neoliberal 266 political economy of xiv; and private property rights 41 and racialisation 8 reproduction of ix; revivified xi; vulture 162 capitalist markets 33, 53 capitalo-centric studies 10 car industry 121, 138, 148, 158, 188 carbon trading 235, 250 Caribbean migrants 115 Cartesian thinking 247 Cato Institute 143 Central America 136 central banks/bankers xi–xii, 37, 45, 46, 48, 51, 109, 142, 156, 161, 173, 233, 245 centralisation 135, 142, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 219 Césaire, Aimé 291 CFCs (chloro-fluorocarbons) 248, 254, 256, 259 chambers of commerce 168 Chandler, Alfred 141 Chaplin, Charlie 103 Charles I, King 199 Chartism 184 Chávez, Hugo 123, 201 cheating 57, 61, 63 Cheney, Dick 289 Chicago riots (1968) x chicanery 60, 72 children 174 exploitation of 195 raising 188, 190 trading of 26 violence and abuse of 193 Chile 136, 194, 280 coup of 1973 165, 201 China air quality 250, 258 becomes dynamic centre of a global capitalism 124 a BRIC country 170, 228 capital in (after 2000) 154 class struggles 233 and competition 150, 161 consumerism 194–5, 236 decentralisation 49 dirigiste governmentality 48 dismantlement of old ships 250 dispossessions in 58 education 184, 187 factories 123, 129, 174, 182 famine in 124–5 ‘great leap forward’ 125 growth of 170, 227, 232 income inequalities 169 industrialisation 232 Keynesian demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi; labour 80, 82, 107, 108, 123, 174, 230 life expectancy 259 personal debt 194 remittances 175 special economic zones 41, 144 speculative booms and bubbles in housing markets 21 suburbanisation 253 and technology 101 toxic batteries 249–50 unstable lurches forward 10 urban and infrastructural projects 151 urbanisation 232 Chinese Communist Party 108, 142 Church, the 185, 189, 199 circular cumulative causation 150 CitiBank 61 citizenship rights 168 civil rights 202, 205 class affluent classes 205 alliances 143, 149 class analysis xiii; conflict 85, 159 domination 91, 110 plutocratic capitalist xiii; power 55, 61, 88, 89, 92, 97, 99, 110, 134, 135, 221, 279 and race 166, 291 rule 91 structure 91 class struggle 34, 54, 67, 68, 85, 99, 103, 110, 116, 120, 135, 159, 172, 175, 183, 214, 233 climate change 4, 253–6, 259 Clinton, President Bill 176 Cloud Atlas (film) 271 CNN 285 coal 3, 255 coercion x, 41–4, 53, 60–63, 79, 95, 201, 286 Cold War 153, 165 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 78 Collins, Suzanne: The Hunger Games 264 Colombia 280 colonialism 257 the colonised 289–90 indigenous populations 39, 40 liberation from colonial rule 202 philanthropic 208, 285 colonisation 229, 262 ‘combinatorial evolution’ 96, 102, 104, 146, 147, 248 commercialisation 262, 263, 266 commodification 24, 55, 57, 59–63, 88, 115, 140, 141, 192, 193, 235, 243, 251, 253, 260, 262, 263, 273 commodities advertising 275 asking price 31 and barter 24 commodity exchange 39, 64 compared with products 25–6 defective or dangerous 72 definition 39 devaluation of 234 exchange value 15, 25 falling costs of 117 importance of workers as buyers 80–81 international trade in 256 labour power as a commodity 62 low-value 29 mobility of 147–8 obsolescence 236 single metric of value 24 unique 140–41 use value 15, 26, 35 commodity markets 49 ‘common capital of the class’ 142, 143 common wealth created by social labour 53 private appropriation of 53, 54, 55, 61, 88, 89 reproduction of 61 use values 53 commons collective management of 50 crucial 295 enclosure of 41, 235 natural 250 privatised 250 communications 99, 147, 148, 177 communism 196 collapse of (1989) xii, 165 communist parties 136 during Cold War 165 scientific 269 socialism/communism 91, 269 comparative advantage 122 competition and alienated workers 125 avoiding 31 between capitals 172 between energy and food production 3 decentralised 145 and deflationary crisis (1930s) 136 foreign 148, 155 geopolitical 219 inter-capitalist 110 international 154, 175 interstate 110 interterritorial 219 in labour market 116 and monopoly 131–45, 146, 218 and technology 92–3 and turnover time of capital 73, 99 and wages 135 competitive advantage 73, 93, 96, 112, 161 competitive market 131, 132 competitiveness 184 complementarity principle of 70 compounding growth 37, 49, 222, 227, 228, 233, 234, 235, 243, 244 perpetual 222–45, 296 computerisation 100, 120, 222 computers 92, 100, 105, 119 hardware 92, 101 organisational forms 92, 93, 99, 101 programming 120 software 92, 99, 101, 115, 116 conscience laundering 211, 245, 284, 286 Conscious Capitalism 284 constitutional rights 58 constitutionality 60, 61 constitutions progressive 284 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 US Constitution 284 and usurpation of power 45 consumerism 89, 106, 160, 192–5, 197, 198, 236, 274–7 containerisation 138, 148, 158 contracts 71, 72, 93, 207 contradictions Aristotelian conception of 4 between money and the social labour money represents 83 between reality and appearance 4–6 between use and exchange value 83 of capital and capitalism 68 contagious intensification of 14 creative use of 3 dialectical conception of 4 differing reactions to 2–3 and general crises 14 and innovation 3 moved around rather than resolved 3–4 multiple 33, 42 resolution of 3, 4 two modes of usage 1–2 unstable 89 Controller of the Currency 120 corporations and common wealth 54 corporate management 98–9 power of 57–8, 136 and private property 39–40 ‘visible hand’ 141–2 corruption 53, 197, 266 cosmopolitanism 285 cost of living 164, 175 credit cards 67, 133, 277 credit card companies 54, 84, 278 credit financing 152 credit system 83, 92, 101, 111, 239 crises changes in mental conceptions of the world ix-x; crisis of capital 4 defined 4 essential to the reproduction of capitalism ix; general crisis ensuing from contagions 14 housing markets crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22 reconfiguration of physical landscapes ix; slow resolution of x; sovereign debt crisis (after 2012) 37 currency markets, turbulence of (late 1960s) x customary rights 41, 59, 198 D Davos conferences 169 DDT 259 Debord, Guy: The Society of the Spectacle 236 debt creation 236 debt encumbrancy 212 debt peonage 62, 212 decentralisation 49, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 219, 281, 295 Declaration of Independence (US) 284 decolonisation 282, 288, 290 decommodification 85 deindustrialisation xii, 77–8, 98, 110, 148, 153, 159, 234 DeLong, Bradford 228 demand management 81, 82, 106, 176 demand-side management 85 democracy 47, 215 bourgeois 43, 49 governance within capitalism 43 social 190 totalitarian 220, 292 democratic governance 220, 266 democratisation 43 Deng Xiaoping x depressions 49, 227 1930s x, 108, 136, 169, 227, 232, 234 Descartes, René 247 Detroit 77, 136, 138, 148, 150, 152, 155, 159, 160 devaluation 153, 155, 162 of capital 233 of commodities 234 crises 150–51, 152, 154 localised 154 regional 154 developing countries 16, 240 Dhaka, Bangladesh 77 dialectics 70 Dickens, Charles 126, 169 Bleak House 226 Dombey and Son 184 digital revolution 144 disabled, the 202 see also handicapped discrimination 7, 8, 68, 116, 297 diseases 10, 211, 246, 254, 260 disempowerment 81, 103, 116, 119, 198, 270 disinvestment 78 Disneyfication 276 dispossession accumulation by 60, 67, 68, 84, 101, 111, 133, 141, 212 and capital 54, 55, 57 economies of 162 of indigenous populations 40, 59, 207 ‘land grabs’ 58 of land rights of the Irish 40 of the marginalised 198 political economy of 58 distributional equality 172 distributional shares 164–5, 166 division of labour 24, 71, 112–30, 154, 184, 268, 270 and Adam Smith 98, 118 defined 112 ‘the detail division of labour’ 118, 121 distinctions and oppositions 113–14 evolution of 112, 120, 121, 126 and gender 114–15 increasing complexity of 124, 125, 126 industrial proletariat 114 and innovation 96 ‘new international division of labour’ 122–3 organisation of 98 proliferating 121 relation between the parts and the whole 112 social 113, 118, 121, 125 technical 113, 295 uneven geographical developments in 130 dot-com bubble (1990s) 222–3, 241 ‘double coincidence of wants and needs’ 24 drugs 32, 193, 248 cartels 54 Durkheim, Emile 122, 125 Dust Bowl (United States, 1930s) 257 dynamism 92, 104, 146, 219 dystopia 229, 232, 264 E Eagleton , Terry: Why Marx Was Right 1, 21, 200, 214–15 East Asia crisis of 1997–98 154 dirigiste governmentality 48 education 184 rise of 170 Eastern Europe 115, 230 ecological offsets 250 economic rationality 211, 250, 252, 273, 274, 275, 277, 278, 279 economies 48 advanced capitalist 228, 236 agglomeration 149 of dispossession 162 domination of industrial cartels and finance capital 135 household 192 informal 175 knowledge-based 188 mature 227–8 regional 149 reoriented to demand-side management 85 of scale 75 solidarity 66, 180 stagnant xii ecosystems 207, 247, 248, 251–6, 258, 261, 263, 296 Ecuador 46, 152, 284 education 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 127–8, 129, 134, 150, 156, 168, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 223, 235, 296 efficiency 71, 92, 93, 98, 103, 117, 118, 119, 122, 126, 272, 273, 284 efficient market hypothesis 118 Egypt 107, 280, 293 Ehrlich, Paul 246 electronics 120, 121, 129, 236, 292 emerging markets 170–71, 242 employment 37 capital in command of job creation 172, 174 conditions of 128 full-time 274 opportunities for xii, 108, 168 regional crises of 151 of women 108, 114, 115, 127 see also labour enclosure movement 58 Engels, Friedrich 70 The Condition of the English Working Class in England 292 English Civil War (1642–9) 199 Enlightenment 247 Enron 133, 241 environmental damage 49, 61, 110, 111, 113, 232, 249–50, 255, 257, 258, 259, 265, 286, 293 environmental movement 249, 252 environmentalism 249, 252–3 Epicurus 283 equal rights 64 Erasmus, Desiderius 283 ethnic hatreds and discriminations 8, 165 ethnic minorities 168 ethnicisation 62 ethnicity 7, 68, 116 euro, the 15, 37, 46 Europe deindustrialisation in 234 economic development in 10 fascist parties 280 low population growth rate 230 social democratic era 18 unemployment 108 women in labour force 230 European Central Bank 37, 46, 51 European Commission 51 European Union (EU) 95, 159 exchange values commodities 15, 25, 64 dominance of 266 and housing 14–23, 43 and money 28, 35, 38 uniform and qualitatively identical 15 and use values 15, 35, 42, 44, 50, 60, 65, 88 exclusionary permanent ownership rights 39 experts 122 exploitation 49, 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 124, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 159, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 193, 195, 208, 246, 257 exponential growth 224, 240, 254 capacity for 230 of capital 246 of capital accumulation 223, 229 of capitalist activity 253 and capital’s ecosystem 255 in computer power 105 and environmental resources 260 in human affairs 229 and innovations in finance and banking 100 potential dangers of 222, 223 of sophisticated technologies 100 expropriation 207 externality effects 43–4 Exxon 128 F Facebook 236, 278, 279 factories ix, 123, 129, 160, 174, 182, 247, 292 Factory Act (1864) 127, 183 famine 124–5, 229, 246 Fannie Mae 50 Fanon, Frantz 287 The Wretched of the Earth 288–90, 293 fascist parties 280 favelas ix, 16, 84, 175 feminisation 115 feminists 189, 192, 283 fertilisers 255 fetishes, fetishism 4–7, 31, 36–7, 61, 103, 111, 179, 198, 243, 245, 269, 278 feudalism 41 financial markets 60, 133 financialisation 238 FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sections 113 fishing 59, 113, 148, 249, 250 fixity and motion 75–8, 88, 89, 146, 155 Food and Drug Administration 120 food production/supply 3, 229, 246, 248, 252 security 253, 294, 296 stamp aid 206, 292 Ford, Martin 104–8, 111, 273 foreclosure 21, 22, 24, 54, 58, 241, 268 forestry 113, 148, 257 fossil fuels 3–4 Foucault, Michel xiii, 204, 209, 280–81 Fourier, François Marie Charles 183 Fourierists 18 Fourteen Points 201 France banking 158 dirigiste governmentality under de Gaulle 48 and European Central Bank 46 fascist parties 280 Francis, Pope 293 Apostolic Exhortation 275–6 Frankfurt School 261 Freddie Mac 50 free trade 138, 157 freedom 47, 48, 142, 143, 218, 219, 220, 265, 267–270, 276, 279–82, 285, 288, 296 and centralised power 142 cultural 168 freedom and domination 199–215, 219, 268, 285 and the good life 215 and money creation 51 popular desire for 43 religious 168 and state finances 48 under the rule of capital 64 see also liberty and freedom freedom of movement 47, 296 freedom of thought 200 freedom of the press 213 French Revolution 203, 213, 284 G G7 159 G20 159 Gallup survey of work 271–2 Gandhi, Mahatma 284, 291 Gaulle, Charles de 48 gay rights 166 GDP 194, 195, 223 Gehry, Frank 141 gender discriminations 7, 8, 68, 165 gene sequences 60 General Motors xii genetic engineering xii, 101, 247 genetic materials 235, 241, 251, 261 genetically modified foods 101 genocide 8 gentrification 19, 84, 141, 276 geocentric model 5 geographical landscape building a new 151, 155 of capitalism 159 evolution of 146–7 instability of 146 soulless, rationalised 157 geopolitical struggles 8, 154 Germany and austerity 223 autobahns built 151 and European Central Bank 46 inflation during 1920s 30 wage repression 158–9 Gesell, Silvio 35 Ghana 291 global economic crisis (2007–9) 22, 23, 47, 118, 124, 132, 151, 170, 228, 232, 234, 235, 241 global financialisation x, 177–8 global warming 260 globalisation 136, 174, 176, 179, 223, 293 gold 27–31, 33, 37, 57, 227, 233, 238, 240 Golden Dawn 280 Goldman Sachs 75, 239 Google 131, 136, 195, 279 Gordon, Robert 222, 223, 230, 239, 304n2 Gore, Al 249 Gorz, André 104–5, 107, 242, 270–77, 279 government 60 democratic 48 planning 48 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 spending power 48 governmentality 43, 48, 157, 209, 280–81, 285 Gramsci, Antonio 286, 293 Greco, Thomas 48–9 Greece 160, 161, 162, 171, 235 austerity 223 degradation of the well-being of the masses xi; fascist parties 280 the power of the bondholders 51, 152 greenwashing 249 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba 202, 284 Guatemala 201 Guevara, Che 291 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 141 guild system 117 Guinea-Bissau 291 Gulf Oil Spill (2010) 61 H Habermas, Jürgen 192 habitat 246, 249, 252, 253, 255 handicapped, the 218 see also disabled Harvey, David The Enigma of Capital 265 Rebel Cities 282 Hayek, Friedrich 42 Road to Serfdom 206 health care 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 134, 156, 167, 189, 190, 235, 296 hedge funds 101, 162, 239, 241, 249 managers 164, 178 Heidegger, Martin 59, 250 Heritage Foundation 143 heterotopic spaces 219 Hill, Christopher 199 Ho Chi Minh 291 holocausts 8 homelessness 58 Hong Kong 150, 160 housing 156, 296 asset values 19, 20, 21, 58 ‘built to order’ 17 construction 67 controlling externalities 19–20 exchange values 14–23, 43 gated communities ix, 160, 208, 264 high costs 84 home ownership 49–50 investing in improvements 20, 43 mortgages 19, 21, 28, 50, 67, 82 predatory practices 67, 133 production costs 17 rental markets 22 renting or leasing 18–19, 67 self-built 84 self-help 16, 160 slum ix, 16, 175 social 18, 235 speculating in exchange value 20–22 speculative builds 17, 28, 78, 82 tenement 17, 160 terraced 17 tract ix, 17, 82 use values 14–19, 21–2, 23, 67 housing markets 18, 19, 21, 22, 28, 32, 49, 58, 60, 67, 68, 77, 83, 133, 192 crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22, 82–3 HSBC 61 Hudson, Michael 222 human capital theory 185, 186 human evolution 229–30 human nature 97, 198, 213, 261, 262, 263 revolt of 263, 264–81 human rights 40, 200, 202 humanism 269 capitalist 212 defined 283 education 128 excesses and dark side 283 and freedom 200, 208, 210 liberal 210, 287, 289 Marxist 284, 286 religious 283 Renaissance 283 revolutionary 212, 221, 282–93 secular 283, 285–6 types of 284 Hungary: fascist parties 280 Husserl, Edmund 192 Huygens, Christiaan 70 I IBM 128 Iceland: banking 55 identity politics xiii illegal aliens (‘sans-papiers’) 156 illegality 61, 72 immigrants, housing 160 imperialism 135, 136, 143, 201, 257, 258 income bourgeois disposable 235 disparities of 164–81 levelling up of 171 redistribution to the lower classes xi; see also wages indebtedness 152, 194, 222 India billionaires in 170 a BRIC country 170, 228 call centres 139 consumerism 236 dismantlement of old ships 250 labour 107, 230 ‘land grabs’ 77 moneylenders 210 social reproduction in 194 software engineers 196 special economic zones 144 unstable lurches forward 10 indigenous populations 193, 202, 257, 283 dispossession of 40, 59, 207 and exclusionary ownership rights 39 individualism 42, 197, 214, 281 Indonesia 129, 160 industrial cartels 135 Industrial Revolution 127 industrialisation 123, 189, 229, 232 inflation 30, 36, 37, 40, 49, 136, 228, 233 inheritance 40 Inner Asia, labour in 108 innovation 132 centres of 96 and the class struggle 103 competitive 219 as a double-edged sword xii; improving the qualities of daily life 4 labour-saving 104, 106, 107, 108 logistical 147 organisational 147 political 219 product 93 technological 94–5, 105, 147, 219 as a way out of a contradiction 3 insurance companies 278 intellectual property rights xii, 41, 123, 133, 139, 187, 207, 235, 241–2, 251 interest compound 5, 222, 224, 225, 226–7 interest-rate manipulations 54 interest rates 54, 186 living off 179, 186 on loans 17 money capital 28, 32 and mortgages 19, 67 on repayment of loans to the state 32 simple 225, 227 usury 49 Internal Revenue Service income tax returns 164 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 49, 51, 100, 143, 161, 169, 186, 234, 240 internet 158, 220, 278 investment: in fixed capital 75 investment pension funds 35–6 IOUs 30 Iran 232, 289 Iranian Revolution 289 Iraq war 201, 290 Ireland dispossession of land rights 40 housing market crash (2007–9) 82–3 Istanbul 141 uprising (2013) 99, 129, 171, 243 Italy 51,161, 223, 235 ITT 136 J Jacobs, Jane 96 James, C.L.R. 291 Japan 1980s economic boom 18 capital in (1980s) 154 economic development in 10 factories 123 growth rate 227 land market crash (1990) 18 low population growth rate 230 and Marshall Plan 153 post-war recovery 161 Jewish Question 213 JPMorgan 61 Judaeo-Christian tradition 283 K Kant, Immanuel 285 Katz, Cindi 189, 195, 197 Kenya 291 Kerala, India 171 Keynes, John Maynard xi, 46, 76, 244, 266 ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ 33–4 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money 35 Keynesianism demand management 82, 105, 176 demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi King, Martin Luther 284, 291 knowledge xii, 26, 41, 95, 96, 100, 105, 113, 122, 123, 127, 144, 184, 188, 196, 238, 242, 295 Koch brothers 292 Kohl, Helmut x L labour agitating and fighting for more 64 alienated workers 125, 126, 128, 129, 130 artisan 117, 182–3 and automation 105 capital/labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9, 146 collective 117 commodification of 57 contracts 71, 72 control over 74, 102–11, 119, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 deskilling 111, 119 discipline 65, 79 disempowering workers 81, 103, 116, 119, 270 division of see division of labour; domestic 196 education 127–8, 129, 183, 187 exploitation of 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 195 factory 122, 123, 237 fair market value 63, 64 Gallup survey 271–2 house building 17 housework 114–15, 192 huge increase in the global wage labour force 107–8 importance of workers as buyers of commodities 80–81 ‘industrial reserve army’ 79–80, 173–4 migrations of 118 non-unionised xii; power of 61–4, 71, 73, 74, 79, 81, 88, 99, 108, 118–19, 127, 173, 175, 183, 189, 207, 233, 267 privatisation of 61 in service 117 skills 116, 118–19, 123, 149, 182–3, 185, 231 social see social labour; surplus 151, 152, 173–4, 175, 195, 233 symbolic 123 and trade unions 116 trading in labour services 62–3 unalienated 66, 89 unionised xii; unpaid 189 unskilled 114, 185 women in workforce see under women; worked to exhaustion or death 61, 182 see also employment labour markets 47, 62, 64, 66–9, 71, 102, 114, 116, 118, 166 labour-saving devices 104, 106, 107, 173, 174, 277 labour power commodification of 61, 88 exploitation of 62, 175 generation of surplus value 63 mobility of 99 monetisation of 61 private property character of 64 privatisation of 61 reserves of 108 Lagos, Nigeria, social reproduction in 195 laissez-faire 118, 205, 207, 281 land commodification 260–61 concept of 76–7 division of 59 and enclosure movement 58 establishing as private property 41 exhausting its fertility 61 privatisation 59, 61 scarcity 77 urban 251 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 land market 18, 59 land price 17 land registry 41 land rents 78, 85 land rights 40, 93 land-use zoning 43 landlords 54, 67, 83, 140, 179, 251, 261 Latin America ’1and grabs’ 58, 77 labour 107 reductions in social inequality 171 two ‘lost decades’ of development 234 lawyers 22, 26, 67, 82, 245 leasing 16, 17, 18 Lebed, Jonathan 195 Lee Kuan-Yew 48 Leeds 149 Lefebvre, Henri 157, 192 Critique of Everyday Life 197–8 left, the defence of jobs and skills under threat 110 and the factory worker 68 incapable of mounting opposition to the power of capital xii; remains of the radical left xii–xiii Lehman Brothers investment bank, fall of (2008) x–xi, 47, 241 ‘leisure’ industries 115 Lenin, Vladimir 135 Leninism 91 Lewis, Michael: The Big Short 20–21 LGBT groups 168, 202, 218 liberation struggle 288, 290 liberty, liberties 44, 48–51, 142, 143, 212, 276, 284, 289 and bourgeois democracy 49 and centralised power 142 and money creation 51 non-coercive individual liberty 42 popular desire for 43 and state finances 48 liberty and freedom 199–215 coercion and violence in pursuit of 201 government surveillance and cracking of encrypted codes 201–2 human rights abuses 202 popular desire for 203 rhetoric on 200–201, 202 life expectancy 250, 258, 259 light, corpuscular theory of 70 living standards xii, 63, 64, 84, 89, 134, 175, 230 loans fictitious capital 32 housing 19 interest on 17 Locke, John 40, 201, 204 logos 31 London smog of 1952 255 unrest in (2011) 243 Los Angeles 150, 292 Louis XIV, King of France 245 Lovelace, Richard 199, 200, 203 Luddites 101 M McCarthyite scourge 56 MacKinnon, Catherine: Are Women Human?

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

According to Mises, a citizen must have economic freedom in order to be politically and morally free. Ulbricht wrote on his LinkedIn page that he wanted to “use [Mises’s] economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind.” With the arrival in 2009 of the anonymous currency Bitcoin, all the pieces were in place to unite Dread Pirate Roberts’s three obsessions: libertarian economics, the Dark Web, and drugs. He built Silk Road in two months and went live in January of 2011 with his own home-cultivated psilocybin mushrooms as a starter product. Within months he had sellers of heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine as well as prescription opioids doing business on the site.

…

Alford was pretty sure he had the proprietor of Silk Road, but it took him more than three months to convince the FBI that this was their man. Two months after Ross Ulbricht was arrested, the notorious cyberanarchist Cody Wilson, inventor of the world’s first 3-D-printed handgun, stood onstage in London at the MIT Bitcoin Expo and castigated his colleagues: “Ross Ulbricht is alleged to be the founder and operator of Silk Road, the glittering jewel of all things libertarian, black market, and wonderful. And it’s a severe indictment of the modern libertarian conscience that he can’t get any support at all.” Perhaps that’s because Ulbricht used Silk Road to purchase the services of hit men to take out his rivals, who were threatening to assume control of Silk Road.

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
by Mark O'Connell
Published 13 Apr 2020

Reluctant to enrich Davidson or the Rees-Mogg estate any further, I bought a used edition online, the musty pages of which were here and there smeared with the desiccated snot of whatever nose-picking libertarian had preceded me. It presented a bleak vista of a post-democratic future. Amid a thicket of analogies to the medieval collapse of feudal power structures, the book also managed, a decade before the invention of Bitcoin, to make some impressively accurate predictions about the advent of online economies and cryptocurrencies. Its four-hundred-odd pages of near-hysterical orotundity can roughly be broken down into the following sequence of propositions: 1) The democratic nation-state basically operates like a criminal cartel, forcing honest citizens to surrender large portions of their wealth to pay for stuff like roads and hospitals and schools. 2) The rise of the Internet, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, will make it impossible for governments to intervene in private transactions and to tax incomes, thereby liberating individuals from the political protection racket of democracy. 3) The state will consequently become obsolete as a political entity. 4) Out of this wreckage will emerge a new global dispensation, in which a “cognitive elite” will rise to power and influence, as a class of sovereign individuals “commanding vastly greater resources” who will no longer be subject to the power of nation-states and will redesign governments to suit their ends.

…

as he put it, in what I assumed was a purely rhetorical formulation.) He told us of one wealthy American of his acquaintance, “pretty left-of-center,” who had bought land down here to allay his apocalyptic fears in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election. Another couple he knew of, a pair of Bitcoin billionaires, had bought a large lakeside estate on which they were constructing a gigantic bunker. This was the first I’d heard since coming here of an actual bunker being built. From the point of view of the modern apocalypticist, the whole appeal of the country—its remoteness and stability, its abundant clean water, its vast and lovely reaches of unpeopled land—seemed to be that it was itself a kind of reinforced geopolitical shelter, way down there at the bottom of the world.

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous
by Gabriella Coleman
Published 4 Nov 2014

Thankfully, he reigned in my imagination and clarified: “The IRC channel—we had a channel called #kittencore, and another called #upperdeck. The only difference is that #upperdeck had all the same people in #kittencore but one less.” I asked why they kept one person in the dark. He replied, “Because he came very late into it and we became reluctant to have him in the center and also because he came just as we were splitting the bitcoins.” “Micro-micro-politics and cabals nested within cabals,” I replied. It is precisely this mixture of concreteness and abundance—one channel, exactly the same as the other, minus one person, since he is too new and not yet trustworthy—which makes Anonymous both so difficult to describe and so resistant to being slotted into a pre-fabricated mental template.

…

But no Anonymous or LulzSec hacker has ever admitted or been charged for this crime (and five of them, along with two associates, have been found guilty of scores of hacking crimes that involved their hard drives being trucked away for forensic analysis). The PSN hack, a mystery in 2011, is still unsolved today. “Laundering money, funneling bitcoins, PPI scaming, botnets, database dumping” The drama that surrounded OpSony’s fouling of the PlayStation Network provided the immediate context for LulzSec’s germination. In mid-April, a few of the hackers on #internetfeds managed to weasel their way into fox.com and steal a sales database. Alongside personal information on Fox employees and journalists, it included over seventy thousand email addresses and passwords for people who had signed up to receive updates about auditions for Fox’s forthcoming TV talent show, The X Factor.

…

twitter.com/LulsSec tflow: perfect Falcon: though that’s @LulzSec Falcon: shit son I wrote that off the top of my head in 2 minutes, BRB getting a cookie Topiary and Sabu offered prescient predictions: Sabu: oh man lol Sabu: this is going to be fun Falcon: LulzSec at its finest Falcon: laundering money, funneling bitcoins, PPI scaming, botnets, database dumping Falcon: the lulz they do go on All that hype, however, was for naught. The first dump yielded little in the way of media response. LulzSec was still totally unknown; it was Friday after all, a terrible day to release something new to the media. But AnonOps was going through serious drama, and these hackers, secure in their newfound identity as LulzSec, could turn to the juicy gossip about an AnonOps operator named Ryan Cleary, who had recently gone rogue.

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know
by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman
Published 3 Jan 2014

Alertpay, on the other hand, was repeatedly warned by its acquiring banks for dealing with online scams and child pornography sites before being shut down in 2011. To evade the growing security and control of the payment networks, some bad actors turn to digital currencies. These are alternate currencies that can be traded just like other forms of money, provided that you can find someone in the online world to accept them. Examples range from Bitcoin to the Linden Dollar used in the online world Second Life. Proponents of these currencies often make the argument that they are more efficient ways to trade in a virtual world that doesn’t have clear national boundaries. Especially compared to developing world currencies, they can be more stable than government-backed money, as well as offer the more than 2.5 billion people in the world who don’t have access to traditional banks a way to connect and trade.

…

Data encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted with the private key, and vice versa. This allows secure communications without a shared secret. Autonomous System (AS): An independent network serving as a node in the interconnected Internet. Traffic between ASs is governed by the Internet protocols and routing policies. Bitcoin: A popular digital currency, first developed in 2008, that offers significant anonymity and requires no centralization or coordinated control. botnet: A network of “zombie” computers controlled by a single actor. Botnets are a common tool for malicious activity on the Internet, such as denial-of-service attacks and spam, since they provide free (stolen) computation and network resources while hiding the identity of the controller.

…

See cryptography Automated Teller Machine (ATM), 32, 85, 244 Autonomous System (AS), 24–25 Axelrod, Robert, 182, 193 Baker, Stewart, 215 Barlow, John, 84, 181 Baruch Plan, 160, 162 Bataller, Erik, 226 Beijing Olympics, 75, 92 Bellovin, Steve, 166, 169 Bernard, Baruch. See Baruch Plan Biden, Joe, 195 Big Data, 250 Bin Laden, Osama, 101–102, 105 biometric, 32, 244 Bitcoin. See digital currency black market (digital), 73, 90, 98, 109, 158, 178. See also Silk Road blue-team. See red-team Botnets and attribution, 72–73 combating against, 176, 187, 208 definition of, 44–45 Braithwaite, Bill, 231 Brammer, Robert, 240 Brenner, Joel, 121, 234 Britain, 83–84, 105, 181 Brookings Institution, 21–23, 57, 249–250 Brown, Brittany, 102 Bucci, Steven, 242 Bush, George W., 15, 199 Byzantine Hades, 75 Cartwright, James, 156 cats, 10, 21, 38, 174, 193, 219, 252, 254 cell phone.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence
by John Brockman
Published 5 Oct 2015

THE COLOSSUS IS A BFG NICHOLAS HUMPHREY Emeritus professor of psychology, London School of Economics; visiting professor of philosophy, New College of the Humanities; senior member, Darwin College, University of Cambridge; author, Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness A penny for your thoughts? You may not choose to answer, but the point is that as a conscious agent, you can. That’s what it means to have introspective access. You know—and can tell us—what’s on stage in the theater of your mind. Then how about machines? A bitcoin for the thinking machine’s thoughts? But no one has yet designed a machine to have that kind of access. Wittgenstein remarked that if a lion could speak, we wouldn’t understand him. If a machine could speak, it wouldn’t have anything to say. What do I think about machines that think? Simple. I don’t think there are, as yet, any such machines.

…

They change over time based on what they “learn” from examples. (While it remains linguistically controversial whether machines think, the vernacular has accepted the usage “machines learn.”) Adaptability is useful. We want, say, our automated spelling-correction programs to learn new terms, such as “bitcoin,” without waiting for a new dictionary edition to list them. But sometimes an adaptable program can be nudged, example by example, to the point where its responses are inaccurate. Just as bridge designers must deal with crosswinds, so the designers of AI systems must deal with these issues. Some critics worry that many AI systems are built with a framework that maximizes expected utility.

…

WHEN THINKING MACHINES BREAK THE LAW BRUCE SCHNEIER Security technologist; fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School; chief technical officer, Co3 Systems, Inc.; author, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World Last year, two Swiss artists programmed a Random Botnot Shopper, which every week would spend $100 in bitcoin to buy a random item from an anonymous Internet black market—all for an art project on display in Switzerland. It was a clever concept, except there was a problem. Most of the stuff the bot purchased was benign—fake Diesel jeans, a baseball cap with a hidden camera, a stash can, a pair of Nike trainers—but it also purchased ten ecstasy tablets and a fake Hungarian passport.

Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman
Published 1 Jun 2020

Implications for Cumulative Culture’. 30Graeber and Wengrow, ‘How to Change the Course of Human History (at Least, the Part That’s Already Happened)’. 31Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 149. 32David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules. On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn and London, 2015), pp. 31–3. 33This is why serious economists were able to predict early on that the myth we call ‘Bitcoin’ was doomed to fail while the dollar will prevail for many more decades. The dollar is backed by the world’s most powerful army, whereas the Bitcoin is backed only by belief. 34Harari, Sapiens, p. 153. 35Quoted in Noam Chomsky, ‘What is the Common Good?’, Truthout (7 January 2014). 36Just how effective shaming can be was recently proved yet again by the #MeToo movement.

…

S., here Bahn, Paul, here, here bananas, here ‘barbarians’, here Bataclan massacre, here Battle of the Somme, here Baumeister, Roy, here BBC Prison Study, here, here, here Beethoven, Ludwig van, here behavioural disorders, here behaviourism, here Belyaev, Dmitri, here, here Bentham, Jeremy, here Berkowitz, Roger, here Berlin Wall, fall of, here, here Berners-Lee, Tim, here Bertsch, Leann, here bestiality, here bin Laden, Osama, here binge drinking, here Bird Mound, here Birdman Cult, here Bismarck, Otto von, here Bitcoin, here Blackett, Patrick, here Bletchley Park, here Blitz, the, here, here, here Bloom, Paul, here blushing, here, here, here, here, here Boer Wars, here Boersema, Jan, here, here, here, here bonobos, here, here Book of Genesis, here Book of Samuel, here Bornem, Coca-Cola Incident, here Bosch, Reinier, here, here Boston Marathon bombing, here, here Bowman, Steve, here brain areas, here brain damage, here brain size, here, here, here, here Bratton, William, here Breivik, Anders, here Brexit, here, here Brown, Jack, here Buddha, here bullying, here Burke, Edmund, here Buss, David, here Buurtzorg, here, here, here, here, here, here bystander effect, here Calvin, John, here canaries, here cannibalism, here, here, here, here, here, here capitalism, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and incentives, here, here cargo cults, here Carib people, here Carlin, John, here Cattivelli, Walter, here cave paintings, here, here Chagnon, Napoleon, here, here Charles V, Emperor, here Chávez, Hugo, here Chávez, Julio, here Chekhov, Anton, here Chernoweth, Erica, here chimpanzees, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Christmas truce (1914), here, here Churchill, Winston, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Cicero, here Cleary, Raoul, here climate change, here, here Clinton, Bill, here Code of Hammurabi, here coinage, here Cold War, here collective work events, here Collins, Randall, here Colombia, and FARC insurgency, here, here, here Columbus, Christopher, here, here commons, the, here, here communism, here, here, here, here, here, here and evolutionary theory, here, here and incentives, here, here from Latin communis, here Confucius, here conquistadors, here, here Cook, James, here Cookie Monster study, here Crécy, Battle of, here Crick, Francis, here crime, here broken windows theory, here, here, here see also prisons; terrorists Crimean War, here crocodiles, here, here Curtis, Richard, here Daily Mail, here, here Dams, John, here Darley, John, here, here Dart, Raymond, here, here, here Darwin, Charles, here, here, here, here Dawkins, Richard, here, here, here, here de Blok, Jos, here, here, here, here, here de Klerk, Frederik Willem, here De May, Joseph, here de Moor, Tine, here de Queirós, Pedro Fernandes, here de Tocqueville, Alexis, here de Waal, Frans, here, here, here Deci, Edward, here, here demand characteristics, here democracy, here Alaska, here Leicester East, here Porto Allegre, here, here, here Torres, here, here Vallejo, California, here see also commons, the; participatory budgeting depression, here Diamond, Jared, here, here, here, here, here, here Diaz, Julio, here, here Diderot, Denis, here dogs, here Dresden bombing, here drones, here Drummen, Sjef, here, here, here, here, here, here Du Bois, W.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
by Kashmir Hill
Published 19 Sep 2023

The search for face bounty hunters sometimes took him into the darker zones of the internet, places where people wouldn’t share their real names. One guy said he had scraped Meetup, AngelList, and Couchsurfing and offered to sell Ton-That the photos. But he wanted to be paid in the cryptocurrency Ethereum. “I had to swap my Bitcoin to buy it,” Ton-That said. “And it was good. I wanted to hire him. He said no, but he introduced me to some of his friends.” Ton-That would eventually hire about a dozen contractors from all over the world to hunt faces on the internet for him. He had no idea who some of those people actually were, only how to pay them.

…

Kuznetsova was not a jealous girlfriend tracking a significant other’s whereabouts but rather a volunteer for a civil liberties group called Roskomsvoboda. They were investigating the abuse of Moscow’s face surveillance system. Kuznetsova told the anonymous seller that she was looking for a person she used to know but sent instead a handful of photos of herself. She paid 16,000 rubles in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and then waited. Two weeks later, her phone buzzed with a thirty-five-page report, showing each time the system thought it had seen her face on a surveillance camera, along with the location of each camera, the date and time she had been spotted, and the degree of confidence that it was her. The report contained more than three hundred sightings over the previous month; she did have a few doppelgängers in Moscow, but nearly a third of the sightings were of her.

…

See also facial recognition; fingerprints/fingerprinting Abrams case and, 209, 211, 212 care with in Illinois, 151, 158 communities of color and, 239 lack of laws regarding, 100 legislation protecting, 82–87, 223, 240 orders to delete information on, 192 possible expansion of use of, 194 use of in United Kingdom, 215–220 BIPA (Biometric Information Privacy Act; Illinois) Clearview AI and, 158, 204, 205, 206, 213 lawsuits filed under, 151–152 passage of, 86 SceneTap and, 122 Bitcoin, 81, 222–223 Black Hat, 108, 110 Black Lives Matter, 11 Blackwater, 51–52 Bledsoe, Woody, 37, 38, 39, 40, 125 Bloomberg LP, 81 Blue Lives Matter, 232 BMI predictors, 32 Booker, Cory, 11 border walls, sensor-based, 57 Borthwick, John, 112–113 Boston Marathon bombing, 287n106 Bosworth, Andrew “Boz,” 243–244 Brandeis, Louis D., viii, 204–205 Bratton, William, 129–130 Bridges, Ed, 308n219 Brill, Julie, 122, 125 Broderick, Matthew, 117 “broken windows” policing, 129 Brown, Dan, 247 Brown, Michael, 11 Brululo, Bridget, 292n134 Buckby, Jack, 272n50 Buolamwini, Joy, 156 Burning Man, 8–9, 10 Bush, George W., ix, 11, 64, 157, 209 Buzz, 102 BuzzFeed News, 165–166 C Cagle, Matt, 137–138 Cahill Gordon & Reindel, 205–206 Cambridge Analytica scandal, 6, 92 cameras.

Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire
by Hans Gremeil and William Sposato
Published 15 Dec 2021

When it suits Japanese interests, they could set a trap for you.” This was very much the case for a young French entrepreneur in the realm of digital currencies. Mark Karpeles was the owner of the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange, which at the time was one of the primary bitcoin marketplaces globally. He went to Japanese authorities in early 2014 to report that his company had been hacked. The loss was initially estimated at 850,000 bitcoins, a theft totaling around $457 million (at 2020 prices, the coins would be worth $7 billion). Working with the police for over a year produced results, with a suspect duly arrested—Karpeles.

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime
by Bradley Hope
Published 1 Nov 2022

At times, he struck listeners as a lawyer making a moral case for a client’s actions; the twist was the client hadn’t committed the acts yet. In practical terms, Adrian also laid out core tenets of the group, including secrecy and compartmentalization. After this meeting, efforts would be segmented into groups with only those who “need to know” given all the details. Different groups also worked on problems like how to set up a Bitcoin wallet for donations to the group, anti-regime propaganda efforts, and secrecy protocols for the group. Everyone was to use disappearing messages on apps like Signal to communicate. They’d hold conference calls using a piece of software called Silent Circle. Afterward, Adrian led the whole group to Dallas BBQ, a discount barbecue restaurant popular with thrifty twentysomethings in Manhattan who wanted to eat and drink to their heart’s content.

…

North Korea’s interest in alternative forms of money is not surprising. Severely sanctioned and barred from the global financial system, North Korea found the idea of using cryptocurrencies to trade with the world distinctly appealing. North Korean state hackers had for years been extorting people out of their cryptocurrency and stolen Bitcoin through computer intrusion techniques. U.S. prosecutors later charged Virgil Griffith, a cryptocurrency designer and one of the attendees of the cryptocurrency conference, with violating U.S. sanctions. After initially trying to fight the charges, he agreed to plead guilty in September 2021 and was awaiting sentencing at the time of the writing of this book.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson
Published 6 Oct 2014

“It would make the Web a very different place. It might be really enabling. Certainly the ability to pay for a good article or song could support more people who write things or make music.”52 Andreessen said he hoped that Bitcoin,42 a digital currency and peer-to-peer payment system created in 2009, might turn out to be a model for better payment systems. “If I had a time machine and could go back to 1993, one thing I’d do for sure would be to build in Bitcoin or some similar form of cryptocurrency.”53 We at Time Inc. and other media companies made one other mistake, I think: we abandoned our focus on creating community after we settled into the Web in the mid-1990s.

…

Torvalds: © Jim Sugar/Corbis Berners-Lee: CERN Andreessen: © Louie Psihoyos/Corbis Case: Courtesy of Steve Case Hall: Courtesy of Justin Hall Kasparov: Associated Press Brin and Page: Associated Press Williams: Courtesy of Ev Williams Wales: Terry Foote via Wikimedia Commons IBM Watson: Ben Hider/Getty Images INDEX Abbate, Janet, ref1 Aberdeen Proving Ground, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Abound, ref1 Acid Tests, ref1 acoustic delay line, ref1 “Action Office” console, ref1 Ada, Countess of Lovelace, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 in affair with tutor, ref1, ref2 algorithms worked out by, ref1 Analytical Engine business plan of, ref1 Analytical Engine potential seen by, ref1 Babbage requested to be tutor of, ref1 Babbage’s first meeting with, ref1 at Babbage’s salons, ref1, ref2 Bernoulli numbers computed by, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 on “Combining Faculty,” ref1 on connection between poetry and analysis, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 as doubtful about thinking machines, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 on general purpose machines, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 illnesses of, ref1, ref2, ref3 marriage of, ref1 “Notes” of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 opiates taken by, ref1, ref2, ref3 programming explored by, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 on subroutines, ref1, ref2 temperament and mood swings of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 tutored in math, ref1, ref2, ref3 Ada (programming language), ref1 Adafruit Industries, ref1n Adams, John, ref1 Adams, Samuel, ref1 Adams, Sherman, ref1 Adcock, Willis, ref1 advertising, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Age of Wonder, The (Holmes), ref1 Aiken, Howard, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Difference Engine of, ref1, ref2, ref3 and operation of Mark I, ref1 stubborness of, ref1 Aiken Lab, ref1, ref2, ref3 Air Force, U.S., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Albert, Prince Consort, ref1 Albrecht, Bob, ref1, ref2 Alcorn, Al, ref1, ref2 algebra, ref1, ref2 algorithms, ref1 Allen, Paul, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 BASIC for Altair designed by, ref1, ref2 8008 language written by, ref1 electronic grid work of, ref1 Gates’s disputes with, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 in Lakeside Programming Group, ref1 PDP-10 work of, ref1, ref2 “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (Brautigan), ref1, ref2 ALOHAnet, ref1 Alpert, Dick, ref1 Altair, ref1, ref2, ref3 Altair 8800, ref1, ref2, ref3 BASIC program for, ref1, ref2, ref3 exhibition of, ref1 AltaVista, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, ref1 American Physical Society, ref1 American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC), ref1 America Online (AOL), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Ames Research Center, ref1 Ampex, ref1, ref2 analog, ref1 digital vs., ref1, ref2, ref3 Analytical Engine, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Differences Engine vs., ref1 Lovelace’s business plan for, ref1 Lovelace’s views on potential of, ref1 Menabrea’s notes on, ref1 punch cards and, ref1, ref2 as reprogrammable, ref1 Analytical Society, ref1 “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, The” (Brin and Page), ref1 Anderson, Sean, ref1 Andreessen, Marc, ref1, ref2, ref3 Android, ref1 A-O system, ref1 Apollo Guide Computer, ref1 Apollo program, ref1, ref2, ref3 Apple, ref1n, ref2, ref3n, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 creativity of, ref1 headquarters of, ref1, ref2 Jobs ousted from, ref1, ref2 lawsuits of, ref1 Microsoft’s contract with, ref1 patents of, ref1 Apple I, ref1 Apple II, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 AppleLink, ref1 Apple Writer, ref1 Applied Minds, ref1 Aristotle, ref1 Armstrong, Neil, ref1 ARPA, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 funding for, ref1 ARPANET, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 bids on minicomputers for, ref1 connected to Internet, ref1 distributed network of, ref1, ref2 first four nodes of, ref1, ref2 military defense and, ref1 start of, ref1 ARPANET News, ref1 arsenic, ref1 artificial intelligence, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 human-machine interaction and, ref1, ref2 as mirage, ref1, ref2, ref3 video games and, ref1 Artificial Intelligence Lab, ref1 Asimov, Isaac, ref1 assembly code, ref1 assembly line, ref1, ref2 Association for Computing Machinery, ref1n “As We May Think” (Bush), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Atanasoff, John Vincent, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 influence of, ref1, ref2 Atanasoff, Lura, ref1 Atanasoff-Berry computer, ref1 AT&T, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Atari, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 founding of, ref1 Atari 800, ref1 Atkinson, Bill, ref1, ref2 Atlantic, ref1, ref2 atom bomb, ref1, ref2 Atomic Energy Commission, ref1 atomic power, ref1 ATS-3 satellite, ref1 Augmentation Research Center, ref1, ref2, ref3 augmented intelligence, ref1 “Augmenting Human Intellect” (Engelbart), ref1, ref2 Auletta, Ken, ref1 Autobiography (Franklin), ref1 automata, ref1 Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), ref1, ref2 automobile industry, ref1 Aydelotte, Frank, ref1 Baba, Neem Karoli, ref1 Babbage, Charles, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15 Ada’s first meeting with, ref1 government attack published by, ref1 limits of Analytical Engine mistaken by, ref1 logarithm machine considered by, ref1, ref2 Lovelace given credit by, ref1 Lovelace’s Analytic Engine business plan and, ref1 programming as conceptual leap of, ref1 weekly salons of, ref1, ref2, ref3 Babbage, Henry, ref1 BackRub, ref1 Baer, Ralph, ref1 Baidu, ref1 ballistic missiles, ref1, ref2 Ballmer, Steve, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Bally Midway, ref1, ref2, ref3 Baran, Paul, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 packet-switching suggested by, ref1 Bardeen, John, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 in dispute with Shockley, ref1, ref2, ref3 Nobel Prize won by, ref1 photovoltaic effect studied by, ref1 solid-state studied by, ref1 surface states studied by, ref1 Barger, John, ref1 Bartik, Jean Jennings, see Jennings, Jean BASIC, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 for Altair, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 batch processing, ref1 BBC, ref1 Beatles, ref1 Bechtolsheim, Andy, ref1 Beckman, Arnold, ref1, ref2, ref3 Beckman Instruments, ref1 Bell, Alexander Graham, ref1, ref2, ref3 Bell & Howell, ref1 Bell Labs, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21 founding of, ref1 Murray Hill headquarters of, ref1 patents licensed by, ref1 solid-state physics at, ref1, ref2, ref3 transistor invented at, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Bell System, ref1 Benkler, Yochai, ref1, ref2 Berkeley Barb, ref1, ref2 Berners-Lee, Tim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 background of, ref1 and creation of browsers, ref1 hypertext created by, ref1 and micropayments, ref1 religious views of, ref1 Bernoulli, Jacob, ref1n Bernoulli numbers, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Berry, Clifford, ref1, ref2 Beyer, Kurt, ref1, ref2 Bezos, Jeff, ref1 audaciousness celebrated by, ref1 Bhatnagar, Ranjit, ref1 Big Brother and the Holding Company, ref1, ref2 Bilas, Frances, ref1, ref2 Bilton, Nick, ref1 Bina, Eric, ref1, ref2 binary, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 in code, ref1 in German codes, ref1 on Z1, ref1 Bitcoin, ref1n bitmapping, ref1 Bletchley Park, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Blitzer, Wolf, ref1 Bloch, Richard, ref1, ref2, ref3 Blogger, ref1, ref2 Blogger Pro, ref1 blogs, ref1 coining of term, ref1 McCarthy’s predictions of, ref1 Blue, Al, ref1 Blue Box, ref1, ref2 Board of Patent Interferences, ref1 Bohr, Niels, ref1 Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 bombe, ref1 BOMIS, ref1, ref2 Bonneville Power Administration, ref1 Boole, George, ref1, ref2 Boolean algebra, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Borgia, Cesare, ref1 boron, ref1 Bowers, Ann, ref1 brains, ref1, ref2 Braiterman, Andy, ref1, ref2 Braithwaite, Richard, ref1 Brand, Lois, ref1 Brand, Stewart, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Brattain, Walter, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 in dispute with Shockley, ref1, ref2, ref3 Nobel Prize won by, ref1 photovoltaic effect studied by, ref1 solid-state studied by, ref1 in World War II, ref1, ref2 Brautigan, Richard, ref1, ref2, ref3 Breakout, ref1, ref2 Bricklin, Dan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Brilliant, Larry, ref1, ref2 Brin, Sergey, ref1, ref2, ref3 Google founded by, ref1, ref2, ref3 PageRank and, ref1 personality of, ref1 Bristow, Steve, ref1 British Association for the Advancement of Science, ref1 Brookhaven National Lab, ref1, ref2 Brown, Ralph, ref1 browsers, ref1 bugs, ref1 Bulletin Board System, ref1 Burks, Arthur, ref1 “Burning Chrome” (Gibson), ref1 Burns, James MacGregor, ref1 Bush, Vannevar, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17 background of, ref1 computers augmenting human intelligence foreseen by, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 linear model of innovation and, ref1 personal computer envisioned by, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 technology promoted by, ref1, ref2 Bushnell, Nolan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 venture capital raised by, ref1 Busicom, ref1 Byrds, ref1 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 incest of, ref1, ref2 Luddites defended by, ref1, ref2, ref3 portrait of, ref1, ref2, ref3 Byron, Lady (Annabella Milbanke), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Cailliau, Robert, ref1, ref2 Caine Mutiny, The, ref1 calculating machines: of Leibniz, ref1 of Pascal, ref1, ref2 calculators, pocket, ref1, ref2, ref3 calculus, ref1, ref2 notation of, ref1 California, University of, at Santa Barbara, ref1 Call, Charles, ref1 Caltech, ref1, ref2 CamelCase, ref1 capacitors, ref1 CapitalLetters, ref1 Carey, Frank, ref1 Carlyle, Thomas, ref1 Cary, Frank, ref1 Case, Dan, ref1, ref2 Case, Steve, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 background of, ref1 Cathedral and the Bazaar, The (Raymond), ref1, ref2 cathode-ray tubs, ref1 Catmull, Ed, ref1 Caufield, Frank, ref1, ref2 CBS, ref1, ref2, ref3 CB Simulator, ref1 Census Bureau, U.S., ref1, ref2 Centralab, ref1 central processing unit, ref1 Cerf, Sigrid, ref1 Cerf, Vint, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 background of, ref1 internet created by, ref1 nuclear attack simulated by, ref1 CERN, ref1, ref2 Cézanne, Paul, ref1 Cheatham, Thomas, ref1 Cheriton, David, ref1 Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange, ref1 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron), ref1, ref2 Chinese Room, ref1, ref2 Christensen, Clay, ref1 Christensen, Ward, ref1 Church, Alonzo, ref1, ref2 circuit switching, ref1 Cisco, ref1 Clark, Dave, ref1 Clark, Jim, ref1 Clark, Wes, ref1, ref2, ref3 Clinton, Bill, ref1n Clippinger, Richard, ref1 COBOL, ref1, ref2n, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Cold War, ref1 Collingwood, Charles, ref1 Colossus, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 as special-purpose machine, ref1 Command and Control Research, ref1 Commodore, ref1 Community Memory, ref1, ref2, ref3 Complex Number Calculator, ref1, ref2, ref3 Compton, Karl, ref1 CompuServe, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 computer, ref1, ref2 debate over, ref1, ref2, ref3 “Computer as a Communication Device, The” (Licklider and Taylor), ref1 Computer Center Corporation (C-Cubed), ref1 Computer Quiz, ref1 Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, ref1 computers (female calculators), ref1, ref2 Computer Space, ref1, ref2, ref3 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Turing), ref1 Conant, James Bryant, ref1, ref2 condensers, ref1, ref2 conditional branching, ref1 Congregationalist, ref1 Congress, U.S., ref1 Congress of Italian Scientists, ref1 Constitution, U.S., ref1n content sharing, ref1 Control Video Corporation (CVC), ref1, ref2 copper, ref1 Coupling, J.

…

The links were done by the servers rather than embedded in the documents. It was named after the university’s mascot and was also a pun on “go for.” 41. A year later, Andreessen would join with the serially successful entrepreneur Jim Clark to launch a company called Netscape that produced a commercial version of the Mosaic browser. 42. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies incorporate mathematically coded encryption techniques and other principles of cryptography to create a secure currency that is not centrally controlled. 43. In March 2003 blog as both a noun and a verb was admitted into the Oxford English Dictionary. 44. Tellingly, and laudably, Wikipedia’s entries on its own history and the roles of Wales and Sanger have turned out, after much fighting on the discussion boards, to be balanced and objective. 45.

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design
by Alvin E. Roth
Published 1 Jun 2015

That said, in recent years the Internet revolution has opened the door to competition from wholly new directions—including new kinds of payment services, such as PayPal; an international network of automatic teller machines to challenge old standbys such as traveler’s checks; and maybe even new types of “virtual money” such as Bitcoin. As I write this in 2014, Apple has announced a new payment system on the latest iPhones, and we can reasonably expect that it and/or other new payment systems that make use of mobile devices will become commonplace. The bank that handles Amazon’s transactions, or the one that manages the account of your favorite restaurant, is typically different from the bank that issued your credit card and takes your payment.

…

See also labor markets for college admissions, 5–6, 169, 170–73 in law firm recruiting, 65–68 signaling in, 169–73 strategic decision making in, 10–11 apps, 21–22 Arunta people, 71–72 Ashlagi, Itai, 48, 149, 239, 243, 244 auctions, 121–22, 180–89 ascending bid, 182, 184, 188–89 eBay, 104–5 first-price, 184–85 package bidding in, 188–89, 225–26 price discovery in, 185–89 sealed bid, 182–84 second-price sealed, 182–84 simultaneous ascending, 187–89 for spectrum licenses, 185–89 for targeted ads, 189–92 automatic teller machines, 24 Avery, Chris, 91, 239 BandwidthX, 105 bankruptcy, 201 banks and banking, 178, 200–201 banner ads, 191–92 barriers to entry, 24 barter kidney donation as, 31–32 repugnant markets and, 202–5 Becker, Gary, 245 behavioral economics, 52 Beran, Bob, 146 Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Boston), 42 Bitcoin, 24 BlackBerry, 22 black markets, 207 blocking pairs, 139–43 Bloomberg, Michael, 106, 107 Bolton, Gary, 118, 240 Boston Globe, 126 Boston Pool Plan, 138 Boston Public Schools, 11, 122–28, 162–65. See also algorithms Bowl Championship Series, 63–64 boxing, 7 Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Boston), 42 British National Health Service, 140–41 Brown, Janice Rogers, 97 Budish, Eric, 82, 86, 88, 239, 246 Burns, Adele, 42 Burns, Jack, 42 busing, 166–67 California Penal Code, 195–97 Carnegie Mellon University, 180 Catholic Church, 207 cell phones, 186.

Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors
by Matt Parker
Published 7 Mar 2019

Or, to put it another way, if the bolts are too similar to tell apart, write the product number on them. TEN Units, Conventions, And Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? A number without units can be meaningless. If something costs ‘9.97’ you want to know what currency that price is listed in. If you’re expecting British pounds or American dollars and it ends up being Indonesian rupiah or bitcoin, you’re in for a surprise (and a very different surprise, depending on which of those two it is). I run a UK-based retail website and we had a complaint from a customer for our audacity in listing prices in a ‘foreign currency’. So the charge amount listed was foreign currency? Obviously, and probably for a good number of us ordering, we would be expecting a US dollar quote.

…

Well, you’re going to need a random object. Nothing beats physical actions like flipping a coin or rolling a dice for getting real random numbers, even in our modern, high-tech age. This is why I keep various dice on me at all times, including a sixty-sided dice in case I need to generate a random seed for a bitcoin address (which use base-58 numbers). In the San Francisco office of Cloudflare, lava lamps are used as a physical randomness generator. This is back to internet security and SSL, but on a much bigger scale than Netscape: Cloudflare handles over a quarter of a quadrillion encryption requests per day.

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy
by Paolo Gerbaudo
Published 19 Jul 2018

A few days after, r0gue_0, a ‘black hat’ using hacking for criminal purposes, revealed that he had already identified the vulnerabilities and had been on the system for a long time. He demonstrated that he had both reading and writing access to all the data and put on sale the entire database of Rousseau users for 0.3 Bitcoin, which at that point were convertible in around 1,000 euros. These events are testament to the rather amateurish character of Five Star Movement digital operations, themselves a consequence of the familial and opaque management of the movement. Podemos’s participatory platform is called Participa and is one of the sections of the main party website, Podemos.info.

…

‘Digital democracy: reimagining pathways to political participation.’ Journal of Information Technology & Politics 7, no.1 (2010): 36–51. Gillespie, Tarleton. ‘The politics of “platforms”.’ New Media & Society 12, no.3 (2010): 347–364. Gladwell, Malcolm. ‘Small change.’ New Yorker (2010, 4 October) 42–49. Golumbia, David. The politics of Bitcoin: software as right-wing extremism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Ed. and transl. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Gramsci, Antonio, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard
Published 19 Apr 2018

OpenBazaar exists as little more than a proof of concept: the plan was sketched out by a group of hackers in Toronto in mid-April, where they won the $20,000 first prize for their idea.”11 Two years later, an entrepreneur named Brian Hoffman took the OpenBazaar code, commercialized it, and got a $3 million investment from venture capital firms Union Square Ventures and Andreesen Horowitz to run the marketplace using Bitcoin, an alternative digital currency. In this, we can see the libertarian paradise that Thiel and others imagine: a new space, beyond the reach of government. It seems that their plan is working. Lend Edu, a fintech firm, surveyed millennials about their use of Venmo, a payments app owned by PayPal. Thirty-three percent of respondents said they had used Venmo to buy marijuana, Aderall, cocaine, or other illegal narcotics.12 A site called Vicemo.com boasts the tagline “See who’s buying drugs, booze, and sex on Venmo.”

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W., 46–47 Angwin, Julia, 154–156 App hackathons, 165–174 Apple Watch, 157 Artificial intelligence (AI) beginnings, 69–73 expert systems, 52–53, 179 fantasy of, 132 in film, 31, 32, 198 foundations of, 9 future of, 194–196 games and, 33–37 general, 10–11, 32 narrow, 10–11, 32–33, 97 popularity of, 90 real vs. imagined, 31–32 research, women in, 158 sentience challenge in, 129 Asimov, Isaac, 71 Assembly language, 24 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 145 Astrolabe, 76 Asymmetry, positive, 28 Automation technology, 176–177 Autopilot, 121 Availability heuristic, 96 Babbage, Charles, 76–77 Bailiwick (Broussard), 182–185, 190–191, 193 Barlow, John Perry, 82–83 Bell Labs, 13 Bench, Shane, 84 Ben Franklin Racing Team (Little Ben), 122–127 Berkman Klein Center (Harvard), 195 Berners-Lee, Tim, 4–5, 47 Bezos, Jeff, 73, 115 Bias in algorithms, 44, 150, 155–157 in algorithms, racial, 44, 155–156 genius myth and, 83–84 programmers and, 155–158 in risk ratings, 44, 155–156 in STEM fields, 83–84 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 60–61, 157 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, 180 Bitcoin, 159 Bizannes, Elias, 165, 166, 171 Blow, Charles, 95 Boggs, David, 67–68 Boole, George, 77 Boolean algebra, 77 Borden, Brisha, 154–155 Borsook, Paulina, 82 Bowhead Systems Management, 137 boyd, danah, 195 Bradley, Earl, 43 Brains 19–20, 95, 128–129, 132, 144, 150 Brand, Stewart, 5, 29, 70, 73, 81–82 Brin, Sergei, 72, 151 Brown, Joshua D., 140, 142 Bump, Philip, 186 Burroughs, William S., 77 Burroughs, William Seward, 77 Calculation vs. consciousness, 37 Cali-Fame, 186 California, drug use in, 158–159 Cameron, James, 95 Campaign finance, 177–186, 191 Čapek, Karel, 129 Caprio, Mike, 170–171 Carnegie Mellon University, autonomous vehicle research ALVINN, 131 University Racing Team (Boss), 124, 126–127, 130–131 Cars deaths associated with, 136–138, 146 distracted driving of, 146 human-centered design for, 147 Cars, self-driving 2005 Grand Challenge, 123–124 2007 Grand Challenge, 122–127 algorithms in, 139 artificial intelligence in, 129–131, 133 deaths in, 140 driver-assistance technology from, 135, 146 economics of, 147 experiences in, 121–123, 125–126, 128 fantasy of, 138, 142, 146 GPS hacking, 139 LIDAR guidance system, 139 machine ethics, 144–145, 147 nausea in, 121–123 NHTSA categories for, 134 problems/limitations, 138–140, 142–146 research funding, 133 SAE standards for levels of automation, 134–135 safety, 136–137, 140–142, 143, 146 sentience in, 132 Uber’s use of, 139 Udacity open-source car competition, 135 Waymo technology, 136 CERN, 4–5 Cerulo, Karen A., 28 Chess, 33 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), 63–64 Chinese Room argument, 38 Choxi, Heteen, 122 Christensen, Clayton, 163 Chrome, 25, 26 Citizens United, 177, 178, 180 Clarke, Arthur C., 71–72 Client-server model, 27 Clinkenbeard, John, 172 Cloud computing, 26, 52, 196 Cohen, Brian, 56–57 Collins, John, 117 Common Core State Standards, 60–61 Communes, 5, 10 Computer ethics, 144–145 Computer Go, 34–36 Computers assumptions about vs. reality of, 8 components, identifying, 21–22 consciousness, 17 early, 196–199 human, 77–78, 198 human brains vs., 19–20, 128–129, 132, 144, 150 human communication vs., 169–170 human mind vs., 38 imagination, 128 limitations, 6–7, 27–28, 37–39 memory, 131 modern-day, development of, 75–79 operating systems, 24–25 in schools, 63–65 sentience, 17, 129 Computer science bias in, 79 ethical training, 145 explaining the world through, 118 women in, 5 Consciousness vs. calculation, 37 Constants in programming, 88 Content-management system (CMS), 26 Cooper, Donna, 58 Copeland, Jack, 74–75 Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS), 44, 155–156 Cortana, 72 Counterculture, 5, 81–82 Cox, Amanda, 41–42 Crawford, Kate, 194 Crime reporting, 154–155 CTB/McGraw-Hill, 53 Cumberbatch, Benedict, 74 Cyberspace activism, 82–83 DarkMarket, 159 Dark web, 82 Data on campaign finance, 178–179 computer-generated, 18–19 defined, 18 dirty, 104 generating, 18 people and, 57 social construction of, 18 unreasonable effectiveness of, 118–119, 121, 129 Data & Society, 195 DataCamp, 96 Data density theory, 169 Data journalism, 6, 43–47, 196 Data Journalism Awards, 196 Data journalism stories cost-benefit of, 47 on inflation, 41–42 Parliament members’ expenses, 46 on police speeding, 43 on police stops of people of color, 43 price discrimination, 46 on sexual abuse by doctors, 42–43 Data Privacy Lab (Harvard), 195 Data Recognition Corporation (DRC), 53 Datasets in machine learning, 94–95 Data visualizations, 41–42 Deaths distracted driving accidents, 146 from poisoning, 137 from road accidents, 136–138 in self-driving cars, 140 Decision making computational, 12, 43, 150 data-driven, 119 machine learning and, 115–116, 118–119 subjective, 150 Deep Blue (IBM), 33 Deep learning, 33 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge, 123, 131, 133, 164 Desmond, Matthew, 115 Detroit race riots story, 44 Dhondt, Rebecca, 58 Diakopoulos, Nicholas, 46 Difference engine, 76 Differential pricing and race, 116 Digital age, 193 Digital revolution, 193–194 Dinakar, Karthik, 195 Django, 45, 89 DocumentCloud, 52, 196 Domino’s, 170 Drone technology, 67–68 Drug marketplace, online, 159–160 Drug use, 80–81, 158–160 Duncan, Arne, 51 Dunier, Mitchell, 115 Edison, Thomas, 77 Education change, implementing in, 62–63 Common Core State Standards, 60–61 competence bar in, 150 computers in schools, 63–65 equality in, 77–78 funding, 60 supplies, availability of, 58 technochauvinist solutions for, 63 textbook availability, 53–60 unpredictability in, 62 18F, 178–179 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 82 Elevators, 156–157 Eliza, 27–28 Emancipation Proclamation, 78 Engelbart, Doug, 25, 80–81 Engineers, ethical training, 145 ENIAC, 71, 194, 196–199 Equality in education, 77–78 techno hostility toward, 83 technological, creating, 87 technology vs., 115, 156 for women, 5, 77–78, 83–85, 158 Essa, Irfan, 46 Ethics, 144–145, 147 EveryBlock, 46 Expertise, cognitive fallacies associated, 83 Expert systems, 52–53, 179 Facebook, 70, 83, 152, 158, 197 Facial recognition, 157 Fact checking, 45–46 Fake news, 154 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), 63–64 FEC, McCutcheon v., 180 FEC, Speechnow.org v., 180 FEC.gov, 178–179 Film, AI in, 31, 32, 198 FiveThirtyEight.com, 47 Foote, Tully, 122–123, 125 Ford Motor Company, 140 Fowler, Susan, 74 Fraud campaign finance, 180 Internet advertising, 153–154 Free press, role of, 44 Free speech, 82 Fuller, Buckminster, 74 Futurists, 89–90 Games, AI and, 33–37 Gates, Bill, 61 Gates, Melinda, 157–158 Gawker, 83 Gender equality, hostility toward, 83 Gender gap, 5, 84–85, 115, 158 Genius, cult of, 75 Genius myth, 83–84 Ghost-in-the-machine fallacy, 32, 39 Giffords, Gabby, 19–20 GitHub, 135 Go, 33–37 Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI), 10 Good vs. popular, 149–152, 160 Google, 72 Google Docs, 25 Google Maps API, 46 Google Street View, 131 Google X, 138, 151, 158 Government campaign finance, 177–186, 191 cyberspace activism, antigovernment ideology, 82–83 tech hostility toward, 82–83 Graphical user interface (GUI), 25, 72 Greyball, 74 Guardian, 45, 46 Hackathons, 165–174 Hackers, 69–70, 82, 153–154, 169, 173 Halevy, Alon, 119 Hamilton, James T., 47 Harley, Mike, 140 Harris, Melanie, 58–59 Harvard, Andrew, 184 Harvard University Berkman Klein Center, 195 Data Privacy Lab, 195 mathematics department, 84 “Hello, world” program, 13–18 Her, 31 Hern, Alex, 159 Hernandez, Daniel, Jr., 19 Heuristics, 95–96 Hillis, Danny, 73 Hippies, 5, 82 HitchBOT, 69 Hite, William, 58 Hoffman, Brian, 159 Holovaty, Adrian, 45–46 Home Depot, 46, 115, 155 Hooke, Robert, 88 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) HP, 157 Hugo, Christoph von, 145 Human-centered design, 147, 177 Human computers, 77–78, 198 Human error, 136–137 Human-in-the-loop systems, 177, 179, 187, 195 Hurst, Alicia, 164 Illinois quarter, 153–154 Imagination, 89–90, 128 Imitation Game, The (film), 74 Information industry, annual pay, 153 Injury mortality, 137 Innovation computational, 25 disruptive, 163, 171 funding, 172–173 hackathons and, 166 Instacart, 171 Intelligence in machine learning Interestingness threshold, 188 International Foundation for Advanced Study, 81 Internet advertising model, 151 browsers, 25, 26 careers, annual pay rates, 153 core values, 150 drug marketplace, 159–160 early development of the, 5, 81 fraud, 153–154 online communities, technolibertarianism in culture of, 82–83 rankings, 72, 150–152 Internet Explorer, 25 Internet pioneers, inspiration for, 5, 81–82 Internet publishing industry, annual pay, 153 Internet search, 72, 150–152 Ito, Joi, 147, 195 Jacquard, Joseph Marie, 76 Java, 89 JavaScript, 89 Jobs, Steve, 25, 70, 72, 80, 81 Jones, Paul Tudor, 187–188 Journalism.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

Protocols like IPFS are allowing for the online exchange of data between independent players, resulting in the creation of what Burnham calls “decentralized marketplaces.” Other examples of this are the so-called decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), such as the controversial peer-to-peer currencies Bitcoin and Etherium, which operate on blockchain technology. These networked platforms do away with the need for the middleman: a bank or a government agency. They are returning us to Berners-Lee’s original web, a level playing field on which power resides on the edge, with its users. After Burnham’s speech, I talk with him outside the Alte Teppichfabrik in a small beer garden overlooking the river Spree.

…

Ibid., 208. 8. https://e-estonia.com/facts. 9. Press release. 10. “Estonians’ Trust in Parliament, Government Much Higher Than EU Average,” Baltic Times, December 29, 2014. 11. “Linnar Viik—Estonia’s Mr. Internet,” EUbusiness.com, April 20, 2004. 12. Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World (Portfolio, 2016), 6. 13. Ibid. 14. More, Utopia, 46. 15. Ibid., 79. 16. Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Down of the Post-Market Era (Tarcher, 1996). 17. Andreas Weigend, Data for the People: How to Make Our Post-Privacy Economy Work for You (Basic, 2017). 18.

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell
Published 23 May 2023

A more tangible future One of the most interesting technological and financial developments of the last decade is the rise of cryptocurrencies – digital currencies that seek to do away with inflation and central banking through a decentralised registry system, the ‘blockchain’ – and NFTs (non-fungible tokens)57 – which, in the simplest terms, are an attempt to replicate the logic of private property for online informational objects such as memes. Both are interesting economic and sociocultural phenomena; digital in nature but increasingly important for speculators. The most famous cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, began in January 2013 being traded at USD$13.30 and by January 2014, was worth $770. However, in the following years, its trading slumped sharply and then rose again, as competition started to appear and advocates struggled to make cryptocurrencies useful as actual currencies (or to seamlessly turn them into their nominal value).

…

A abortion, top 10% attitudes towards 6, 16 academics/academia 5, 9–10, 54 knowledge production and enabling of the wealthy 132–3 acceleration, of the pace of life 128–9 accountancy firms 67, 68, 108, 109, 126 accumulation 135–6 Advani, A. 179, 180 affluence 22, 144, 162, 180 see also top 1%; top 10%; wealth age profile of the top 10% 8 agency 49 Alamillo-Martinez, Laura 73 Amazon 180 Ambler, L. 132–3 anti-elitism 12, 46, 96 anxiety 72, 130, 150 and status 135, 165 see also mental health ‘anywheres’ 96 ascriptive identities 153 attitudes to cultural issues 42, 84 to economic issues 6, 8, 11, 16, 18–19, 42, 42, 77, 92–3, 161–4 to political issues 8, 16–17, 42, 76–99 to social issues 6, 8, 16, 18–19, 42, 65–71, 77, 92, 92–3, 161–3, 164–6 austerity policies 10, 11, 13, 16, 76, 78–9, 105, 115–16, 169–70 automation 79, 158, 160 B Bangladeshi ethnicity, in the top 10% 30 Bank of England 78, 105, 164, 175 ‘bank of mum and dad’ 29, 111 Barber, Rob 1, 2, 4, 181 Barclay family 121 BBC 11 Beck, U. 64 Bell, Torsten 2, 6 Berman, Y. 34 Berry, C. 82 Bezos, Jeff 144 Biden, Joe 142 Big Four accountancy firms 67, 68 see also accountancy firms Bill of Rights 121 Bitcoin 143 Black African/British/Caribbean ethnicity, in the top 10% 30 Black Lives Matter 113 Black Report 1977 115 Blair, Tony 9, 84, 185 Blakeley, Grace 139, 176 Bolsonaro, Jair 96, 98 ‘boundary work’ of elites 45 Bourdieu, Pierre 40 Brahmins 38, 41–2, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51, 59, 61, 68, 73, 74–5, 84, 96, 167, 185 ‘brain drain’ 124 see also mobility Brexit 11, 16, 76, 80, 86–7, 97, 101–2, 125 Brown, Gordon 175 Bullough, Oliver 113–14 bunkers 130, 131, 144, 187 Burgon, Richard 1, 3, 6 business support schemes, COVID-19 pandemic 15, 104, 126–7, 140, 151 C Cambridge University 28–9, 119 Cameron, David 84 capital, income from 33–4 capital flight 124 capital tax, global 180 car ownership 153 carbon emissions 54, 114–15, 135, 143, 145, 171, 172, 178 see also climate change 236 Index care see social care Centre for Economic Performance 163 Chancel, L. 176–7 charitable donations 70–1 charitable sector 132 child poverty 170 see also poverty children of the top 10% 27, 35–6, 100–1, 109, 111–12, 183–4, 186 ‘bank of mum and dad’ 29, 111 childcare costs 135–6 downward social mobility 31–2, 162 social reproduction 135–7 US 57 Chinese ethnicity, in the top 10% 30 class 39–40 cultural signifiers of 39, 40–1 ‘death of ’ 39 and education 40–1, 46, 51, 58–9 inherited nature of 148 middle class 33, 39, 40, 133, 136, 148 and social mobility 57–8 terminology of 38–9 upper class 38–9, 133 upper-middle class 4, 16, 27, 31–2, 38–54, 39 (see also top 10%) working class 24, 39, 57, 101–2, 148 climate change 54, 100, 101, 114–15, 125, 135, 141, 171–2 carbon emissions 54, 114–15, 135, 143, 145, 171, 172, 178 need for collective action on 122–3 net zero 174, 176–7 coalition government (Conservative/ Liberal Democrat) 78 collective denial 139–42 common sense 11, 19, 74, 89, 90, 108, 126, 130, 147 community gender and community involvement 70 top 10%’s lack of awareness of/ involvement in 45–6, 49–50, 127–31, 131, 150–1, 154–7, 164–6 ‘compensatory consumption’ 129, 134 Conservative Party/Conservatives 3, 16, 53, 76–7, 84, 85, 88, 97, 99, 120, 179 leadership election, 2022 39 taxation policy 3, 53 traditional supporters 44 consumption 152–4, 169, 171, 178 ‘compensatory consumption’ 129, 134 environmental impact of 135 luxury consumption, and climate change 114–15 Corbyn, Jeremy 11, 16, 80, 84, 85, 87, 96, 97 corporate governance 174 corporate responsibility 70–1 corporate sector 46, 51, 59, 64, 65–6, 67–8, 71, 88–9, 108, 128, 153 corporation tax 105–6, 113, 180 cost of living crisis 14, 52, 76, 101, 104, 106, 127, 177–8 council tax 110, 180 COVID-19 pandemic 13, 15, 72–3, 103–4, 116, 126, 134, 142, 144, 151 furlough and business support schemes 15, 104, 126–7, 128, 140, 151 political impact of 87–8 Coyle, Diane 145 crises cost of living crisis 14, 52, 76, 101, 104, 106, 127, 177–8 of democracy 119–21 global financial crisis, 2008 31, 77–9, 126, 140 cryptocurrencies 143–4 cultural attitudes of the top 10% 42, 84 cultural capital 40, 41, 46, 51 cuts, in public services 78–9, 105, 117, 170 D deindustrialisation 28 democracy crisis of 119–21 erosion of 76, 81–2 demographic profile of the top 10% 8 depression 130, 150 see also mental health ‘deserving’, the 23, 57, 74 see also ‘undeserving’, the disability and social mobility 58 welfare benefits 78, 79, 175 Disability Rights UK 175 diversity and inclusion targets 57 domestic work see unpaid work Dorling, Danny 35, 146–7, 156, 183 downward orientation 35, 46, 47 downward social mobility 14, 36, 73, 136, 152, 162, 182 237 Uncomfortably Off children of the top 10% 31–2, 162 income and status insecurity 51–2 Dubai 133 Durose, Oly 39–40 E Earth4All 177 economy economic attitudes of the top 10% 6, 8, 11, 16, 18–19, 42, 42, 77, 92–3, 161–4 economic common sense 89, 90 GDP, as indicator of success 176 Economy 2030 Enquiry 109 EDF 106 Edmiston, Daniel 49 education and class 40–1, 46, 51, 58–9 inequalities 17, 100–1, 117–19, 136 Ofsted ratings and league tables 137 and political attitudes 41, 42 and social capital 60 and social mobility 58–60, 147–8 state education 36, 60, 119, 136, 137, 148, 170 see also higher education; private education Ehrenreich, Barbara 152 Elections Bill 2021 120 Electoral Calculus 173 Electoral Commission 120 electoral system reform 172–3 Eliasoph, Nina 81 elites 39, 44–5, 77 anti-elitism 12, 96 employment 151 blue-collar 28 good jobs 55–61 hard work 48, 50, 61–73, 162 impact on society of 65–71 inequalities 17, 100, 107–9 low-wage work 62, 127 precarity 61, 107–9 presenteeism 64 public sector 109 and purpose 66–7, 71, 75, 162 and self-respect 55–6 and status 55–7, 68, 74 structural labour market change 27–8, 158 top 10% 6, 16, 24, 25, 26–8, 55–75 total British employed 2 white-collar 28 work-life balance 18, 171 workplace reform 71–2 see also unpaid work energy costs 101, 104, 105–7, 175 energy industry privatisation of 177–8 windfall taxes 177 environmental issues 54, 161 carbon emissions 54, 114–15, 135, 143, 145, 171, 172, 178 net zero 174, 176–7 equality of opportunity 57, 153 equality of outcome 57 ESS (European Social Survey) 89, 92 ethnicity see race and ethnic origin Eton College 26, 119 EU-SILC (European Union Statistics on Living Conditions) 24, 28, 29–30, 32, 33 Eurofound 27–8, 36–7 European Convention on Human Rights 121 European Social Survey (ESS) 89, 92 European Union Statistics on Living Conditions (EU-SILC) 24, 28, 29–30, 32, 33 experts, anti-elitist attitudes towards 12 Extinction Rebellion 84 ‘extraction capitalism’ 112 F Farage, Nigel 96 ‘fear of falling’ 152, 182 see also downward social mobility feminism 56 financial sector 51–2, 88–9 food food banks 93, 175 ‘right to’ 178 foreign policy, top 10% attitudes towards 6, 42 formal work see employment ‘fortification mentality’ 134–5 Frank, Robert H. 48 Friedman, Sam 27, 29, 31, 40, 57 furlough scheme, COVID-19 pandemic 15, 104, 128, 140, 151 G Gallup Poll, US 22, 26 Gates, Bill 144 GDP, as indicator of success 176 gender gender profile of the top 10% 8, 29–30 inclusivity 152–3 social mobility 57–8 general election, 2019 1, 76, 97, 120, 173 Generation Z 17, 100, 118 gentrification 133–4 238 Index Germany 159, 169 Gethin, Stephen 121 Ghosh, J. 132–3 Giddens, A. 64 Gilens, Martin 42–3 gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement, France 115 global financial crisis, 2008 31, 77–9, 126, 140 global warming see climate change globalisation 39 offshoring 79, 109, 158 Good Friday Agreement 121 good jobs 55–61 see also employment Goodhart, David 96–7 Gove, Michael 84 government debt 140 government employees, as members of the top 10% 5 government spending 169–70 see also public services; welfare state Graeber, David 46, 66, 75, 129, 157 Great British Class Survey 2013 39 Green, Duncan 184 Green New Deal 176 Green Party 87, 120, 178 Guinan, J. 82 H House of Commons Committee for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy 107 household debt 152 housing 52 and climate change 114 house prices 33 housing costs 110, 111 inequalities 17, 100, 107–9, 133–4 insulation grants 176 mortgages 33, 52, 106, 110 and state education 137 see also home ownership; homelessness human rights 121 Human Rights Act 1998 121 I Haldane, Andy 164 hard work 48, 50, 61–73, 162 HC-One 107 healthcare 144, 168 inequalities 112–14, 138, 139 NHS 91, 94, 116, 137, 138, 170 private healthcare 116, 137, 140, 159, 167–8, 182 Hecht, Katharina 62 higher education 30–1, 58, 136, 147–8, 183 elite 17, 26, 28–9, 73, 74, 100 and employment 57, 61 inequalities 17, 100, 117–19 mental health issues 73 post-1992 28 and social capital 118 student debt 37 US 57, 74 Hills, John 168 HMRC, income survey 5–6 hoarding 135–6, 144 home ownership 33, 52, 110, 111 see also housing homelessness 93 see also housing immigration, top 10% attitudes towards 6, 16, 42, 43 income distribution 133, 168 misconceptions around 1–4 Palma ratio 22–3 UK breakdown, 2019/20 7 income from capital 33–4 income tax 178–9, 181 Indian ethnicity, in the top 10% 30 inequalities 53, 77–8, 92–3, 100–23, 129–30, 153–4, 165–6, 183 and the COVID-19 pandemic 127 and education 17, 100–1, 117–19, 136 and employment 17, 100, 107–9 global 177 growth of 14, 32–3 healthcare 112–14, 138, 139 higher education 17, 100, 117–19 housing 17, 100, 107–9, 133–4 intergenerational 14, 17, 100, 109, 111–12, 117–18 labour market 60–1 and politics 87 private sector responsibility 69–71 and the top 10% 8, 17, 101–23 and the ‘undeserving’ 148–50 inflation 101, 105 Inflation Reduction Act 2022, US 169 informal work 56–7 inheritance, and housing inequality 111 Institute for Fiscal Studies 26, 105 Institute for Government 104 insulation 125–7, 130, 144 interdependence 175–6 Intergenerational Commission 118 intergenerational inequalities 14, 17, 100, 109, 111–12, 117–18 International Labour Organization 56 interview panels 40 239 Uncomfortably Off IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 114 Ireland 5, 13, 33, 155 isolation 127–31, 131, 144, 150–1 Ivy League universities, US 57 J jobs see employment Johnson, Boris 11, 26, 76, 84, 87, 97, 119, 121 Johnson, Paul 105 Jones, Owen 133, 148 K Kawachi, I. 116–17 key workers 127, 144, 150, 165 Khan, Shamus 152–3 King’s Fund 138 Kwarteng, Kwasi 3, 105 L labour market 60–1, 79–80 Labour Party/ Labour 1, 2, 44, 76, 80, 82–3, 84, 85, 89, 120, 122, 180, 194 New Labour 9, 78, 85 Lamont, Michèle 44–5 land values 110 Lansley, Stewart 112, 114, 151 Laurison, Daniel 27, 29, 31, 40, 57 Lawson, Neal 154 Le Pen, Marine 96, 98 left, the and Brahmins 41 social attitudes of the top 10% 16, 4 2 LGBTQ+ people, top 10% attitudes towards 43 Liberal Democrat Party 76, 84, 85, 86, 102, 120 liberalism small-l liberalism 96, 98, 182 life expectancy 79, 115, 138 Lindner, Christian 169 living standards 23–4 see also cost of living crisis local government 81–3, 117 local politics 81, 82–3 low-wage work 62, 127 luck 48, 59, 61 luxury consumption, and climate change 114–15 Lynch, Mick 178 M Major, John 60 Make Votes Matter 84 management consultants 47, 59, 70, 86, 90, 108, 126, 130, 147 Mandler, Peter 148 manners elite 45 market failures 105–7, 141 marketisation 137–9 Markovits, D. 20 Marmot reports, 2010 and 2020 115–16, 117 Mason, Paul 142 May, Theresa 84, 87 Mazzucato, Mariana 173–4 mean-tested benefits 77, 93–4, 159 media control of 120 as members of the top 10% 5, 26 Members of Parliament (MPs) 5, 76 men community involvement 70 see also gender mental health anxiety 72, 130, 135, 150, 165 depression 130, 150 higher education 73 unequal societies 130 working hours reduction 171 Merchants 38, 41–2, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 53, 61, 65, 68, 69, 72, 73, 88–9, 96, 98, 160, 162, 174 meritocracy 6, 11, 18, 19, 20, 39, 47, 58, 65, 68, 74, 100, 109, 111, 118, 146–9, 165, 170, 181, 184–5, 186 middle class 33, 39, 40, 133, 136, 148 Mijs, Jonathan 118, 155–6, 156–7 Milanovic, Branco 14, 34 Millennials 17, 100, 117, 118 minority rights, top 10% attitudes towards 6, 43 mobility 17–18, 124–5, 144, 148, 167 money, cultural taboos around 3 money elite 45 monopolies 140 and energy market failure 106–7 morals elite 45 mortgages 33, 52, 106, 110 MPs (Members of Parliament) 5, 76 multinational companies, taxation of 180 Murdoch, Rupert 120 N NatCen Social Research 24, 39 National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers 178 240 Index Nationality and Borders Bill 2021 120 neoliberalism 142 net zero 174, 176–7 networking 63 see also social capital New Labour see Labour Party/Labour NFTs (non-fungible tokens) 143–4 NHS 91, 94, 116, 137, 138, 170 Nietzsche, F. 46 Nixon, B. 82 Northern Ireland 121 O Obama, Barack 96 occupation see employment Occupy movement 181 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) data 23, 31 Office for National Statistics (ONS) 24, 29 offshoring 79, 109, 158 Olson, Dan 144 online shopping, and the COVID-19 pandemic 134 online working see working from home ONS (Office for National Statistics) 24, 29 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data 23, 31 overwork 69, 75 see also working hours Oxford Brookes University 29 Oxford University 28–9, 119 P Pakistani ethnicity, in the top 10% 30 Palma ratio 22–3 Parra, Nicanor 32 Parsons, Tony 3 participation, political 80–5, 172–3 ‘partygate’ scandal 76 Paugam, Serge 49–50 pensions, state 138 performance management 72 Personal Independence Payment 79 PFIs (private finance initiatives) 139 Piketty, Thomas 5, 14, 31, 38, 41, 42, 113, 180 Polanski, Jack 178 polarisation, political 14, 85–6, 98, 102, 172 Policing Bill 2021 120 politicians, as members of the top 10% 5, 26 politics 76–99, 181 centre ground 85–8 contemporary context 77–80 party membership 82–3, 84 political change 184–5 political participation 80–5, 172–3 political polarisation 14, 85–6, 98, 102, 172 political reform 172–3 and trust 76, 82 populism 11, 14, 16, 76, 77, 98, 102 positionality of authors 8–11 poverty 59, 78, 93, 151, 174, 175 child poverty 170 and education 118 and the ‘undeserving’ 148–50 precarity, of employment 61, 107–9 presenteeism 64 private education 54, 118–19, 136, 137, 147–8, 159, 162, 167, 170, 182 school fees 26, 33, 35, 36, 37 and social capital 60, 118 see also education private finance initiatives (PFIs) 139 private healthcare 116, 137, 140, 159, 167–8, 182 see also healthcare private sector 19–20 corporate sector 46, 51, 59, 64, 65–6, 67–8, 71, 88–9, 108, 128, 153 financial sector 51–2, 88–9 insecurity in 109 involvement in public services 139, 170 raising expectations of 171 privatisation excess profits of privatised companies 101 of utility companies 177–8 professionals anti-elitist attitudes towards 12, 46, 96 professionals and managers 24, 25, 26–8, 39, 55 see also top 10% property tax 180–1 protest, right of 120 Protestant work ethic 50 public sector employment 109 public services 159, 173 cuts in 78–9, 105, 117, 170 destigmatisation of 170 and marketisation 137–8 private sector involvement in 139, 170 and the top 10% 8, 19, 56, 77, 91–2, 138–9, 140, 144, 159, 163, 166–8, 183 universal 56, 77, 93–5, 144, 159 241 Uncomfortably Off Putnam, Robert 81, 129, 157, 158 Q Question Time, BBC 1, 2, 181 R race and ethnic origin and inclusivity 152–3 and social mobility 58 of the top 10% 8, 30 Raworth, Kate 135 redistribution 139, 161, 163, 182 top 10% attitudes towards 6, 42, 42, 43, 77 Reed, Howard 151 Reich, Robert 141 relocation see mobility renewable energy 141 see also climate change; energy costs Resolution Foundation 2, 34, 112, 163 rich, the see top 1%; top 10% richness 47 right, the 16 and Brexit 102 centre right 89, 97 and control of the media 121 far right 15, 97–8 and Merchants 41 political attitudes of the top 10% 16, 42 rights and responsibilities 158–60 Rivera, Lauren 57, 119 Rosa, Hartmut 129 Rothermere, Lord 120 Russell Group universities 57 Russia-Ukraine war 76, 104, 105–6 S Saez, E. 31 Salvini, Matteo 98 same-sex marriage, top 10% attitudes towards 6, 16, 42 Sandbu, Martin 179 Sandel, Michael 142, 150–1 Sanders, Bernie 96 Savage, Mike 183 savings levels of the top 10% 36 school fees, private education 26, 33, 35, 36, 37 Schor, Juliet 171 Scotland, devolved government 121 Scottish Greens 121 Scottish National Party 121 self-respect, and employment 55–6 Sherman, Rachel 35, 45–6 Shrubsole, Guy 110 ‘sink’ schools 137 Sinn Féin 121 small-l liberalism 96, 98, 182 ‘smart’ working 64 social capital decline in 157–8 and private education 60, 118 social care 117 low pay of care workers 103 market failure in 107 Social Democratic Party of Germany, Programme for the Future 159 social media ‘echo chambers’ 128 social mobility 19, 28, 36, 57–9 downward 14, 36, 73, 136, 152, 162, 182 children of the top 10% 31–2, 162 income and status insecurity 51–2 and education 58–60 meritocracy 6 and networking 63 structural barriers to 62 upward 18, 36, 50, 64, 136 Social Mobility Commission 60 social reproduction 135–7 social security top 10% attitudes towards 77 see also welfare benefits; welfare state society, attitudes to impact of work on 65–71, 74–5 sociological imagination 13, 49, 128, 160 solidarity 94, 127, 142, 157, 158, 159, 170 ‘somewheres’ 96 Soper, Kate 74 Spain 5, 73, 149, 155, 169 stamp duty 110–11 Starmer, Keir 87 state, the 161 raising expectations of 173–6 top 10% attitudes towards 91–5, 92 state education 36, 60, 119, 136, 137, 148, 170 status and employment 55–7, 68, 74 status anxiety and insecurity 14, 51–2, 135, 165 Stevenson, Gary 15 stigma, and unemployment 56 Streib, Jessi 31–2 structure 49 student debt 37 suburbia 40 Summers, A. 179, 180 Sutton Trust 29 Sweden 5, 23, 155 242 Index T tactical voting 172–3 taxation 97, 161, 163, 164, 178–81, 182 corporation tax 105–6, 113, 180 council tax 110, 180 income tax 2, 105–6, 178–9, 181, 185 property tax 180–1 stamp duty 110–11 tax avoidance/evasion 178, 181 tax cuts 169 tax fraud 181 top 10% attitudes towards 8, 42, 43, 77, 88–91, 92 Truss government tax cuts 105–6 wealth tax 179 windfall taxes, energy industry 177 technology and acceleration of the pace of life 129 automation 79, 158, 160 Thatcher, Margaret 105, 180 third sector, as members of the top 10% 5 Thomas, Mark 120 top 1% 2, 4, 13, 14, 15, 32, 41, 52, 64, 65, 93, 126, 128, 162 and employment 58–9 enabling of 131–4 inequality in 155 top 10% 4–7, 8, 11–13, 18, 33 accumulation and hoarding 135–6, 144 and austerity policies 1, 11, 13, 16 barriers to sense of belonging 18, 146–60 collective denial 139–42 contradictory isolation of 53–4 cost of living pressures 14, 15 and the COVID-19 pandemic 13, 15, 18, 127 furlough and business support schemes 15, 104, 126–7, 128, 151 cultural attitudes 42, 84 demographic profile 8 economic attitudes 6, 8, 11, 16, 18–19, 42, 42, 77, 92–3, 161–4 education 28–9, 30–1 employment 6, 16, 24, 25, 26–8, 55–75 enabling the wealthy 131–4 future prospects for 34–7, 95–9, 98, 182-7 gender profile 8, 29–30 HMRC income data 5–6 income and status insecurity 14, 51–2 inequalities 8, 17, 101–23 insulation 125–7, 130, 144 internal diversity of 32 isolation/lack of awareness of others’ lives 45–6, 49–50, 127–31, 131, 150–1, 154–7, 164–6 location 8, 29 and marketisation 137–9 and meritocracy 6, 11, 18, 19, 20, 39, 47, 58, 65, 68, 74, 100, 109, 111, 118, 146–9, 165, 170, 181, 184–5, 186 mobility 17–18, 124–5, 144, 148 overview and profile of 13–15, 21–37, 154–5 perceptions of income distribution 38, 47–51 political attitudes 8, 16–17, 42, 76–99 political participation 80–5 political influence of 5, 11, 76 and public services 8, 19, 56, 77, 91–2, 138–9, 140, 144, 159, 163, 166–8, 183 qualitative analysis of 15–16, 38–54 race and ethnic origin 8, 30 response to social and economic pressures 17–18, 124–45 rights and responsibilities 158–60 and the role of the state 91–5, 92 savings levels 36 social attitudes 6, 8, 16, 18–19, 42, 65–71, 77, 92, 92–3, 161–3, 164–6 social reproduction 135–7 uncertainty and insecurity of 68–9 Törmälehto, Veli-Matti 36–7 Toynbee, P. 89 trade unions 165, 172 membership 72, 157, 158, 163 Trump, Donald 11, 47, 96, 97, 98 Truss, Liz 105, 141, 186 Trussell Trust 175 trust 130–1 and politics 76, 82 Trust for London 23–4 U UBI (Universal Basic Income) 160 UK devolved government 121 Palma ratio 23 UKIP 87 Ukraine-Russia war 76, 104, 105–6 ‘undeserving,’ the 23, 148–50, 163 see also ‘deserving’, the 243 Uncomfortably Off unemployment 56 welfare benefits 138 Universal Basic Income (UBI) 160 universal welfare benefits 93, 168 see also welfare benefits universal public services 56, 77, 93–5, 144, 159 see also public services universities/university education 30–1, 58, 136, 147–8, 183 elite 17, 26, 28–9, 73, 74, 100 and employment 57, 61 inequalities 17, 100, 117–19 mental health issues 73 post-1992 28 and social capital 118 student debt 37 US 57, 74 Unlock Democracy 83 unpaid work 56, 150, 175–6 upper class 38–9, 133 upper-middle class 4, 16, 27, 31–2, 38–54, 39 see also top 10% upward orientation 35, 45–6, 47, 50, 51 upward social mobility 18, 36, 50, 64, 136 US and the COVID-19 pandemic 141 downward social mobility 31–2 elitism in higher education 150–1 employment and social class 57 inequalities and social segregation 156–7 Inflation Reduction Act 2022 169 middle class 33 universities/university education 57, 74 utility companies, privatisation of 177–8 V volunteering 69, 70–1 W Walker, D. 89 water industry, privatisation of 178 wealth distribution of 142 enabling of the wealthy 131–4 historical accumulation of 113 inequalities 112–14 unequal distribution of 14 wealth tax 179 Weber, Max 50 welfare benefits 138, 159–60, 167–8 cuts in 78, 79, 169 increasing of in line with inflation, 2022 175 mean-tested 77, 93–4, 159 universal 93, 168 welfare state 167, 174 anti-welfare attitudes 42, 42–3 top 10% attitudes towards 42, 93–4 and the ‘undeserving’ 149–50 see also public services well-off, the social attitudes and perceptions of 21–2 see also top 1%; top 10% White ethnicity, in the top 10% 30 Whitmarsh, Lorraine 114 Whyte, William 55–6 Williams, Zoe 134, 178 women anti-exclusion policies 43 community involvement 70 gender pay gap 30 life expectancy, decrease in 115 and online working 64 top 10% 8, 29–30 trade union membership 72 unpaid work 56, 150, 175–6 working class, and employment 57 see also gender Woodward, A. 116–17 work hard work 55, 61–73 see also employment work-life balance 18, 171 working class 24, 39, 148 and Brexit 101–2 and employment 57 working from home 27, 64, 104, 126, 128, 165 working hours 64 reduction in 171 World Bank 47 World Inequality Database 13, 32, 54 Wren-Lewis, Simon 78–9, 90 Y yellow vest (gilets jaunes) movement, France 115 Young, Michael 184–5 Younge, Gary 181 Z Zahawi, Nadim 107 244 

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth
by Robin Hanson
Published 31 Mar 2016

Myers, David, and Ed Diener. 1995. “Who Is Happy?” Psychological Science 6(1): 10–19. Nagy, Bela, J. Doyne Farmer, Quan Bui, and Jessika Trancik. 2013. “Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress.” PLoS ONE 8(2): e52669. Nakamoto, Satoshi. 2008. “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” November. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. Navarrete, C. David, Robert Kurzban, Daniel Fessler, and Lee Kirkpatrick 2004. “Anxiety and Intergroup Bias: Terror Management or Coalitional Psychology?” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 7(4): 370–397. Nguyen, Anh Ngoc, Jim Taylor, and Steve Bradley. 2003.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
Published 4 Apr 2016

If you’re willing to tolerate an error rate of just 1% or 2%, storing your findings in a probabilistic data structure like a Bloom filter will save you significant amounts of both time and space. And the usefulness of such filters is not confined to search engines: Bloom filters have shipped with a number of recent web browsers to check URLs against a list of known malicious websites, and they are also an important part of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Says Mitzenmacher, “The idea of the error tradeoff space—I think the issue is that people don’t associate that with computing. They think computers are supposed to give you the answer. So when you hear in your algorithms class, ‘It’s supposed to give you one answer; it might not be the right answer’—I like to think that when [students] hear that, it focuses them.

…

the URL is entered into a set of equations: Bloom, “Space/Time Trade-offs in Hash Coding with Allowable Errors.” shipped with a number of recent web browsers: Google Chrome until at least 2012 used a Bloom filter: see http://blog.alexyakunin.com/2010/03/nice-bloom-filter-application.html and https://chromiumcodereview.appspot.com/10896048/. part of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin: Gavin Andresen, “Core Development Status Report #1,” November 1, 2012, https://bitcoinfoundation.org/2012/11/core-development-status-report-1/. “The river meanders”: Richard Kenney, “Hydrology; Lachrymation,” in The One-Strand River: Poems, 1994–2007 (New York: Knopf, 2008). use this approach when trying to decipher codes: See Berg-Kirkpatrick and Klein, “Decipherment with a Million Random Restarts.”

…

Thomas Bayes’s Rule defined BBC BBC News Beautiful Mind, A (Nasar) beauty Bedarf, Erwin Bélády, László “Les” Bélády’s Algorithm Belew, Rik Bell, Alexander Graham bell curve Bellman, Richard Bellows, Meghan Belmont Report benchmarks Berezovsky, Boris Berkeley, Bishop George Berlin Wall Bernard, Claude Berry, Don best-case performance Bezos, Jeff big data Big-O notation. See also constant time; exponential time; factorial time; linearithmic time; linear time; polynomial time; quadratic time Big Ten conference Bikhchandani, Sushil bill-paying schedule Bing Binmore, Ken births, male vs. female Bitcoin “Blind Variation and Selective Retention” (Campbell) blocking Bloom, Burton H. Bloomberg Businessweek Bloom filter Blum, Avrim Boguslavsky, Leonid bookbinding Booker, Christopher bracket tournaments Bradáč, Zdeněk breaking symmetry Brighton, Henry bubbles, financial Bubble Sort Bucket Sort bufferbloat buffers Buffon, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de burglar problem Burks, Arthur business.

Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare
by Thomas Rid

The Americans’ aim, he said, was to weaken Russia from within: “to spread distrust for the ruling authorities and the bodies of power within society.” Meanwhile, Unit 26165 officers had “mined” some bitcoin, then a favored cryptocurrency widely, but falsely, believed to enable anonymous payments. This meant that the GRU had earned some of its own cryptographic money by dedicating computing resources to verifying and registering payments on a public ledger.9 Now, five days after Putin’s Q&A, the spies used $37 worth of freshly minted bitcoin to reserve a domain called electionleaks.com with a Romanian web-hosting company called THC Servers, leaving a cryptographic trail of evidence in the process.10 But the site was never furnished with content.

…

The attack seriously compromised the Democratic Party’s internal and external communications.12 The clandestine intruders also accessed the DNC’s telephone systems, giving the military intelligence officers access to phone calls and even voice mail inside the Democratic headquarters, all while an election campaign was in full swing.13 Just one day after compromising the DNC, on April 19, the GRU registered yet another website, DCLeaks.com, using the same Romanian hosting company, and paying for the new site out of the same pool of bitcoin. Now the GRU needed to do some web design. The next day, on April 20, the Russian operators finished drawing a sleek logo, with “DC” in blue, the white silhouette of the Capitol building perched between the D and the C, and “Leaks” printed in red underneath.14 The GRU worked through May on getting the leak portal ready for publication.

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
by Scott E. Page
Published 27 Nov 2018

Predictive models: This model explains prices as forecasts of future value. The value of the one-acre lot in Ocala, Bitcoin, or a stock depends on how much people will pay for them in the future. These valuations depend on predictive models, which in turn depend on attributes and categories. We might categorize Ocala as warm, low-tax, and inland. Variation in people’s valuations arises from different predictive models. Investors use multiple predictive models. These models may rely on attributes or, as in the case of valuing Bitcoin, also make assumptions about coordination. These three models provide three distinct explanations for the value of a good.

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basketball, 157 Bass model, 136–137 Bayesian multi-armed bandit problems, 321–324 Beatles, 132 Bednar, Jenna, 283 behavioral rules, 284 belief-based learning rule, 316 beliefs, 14 in rational-actor model, 48 benchmarks rational choice and, 50 in rational-actor model, 51 Berkshire Hathaway, 154 Berlin Observatory, 24 Bernoulli bandit problems, 320–321 Bernoulli urn model, 154–155, 163 betweenness network structure and, 118 score, 119 bias immediacy, 52 psychological, 51–53 selection, 89 big coefficient, 89–90 big rocks first, 17 bin packing problem, 17 binary categorization model, 30–31 binary classifications, of data, 92–93 Bitcoin, 241–242 BlackRock, 4 block entropy, 326 blocks, 177 body mass index (BMI), 37–38 Boldrin, Michele, 336–337 bootstrap aggregation, 42 Borges, Jorge Luis, 33 Botswana, 96 Box, George, 6 Boyle’s law, 19 broadcast model, 132–134 data and, 134 defined, 132 r-shaped adoption curve and, 133 (fig.)

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay
Published 5 Mar 2020

And what is meant by ‘money’ is temporally and geographically specific. Money is dollars in the US, and euros in Europe. Not so long ago, money was gold and silver. For the inhabitants of Yap in the Caroline Islands, money was Rai, heavy circles of limestone with a hole in the middle. Some people think that crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are ‘money’. Numbers are essential to economic analysis. But economic data and economic models are never descriptive of ‘the world as it really is’. Economic interpretation is always the product of a social context or theory. Expressing uncertainty When we are wondering whether the man in the compound is bin Laden or what happened to the Mary Celeste , whether the second Smith child is a girl or whether Joyce met Lenin, probabilities are unhelpful.

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The collapse of a narrative is a more rapid process than its transmission. And as we write, the financial press is full of perhaps the thinnest story since tulips to give rise to a bubble – the imagined future takeover of the world monetary system by crypto-currencies. Like other popular fictions, the Bitcoin phenomenon combines several perennial narratives – in this case, a libertarian vision of a world free of state intervention, the power of a magic technology, and the mystery of ‘money creation’. Round-up at Jackson Hole In the 1980s, bond markets, once staid backwaters of the financial system, became the focus of an exciting new narrative based on securitisation.

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INDEX 10 (film, 1979), 97 737 Max aircraft, 228 9/11 terror attacks, 7 , 74–6 , 202 , 230 Abbottabad raid (2011), 9–10 , 20 , 26 , 44 , 71 , 102 , 118–19 , 120 , 174–5 ; reference narrative of, 122–3 , 277 , 298 ; role of luck in, 262–3 ; and unhelpful probabilities, 8–19 , 326 abductive reasoning, 138 , 147 , 211 , 388 , 398 ABN AMRO, 257 Abraham (biblical character), 206 Abrahams, Harold, 273 Abramovich, Roman, 265 accountancy, 409 aeronautics, 227–8 , 352–6 , 383 Agdestein, Simen, 273 AIDS, 57 , 230 , 375–6 Airbus A380, 40 , 274–6 , 408 Akerlof, George, 250–1 , 252 , 253 , 254 , 382 Alchian, Armen, 158 alien invasion narratives, 295–6 Allais, Maurice, 134–5 , 136 , 137 , 437 , 440–3 Allen, Bill, 227–8 Allen, Paul, 28 , 29 Altair desktop, 28 Amazon, 289 , 309 Anderson, Roy, 375 ant colonies, 173 anthropology, 160 , 189–91 , 193–4 , 215–16 antibiotics, 40 , 45 , 284 , 429 Antz (film, 1998), 274 apocalyptic narratives, 331–2 , 335 , 358–62 Appiah, Anthony, 117–18 Apple, 29–30 , 31 , 169 , 309 Applegarth, Adam, 311 arbitrage, 308 Archilochus (Greek poet), 222 Aristotle, 137 , 147 , 303 Arrow, Kenneth, 254 , 343–5 , 440 artificial intelligence (AI), xvi , 39 , 135 , 150 , 173–4 , 175–6 , 185–6 , 387 ; the ‘singularity’, 176–7 Ashtabula rail bridge disaster (1876), 33 Asimov, Isaac, 303 asteroid strikes, 32 , 71–2 , 238 , 402 astrology, 394 astronomical laws, 18–19 , 35 , 70 , 373–4 , 388 , 389 , 391–2 , 394 AT&T, 28 auction theory, 255–7 Austen, Jane, 217 , 224–5 , 383 autism, 394 , 411 aviation, commercial, 23–4 , 40 , 227–8 , 274–6 , 315 , 383 , 414 axiomatic rationality: Allais disputes theory, 134–5 , 136 , 137 ; Arrow– Debreu world, 343–5 ; assumption of transitivity, 437 ; and Becker, 114 , 381–2 ; and behavioural economics, 116 , 135–6 , 141–9 , 154–5 , 167–8 , 386–7 , 401 ; capital asset pricing model (CAPM), 307–8 , 309 , 320 , 332 ; completeness axiom, 437–8 ; consistency of choice axiom, 108–9 , 110–11 ; continuity axiom, 438–40 ; definition of rationality, 133–4 , 137 , 436 ; definition of risk, 305 , 307 , 334 , 420–1 ; efficient market hypothesis, 252 , 254 , 308–9 , 318 , 320 , 332 , 336–7 ; efficient portfolio model, 307–8 , 309 , 318 , 320 , 332–4 , 366 ; and evolutionary rationality, 16 , 152–3 , 154–5 , 157 , 158 , 166–7 , 171–2 , 386–7 , 407 ; and ‘expectations’ concept, 97–8 , 102–3 , 121–2 , 341–2 ; extended to decision-making under uncertainty, xv , 40–2 , 110–14 , 133–7 , 257–9 , 420–1 ; and Friedman, 73–4 , 111–12 , 113–14 , 125 , 257–9 , 307 , 399–400 , 420 , 437 ; hegemony of over radical uncertainty, 40–2 , 110–14 ; implausibility of assumptions, xiv–xv , 16 , 41–4 , 47 , 74–84 , 85–105 , 107–9 , 111 , 116–22 , 344–9 , 435–44 ; independence axiom, 440–4 ; as limited to small worlds, 170 , 309–10 , 320–1 , 342–9 , 382 , 400 , 421 ; and Lucas, 36 , 92 , 93 , 338–9 , 341 , 345 , 346 ; and Markowitz, 307 , 308 , 309–10 , 318 , 322 , 333 ; maximising behaviour, 310 ; ‘pignistic probability’, 78–84 , 438 ; and Popperian falsificationism, 259–60 ; Prescott’s comparison with engineering, 352–6 ; ‘rational expectations theory, 342–5 , 346–50 ; and Samuelson, xv , 42 , 110–11 , 436 ; and Savage, 111–14 , 125 , 257–9 , 309 , 345 , 400 , 435 , 437 , 442–3 ; shocks and shifts discourse, 42 , 346 , 347 , 348 , 406–7 ; Simon’s work on, 134 , 136 , 149–53 ; triumph of probabilistic reasoning, 15–16 , 20 , 72–84 , 110–14 ; Value at risk models (VaR), 366–8 , 405 , 424 ; von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms, 111 , 133 , 435–44 ; see also maximising behaviour Ballmer, Steve, 30 , 227 Bank of England, xiii , 45 , 103–5 , 286 , 311 Barclays Bank, 257 Barings Bank, 411 Basel regulations, 310 , 311 Bay of Pigs fiasco (1961), 278–9 Bayes, Reverend Thomas, 60–3 , 66–7 , 70 , 71 , 358 , 431 Beane, Billy, 273 Bear Stearns, 158–9 Becker, Gary, 114 , 381–2 Beckham, David, 267–8 , 269 , 270 , 272–3 , 414 behavioural economics, 116 , 145–8 , 154 , 386–7 ; and Allais paradox, 442 ; ‘availability heuristic’, 144–5 ; biases in human behaviour, 16 , 136 , 141–8 , 154 , 162 , 165 , 167–8 , 170–1 , 175–6 , 184 , 401 ; and evolutionary science, 154–5 , 165 ; Kahneman’s dual systems, 170–1 , 172 , 271 ; Kahneman–Tversky experiments, 141–7 , 152 , 215 ; ‘noise’ (randomness), 175–6 ; nudge theory, 148–9 Bentham, Jeremy, 110 Berkshire Hathaway, 153 , 319 , 324 , 325–6 Berlin, Isaiah, 222 Bernoulli, Daniel, 114–16 , 199 Bernoulli, Nicolaus, 199 , 442 Bertrand, Joseph, 70 Bezos, Jeff, 289 big data, 208 , 327 , 388–90 billiard players, 257–8 bin Laden, Osama, 7 , 8–10 , 21 , 44 , 71 , 118–19 , 120 , 122–3 , 262–3 , 326 Bismarck, Otto von, 161 Bitcoin, 96 , 316 Black Death, 32 , 39–40 BlackBerry, 30 , 31 blackjack, 38 Blackstone, Sir William, 213 BNP Paribas, 5 , 6 BOAC, 23–4 Boas, Franz, 193 Boeing, 24 , 227–8 Boer War, 168 Bolt, Usain, 273 bonobos, 161–2 , 178 Borges, Jorge Luis, 391 Borodino, battle of (1812), 3–4 , 433 Bortkiewicz, Ladislaus, 235–6 Bower, Tom, 169–70 Bowral cricket team, New South Wales, 264 Box, George, 393 Boycott, Geoffrey, 264–5 Bradman, Don, 237 , 264 Brahe, Tycho, 388–9 Brånemark, Per-Ingvar, 387 , 388 Branson, Richard, 169–70 Brearley, Michael, 140–1 , 264–5 Breslau (now Wrocław), 56 Brexit referendum (June 2016), 241–2 ; lies told during, 404 bridge collapses, 33 , 341 Brownian motion, 37 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 143 , 147 Buffett, Warren, 83 , 152 , 179 , 319–20 , 324 , 335 , 336–7 Burns, Robert, 253 Bush, George W., 295 , 407 , 412 business cycles, 347 business history (academic discipline), 286 business schools, 318 business strategy: approach in 1970s, 183 ; approach in 1980s, 181–2 ; aspirations confused with, 181–2 , 183–4 ; business plans, 223–4 , 228 ; collections of capabilities, 274–7 ; and the computer industry, 27–31 ; corporate takeovers, 256–7 ; Lampert at Sears, 287–9 , 292 ; Henry Mintzberg on, 296 , 410 ; motivational proselytisation, 182–3 , 184 ; quantification mistaken for understanding, 180–1 , 183 ; and reference narratives, 286–90 , 296–7 ; risk maps, 297 ; Rumelt’s MBA classes, 10 , 178–80 ; Shell’s scenario planning, 223 , 295 ; Sloan at General Motors, 286–7 ; strategy weekends, 180–3 , 194 , 296 , 407 ; three common errors, 183–4 ; vision or mission statements, 181–2 , 184 Buxton, Jedediah, 225 Calas, Jean, 199 California, 48–9 Cambridge Growth Project, 340 Canadian fishing industry, 368–9 , 370 , 423 , 424 cancer, screening for, 66–7 Candler, Graham, 352 , 353–6 , 399 Cardiff City Football Club, 265 Carlsen, Magnus, 175 , 273 Carnegie, Andrew, 427 Carnegie Mellon University, 135 Carré, Dr Matt, 267–8 Carroll, Lewis, Through the Looking-Glass , 93–4 , 218 , 344 , 346 ; ‘Jabberwocky’, 91–2 , 94 , 217 Carron works (near Falkirk), 253 Carter, Jimmy, 8 , 119 , 120 , 123 , 262–3 cartography, 391 Casio, 27 , 31 Castro, Fidel, 278–9 cave paintings, 216 central banks, 5 , 7 , 95 , 96 , 103–5 , 285–6 , 348–9 , 350 , 351 , 356–7 Central Pacific Railroad, 48 Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, 39 Chabris, Christopher, 140 Challenger disaster (1986), 373 , 374 Chamberlain, Neville, 24–5 Chandler, Alfred, Strategy and Structure , 286 Chariots of Fire (film, 1981), 273 Charles II, King, 383 Chelsea Football Club, 265 chess, 173 , 174 , 175 , 266 , 273 , 346 Chicago economists, 36 , 72–4 , 86 , 92 , 111–14 , 133–7 , 158 , 257–8 , 307 , 342–3 , 381–2 Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 423 chimpanzees, 161–2 , 178 , 274 China, 4–5 , 419–20 , 430 cholera, 283 Churchill, Winston: character of, 25–6 , 168 , 169 , 170 ; fondness for gambling, 81 , 168 ; as hedgehog not fox, 222 ; on Montgomery, 293 ; restores gold standard (1925), 25–6 , 269 ; The Second World War , 187 ; Second World War leadership, 24–5 , 26 , 119 , 167 , 168–9 , 170 , 184 , 187 , 266 , 269 Citibank, 255 Civil War, American, 188 , 266 , 290 Clapham, John, 253 Clark, Sally, 197–8 , 200 , 202 , 204 , 206 Clausewitz, Carl von, On War , 433 climate systems, 101–2 Club of Rome, 361 , 362 Coase, Ronald, 286 , 342 Cochran, Johnnie, 198 , 217 Cochrane, John, 93 coffee houses, 55–6 cognitive illusions, 141–2 Cohen, Jonathan, 206–7 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 411 Cold War, 293–4 , 306–7 Collier, Paul, 276–7 Columbia disaster (2003), 373 Columbia University, 117 , 118 , 120 Columbus, Christopher, 4 , 21 Colyvan, Mark, 225 Comet aircraft, 23–4 , 228 communication: communicative rationality, 172 , 267–77 , 279–82 , 412 , 414–16 ; and decision-making, 17 , 231 , 272–7 , 279–82 , 398–9 , 408 , 412 , 413–17 , 432 ; eusociality, 172–3 , 274 ; and good doctors, 185 , 398–9 ; human capacity for, 159 , 161 , 162 , 172–3 , 216 , 272–7 , 408 ; and ill-defined concepts, 98–9 ; and intelligibility, 98 ; language, 98 , 99–100 , 159 , 162 , 173 , 226 ; linguistic ambiguity, 98–100 ; and reasoning, 265–8 , 269–77 ; and the smartphone, 30 ; the ‘wisdom of crowds’, 47 , 413–14 Community Reinvestment Act (USA, 1977), 207 comparative advantage model, 249–50 , 251–2 , 253 computer technologies, 27–31 , 173–4 , 175–7 , 185–6 , 227 , 411 ; big data, 208 , 327 , 388–90 ; CAPTCHA text, 387 ; dotcom boom, 228 ; and economic models, 339–40 ; machine learning, 208 Condit, Phil, 228 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 199–200 consumer price index, 330 , 331 conviction narrative theory, 227–30 Corinthians (New Testament), 402 corporate takeovers, 256–7 corporations, large, 27–31 , 122 , 123 , 286–90 , 408–10 , 412 , 415 Cosmides, Leda, 165 Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, 32 , 39 , 71–2 Crick, Francis, 156 cricket, 140–1 , 237 , 263–5 crime novels, classic, 218 crosswords, 218 crypto-currencies, 96 , 316 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 140 , 264 Cuba, 278–80 ; Cuban Missile Crisis, 279–81 , 299 , 412 Custer, George, 293 Cutty Sark (whisky producer), 325 Daily Express , 242–3 , 244 Damasio, Antonio, 171 Dardanelles expedition (1915), 25 Darwin, Charles, 156 , 157 Davenport, Thomas, 374 Dawkins, Richard, 156 de Havilland company, 23–4 Debreu, Gerard, 254 , 343–4 decision theory, xvi ; critiques of ‘American school’, 133–7 ; definition of rationality, 133–4 ; derived from deductive reasoning, 138 ; Ellsberg’s ‘ambiguity aversion’, 135 ; expected utility , 111–14 , 115–18 , 124–5 , 127 , 128 – 30 , 135 , 400 , 435–44 ; hegemony of optimisation, 40–2 , 110–14 ; as unable to solve mysteries, 34 , 44 , 47 ; and work of Savage, 442–3 decision-making under uncertainty: and adaptation, 102 , 401 ; Allais paradox, 133–7 , 437 , 440–3 ; axiomatic approach extended to, xv , 40–2 , 110–14 , 133–7 , 257–9 , 420–1 ; ‘bounded rationality concept, 149–53 ; as collaborative process, 17 , 155 , 162 , 176 , 411–15 , 431–2 ; and communication, 17 , 231 , 272–7 , 279–82 , 398–9 , 408 , 412 , 413–17 , 432 ; communicative rationality, 172 , 267–77 , 279–82 , 412 , 414–16 ; completeness axiom, 437–8 ; continuity axiom, 438–40 ; Cuban Missile Crisis, 279–81 , 299 , 412 ; ‘decision weights’ concept, 121 ; disasters attributed to chance, 266–7 ; doctors, 184–6 , 194 , 398–9 ; and emotions, 227–9 , 411 ; ‘evidence-based policy’, 404 , 405 ; excessive attention to prior probabilities, 184–5 , 210 ; expected utility , 111–14 , 115–18 , 124–5 , 127 , 128–30 , 135 , 400 , 435–44 ; first-rate decision-makers, 285 ; framing of problems, 261 , 362 , 398–400 ; good strategies for radical uncertainty, 423–5 ; and hindsight, 263 ; independence axiom, 440–4 ; judgement as unavoidable, 176 ; Klein’s ‘primed recognition decision-making’, 399 ; Gary Klein’s work on, 151–2 , 167 ; and luck, 263–6 ; practical decision-making, 22–6 , 46–7 , 48–9 , 81–2 , 151 , 171–2 , 176–7 , 255 , 332 , 383 , 395–6 , 398–9 ; and practical knowledge, 22–6 , 195 , 255 , 352 , 382–8 , 395–6 , 405 , 414–15 , 431 ; and prior opinions, 179–80 , 184–5 , 210 ; ‘prospect theory’, 121 ; public sector processes, 183 , 355 , 415 ; puzzle– mystery distinction, 20–4 , 32–4 , 48–9 , 64–8 , 100 , 155 , 173–7 , 218 , 249 , 398 , 400–1 ; qualities needed for success, 179–80 ; reasoning as not decision-making, 268–71 ; and ‘resulting’, 265–7 ; ‘risk as feelings’ perspective, 128–9 , 310 ; robustness and resilience, 123 , 294–8 , 332 , 335 , 374 , 423–5 ; and role of economists, 397–401 ; Rumelt’s ‘diagnosis’, 184–5 , 194–5 ; ‘satisficing’ (’good enough’ outcomes), 150 , 167 , 175 , 415 , 416 ; search for a workable solution, 151–2 , 167 ; by securities traders, 268–9 ; ‘shock’ and ‘shift’ labels, 42 , 346 , 347 , 348 , 406–7 ; simple heuristics, rules of thumb, 152 ; and statistical discrimination, 207–9 , 415 ; triumph of probabilistic reasoning, 20 , 40–2 , 72–84 , 110–14 ; von Neumann– Morgenstern axioms, 111 , 133 , 435–44 ; see also business strategy deductive reasoning, 137–8 , 147 , 235 , 388 , 389 , 398 Deep Blue, 175 DeepMind, 173–4 The Deer Hunter (film, 1978), 438 democracy, representative, 292 , 319 , 414 demographic issues, 253 , 358–61 , 362–3 ; EU migration models, 369–70 , 372 Denmark, 426 , 427 , 428 , 430 dentistry, 387–8 , 394 Derek, Bo, 97 dermatologists, 88–9 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), 27 , 31 dinosaurs, extinction of, 32 , 39 , 71–2 , 383 , 402 division of labour, 161 , 162 , 172–3 , 216 , 249 DNA, 156 , 198 , 201 , 204 ‘domino theory’, 281 Donoghue, Denis, 226 dotcom boom, 316 , 402 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 34 , 224–5 , 253 Drapers Company, 328 Drescher, Melvin, 248–9 Drucker, Peter, Concept of the Corporation (1946), 286 , 287 Duhem–Quine hypothesis, 259–60 Duke, Annie, 263 , 268 , 273 Dulles, John Foster, 293 Dutch tulip craze (1630s), 315 Dyson, Frank, 259 earthquakes, 237–8 , 239 Eco, Umberto, The Name of the Rose , 204 Econometrica , 134 econometrics, 134 , 340–1 , 346 , 356 economic models: of 1950s and 1960s, 339–40 ; Akerlof model, 250–1 , 252 , 253 , 254 ; ‘analogue economies’ of Lucas, 345 , 346 ; artificial/complex, xiv–xv , 21 , 92–3 , 94 ; ‘asymmetric information’ model, 250–1 , 254–5 ; capital asset pricing model (CAPM), 307–8 , 309 , 320 , 332 ; comparative advantage model, 249–50 , 251–2 , 253 ; cost-benefit analysis obsession, 404 ; diversification of risk, 304–5 , 307–9 , 317–18 , 334–7 ; econometric models, 340–1 , 346 , 356 ; economic rent model, 253–4 ; efficient market hypothesis, 252 , 254 , 308–9 , 318 , 320 , 332 , 336–7 ; efficient portfolio model, 307–8 , 309 , 318 , 320 , 332–4 , 366 ; failure over 2007–08 crisis, xv , 6–7 , 260 , 311–12 , 319 , 339 , 349–50 , 357 , 367–8 , 399 , 407 , 423–4 ; falsificationist argument, 259–60 ; forecasting models, 7 , 15–16 , 68 , 96 , 102–5 , 347–50 , 403–4 ; Goldman Sachs risk models, 6–7 , 9 , 68 , 202 , 246–7 ; ‘grand auction’ of Arrow and Debreu, 343–5 ; inadequacy of forecasting models, 347–50 , 353–4 , 403–4 ; invented numbers in, 312–13 , 320 , 363–4 , 365 , 371 , 373 , 404 , 405 , 423 ; Keynesian, 339–40 ; Lucas critique, 341 , 348 , 354 ; Malthus’ population growth model, 253 , 358–61 , 362–3 ; misuse/abuse of, 312–13 , 320 , 371–4 , 405 ; need for, 404–5 ; need for pluralism of, 276–7 ; pension models, 312–13 , 328–9 , 405 , 423 , 424 ; pre-crisis risk models, 6–7 , 9 , 68 , 202 , 246–7 , 260 , 311–12 , 319 , 320–1 , 339 ; purpose of, 346 ; quest for large-world model, 392 ; ‘rational expectations theory, 342–5 , 346–50 ; real business cycle theory, 348 , 352–4 ; role of incentives, 408–9 ; ‘shift’ label, 406–7 ; ‘shock’ label, 346–7 , 348 , 406–7 ; ‘training base’ (historical data series), 406 ; Value at risk models (VaR), 366–8 , 405 , 424 ; Viniar problem (problem of model failure), 6–7 , 58 , 68 , 109 , 150 , 176 , 202 , 241 , 242 , 246–7 , 331 , 366–8 ; ‘wind tunnel’ models, 309 , 339 , 392 ; winner’s curse model, 256–7 ; World Economic Outlook, 349 ; see also axiomatic rationality; maximising behaviour; optimising behaviour; small world models Economic Policy Symposium, Jackson Hole, 317–18 economics: adverse selection process, 250–1 , 327 ; aggregate output and GDP, 95 ; ambiguity of variables/concepts, 95–6 , 99–100 ; appeal of probability theory, 42–3 ; ‘bubbles’, 315–16 ; business cycles, 45–6 , 347 ; Chicago School, 36 , 72–4 , 86 , 92 , 111–14 , 133–7 , 158 , 257–8 , 307 , 342–3 , 381–2 ; data as essential, 388–90 ; division of labour, 161 , 162 , 172–3 , 216 , 249 ; and evolutionary mechanisms, 158–9 ; ‘expectations’ concept, 97–8 , 102–3 , 121–2 , 341–2 ; forecasts and future planning as necessary, 103 ; framing of problems, 261 , 362 , 398–400 ; ‘grand auction’ of Arrow and Debreu, 343–5 ; hegemony of optimisation, 40–2 , 110 – 14 ; Hicks–Samuelson axioms, 435–6 ; market fundamentalism, 220 ; market price equilibrium, 254 , 343–4 , 381–2 ; markets as necessarily incomplete, 344 , 345 , 349 ; Marshall’s definition of, 381 , 382 ; as ‘non-stationary’, 16 , 35–6 , 45–6 , 102 , 236 , 339–41 , 349 , 350 , 394–6 ; oil shock (1973), 223 ; Phillips curve, 340 ; and ‘physics envy’, 387 , 388 ; and power laws, 238–9 ; as practical knowledge, 381 , 382–3 , 385–8 , 398 , 399 , 405 ; public role of the social scientist, 397–401 ; reciprocity in a modern economy, 191–2 , 328–9 ; and reflexivity, 35–6 , 309 , 394 ; risk and volatility, 124–5 , 310 , 333 , 335–6 , 421–3 ; Romer’s ‘mathiness’, 93–4 , 95 ; shift or structural break, 236 ; Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, 163 , 254 , 343 ; social context of, 17 ; sources of data, 389 , 390 ; surge in national income since 1800, 161 ; systems as non-linear, 102 ; teaching’s emphasis on quantitative methods, 389 ; validity of research findings, 245 ‘Economists Free Ride, Does Anyone Else?’

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History
by Stephen D. King
Published 22 May 2017

At worst, we could end up with a chaotic ever-changing constellation of currencies challenging globalization on three separate fronts: first, the desire for individual countries to deflect their debt problem somewhere else; second, the American economy’s diminishing status on the world stage; and third, the absence of a global financial imperium to replace the US. It’s no great surprise that, given this prospect, interest in new currency algorithms – most obviously the Blockchain that underlies Bitcoin – is on the increase. ‘CONSPANSIONARY’ MONETARY POLICY Monetary policy’s redistributional qualities are not, however, confined to cross-border effects alone. Within countries, it increasingly appears that monetary stimulus has both expansionary and contractionary effects – a combination that might best be termed ‘conspansionary’.8 Before the global financial crisis, these effects tended to even out over time.

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London, January 2017 INDEX Abbasids (i), (ii) Abu Bakr (i) Acemoglu, Daron (i) advertising (i) Afghanistan (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Africa (i) China and (i) high levels of ethnic diversity (i) oil, commodities and (i) population percentages (i) ‘scramble for’ (i), (ii) sub-Saharan nations (i), (ii), (iii) trade flows and slavery (i) ageing population (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Agincourt, Battle of (i) Al Qaeda (i), (ii)n2 Alaska (i) Ali (cousin/son-in-law to Prophet Mohammad) (i) Alibaba (i) Allies (Second World War) (i) Almaty (i) Almohads (i) Almoravids (i) Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) (i) Amazon (i) America see United States American Civil War (i), (ii) American dollar (i), (ii) as good as gold (i) global foreign exchange market and (i) peso and (i) premier reserve currency (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) American Dream (i) American Samoa (i) Amin, Idi (i) Amsterdam Treaty (1997) (i), (ii) Anatolia (i) Andalucía (i) Andes (i) Angell, Norman (i), (ii), (iii) Angola (i) ‘animal spirits’ (i) Annecy (i) Apple (i), (ii) Arab nations (i), (ii) Arab Spring (i) Arabic language (i), (ii) Arabs (i), (ii), (iii) Aramaic (i) Arc of Prosperity (i) Argentina (i), (ii), (iii) Armenia (i) ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) (i) Asia see also China and other individual countries 1997/8 crisis (i), (ii), (iii) ageing population (i) balance of payments deficits (i) Central Asia (i), (ii), (iii) Columbus’s belief (i) East Asia (i) emerging market labour (i) events impinging on the West (i) immigrants in America (i) mathematical ability (i) Obama and (i), (ii), (iii) rail connections (i) Russia and (i) Trump and a vacuum (i) Asian Development Bank (i) Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Asiatic Barred Zone Act (i) al-Assad, Bashar (i), (ii) asylum seekers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)n17 see also immigration; refugees Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal (i) Atlantic (i), (ii) Austen, Jane (i) austerity (i), (ii), (iii) Australia ASEAN and (i) Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and (i) average incomes (i) foreign-born share of population (i) Second Gulf War (i) tobacco policy (i) Austria (i), (ii) Austro-Hungarian Empire (i), (ii) Axis (Second World War) (i) Azerbaijan (i) Bagehot, Walter (i) Baghdad (i) Baker, James (III) (i) balance of payments (i) Asian Crisis (i) Latin America (i) Plaza Accord and (i) UK and Suez (i) US (i), (ii) Varoufakis on (i) Balkans (i) Baltic Sea (i), (ii) bancor (i), (ii), (iii) Bangladesh (i) Bank of Credit and Commerce International (i) Bank of England (i), (ii) Bank of Japan (i) bankers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) see also central banks Barings (i), (ii)n1 Basel I (i) Basel II (i) Basra (i) Battle of Bretton Woods, The (Ben Steil) (i)n4 BBC Two (i) Bedford (i) Beijing (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Belarus (i), (ii) Belgium (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Belt and Road strategy (i), (ii) Benn, Tony (i) Bentham, Jeremy (i) Berbers (i) Bergère, 14 rue (i) Berghof sanatorium (i) Berlin Wall (fall of) asylum seekers after (i) changing times after (i), (ii) Poland goes from strength to strength (i) relative living standards after fall (i) Soviet living standards (i) US military spending and (i) Bernanke, Ben (i) Big Brother (i) Bilderberg Club (i) bin Laden, Osama (i) Bitcoin (i) Black and White Minstrel Show, The (i) Black Death (i) Black Sea (i), (ii), (iii) Blair, Tony (i), (ii), (iii) Blanchard, Olivier (i) Blockchain (i) Blue Feed (i) BMW (i) BNP Paribas (i) Boers (i) Boko Haram (i) Bolsheviks (i) see also communism borders (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) see also cross-border capital flow capital flows see cross-border capital flow EU and (i) globalization and (i) historical accident (i) Mediterranean (i) movement of labour (i), (ii) post-global financial crisis (i), (ii) railways and (i) slowly dissolving (i), (ii) technology and (i), (ii) Triffin Dilemma (i) Boston (i), (ii) Boughton, James M.

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy
by Eric O'Neill
Published 1 Mar 2019

But today, many of those spies don’t even know that they’re compromised. CHAPTER 27 THERE ARE NO HACKERS, ONLY SPIES On Friday, May 12, 2017, North Korea started a pandemic that made the world look up and listen. Bright-red screens popped up on more than 200,000 infected computers worldwide, with a mocking message demanding that users pay $300 in Bitcoin to the attackers before a countdown timer expired and all their data disappeared forever. Those who did pay quickly learned that the ransom demand was a hoax: all the data was already gone. More than 150 countries desperately fought the attack, but resistance was futile. The malware leapt across borders at the speed of thought, worming its way through businesses and government agencies, wreaking havoc in banks and universities, shutting down airports and bringing hospitals to a standstill.

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A July 13, 2018, indictment from the Robert Mueller investigation accused Lukashev and eleven other Russian GRU officers of hacking into the computers of US persons involved in the 2016 presidential election, stealing documents from those persons, and staging the release of that information in order to interfere with the election. To mask their connection to Russia, the twelve cyber spies used false identities and exploited a network of computers located across the world funded by cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin. These “middle server” computers acted as proxies to obscure the connection between the Russian attackers and their victims at the DCCC, DNC, and Hillary Clinton campaign. Essentially, the Russians created a modern Moonlight Maze. Russia has long sought to influence and undermine elections and the political process of rival nations.

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors
by Edward Niedermeyer
Published 14 Sep 2019

Because of this environment, in which it’s easy to raise money without a lot of scrutiny of the fundamentals of your business, “there’s this general sense that if you believe you’re changing the world, you can lie to investors,” he argued. “That’s a bull market phenomenon . . . A whole generation has forgotten about the late 1990s, and so a lot of people who are buying these stocks or the Bitcoin craziness never saw these things go down 90 or 99 percent like my generation did. We saw a bull market phenomenon in the late 90s, and when the market turned down and the glasses became half empty and not half full, the access to capital dried up overnight. If you have positive cash flow you can survive, but if your burn rate is really high and capital markets shut down for six months, you’re dead.

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YouTube video, June 30, 2015. https://youtu.be/1llEcjAIDjY INDEX A AC Propulsion, 23, 24, 26–27, 31, 37, 43, 49 Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), 124, 132–133 AEB (Automatic Emergency Braking), 125, 127 Anderson, Sterling, 140, 171 Andreessen, Marc, 41 Apple, 41, 95 Aptera, 11 Audi, 114, 203–204 auto industry, xi, 1–3, 11, 16, 42, 78–79, 197 Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB), 125, 127 Automotive News, 2 AutoNation, 99–100 autonomous cars, 163–179 Level 4, 175–176 Level 5, 170, 172, 175–176, 178 and Mobileye, 167–170 obstacles to, 171–179 as robotaxis, 166–167 Tesla’s master plan for, 163–167 Autopilot system, 88, 120–133, 140, 155, 161, 165, 167–173, 176–178, 212, 223, 228 Autosteer, 125 B Baer, Drake, 23, 30 Banks, Azealia, 219 barriers to entry, 35, 56 batteries fast-charging, 205 improvements in, 35 lead-acid, 23–24, 197 lithium-ion, 22–24, 26, 34 for Model S, 90–91, 200 Panasonic, 77, 183–184 production of, 48, 67–69, 183–184, 188–189, 205, 206 for Tesla Roadster, 37–38 battery swapping, 4, 5, 12, 88, 93, 108, 114–119 Begley, Ed, Jr., 45 Beijing Auto, 206 Bentley, 200–201, 203–204 Bitcoin, 104 Black Sheep Planet (blog), 99 Bloomberg News, 124, 189 Bloomberg View, 2 The Boring Company, 16 Brammo, 11–12 branding, 16, 18, 59–63, 225–234 environmentalism as, 231–232 large screen as Tesla’s, 225–231 Elon Musk’s role in, 232–234 Brin, Sergey, 44 Brown, Joshua, 127–133 Brownlee, Marques, 96 Bugatti Chiron, 214 BusinessInsider, 23, 30, 189 BuzzFeed, 218 C Cadillac, 132, 204 Cadillac Super Cruise system, 132 California, 3, 34, 48, 70, 170–171 California Air Resources Board (CARB), 12, 46, 118–119 carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP), 39, 48 Chanos, Jim, 103–105 China, 11, 204–207 Christensen, Clayton, 195–197 Chrysler Corporation, 2–3, 11, 15, 34, 88 Citroën (company), 193–195, 209 Citroën, André, 194–195 CleanTechnica, 100 Clooney, George, 61 CNBC, 189 Cocconi, Alan, 13, 24 Coda, 11 collisions, 127–133 Consumer Reports, 143 continuous improvement, 58 The Contrarian Investor, 96 Cordaro, Peter, 148–149, 151, 154–155 culture of Tesla, 51–52, 60 D The Daily Beast, 2 Daimler, 67–68, 75, 76, 81, 83, 159, 160, 204 Dediu, Horace, 56 defects, 59, 149–162 non-disclosure agreements surrounding, 149–151, 152, 155–156 “stealth recalls” due to, 160–161 Delphi, 171 Deming, W.

Boundless: The Rise, Fall, and Escape of Carlos Ghosn
by Nick Kostov
Published 8 Aug 2022

Ghosn counseled the former soldier to hunker down in Lebanon, but Taylor was losing his mind after so many weeks away. “I’m not a runner,” he told a relative. Instead, he asked Ghosn for help to cover his legal fees. Ghosn agreed to send the Taylors some money in cryptocurrency to keep the transfer secret. The sixty-five-year-old Ghosn had never handled Bitcoin before, so he asked Anthony to process the transfer. On February 16, Taylor had finally had enough. Having booked and not boarded three flights since landing in Lebanon, he decided to take a chance and hopped on a flight home to Massachusetts via Dubai. He made it home without issues. Back in the United States, he picked up his old activities, including playing basketball on Wednesday and working on expanding his vitamin water business.

…

In the extradition file prepared by Japanese prosecutors and passed on to US authorities, a document showed that Anthony Ghosn had made six transfers to Peter Taylor using the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange platform for a total of more than $500,000. When those details became public and reporters sought comment from Anthony, he was angry. He was back in the news, this time for financing an international caper. He had sent the Bitcoin to help out his dad, with no idea that the beneficiary was Peter Taylor. He didn’t want that kind of attention. * * * Greg Kelly, at sixty-four years old, was finally going to have his first day in court. He had been fighting to get his trial started for nearly two years and was eagerly waiting for a chance to defend himself against what he regarded as trumped-up charges.

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars
by Rowan Hooper
Published 15 Jan 2020

As I write, in 2020, there are at least 10 billion entities – toasters and Fitbits and fridges and cars and robots and other automated systems – using the internet. That’s in addition to the people using it. Combined, the world’s ICT accounts for 2.5 per cent of global emissions (1.4 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent, annually). Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies alone burn through 68 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent each year. As computing power and usage increase, so does the energy consumption and the carbon emissions. This needs to become sustainable. One answer is to shift some of the computing infrastructure off-planet. Energy and minerals can be provided from the Moon, without further eroding Earth’s biosphere.

…

DeepMind was reprimanded when it was revealed that it had used sensitive medical information about 1.6 million people registered with the UK National Health Service without those people’s informed consent.7 One way to make things more secure could be to use blockchain technology – the same thing that underpins Bitcoin cryptocurrency – to help protect patient data. The more this encourages people to give access to their medical data, the better algorithms will become at interpretation. $ $ $ THIS IS NOT TO SAY that we should create an all-powerful AGI, then prostrate ourselves before it to sort out our lives and clean up our mess.

Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere
by Christian Wolmar
Published 18 Jan 2018

— Kate Barker Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax System to Make Us Healthier — David Fell A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier — Danny Dorling Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No Transport Policy — Christian Wolmar Travel Fast or Smart? A Manifesto for an Intelligent Transport Policy — David Metz Britain’s Cities, Britain’s Future — Mike Emmerich Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand To Money That Understands Us — David Birch The Weaponization of Trade: The Great Unbalancing of Politics and Economics — Rebecca Harding and Jack Harding Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere — Christian Wolmar Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere Christian Wolmar London Publishing Partnership Copyright © 2018 Christian Wolmar Published by London Publishing Partnership www.londonpublishingpartnership.co.uk Published in association with Enlightenment Economics www.enlightenmenteconomics.com All Rights Reserved ISBN: 978-1-907994-76-0 (interactive PDF) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This book has been composed in Candara Copy-edited and typeset by T&T Productions Ltd, London www.tandtproductions.com Contents Prefacevii Chapter 1 The myth of motoring freedom 1 Chapter 2 The hard sell 13 Chapter 3 The triple revolution 31 Chapter 4 What can cars do now?

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs
by Reid Hoffman , June Cohen and Deron Triff
Published 14 Oct 2021

But this has really, really done it.’ ” Danny has already spent a lot of time talking to his industry colleagues, asking, “What is the opportunity that this crisis is providing to deal with things that none of us as individuals have succeeded at dealing with in the past?” They’re now looking at ways to improve how restaurant people are paid, the tipping system, the problems restaurants face with payroll taxes and liquor laws, and relationships with landlords. Wences Casares, CEO of the Bitcoin wallet platform Xapo, and Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, both believe that a crisis can be a good time to make your company more adaptable and flexible—specifically, by changing the way the company is structured. More specifically, by pivoting to a remote office structure. If there’s one positive change wrought by the pandemic, it’s that companies large and small have witnessed firsthand the benefits of shifting to an all-remote workforce.

…

But as soon as we met him we said, ‘This guy is on to something.’ ” Endeavor helped Wences raise capital from Flatiron Partners and Chase Capital. They found him a COO. And a year later, Banco Santander bought Wences’s company for three quarters of a billion dollars. Wences went on to other successes, including starting the bitcoin wallet Xapo, which aims to “democratize money” by promoting a more stable universal currency. But at the time Linda Rottenberg approached Wences, he was skeptical that an outsider would have any interest in his business ideas. Linda says that after she helped him get going, he confessed something to her: “When I first approached him,” Linda says, “he thought I was running a cult.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas
Published 27 Aug 2018

It brought together a great many entrepreneurs and financiers who invest in entrepreneurs, some artists and yoga teachers to keep things interesting and healthy, and various others who tend to run in those circles and whose bios refer to them using terms like “influencer,” “thought leader,” “curator,” “convener,” “connector,” and “community manager.” Summit, being one of the hotter MarketWorld tickets, had drawn to this cruise ship the founders or representatives of such venerable institutions as AOL, Apple, the Bitcoin Foundation, Change.org, Dropbox, Google, Modernist Cuisine, MTV, Paypal, SoulCycle, Toms Shoes, Uber, Vine, Virgin Galactic, Warby Parker, and Zappos. There were some billionaires and many millionaires on board, and lots of others who had paid a typical American’s monthly salary to attend. Selena Soo, a New York publicist who was on board and represented many of these entrepreneur types, perfectly captured the prevailing view.

…

These protocol-equipped figures pressed companies to embrace a new philosophy: Do each of your activities where it can be best done, wherever that might be. You raised money from Korean investors, sourced from Mexico, sold in France, paid taxes in the Caribbean, and, when growth hit, chose a Swiss bank or ethereal Bitcoins to store the proceeds—or reinvested them in whatever venture on earth promised you the most attractive returns. It was an expansion of commercial freedom. Porter suggested, however, that it had disrupted an older pattern of companies behaving with a sense of citizenship. “There is somehow a detachment because of this notion of globalization—that we’re no longer an American company,” he said.

Why Aren't They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis
by Kevin Rodgers
Published 13 Jul 2016

But what is true is that the same technologies that are undermining the traditional roles of banks could have a more radical and profound effect. Using computer power, the new competitors are not just limiting themselves to doing what banks have always done in better, faster and more convenient ways – they are also striking at the very heart of what banking means. Innovations like the virtual computer-generated currency Bitcoin are taking the monopoly of the creation of money away from governments and, with them, the banks that serve them. Online peer-to-peer funding initiatives like Prosper, LendingClub or Zopa enable individuals to lend directly to other individuals without going through the intermediation of a bank. Similar technological efforts – dubbed crowd-funding – are democratising the raising of equity capital for start-ups.

…

A Ackermann, Josef, 226 Admati, Anat, 211 ‘agency’ model, 7 agency-like risk, 119, 127 aggressive prices, 14–15 AIG, 90, 174 algorithms, 58, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 192–4, 195 Alpari, 83 alternative assets, 146–7 American Home Mortgage Investment Corporation, 89 amputation analogy, 128, 129 analytic formula, 106 Apple, 234 Application Program Interfaces (APIs), 59–60, 66, 71, 78 arbitrage, 31–2, 42, 44, 54, 70, 72, 91, 133, 142, 152 Asia, 3, 37–8, 56, 58, 106, 114, 117–18, 135–7, 146, 228 Financial Crisis (1997), xi, 114, 135–7, 139, 146, 228 Asian options, 106 assets, 6, 89, 92–5, 97, 104, 108, 112–14, 116, 117, 123, 136, 146, 147, 149, 150, 154–7, 160, 166–74, 203, 211, 223, 228, 233 alternative, 146–7 risk-weighted assets (RWA), 124–31, 134, 166, 208, 211 Atom Bank, 233 atomic bomb, see nuclear bomb Australia, 30, 65 dollars, 28, 75 Autobahn, 48–51, 53, 64, 68, 69–70, 78, 225 Automated Risk Manager (ARM), 53–5, 56–9, 64, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 79, 101, 129, 169 B back testing, 149 BaFin, 200, 202 bandwidth, 71 ‘banging the close’, 190 Bank for International Settlements (BIS), 73, 77, 80, 208 Bank of America, 174 Bank of England, 32, 173, 182, 233 bank runs, 89 bank tax, 216 Bankers Trust, xi–xii, 3–6, 24, 29–37, 40, 44, 46, 48, 65, 68, 103–14, 116–35, 137–143, 149, 166, 168, 169 carry trade, 108–10 Deutsche Bank takeover, 29–30, 34–5, 37, 46, 48, 166, 168 Emerging Markets, xi, 29–30, 116–17, 130–1, 143 Engine, 127–31, 135, 139, 157, 167, 169 exotic derivatives, 105–11, 127 Gibson Greetings suing, 109 Monte Carlo pricing, 111–14, 150 Procter and Gamble suing, 109 quantitative analysis, 103–8, 110–14, 126, 150 Risk Management, 122–31 risk-adjusted return on capital (RAROC), 126–7, 131 rouble-denominated bonds (GKOs), 118–32, 134, 138–43, 149, 152, 158, 159, 173 Russian Financial Crisis (1998), 115–16, 124, 137–143 Spreadsheet Solutions Framework (SSF), 111, 121, 138, 153 value at risk (VaR), 127–31, 135, 139, 169 Barcelona, Spain 87–9, 151, 159, 171, 172 Barclays, 63–6, 67, 68, 167, 186–7, 197 barrier products, 104, 107, 108 BARX, 64, 65 Basel Accords, 124, 125, 130, 166, 207–9, 211, 217, 231 basis points, 12 basis risk, 152 Bear Stearns, 88–9, 90, 172, 230 Bentham, Jeremy, 199 Berlin Wall, 204 Bernanke, Ben, 90 bid-offer spreads, see spread ‘Big Are Getting Bigger, The’, 41, 145 Big Bang (1986), 201 big figure, 13 binomial tree, 112–14 Bitcoin, 234 Black Monday (1987), 108, 138, 204, 207 Black–Scholes formula, 94–5, 97, 99, 105, 128, 219 Black, Fischer, 94–5, 97, 134, 135 BlackBerries, 169 Blackpool, England, 33 Blair, Tony, 120 Bloomberg, 9, 22–3, 142, 187, 189, 191, 197 Bohr, Niels, 43 bonds, xiv, 8, 23, 28, 33, 38, 89, 108–10, 118–43, 146–7, 151, 154–64, 170–2, 174, 192, 197, 211, 224–5 carry trade, 108–10 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), xiv, 154–64, 170–2, 174, 192, 224–5 credit default swaps (CDSs), 151 mortgage-backed, xiv, 197 rouble-denominated (GKOs), 118–32, 134, 138–43, 149, 152, 158, 159, 173 total return swaps (TRSs), 119–20, 136, 152 US government, 119, 129, 133, 147 bonuses, 5, 117, 161, 210, 216 boxes and arrows, 159 Brazil, 167, 231 Breuer, Rolf, 42 Bristol, England, x British Bankers Association (BBA), 182, 187 British pound, 9, 13, 28, 53, 184 Bruno, Philip, 234 BTAnalytics, 107, 108, 112, 134, 150 Businessweek, 170 C Cable, 9, 13, 28 California, United States, 234 calls, 19–21, 23, 27, 51, 53, 98, 99 Cambios, 21, 123 Cambridge University, 165 Canada, 88, 172 dollars, 28 Cannes, France, 35, 41, 44, 46, 55, 64, 65, 77 carry trade, 108–10 Case–Schiller index, 163, 170 cash settlement, 109 ‘CDO-squared’, 161 central banking, 79, 102–3, 187, 193, 220 Central Counterparties (CCPs), 209, 213–15, 229 chain of command, 224–6 Chase Manhattan, 51, 168, 169 Chemical Bank, 168, 169 Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), 193, 209 China, 78, 149, 229 Chopin, Frédéric, 61 circuit breakers, 80 Citigroup, 23, 27, 36–7, 47, 51, 68, 167, 216, 226, 229 Clackatron, 32–3, 54, 91 Cold War, 204 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), xiv, 154–64, 170–2, 174, 192, 224–5 multi-sector CDOs, 155 risk 154, 156, 158–63 sub-prime mortgages, 159–60, 170–2 synthetic, 163–4 tranches, 154–9, 161, 174, 208 colocation, 71 colonial currencies, 28 commodities, viii, xii, 144–50, 153–4, 157, 174, 223, 231–2 commodities indexes, 147–50, 153–4, 157, 163 commoditisation, 110–11 Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), 202 commodity futures, 92 Communism, 199 complex risk, 159, 222 complexity, 90, 100, 103–14, 121, 127, 130, 134, 136, 143, 157, 196, 200–1, 218–24, 225, 228, 229 Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR), 212 computers, ix–x, xii–xv, 6, 21–8, 32–55, 56–84, 89–90, 99–114, 116, 121, 127, 130, 134, 136, 138, 143, 144, 147, 150, 157, 160, 161, 164, 167, 169–70, 172, 190–200, 209, 213, 218–24, 225, 228, 231–5 algorithms, 58, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 192–4, 195 Autobahn, 48–51, 53, 64, 68, 69–70, 78, 225 Application Program Interfaces (APIs), 59–60, 66, 71, 78 Automated Risk Manager (ARM), 53–5, 56–9, 64, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 79, 101, 129, 169 BARX, 64, 65 BTAnalytics, 107, 108, 112, 134, 150 Clackatron, 32–3, 54, 91 complexity, 90, 100, 103–14, 121, 127, 130, 134, 136, 143, 157, 196, 200–1, 218–24, 225, 228, 229 DBAnalytics, 150, 153 decimalisation, 63–6, 67, 73, 77 decentralisation, 232–5 efficiency improvements, 169–70 Electronic Broking Services (EBS), 24–8, 31, 32–3, 42, 45, 46, 48, 50, 59–60, 63, 69–70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 83, 188 Electronic Communication Networks (ECNs), 59, 61, 66, 193 Engine, 127–31, 135, 139, 157, 167, 169 FX-fixing scandal (2013), 190–2 OPTICS, 101, 103, 131, 153, 170 options trade automation, 27, 33, 38–47 Piranha, 48 prime brokerage (PB), 61–3, 66, 120, 209 regulation, 209, 213 Revolutionary Application Program Interface Development (RAPID), 56–9, 77, 101 Reuters Dealing machines, 23, 25–8, 31, 32, 50, 59, 73 rogue systems, 79–80 screen scraping, 32–3, 50, 59 simplification, 231–2 spoofing, 192–3 spot trade automation, 23–8, 31–3, 42, 48–55, 56–84, 111, 199, 201 spreads, 80–3 concentration risk, 213 Conservative Party (UK), 201 correlation, 14, 79, 129–30, 142, 156–8, 160, 163 cost–benefit analysis, 41 Costello, Elvis, 140 counterparty credit risk, 141–2, 172, 201, 209 Countrywide, 90 credit default swaps (CDSs), xiv, 150–3, 157, 158, 164, 225 credit risk, 7, 8, 62–3, 123, 125–6, 130, 141, 151, 209 counterparty, 141–2, 172, 201, 202–3, 209 Credit Suisse, 140, 198 credit trading, 146–7, 150–63, 166, 175, 224 crowd-funding, 235 currency pairs, 9, 12, 14, 46, 53, 75, 80 Currenex, 59 CVIX, 74 D D:Ream, 120, 121 daisy-chaining, xiv DBAnalytics, 150, 153 decentralisation, 232–5 decimalisation, 63–6, 67, 73, 77 delta hedging, 97 ‘dentists, the’, 82–3 deposits, 124 derivatives, xi, xii, xiv, 44–5, 87, 91–114, 118, 119, 121, 127, 132, 134, 138–43, 144–5, 150–74, 182–6, 189, 196, 209, 210, 214, 218–25, 231 Asian options, 106 barrier products, 104, 107, 108 carry trade, 108–10 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), xiv, 154–64, 170–2, 174, 192, 224–5 commoditisation, 110–11 credit default swaps (CDSs), xiv, 150–3, 157, 158, 164, 225 delta hedging, 97 democratisation, 108, 219 double knockouts, 107 exotics, 105–11, 127 foreign exchange, 10, 13, 20, 23, 27, 33–4, 38, 43–7, 49, 77, 95–114, 222–3 forward rate agreements (FRAs), 182 gamma, 97–8, 100 Greeks, 98, 99, 101, 105, 107, 110, 111, 112, 114, 127, 129, 150, 157, 158, 182, 219 interest rate derivatives, 8, 92, 104, 132, 182–6, 214 lattice methods, 112, 150, 157 lookbacks, 107 over-the-counter (OTC) market, 96, 209 power options, 107 pricing, 91–5, 107, 111–14, 128, 133, 150 range trades, 107, 108 rho, 98 risk-weighted assets (RWA), 124–31, 134, 166, 208, 211 spoofing, 99, 192–3 strike price, 94, 95, 104, 113, 218 swaps, 8, 92, 119–20, 121, 125, 126, 132, 134, 136, 141, 148, 149, 152, 173 theta, 98, 140 time decay, 98 total return swaps (TRSs), 119–20, 136, 152 tree approach, 112–14 vega, 98 volatility, 94, 98, 128–9 weather, 144–5, 146 zero coupon bonds, 118–31, 134, 138–43, 149, 152, 158, 173 desk real estate, 25 Deutsche Bank, vii–x, xii–xiii, 12, 21, 23, 28, 29–30, 33–55, 56–80, 84, 87, 101, 122, 144–74, 179–80, 187, 190, 195–6, 199, 200, 201, 209–10, 212–13, 216, 222, 224–6, 231 Autobahn, 48–51, 53, 64, 68, 69–70, 78, 225 Automated Risk Manager (ARM), 53–5, 56–9, 64, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 79, 101, 129, 169 BaFin audits, 200, 202 Bankers Trust acquisition, 29–30, 34–5, 37, 46, 48, 166, 168 Barcelona Conference, 87–9, 151, 159, 171, 172 Commodities, 144–50, 153–4, 157, 165, 175, 223, 231–2 Complex Risk, 159, 222 Compliance, 195, 196 Corporate and Investment Banking division, 166 Credit Trading, 146–7, 150–63, 166, 175, 224 CVIX, 74 DBAnalytics, 150, 153 e-trading, 55, 57, 67–73, 75, 84, 122 Foreign Exchange, vii–x, xii–xiii, 12, 21, 23, 28, 29–30, 33–55, 56–80, 84, 87, 101, 122, 165, 175, 210, 212–13, 224, 225 FX-fixing scandal (2013), 187, 190 Global Currencies and Commodities, 165–6 Great Financial Crisis (2007–8), 174–5 Liquid Commodity Index (DBLCI), 148, 149 market share, 36, 41, 48, 51–2, 54, 55, 56, 57, 64, 66–8, 70, 77 MortgageIT acquisition, 160 offsites, 35–41, 46, 55, 64, 65, 77 options trade automation, 27, 33, 38–47 Plankton Strategy, 38, 40, 55, 58 production credits, 49, 50 regulation, 200, 202, 209–10, 212–13 Revolutionary Application Program Interface Development (RAPID), 56–9, 77, 101 Risk Management, 175, 206–7, 209, 226 risk-weighted assets (RWA), 124–31, 134, 166 simplification, 231–2 small deals team, 52, 55 spot trade automation, 48–55, 56–77 video messaging system, 71 weather derivatives, 144–5, 146 Deutschmark, 9, 96, 97, 99, 100, 104 Dewar, Sally, 197 Dickens, Charles, 162 Digital Reasoning Systems Inc., 197–8 dividends, 91, 147, 212 Dodd–Frank Act (2010), 209, 230 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 30 dot-com boom (1997–2000), 37, 146, 207 double knockouts, 107 Dow Jones, 79, 138, 147 Dresdner Bank, 20, 48 drive-bys, 17, 20, 68, 132 E e-trading, 55, 57, 67–73, 75, 84, 122 efficiency improvements, 169–70 efficient market theory, 203 Electronic Broking Services (EBS), 24–8, 31, 32–3, 42, 45, 46, 48, 50, 59–60, 63, 69–70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 83, 188 Electronic Communication Networks (ECNs), 59, 61, 66, 193 elephant deals, 38 email, 169, 191, 195, 197, 199 emerging markets, xi, 6, 29–30, 116–43, 147, 228 Empire State Building, New York, 130 ‘Engine’, 127–31, 135, 139, 157, 167, 169 engineering, x–xi, 10 Enron, 156 equities, viii, 23, 50, 66, 71, 74, 80, 89, 95, 146, 193, 207, 211, 235 circuit breakers, 80 colocation, 71 sales-traders, 50, 78 euro, 22, 28, 31, 37, 53, 69, 80, 81–3, 189 Euromoney, 36, 41, 47, 51–2, 54, 55, 56, 57, 64, 66–8, 70, 77, 81, 233 Europe, Middle Eastern and African (EMEA) markets, 117–18 European Union (EU), 102, 196, 201, 203, 207, 210, 212, 230 Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), xi, 22, 102–3, 106, 123, 130, 136, 207, 224 Liikanen Report (2012), 230 Maastricht Treaty (1992), 102 Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), 209 ‘Every Day I Write the Book’ (Elvis Costello), 140 Excel, 107, 221 exchange rates, 9, 11–13, 14, 17, 32, 100 exotic derivatives, 105–11, 127 F ‘F9 monkeys’, 221 Fannie Mae, 90 Federal Reserve, xii, 90, 109, 143, 187, 202–6, 212 Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 193 fibre-optic cables, 77, 84 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), 167 Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), 190 Financial Services Act (2013), 210 Financial Stability Board (FSB), 212, 214, 216 Financial Times, 116, 187 financial transactions tax, 216 fines, 181, 190, 196 First Chicago, 168 Fitch, 155 fixings, 181, 187–92, 198 Flannery, Mark, 215 Flash Crash (2010), 79–80, 193 Florence, Italy, 78 Florida, United States, 116 football, 10–11, 43, 83, 117, 167, 195 Forbes, 234 foreign direct investment (FDI), 136 foreign exchange (FX), viii, xi, xii, xiv, 3–28, 29–55, 56–84, 89, 90–1, 95–114, 115–44, 145, 158–9, 165, 174, 175, 180, 181–94, 196–7, 210, 213, 222–3, 224, 225, 233 aggressive prices, 14–15 Application Program Interfaces (APIs), 59–60, 66, 71, 78 Autobahn, 48–51, 53, 64, 68, 69–70, 78, 225 Automated Risk Manager (ARM), 53–5, 56–9, 64, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 79, 101, 129, 169 banging the close, 190 BARX, 64, 65 bidirectional flows, 69 calls, 19–21, 23, 27, 51, 53, 98, 99 carry trade, 108–10 Clackatron, 32–3, 54, 91 colocation, 71 complex risk, 159, 222 corporations, 9, 36, 61, 76, 96, 109–10 costs, 42 currency pairs, 9, 12, 14, 46, 53, 75, 80 decimalisation, 63–6, 67, 73, 77 drive-bys, 17, 20, 68, 132 Electronic Broking Services (EBS), 24–8, 31, 32–3, 42, 45, 46, 48, 50, 59–60, 63, 69–70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 83, 188 Electronic Communication Networks (ECNs), 59, 61, 66, 193 elephant deals, 38 emerging markets, xi, 6, 29–30, 116–43 Engine, 127–31, 135, 139, 157, 167, 169 fixings, 181, 187–92, 198 forwards trades, 10, 52, 77, 92, 121 hedge funds, 9, 29, 36, 57, 61, 66, 69–74, 77, 81, 120, 123, 131–5, 141–3 hedging, 97, 108, 117–18, 190, 225 high frequency trading (HFT), 57, 63, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 84, 180, 194 LIBOR scandal (2012), 181–7, 188, 189, 190, 197, 198 liquidity, 18–19, 21, 27, 80–1, 83, 233 making rates, 13–21, 27, 38–9, 50, 96 market makers, 18–19, 21, 83 market shares, 41, 48, 51–2, 54, 55, 65, 66–8, 70, 77, 81, 169 ‘mine-and-yours’, 15–16, 18, 19, 192 Monte Carlo pricing, 111–14 off system trades, 111 OPTICS, 101, 103, 131, 153, 170 options trade, 10, 13, 20, 23, 27, 33–4, 38, 43–7, 49, 77, 95–114, 222–3 over-the-counter (OTC) market, 96, 209 passive v. active strategies, 17–19 pay, 43 pension funds, 9, 61, 76, 96 pips, 13, 18, 41, 65, 73, 77 Piranha, 48 pre-deal services, 8 prime brokerage (PB), 61–3, 66, 120, 209 production credits, 49–50 proprietary trading, 22, 31, 39, 46–7, 125 relative value trades, 72–3 retail trade, retail aggregators, 21, 61, 66, 74, 75, 79, 82–3 Reuters Dealing machines, 23, 25–8, 31, 32, 50, 59, 73 Revolutionary Application Program Interface Development (RAPID), 56–9, 77, 101 risk, 15, 16, 19, 20–1, 24, 29, 31, 38, 39, 40, 44–5, 49, 51, 53, 62, 77, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101–8, 110–14, 121–31, 135, 192 risk management systems, 24, 40, 44–5, 53–5, 56–9, 64, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 99, 101–8, 110–14, 121–31, 135 rogue systems, 79–80 salespeople, 8–9, 11, 13–15, 20, 24, 28, 29, 33, 35, 37, 46, 47–52, 68, 96, 120 settlements, 5, 24, 40, 44, 51, 61, 101, 209 screen scraping, 32–3, 50, 59 skewed prices, 18, 19, 73, 96, 98 slippage, 188–9 speculation, 21, 31, 102–14 spot, 3–28, 33–4, 42–4, 46, 48–55, 67, 76, 77, 91, 96, 97, 98–9, 108, 111, 118, 122, 159, 165, 169, 188, 189, 199, 201, 222 spread, 12, 14–15, 16, 18, 19, 31, 41–2, 44, 45, 53, 55, 61, 64, 68, 69, 75, 80, 96, 225 traders, 3–28, 33, 35, 38, 41, 43, 46, 50, 52–4, 67, 73, 76, 78, 96, 99, 122, 189 Triangle arbitrage, 31–2, 42, 54, 91, 122 two-way pricing, 11–21, 23, 99 volatility, 14, 26, 46–7, 74–5, 80, 98, 137 wallet, 40 window, 118, 137, 188 WM/R, 187–8 zero coupon bonds, 118–32, 134, 138–43, 149, 152, 158, 159, 173 forward rate agreements (FRAs), 182 forwards trades, 10, 52, 77, 92, 121 Four Seasons, The, 3–5, 9 France, 6–7, 35, 37, 41, 46, 55, 64, 65, 77, 102, 140, 159, 207 Freddie Mac, 90 free market economics, 202–6 FTSE 100, 147 Fuld, Dick, 226 FX All, 59, 78 FX-fixing scandal (2013), 181, 187–92, 198 FXCM, 82–3 G G20 nations, 209, 212, 216 gambling, 31, 102–14 gamma, 97–8, 100 Gaussian copula, 158 geekiness, x, 10, 43, 223 geopolitics, 229 Germany, vii–x, xii, xiii, 16, 28, 36, 44, 54, 75, 144–5, 159, 167, 180, 200, 204 mark, 9, 96, 97, 99, 100, 104 Gibson Greetings, 109 GKOs (rouble-denominated bonds), 118–32, 134, 138–43, 149, 152, 158, 159, 173 Glass–Steagall Act (1933), 168, 201, 230 globally systemically important banks (G-SIBs), 216 Goldman Sachs, 23, 146, 198, 216, 230 Commodity Index (GSCI), 148 Google, 78, 234 GQ, 141 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (1999), 168, 201 Great Depression (1929–39), 168 Great Financial Crisis (2007–8), xiii, xiv–xv, 74–5, 87–90, 114, 124, 163, 172–5, 179–80, 196, 204–6, 207, 217, 219, 220, 223, 227–8 Greece, 82, 92, 181 Greeks, 98, 99, 101, 105, 107, 110, 111, 112, 114, 127, 129, 150, 157, 158, 182, 219 Greenspan, Alan, 202–6 GSA, 233 Gulf War (1990–1), xi, 22, 95 Gulliver, Stuart, 231 H ‘haircuts’, 132 Haldane, Andrew, 173 hand signals, 16 Hang Seng, 137 Harrison, William, 168 Harrow School, London, 149 Harvard University, 166 La Haye Sainte, Belgium, 10 hedge funds, xi, 9, 29, 36, 57, 61, 66, 69–74, 77, 81, 97, 114, 116, 122, 123, 131–5, 141–2, 164, 171, 172, 201, 229, 233 hedging, 94, 95, 97, 108, 117–18, 144, 145–6, 157, 190, 225, 226 delta hedging, 97 Hellwig, Martin, 211 Henry, John, 28 Herrhausen, Alfred, 226 high frequency trading (HFT), 57, 63, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 84, 180, 194 Hodgkin, Howard, 195 Holder, Noddy, 232 Hong Kong, 137 Hotspot, 59 Hounslow, London, 193 HSBC, 216, 229, 231 Hussein, Saddam, 22, 95 I ICAP, 73 Iceland, 167, 174 identity theft insurance, 231 Immendorff, Jörg, 56 indexes, 147–50, 153–4, 157, 163, 190 India, 149 Indonesia, 135, 137, 139 IndyMac, 90 initial margin, 120, 132 insurance, 93, 151, 164, 168, 172, 174, 229 Intelligent Flow Monster, 146 interest rates, viii, 7, 10, 92, 108–10, 135, 225 carry trade, 108–10 derivatives, 104, 132, 182–6, 214 futures, 182 LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate), 109, 181–7, 188, 189, 190, 197, 198 swaps, 8, 92, 182–4 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 132, 135, 140, 211, 214, 230 International Swap Dealers Association (ISDA), 152, 153 Internet, xii, 5, 42, 76, 78, 169, 191–2, 195, 197, 199, 228, 233–5 investment banking, 36, 87, 110, 133, 145–6, 151, 158, 165–8, 229–30 iPhone, 5, 228 Iran, 181–2 Iraq, xi, 22, 95 Israel, 29, 138 Italy, 10, 13, 22, 78, 115–16, 141 lira, 22, 102–3, 123 iTraxx, 153 J Jagger, Mick, 87 Japan, 61, 72, 79, 159 yen, 9, 14, 17, 28, 71–2, 75, 79, 80, 136, 184 JPMorgan Chase, 131, 150, 158, 163, 168, 182, 197, 216, 229, 231, 23 J.

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis
by James Rickards
Published 15 Nov 2016

Regulators will want to suppress twenty-first-century digital curb exchanges to prevent price discovery and maintain the myth of pre-panic prices. Curb exchanges could be conducted online in an eBay-style format with settlement by bitcoin or cash delivered face-to-face. Title to shares can be recorded in a distributed ledger using a blockchain. Eliminating cash helps the suppression of alternative markets, although bitcoin presents new challenges to elite power. The second reason for eliminating cash is to impose negative interest rates. Central banks are in a losing battle against deflationary trends. One way to defeat deflation is to promote inflation with negative real interest rates.

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History
by Kassia St Clair
Published 3 Oct 2018

The industry of fabric is older than pottery or metallurgy and perhaps even than agriculture and stock-breeding. Cloth is the original technology.7 Trade and Technology The weavers take the intertwined threads and through their expert, value-added activity create a strong fabric – which is exactly what the global distributed network of computers creating the Bitcoin Blockchain does. David Orban, ‘Weaving is a Better Metaphor for Bitcoin, Instead of Mining’, 2014 In 2015, Google I/O, one of the firm’s secretive research and development divisions, announced that they were planning to make a pair of trousers that would also be computers. They would be made of a special textile – available in a wide palette of colours and myriad textures – that would function as a touchscreen, registering special gestures and able to control devices such as smartphones.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

The subsequent second and third waves of industrialization—which brought the world the internal combustion engine, cars, planes, and computers—made the human footprint on the environment only worse, even as it increased the quality of life for billions of people. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, which started recently, and brought us innovations such as the Internet of Things, 5G, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrencies, is so far adding to the ever-expanding human footprint on the environment. Electricity required to produce Bitcoin, one of the most popular cryptocurrencies, leads to annual carbon emissions of 22 to 23 megatons of CO2, scientists calculated.37 That figure is comparable to the emissions of countries such as Jordan or Sri Lanka. And while connected devices make our energy infrastructure smart, that doesn't automatically mean it turns green as well.

…

, France Culture, November 2019, https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/linvite-des-matins/fin-du-mois-fin-du-monde-meme-combat. 27 “Per Capita Emissions, Navigating the Numbers: Greenhouse Gas Data and International Climate Policy,” World Resources Institute, http://pdf.wri.org/navigating_numbers_chapter4.pdf. 28 “Palau Climate Change Policy for Climate and Disaster Resilient Low Emissions Development,” Government of Palau, 2015, p.22-23, https://www.pacificclimatechange.net/sites/default/files/documents/PalauCCPolicy_WebVersion-FinanceCorrections_HighQualityUPDATED%2011182015Compressed.pdf. 29 “Urbanization,” Our World in Data, November 2019, https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization. 30 “68% of the World Population Projected to Live in Urban Areas by 2050, Says UN,” UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, May 2018, https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-revision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html. 31 “Global Gridded Model of Carbon Footprints (GGMCF),” http://citycarbonfootprints.info/. 32 “Sizing Up the Carbon Footprint of Cities,” NASA Earth Observatory, April 2019, https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144807/sizing-up-the-carbon-footprint-of-cities. 33 “Why a Car Is an Extravagance in Singapore,” CNN, October 2017, https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/31/asia/singapore-cars/index.html. 34 “World Population Growth,” Our World in Data, May 2019, https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth 35 “Russia's Natural Population Decline to Hit 11-Year Record in 2019,” The Moscow Times, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/12/13/russias-natural-population-decline-hit-11-year-record-2019-a68612. 36 “Fertility Rate, Total (Births per Woman)—India,” World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=IN. 37 “The Carbon Footprint of Bitcoin,” Christian Stoll, Lena Klaaßen, Ulrich Gallersdörfer, Joule, July 2019, https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30255-7. 38 “Firms Must Justify Investment in Fossil Fuels, Warns Mark Carney,” Andrew Sparrow, The Guardian, December 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/dec/30/firms-must-justify-investment-in-fossil-fuels-warns-mark-carney. 39 “The Net-Zero Challenge: Fast-Forward to Decisive Climate Action,” World Economic Forum, January 2020, https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-net-zero-challenge-fast-forward-to-decisive-climate-action. 40 “German Air Travel Slump Points to Spread of Flight Shame,” William Wilkes and Richard Weiss, Bloomberg, December 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-19/german-air-travel-slump-points-to-spread-of-flight-shame?

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

The subsequent second and third waves of industrialization—which brought the world the internal combustion engine, cars, planes, and computers—made the human footprint on the environment only worse, even as it increased the quality of life for billions of people. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, which started recently, and brought us innovations such as the Internet of Things, 5G, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrencies, is so far adding to the ever-expanding human footprint on the environment. Electricity required to produce Bitcoin, one of the most popular cryptocurrencies, leads to annual carbon emissions of 22 to 23 megatons of CO2, scientists calculated.37 That figure is comparable to the emissions of countries such as Jordan or Sri Lanka. And while connected devices make our energy infrastructure smart, that doesn't automatically mean it turns green as well.

…

, France Culture, November 2019, https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/linvite-des-matins/fin-du-mois-fin-du-monde-meme-combat. 27 “Per Capita Emissions, Navigating the Numbers: Greenhouse Gas Data and International Climate Policy,” World Resources Institute, http://pdf.wri.org/navigating_numbers_chapter4.pdf. 28 “Palau Climate Change Policy for Climate and Disaster Resilient Low Emissions Development,” Government of Palau, 2015, p.22-23, https://www.pacificclimatechange.net/sites/default/files/documents/PalauCCPolicy_WebVersion-FinanceCorrections_HighQualityUPDATED%2011182015Compressed.pdf. 29 “Urbanization,” Our World in Data, November 2019, https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization. 30 “68% of the World Population Projected to Live in Urban Areas by 2050, Says UN,” UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, May 2018, https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-revision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html. 31 “Global Gridded Model of Carbon Footprints (GGMCF),” http://citycarbonfootprints.info/. 32 “Sizing Up the Carbon Footprint of Cities,” NASA Earth Observatory, April 2019, https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144807/sizing-up-the-carbon-footprint-of-cities. 33 “Why a Car Is an Extravagance in Singapore,” CNN, October 2017, https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/31/asia/singapore-cars/index.html. 34 “World Population Growth,” Our World in Data, May 2019, https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth 35 “Russia's Natural Population Decline to Hit 11-Year Record in 2019,” The Moscow Times, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/12/13/russias-natural-population-decline-hit-11-year-record-2019-a68612. 36 “Fertility Rate, Total (Births per Woman)—India,” World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=IN. 37 “The Carbon Footprint of Bitcoin,” Christian Stoll, Lena Klaaßen, Ulrich Gallersdörfer, Joule, July 2019, https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30255-7. 38 “Firms Must Justify Investment in Fossil Fuels, Warns Mark Carney,” Andrew Sparrow, The Guardian, December 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/dec/30/firms-must-justify-investment-in-fossil-fuels-warns-mark-carney. 39 “The Net-Zero Challenge: Fast-Forward to Decisive Climate Action,” World Economic Forum, January 2020, https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-net-zero-challenge-fast-forward-to-decisive-climate-action. 40 “German Air Travel Slump Points to Spread of Flight Shame,” William Wilkes and Richard Weiss, Bloomberg, December 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-19/german-air-travel-slump-points-to-spread-of-flight-shame?

Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge
by Ted Conover
Published 1 Nov 2022

As the friendship grew, they became partners in some gold-mining claims, mostly on Blanca, and interested in the idea of lost treasure. Both had other moneymaking schemes, as well. Matt’s included allowing an application to take over his smartphone’s processor when he wasn’t using it, in order to mine Bitcoin. His take from this was pennies a day “but it adds up,” he said. Both loved raising animals and tried to monetize that: Matt’s latest scheme was shipping horse manure to buyers who found him via eBay. It was organic, the product of alfalfa feeding; he sold it dried, wrapped in plastic, and packed into a flat-rate postal service box.

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See also La Puente Alaska, 70 alcoholism, 57, 80 allergies, 186–87 al-Qaeda, 89 Amalia, New Mexico, 194 America first, 70 American flag, 4, 89, 167, 221 American West, history of, 112–14, 119–26, 248 AmeriCorps, 13, 21, 65, 208–9, 213, 237 Amish, 173 Andersen, Paul, 192–93 Anderson, Harold, 114–20, 218, 254, 264n Angels in America (Kushner), 68 Ania (Polish immigrant), 88–92 antelope, pronghorn, 11, 40, 71–72 anti-government ideology, 70, 88–92 Antonito, Colorado, 10, 14, 20, 54, 73, 93, 95–98, 100, 124, 155, 160, 165, 185, 190–91, 199, 212, 215 Appalachia, 70 Apple Valley, California, 123 Arapahoe people, 190 Arellano, Sidney, 66, 199–200 Arizona, 70, 112, 159 Armando (Paul’s neighbor), 17–18 Ashley (Grubers’ cousin), 73–74 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 76 Aspen, 174 Aspen Times, 192 Asperger’s syndrome, 148, 150, 154 at-risk families program, 25 Attica prison, 199 Aurora, Colorado, 80 autism, 154, 265n–66n auto insurance, lack of, 91 B Bankers Life, 46, 119–22, 129, 142 Baroz, Adre “Psycho,” 198–99 BBC World Service, 138 “Beach, The,” 81–82, 95 Beaubien, Carlos, 112–13 Beaubien, Narciso, 112 bentonite mine, 97 Bewitched (TV show), 160 Big Rock Candy Mountain, The (Stegner), 217 bipolar disorder, 211–12 birds deaths of, 228–32 watching, 100, 229 Birds, The (film), 231 birth certificates, 90 bison, 12 Bitcoin mining, 148 Black Lives Matter, 219–23, 227 Blacks, 20, 65, 91, 144–45, 176–84, 227 Blanca Peak (Sisnaajini), 9–11, 10, 13, 15, 23, 26, 50, 64, 82, 106, 124, 127, 129, 141, 148, 200–203, 245, 263n Blanca RV Park, 34, 86, 106, 221 Blanton, Carolyn Gloria, 191 Blanca (town), 10, 25, 49, 81, 85, 88, 116, 119, 127, 146, 243–44, 252, 265n Bobby (Troy Zinn’s friend), 121, 195 Bosdell, Don and Sherry, 166–70 Bowie, David, 217 Branson online curriculum, 72 Brown, Calvin, 220 Brown, Wesley, 260 Brownlow, Lonnie, 123–24 Bundy family, 91 Bureau of Land Management (BLM), 15, 97, 259 burn pits, 105, 157, 170–72 Busse, Brian, 147 C California, 70, 73, 112, 122, 159, 198 Calvin (Vera’s friend), 86–88, 90, 92 Camaro Jim (neighbor), 144–45, 162–63, 230–31 camping, 28, 32, 51, 86, 117, 135, 160, 236 cancer, 78–79 Cano’s Castle, 14 capital letters, 89–90 carbon footprint, 69, 232 Caring for Colorado, 25 Caro, Robert, 128 “Car Wash” Kevin, 237, 256–57 Casper, Wyoming, 44, 74, 207 Catholic Church, 196 cattle, 19, 46, 94–95, 119–21, 140, 143, 144–5, 167, 196, 205, 214, 227 mutilated, 232–34 cell phones, 11, 35, 97, 131, 156, 201 Central Americans, 20 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 88–89 Cerro de la Olla mountain, 234 Chama settlement, 110 Changes in the Land (Cronon), 268n Charlie (Ania and Jurek’s friend), 91–92 Chatwin, Bruce, 260 Chávez, César, 98 Cheap and Easy Way to Find Gold, The (video), 201 Cherokee people, 264n Cheslock, Lance, 13, 18, 21, 24–25, 27–28, 34, 65–66, 85, 96, 98, 100–101, 199, 217, 219, 229, 234, 253, 256 Cheslock, Rachael, 24, 27 Cheyenne people, 190 Chicago, 176–77, 184, 192–93 Chicago Tribune, 109, 126 Chicano activists, 191 China, 227 Choman, Chet, 127–30, 265n Christians, 87–88, 92, 155, 168–69, 215 Christmas, 65–67, 156, 180, 200 Church of Christ halfway house, 67 Church of England, 89 Cielo Vista Ranch (formerly Taylor Ranch), 109–10 Cindy (Sam’s partner), 74, 78–79, 105, 159, 237 climate change, 231 Climax Molybdenum mine, 119 Clinton, Hillary, 70 “Cloud on the Title, A” (Trillin), 110 Cobb, Jelani, 250 cocaine, 52 Cochran (road grader), 134 code violators, 17.

Strange Sally Diamond: A BBC Between the Covers Book Club Pick
by Liz Nugent
Published 2 Mar 2023

Hoani Mata Productions must have sent the same email to every Steve Armstrong in the country. I sent a note to the COO of the bank, saying that I had to take leave as a matter of urgency on a private medical matter. It would require three months, I said, but I would be contactable by email. I briefed my second-in-command on issues relating to the bank’s relationship to bitcoin and cryptocurrency, which was becoming a problem for us. I then left. I went home and used my laptop to book flights to Ireland. I needed to go back. I needed to find my sister. She was the key to the connection I needed. 50 Sally The results, when they came within twelve days, were unequivocal.

…

I assured him that I could give him as much cash as he needed until such time as we were able to regularize his citizenship and identity, but he was afraid of the publicity that would inevitably follow if the media were to get a sniff of the fact that the infamous Conor Geary had a living son in Ireland. I could see his point. It would be impossible to keep a big story like this private. I didn’t know anything about bitcoin, but Peter already had an account. All I had to do was go to my bank and direct them to make the transfer. The bank made a fuss and the bank manager was called to talk to me and tried to persuade me that my transaction was most unorthodox. I reminded her that it was not illegal and that it was my money.

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts
by Shane Parrish
Published 22 Nov 2019

Maybe it doesn’t match up to our experiences. Maybe it’s something that used to be true but isn’t true anymore. And maybe we just think very differently about something. When it comes down to it, everything that is not a law of nature is just a shared belief. Money is a shared belief. So is a border. So are bitcoin. So is love. The list goes on. If we want to identify the principles in a situation to cut through the dogma and the shared belief, there are two techniques we can use: Socratic questioning and the Five Whys. Socratic questioning can be used to establish first principles through stringent analysis.

Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman
by Ben Hubbard
Published 10 Mar 2020

By July, he knew it was risky to go home. KHASHOGGI: I spoke to my lawyer. I think I should stay and go to London. If I was a drinker, I would’ve gone to the bar. I hate planning for my life. I’ll go and smoke a cigar. Bye. LORD OF THE FLIES IN 2012, AN amateur hacker and poet with an interest in bitcoin, bots, and online video games got in touch with Hacking Team, an Italian company that sold cyber tools to governments to allow them to hack cellphones and other devices. Dear Sir, We need people visit us in Hosted by the Saudi governmen that have high technical knowledge and high Authority in order to provide an integrated display and explain the solutions you offer and training and costs. we Will bear all the costs of the trip from a-z. please send to me all the info you need to manage that.

…

He found it hard to believe that a hacker had hacked him. “i think he is a very good man and look trusted!!!” he wrote. That was the first of at least four times that the hackers whose services al-Qahtani sought tricked him. He later paid $150 to restore control of his Hotmail account, and lost $3,000 in Bitcoin. In 2015, someone hacked his account on the forum itself. Two weeks later, he returned and implored its other members to secure their accounts. But his skills improved. At one point, he promised $500 to anyone who could hack Hotmail accounts, but soon rescinded the offer when he did it himself.

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

A colleague at Stanford, Susan Athey, conducted a more systematic exploration of the value of privacy with students at MIT. She surveyed them about their privacy preferences in the context of a campus-wide effort to encourage undergraduates to experiment with the use of Bitcoin. The university offered students a variety of online “wallets” to manage their Bitcoin, each with a different level of privacy protection. The striking fact was that students made choices based on the order in which the wallet options appeared, regardless of their privacy preferences. Athey then went one step further. She wanted to see whether a small incentive could influence the students’ decisions about privacy.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems
by Linda Yueh
Published 4 Jun 2018

His reckoning was that competition between money providers would favour the most stable of the currencies in circulation. The same competition would also enforce self-regulation. The work was widely derided. Milton Friedman pointed out that there was nothing in current law to prevent bilateral trade using any medium of exchange accepted by all parties. Curiously, the recent rise of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, which are digital currencies that can be used to make purchases on the internet, are an example of non-governmental money. Nevertheless, Hayek’s body of work had made an impression on the politicians who would introduce free-market economics into the British and American economies in the 1980s.

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artificial intelligence Arts Council, British ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) Asia financial crisis (1997–98) see also specific countries asset management companies Aung San Suu Kyi austerity Austrian School of economics see also Hayek, Friedrich Austro-Hungarian Empire automation see also artificial intelligence; robotics BAE Systems Bagehot, Walter banks/banking ‘bad banks’ bail-outs Bank Charter Act of (Peel Banking Act) central banks see central banks China competition constrained lending European Investment Bank financial crises see financial crises government guarantees on deposits and the Great Crash (1929) and Great Depression and the Great Recession interest rates see interest rates investment banking mortgage lending see mortgage lending regulation and Schumpeter shadow banking US Banking Acts (1933 and 1935) World Bank see World Bank Barro, Robert Bear Stearns Beijing Consensus Bentham, Jeremy Bernanke, Ben Beveridge Report ‘Big Bang’ (1986) Bitcoin Bitterlich, Helene Blackberry Blackett, Basil Blaug, Mark Bloomsbury Group Böhm von Bawerk, Eugen Bolshevik Party Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon Boody Firuski, Romaine Elizabeth Botswana Brazil Bretton Woods System Brexit foreign investment after BRIC economies see also Brazil; China; India; Russia Britain/UK and the financial crisis aerospace industry banking sector difficulties Black Wednesday budget deficits see budget deficits credit rating current account deficit deindustrialization ERM exit of pound EU referendum exports (general) exports of services foreign investment after Brexit GDP and the gold standard gold supply government administration government’s renewed focus on growth and the Great Depression IMF bail out (1976) industrialization/Industrial Revolution inequality information technology industries investment as share of GDP labour force growth as largest world trader low wages manufacturing national debt National Infrastructure Commission oil and gas industry productivity and wage growth productivity puzzle rebalancing the economy reindustrialization services sector slow productivity growth telecommunications industry trade-to-GDP ratio trade deficit trade with US Treasury unemployment wages and productivity welfare state as ‘workshop of the world’ Brookings Institution Brown, Douglas V.

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back
by Oliver Bullough
Published 5 Sep 2018

St Kitts has provided nothing like that level of detail but, judging by what it has released, its programme has more or less the same client base as its two Caribbean neighbours: equal parts Chinese, Middle Easterners and residents of the former Soviet Union, with a final quarter made up of everyone else. Roger Ver, whose success in the world of cryptocurrencies has earned him the nickname ‘Bitcoin Jesus’, was happy to sit down and chat with me about his decision to swap his American passport for a Kittitian one. He has made a fortune out of his website bitcoin.com, and reckons he’s 10 to 15 per cent more productive now he doesn’t have to fill in a US tax return. But he’s not exactly a typical applicant, partly because he doesn’t believe in passports anyway (‘It’s a big giant rock in space.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 29 Aug 2018

As AI improves, we might soon reach a point when no human can make sense of finance any more. What will that do to the political process? Can you imagine a government that waits humbly for an algorithm to approve its budget or its new tax reform? Meanwhile peer-to-peer blockchain networks and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin might completely revamp the monetary system, so that radical tax reforms will be inevitable. For example, it might become impossible or irrelevant to tax dollars, because most transactions will not involve a clear-cut exchange of national currency, or any currency at all. Governments might therefore need to invent entirely new taxes – perhaps a tax on information (which will be both the most important asset in the economy, and the only thing exchanged in numerous transactions).

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Abbasid caliphs 94 Abraham, prophet 182–3, 186, 187, 274 advertising 36, 50, 53, 54, 77–8, 87, 97, 113, 114, 267 Afghanistan 101, 112, 153, 159, 172, 210 Africa 8, 13, 20, 58, 76, 79, 100, 103–4, 107, 139, 147, 150–1, 152, 168, 182, 184, 223, 226, 229, 239 see also under individual nation name African Americans 67, 150, 152, 227 agriculture 171, 185; animals and 71, 118–19, 224; automation of jobs in 19–20, 29; climate change and modern industrial 116, 117; hierarchical societies and birth of 73–4, 185, 266–7; religion and 128–30 Aisne, third Battle of the (1918) 160 Akhenaten, Pharaoh 191 Al-Aqsa mosque, Jerusalem 15 al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr 98 Algeria 144, 145 algorithms see artificial intelligence (AI) Ali, Husayn ibn 288 Alibaba (online retailer) 50 Allah 104, 128, 130, 204, 271–2, 289 AlphaZero 31, 123 al-Qaeda 162, 168 Amazon (online retailer) 39, 40, 50, 52, 91, 267–8 Amazon rainforest 116 Amos, prophet 188 Amritsar massacre (1919) 10 Andéol, Emilie 102 animals xi, 73, 86, 98–9, 182, 190, 218, 245; distinct social behaviours 94–5; ecological collapse and 71, 116, 118–19, 224; farm animals, subjugation of 71, 118–19, 224; morality and 187–8, 200; religious sacrifice of 190 anti-Semitism 142, 143, 194, 195, 235–6 see also Jews Apple (technology company) 91, 178 Arab Spring xi, 91 Arjuna (hero of Bhagavadgita) 269–70, 271, 299 art, AI and 25–8, 55–6, 182 artificial intelligence (AI) xiii, xiv; art and 25–8, 55–6, 182; authority shift from humans to 43, 44–72, 78, 268; biochemical algorithms and 20, 21, 25–8, 47–8, 56, 59, 251, 299; cars and see cars; centaurs (human-AI teams) 29, 30–1; communism and 35, 38; consciousness and 68–72, 122, 245–6; creativity and 25–8, 32; data ownership and 77–81; dating and 263; decision-making and 36–7, 50–61; democracy and see democracy; digital dictatorships and xii, 43, 61–8, 71, 79–80, 121; discrimination and 59–60, 67–8, 75–6; education and 32, 34, 35, 38 39, 40–1, 259–68; emotional detection/manipulation 25–8, 51–2, 53, 70, 79–80, 265, 267; equality and xi, 8, 9, 13, 41, 71–2, 73–81, 246; ethics and 56–61; free will and 46–9; games and 29, 31–2, 123; globalisation and threat of 38–40; government and xii, 6, 7–9, 34–5, 37–43, 48, 53, 61–8, 71, 77–81, 87, 90, 121, 267, 268; healthcare and 22–3, 24–5, 28, 48–9, 50; intuition and 20–1, 47; liberty and 44–72; manipulation of human beings 7, 25–8, 46, 48, 50–6, 68–72, 78, 79–80, 86, 96, 245–55, 265, 267, 268; nationalism and 120–6; regulation of 6, 22, 34–5, 61, 77–81, 123; science fiction and 245–55, 268; surveillance systems and 63–5; unique non-human abilities of 21–2; war and 61–8, 123–4 see also war; weapons and see weapons; work and 8, 18, 19–43 see also work Ashoka, Emperor of India 191–2, 286 Ashura 288, 289 Asia 16, 39, 100, 103, 275 see also under individual nation name Assyrian Empire 171 Athenian democracy, ancient 95–6 attention, technology and human 71, 77–8, 87, 88–91 Australia 13, 54, 116, 145, 150, 183, 187, 232–3 Aztecs 182, 289 Babri Mosque, Ayodhya 291 Babylonian Empire 188, 189 Baidu (technology company) 23, 40, 48, 77, 267–8 Bangladesh 38–9, 273 bank loans, AI and 67 behavioural economics 20, 147, 217 Belgium 103, 165, 172 Bellaigue, Christopher de 94 Berko, Anat 233 bestiality, secular ethics and 205–6 bewilderment, age of xiii, 17, 215, 257 Bhagavadgita 269–70, 271, 299 Bhardwaj, Maharishi 181 Bible 127, 131–2, 133, 186–90, 198, 199, 200, 206, 233, 234–5, 240, 241, 272, 298 Big Data xii, 18, 25, 47, 48, 49, 53, 63, 64, 68, 71–2, 268 biometric sensors 23, 49, 50, 52, 64, 79, 92 biotechnology xii, xiv, 1, 6, 7, 8, 16, 17, 18, 21, 33–4, 41, 48, 66, 75, 80, 83, 88, 109, 121, 122, 176, 211, 251–2, 267 see also under individual area of biotechnology bioterrorism 167, 169 Bismarck, Otto von 98–9 bitcoin 6 Black Death 164 Blair, Tony 168 blockchain 6, 8 blood libel 235–6 body, human: bioengineered 41, 259, 265; body farms 34; technology and distraction from 88–92 Bolshevik Revolution (1917) 15, 248 Bonaparte, Napoleon 96, 178, 231, 284 Book of Mormon 198, 235, 240 Book of the Dead, Egyptian 235 Bouazizi, Mohamed xi brain: biochemical algorithms of 20, 21, 47, 48; brain-computer interfaces 92, 260; brainwashing 242–4, 255, 267, 295; decision-making and 50, 52; equality and 75, 79; flexibility and age of 264–5; free will and 250–2, 255; hominid 122; marketing and 267; meditation and 311, 313–14, 316, 317 Brazil 4, 7, 12, 76, 101, 103, 118, 130 Brexit referendum (2016) 5, 9, 11, 15, 45–6, 93, 99, 115 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 283–4, 302–3 Britain 5, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 44–5, 94, 99, 108, 115, 139, 143, 150, 165, 172, 178, 182, 232–3, 243 Brussels bombings (March, 2016) 160 Buddha/Buddhism 58, 102, 136, 183, 184, 186, 190, 196, 278, 291, 302–6, 315 Bulgaria 169, 195, 227 Burma 304–5 Bush, George W. 4, 168, 176, 178 Caesar, Julius 96, 179 California, U.S. 8, 39, 85, 88, 148, 172, 177, 178, 200, 266 Cambridge Analytica 80, 86 Cambridge University 12, 45, 194 Cameron, David 45, 46 Canaan 189, 190, 289, 291 Canada 13, 38, 74, 107 capitalism xii, 11, 16, 35, 38, 55, 68, 76, 77, 96, 105–6, 108, 113, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 148, 210, 217, 245, 273, 292, 309 carbon dioxide 117 care industry 24–5 Caro, Rabbi Joseph 195 cars 133, 135; accidents and 23–4, 54, 56–7, 114, 159, 160; choosing 78; GPS/navigation and 54; self-driving 22, 23–4, 33, 41, 56–7, 58–9, 60–1, 63, 168 Catalan Independence 124, 125 Catholics 108, 132, 133, 137, 213, 292, 299 centaurs (human-AI teams) 29, 30 Chad 103, 119 Chaucer, Geoffrey: Canterbury Tales 235–6 Chemosh 191 chess 29, 31–2, 123, 180 Chigaku, Tanaka 305 child labour 33, 224 chimpanzees 94–5, 98, 122, 187–8, 200, 242 China xi, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 64, 76, 100, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 113, 114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 135, 145, 150, 151, 159, 168, 169, 171, 172–3, 175, 176, 177–8, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 193, 201, 227–8, 232, 251, 259–60, 262, 274, 284–5 Chinese Communist Party 5 Christianity 13, 55, 58, 96, 98, 126, 128–30, 131, 132, 133, 134–5, 137, 142, 143, 148, 183, 184–6, 187, 188, 189–90, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 199, 200, 203, 204, 208, 212–13, 233, 234–5, 236, 253, 282, 283, 288, 289, 291, 294, 296, 308; Orthodox 13, 15, 137, 138, 183, 237, 282, 308 Churchill, Winston 53, 108, 243 civilisation, single world xi, 5, 92, 95–109, 110, 138; ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis and 93–8; economics and 105–6; European civilisation and 95–6, 108–9; human tribes and 98–100; science and 107–8 ‘clash of civilisations’ 93–4 climate change x, xi, 15, 75–6, 78, 108, 109, 116–20, 121, 122–3, 124, 127, 128, 130, 133, 138, 168, 195, 219, 223, 228, 244, 265 Clinton, Bill 4, 168, 176 Clinton, Hillary 8, 97, 236 Cnut the Great, King of the Danes 105 Coca-Cola 50, 238, 267 Coldia (fictional nation) 148–50, 152–4 Cold War (1947–91) 99, 100, 113, 114, 131, 176, 180 communism xii, 3, 5, 10, 11, 14, 33, 35, 38, 74, 87, 95, 131, 132, 134, 176–7, 209–10, 251, 262, 273, 277, 279 Communities Summit (2017) 85 community 11, 37, 42, 43, 85–92, 109, 110, 135, 143–4, 201, 230, 241; breakdown of 85–7; Facebook and building of global xiii, 81, 85–91 compassion 62, 63, 71, 186; Buddhism and 305–6; religion and 186, 200, 201–2, 204, 208–9, 234, 305–6; secular commitment to 200, 201–2, 204–6, 208–9, 210 Confucius 15, 136, 181, 190, 260, 284–5 consciousness ix; AI and 36, 68–72, 122; intelligence and 68–70, 245–6; meditation and 315, 316; religion and 197 Conservative Party 45 conservatives: conservation and 219–20; embrace liberal world view 44–5 conspiracy theories 222, 229 Constantine the Great, Roman Emperor 192 Constantius II, Roman Emperor 192 cooperation 12, 29, 134; fictions and mass 134, 137, 233–42, 245; human-AI 29, 31; morality and 47, 187; nationalism and 134, 137, 236–8; religion and 134, 137, 233–6 corruption 12, 13, 15, 188–9 Council of Religion and the Homosexual (CRH) 200 creativity 25–8, 31, 32, 75, 182, 234, 262, 299 Crimea 174–5, 177, 179, 231, 238 Croats 282 Crusades 96, 165, 184, 199, 212, 213, 296 cryptocurrency 6 Cuba 9–10, 11, 114, 176 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) 114 cultures, differences between 147–55 culturism 150–4 cyberwarfare 127, 176, 178, 179 cyborgs 8, 76–7, 212, 278 Czech Republic 200 Daisy advertisement: US presidential election (1964) and 113, 114 Darwin, Charles 194; On the Origin of Species 98–9 Darwinism 213 data: Big Data xii, 18, 25, 47, 48, 49, 53, 63, 64, 68, 71–2, 268; liberty and 44–72; ownership regulation 77–81, 86 see also artificial intelligence (AI) Davos World Economic Forum 222 Dawkins, Richard 45 Deep Blue (IBM’s chess program) 29, 31 democracies: ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis and 93–8; data processing and 65; equality and 74; individual, trust in and 217, 220; liberal democracy see liberal democracy; liberty and 44–6, 53, 55, 64, 65, 66, 67; media manipulation and 12–13; secular ethics and 204, 210 Denmark 4, 94, 105, 144, 153, 200, 210 dharma 270, 271, 286, 299, 309 Di Tzeitung 97 dictatorships 3, 5, 33, 74, 210, 305; digital xii, 43, 61–8, 71, 79–80, 121 discrimination: AI and 59–60, 67–8, 75–6; brain and structural bias 226–8; religion and 135, 191, 200, 208; racism/culturism, immigration and 147–55 disease 16, 22, 28, 49, 88, 107, 218, 289 disorientation, sense of 5, 6 DNA 49, 66, 67, 79, 98, 150, 182 doctors 22–3, 24, 28, 48–9, 106–7, 128–9, 280 dogmas, faith in 229–30 dollar, American 106 Donbas 238 Donetsk People’s Republic 232 drones 29, 30, 35, 64, 76 East Africa 239 ecological crisis, xi, xiv, 7, 109, 195, 219, 244, 265; climate change x, xi, 15, 75–6, 78, 108, 109, 116–20, 121, 122–3, 124, 127, 128, 130, 133, 138, 168, 195, 219, 223, 228, 244, 265; equality and 75–6; global solution to 115–26, 138, 155; ignorance and 219–20; justice and 223, 228, 244, 265; liberalism and 16; nationalism and 15, 115–26; religion and 127, 128, 130, 133, 138; technological breakthroughs and 118–19, 121, 122–4 economics xii, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 16, 68, 99, 222, 224, 225, 240, 262, 309; AI and 6, 7, 8, 9, 19–43; capitalist see capitalism; communism and see communism; data processing and 65–6; economic models 37, 105–6; equality and 9, 71, 73–7 see also equality; liberalism and 3–5, 16, 44–5; nationalism and 115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 124; religion and 130–3; war and 171–5, 177–8, 179–80; work and 19–43 education 11, 16, 66, 74, 75, 111, 112, 113, 184, 194, 259–68; AI and 32, 34, 35, 38 39, 40–1, 259–68; basic level of 40–1; future of 259–68; liberal 217, 219, 261; secular 207, 209 Egypt 63, 74, 128–9, 172, 181, 188–9, 235, 284, 291, 296 Einstein, Albert 45, 181, 193, 194, 195 El Salvador 4, 150 ‘End of History’ 11 Engels, Friedrich: The Communist Manifesto 262, 273 England 105, 139, 235–6 equality xi, 13, 41, 71–2, 73–81, 92, 95, 144, 204, 223; AI and 75–81; history of 73– 4; secularism and 206–7, 208–9 ethics: AI and 56–61, 63, 121; complex nature of modern world and 223–30; nationalism and 121–2; religion and 186–93, 199–202; secular 199–202, 203–14 Europe xi, xii, 5, 10, 11, 16, 40, 47, 79, 93–100, 103–4, 105, 106, 107, 108–9, 113, 114, 115, 124–5, 128, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 143–4, 145, 147, 150, 153, 154–5, 159, 160, 164, 169, 171–2, 175, 176, 186, 187, 193, 201, 207, 228, 236, 252, 294, 307 see also under individual nation name European Union xii, 47, 93, 94, 95, 99, 108, 115, 124, 169; Constitution 95, 124; crisis in 138; immigration and 138, 139, 143–4, 154–5; Russia and 177; size and wealth of 176; terrorism and 159 Evangelical Christians 133 evolution 47, 98–9, 110–11, 127, 187, 194, 205, 206, 217, 218, 223, 274, 276, 277 Ex Machina (film) 246 Facebook xiii, 27, 77, 178, 230, 301, 302, 306; community-building and xiii, 85–91, 93; equality and 77, 80; liberty and 55, 64, 65, 67, 80, 86; ownership of personal data 80, 86; post-truth and 233, 235, 238; US presidential election (2016) and 80, 86 failed states 101, 112, 210 fair game rules 187 fake news xi, 231–42 famine 16, 33, 208, 212, 238, 251, 271 farming, modern industrial 29, 116, 118, 127, 128, 129, 224, 260, 262 see also agriculture fascism xii, 3, 9, 10, 11, 33, 142, 148, 154, 237, 251, 292–5, 297, 305 feminism 87, 143, 208, 217, 246, 280 Ferdinand, Archduke Franz 9, 11, 171 Fernbach, Philip 218 financial crisis, global (2008) 4, 171 financial system, computers and complexity of 6 Finland 38, 74 First World War (1914–18) 9, 10, 11, 30, 33, 99–100, 112, 123, 124, 160, 170, 171, 172, 265 Flag Code of India 285–6 flags, national 103, 285–6 fMRI scanner 21, 240 football, power of fictions and 241 France 10, 13, 51, 63, 66, 76, 94, 96, 99, 102, 103, 104, 115, 122, 139, 144, 145, 164, 165, 172, 182, 184, 194, 204, 285, 295–6 Francis, Pope 133 Freddy (chimpanzee) 188 free-market capitalism xii, 3, 4, 11, 16, 44, 55, 217, 245 free will 20, 44, 45–6, 47–8, 250–1, 299–301 French Revolution (1789) 63, 184, 207 Freud, Sigmund 135, 185, 193, 194–5, 286 Friedman, Milton 130 Front National 13 Galilei, Galileo 193, 207 gay marriage 44, 198, 205–6 Gaza 173 genetically modified (GM) crops 219 Georgia 176, 177 Germany 13, 66, 68, 95, 96, 98–9, 108, 118, 139, 147, 148, 155, 169, 171–2, 173, 179, 182, 194, 195, 239, 251, 277; Nazi 10, 66, 96, 134, 136, 212, 213, 226, 237, 251, 279, 294, 295 Gandhi, Mahatma 132 globalisation 8, 9, 113, 139; AI/automation and 38–9; history of 99; inequality and 73, 74, 76; nationalism and 109; reversing process of xiii, 5; spread of 4, 99 global stories, disappearance of 5, 14 global warming see climate change God xi, xiii, 46, 106, 197–202; 245, 252, 254, 269, 281, 285, 287, 303, 304; Bible and see Bible; ethics and 199–202, 205, 206, 208, 209; existence of 197–9; Jewish and Christian ideas of 184–5, 189, 190; justice and 225; mass cooperation and 245; monotheism and 190–3; post-truth and 234–6, 239; sacrifice and 287, 289; state identity and 138 gods xii, 277, 281, 291; agriculture and 128, 129; humans becoming ix, 79, 86; justice and 188, 189; sacrifice and 287–9; state identity and 136, 137 Goebbels, Joseph 237 Goenka, S.

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age
by David E. Sanger
Published 18 Jun 2018

Computer users throughout the country all saw the same broken-English message pop onto their screens. It announced that everything on the hard drives of their computers had been encrypted: “Oops, your important files have been encrypted…Perhaps you are busy looking to recover your files, but don’t waste your time.” It went on to make the dubious claim that if they paid $300 in Bitcoin, the hard-to-trace cryptocurrency, their data would be unlocked. The attack was designed to look like a national shakedown scheme. It wasn’t. The hackers weren’t after money, and they didn’t get much. This was “NotPetya”—so nicknamed by Kaspersky Lab, which was itself suspected by the US government of providing back doors to the Russian government via its profitable security products.

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It can hold large swaths of nation-state infrastructure and private-sector infrastructure at risk. It’s a source of income.” At an earlier time, North Korea counterfeited crude $100 bills to finance the country’s operations. That grew more difficult as the United States made the currency harder and harder to copy. But ransomware, digital bank heists, and hacks of South Korea’s fledgling Bitcoin exchanges all made up for the loss of the counterfeiting business. Today the North may be the first state to use cybercrime to finance its state operations. Bangladesh was hardly the only victim, and not even the first. In 2015 there was an intrusion into the Philippines, then the Tien Phong Bank in Vietnam.

Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women's Rights Worldwide
by Hawon Jung
Published 21 Mar 2023

Son ran this vast enterprise by following the well-thumbed playbook of his predecessors of digital sex crimes. Those who uploaded their own original videos received reward points that they could redeem to download other videos. They were then rewarded with even more points whenever someone else downloaded their creations. All payments were made in bitcoin to dodge crackdowns. Son was arrested in 2018 along with hundreds of his customers worldwide, and he was eventually convicted of producing and distributing child pornography, a charge that carried up to ten years in jail in South Korea, or decades in the United States. But he was soon sent home after receiving a suspended jail term on the grounds that he was too young, a first-time offender, and repenting.

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3194771 72Son Hyeon-Gyu, 460 [Office worker who took 460 spycam at bus stations and subways … received a suspended jail term], Yonhap News Agency, August 11, 2016, https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20160811138000065 73The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), “South Korean National and Hundreds of Others Charged Worldwide in the Takedown of the Largest Darknet Child Pornography Website, Which was Funded by Bitcoin,” press release, October 16, 2019, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/south-korean-national-and-hundreds-others-charged-worldwide-takedown-largest-darknet-child 74United States District Court for the District of Columbia, United States of America v. Son Jong Woo, indictment, August 9, 2018, https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1210441/download 75Kim So-Jeong, [Son Jong Woo who married during his trial eventually annulled his marriage … “not a marriage for money”], Edaily, August 5, 2020, https://www.edaily.co.kr/news/read?

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
by Extinction Rebellion
Published 12 Jun 2019

But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the hedge-fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own. They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern. Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one?

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People?
by John Kay
Published 2 Sep 2015

The complete dematerialisation of payments potentially deprives governments and established banking institutions of their traditional mechanisms of control: monopoly of currency issue and access to physical records. The invention of the credit card means that it is no longer necessary to have cash or deposits to make a payment, only a certificate of anticipated future resources sufficient to settle the transaction: a change that is potentially the end of money as we have known it. The evangelists for bitcoin, the much-hyped digital currency that is a strange mixture of the visionary and the fraudulent – are, in a sense, not imaginative enough. They are simply trying to reproduce in the electronic world a commodity – currency – that has long existed in the material world. The larger question is whether currency as we have known it is any longer necessary at all.

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.: ‘The Fall of Rome’ 119 Augar, Philip 114–15 Australian central bank 243 automobile manufacture 44 AXA 27, 200 B Bagehot, Walter 244 bail-outs 75, 138, 150, 260, 268, 271 balance sheets 221 Bank of England 245 derivatives 193 Deutsche Bank 191, 192, 192, 222 Federal Reserve System 245 financial institutions’ claims against each other 190 Halifax 140, 164, 190 Japanese banks 221 of large US banks 38 of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac 75 need for new capital 137 removal of debt from the public-sector balance sheet 158 value of securities 41 Baltic Exchange 17 Bank for International Settlements (BIS) 221 ‘bank levy’ 266 Bank of America 113, 135, 150, 185, 186, 193, 300 Bank of England 98, 139, 247, 260, 264 advocacy of City of London interests 20 balance sheet 245 central bank for the UK 183 and Diamond 35 direct funding to HBoS and RBS 135 Eurodollar market 20 nationalised (1946) 243 and Overend, Gurney & Co. 31 saves Scottish banks 26 and Soros 23 Bank of Italy 243 Bank of Japan 221 Bank of New York (now incorporated into BNY Mellon) 24 Bank of Scotland 11, 12, 14, 24, 26, 34, 78, 124, 125, 129, 135, 139 Bank of Spain 183 banking annualised shareholder returns of major banks 134 assets 91 bank managers 11–12, 27, 84, 125, 129, 197, 198, 281 banking crises (1800–2010) 37 Basel rules on bank lending 21, 151, 220–25 career in 11–12 cartelised 219 co-operative banks 169 complexity 276–7 conglomerate banks 133, 136, 137 deposit and investment channels 25–6 deposit-taking banks 259–60, 288–9, 290 equity in 282 inter-bank lending 244 long history of banking institutions 24 nationalisation 301 retail banks 33, 185, 198, 220, 284, 290, 291 ‘reverse-engineering’ products 21 run on bank 90 savings banks 169 size in 276 transformation of investment banking 15 universal banks 220 zombie banks 38, 39, 219 ‘banking book’ 320n20 Banque de France 243 Barclays Bank 24, 34, 35, 113, 135, 139, 166, 185, 186, 261, 266, 267 Barings Bank 31, 130, 134 Basel agreements 21, 151, 220–25, 234, 270, 298 Bausparkassen 149, 154 BBC 58 Bear Stearns 48, 90, 135 Berkshire Hathaway 107–8, 203, 212, 282 Berle, Adolf 51 Berlin financial centre 26 Bernanke, Ben 40, 57, 58, 73, 104 beta (β) parameter 206 beta-blockers 47 bezzle 127, 128, 132, 136, 176, 177, 190, 201, 244, 280 bias to action 203–8, 211, 273, 291 ‘Big Bang’ (1986) 28 ‘Big Dig’ tunnel, Boston 158 biotechnology 168 bitcoin 187 Black, Fischer 19, 69 Black, James 47 ‘Black Monday’ (19 October 1987) 242 ‘black swans’ 67 Black-Scholes model 20, 69 BlackRock 200, 207, 213, 253 Blair, Tony 262 Blankfein, Lloyd 14–15, 143, 160, 300 Blodget, Henry 199, 293 Bloomberg 281, 302 Bloomingdale’s department store 46 BMW 170 BNP Paribas 33, 50, 193, 200 BNY Mellon 200 Bogle, Jack 207 Bolton, Anthony 108, 109 bond trading 20 bonus culture 50–52 Born, Brooksley 57 Bovis 158 Bowie, David 21 Bradford and Bingley 135 Brandeis, Louis: Other People’s Money 114 Brecht, Bertolt: Happy End 188 Bretton Woods conference (1944) 17, 18, 36, 221 Britain assets and liabilities of British banks 1 English law 263 failure of UK banking sector (2008) 276–7 and FISIM 264 global dominance of the finance industry 218, 265 housing 149, 174 British Telecom sale 158, 250 Brittan, Samuel 58, 70 Brokaw, Tom 258 broker-dealer 29, 84, 117, 198 brokers 29–30 Brooke, Rupert 95 ‘Heaven’ 87 Brooks, Rebekah 292, 295 Brown, Gordon 24, 231, 235, 262 Browning, Robert: ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’ 262 BTR 45 Buffett, Warren 69–70, 100, 107, 108, 109, 112–13, 124, 127, 131, 132, 192, 203, 205, 212, 267, 268, 282 building societies 25, 149, 150, 151, 154, 290 Building Societies Act (1986) 150–51 Bundesbank 243 Burke, Edmund: Letters on a Regicide Peace 173 Burrough, Bryan and Helyar, John: Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco 46, 164, 204 Burroughs, William S. 259 Bush, George W. 58, 255 buy-outs 166 buy-side analysts 199 Byng, Admiral 71[?

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

, in that it isn’t a mainstream idea, though it remains commonplace in certain streams of American political thought. It is relevant, however, because the idea that there must be a hard limit to the amount of money in the world also drives most Silicon Valley–styled schemes to create new forms of money, like Bitcoin. If the world were to run on a gold standard, then that stash would have to function as the memory of the global computer that humanity uses to plan its economic future. Therefore, the gold standard is a fundamentally pessimistic idea. Limiting our model of how to invent the future to the memory capacity of around 50 billion troy ounces§ is just a way of saying the future holds nothing of surprising value.

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Brian, 169n artificial hearts, 157–58 artificial intelligence (AI), 23, 61, 94, 95, 114, 116, 136, 138n, 147, 155, 157, 178, 191, 192–93, 325, 330, 354, 359n artificial memory, 35 art market, 108 Art of the Long View, The (Schwartz), 214 ashrams, 213 assets, 31, 60 “As We May Think” (Bush), 221n asymmetry, 54–55, 61–66, 118, 188, 203, 246–48, 285–88, 291–92, 310 Athens, 22–25 atomic bomb, 127 “attractor nightmare,” 48 auctions, 170, 286 aulos, 23n austerity, 96, 115, 125, 151, 152, 204, 208 authenticity, 128–32, 137 authors, 62n automata, 11, 12, 17, 23, 42, 55, 85–86, 90–92, 97–100, 111, 129, 135–36, 155, 157, 162, 260, 261, 269, 296n, 342, 359–60 automated services, 62, 63, 64, 147–48 automated trading systems, 74–78, 115 automation, 7, 85, 123–24, 192, 234, 259, 261, 343 automobiles, 43, 86, 90–92, 98, 118–19, 125n, 302, 311, 314, 343, 367 avatar cameras, 265 avatars, 89n, 265, 283–85 baby boomers, 97–100, 339, 346 bailouts, financial, 45, 52, 60, 74–75, 82 Baird-Murray, Kathleen, 200n “Ballad of John Henry, The,” 134–35 bandwidth, 171–72 banking, 32–33, 42, 43, 69, 76–78, 151–52, 251, 269n, 289, 345–46 bankruptcy, 2, 89, 251 bargains, 64–65, 95–96 Barlow, John Perry, 353 Barnes & Noble, 62n, 182 barter system, 20, 57 Battlestar Galactica, 137, 138n “beach fantasy,” 12–13, 18, 236–37, 331, 366–67 Beatles, 211, 212, 213 behavior models, 32, 121, 131, 173–74, 286–87 behavior modification, 173–74 Belarus, 136 belief systems, 139–40 Bell, Gordon, 313 bell curve distribution, 39, 39–45, 204, 208, 262, 291–93 Bell Labs, 94 Bentham, Jeremy, 308n Berners-Lee, Tim, 230 Bezos, Jeff, 352 big business, 265–67, 297–98 big data, 107–40, 150, 151–52, 155, 179, 189, 191–92, 202–4, 265–66, 297–98, 305, 346, 366, 367 big money, 202–4, 265–67 billboards, 170, 267, 310 billing, 171–72, 184–85 Bing, 181–82 biodiversity, 146–47 biological realism, 253–54 biotechnology, 11–13, 17, 18, 109–10, 162, 330–31 Bitcoin, 34n BitTorrent, 223 blackmail, 61, 172–73, 207, 273, 314, 316, 322 Black Monday, 74 blogs, 118n, 120, 225, 245, 259, 349, 350 books, 1–2, 62, 63, 65, 113, 182, 192, 193, 246–47, 277–78, 281, 347, 352–60 bots, 62, 63, 64, 147–48 brain function, 195–96, 260, 328 brain scans, 111–12, 218, 367 Brand, Stewart, 214 brand advertising, 267 Brandeis, Louis, 25, 208 Brazil, 54 Brooks, David, 326 Burma, 200n Burning Man, 132 Bush, George H.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

It is very difficult to change merchant behavior.”16 No one knows how this market will evolve, but markets, competition, and consumer behavior – not only the technology itself – will determine its future success. The same is true for another promising technology that can be applied to the payments market: blockchain, or mutual distributed ledger technology (like bitcoin). The market clearly sees a big potential in blockchain technology. It could reduce the costs and risks in transactions, and create a far better system for sharing information in financial markets. Some have billed it as a greater technological leap than the internet for capital markets. Perhaps it will be, but the hype around the technology is premature and the expectation of big market changes is an aspiration.

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Chance character (i), (ii) Belgium profit margins (i) taxi services and regulation (i) Bell, Alexander Graham (i), (ii) Bell Labs (AT&T) (i) Bellamy, Edward (i) Bellman, Richard (i) benchmarking (i), (ii) benefits, and incomes (i) Benz, Karl (i) Bergman, Ingmar (i) Berkshire Hathaway (i) Berle, Adolf (i) Berra, Yogi (i) Bezos, Jeff (i) Bhide, Amar (i) big firms big firm market dominance (i) and investment allocation for innovation (i) and private standards (i) relative importance of in European countries (i) reputation of (i) see also firm boundaries; firms; multinational (global) companies “big swinging dicks” (i) big-data business models (i) biofuels and EU regulation (i) see also energy sector biotechnological sector, and EU regulation (i) Bismarck, Otto von (i) bitcoin (i) BlackBerry (i) blackboard economics (i) Blackrock (i) blockchain (mutual distributed ledger) technology (i) Blue Ribbon Commission (US) (i) The Blues Brothers (movie) (i) boom and bust cycles (i), (ii), (iii) boomer (or baby boomer) generation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Boston Consulting Group index of complicatedness (i) on performance imperatives (i) on working time of managing teams (i) branding (i), (ii) Brazil and BRIC concept (i), (ii) taxi services and regulation (i) BRIC as a Bloody Ridiculous Investment Concept (i) countries (Brazil, India, Russia, and China) (i), (ii) Bridgewater (i) Brin, Sergey (i) Britain see United Kingdom (UK) British managerialism (i) Brockovich, Erin (i) Brookings (i) Brown, Gordon (i) Brynjolfsson, Erik, The Second Machine Age (Brynjolfsson and McAfee) (i), (ii) budget process, and compliance officers (i) Buffett, Warren (i), (ii) bureaucracy and capitalism (i), (ii) and competition (i) and compliance officers (i) and globalization (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and IBM (i) and index of complicatedness (Boston Consulting Group) (i) and Indian economy (i) and managerialism (i), (ii), (iii) and organizational diversification (i) and principal–agent debate (i) and socialism (i) see also bureaucracy brake; bureaucrats; corporate managerialism; managerialism bureaucracy brake, and regulation (Germany) (i) bureaucrats vs. entrepreneurs (i), (ii) see also bureaucracy; bureaucracy brake Burning Man festival (Nevada) (i) Burns, Scott, The Clash of Generations (Kotlikoff and Burns) (i) business-building skills, vs. financial skills (i) business cycles, and productivity (i) business development, and strategy (i), (ii) business information technology (IT) services (i) business investment and cash hoarding (i) and corporate net lending (i), (ii) declining trend (i) explanations for decline (i) and financial regulation (i), (ii) and gray capitalism (i) investment allocation for innovation and big firms (i) low investment growth vs. fast corporate borrowing growth (i) measuring issues (i) and mergers and acquisitions (i) and policy uncertainty (i), (ii) and shareholders (i), (ii), (iii) UK business investment (i), (ii) US business investment (i), (ii) see also asset managers; investment; R&D business management (i), (ii) see also corporate managerialism business productivity growth (i) Business Week, on Peter Drucker (i) CAC 40 index (France) (i) cadmium (i), (ii) Canada diffusion of innovations (i) GDP figures (i) North American Free Trade Agreement (i) cancer research, and innovation (i), (ii) capital accumulation, and capitalism (i) capital expenditure (capex) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n39 capital markets (external) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) capitalism and agency (i) and asset bubbles (i) and bureaucracy (i), (ii) and capital accumulation (i) “complex by design” capitalism (i) criticism of Western capitalism (i) crony capitalism (i) death of capitalism utopia and socialism (i) decline of Western capitalism (i) and digital age (i) and dissent (i), (ii), (iii) and eccentricity (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) and economic dynamism (i), (ii), (iii) and Enlightenment (i), (ii) and entrepreneurship (i), (ii) financial capitalism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) free-market capitalism (i) and individual freedom (i), (ii), (iii) and innovation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) joint-stock capitalism (i), (ii) and labor vs. work (i) vs. the market (i), (ii) Marxist monopolistic theory of (i) “middle-aged” capitalism (i), (ii), (iii) “money manager capitalism” (Hyman Minsky) (i) and organization (i) and planning machines (i) rentier capitalism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) and Swedish hybrid economy (i) and technology (i) see also capitalist ownership; corporate managerialism; entrepreneurs; entrepreneurship; the future (and how to prevent it); globalization; gray capitalism; regulation; rich people capitalist ownership and corporate globalism (i) and diversification (i) and gray capitalism: case of Harley-Davidson Motor Company (HD) (i); decline/obituary of capitalist ownership (i); dispersed ownership (i); gray ownership (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi); severing gray capital–corporate ownership link (i) ownership structure reforms (i) and pensions (i) and principal–agent problem (i) and uncertainty (i) car industry car sales and regulation (i) driverless vehicles (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) German car production and value chains (i) lean production (i) US environment-related regulations (i) Carew, Diana G.

The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions
by Victor Haghani and James White
Published 27 Aug 2023

Matt Levine's excellent description of systemic risks in safe assets: “Safe assets are much riskier than risky ones. This is, I think the deep lesson of the 2008 financial crisis… . Systemic risks live in safe assets. Equity‐like assets— tech stocks, Luna, Bitcoin—are risky, and everyone knows they're risky, and everyone accepts the risk…. And so most people arrange their lives in such a way that, if their stocks or Bitcoin go down by 20%, they are not ruined… . On the other hand safe assets—AAA mortgage securities, bank deposits, stable coins—are not supposed to be risky, and people rely on them being worth what they say they're worth, and when people lose even a little bit of confidence in them they crack completely” (Money Stuff, 2022). 1.

Billionaires' Row: Tycoons, High Rollers, and the Epic Race to Build the World's Most Exclusive Skyscrapers
by Katherine Clarke
Published 13 Jun 2023

Stern was now engulfed in a mountain of litigation and, in light of the COVID crisis, most of the legal hearings had moved online. Juracich felt exhausted and anxious for the day he could be clear of the whole saga. He was eager to detach himself from the real estate industry once and for all and was eyeing a move into other businesses, including Bitcoin mining. The deposition in question was in relation to a lawsuit brought against an entity controlled by Stern and Juracich by two consulting companies that claimed they had been bilked out of money they were owed for helping to line up financing for 111 West 57th Street. A judgment had already been issued in the consulting companies’ favor, but Stern and Juracich still hadn’t coughed up the cash.

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The assembled spectators looked on enraptured as two major whales emerged, issuing competing bids on the phone via Sotheby’s representatives. The sculpture would ultimately go for $78.4 million to Justin Sun, creator of the cryptocurrency Tron. That Sun was the buyer spoke to the moment perfectly. Cryptocurrency was reaching new heights, Bitcoin billionaires were flashing big checks, and an NFT craze was sweeping the globe. If foreign buyers hadn’t yet returned to the real estate market in force, they were certainly making their mark on the art market. All the while, Macklowe sat among the bidders and onlookers looking dour in a paisley pashmina and velvet loafers.

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today
by Jane McGonigal
Published 22 Mar 2022

To consider just a few examples, it took, give or take a few months: ten years for the civil rights movement against racial segregation in the United States to go from its first boycott of segregated bus seating to the successful passage of the federal Civil Rights Act (1955–1964) ten years for the first international economic sanctions against South Africa’s segregationist apartheid system to lead to a new constitution that enfranchised Black South Africans and other racial groups (1985–1996) ten years for same-sex marriage to go from being considered controversial when it was legalized by a country for the first time (the Netherlands) to being supported in global surveys by a majority of people in a majority of countries (2001–2010) ten years for marijuana to go from being legalized for all uses in one US state, Colorado, to being decriminalized in forty-four out of fifty states (2012–2021) And it took: ten years from when just sixteen million people, mostly scientists and other academic researchers, were using the internet—they thought it would be used mostly to share scientific data—to when a billion people were using it (1991–2001) ten years from the first iPhone release until a majority of people on the planet had smartphones, creating a new era of always-on communication (2007–2017) ten years for Facebook to go from one user to one billion daily users, on its way to becoming the first product used by more than one in three humans on the planet (2004–2015) ten years for Bitcoin to go from being a hypothetical idea discussed in a scientific article to having a nearly US$1 trillion market capitalization, larger than the three biggest US banks combined (2008–2019) ten years from Airbnb’s and Uber’s foundings for a full 36 percent of US workers to be engaged in some form of “gig work” (2008–2018) ten years for Zoom to go from its first user testing session to becoming a critical lifeline for humanity during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the de facto tool for learning, work meetings, and staying in touch with friends and family (2011–2020) In other words: things that are small experiments today in ten years can become ubiquitous and world-changing.

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Anything with the potential to change the world can be a future force. It might be a quickly advancing area of scientific research, like human genetic modification or artificial intelligence. It might be a social movement, like Black Lives Matter. It might be a new technology entering the mainstream, like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It might be an increasingly popular policy idea, like lowering the voting age to sixteen. It might be a shift in consumer behavior, like the rise of plant-based diets. It might be a growing threat documented by experts and researchers, like sea-level rise from climate change or the impact of noise pollution on mental health.

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet
by Varun Sivaram
Published 2 Mar 2018

But in a DC microgrid future, networks might arise organically, from the bottom up.46,47 This theory is known as “swarm electrification,” and the researcher who conceived the term, Sebastian Groh, likens a bottom-up electricity network to a “swarm of fish,” in which “there is no central intelligence, and the fish work together to create unity.” His company, ME SOLshare, is making it possible for the 4 million households in Bangladesh with DC SHSs to connect to one another and trade electricity. Using peer-to-peer mobile payments—securely logged using blockchain technology, which is also used to authenticate Bitcoin transactions—homes can participate in a bottom-up marketplace, dynamically balancing supply and demand across a self-assembled DC microgrid. This concept could work in any place with a high population density—Bangladesh is an ideal starting point, with a population of 160 million squished into an area the size of New York State.48 Clearly, DC microgrids could enable a wealth of new ways to improve energy access.

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See also Lithium-ion batteries as back up for grid, 82–83 commercial adoption of, 11 and cost of solar power, 22 DC power in, 132 in deep decarbonization effort, 235–236 defined, 283g–284g electrochemical, 228 energy storage in, 193, 221–226 flow, 230 lead-acid, 123, 228 nickel, cobalt, and aluminum, 229 nickel-manganese-cobalt, 229 other storage technologies vs., 228–231 for solar home systems, 123 storage capacity of, 235, 235f Batteries and Energy Storage hub, 263 Bazilian, Morgan, 119 BBOXX, 126–127 Becquerel, Edmond, 32 Bell Laboratories, 37, 260 Berkshire Hathaway Energy Renewables, 108 Bernard, Rob, 213 Bihar, India, 133–134 Biomass, burning of, 59 Birds, CSP plants and, 183 Bitcoin, 134 Black cells, 40–41 Blackouts, 77, 207, 215, 245–247 Blackstone, 93 Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), 51, 64, 80, 252 Bonds, green/climate, 113, 288g Boston Celtics, 93 British Petroleum (BP), 35, 41 Brooklyn, New York, 208 Buffett, Warren, 109 Building materials, solar, 162–163 Burning mirrors, 29 Bush, Vannevar, 254–255, 260 Business model innovation defined, 58b, 288g and economic appeal of solar, 78–79, 83 for expansion of solar energy, 23–24, 85, 90 and future of solar energy, 2 with microgrids, 130 with off-grid solar, 118, 135 to overcome deployment challenges, 57, 58b in regulated utilities, 108 BYD (company), 223 Cadmium telluride (CdTe), 38, 151, 155, 280g CAISO.

Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley
by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans
Published 25 Apr 2023

“How do you make a business out of crypto? What exactly is the business model?” Tony’s tone felt hostile. As Ben tried to answer, Tony interrupted him. “Well, what is the value of it? How do you even sell that?” Ben was used to people being skeptical about his cryptocurrency business—it was 2018, after all, when Bitcoin crashed from $20,000 a coin to just over $3,000. But this was the last thing Ben had expected from Tony. He had brought his team to Vegas hoping for what Tony was famous for—encouraging entrepreneurs through productive and inspiring conversation. “It was a very weird dynamic, and my co-founders eventually started to object to Tony’s questions,” Ben said later.

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ABC News Abdul, Paula Abercrombie & Fitch Accel AC/DC acid Ackman, Bill Adderall Adele ADHD Adidas Aguirre, Blaise AIDS Airbnb Airstream Park Alaska alcoholism Allen, Ashton Alltounian, Howard Alvarez & Marsal Amazon death of Tony and Downtown Project and Tony’s decline and Zappos bought by Ambien AMC Theaters American Chemical Society American Institute of Chemical Engineers Anderson, Richard Dean Anderson .Paak Apple Apprentice, The (TV show) Arizona State University Arquette, David Ascher, Kevin Asian Americans AskJeeves Asprey, Dave Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest Astrovan Atlantic City Atomic Liquors Austin, Texas B-52s Baleson, Suzie Ballard, Karla Ballmer, Steve Baltimore Banerjee, Anondo Banerjee, Ovik Banerjee, Subhankar Bank of America Barnes & Noble Barrass, Kathy Barshack, Lenny Bass, Derrick Bass family Bayle, Michael BBN Beat Coffeehouse The Beau Hodges Band Beauty Bar Beck Belcampo farm Bellagio hotel Benioff, Marc Ben-Shahar, Tal Ben Sherman Berman, Matt Berman, Robert M. Bevilacqua, Ali Bezos, Jeff Biden, Joe Bigfoot holding company Big Moose Yacht Club “Billie Jean” (song) biohacking bipolar disorder Bitcoin Black Ops (Zappos team) Black people Black Rock City Blair, Tony Blige, Mary J. Blizzy Ranch Daily News Bloomberg Bloomberg, Michael Bolt Barber Bomberman (video game) Bowles, Nellie Boy Scouts of America Boys’ Life Bozzini, Mark Branson, Richard Branson School, The Bridgeport Hospital Brin, Sergey Brokaw, Aphrah Brown, Rachael Brown University Bruno Magli Bulletproof Nutrition Bunch, John Bunkhouse Saloon Burning Man Business Insider Caesars Entertainment Calacanis, Jason Calder, Don California School of Professional Psychology California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly) Calvin and Hobbes (comic strip) Camacho, David carbon monoxide Carr, Paul Carson Kitchen Catalyst Week Challenge Point Framework Chesnoff, David Chevron China Chinese New Year Chopra, Deepak Chou, Millie Choudhry, Rehan Ciraco, Bill civil rights movement Clark County District Court Clark County Superior Court Clay, Phillip Cleveland Clinton, Bill Club BIO CNN Coachella Colbert, Stephen Coldplay Collins, Jim Colorado River mindfulness retreat Comedy Central Commonwealth bar Complex Confucius conservatorship Constellation Labs Container Park Conway, Ron Cooney, Susan Coors Light Cornell University Corner Bar Management Cornthwaite, Jennifer Cornthwaite, Michael Cosmopolitan casino, The COVID-19 Craigslist Crimson, The Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Cum Laude Society Curcio, Tom D’Attilio, Michelle Dave Matthews Band Davis, Tyler Days of Our Lives (TV show) Deadmau5 Delaney, Hollie Delivering Happiness company Delivering Happiness (Hsieh) book tour sales written Deloitte depression Deshpande, Kedar Detroit Diaspora (website) Digital Royalty DiVincenzo, Tony DJ Solomon Dodge, Antonia Doherty, Ryan domain names Donner, Andrew DoorDash dopamine Dorsey, Jack dot-com boom Downs, Michael Downtown Cocktail Room “Downtown Las Vegas Is the Great American Techtopia” (Bowles) Downtown Project (DTP) all-hands meetings artists and Burning Man and Catalyst Week and community and conditions for businesses in core values and death of Tony and drinking and events and financials and Fred Mossler and Groth book on Holacracy and layoffs and Life Is Beautiful and problems outlined real estate portfolio and startups and suicides and Tony and Fred first plan renovation of Tony as “Mayor” of Tony draws people to Tony’s dating and Tony’s decline and Tony’s drinking and drugs and Tony steps away from Victor Oviedo and Drew Carey Show, The (TV show) DrinkExchange Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) drug-induced psychosis.

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future
by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever
Published 2 Apr 2017

Census, via the machines that cracked the Nazi enigma code, the CBS vacuum-tube computer, the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, and more recently the integrated circuit– based personal computer. * The blockchain is an almost incorruptible digital ledger that can be used to record practically anything that can be digitized: birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, educational degrees, medical records, contracts, and votes. Bitcoin is one of its many implementations. With exponentially advancing technologies, things move very slowly at first and then advance dramatically. Each new technology advances along an S-curve—an exponential beginning, flattening out as the technology reaches its limits. As one technology ends, the next paradigm takes over.

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments
by Michael Batnick
Published 21 May 2018

“I'm going to hold onto this fund that's done horribly because I can't stand the thought of selling at the bottom,” and it can compel us to do something because we don't want to regret not doing it: “I'm going to buy this ICO (initial coin offering) because I won't be able to live with myself if I miss the next Bitcoin.” You know Steve Jobs and his early partner Steve Wozniak, but the name Ronald Wayne likely means nothing to you. Wayne was the third founder of Apple, but the reason his name is erased from the history books is because in 1976 he sold his 10% stake in the company for $800.4 Apple is currently worth north of $900 billion!

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
by Daniel C. Dennett
Published 7 Feb 2017

Probably one of the most powerful subliminal supports for the belief in the reality of dollars comes from the undoubted existence of dollar bills and coins, legal tender you can see and weigh and manipulate and carry around. Bitcoin, in contrast, seems much more illusory to most folks, but if they reflect on it, they will discover that the palpable, foldable dollar bills that are physical objects are ontological crutches of sorts, to be thrown away once you’ve learned how to walk, leaving in place only the mutual expectations and habits that can in principle support bitcoin as well as dollars. Well into the twentieth century there were heated political debates on the necessity of maintaining such crutches—the gold standard and silver certificates, and the like—but tomorrow’s children may grow up with only credit cards to hold and manipulate and be none the worse off for it.

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence
by Jacob Turner
Published 29 Oct 2018

Secondly, the New Zealand scheme does not cover financial loss which is not directly related to physical harm (known as “pure economic loss”). The vast and increasing range of AI’s applications means that harm which it causes will not be limited merely to physical accidents. If an AI trading program invests all of a company’s money in a volatile commodity/financial instrument like Bitcoin immediately before a crash, then under the New Zealand scheme there would be no compensation available to the victim. They would have to seek recourse through the various other mechanisms identified above and below, such as negligence, product liability or contract . 2.5 Contract A contract is a legally binding agreement, or set of promises.85 Not all promises are enforceable in law: a promise to meet a friend for dinner is unlikely to have contractual force.

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The possibility remains though for such rivers to have other, non-human legal rights. 30Thomas Burri, “Free Movement of Algorithms: Artificially Intelligent Persons Conquer the European Union’s Internal Market”, in Research Handbook on the Law of Artificial Intelligence, edited by Woodrow Barfield and Ugo Pagallo (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2018). 31See, for a similar argument, Shawn Bayern, “Of Bitcoins, Independently Wealthy Software, and the Zero-Member LLC”, Northwestern University Law Review Online, Vol. 108 (2014), 257. 32[1991] 1 WLR 1362. 33Überseering BV v. Nordic Construction Company Baumanagement GmbH (2002) C-208/00, ECR I-9919. 34Thomas Burri, “Free Movement of Algorithms: Artificially Intelligent Persons Conquer the European Union’s Internal Market”, Oxford Law Faculty Blog, 4 January 2018, https://​www.​law.​ox.​ac.​uk/​business-law-blog/​blog/​2018/​01/​free-movement-algorithms-artificially-intelligent-persons-conquer, accessed 1 June 2018.

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society
by Charles Handy
Published 12 Mar 2015

We can not only buy books online, we can publish our own, should we wish to write any. We need no longer go anywhere near a physical bank; we can even start our own by creating a crowd-funding site. Kickstarter, one of the leading sites, began in 2009 and opened in Britain in 2012. You can, should you wish to take the risk, start your own currency. Bitcoin, Peercoin and Primecoin already exist as internet currencies with a defined amount whose value varies according to the demand, although the risk quickly overtook a couple of the early Britcoin exchanges. Or you can turn banker yourself via a peer-to-peer lending platform. You don’t have to leave home to go to university any more.

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery
by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore
Published 18 Jun 2018

As Pete Pachal wrote, Kodak was ‘too scared to cannibalize its own business to progress’.27 Successful digital transformation required taking calculated risks when times were good. Kodak didn’t. As this book was being finished in early 2018, Kodak decided to launch both its own cryptocurrency and a machine that you rent from the company for mining bitcoins. Some technology commentators blasted the idea as a ‘scam’ and a ‘desperate attempt to stay relevant’. Time will tell. Governments are different. Some people argue, persuasively, that the internet presents a genuinely existential threat to what we traditionally imagine ‘the state’ to be. The giants of the web are operating like mini-governments in many developing nations, and there is no reason to think their role will diminish.

The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data
by Michael P. Lynch
Published 21 Mar 2016

Not everything about Google-knowing is new, however. And that itself is important to appreciate. One humorous illustration of this came in 2013, when the website College Humor asked: what if Google was a guy? The ensuing video was hilarious and a bit disturbing. The questions we ask our search engines (“Hedgehog, cute,” “Bitcoin unbuy fast,” “college girls?”) seem all the more ridiculous (and creepy) once we imagine asking them of an actual person—like an amiable but overworked bureaucrat behind a desk. But it also reminds us of a fact about how we treat Google and other search engines—a fact that is obvious enough but often overlooked.

Demystifying Smart Cities
by Anders Lisdorf

Once a transaction has been stored in the distributed ledger, it can no longer be disputed or reversed in any way, and it is free and open for anyone to see that it has been done. This is why block chain is good for problems where trust and validating data is an issue. As a general storage option, it has serious drawbacks because it is very slow. From the time a transaction is made until it is validated by the block chain, it can take minutes. For the original Bitcoin block chain, it was around 10 minutes. Other block chains have been developed that are faster, but it will never be able to compete with any other storage technology in terms of latency. It is also very costly in terms of processing, since all nodes in the distributed ledger need to process everything and generate new blocks.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
by Gautam Baid
Published 1 Jun 2020

Throughout his early partnership years, Buffett embodied what Peter Kaufmann referred to during the 2018 Daily Journal Corporation meeting as the “five aces” of money management (figure 10.1). FIGURE 10.1 “Five Qualities of Investment Advisors” by Peter Kaufman. Source: “Charlie Munger on Bitcoins, Banking, AI, and Life,” Safal Niveshak (blog), February 17, 2018, https://www.safalniveshak.com/charlie-munger-bitcoins-banking-life/. Fund managers (who, in essence, are operating in a fiduciary role for their clients) should view themselves first and foremost as risk managers. As such, they should follow the key principles of prudent insurance underwriting, outlined in Buffett’s 2001 shareholder letter: They accept only those risks that they are able to properly evaluate (staying within their circle of competence) and that, after they have evaluated all relevant factors including remote loss scenarios, carry the expectancy of profit….

Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era?
by David de Cremer
Published 25 May 2020

In light of this movement of algorithms into a role of managing (some may say monitoring) others, an interesting application in this area concerns the potential employment of blockchain technology to manage work relations in organizations. Blockchain is mostly known as the underlying technology of applications, such as Bitcoin. At the same time, the technology is also increasingly being seen as a way of changing how our companies work. One specific application that was pointed out in a recent Deloitte survey is to use this technology to perform the basic functions of management as well as motivating employees more specifically.¹⁰³ This survey revealed that among 1,386 senior executives in 12 nations, 83% saw compelling ways for blockchain to be used by their organizations.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

Later revised by Moore to a doubling every two years, Moore’s Law has been a remarkably accurate forecast of the growth of the semiconductor industry over the last forty years. As computing has become faster, cheaper, and better at automating a variety of tasks, financial institutions have been able to greatly increase the scale and sophistication of their services. The emergence of automated, algorithmic, and online trading, mobile banking, crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, crowdfunding, and financial robo-advisers are all consequences of Moore’s Law. Technological innovation has always been intimately interconnected with financial innovation, a coevolutionary process in which adaptations in one domain have influenced innovation in the other. New stamping and printing processes, used to prevent coin clipping, counterfeiting, and other forms of financial fraud, led directly to the modern system of paper banknotes and token coinage.

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L., 46–47 Australopithecus, 153 autism, 110–111 Automated Proprietary Trading (APT), 236, 237, 240 automated teller machines (ATMs), 400 automobile safety, 205 aviation safety, 85, 321, 379–383 Avnaim-Pesso, Liora, 166, 167 Awakenings (Sacks), 88 Azar, Pablo, 372 Bachelier, Louis Jean-Baptiste Alphonse, 18–20, 21, 234 back testing, 285 Ball, Lucille, 395 Bamberger, Gerry, 235–236 Bankers Trust, 320, 344 Bank of America, 386–387 Bank of England, 366–367 bank runs, 176 Barings Bank, 61 Barnea, Amir, 161 Baron-Cohen, Simon 111 Barrett, Majel, 396 Bartra, Oscar, 100 BATS Global Markets, 360 Bear Stearns, 304, 305, 307, 308, 309, 316, 317 Bechara, Antoine, 106 behavioral economics, 3, 6–7, 51, 71, 92, 220 Behavioral Investment Allocation Strategy (BIAS), 90 behavioral risk, 388–394 Beinhocker, Eric, 218 bell curve (Gaussian distribution), 22, 273 Benner, Samuel, 29 Benner’s Prophecies of Future Ups and Downs in Prices, 29 Benyamine, David, 60 Bernanke, Ben, 300 Bernoulli, Daniel, 57 Berns, Gregory, 97, 98 Berra, Yogi, 415 beta (measure), 232, 249, 251, 252, 268–269, 282 Between a Rock and a Hard Place (Ralston), 118 Beutler, Ernest, 419 Bezear Homes, 325 Biham, Eli, 238 Billio, Monica, 376 binary choice model, 190–199, 201–202, 220, 362 biodiversity, 148–149 biofeedback, 93 biological determinism, 170–172 Biological Economics (Lo and Zhang), 218 biotechnology, 401–410 birthday problem, 67–68 Bismarck, Otto von, 417 Biston betularia (peppered moth), 138–140, 141 Bitcoin, 356 Black, Fischer, 27, 97, 260, 274, 276, 356–357 Black-Scholes/Merton option pricing formula, 10, 27, 97, 211, 260, 356–357 Blinder, Alan, 7, 310 block trading, 235 Bloomberg terminals, 360 Bocskocsky, Andrew, 69 Bogle, John C., 6, 263–264, 265, 397, 398 bonds, 259, 409; for biotechnology, 407; government, 242, 249–250, 292; index funds for, 265 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 322 Bonner, John, 371 bonobo, 162 bonuses, 303–305 Bossaerts, Peter, 101 bounded rationality, 36, 208, 215; Adaptive Markets Hypothesis likened to, 188; applications of, 185, 217; criticisms of, 181–182, 209, 213–214; informational limits acknowledged by, 34; optimization contrasted with, 180, 183 Boyle, Danny, 118 bracketology, 64–65 brain size, 152–53 brainstem, 81 Breiter, Hans, 88–89 Brennan, Tom, 182, 190, 196–197, 198, 203, 220, 362, 369 Brexit referendum, 377 Brodmann, Korbinian, 76 broker-dealers, 304–308, 311, 376 Bronze Age, 163 Brosnan, Sarah F., 337 Brownian motion, 19, 211 Buck v.

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell
by Neal Stephenson
Published 3 Jun 2019

And when the hoax was discovered and quashed, all of them would be tracked down by vengeful Miasma sleuths and all of them would probably tell a similar story: they had been recruited by a production company working on a low-budget indie thriller, they had gone to certain soundstages and recited certain lines. They and the production crew had all been paid in some untraceable way, through Bitcoin or whatever, and they’d moved on to the next job. A text came through from Laurynas: We found the people who made the mushroom cloud sim—a CGI house in the Philippines. He Googled Moab hoax and found a basically infinite amount of stuff already posted. Much of it was right for the wrong reasons.

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The Moab Project investigated and documented the operational details of the hoax in forensic detail, right up to the point where each separate trail of evidence dead-ended in perfect cryptographic anonymity. The total budget for the hoax was estimated to have been less than one million dollars. The networks had actually paid out more than that for the privilege of airing fake footage supplied by the hoaxers. Those payments, made in Bitcoin, had gone to anonymous overseas accounts presumably controlled by the hoaxers. Between that and short-selling various affected stocks on Wall Street, it appeared that they had paid for the exploit many times over. Which was a mere detail when set against the thirty-one deaths and the direct economic losses, which were way into the tens of billions.

…

The scripts and other written material, such as fake blogs and social media postings, seemed to have been written by native English speakers. More people than just Corvallis began to suspect Elmo Shepherd of being the mastermind. He was a major shareholder, or a member of the board of directors, of more than one company that would profit from what came next. He was libertarian minded, a Bitcoin advocate. And he was from Utah, with a lot of local practical knowledge of conditions on the ground there. And so one school of thought said that he must have done it. The opposing school of thought said simply “nah.” Simply “nah.” It was too ridiculous—too far-fetched. The connection to El’s home state was a mere coincidence, or a deliberate scheme to cast suspicion on him.

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking)
by Christian Rudder
Published 8 Sep 2014

Thank you to Michael Tapper and Ben Murray for reading drafts, and to Sean Mathey at Mathey & Tree, Eric Brown at Franklin, Weinrib, Rudell & Vassallo, and John Therien at Smith Anderson for legal work. Thank you to Doug Demay for advice that was no less wise for being informal. Finally, thank you to Jed McCaleb and Justin Rice, who, from d20s to bitcoin to Dylan to Ulysses, have taught me so much. My life and this book are much richer for your friendship. Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abrams, J. J. abstractions, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 12.1 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Africa, 9.1, 9.2n, 9.3, 12.1 African Americans, 12.1, nts.1 jokes about, 8.1n, 8.2, 9.1 as political candidates, 8.1, 8.2 on Twitter, 13.1, nts.1 see also racism aging AIDS, 9.1, 9.2 algorithms, itr.1, 4.1, 6.1, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1n, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 11.1, 12.1, 13.1, 13.2, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3 Ali, Muhammad, 8.1, nts.1 Amazon, itr.1, bm2.1, nts.1 American Institute of Public Opinion American Political Science Association (APSA) Anderson, Benedict, 12.1, nts.1 Anderson, Pamela Anonymous collective anorexia Apple, 3.1, 14.1 apps, itr.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 12.1, 13.1, 14.1, nts.1 Arab Spring, n Aristotle, 10.1, nts.1 Arizona State University, 3.1, nts.1 Asians, itr.1, 6.1, 8.1, 10.1 atheism, 5.1, 7.1 attractiveness, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 7.1, nts.1, nts.2 aging and disparities in, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 jobs and, 7.1, 7.2 of men to women, 1.1, 2.1, 5.1, 6.1 race and, 6.1, 6.2 satisfaction and, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 sex and, itr.1, 1.1, 2.1, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, bm2.1 of women to men, 1.1, 5.1 Atwater, Lee, 8.1, nts.1 Backstrom, Lars, 4.1, nts.1, nts.2 ballads, 3.1, 10.1 Ballou, Sullivan, 3.1, 3.2, nts.1, nts.2 Bass Ale, 13.1, 13.2, nts.1 Baywatch (TV series), 6.1, nts.1 Beatles, 10.1, 13.1 beauty, itr.1, 1.1, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1n definition of, 2.1, nts.1 divisiveness of, itr.1, 7.1 effects of imperfection and, 2.1, 2.2 Beauty Myth, The (Wolf) behavior research Big Data, itr.1, itr.2, 6.1 Big Lead, The (blog) biology: evolutionary marine, 9.1, nts.1 bisexuality, itr.1, 11.1n, nts.1 male vs. female, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 message exchanges and, 11.1, 11.2 vocabulary typical of, 11.1 Bisexual Resource Center blindness, 6.1, nts.1 blogs, itr.1, 3.1, 5.1, 6.1, 13.1, bm2.1 body-image Blumenbach, Johann books, 3.1n, 3.2, 8.1, 12.1 Boston, Mass., 6.1, 11.1 Boston Globe, 6.1, 9.1, 11.1, nts.1, nts.2, nts.3 Boston Marathon bombing, 14.1, nts.1 Bradley effect, 8.1, nts.1 brain, itr.1, 2.1, 7.1 Brand Called You, The (Montoya) “Brand Called You, The” (Peters) brands, 9.1, 13.1, nts.1 personal, 13.1, 13.2, nts.1 product, 13.1, 13.2, nts.1, nts.2 Breitbart, Andrew British Trademark Registration Act Bujalski, Andrew Burns, Ken BuzzFeed, 9.1, nts.1 calculus, 4.1, 9.1 California, 8.1, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3 cancer Carnegie, Andrew Carnegie, Dale, 13.1, 13.2, nts.1 Carver, Raymond celebrities, 9.1, 11.1, 13.1, 14.1 gay Census, US, 1.1, 10.1, nts.1, nts.2 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Chicago, Ill., 8.1, 12.1, 12.2 children, itr.1, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, bm2.1 birth of raising of, 1.1, 2.1, 7.1 teenage, 1.1, 2.1, 3.1, 7.1, 7.2, 9.1, 10.1, 12.1, 13.1 China Christianity, 7.1, 13.1 Chungking Express (film) Civil War, The (TV series) Civil War, US, 3.1, 3.2 Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clovis people Coldest Winter Ever, The (Sister Souljah) Columbia University communication, 3.1, 5.1, 9.1, 13.1, 14.1 connections fostered by, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 13.1 identifying sources of momentous changes in, 3.1, 3.2 communities, itr.1, 12.1, 13.1 movement of virtual Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) computers, itr.1, itr.2, 5.1, 6.1, 8.1, 13.1 cookies on hard drives on laptop, itr.1, 13.1 limitations of science of, 4.1, 13.1, 14.1 sitting at software for, 4.1, 4.2, 6.1, 9.1, 11.1, 12.1, 14.1, 14.2 storage of data on, itr.1, 1.1, 3.1, 14.1 use of mouse with Condor, 9.1, 9.2 Congress, US, 9.1, 12.1 approval ratings of, itr.1, nts.1 see also House of Representatives, US Constitute project conversation, itr.1, 4.1, 7.1, 8.1 in-depth on-line, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 on race Cornell University, 11.1, 12.1 Craigslist, itr.1, 12.1, nts.1 maps of, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3 “Missed Connections” section on, 12.1, 12.2 Crawford, Cindy Crick, Francis criminal justice system, 6.1, 7.1 black vs. white defendants in, 6.1, 8.1 Cronkite, Walter cross dressing Cuban Missile Crisis culturomics, 3.1, 3.2n curves, itr.1, itr.2, 7.1, 7.2, 9.1, bm2.1, nts.1 bell beta, itr.1, nts.1 customer relations management (CRM) customers contradictory behavior of Cyrus, Miley data, itr.1, 9.1, bm2.1 actor vs. acted upon in analysis of, itr.1, 1.1, 2.1, 4.1, 6.1, 14.1, bm2.1 collection of, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, itr.4, itr.5, 1.1, 1.2, 8.1, 12.1, 14.1 commercial use of, itr.1, 14.1, 14.2 corporate use of, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3 cross-referencing of deletion of, 14.1, 14.2 digital, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, 6.1, bm2.1 emotional shading behind extrapolations from, 6.1, 8.1, 14.1 governmental surveillance of, itr.1, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, nts.1 hacking of, 12.1, 14.1, 14.2, nts.1 of human interaction, itr.1, itr.2 human story behind, itr.1, itr.2 lack of location longitudinal message, 3.1, 6.1 personal pollution of, 11.1n, 12.1 privacy issue and, itr.1, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, 14.4, nts.1 robust, 5.1, 10.1 selection bias and selling of, 14.1, 14.2 storage of, itr.1, 1.1, 3.1, 14.1 as storytelling terabytes of, itr.1, 2.1 truth of, 13.1, 14.1 unprecedented deluge of, itr.1, 4.1, 14.1, 14.2 use of color with, itr.1, 3.1, bm1.1 visualization of, 1.1n, 14.1 as windows on our lives databases, itr.1, 1.1, 3.1, 8.1 dataclysm.org/relationshiptest, 4.1 DateHookup, itr.1, 6.1, 6.2 dating, 1.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, nts.1 attractiveness and satisfaction in, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 racism and, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5 see also websites, dating Dazed and Confused (film), 1.1, 12.1 death “and taxes,” death penalty Democratic Party, 5.1, 8.1, 13.1 demographics, itr.1, 1.1, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 10.1 depression, 8.1, 11.1 Description of a Slave Ship Digital OnLine Life and You (DOLLY Project), 12.1, nts.1 disease, 4.1, 14.1, bm1.1 epidemics of, 8.1, 8.2, 14.1, nts.1 “Dittoheads,” dogfooding Don’t Look Back (film) Dowdell, James, 4.1, nts.1 drugs, 8.1, 11.1 side effects of Dylan, Bob, itr.1, itr.2 Earth, itr.1, 2.1, 10.1, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3 age of, 9.1, 9.2 as viewed from space earthquakes, 7.1, 12.1, 12.2, nts.1 eating disorders economics, 1.1, 8.1, 13.1 Economist, 9.1, nts.1 education, 1.1, 5.1, 6.1 college, itr.1, 4.1, 6.1, 10.1, 13.1, 14.1 exchange programs in high school, itr.1, 3.1, 6.1, 9.1, 12.1, 13.1 Egypt, 9.1, 9.2, 13.1 Einstein, Albert, 10.1, 13.1, 13.2, 14.1 elections, US black candidates in, 8.1, 8.2 district gerrymandering and exit polls in of 1952 of 1982 of 2008, 8.1, 8.2, nts.1, nts.2 of 2012 e-mail, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 5.1, 12.1, 14.1 embeddedness, 4.1, 4.2 employment, 6.1, 6.2 search for, 7.1, 7.2 see also jobs English language, 3.1, 3.2, 10.1 Enlightenment era, 4.1, 6.1 Escher, M.

Investing Demystified: How to Invest Without Speculation and Sleepless Nights
by Lars Kroijer
Published 5 Sep 2013

In a really nasty world scenario those cash holdings could prove invaluable and ensure survival longer than many governments. To ensure that you actually own those underlying stocks you would need an ETF to be physical instead of synthetic, where you take credit risk with the issuer. 2 The emergence of virtual currencies/commodities like Bitcoin may provide financial shelter in the future and a potential alternative to gold. These currencies are still in the nascent stages, but if they end up as a recognised asset that can be stored securely I would not be surprised to see its value go up at times of turmoil and stress in the financial markets.

Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime-From Global Epidemic to Your Front Door
by Brian Krebs
Published 18 Nov 2014

To create these safeguards, most established crime forums require new applicants to list at least two existing and trusted forum members as references or “vouches,” signaling that one or more existing members of the forum can vouch for the applicant’s skills and integrity and have invited the novice to apply for membership. New applicants generally also must proffer a nonrefundable deposit, usually in the form of a digital currency such as WebMoney or bitcoins. Assuming the applicant’s references confirm that members know him and can vouch for his skills, the applicant is granted limited access to the forum, which he can then use to introduce himself to the broader community, plead his case for membership, and list any unique talents that his full membership would bring to the forum.

Give People Money
by Annie Lowrey
Published 10 Jul 2018

Musk, Gates, and other tech titans have expressed interest in the policy christened the “social vaccine of the twenty-first century,” “a twenty-first-century economic right,” and “VC for the people.” Increasingly, that interest is turning into action. There are now “basic income create-a-thons,” for programmers to get together, talk UBI, and hack poverty. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are looking into a Bitcoin-backed basic-income program. A number of young millionaire tech founders are funding a basic-income pilot among the world’s poorest in Kenya. The start-up accelerator Y Combinator is sending no-strings-attached cash to families in a few states as part of a research project. And Chris Hughes, a founder of Facebook, has plowed $10 million into an initiative to explore UBI and other related policies, something he is calling the Economic Security Project.

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be
by Diane Coyle
Published 11 Oct 2021

In every case, the absence of the underlying data gathering has been a hurdle, and official statisticians are gradually adjusting their surveys and other forms of data gathering to fill the gaps. However, there is more to the measurement challenge than just having failed to keep up with needing to know how many people are employed in the videogames industry or what proportion of transactions are taking place in bitcoin. Economic statistics fit the world into a philosophical framework. The current System of National Accounts has been described as the ‘one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century’. The invention of GDP (or rather its predecessor GNP) has even been credited with helping the Allies win the Second World War by providing them with a more accurate estimate of the nations’ productive capacity and consumption needs (Lacey 2011).

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

Humans are talking animals, and whatever the idiots in the Manosphere have to say (god, men talk A LOT), a doll that appears to be taking an interest in you via voice commands, seems to be necessary to the fantasy of a relationship. As soon as this doll can make her man a sandwich, she’ll be bigger than Bitcoin. In China, doll-buying is becoming more popular and more public. DollMates is a prolific group on Chinese social media. Some men on the site have never had a relationship with a female. Others use the dolls as love-objects while maintaining a human relationship. I think it is likely that the popularity of consoles and gaming in China has influenced wider acceptance of AI-enhanced dolls.

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News
by Eliot Higgins
Published 2 Mar 2021

It is difficult to know how to react: you’re probably just dealing with an idiot who wants to upset you, but the person could intend to harm you. Robert Evans, after writing about the shitposting in the Christchurch gunman’s manifesto, found a post on 8chan of his own face photoshopped into a ‘Wanted’ poster, with a bullet hole in his forehead and the promise of a fifteen-bitcoin bounty – approximately $60,000 at the time. The one-word message was ‘bump’. Another 8chan poster responded: ‘Unironically? For that much it can be done.’ This was probably an empty boast. But 8chan ‘pranks’ have a way of turning into real bloodshed. In another instance, we were investigating Ukrainian neo-Nazis through the Bellingcat Anti-Equality Monitoring group, which studies fascist movements targeting the LGBT community, feminists and ethnic minorities in Ukraine, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls
by Tim Marshall
Published 8 Mar 2018

The planet and its human inhabitants are too complex for there to be a sudden shift to a global government in which nation states are dissolved and the world is the ‘province of all mankind’. The demise of the nation state is frequently forecast for a variety of reasons: globalization, federal superstructures such as the EU, the rise of city states and, most recently, by the rise of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. And yet the nations and the states keep surviving. What’s more, the world of nation states that we live in has, for all its flaws, brought with it relative stability. We have come a long way, even if there is further to go. Measure the post-Second-World-War era against the seventy-five years prior to it and you can see how much progress we’ve made.

I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual
by Luvvie Ajayi
Published 12 Sep 2016

Nevertheless, I am a big believer in the notion that we’ve each got to look outside ourselves and figure out what we’re going to do to make this world a little bit less terrible. Even though I check Craigslist several times a week to see if Mars has gotten its shit together and is looking for new roommates, we’re currently all stuck here on Earth together. (I figure if Bitcoin exists, then surely we must be close to creating a colony on the red planet.) So while we’re here on the planet with water and perfect conditions that allow us to exist, what are we doing to contribute to it? What are we doing to ensure that the third rock from the sun isn’t a hellhole where everything sucks?

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It
by Mark Thomas
Published 7 Aug 2019

There are numerous examples of good technology being used badly and little reason to think gene drives would be an exception.8 NEW COMPUTING APPROACHES The world of computing is highly innovative, and there are many emerging technologies that may prove influential over the next thirty-five years. These range from distributed ledger technology (block chain) as used by Bitcoin and other digital currencies, through virtual reality and the Internet of Things to cerebral interfaces. Two areas which may prove to be fundamental are quantum computing and the development of AI: first narrow AI – the use of artificial intelligence to solve tightly defined problems such as image recognition – and, ultimately, full AI.

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World
by Peter Frankopan
Published 14 Jun 2018

* The rapid development of new technologies is also a significant difficulty to address, in terms of trying to predict the impact these will have in the coming years – and working out how to prepare accordingly for a world where artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, machine learning, Blockchain, Ethereum and more will change the way we live, love, work and communicate. Then there are cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which, while exciting for digital pioneers, seem most obviously of interest to those who seek to keep their transactions secure and away from prying eyes – including those who deal in illicit substances or goods, or who prefer to keep potentially taxable revenue away from the authorities. Ironically, the impact of decentralised digital currencies might prove more important for states seeking to continue to engage in trade in the face of pressures – such as sanctions – where the dominance of the dollar, euro and the yen in international transactions makes large-scale trade in other currencies impractical, inconvenient or impossible.

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?
by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland
Published 15 Jan 2021

— Kate Barker Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax System to Make Us Healthier — David Fell A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier — Danny Dorling Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No Transport Policy — Christian Wolmar Travel Fast or Smart? A Manifesto for an Intelligent Transport Policy — David Metz Britain’s Cities, Britain’s Future — Mike Emmerich Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand To Money That Understands Us — David Birch The Weaponization of Trade: The Great Unbalancing of Politics and Economics — Rebecca Harding and Jack Harding Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere? — Christian Wolmar Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery — Andrew Greenway, Ben Terrett, Mike Bracken and Tom Loosemore Gaming Trade: Win–Win Strategies for the Digital Era — Rebecca Harding and Jack Harding The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony — David Birch Catastrophe and Systemic Change: Learning from the Grenfell Tower Fire and Other Disasters — Gill Kernick Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?

Architecting Modern Data Platforms: A Guide to Enterprise Hadoop at Scale
by Jan Kunigk , Ian Buss , Paul Wilkinson and Lars George
Published 8 Jan 2019

Large multinational organizations routinely collect data, both intentionally and incidentally, about their customers and employees around the world. When legal frameworks specify that this data should be kept segregated, it is highly likely that the result is multiple clusters. Multiple Clusters and Independent Storage and Compute Computing workloads come in all shapes and sizes. Some workloads, such as bitcoin mining, use huge amounts of CPU but almost no network or disk resources. At the opposite end of the scale, data archiving makes heavy use of disk storage but very little CPU. As multipurpose environments, modern data platforms need to support a wide range of workloads, often simultaneously. We discuss how clusters can vary in terms of their hardware profiles to support a variety of workloads in Chapter 3.

…

Such accesses include: Network access VPC settings, VPNs, internet gateways, firewalls, security groups Data access Security settings on local or object storage System access Ability to log in to the boxes via SSH or web-based console via accidentally exposed credentials or lax controls A typical case could be criminals using compromised credentials to use computational resources for their own purposes, such as bitcoin mining. Application design Often, real-world cloud deployments include some sort of application or intermediary API layer that accesses cluster services and data. To prevent accidental exposure to data and systems, these applications and APIs need to be carefully designed such that their authentication and authorization controls are at least as strong than those on the cluster.

Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre
Published 18 Jan 2023

Department of Commerce, “Commerce Adds China’s SMIC to the Entity List”; “Addition of Entities to the Entity List, Revision of Entry on the Entity List, and Removal of Entities From the Entity List.” 184production capacity at the 14 nm node: “About Us,” Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, 2022, captured by the Internet Archive February 1, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20220201031506/https://www.smics.com/en/site/about_summary; Khan, Mann, and Peterson, The Semiconductor Supply Chain, 21, 23; Anton Shilov, “China to Ramp Up High-Volume Production Using 14nm Node by End of 2022,” Tom’s Hardware, June 23, 2021, https://www.tomshardware.com/news/china-hopes-to-ramp-up-14nm-production-in-2022. In July 2022, SMIC was revealed to have developed a quasi-7 nm chip for bitcoin mining. Majeed Ahmad, “The truth about SMIC’s 7nm chip fabrication ordeal,” EDN Asia, August 26, 2022, https://www.ednasia.com/the-truth-about-smics-7nm-chip-fabrication-ordeal/; TechInsights, 7nm SMIC MinerVa Bitcoin Miner, 2022. 184expansive new restrictions: “Additional Export Controls: Certain Advanced Computing and Semiconductor Manufacturing Items; Supercomputer and Semiconductor End Use; Entity List Modification,” document no. 2022-21658 (October 13, 2022), https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2022-21658/additional-export-controls-certain-advanced-computing-and-semiconductor-manufacturing-items. 184China announced a $1.4 trillion investment: “China’s Got a New Plan to Overtake the U.S. in Tech,” Bloomberg, May 20, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-20/china-has-a-new-1-4-trillion-plan-to-overtake-the-u-s-in-tech. 185slow to develop a strategy for competing in AI hardware: Christopher Darby and Sarah Sewall, “The Innovation Wars: America’s Eroding Technological Advantage,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-02-10/technology-innovation-wars; Matt Pottinger, “Beijing’s American Hustle,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/2021-08-23/beijings-american-hustle; Ben Buchanan, “The U.S.

Technical Blogging: Turn Your Expertise Into a Remarkable Online Presence
by Antonio Cangiano
Published 15 Mar 2012

Another problem with donations is that if you try to earn money from your blog with ads, sponsorships, and affiliate offers, very few readers will feel like donating to you. And if you get rid of those revenue channels, you generally won’t be able to make up for them with donations alone. I have tried a variety of donation-related approaches, including accepting Bitcoins and receiving micropayments via Flattr and Readability.[93] Earnings were abysmal when compared to other revenue sources. One donation approach that I have seen work many times is having infrequent fund-raising posts,[94] in which the blogger outlines the expenses and time commitment required to keep up the blog and requests (perhaps once a year) that readers to chip in to reach a specific amount of money.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

In the meantime, the only unifying force in such a disunited Europe, the equivalent of bishops and monastics taking over for Roman governance in late antiquity, might be corporate powers—the tech companies above all, based in the United States or China, which would continue to hang the necessary satellites and extract the necessary Bitcoin or Libra payments from natives and migrants alike, maintaining a kind of virtual connection to a former world that had otherwise passed away. Meanwhile, other world powers would endure the way Byzantium endured the twilight of the classical world—as a redoubt, a fortress, in which the forces driving state collapse are held at bay by walls both figurative and literal, and perhaps by the power of surveillance above all.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

When the economic cycle is on the upswing, the prices of financial assets like stocks and shares start increasing. Investors buy these securities, expecting the good times to continue for the foreseeable future. When lots of investors buy the same asset, the price rises. Think, for example, about the increase in the price of Bitcoin, which was driven by expectations about the crypto-currency’s future value almost entirely divorced from its utility. As investors experience several periods of strong returns, they start borrowing greater sums to invest. Banks also tend to lend more to businesses when the economy is doing well. More money enters the financial system, pushing up asset prices even further and creating a self-reinforcing cycle of optimism-driven asset price inflation.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh
Published 14 Apr 2018

You need to have some humility when breaking rules and recognize that you might not understand all the consequences. It’s not always cheating to break the rules, but it is always a high-beta activity, hence the need for caution and compassion. A present-day example of a field where there are both ethical and unethical pirates is the rapid development of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and initial coin offerings (ICOs) as a financing tool. The start-ups that are creating currencies and holding ICOs are operating in a legal gray area and likely breaking rules. Some of these start-ups are ethical pirates who are working to change the rules for everyone. Others are sociopathic criminals who are simply trying to collect as much money as possible before the window closes and devil take the hindmost.

Infinite Detail
by Tim Maughan
Published 1 Apr 2019

The consensus seemed to be it was of military or intelligence agency origin, and regardless of where it had come from there was no doubting it was meant to be a weapon. Rush had seen countless ransomware tools come and go over the decades, viruses designed to seize and infect systems, to paralyze them until their desperate, money-hemorrhaging users coughed up the requested bitcoins to get their data and businesses back. But this was different. There wasn’t even any pretense of making money here, no attempt to inform or give warning to users. This just broke stuff. It just stopped shit working. At the very least, after it had spread itself to anything else it could find, it disconnected what it infected from the network.

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe
by William Poundstone
Published 3 Jun 2019

But this disregards a key feature of quantum theory, the wave function’s amplitude. This determines the probability of observing a particular outcome. Though many worlds says that all quantum possibilities are realized, that doesn’t mean we can just ignore amplitudes and probabilities. Imagine another quantum slot machine. I put in my Bitcoin, push the button, and it makes a quantum measurement to decide whether I win. There’s a 1 in a million chance of hitting the jackpot. In other words, there is a world branch in which I win and another in which I lose. Both branches are real but evidently one is “realer.” I am 999,999 times more likely to find myself in the loser world than the jackpot world.

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
by Joseph Menn
Published 3 Jun 2019

Then he convinced Boston software entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, inventor of the modern electronic spreadsheet, and libertarian engineer John Gilmore to join him in founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Gilmore would soon host the Cypherpunks mailing list, which would be home to the most public-spirited cryptographers of the next two decades, along with hackers, assorted freethinkers, and the probable inventor of Bitcoin.) The trio’s long-term goal was to extend the freedom of the press, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and as many other rights as possible to the digital realm. The short-term goal was to defend hackers who were merely exploring from the full consequences of zealous prosecution, starting with Neidorf.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?
by Aaron Dignan
Published 1 Feb 2019

Moreover, as you put money into that machine, you and its other users have a say in what snacks it will order and how often it should be cleaned. It has no managers, all of those processes were pre-written into code.” Developers, leveraging what they have learned in creating cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, are pioneering a new generation of decentralized applications that allow organizations to operate like that magical vending machine. Through a series of rules called smart contracts, founders can create, fund, and operate an entire organization independent of hierarchical management.

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
by Simone Browne
Published 1 Oct 2015

The root word -veillance is differently applied and invoked, for example, with the terms “überveillance” (often defined as electronic surveillance by way of radio-frequency identification or other devices embedded in the living body), “redditveillance” (the crowdsourcing of surveillance through publicly accessible CCTV feeds, photographs uploaded to online image sharing platforms such as Flickr, and online discussion forums, such as Reddit and 4chan), and “dataveillance,” to name a few.51 Lyon has outlined the “potency of dataveillance” in a surveillance society, which, he writes, is marked by “a range of personal data systems, connected by telecommunications networks, with a consistent identification scheme.”52 The prefix data- signals that such observing is done through data collection as a way of managing or governing a certain population, for example, through the use of bar-coded customer loyalty cards at point of sale for discounted purchases while also collecting aggregate data on loyalty cardholders, or vehicles equipped with transponders that signal their entry and exit on pay-per-use highways and roads, often replacing toll booths. The Guardian newspaper named “surveillance” and “sousveillance” as the words that mattered in 2013 alongside “Bitcoin,” “Obamacare,” and “binge-watching.”53 For Steve Mann, who coined the term “sousveillance,” both terms—sousveillance and surveillance—fall under the broad concept of veillance, a form of watching that is neutral. Mann situates surveillance as the “more studied, applied and well-known veillance” of the two, defining surveillance as “organizations observing people” where this observing and recording is done by an entity in a position of power relative to the person or persons being observed and recorded.54 Such oversight could take the form of red-light cameras that photograph vehicles when drivers violate traffic laws, or the monitoring of sales clerks on shop floors with CCTV, as well as, for example, punch clocks that track factory workers’ time on the floor to more ubiquitous forms of observation, productivity monitoring, and data collection, such as remote desktop viewing or electronic monitoring software that tracks employees’ non-work-related Internet use.

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century
by Jeff Lawson
Published 12 Jan 2021

I happened to pick a banking example to demonstrate Build vs. Die in action. It’s hard to imagine an industry more immune to disruption, given the high stakes (people’s money!) and the byzantine regulations involved. Yet even banking is becoming a software industry. I’m not even talking about the potential impacts of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency; I’m just talking about the basics of how to run a retail bank, acquire customers, and keep them happy. These dynamics are playing out in every industry, all around the world: in Munich, at Allianz, the world’s biggest insurer; in the United States, at Domino’s, Target, and U-Haul.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil
by Kenneth Cukier , Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt
Published 10 May 2021

In other cases, new frames peacefully coexist with the old. Einsteinian and Newtonian physics both have their place in explaining motion, just as proprietary software and open-source code can flourish. Places like Britain, Belgium, Bhutan, and Thailand can meld democracy and monarchy. Central banks manage fiat currencies but people still barter or use Bitcoin. Yet in all cases, reframing an issue allows us to see it from a new perspective, which reveals alternatives that we might not otherwise have imagined. That, in turn, helps us make good decisions and achieve better outcomes. A place where a useful reframing took place was the city of Camden in southern New Jersey.

The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life
by Paul Davies
Published 31 Jan 2019

From that calculation one soon finds that the theoretical maximum amount of work extracted by Szilárd’s engine is kT ln 2. Here the quantity k (known as Boltzmann’s constant) is needed to express the answer in units of energy, such as joules. Putting in the numbers, at room temperature, one bit of information yields 3 x 10−21 joules. fn12 A much-discussed example is bitcoin mining, which is estimated to consume more power than Denmark. fn13 There is an important difference between physically eliminating the 1s and 0s and resetting the state of the computer’s memory to some reference state, such as all 0s, creating a ‘tabula rasa’. It was the latter that Landauer studied.

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back
by Bruce Schneier
Published 7 Feb 2023

Traditionally, this scheme involved calling potential investors on the telephone. Today, it more often involves online trading message boards, social media groups, and spam emails. Whether it’s ringleaders on the Reddit finance forum r/WallStreetBets pushing retail investors to send GameStop’s price “to the moon” or Elon Musk tweeting about his bitcoin buys to millions of online followers, investors can use online communications to manipulate investor expectations and produce asset bubbles for their own profit (and others’ loss) with unprecedented speed and scale. The advent of online trading has made this particular hack even more profitable. Mostly, pump-and-dump is illegal, and there are heavy fines if you get caught.

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals
by Oliver Bullough
Published 10 Mar 2022

When I was in Gibraltar I had a long chat with Albert Isola, minister for digital and financial services, who was surprisingly hip-looking with an open-necked shirt and multicoloured thread bracelet. He was keen to talk about the peninsula’s new proposal for attracting business to the Rock, which is to introduce regulations for companies that use blockchain, a mechanism by which financial or other transactions are recorded in a decentralised way and which underpins crypto-currencies like Bitcoin. From Gibraltar’s perspective, it is acting in a nimble way to take advantage of a new business opportunity, and it is perfectly possible that the companies that submit to the peninsula’s regulators will prove beneficial to the world. It is also, however, perfectly possible that this new technology will act like a twenty-first-century shell company, and help crooks and tax dodgers hide their wealth from democratic scrutiny.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 15 Nov 2016

But, as always, what began with an attempt to create and share new kinds of sounds ended up triggering other revolutions in other domains. The first true peer-to-peer networks for sharing information were designed specifically for the swapping of musical files. It is still too early to tell, but this innovation may turn out to be as influential as those piano keyboards and pinned cylinders, if in fact peer-to-peer platforms like Bitcoin eventually become an important part of the global financial infrastructure, as many people believe. It is entirely possible that the most significant advance in the history of money since the invention of a government-backed currency will end up having its roots in teenagers sharing Metallica songs.

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution
by Wendy Brown
Published 6 Feb 2015

Certainly, neoliberalism ushers in a new order of economic reason, a new governing rationality, new modes and venues of commodification, and of course, new features of capitalism C h a r t in g N eo l ib e r a l P o l i t i c a l R at i o n a l i t y 75 and new kinds of capital — from sharing economies to Bitcoin, from derivatives to human capital — but its systematic imperatives cannot be reduced to any of these things. These imperatives can be radically refashioned and reorganized (as financialization itself makes clear), and they are not matters of instinct or of hydraulics, yet they are fundamental life drives no less fierce than those of a living being.

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction
by Richard Bookstaber
Published 1 May 2017

My first attempt, in the 1980s, was a thriller that portrayed a world without physical currency, where all transactions were done on a system called transNet, and where the central plot revolved around a group bent on destroying the records of that system, throwing the world into chaos. (In other words, Bitcoin gone rogue on a global scale.) There was a backup copy of transNet held in vaults deep under the mountains in Utah (where Mormons keep copies of their genealogical records), but the plot included the erasure of those records once they surfaced. If anyone is interested, I could dust it off and try to finish it, but now the plot would not be so original.

Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter
by Dr. Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler
Published 7 Nov 2017

That’s why the more we understand our flaws and limitations now, the better equipped we’ll be to deal with them in the future. No one can predict the future: not about our investments, health, and jobs, nor about world events, celebrity presidents, and wine-drinking robots.* What we do know is that the future will make our spending decisions even more challenging. From Bitcoin to Apple Pay, retinal scanners, Amazon preferences, and drone delivery, more and more modern systems are designed to make us spend more, more easily, and more often. We are in an environment that is ever more hostile to making thoughtful, well-reasoned, rational decisions. And because of these modern tools, it’s only going to get more difficult for us to make choices that serve our long-term best interests.

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists
by Gary Marcus and Jeremy Freeman
Published 1 Nov 2014

Once one realizes what a GPU can do, and realizes that a GPU is just a different kind of computer, the notion that the brain might somehow not be a computer loses all its force. Many pathways in the visual cortex, for instance, seem to perform transformations on representations of visual scenes, for example, extracting, in parallel edges across a scene. Digital designs like ASICs that are dedicated to specific tasks (like BitCoin mining) show that programs are optional, too; up to certain limits, many programs that might be loaded into memory and executed sequentially can be translated into parallel circuitry that is hardwired and run without a stored program. In my own view, it is obvious that brains (especially those of vertebrates) are computers, in the sense of being systems that operate over inputs and manipulate information systematically.

War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers
by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum
Published 14 May 2020

That’s why its political incarnation seems so radical, and also why it is so hard to imagine Traditionalism ever operating within the institutions of contemporary democratic politics. * * * BANNON AND I had been speaking for nearly an hour and a half when the door to his apartment opened and his next guest, early bitcoin investor Jeffrey Wernick, entered the room. I took my leave, rode the elevator down to the hotel lobby, passed the dapper bar to the right, and wended my way out to the street. How surreal it all was. Bannon was well-read and quick-thinking. Brilliant, even. And yet our conversation also left me curious and unnerved.

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Apr 2015

Another compelling analysis is Ananya Roy’s Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (London: Routledge, 2010). 29Emerson and Bugg-Levine’s comment is from an interview with Alex Goldmark, ‘Social Impact Investing’, 20 October 2011. 30Harvey Koh, Ashish Karamchandani and Robert Katz, ‘From Blueprint to Scale: The Case for Philanthropy in Impact Investing’, Monitor Group report (April 2012), 10. 31See ‘Safaricom: Managing Risk in a Frontier Capital Market’, at fletcher. tufts.edu; the figures on Gates Foundation grants are drawn from the foundation’s Form 990 reports, publicly available on its website. 32Koh et al., ‘From Blueprint to Scale’, 16. 33Eleanor Whitehead, ‘Africa: Aiding Business’, All Africa, 5 January 2012; my discussion in this section is drawn from Linsey McGoey, ‘The Philanthropic State: Market-State Hybrids in the Philanthrocapitalist Turn’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 1 (2014), 109–25. Comments on Vodafone’s tax avoidance drawn from Richard Brooks, The Great Tax Robbery (London: Oneworld, 2014). 34Katie Collins ‘Africa’s First Bitcoin Wallet Launches in Kenya’, Wired, 9 July 2013. 35William Lazonick and Mazzucato Marinna “The Risk-Reward Nexus in the Innovation-Inequality Relationship: Who Takes the Risks? Who Gets the Rewards?’, Industrial and Corporate Change, 22, no. 4 (2013), 1093–128, 1099; see also Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs.

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back
by Jacob Ward
Published 25 Jan 2022

Facebook is so proud of its ability to deliver outcomes to its advertising customers, rather than just eyeballs, that by 2018, a senior executive there told me, the majority of its advertising contracts were written on that basis. This is a function of scale, of course. When two billion people are spending at least an hour a day on average on your platform, you can learn enough about them to deliver the ones that would want to buy a cheese knife or subscribe to a newsletter about Bitcoin. But it’s also a function of pattern recognition, and of putting a price on those patterns. If we wanted to learn the value of a potentially compulsive gambler to a social casino gaming company, we’d only need to know how much Facebook charges social casino companies each time a customer downloads an app.

Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married
by Abby Ellin
Published 15 Jan 2019

Questions about why this is happening: Why do we keep hearing these types of stories now? Is it because, as a culture, we talk more about deception than we used to? Or are there more pathological liars lurking about now? Is it simply Fear of Missing Out that propels people to do whatever they want, others be damned? Does the Internet, with its alibi networks and untraceable Bitcoin and disposable, prepaid credit cards, make it easier to pretend to be someone else? With all of this deceit swirling around us, where does our avowed value of honesty come from? And why do we even expect it from others? And then there are questions about how it’s happening: How do people pull it off, psychologically and logistically?

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

Smartphones, cups of coffee, steel girders, and most other products are owned by the people or companies that bought them. The companies that produced these things are also owned by people. Many shares of Apple, Starbucks, US Steel, and other public companies are held by mutual funds, pension funds, and hedge funds, but all these funds are themselves ultimately owned by people. Most houses, cars, land, gold, Bitcoin, and other assets are also owned by people rather than the government. Voluntary exchange. The phrase most closely associated with capitalism is voluntary exchange. People can’t be forced to buy specific products, take a certain job, or move across the country. Companies don’t have to sell themselves if they don’t want to.

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization
by Branko Milanovic
Published 10 Apr 2016

As the world becomes more integrated, many more such revisions will affect the basic economic tools we use. I have already mentioned that national accounts will become less relevant and that monetary policy may no longer be conducted by states. (And one can think in addition of the role that private monies such as Bitcoin may play.) But even essential economic concepts like comparative advantage, which is based on an implicit assumption of methodological nationalism, that is, of national accounting and immobility of some factors of production, may have to be revised. In a single market both wine and cloth would be, as in David Ricardo’s famous example, produced in Portugal because workers and machines would all move there (and none would stay in England).

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley
by Atsuo Inoue
Published 18 Nov 2021

‘Whoever controls AI controls the future; the future of humankind lies in AI,’ Son declared, once again stating his intent to invest in technological advances and that going forward the SoftBank Group would seek to simultaneously both attack as well as defend its position. Responding to a question put to him by Andrew Ross Sorkin (DealBook editor and CNBC presenter) at the DealBook Online Summit organised by the New York Times held on 17 November 2020 concerning his failed stake in Bitcoin, Son stated, ‘I was told to look into it, so I did, but now I don’t bother with it any more.’ He would also talk about the optimistic outlook he has for ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company), as the SoftBank Vision Fund is a major investor. Furthermore, he spoke about the extensive monetisation operation under way, stating the SoftBank Group had ‘80 billion dollars (approximately 8.32 trillion yen, inclusive of deals such as the sale of ARM, which should be concluded by March 2022) in cash in hand.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince
Published 22 Aug 2022

The group’s first venture, a floating charter city in French Polynesia, stalled at the planning stage due to negative reaction from the French Polynesians, concerned about pollution, disruption and environmental damage. One Tahitian TV host compared the situation to the evil Galactic Empire in Star Wars imposing on the innocent Ewoks, while secretly building the Death Star.21 Undeterred, Bitcoin tycoon Chad Elwartowski and his partner, Supranee Thepdet, built a Seastead cabin off the coast of Phuket in Thailand in 2019. However, the Thai government charged them with violating national sovereignty, which carries the death penalty, and the couple fled, escaping Thai naval police by minutes.

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors
by Spencer Jakab
Published 1 Feb 2022

A passenger stands up in his seat on an airplane, asking for and receiving a show of hands: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” Especially for a generation whose formative years included the global financial crisis, Wall Street’s advice had a credibility problem. These were the people who had told them or their parents that “subprime is contained,” that bitcoin was too speculative, and that they should be happy making 8 percent a year in mutual funds. Peers and wealthy influencers from outside the traditional financial sphere, such as Silicon Valley executives Elon Musk and Chamath Palihapitiya, are seen as far more reliable than the man with a nice suit in a brokerage commercial.

How to Own the World: A Plain English Guide to Thinking Globally and Investing Wisely
by Andrew Craig
Published 6 Sep 2015

New York: Dutton, 2003. Frieden, Jeffry A., and David A. Lake. International Political Economy: Perspectives on Global Power and Wealth. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Friedman, Thomas L. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Frisby, Dominic. Bitcoin: The Future of Money? Unbound, 2014. ———. Life after the State. Unbound, 2013. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. ———. Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. New York: Free Press, 1996. Funnell, Warwick, Jane Andrew, and Robert E.

My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture
by Guy Branum
Published 29 Jul 2018

On most trips, I boarded the van with a book and we all politely listened to late-1990s indie pop as we crossed America’s fruited plains, but as time wore on, our collective need for socialization crept high enough that van-wide talk began. There was a jaded conspiracy theorist who probably ended up buying a lot of Bitcoin early on; there was a bearded chemical engineer I assumed was in his mid-thirties but was actually eighteen. A Mennonite historian, a Muslim Kansan girl whose dad owned three Dairy Queens, a dazzlingly intelligent, medium-handsome architecture student, a thirty-seven-year-old who enrolled in classes at the university only so he could play quiz bowl, and a zaftig freshman girl from North Dakota who dressed and behaved exactly as though she were an eighth-grade boy.

This Is Not Fame: A "From What I Re-Memoir"
by Doug Stanhope
Published 5 Dec 2017

Sauce and cocktail straws. I’d told Hennigan weeks before the tour ended that I was done with doing stand-up comedy as soon as we got home. I meant it. I’ve told him from the plotting of my first book that I would never write another book as well. My word is worth the exchange rate of dog shit to bitcoin. I’ve been compared to Bill Hicks quite often in the later years of my career, almost exclusively and repeatedly in the UK where he is revered. At first this didn’t bother me. I was flattered and somewhat scared as though I had to somehow live up to and fill his big dead shoes. It didn’t start to annoy me until I’d see people online shitting on me for thinking I was the next Bill Hicks.

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations
by Nandan Nilekani
Published 4 Feb 2016

In Sweden, you can buy a magazine from a homeless vendor, or make a donation in a church, and pay with your credit card.14 PayPal, was an early pioneer in online payments, and services like Square, Paytm, MobiKwik, Apple Pay and Ezetap (founded by our former UIDAI colleague Sanjay Swamy) offer a multitude of electronic payment options to the consumer, whether it’s turning your phone into a mobile terminal that can process credit card payments, or letting you pay by simply tapping your phone against a point-of-sale terminal in a store. Smartphones like Apple’s iPhone 6 now come equipped with fingerprint readers so that adding your fingerprint data to every online transaction increases the security and reliability of such payment systems. Taking things further, we have systems like Bitcoin that operate on ‘digital currency’—not issued or controlled by any government—where users can transfer money completely free of regulatory oversight. Lest one think that all of these innovations are confined to developed nations, consider M-Pesa, a mobile payment system operational in Kenya and Tanzania that’s run by Safaricom and Vodacom, subsidiaries of the telecom giant Vodafone.

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy
by David Sawyer
Published 17 Aug 2018

In Section 3 of the FIRE Triumvirate, I reveal the secret weapon in your journey to early retirement. A simple, transparent, set-and-forget approach to investing that allows you to focus on what’s important in life: being happier. Chapter 30 Section 3: Investing (Options, Interest and the SWR) IT’S TUESDAY FEBRUARY 7TH 2018. I’m writing this sentence after the bitcoin bubble has burst and our portfolio has dropped 7% in the space of a week. I have friends who have converted their defined contribution pensions to cash and are running for the hills. Panic reigns. Yet I’m saying you should consider placing your life savings in the stock market. Is he mad? you’re thinking.

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass
by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri
Published 6 May 2019

And, much like we found among other workers, LeadGenius’s team members end their shifts and meet up with fellow workers who live in their local communities. LeadGenius pays workers every other Tuesday, by noon California time (that’s where the startup’s headquarters are based), using digital payment services PayPal, Payoneer, and even Bitcoin. But, as with MTurk and UHRS, getting paid requires direct deposit, so workers must take a leap of faith and connect their bank account to accept a global transfer from a company headquartered on the other side of the planet, operated by people they may never meet or speak to in person. Working for LeadGenius, Zaffar saved enough money for his marriage ceremony and to take almost a month off from work.

Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life
by Alan B. Krueger
Published 3 Jun 2019

Newman, “Power Laws, Pareto Distributions and Zipf’s Law,” Contemporary Physics 46, no. 5 (2005): 323–51; Dimitrios Rafailidis and Yannis Manolopoulos, “The Power of Music: Searching for Power-Laws in Symbolic Musical Data,” working paper, Department of Informatics, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2008. 20. Stephen Gandel, “Beware, Bitcoin Buffs, Bubbles Often Bite,” Bloomberg, Sep. 29, 2017. 21. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006). 22. Paul Krugman, “Is This (Still) the Age of the Superstar?,” New York Times, Jun. 13, 2013. 23. Author’s calculation using information from the Pollstar Boxoffice Database. 24.

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
by Martin Gurri
Published 13 Nov 2018

They symbolized a starched-collar kind of mastery, and they meant to impress. Even the lowest-ranking person in these organizations, the names implied, had risen far above the masses. The digital age loves self-mocking names, which are a way to puncture the formal stiffness of the established order: “Yahoo,” “Google,” “Twitter,” “reddit,” “Flickr,” “Photobucket,” “Bitcoin.” Without having asked the people in question, I feel reasonably sure that the founders of Google never contemplated naming their company “National Search Engine Corporation” and Mark Zuckerman of Facebook never felt tempted by “Social Connections Center of America.” It wasn’t the style. The names of two popular political blogs from the early days of blogging, Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, poked fun at the pretentiousness of the news business.

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut
by Nicholas Schmidle
Published 3 May 2021

She and Moses formed a potent intellectual duo, needling each other like only married aerospace engineers could. “I used to say that his program was just the truck that got me there,” said Beth. “He used to say that, without his truck, all my spacewalk hardware was just very expensive scuba gear.” She hosted Bitcoin hardware in their garage. We shared a roomy booth. He drank craft beer. She sipped a fluorescent cocktail from a martini glass. Beth was used to being the black sheep in a male-dominated world. Virgin’s pilots, engineers, and techs were overwhelmingly male. Historically, women have accounted for 20 percent of all engineering majors.

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans
by Eben Kirksey
Published 10 Nov 2020

The doctor who ran this clinic, Eric Scott Sills, was later arrested and charged with murdering his wife and business partner.4 * * * When Ascendance Biomedical launched their new website, http://ascendance.io, in December 2017, they invited the public to “Help Us Choose Our Next Experiments.” Tristan Roberts designed the front end of the website, plus a back-end cryptocurrency infrastructure that would enable anyone to invest in the project, undetected by the government. Rather than Bitcoin, the best-known cryptocurrency, the group was banking on Ethereum, a newer currency that was growing exponentially in value. One coin (known as an “ether”) was valued at $299 in early November 2017, and the price skyrocketed to $821 just before Christmas. Ascendance offered a diverse menu of options on their website.

Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath
by Bill Browder
Published 11 Apr 2022

His office was indicting 12 Russian GRU officers (the GRU is Russia’s military intelligence wing), accusing them of hacking the Democratic National Committee and interfering in the election to help Trump win. The indictment was devastating. Mueller had gained access to secret emails between Russian intelligence officers. He’d also found Bitcoin payments, which are supposed to be untraceable by their nature, that the Russians had used to fund their operations in the United States. It looked like the US government would secure iron-clad convictions—if these 12 Russian officers could ever be brought before a US court. Whatever had been on Trump’s and Putin’s agenda before, the Mueller indictment would now be front and center, no matter how awkward it would be for both sides.

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
by Elle Reeve
Published 9 Jul 2024

He felt like he was being deleted from the internet. He’d been permanently banned from mainstream social media, including dating sites. It was hard to make money. He’d been kicked off several payment processors, and estimated he’d been turned down by a hundred others. He took donations in cryptocurrency, but not many people used it, and with Bitcoin, there was no mechanism for recurring payments. But the biggest problem, he said, was Sines v. Kessler. He thought the discovery process—in which the plaintiffs subpoenaed records of alt-right leaders’ communications with one another—was the whole point of the case. It was certainly the most interesting part of the case to me.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason
Published 29 Jul 2015

Out of the ruins, he predicts, will come a system where all loans have to be backed by cash in the bank, known as ‘100 per cent reserve banking’, together with a new Gold Standard. This will require a massive one-off hike in the price of gold, as the value of all the gold in the world has to rise to make it equal to the world’s wealth. (A similar rationale stands behind the Bitcoin movement, which is an attempt to create a digital currency, not backed by any state and with a limited number of digital coins.) This proposed new world of ‘real’ money would come at a massive economic cost. If bank reserves have to match loans made, there can be no expansion of the economy through credit, and there can be little space for derivatives markets, where complexity – in normal times – aids resilience to problems such as drought, crop failure, the recall of faulty motor cars etc.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy)
by Benjamin Peters
Published 2 Jun 2016

Following this line of thought, Glushkov included in his initial OGAS draft proposal a noteworthy provision to eliminate all paper currency, providing in its place wireless money transfers, or a “moneyless system of receipts” over the OGAS network.31 Although modern readers may be tempted to see in his proposal a prototype of the modern-day ATM, e-commerce digital money transfers, PayPal, or BitCoin, Glushkov framed paperless money transfers in the politics of his time and place, calling it the fulfillment of a Marxian prophecy of a future Communist society without hard currency. Read backward in presentist terms, as historians are loath to do, the proposal, if realized, would have transformed the Soviet Union into, in Vladislav Zubok’s phrase, “a computerized socialist utopia, the motherland of the Internet and also possibly the ATM.”32 I maintain that the historical lesson is that whatever our present-day language and whatever the future imaginations of hard currency, the past brims with a variety of visionaries who thought about the future of money as virtual, when as history instructs, the dominant form of currency has already always been, since ancient Mesopotomia, the arithmetic matter of credit and debit—itself a form of expectant funds, or money transfers made virtual across time, not space.33 After reviewing the proposal, Keldysh, then president of the Soviet Academy of Science and a major supporter of Glushkov, asked to meet with Glushkov privately and urged Glushkov to strike from his original OGAS proposal the recommendation of a networked society without hard currency out of fear that it would raise “unneeded emotions.”

Bit Rot
by Douglas Coupland
Published 4 Oct 2016

Let’s not forget that people are demanding more from their currency these days. The new Canadian twenty is a high-tech marvel: one-quarter transparent, it contains no culturally offensive references of any kind, and features a stern photo of the Queen contemplating having to eat Christmas dinner at the Middletons’. And then there’s bitcoin. Should it ever get fully off the ground in a material way, all I ask is that they focus-group a little bit and then, having gone through the motions, just put Elvis on the damn thing. Grexit Okay, just look at the following words: Grexit. Syriza. Tsipras. Merkel. Austerity. At first glance they don’t even look like words; they resemble, I don’t know…launch codes—or maybe the names of recently FDA-approved osteoporosis medications—and yet at the moment these words are some of the most freighted in the language.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

The pale, thin, beautiful lad and girl in their branded red Radisson hoodies and Converses looked at me as if I’d asked for an antimacassar or an elephant gun. ‘We don’t do room service,’ they explained. ‘Everyone uses Just Eat and Deliveroo … on their phones, y’know …’ The information was relayed in the same hesitant tone of voice they might employ to explain Bitcoin to a hundred-year-old Bolivian villager. This morning, I left my room to head to the museum, having with some awkwardness hung a sign on the doorknob featuring a pouting young woman in John Lennon glasses bearing the legend: ‘Shh! Don’t tell my Mum but please tidy my room.’ This without any apparent irony.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

The very same week that Google’s $90 million Andy Rubin sex scandal hit the papers, there was news of another and perhaps even more telling debacle: 125 Android apps and websites were subject to a multimillion-dollar scam. Essentially, fraudsters acquired legitimate apps—many targeted at kids, including a number of popular games, a selfie app, a flashlight app, and more—from their developers (paid for in Bitcoin) and sold them to shell companies in Cyprus, Malta, the British Virgin Islands, Croatia, Bulgaria, and elsewhere. Unbeknownst to the users, these apps had been loaded up with bots programmed to capture their every click, scroll, and swipe—then mimic that behavior to artificially boost traffic to the apps’ ads and collect bigger payouts from advertisers, even as they increased the risk of compromising the data of the real human beings who were being duped.

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets
by Thomas Philippon
Published 29 Oct 2019

JPMorgan Chase & Co. recently announced that it will require its asset management analysts to learn to use Python, a powerful and flexible coding language. This is not to say that all fintech ideas are great. There is a lot of hype and buzzword use. “Big” data is just data. “Machine learning” often simply means running a large number of nonlinear regressions on large data sets. Most of the transactions in Bitcoins involve drugs, pornography, and weapons. But there are also some genuinely useful ideas. A clear winner is the market for remittances. Remittances are the transfers of money by a foreign worker back to their home country. Poor households have been ripped off for decades by a highly concentrated banking industry.

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments
by Andrew Henderson
Published 8 Apr 2018

Instead, it allows you to harness the systems that are in place with total transparency to build a life of greater freedom and prosperity for yourself, your posterity, and the many other people you care about. However, if you are still bound and determined to achieve anonymity, cryptocurrency is about the only way to obtain some anonymity in your financial dealings. The US recently issued an edict making Bitcoin unfavorable from a capital gains perspective, but at least you can maintain some anonymity. If you are looking for anonymous banking, the first step you should consider is renouncing your citizenship. There are benefits to not having citizenship in a populous, bankrupt country when it comes to availing yourself of bank secrecy laws.

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success
by Tom Eisenmann
Published 29 Mar 2021

In each instance, VCs poured huge amounts of capital into scores of ventures in some hot new sector. Then, the flow of capital suddenly stopped, and startups, starved for capital, struggled to survive. Boom-bust investment cycles do not always impact entire industry sectors. Sometimes they are limited to certain segments, like meal delivery services, virtual reality, pet care, bitcoin/blockchain, direct-to-consumer brands, robo-investing, autonomous vehicles, and so forth. Investment bubbles typically start when entrepreneurs and investors recognize a big, new opportunity, often triggered by technology breakthroughs, like machine learning, gene editing, or voice recognition software (e.g., Jibo).

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

It seems that efforts to recreate a maritime version of Galt’s Gulch, the fictitious libertarian community where the entrepreneurs of a dystopian statist US take refuge in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (a bible for libertarians who follow her pseudo-philosophy known as objectivism), have a tendency to disappoint. Land-based versions fare little better. A community called Galt’s Gulch was actually founded in 2012 in Chile’s wine country. Its official currency was Bitcoin. But it too has failed to achieve its utopian intentions following disputes among its wealthy American founders who later described each other as “drunks, liars, and sociopaths”.2 The community is currently in limbo and, in a most un-libertarian fashion, is facing a myriad of lawsuits. If economics was a religion, libertarians would be its Jehovah’s Witnesses; an almost comically extreme cult based around a utopian worship of individualism that invariably descends into self-destructive selfishness.

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster
by Nick Timiraos
Published 1 Mar 2022

Louis Fed.11 Policymakers had committed not to make the same mistakes from the past. Were they about to make new ones? One obvious source of concern was all the easy money sloshing around in markets. When Biden’s stimulus was approved, the S&P 500 had risen about 75 percent from its pandemic low on March 23, 2020. The price of Bitcoin, the speculative cryptocurrency, was a staggering ten times higher than just a year earlier. Home prices were booming. Investors were pouring cash into newfangled investments, including something called special-purpose acquisition companies—essentially big pools of cash listed on an exchange, prowling for private companies to buy and take public.

Into the Raging Sea
by Rachel Slade
Published 4 Apr 2018

In 2013, the World Bank estimated that the annual cost of piracy off the coast of Somalia ran somewhere around $18 billion. Cyberattack posed another threat. Shipping is heavily dependent on computers for tracking vessels and complex logistics. Maersk, a global shipping giant based in Denmark, found its data held for a $300 bitcoin ransom (about $1 million at the time) by malware in June 2017. The attack cost the company approximately $300 million in lost revenue. Compounding TOTE’s plight: Puerto Rico, the company’s cash cow, was collapsing. Islanders were fleeing the bankrupt state, reducing demand for goods from the mainland.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

Strassheim, I. (2014) ‘Zeit statt Geld fürs Alter sparen’, Migros-Magazin, 1 September 2014. www.zeitvorsorge.ch/#!/DE/24/Medien.htm 59. DEVCON1 (2016) Transactive Grid: a decentralized energy management system. Presentation at Ethereum Developer Conference, 9–13 November 2015, London, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq8RPbFz5UU 60. Seaman, D. (2015) ‘Bitcoin vs. Ethereum explained for NOOBZ’, published 30 November 2015, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEJKLFH8q5c 61. Trades Union Congress (2012) The Great Wages Grab. London: TUC. https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/tucfiles/TheGreatWagesGrab.pdf 62. Mishel, L. and Shierholz, H. (2013) A Decade of Flat Wages.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today
by Linda Yueh
Published 15 Mar 2018

His reckoning was that competition between money providers would favour the most stable of the currencies in circulation. The same competition would also enforce self-regulation. The work was widely derided. Milton Friedman pointed out that there was nothing in current law to prevent bilateral trade using any medium of exchange accepted by all parties. Curiously, the recent rise of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, which are digital currencies that can be used to make purchases on the internet, are an example of non-governmental money. Nevertheless, Hayek’s body of work had made an impression on the politicians who would introduce free-market economics into the British and American economies in the 1980s.

The Great Firewall of China
by James Griffiths;
Published 15 Jan 2018

Dozens of VPN apps and proxy services were also banned.52 Popular Google services, including Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive and the reCAPTCHA security tool, reported disruptions.53 One business owner estimated that he was losing over $32,000 a day due to the disruptions, while others predicted total losses to the economy could quickly reach $1 billion.54 Smart TVs, airline ticket sales, bike rentals, Bitcoin mining, online gaming and mobile wifi were among the many services reportedly affected by the mass IP blocking.55 Soon enough, there were signs the pressure was working. Early on in Telegram’s fight against the ban, Durov publicly thanked “Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft – for not taking part in political censorship”.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture
by Scott Belsky
Published 1 Oct 2018

NEVER BEING FINISHED CONTINUING TO LEARN IS AN ELIXIR TO LIFE. holds more than $600 billion: “Warren Buffett: Latest Portfolio,” Warren Buffett Stock Portfolio, February 14, 2018, http://warrenbuffettstockportfolio.com. Buffett publicly stated: Henry Blodget, “Here’s the Real Reason Warren Buffett Doesn’t Invest in Technology—Or Bitcoin,” Business Insider, March 26, 2014, www.businessinsider.com/why-buffett-doesnt-invest-in-technology-2014-3. one of Apple’s largest: Chuck Jones, “Apple Is Now Warren Buffett’s Largest Investment,” Forbes, February 15, 2018, www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/02/15/apple-is-now-warren-buffetts-largest-investment/#35e572fb4313.

The Nature of Software Development: Keep It Simple, Make It Valuable, Build It Piece by Piece
by Ron Jeffries
Published 14 Aug 2015

These have their own authentication mechanisms and default admin passwords. The whole world got a vivid wake-up call in the early days of 2017, when somewhere north of 20,000 MongoDB installations were taken hostage. The databases had default credentials and were exposed to the Internet. Attackers took the data, wiped the database out, and replaced it with a demand for bitcoin. (Note that MongoDB, the company, has a thorough guide for securing the database;[61] it’s unfortunate that the default installation at the time was not secured.) Remember the install script is the first step in installation, not the last. Another common security misconfiguration relates to servers listening too broadly.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
Published 14 Jun 2018

Many of them came from local radical anarchist groups that call themselves “antifascists,” or “Antifa.”4 UC Berkeley officials claimed5 that only about 150 of the protesters were responsible for the vandalism and violence that ensued—knocking down a light generator;6 shooting commercial-grade fireworks7 into buildings8 and at police officers;9 smashing ATMs;10 setting fires;11 dismantling barricades12 and using them (as well as bats)13 to break windows; throwing rocks at police officers;14 and even hurling Molotov cocktails.15 The property damage (exceeding $500,000 for the university and town combined)16 was less chilling, however, than the physical attacks on students and others who attempted to attend the speech. One man carrying a sign saying “The First Amendment is for everyone” was hit in the face, leaving him bloody.17 Others also suffered bloodying blows to the face and head as protesters attacked with fists, pipes, sticks, and poles.18 Recorded on video, a young woman sporting a red MAKE BITCOIN GREAT AGAIN baseball cap told a reporter, “I’m looking to make a statement by just being here, and I think the protesters are doing the same. Props to the ones who are doing it non-violently, but I think that’s a very rare thing indeed.” As she turned, the camera caught a black-gloved hand pepper-spraying her in the face.19 Masked Antifa protesters clad in black used flagpoles to batter a woman and her husband as they were pinned against metal barriers, unable to get away.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition)
by Burton G. Malkiel
Published 5 Jan 2015

John Carswell, the author of an excellent history, The South Sea Bubble, wrote of John Blunt, a director and one of the prime promoters of the securities of the South Sea Company, that “he continued to live his life with a prayer-book in his right hand and a prospectus in his left, never letting his right hand know what his left hand was doing.” Across the Channel, another company was formed by an exiled Englishman named John Law. Law’s goal in life was to replace metal as money and create more liquidity through a national paper currency. (Bitcoin promotors are following a long tradition.) To further his purpose, Law acquired a derelict concern called the Mississippi Company and proceeded to build a conglomerate that became one of the largest capital enterprises ever to exist. The Mississippi Company attracted speculators and their money from throughout the Continent.

Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need
by Grant Sabatier
Published 5 Feb 2019

This is all meant to say, be cautious with your individual stock investments, and if you are just starting out, don’t invest more than 5 percent of your net worth into individual stocks. What is not included in the chart opposite are a few stocks that I lost money on and sold during this period (these amounted to less than $5,000 in losses), my investment in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency (which is highly speculative, and I don’t recommend investing any more than 1 percent of your net worth in any cryptocurrency), or any of my real estate investments. Investments 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 Index Funds Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund (shares) 520 4894 6903 9821 12552 14616 price per share (as of last day of year) $31.57 $31.30 $35.65 $46.69 $51.60 $50.79 Total Value $16,416 $153,182 $246,092 $458,542 $647,683 $742,347 Vanguard Total International Stock Index (shares) 1892 2785 3218 3449 price per share (as of last day of year) $25.05 $28.01 $26.00 $24.24 Total Value $47,395 $78,008 $83,668 $83,604 Individual Stocks Amazon (shares) 30 200 200 300 300 400 price per share (as of last day of year, adjusted for splits) $180.00 $173.10 $250.87 $398.79 $310.35 $675.89 Total Value $5,400 $34,620 $50,174 $119,637 $93,105 $270,356 Facebook (shares) 800 900 900 1070 price per share (as of last day of year, adjusted for splits) $25.91 $54.65 $78.02 $104.66 Total Value $20,728 $49,185 $70,218 $111,986 Apple (shares) 100 100 100 300 300 400 price per share (as of last day of year, adjusted for splits) $41.46 $52.05 $69.00 $74.57 $104.86 $101.70 Total Value $4,146 $5,205 $6,900 $22,371 $31,458 $40,680 Total Income $43,000 $294,000 $233,000 $248,000 $239,000 $271,000 Savings Rate 53.49% 40.68% 55.97% 68.10% 57.45% 60.48% Total Invested Each Year $23,000 $119,610 $130,402 $168,895 $137,317 $163,901 Total invested in Portfolio $23,000 $142,610 $273,012 $441,907 $579,224 $743,125 Total Percentage Growth 12.88% 35.34% 36.00% 64.68% 59.89% 68.07% Portfolio Total $25,962 $193,007 $371,289 $727,743 $926,132 $1,248,973 CONCLUSION The more you invest, the more your money will grow.

Greater: Britain After the Storm
by Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis
Published 19 May 2021

It is about to happen again.25,26 Another effect of the internet is that the control of money has passed from central banks to other, less recognisable, and perhaps less reliable, providers. This creates an unprecedented opportunity for those who wish to ‘get off the grid’, for compliance or criminal reasons, for instance. This is the case with new digital technologies such as bitcoin, which use blockchain security. Blockchain offers an ultimate lock for a transaction, providing transparency and clarity as to the provenance and destination of funding. In this instance, it could be argued that one of the reasons that banking has been slow to adopt technologies like this is precisely because it provides the ultimate in terms of transparency.