cryptocurrency Concepts

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

by Andy Greenberg · 15 Nov 2022 · 494pp · 121,217 words

. Windsor Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Greenberg, Andy, author. Title: Tracers in the dark: the global hunt for the crime lords of cryptocurrency / Andy Greenberg. Description: First edition. | New York: Doubleday, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2022005413 (print) | LCCN 2022005414 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385548090 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385548106

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Luxury Hotel & Villas website, avaton.com. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Alexander Vinnik suddenly found himself: Andrei Zakharov, “Hunting the Missing Millions from Collapsed Cryptocurrency,” BBC News, Dec. 30, 2019. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT CHAPTER 41: “SERACH VIDEOS” When Janczewski and Gambaryan first copied: Welcome to Video

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law enforcement. See Operation Bayonet IP address of server for, 158, 200–2 long-term effects of takedown of, 236–7 Monero as exclusive cryptocurrency on, 314–15 privacy coins and, 299 products banned on, 146, 314 publicity surrounding takedown of, 229 reopening of in 2021, 313–14 Russia and

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of Bitcoin in 2015 by, 136–7 theft from Silk Road by, 112–16. See also Silk Road, theft of $350,000 from BTC-e (cryptocurrency exchange): Bridges, Shaun, and, 136 creation of, 131 dark web ties to, 123–4, 127 Gambaryan, Tigran, and, 127–30, 132–4 Individual X

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secrecy of, 119, 122–3 See also Vinnik, Alexander Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (U.S.), 162 C California Franchise Tax Board, 23 CampBX (cryptocurrency exchange), 66, 75, 80 Camtasia (screen recording program), 79 Canton Business Corporation, 123 Capone, Al, 282 Carmakal, Charles, 296 Cazes, Alexandre: AlphaBay administration by,

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by, 172–6 Bonakdar, Roger, and, 219–20 cars owned by, 157, 159, 165–6, 205, 214–15 credit card fraud business of, 145–6 cryptocurrency owned by, 218 daily schedule of, 194 death of, 221–7, 229, 314–15 demeanor of, 156–7 Desjardins, Paul, and, 156–7 financial

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–18 blockchain analysis tools of, 106, 173, 316–18 BTC-e study by, 292 cluster audit technique of, 258 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack and, 301 cryptocurrency exchange use of, 137 customers of, 310–11 DarkLeaks document stolen from, 316–18 founding of, 100–2 Gladstein, Alex, and, 306–7, 309

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2021 and, 307, 311 vetting of customers by, 310–11 Welcome to Video case and, 258 See also Gronager, Michael; Levin, Jonathan; Møller, Jan Chatex (cryptocurrency exchange), 302 Chaum, David, 45 Chen, Adrian, 33–4 child sexual abuse materials (CSAM): dark web traffic volume and, 247 Internal Revenue Service (U.

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and Exploited Children and, 274 as term, 239 See also Childs Play; Dark Scandals; Love Zone; Welcome to Video Childs Play (CSAM website), 344 China: cryptocurrency potential in, 306 Christin, Nicolas: Agora analysis by, 124 AlphaBay analysis by, 148, 236–7, 340, 345–6 Evolution analysis by, 124 Silk Road

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analysis by, 36, 38 CipherTrace, 138 Circle (cryptocurrency exchange), 245 Clark, Graham Ivan, 289n Clockwork Orange, A (1971 film), 258 Cloud 9 (dark web market), 123 Cloudflare, 127–8 CNA Financial: ransomware

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Comment Ça Marche (online forum), 159–60 Cox, Joseph, 147 Cross-Input Signature Aggregation, 309 “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, The” (May), 29 cryptoanarchy, 29–30, 37 cryptocurrency: anonymity of, 45–6 banks’ lack of trust in, 99–100 criminal use of, 305 development of, 29–30 mixer services for, 172–3, 289

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North Korea, 288 from Silk Road, 68–9, 81–2, 111–15, 292–4 cryptography: as privacy tool, 44–5, 62 Cryptowatch, 107–8 CryptoXchange (cryptocurrency exchange), 132 CSAM. See child sexual abuse materials Customs and Border Protection (U.S.), 261–3, 290–1 CyberBunker, 287 cypherpunks, 27–30, 37

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executive order), 308 Erin (pseud.; FBI analyst): Cazes, Alexandre, case and, 171–7, 193, 215, 218 Escobar, Pablo, 164 Esposito, Calogero. See Bridges, Shaun Ethereum (cryptocurrency), 218 European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), 96 Europol: conference on virtual currency investigations at, 199–201 Hansa case and, 186, 198, 229, 235 Operation

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–2, 228 F Falder, Matthew, 243–4 Falkvinge, Rick, 97 Farivar, Cyrus, 331, 336, 340 Faruqui, Zia: Gambaryan, Tigran, and, 125–6 North Korean cryptocurrency theft cases and, 288 Tamsi, Thomas, and, 256–7 virtual currency strike force of, 125 Welcome to Video case and, 246–7, 254–6, 263

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, Tigran, and, 238 Joint Criminal Opioid and Darknet Enforcement group and, 235 NetWalker case and, 300 New York field office of, 64 North Korean cryptocurrency theft cases and, 288 Operation Onymous and, 123 ransomware cases and, 301–2 Sacramento field office of, 160, 167, 194 Silk Road takedown by, 64

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, 66–76, 78–82 Greenberg, Andy, and, 323–6 Gronager, Michael, and, 111–12, 122, 130 Individual X case and, 292–4 interest in cryptocurrency of, 24–5, 35 at Internal Revenue Service, 23–4 Levin, Jonathan, and, 238–9, 292 Monero and, 324 at National Cyber Investigative Joint Task

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Bitfinex theft case and, 324 Dark Scandals case and, 281 effect of Welcome to Video investigation on, 279, 282 Gambaryan, Tigran, and, 239 North Korean cryptocurrency theft cases and, 288 Son Jong-woo release from prison and, 280 at TRM Labs, 324 Welcome to Video case and, 3–5, 245–7

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5, 118, 120 Kennedy, Maddie, 310–12 kingpin statute, 18, 219 Kober, Alice, 44 Korean National Police Agency. See National Police Agency (South Korea) Kraken (cryptocurrency exchange), 91, 96, 99–100 Krebs, Brian, 57–8 Kryptos (sculpture), 43 L Laos, 162 Large Hadron Collider, 96 Lazarus Group, 288 Lebua (Bangkok hotel

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200 Gambaryan, Tigran, and, 199–201, 238–9, 292 Individual X case and, 292–4 Welcome to Video case and, 243–6, 283 Liberty Reserve (cryptocurrency), 291 Line (messaging app), 205 Linear A, 44 Linear B, 44 Linux Unified Key Setup, 183 Liu, Jesse, 283 LocalBitcoins (peer-to-peer exchanger),

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152 Love Zone (CSAM website), 191 Luno (cryptocurrency exchange), 324 Lysyanskaya, Anna, 45 M M (Thai agent), 212–13 Manchin, Joe, 34 Mandiant, 296 Mansoor, Ahmed, 310–11 Marion, Louisa: Cazes, Alexandre,

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dark web drug cases and, 153–4 Mohammad, Michael Rahim, 281 Møller, Jan, 101–2, 105–7, 169. See also Chainalysis Monahan, Greg, 283 Monero (cryptocurrency): Cazes, Alexandre, and, 218 dark web markets and, 299 as privacy coin, 298–9 traceability of, 299–300, 316, 324 Mr. Dark. See Mohammad,

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York Times, 301 New York University: BTC-e study by, 292 Nilsson, Kim, 129, 137 Nob. See Force, Carl Mark, IV North Korea: cryptocurrency thefts by, 288 cryptocurrency use in, 306 as inaccessible to U.S. law enforcement, 301 ransomware groups and, 300–1 NSO (spyware contractor), 310 Nueng (pseud.): Cazes, Alexandre

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SaboTor, 235 Ormsby, Eileen, 331 Outlaw Market (dark web market), 123 P Pandora (dark web market), 123 Patreon, 306 PayPal, 24, 306 peer-to-peer cryptocurrency exchangers, 152 Pelker, Alden, 127, 248, 287 Peña, Javier, 164 Perlroth, Nicole, 345 PGP (encryption program), 70–1, 78, 198 Philippines: as sex tourism

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138 Welcome to Video case and, 244, 246, 258 redandwhite (pseud.), 85 Rettig, Charles, 282–3 REvil (ransomware group), 302–3 Rhysider, Jack, 340 Ripple (cryptocurrency startup), 11 Rivest, Ron, 45 RonSwanson (pseud.), 187–8 Roosh V (online forum), 178–9, 194, 209 Rosetta stone, 44 Royal Canadian Mounted Police: Operation

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, 194 Cazes, Alexandre, arrest and, 209, 213, 215 Cazes, Alexandre, death and, 221–2, 225–6 Cazes, Alexandre, interviews with, 216–17, 220–1 cryptocurrency knowledge of, 167 at DEA, 162–3 at Luno, 324 Royal Thai Police and, 193–4 Sanger, David, 345 san-nakji, 256–7 Satoshi Dice

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1 surveillance of by law enforcement, 269 South Chungcheong, 269 spam email: research on by Savage, Stefan, 52 SQLite, 101 Sterlingov, Roman, 290–1 Suex (cryptocurrency exchange), 302 suspicious activity report: on Force, Carl, 13, 67, 135, 326 legal requirement to file, 151 Suttenberg, Lindsay, 254–5, 257, 267, 281 Sybil

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, 65n, 123, 148 TorBox, 265 Tor Carding Forum, 145 Tor Project, 247n Torre, Berny, 344 Tox Chat, 196 traceroute command, 127, 253, 265 Trade Hill (cryptocurrency exchange), 119, 131 TRM Labs, 324 “Tunafish” (Bitcoin address codename), 174–5, 215 Turton, William, 345 Twitter: 2020 hack of, 288–9 U Ulbricht,

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Geoffrey, 52, 55 W WalletExplorer, 113, 169, 317 Wall Street Journal, The, 137, 229, 303 Wall Street Market (dark web drug market), 287–8 Wasabi (cryptocurrency wallet), 317 Weaver, Nick, 84–5, 291 WebMoney Exchanger, 132 Welcome to Video (CSAM market): administrator of, 245, 254, 259, 264–5. See also Son

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Jong-woo BTC-e database and investigation of, 265 chat page at, 251, 264 cryptocurrency use on, 244–7, 252–3, 275 extreme content on, 250–1 Falder, Matthew, and, 244 investigation of. See Welcome to Video investigation IP

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8 Wieczner, Jen, 337 WikiLeaks, 28 Wilson, Cody, 97 WME. See Vinnik, Alexander Y Yerevan, 20–1 Yomiuri Shimbun, 104 Yum, Ilhwan, 85 Z Zcash (cryptocurrency): Cazes, Alexandre, and, 218 dark web markets and, 299 lack of popularity of, 310 as privacy coin, 298–9 shielded transactions of, 298–9 traceability

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

by Jeff John Roberts · 15 Dec 2020 · 226pp · 65,516 words

subject to change. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Roberts, Jeff John, author. Title: Kings of crypto : one startup’s quest to take cryptocurrency out of Silicon Valley and onto Wall Street / Jeff John Roberts. Description: Boston, MA : Harvard Business Review Press, [2020] | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020036284 (print

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on my earlier work and also conducted numerous additional interviews with Coinbase executives and board members. I also interviewed many other influential figures in the cryptocurrency world, including academics, investors, and those close to Coinbase’s competitors. Most of the accounts in this book, including nearly all of the quotes attributed

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a company to manage their stash of digital gold. A heresy in the church of Satoshi. And so it was that even though Coinbase introduced cryptocurrency to millions of non-technical people, many of bitcoin’s early champions reviled the company. These included the radical libertarian Erik Voorhees, who had denounced

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, delivering an impromptu lecture on the work of political economist Albert Hirschman. A scrawny teenager named Vitalik Buterin, who would soon invent the most important cryptocurrency after bitcoin, also spent days puttering around the Coinbase office. Not all visitors to Bluxome Street were so welcome. On several occasions, irate Coinbase customers

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a sort of crypto chamber of commerce, pushing to bestow an air of respectability on Satoshi’s creation. It was not just bitcoin flourishing. Other cryptocurrencies had emerged with fan bases of their own and, like bitcoin, could be exchanged for real-world money. These included Litecoin, the offshoot of bitcoin

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Nakamoto across the freeways of LA. The ensuing restaurant sit-down with Nakamoto revealed the purported crypto creator did not know the first thing about cryptocurrency. The next day, a long-dormant message board account tied to the real Satoshi sent out a simple message: “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.”

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deck to the press. Conservative media outlet The Washington Free Beacon published the presentation in February under a blaring headline of how Coinbase was touting cryptocurrency as a tool to circumvent sanctions on Iran. With a single bullet point, Fred had jerked Coinbase into geopolitics. Silicon Valley Bank had seen

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The long-awaited rebound in bitcoin’s prices, which continued into early 2016, brought delighted relief to Coinbase. But outside, in the broader world of cryptocurrency, something ugly was brewing as the tribal factions who were the bedrock of bitcoin turned on each other—and on Brian—like never before. The

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days. After his expulsion, Hearn described the situation as open civil war. Laura Shin, a Forbes journalist who would go on to build an influential cryptocurrency podcasting series, wrote of the 2016 war over block size: “Bitcoin Twitter has been a toxic stew of name-calling, trolling, bullying, blocking and

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preferred the hurly-burly of Reddit and Hacker News, sites that encouraged vis-itors to share headlines and yammer on about their favorite topics, including cryptocurrency. Since the start of Coinbase, Brian and Fred had been eager participants in these debates—explaining and defending the company’s decisions and chatting with

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at Facebook. McGeenan, known at Coinbase as Magoo, served as a bodyguard for Brian and also kept watch over the online threats. The nature of cryptocurrency meant the entire community was rife with criminals and, as bitcoin grew, so did criminal enterprises within its world. Stories of robbery and kidnapping became

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a special advantage over bitcoin. It had an acknowledged leader in the form of its wunderkind creator who would become the most famous figure in cryptocurrency after Satoshi. PART TWO * * * From Boom to Bubble to Bust 7 Enter Ethereum Vitalik Buterin is soft-spoken, pale, and practically skeletal. He likes to

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wore mismatched Hello Kitty socks and ate lemons, including the rinds. At the urging of his libertarian father, Dmitry, he took an interest in the cryptocurrency called bitcoin. He soon became absorbed. While still in high school, he launched an online news site called Bitcoin Magazine as a side hustle, persuading

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never succeeded—they had robbed exchanges and individual crypto owners but had never found a way to tamper with bitcoin’s all-important ledger. Other cryptocurrencies had been hacked and hijacked. Ethereum wasn’t only hacked, but its ledger was tampered with on purpose. What’s more, buying and selling

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funds, pension funds, private equity firms, family offices. Even in 2016, seven years after bitcoin launched, very little of that capital had flowed into the cryptocurrency economy. Sure, crypto was flourishing in the contained community of advocates and believers, but Brian and others believed that a true breakout would arrive only

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on price swings. And the action wasn’t just in bitcoin and Ethereum. On loosely regulated overseas exchanges, traders speculated on a galaxy of other cryptocurrencies that began to double and triple in price. Litecoin fans, for instance, likened the currency to bitcoin’s little brother and pointed out that its

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or manipulated by unscrupulous insiders. For many traders, it didn’t matter. A bull market was barreling forward as the price of every type of cryptocurrency kept climbing. Business schools took notice, finally. Only a few years earlier, Coinbase’s Adam White had pleaded with his professors at Harvard Business School

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of the Bitcoin Era.” By 2016, outlets like Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal assigned business reporters to cover crypto. Books like The Age of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Revolution further increased the ledger technology’s credibility. The transformation wasn’t instant. Bitcoin’s outlaw origins kept poking through. Hedge funds and

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different. It was broader and more ambitious. Unsubtly titled “The Coinbase Secret Master Plan,” it set out Brian’s sweeping vision for the future of cryptocurrency. Crypto was like the internet, he explained and, like the internet, it would have a four-step development. The initial two steps, which would

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the white knight’s decision to comply with “know your customer” laws had made it easy pickings for the IRS’s first major investigation into cryptocurrency—even as the more renegade exchanges, which operated in secrecy and skirted banking laws, avoided scrutiny. Utzke’s investigation produced a subpoena that landed at

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, hoped thoughtful, careful regulation could bring stability to the crypto markets and help it become even more mainstream. Unfortunately, the emerging US regulatory regime for cryptocurrency was not providing stability, but instead wrapping it in red tape. Multiple agencies were still arguing over whether this stuff was money or property or

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investigation. Today, its millions of tokens are worth nothing. The thousands of people who bought Bitconnect tokens, which briefly sat as the twentieth-most-popular cryptocurrency, lost every dollar. The only remaining value is Matos’s “Bitcooooonnnnnect!” yodel, which became an internet meme and fodder for Last Week Tonight, John Oliver

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were giving away bitcoin and Ethereum in special promotions. To receive the windfall, the targeted Twitter user was told to send a small amount of cryptocurrency first—funds that would, of course, be promptly pocketed by the scammer. Twitter would eventually shut down the impersonator accounts, and the scammers would

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prices climbed and climbed, Brian published a blog post in early December titled “Please Invest Responsibly” that dryly warned customers of the volatility associated with cryptocurrency investing. The market paid no heed whatsoever. Prices kept climbing. Brian’s call for responsible crypto investing wasn’t just ineffective—it was hypocritical. Coinbase

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millionaires—some of them were billionaires—had another priority: creating “Puertopia.” This was to be a new type of city where people paid only with cryptocurrency and laws were written on a blockchain. For the new arrivals, Puertopia invoked a paradise. For everyone else, it meant “crypto bros looking for

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as well. In the show Billions, the main character Bobby Axelrod, who is reportedly based on real-life hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen, turns to cryptocurrency to thwart SEC trading restrictions. “One million dollars straight in crypto, in chilly storage,” Bobby says, proffering a USB storage device to a minion.

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and offer only crypto-to-crypto trades. This meant customers could swap bitcoin for Ethereum, or Ethereum for Litecoin, or Litecoin for dozens of other cryptocurrencies. For CZ, the crypto-to-crypto arrangement offered an obvious advantage: it meant Binance didn’t need to touch the conventional banking system, which was

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Coinbase to split into two legal entities—one that did business in heavily regulated places like the United States and another that offered dozens of cryptocurrencies while operating from a regulatory haven like Bermuda. The plan went nowhere, and well into 2018, Coinbase stumbled along with the same four currencies.

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Coinbase compete with Binance by adding new assets. For months, the company had dithered as Binance grew into a powerhouse by offering dozens of new cryptocurrencies. Meanwhile, Coinbase had plodded along with the same four coins: bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and—as of late December 2017, after its hiccup of a

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questioned why Coinbase was tinkering with Toshi and dApps—especially at a time when millions of people were flocking to Binance to acquire the newest cryptocurrencies. It was as if Coinbase had been a road construction company that instead of laying pavement for interstate highways spent its days adding scenic overlooks

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that signs an endorsement deal with Brooks Brothers. More seriously, it risked a strategic muddle, given Balaji’s quest to challenge Binance by adding exotic cryptocurrencies to Coinbase’s platform. It didn’t take long for the competing visions—Wall Street versus libertarian utopia—to produce factions at Coinbase, with crypto

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of Balaji’s wrecking-ball approach was that the secondary projects got sidelined or smothered, and Coinbase moved to focus on his priority—adding new cryptocurrencies. Coinbase unveiled new currency offerings like XRP and Ethereum Classic for US customers, and dozens more for clients overseas. The gap with Binance started

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2019. The best known one, called Tether, had appeared in 2015. It caught on with traders who wanted to move in and out of various cryptocurrencies without the fees that came with converting from crypto to traditional currency. Tether, however, suffered from a sketchy reputation. How, traders wondered, could they

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challenged Tether as fixtures of crypto trading markets. By 2020, Coinbase and others were paying interest on customers’ stash of stablecoins—a sign of how cryptocurrency could resemble an ordinary savings account. More importantly, the growth of stablecoins signaled to important people outside the crypto world that blockchain-based money could

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, and to contribute to the reserve fund that would back the Libra with hard currency. The partner list included two companies that specialized in storing cryptocurrency, and it also included Coinbase. There already was a link between Facebook and Coinbase: the head of Project Libra was David Marcus, a former

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army, this would be only slightly more hostile to the people of the United States than what is currently proposed,” declared Preston Byrne, an outspoken cryptocurrency lawyer. Critics raised many valid questions, and, as of the time of this writing, it’s far from clear whether Facebook can overcome government opposition

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may have greeted Facebook’s digital currency plans with surprise and alarm, but in crypto circles, Project Libra mostly generated guffaws. This wasn’t real cryptocurrency but a debased version, one that would be controlled by a cabal of powerful companies. Veteran crypto boosters invoked the c-word—centralized—and warned

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business front, the company was still lagging behind Binance, but the gap between the two was shrinking, in part because Coinbase now offered dozens of cryptocurrencies in markets around the world. Meanwhile, Binance’s star lost some of its luster after the exchange suffered a major hack that saw thieves plunder

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Quorum, a spin-off of Ethereum that serves as a private network and ledger for financial transactions. He had even approved JPM Coin, a new cryptocurrency to settle crossborder payments with clients. At the same time JP Morgan was dabbling with crypto, Coinbase was moving closer to traditional banking. The one

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and Apple too—could just as easily dominate crypto. Then there are national governments. Authoritarian regimes like China or Venezuela, Tapscott points out, are developing cryptocurrencies. Their strategic goals involve not only undermining the US dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency but using crypto to surveil and control

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mythology as it is by technology. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Shiller’s latest book, Narrative Economics, devotes its first chapter to bitcoin. The cryptocurrency, Shiller says, has no intrinsic value but has been propped up by a contagious belief that it does. Academics like Shiller who are deeply skeptical

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years, much like the internet, is likely to awe us in ways no one can predict.” 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

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others who have taken the time to help me understand the splendid technology called blockchain. Despite its well-deserved reputation for drama and infighting, the cryptocurrency community is also incredibly supportive, and I want to thank those who offered me advice and encouragement during the writing of this book: Laura Shin

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to Coinbase’s communications team for arranging many interviews. Likewise, I want to thank Barry Silbert, Chris Dixon, Emin Gün Sirer, and the numerous other cryptocurrency theorists and entrepreneurs who helped supply the larger ideas that inform this book. I could not have written Kings of Crypto without the support of

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my employer, Fortune magazine, which not only provided me time to write but also gave me free rein to report and write about cryptocurrency, even when the topics roamed far beyond those familiar to the publication’s regular business audience. My appreciation extends in particular to Fortune CEO Alan

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

by Laura Shin · 22 Feb 2022 · 506pp · 151,753 words

publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shin, Laura, author. Title: The cryptopians : idealism, greed, lies, and the making of the first big cryptocurrency craze / Laura Shin. Description: First edition. | New York : PublicAffairs, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021035607 | ISBN 9781541763012 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541763005 (epub) Subjects

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: LCSH: Cryptocurrencies—History. | Money—History—21st century. | Finance—History—21st century. Classification: LCC HG1710.3 .S55 2021 | DDC 332.4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn

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investors large and small: initial coin offerings (ICOs). A cross between a Kickstarter campaign, an IPO, and bitcoin, ICOs enabled projects to raise funds in cryptocurrency by giving people a new token, and they took off, showing how quickly a tsunami of economically incentivized developers could raise money to shake up

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, it was the spring of Vitalik’s high school senior year. Since starting at Bitcoin Magazine, he’d continued writing his clear prose about the cryptocurrency online: The Bitcoin network is the network of computers through which Bitcoin transactions are broadcasted and which maintains the public blockchain. Sometimes, the term is

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arrived, he saw it featured twelve articles on topics such as the personality of anonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, the history of previous attempts at cryptocurrency, and the Bitcoin bubble of 2011. (The price had barely budged from Christmastime and was now about $5.) Scanning the magazine’s sixty-nine

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of the white paper as follows: The Ethereum protocol’s design philosophy is in many ways the opposite from that taken by many other cryptocurrencies today. Other cryptocurrencies aim to add complexity and increase the number of “features”; Ethereum, on the other hand, takes features away. The protocol does not “support” multisignature

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to a computer science degree, he had worked at a kids’ math-learning platform, which was how he’d taken notice of Bitcoin. He explored cryptocurrencies and even worked on Mastercoin briefly. Then a friend from Mastercoin sent him the Ethereum white paper, since Jeff enjoyed writing computer languages. He found

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of the network for itself. This was the model that internet giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter followed, which the libertarian and cypherpunk Bitcoin and cryptocurrency crowd eschewed. Anthony, a believer in capitalism and incentives, even wanted its software to be closed-source, with the company itself the only entity that

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moved in the Friday before—the dishwasher was being installed as the few dozen attendees strolled in. Some Berlin employees who were completely new to cryptocurrency, like Felix, found the event way over their heads but magical. Gustav Simonsson, a programmer who’d been watching Ethereum but had thought that

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the internet, it was set up as a multisig, in which multiple signers were required to move money.) Michael had previously built such systems for cryptocurrency exchanges and gambling sites. He’d developed a thirteen-page cold storage policy and a six-page key compromise protocol, which outlined the procedure to

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, should have been included.) Previously, when Anthony and the BAC had presented to the Ontario Securities Commission and a regulator asked about the security of cryptocurrencies, Anthony had said, “Well, you’re at risk now”—referring to the traditional financial system. (Anthony says the regulator’s question was about quantum computing

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three-hour conversation that he had enjoyed. They bonded over being geeks and how they’d both survived the traditional school system. Plus, they talked cryptocurrency. Since Gavin and Jeff preferred the UN candidate, Vitalik, who wanted Ming, came up with a compromise: if the UN candidate requested a high

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four senior and junior developers.16 In recent weeks, Ming had tried convincing Vitalik to let Gavin go, but Vitalik—whose whole life revolved around cryptocurrency broadly, if not Ethereum exclusively—was resistant. Even though Gavin berated him and could be dismissive (in the yellow paper, he credited Vitalik with

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identities and make sure that if an entity, say, Slock.it, submitted a payment request, the account requesting it was indeed Slock.it’s. In cryptocurrency parlance, they would serve as “oracles”—agents that verify non-blockchain-based information for use by a smart contract. One curator, Fabian Vogelsteller, the full

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for eight thousand ETH (around $99,000) for one year. THE NEXT DAY, a day before the crowdsale ended, a Cornell professor prominent in the cryptocurrency space, Emin Gün Sirer, along with Ethereum Foundation researcher Vlad Zamfir and Dino Mark, an entrepreneur who also collaborated with ConsenSys’s Joe Lubin, published

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mock-summarized the argument from a pro-ETC Reddit post as ETC “will make better decisions,” so “trust us.” (A long-standing philosophy of the cryptocurrency community was “trustlessness,” meaning blockchain technology could be used in transactions that normally require people to trust others but would instead operate like a financial

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for trading ETH. The exchange, which had been pivotal to the survival of Ethereum Classic, alone accounted for half of global transaction volume in all cryptocurrencies, mainly due to interest in Ethereum and margin trading. Even as it often topped the charts of crypto exchanges worldwide, the company, which was also

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a legal or business background were specifically looking at the Securities and Exchange Commission. While the SEC had performed a handful of enforcement actions involving cryptocurrency, in 2016 there was only one and in 2017 only one regarding a Bitcoin fraud.14 The agency had, however, dropped hints. At the

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and Unikrn were somewhat well-known, the others were no-name projects. He’d also invested in two Chinese projects, Vechain and Qtum. To uninformed cryptocurrency investors, having an Ethereum cofounder on an ICO advisory board gave it an imprimatur of legitimacy, but other crypto community members felt Anthony was mostly

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for “hyping” the price of ether, which raised conflict-of-interest issues when it came to consulting clients who couldn’t risk endorsing a particular cryptocurrency. (Joe, who says he was unaware of the report, did not follow any of its recommendations.) This was the other explanation high-level ConsenSys

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from Santander, and the other was a young trader named Tyler Frederick from Fidelity, the only traditional financial services firm public about its interest in cryptocurrency, lending legitimacy to the space.34 Tyler started on the foreboding date of September 11, 2017. His interview process, done by phone and email,

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dollar value for bitcoin,” “Analyst who predicted bitcoin’s rise now sees it hitting $300,000–$400,000,” and “Trader who called bitcoin rally says cryptocurrency will surge above $100,000 in 2018.”28 News about Bitcoin and Ethereum proliferated: about teens who’d become millionaires off Bitcoin, ETH traders who

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and, in 2011, became interested in using Bitcoin for microfinance for women in developing countries. Soon after, she got a job working for Kraken, the cryptocurrency exchange that had given Vitalik office space when he had written the Ethereum white paper four years prior. She eventually became managing director of Kraken

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Copenhagen, she said, “He isn’t the decision maker. He’s a member of the community.” In the spring of 2019, Coin Jazeera, a satirical cryptocurrency site, published an article titled “Ethereum Development Halts After Vitalik Discovers Sex.” The article asked what had happened to development on Ethereum and said its

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117 million for ETH and 18.8 million for Bitcoin), had reached a market cap of around $90 billion, and briefly become the third-largest cryptocurrency. A new CryptoKitties-like game called NBA Top Shot, which sold digital collectibles (aka nonfungible tokens, or NFTs) of basketball highlight clips, generated more

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pics on Crypto Twitter, where people debated whether NFTs were the ICOs of 2021.64 It looked like the early stages of a second big cryptocurrency craze. Timeline 2011 Late winter Vitalik starts learning about Bitcoin, writing for Bitcoin Weekly June 1 Gawker article, “The Underground Website Where You Can

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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

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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

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computer that is more powerful than a typical computer’s central processing unit, or CPU, making it a more efficient and profitable way to mine cryptocurrencies (though not the most efficient and profitable) hard fork a non-backward-compatible software upgrade to a crypto network; usually refers to a “contentious”

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the nodes do not. This causes the nodes that upgrade to create a blockchain separate from the nodes running the original software, resulting in two cryptocurrencies with a shared history until the moment of the fork. (If the whole network simultaneously upgrades, which is a noncontentious hard fork, everyone stays

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over control of their coins to a company Nakamoto, Satoshi the anonymous creator of Bitcoin node a computer that helps run the software for a cryptocurrency or asset and usually maintains a copy of its blockchain Parity the Rust-language Ethereum software client; also the company (originally called Ethcore) founded

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some coins to the creators or early investors as a reward private key the cryptographic string of numbers and letters that enables one to send cryptocurrency from a specific public address (the other half of the cryptographically connected “public/private key pair”) protocol an established set of rules for the

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than a company or other intermediary, that executes the terms of an agreement between two transacting parties soft fork a backward-compatible change in a cryptocurrency protocol; it only narrows what is possible, so nodes running the older software will still accept the new blocks as valid Solidity a programming language

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downloads and views. Her writing can also be found in her Facebook Bulletin newsletter and on Medium. Shin has spoken about and led discussions on cryptocurrency at places such as TEDx San Francisco, the International Monetary Fund, Singularity University, and the Oslo Freedom Forum. She lives in New York City.

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, https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/@5122440/historic?month=7&year=2016. 42. “IC3-Ethereum Crypto Boot Camp and Workshop at Cornell University,” The Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts, accessed March 31, 2021, https://www.initc3.org/events/2016-07-20-IC3-Ethereum-Crypto-Boot-Camp-and-Workshop-at-Cornell-University.html

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,” Reddit, September 16, 2016, https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/532523/the_dao_extrabalwithdraw_contract_has_now_been. 3. “Directors,” IC3: The Initiative for CryptoCurrencies & Contracts via Wayback Machine, September 10, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20160910051422/https://www.initc3.org/people.html. 4. “Founder of the Apache Software

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.com/1004892/the-bancor-ico-just-raised-153-million-on-ethereum-in-three-hours. 34. Wong, “Ethereum Unleashed the ‘initial coin offering’ craze.” 35. “Global Cryptocurrency Charts: Percentage of Total Market Capitalization (Dominance),” CoinMarketCap, accessed April 2, 2021, https://coinmarketcap.com/charts. 36. “The Status Network: A Strategy Towards Mass Adoption

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-price. 41. Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin), “Another day, another blockchain use case,” Twitter, June 25, 2017, https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/879127496024772610?s=20. 42. “Global Cryptocurrency Charts,” CoinMarketCap. 43. MyEtherWallet (@MyEtherWallet), “Cmonnnnnnn Have you learned NOTHING from the last week?! Take your heads out greedy asses (you too, FOMO investors!) & look

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is for 1 domain,” Twitter, August 20, 2017, https://twitter.com/sniko_/status/899342140572131328/photo/1. 25. Lily Hay Newman, “A Very Dumb Mistake Costs Cryptocurrency Investors Big Time,” Wired, August 21, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/enigma-ico-ethereum-heist. 26. Laura Shin, “Hackers Have Stolen Millions of Dollars

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Predicts Multitrillion-Dollar Value for Bitcoin,” CNBC, December 9, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/09/bitcoin-cameron-winklevoss-predicts-multitrillion-dollar-value-for-cryptocurrency.html; Dan Murphy, “Analyst Who Predicted Bitcoin’s Rise Now Sees It Hitting $300,000–$400,000,” CNBC, December 17, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com

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‘sharting,’ then I WILL leave…,” Twitter, December 27, 2017, https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/945988644661207040?s=20. 42. Zheping Huang, “The world now has a cryptocurrency pop group,” Quartz, January 10, 2018, https://qz.com/1177249/japans-kasotsuka-shojo-the-worlds-first-cryptopop-group-sings-about-bitcoin-and-cryptofraud. 43. Nellie

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Epilogue 1. Anna Irrera, “U.S. SEC Official Says Ether Not a Security, Price Surges,” Reuters, June 15, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cryptocurrencies-ether/u-s-sec-official-says-ether-not-a-security-price-surges-idUSKBN1JA30Q. 2. Taylor Monahan, “A New Beginning: MyCrypto.com,” Medium, February 8, 2018

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via ShapeShift API, accessed April 3, 2021, https://shapeshift.io/txstat/04d2ab5112241124b917d131c9e3858b73c1ff15c04f7330dc55d26491beadee, now at https://laurashin.com/cryptopians/Epilogue/24-04d2a. 25. Ryan Mac, “A Cryptocurrency Pioneer Wrote About Sex with a Preteen Girl on His Blog. He Says It Was Fiction,” BuzzFeed News, September 19, 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com

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Discovers Sex,” Coin Jazeera, accessed April 3, 2021, https://coinjazeera.news/ethereum-development-halts-after-vitalik-discovers-sex. 29. “Two Arrested for Extortion of Startup Cryptocurrency Company,” Department of Justice, US Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of New York, September 18, 2019, https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/two-arrested

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-extortion-startup-cryptocurrency-company. 30. Dominic Kennedy and Oliver Wright, “Christopher Harborne: Brexit Party’s Bankroller Has a Thai Doppelganger,” The Times, November 27, 2019, https://www.thetimes

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order

by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey · 27 Jan 2015 · 457pp · 128,838 words

to mitigate corruption inside those intermediating institutions as well as from the politicians who are drawn into their prosperous orbit. The public ledgers used by cryptocurrencies can bring into the open the inner workings of an economic-political system that was previously hidden within impenetrable, centralized institutions. Indeed, the technology’

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those who support the new one, but also within the ranks of the latter group, as idealists, pragmatists, entrepreneurs, and opportunists compete to control cryptocurrency’s future. When disruption is driven by a technology associated with money, these clashes can be especially intense. However, when the knives are out—metaphorically

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London, Brussels, Beijing, and various other financial and political capitals formulate rules for users of digital currencies to follow. If well designed, these could bolster cryptocurrencies by making people feel better protected from their more dangerous elements. But the bureaucrats may go too far and quash innovative start-ups’ ability to

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of Beijing. It includes visits to the mountains of Utah, the beaches of Barbados, schools in Afghanistan, and start-ups in Kenya. The world of cryptocurrencies comprises venture-capital royalty, high school dropouts, businessmen, utopians, anarchists, students, humanitarians, hackers, and Papa John’s pizza. It’s got parallels with the

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trust relationships between the individual and society at large that currency embodies. This view, the one we subscribe to and which informs our understanding of cryptocurrencies, recognizes the presence of an implicit, societywide agreement that allows monetary exchange to perpetuate and debt and credit to be issued and cleared. This

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system, governments worldwide felt compelled to put up trillions of taxpayer dollars, pounds, and euros to avoid bringing down that entire system. The rise of cryptocurrencies can properly be understood only in relation to those cataclysmic events. * * * On the Wednesday after the September 15 collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008,

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Magazine, founded by Mihai Alisie and Vitalik Buterin in 2011, began publishing a print edition in May 2012, becoming the first serious publication dedicated to cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin conferences became more common, with New York, London, and Prague featuring in the early circuit. In September 2012, the Bitcoin Foundation was founded

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banking system, which always demands its cut. * * * As the calendar progressed through 2013 a vanguard of retail businesses began to spot the advantages of cryptocurrency’s lower-cost, faster payment system and started signing up for payment-processing services offered by Silicon Valley–funded bitcoin start-ups such as BitPay

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adoption offered a compelling counterpoint to the impression of criminality, incompetence, and regulatory crackdown that had dominated mainstream press coverage in 2014. Meanwhile, innovation in cryptocurrency technology powered on. If anything, it accelerated as developers around the world became increasingly enamored with the prospect of total economic disruption and the profits

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explanation, we’re going to focus on how bitcoin’s blockchain, currency-creation, and transaction-confirmation systems work, though many blockchain variations exist across the cryptocurrency universe. James’s cup of coffee represented one transaction. The system must process many more. The blockchain is managed, as we’ve mentioned, by

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in the underlying software, have been met by consensus-driven responses fashioned to be as fair as possible. Still, the challenges are complicated. Designers of cryptocurrency projects are working at the nexus of economics (which emphasizes the creation of incentives for individual behavior that benefits the group) and technology. Computer-system

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rulebook or top-down set of managerial instructions keeps people’s choices in line with a common corporate objective. Guiding people to optimal behavior in cryptocurrencies is entirely up to how the software is designed to affect human thinking, how effectively its incentive systems encourage that desired behavior. The vulnerabilities

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—or face value—of $710 trillion. The vital thing to remember is that the collective brainpower applied to all the challenges facing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is enormous. Under the open-source, decentralized model, these technologies are not hindered by the same constraints that bureaucracies and stodgy corporations face. The

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accounting; Byrne saw it as purely manipulative speculation, all facilitated and encouraged by Wall Street’s centralized systems for buying, selling, lending, and borrowing securities. Cryptocurrency, he believes, is a weapon to combat this because it brings willing buyers and sellers of assets together, without the brokers and investment banks acting

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information could liberate the poor from the incompetence and corruption of bureaucrats and judges. Digitized registers of real-estate deeds, all fully administered by a cryptocurrency computer network without the engagement of a central government agency, could be created to cheaply and reliably manage people’s rights to property, administering digital

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calls Bitcoin 2.0, or, our preference, Blockchain 2.0 applications—products, services, and even full-blown companies that are run autonomously by a decentralized cryptocurrency network. * * * Gleason and Voorhees were not the first people to envision alternative uses for the blockchain. If, some adventurous minds thought, two parties could

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, bypassing a central exchange or clearinghouse. Mike Hearn, who worked for three years on security software at Google before quitting to devote himself to cryptocurrency development, offers perhaps the most far-reaching forecast of such potential in blockchain technology. In a speech at the August 2013 Turing Festival in Edinburgh

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rewarded with free or discounted rides for a prescribed period, and to achieve that kind of broad-based funding objective, Hearn offers up another solution: cryptocurrency assurance contracts, a blockchain-based version of the popular crowdfunding model in which organizers pledge a certain amount when others’ donations reach target levels. Rather

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the ultimate decentralized platform. * * * Sometime before Buterin set his sights on an entirely new blockchain, another school of Blockchain 2.0 developers started taking decentralized cryptocurrency ledgers in another direction. They believed you didn’t have to completely overhaul the traditional economy of fiat currencies to slash the costs of transferring

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happy. Still, “everybody” in this sense includes one constituency that’s especially difficult to please: regulators. The lawyers who are currently acting as liaisons between cryptocurrency innovators and government regulators are struggling to get the latter to shape rules around a concept that the existing legal system never contemplated. “You think

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not easily identify them. One month after the bust, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, took a surprisingly accommodating approach to cryptocurrency. FinCEN issued guidelines treating bitcoin payment processers and exchanges as legal entities that would need to register with it and would have to comply with

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of money-transfer systems. Getting licensed was laborious, unpredictable, bureaucratic, and lengthy. Some states, such as Texas, took a deliberately accommodating stance, deciding that cryptocurrencies didn’t fall within the bounds of their rules and so could be allowed to function without a license. That led a bunch of storefronts

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government announced it would study the prospect of creating a blockchain-based digital peso and explore how the country might leverage the benefits of decentralized cryptocurrency networks to attack corruption. Though it was thin on details, this was an unprecedented statement, suggesting a forward-looking view of the blockchain’s

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processor GoCoin, which includes bitcoin’s self-proclaimed “serial dealmaker” Brock Pierce as a founder, is headquartered in the city-state. Like any reputable cryptocurrency hub, Singapore has some established bitcoin exchanges, including FYB-SG and First Meta, though the latter has come under some scrutiny following the untimely death

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that bitcoin exchanges would have to fulfill regular anti-money-laundering compliance requirements. But generally, Singapore’s government has shown itself cautiously interested in encouraging cryptocurrency innovation. According to one report, giant, state-owned conglomerate Temasek Holdings, a pillar of Singapore’s financial establishment, has been experimenting with bitcoin investments

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, we’ll explore some of these contradictions and look at what they mean for how societies grapple with the introduction of disruptive technologies such as cryptocurrency. We examine the tension it creates and the demands that the tensions be resolved through compromise and negotiation—typically through the intervention of government. * * *

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t bleed into the larger sectors that Big Business dominates. But that’s not what the proponents of this technology foresee—especially those in the cryptocurrency sector. They believe that decentralization is just getting started and that the centralized economic and political establishments—even governments and nation-states, those ultimate centralized

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banks start shutting back-office administrative centers in midtown Manhattan or London’s Canary Wharf when their merchant customers start booking more customer sales via cryptocurrency systems to avoid the 3 percent transaction fees. The challenge for technologists and their venture-capitalist backers is to frame the disruption within a politically

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people facing job displacement. For society to arrive at a happy medium where the great, liberating benefits of community empowerment are achieved through decentralized cryptocurrency applications but at minimal cost to those human beings who are displaced, all these parties will need to come together to find a negotiated solution

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—another way to say “centralizing”—forces to take control of the economy of the future, even if its underlying infrastructure is built upon decentralized cryptocurrency technology. Whereas cryptocurrency enthusiasts tend to think now of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, etc., as the centralized establishment—the enemy—it’s worth remembering that

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and via multiple blockchain-based applications, they promise to hold whole classes of middlemen, centralized institutions, and government agencies accountable as never before. Exactly how cryptocurrency technology gets to become a major part of the global financial infrastructure is the next big unknown we’ll tackle. However, a few routes are

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edge. While business adopters could be the most powerful catalysts for change, they will watch how consumers and the general public view bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies before jumping. Most consumers may never show sufficient support. Consumer-focused digital-wallet, payment-processing, and bitcoin-depository services such as Coinbase, Bitreserve, Circle

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as the dollar. Despite its public-image problem and regulatory constraints, the environment isn’t entirely unaccommodating for bitcoin to flourish. Some of the more cryptocurrency-friendly states such as Switzerland, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Canada could foster hubs of innovation that give the technology an unstoppable momentum. Even in

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our financial systems but in the background, with fiat currencies continuing as the economies’ main units of account and mediums of exchange. In that case, cryptocurrency protocols and blockchain-based systems for confirming transactions would replace the cumbersome payment system that’s currently run by banks, credit-card companies, payment processors

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, and foreign-exchange traders. Some of those intermediaries would disappear; others would simply use cryptocurrency technology for their own institution-to-institution transactions. Because of instantaneous conversion into fiat currencies after each transaction, the end-user consumers and businesses would

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reason to believe that concerns about a bitcoin-induced deflation crisis are overblown. The Multicoin World There’s no guarantee that bitcoin remains the dominant cryptocurrency. If cryptocurrencies do survive, more than one, or many, could end up playing an important role in commerce. Given that the blockchain will allow anybody to

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unpredictable ways. Society at large will play a role, too, partly because of the disruptive impact that technology is having on people’s lives. Cryptocurrency is a potentially powerful new disruptive element. Interconnected computing gadgets give people far greater control over their daily lives, creating opportunities to discover new ideas

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’ve ever had. Whatever you want to call this new economy—the sharing economy, the collaborative economy—it is upending centuries of accepted social norms. Cryptocurrency, a pure form of information technology, a deliberately, explicitly disruptive form of information technology, promises to take things to a new level altogether. The

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/bitbeat-much-good-dogecoin-so-hip/. though with bitcoin’s market capitalization more than ten times: as per the market capitalizations of the top 100 cryptocurrencies quoted at coinmarketcap.com. Andreas Antonopoulos, chief security officer at wallet provider Blockchain.info: Paul Vigna, “BitBeat: Dorian Nakamoto Writes a Letter,” Wall Street

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and debit cards American Express fraud and MasterCard Visa Credit Suisse First Boston Crook, Colin Cross River Bank Crowd Companies crowdfunding “Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto” (May) cryptocurrencies: future of labeling of ledger and mainstreaming of mining of regulation of roots of trust and value of see also bitcoin cryptographers Cypherpunks political differences

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Ulbricht, Ross Ultimate Frisbee unbanked people Unenumerated Unfair Trade, The (Casey) UnionPay Union Square Partners United Kingdom Utah utilities value: of bitcoins of coins of cryptocurrencies of dollar of gold intrinsic of money van der Laan, Wladimir Vaurum venture capitalists (VCs) Ver, Roger Verisign Verizon Vessenes, Peter VHS Virgin Group VirtEx

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Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com. The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Vigna, Paul. The age of cryptocurrency: how bitcoin and digital money are challenging the global economic order / Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey.—First Edition. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-250

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’t quite the anonymous haven that Nakamoto and some underground businesses thought it would be. * This approach has been followed by designers of special cryptocurrency projects intended to develop applications for decentralized commerce beyond merely currency payments. The coin sale proceeds are used to pay for the developers needed to

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

by Ian Demartino · 2 Feb 2016 · 296pp · 86,610 words

, you can do so with the following QR code: Bitcoin Address: 3Bi1fhng5LfoDzue5MTfGw9PgHNKKgRkVt Disclaimer: Although I have attempted to make this book as accurate as possible, cryptocurrencies are complex and constantly evolving. So it is worth mentioning right off the bat: do your own research—things can change from month to month

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have been produced as well. ASIC: Application-specific integrated circuit. A piece of hardware designed to do one thing and one thing only. In the cryptocurrency world, it mines for a specific algorithm (SHA256, Scrypt, etc.). BFGMiner: The second most-popular Bitcoin-mining software. Bitcoin/bitcoin: Bitcoin with a capital B

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blockchain confirmed as valid. This is called a 51% attack. fork: Copying an open-source code and making modifications to it. In the context of cryptocurrencies it can also mean when miners either accidentally or maliciously start mining a false blockchain. full node: A local Bitcoin wallet that stores the entire

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-source code for collaborative work on that code. GUIMiner: The most popular Bitcoin-mining software with a graphical user interface. hard fork: Changes to a cryptocurrency’s code that requires participants to upgrade their software in order to be able to continue functioning with the upgraded clients. If the majority of

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of hashes being put toward a network. The total number of hashes equals the number of computational equations taking place on the Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrency) network. 1/THs hashrate means the network is capable of one trillion calculations per second. hot wallet: A wallet connected to the Internet. Bitcoins are

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was already apparent that smaller vendors would remain a force on the Internet, especially through rapidly growing services like eBay. There were a few other cryptocurrency attempts, however, the most prominent of which was E-gold. E-gold was a digital currency backed by—you guessed it—gold. The company held

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operate while only taking a one to five percent fee from the borrowers. This removal of friction enables more investments and more payments. Another service cryptocurrencies can theoretically provide is the role of arbitrator in any transaction. BitHalo, the Bitcoin half of BlackHalo, was the first instance of workable smart contracts

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legal force. Smart contracts enable the sale of physical goods without either party needing to trust the other. BlackHalo was designed for Blackcoin, an alternative cryptocurrency that I will discuss in Chapter 21. BitHalo has the same functionality but works with Bitcoin. It enables quick transfers between the two currencies. More

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potential to bring advanced banking abilities to users around the world. Bitcoin 2.0 projects, as they are often called, can involve Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. The main idea behind these projects is that the blockchain and blockchain technologies can be used to transfer and keep track of holdings of valuables

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. “Kim Dotcom’s Blockchain MegaNet and Bitcoin ATMs Stolen.” International Business Times RSS. February 17, 2015. Accessed May 20, 2015. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/cryptocurrency-round-kim-dotcoms-blockchain-meganet-bitcoin-atms-stolen-1488393. Chapter 6: Bitcoin: Anonymous or Pseudonymous? There’s going to be so much information about individuals

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, regardless of whether the people who participated in the transaction want them to be or not. It is not unreasonable to expect that in a cryptocurrency-powered future, political candidates will have their Bitcoin history pored over by their opponents and media sleuths. The blockchain is not the only place they

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, there are plenty of users with other belief systems and affiliations. Likewise, the vast majority of libertarians aren’t as radical as some in the cryptocurrency community. But there is also a sect of cryptolibertarian believers who do have a set of consistent and clear principles that generally pushes their software

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the end. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia called for an outright ban on Bitcoin.14 Even the long-time Bitcoin blogger, security researcher, and cryptocurrency evangelist twobitidiot (real name Ryan Selkis) lamented “Bitcoin’s Apocalyptic moment” upon learning the news.15 The concerns, it should be said, were valid. One

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who want to save and spend bitcoins. Although nothing is guaranteed in Bitcoin, these Mt. Gox-like events are becoming more rare; although popular multi-cryptocurrency exchanges still have controversies and issues, the Bitcoin-only exchanges—Circle, Coinbase, etc.—are relatively safe for small-to-medium Bitcoin holdings. Long-term savings

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a password and a special one-time use code) is a must. • Scams that work on the Internet in general have been carried over to cryptocurrencies as well, sometimes with a bit more sophistication. Phishing scams are common and the thieves have proven capable of spoofing legitimate Bitcoin companies’ email addresses

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large number of supported currencies and a professional look. Unfortunately, looks can be deceiving. The MintPal scandal is as convoluted as any other scam in cryptocurrency history, including the Mt. Gox failure. Almost tailor-made for the big screen, it involves fake identities, corporate takeovers, and a cliffhanger. MintPal’s problems

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VeriCoins. VeriCoin uses a proof-of-stake algorithm to confirm transactions. Proof-of-stake algorithms give weight to those who have significant holdings of the cryptocurrency, resulting in a somewhat stable interest rate—typically anywhere between one and five percent, depending on the coin. Unlike proof-of-work coins such as

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of this writing.2 One significant lesson to learn from the MintPal failure is that appearances aren’t indicative of legitimacy. Of the mainstream multi-cryptocurrency exchanges, MintPal had one of the prettier website layouts. I remember at one point commenting to a friend that MintPal had, in my opinion, the

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Miners and its sister company, ZEN Miners, were owned by a man named Homero Joshua Garza, who went by Josh Garza. Garza had gotten into cryptocurrency after running a broadband Internet company that was accused of ripping off its customers before abandoning them; it is currently under investigation.4 GAW Miners

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claiming to mine. The majority of mining payments, according to the SEC, were paid out with new investor money.7 Although many media outlets, particularly cryptocurrency-focused ones, did an adequate job reporting on GAW after the initial sale of Paycoin in December 2014, much of the initial investigation was done

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being ironed out. Issues with Working for Bitcoin Smart contracts—computer protocols that ensure a contract is followed—have been developed for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and are getting more powerful all the time. Escrow is very useful because it gives the worker a third party to depend on to fulfill

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a flurry of controversies. There have also been complaints about these two remaining companies, however. As is my general advice in all matters related to cryptocurrency, do your research before investing significant amounts of money. Before buying any hardware, it’s essential to check a Bitcoin-mining difficulty calculator to figure

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not with the general sentiment behind his statement. Two years is not realistic; although that amount of time might seem like an eternity within the cryptocurrency ecosystem, the general public—and especially the financial markets—don’t move at the same speed. But Bitcoin is growing; this is undeniable. It also

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virtual bag of a worthless coin. Again, such tactics affect all commodities with a low enough liquidity. It just so happens that there are many cryptocurrencies that have low liquidity compared to more traditional commodities. And since the space is virtually unregulated, pump-and-dumps have become commonplace. The groups that

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most headway in accomplishing this goal. It uses “trusted gateways” to allow users to buy commodities such as gold, as well as various currencies—both cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies. Trusted gateways are entities, like precious metal investment companies, that can be trusted to honor assets they put on the Ripple network

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the Ripple network, assuming you trust the gateway. But Ripple has always been careful not to step on any regulation toes. More centralized than other cryptocurrencies, Ripple Labs could feasibly be held responsible for additions to the Ripple network. In fact, it ran afoul of regulations once already, though it settled

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probably will happen someday soon, either via Ripple or another altcoin, or Bitcoin itself. Non–Wall Street markets are becoming more popular every year. Eventually, cryptocurrencies could create a fully peer-to-peer stock market without any kind of middleman outside of code and cryptography. In that kind of system, people

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. In addition, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, a longtime Bitcoin advocate, is currently working on a marketplace that will challenge Wall Street. Unlike many other cryptocurrency “stock market” projects, Overstock is actually going through the proper channels to stay on the right side of regulation. At first, Overstock will only offer

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crowdfunding campaign and raised more than $9 million without being open to US customers.1 But those are the fiat world’s solutions. In the cryptocurrency world, there is a far more direct method of funding businesses: asset tokens distributed on the blockchain. Asset tokens are tokens that represent ownership of

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“more than zero” value. After the article was released, Ars Technica readers became interested in Arscoin and the media outlet suddenly had a fairly successful cryptocurrency on its hands. It launched a store where readers could spend their Arscoins. The store only sold flair—little images of decorative hats that would

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Block Reward (current): 25 LTC Reward Curve: Halves every 840,000 blocks Total Number of LTC: 84 million Litecoin is arguably the second most popular cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, judging by its level of acceptance and brand recognition. Created by Charlie Lee, it is technically a fork of the first Scrypt coin

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(current): 10k Doge Reward Curve: Halves every 840,000 blocks Total Number of Doge: 100 billion [goal, variable] If Litecoin is the most popular serious cryptocurrency, Dogecoin—pronounced either “Doggy Coin” or “Douje-Coin” depending on whom you ask—is the most “viral.” Originally intended as a joke, Dogecoin ended up

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Darkcoin, but the creators decided to rebrand in an attempt to distance themselves from potential perceptions of a criminal connection. Dash is a privacy-minded cryptocurrency that intends to make the final jump from the pseudonymous nature of Bitcoin to the anonymous promise of electronic cash. Dash attempts to do this

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is a fun place for high-risk investments. Some features haven’t been as successful. Its monetary system, for instance, is full of shovelwear cryptocurrencies—i.e., cryptocurrencies that bring no new features or value—that serve no purpose and are being bought by virtually no one. Likewise, its digital goods store

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that plagued its launch and to indicate the project was turning over a new leaf. Mastercoin/Omni was hired by Overstock.com to create a cryptocurrency-powered asset exchange but Overstock eventually decided to continue on with the project without the help of the Mastercoin/Omni developers.8 There are, however

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Time: 10 minutes Difficulty Re-target: 2016 blocks Block Reward (current): 25 NMC Total Supply: 21 million Namecoin was the first “Bitcoin 2.0” or “Cryptocurrency 2.0” project. It was released in April 2011 and was a novel solution to domain registration centralization and censorship issues that some on the

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I am merely an outside observer. Even copycat coins are prevented from scooping up .bit addresses, so Namecoin is in the extremely rare position among cryptocurrencies of being open source but also protected from being directly copied by a lesser coin. Someone else could make a similar uncensorable Internet, but they

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anywhere anytime soon. Blackcoin has its own version of proof-of-stake (dubbed “Proof-of-Stake 3.0”) that depends less on coinage than other cryptocurrencies and which aims to secure the network. Blackcoin’s developers are also reportedly working on further improvements to the proof-of-stake method of securing

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Block Time: Around 20 seconds Block Reward: 5 Ether per block Maximum Blocksize: 1MB Total Number: No limit I conclude with perhaps the most exciting cryptocurrency since Bitcoin. Ethereum is more than a coin, describing itself thus: “Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as

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then communities and developers alike can become discouraged. I think the most important and interesting innovations to come from the altcoin space—both actual alternative cryptocurrencies and “coins” built on top of Bitcoin—will come from communities that realize chasing the price is a fruitless endeavor. I talked earlier about Arscoin

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be. I believe more niche economies such as LTBCoin will spring up over time. Shortly before this book was finished, Uphold announced the Voxel, a cryptocurrency designed to be a currency for virtual reality content creation. What else does the future hold? One of the most heady concepts surrounding Bitcoin is

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services could be handled in a collaborative, volunteer way. Before Bitcoin, I was more socialist than libertarian. But I now foresee systems being built with cryptocurrencies that satisfy the individual freedoms of libertarian ideals and the social safety nets desired by more progressive people. In a far-flung future, even local

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might arise. If that happens, running it on a blockchain makes perfect sense. Not to mention that these communities will eventually need a currency, and cryptocurrencies are uniquely designed to operate in the digital world. It’s not that traditional governments will go away completely; few are that optimistic. Nathan Wosnack

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and informational freedom provided by the Internet. If Bitcoin reaches its potential, billions of people will have their economic lives impacted by the growth of cryptocurrencies. They will gain an economic freedom that will enable them to climb the economic ladder in ways they never imagined possible. In short, Bitcoin will

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13, 2014. Accessed June 22, 2015. http://cointelegraph.com/news/112268/op-ed-how-bitcoin-could-change-how-we-interact-with-sports. Index A Alternative Cryptocurrencies: Arscoin, 283 Blackcoin, 309 Bytecoin, 304 Dash/Dark, 294 Dogecoin, 289 Ethereum, 311 Litecoin, 287 LTBCoin, 318 Monero, 304 Namecoin, 68, 305 NuBits, 296 NXT

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Cloud Mining, 189, 194 Cody Wilson, 86 Coin Mixing, 77 CoinJoin, 79 Darkwallet, 87 Coinality, 178 Coinbase, 140 [blockchain input. See also: Coinbase, Bitcoin Exchanges] Cryptocurrency 2.0 Projects: Bit/BlackHalo, 66 Counterparty, 273, 300 Distributed Automated Corporations (DACs), 69, 324 Factom, 302 iNation, 323 Maidsafe, 302 Mastercoin (see Omni) Omni

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud

by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman · 17 Jul 2023 · 329pp · 99,504 words

12: Chapter 11 CHAPTER 13: Preacher’s Father Epilogue Acknowledgments Appendix Notes Index AUTHOR’S NOTE If you currently own, or have ever owned, cryptocurrency and have lost money on that investment, rest assured that you are not alone. In fact, you join the ranks of the vast majority of

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—particularly prior to the invention of securities laws—created and destroyed fortunes overnight. Almost a century later, the casino descriptor proves even more apt: Cryptocurrencies and their assorted byproducts are generally regarded by economists as at best zero-sum. One person’s gain is another’s loss. You may have

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spread of a distorted economic narrative that led to its downfall. Narrative Economics was published in 2019, prior to both the current viral spread of cryptocurrency and the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that, it is remarkable to observe how intertwined these two viruses would become in the following years. To

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understand the origins of economic narratives surrounding Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, we have to go back to the events that inspired them. Both crypto and the “easy money” policies from which this book derives its

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s the good news: You are now free to forget everything I just said. The operational details of blockchain technology are not important to understanding cryptocurrency’s rise in popular culture. Remember, blockchain is at least thirty years old and barely used by businesses outside of the crypto industry. Since

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use case gambling? Ironically enough, the more important technology is the one that predates it: public key encryption. What is important to understand about cryptocurrency is the economic narrative that developed around it, a constellation of sometimes overlapping stories that built up over the course of its existence. The original

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most popular digital currency, but it was not the first. In a 1982 paper, cryptographer David Chaum theorized the intellectual scaffolding of blockchain, upon which cryptocurrency would emerge some quarter of a century later. Chaum started his own digital currency company, DigiCash, in the late 1980s. Although it was technically

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mean a kind of financial anarchy. Criminals could use crypto to avoid taxes, sanctions, launder money, and collect profits from ransomware. A deluge of cryptocurrencies appeared, not just Ethereum but hundreds and then thousands of others, with the wave cresting during the so-called Initial Coin Offering (ICO) boom of

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money and circulating it through offshore markets. In terms of propensity for fraud, what could be more appealing? Stepping back even further, what did these cryptocurrencies do? From where did their value derive? They were bizarre. Imagine a conventional security, such as a share of stock in the company Apple.

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writing a few articles on the subject? Establish our bona fides, as it were, before we go to market with the book. Celebrities are endorsing cryptocurrencies left and right. Why not start with your superpower? ° ° ° On October 7, 2021, Slate published an article with the unambiguous title “Celebrity Crypto Shilling

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Lindsay Lohan for their involvement in promoting various crypto projects. Along with former NBA star Paul Pierce, Kim and Floyd had been shilling an obscure cryptocurrency called EthereumMax. Kim’s Instagram post from June 2021 read as follows: ARE YOU GUYS INTO CRYPTO???? THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE BUT SHARING

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from the industry’s charming parlance, EthereumMax was a shitcoin. The hastily assembled crypto project seemed purposely designed to be confused with the second biggest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, even though the two were not related. Kim’s post, sent out to her then 251 million (!) followers, was an enormous publicity success

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an all-time high of around $3 trillion. According to a Pew study, 16 percent of adult Americans had invested in, traded, or used cryptocurrency, meaning some forty million people had been lured into the crypto casino. A December 2021 study commissioned by Grayscale, a prominent crypto company, found that

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influencers appear uncannily similar to someone pushing an old-fashioned MLM. Crypto-world celebrities employ a number of social media channels, hawking this or that cryptocurrency based on technobabble “fundamentals,” rumors, misinformation, or just a sense of optimism. Twitter, YouTube, Discord, Telegram, and TikTok were essential platforms for crypto influencers,

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eventually central banks were created to better manage the franchisee banks and ensure the safety of customer deposits. Among the many butcherings of language in cryptocurrency, historians may find this the cruelest cut of all. The purported “future of money” is in fact the past of money, a failed experiment

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myself, I searched for decent podcasts on the subject. Instead, I got a lot of shows with dudes—really loud dudes—hawking this or that cryptocurrency while waxing philosophically on freedom and privacy and displaying a garbage understanding of economics. It was annoying, tedious, and a tad suspect: If these

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° ° ° Two weeks after the Super Bowl, the headline in Variety blared: ‘The O.C.’ Star Ben McKenzie, Journalist Jacob Silverman Sell ‘Easy Money,’ Book About Cryptocurrency, to Abrams Press. After a few setbacks, Jacob and I had managed to convince Abrams Press, an imprint of the storied New York publisher initially

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such extreme financial risks. One man told us that he belonged to at least four DAOs—decentralized autonomous organizations—from which he earned several different cryptocurrencies. A DAO starts with a loose group of people who share a common goal. They build (or attempt to build) an organization without a

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through automated computer programs called smart contracts and stored on ledgers called blockchains. Membership in the organization is denoted in a governance token, aka a cryptocurrency, which is sort of like a voting share of a stock. If it all sounds painfully complicated, it’s not you. DAOs are notoriously

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offerings. CZ responded by moving his operation to Japan, only to have to move it again the following year when Japanese authorities warned against selling cryptocurrencies to the public without a license. Since 2018, Binance has refused to give a location for its global operations, claiming it has no headquarters.

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position liquidated when the price continued to rise. The response from Binance was of little help to users. It nevertheless revealed something fundamental about how cryptocurrency exchanges exist as murkily operated casinos that are essentially unaccountable to their customers. Instead of acknowledging the full scale of the problem, the official

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aggrieved customers. Kim and Ahmed connected with Liti Capital, a Switzerland-based blockchain private equity firm—essentially a litigation finance firm that issues its own cryptocurrency and tries to incorporate public decision-making into which cases it takes on. Liti staked $5 million to support the suit, which was being

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“world’s coolest dictator,” and his profile picture sported laser eyes favored by Bitcoin maximalists, or maxis, who believed that Bitcoin was the one true cryptocurrency and the rest imposters, mere shitcoins. Bukele bragged that he bought Bitcoin, using the state treasury, on his phone while sitting on the toilet.

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the same. Hilary Allen, professor of law at American University, wrote a paper in February 2022, just three months before the crash, referring to cryptocurrency and its assorted DeFi products as effectively a new form of shadow banking. Broadly speaking, shadow banking refers to a company offering banking services while

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drunk after last call. It was nearing its moment of subprime catastrophe. Of all the ironies crypto presented, this was surely near the top. Cryptocurrency, which was supposedly created as a solution to the myriad failures of our regulated financial system laid bare during the subprime crisis, had effectively reproduced

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Sam moved Alameda Research to Hong Kong in search of a more favorable regulatory environment. Hong Kong benefited from being close to mainland China, where cryptocurrency had exploded in popularity, due in no small part to the desire of wealthy Chinese to avoid state capital controls. In Hong Kong, everyone seemed

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dollars on its crypto investments. Elon Musk, the supposed genius billionaire who had gone on Saturday Night Live the year before and promoted Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency he admitted was “a hustle,” had apparently been hustled himself. (Musk was simultaneously in the midst of receiving the most expensive lesson in contract

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, Bitcoin followed in the financial lineage of beef futures. For many coiners, it was taken as good news, a way of legitimizing the first cryptocurrency by enshrining it under the existing regulatory regime. One year later, the CFTC announced that TeraExchange had engaged in illegal wash trading surrounding that very

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and others considered derivatives contracts commodities, which was justifiable under a strict reading of the Commodity Exchange Act. Because such contracts existed for Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency itself was one. Bitcoin’s a pretty weird commodity, in that it obviously isn’t tied to any specific physical good, as commodities were

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lot to make sure there is no fraud or other manipulation. Thank you, Mr. Bankman-Fried, for helping us understand the extensive guardrails a cryptocurrency exchange like FTX has in place to ensure sound crypto spot markets for investors.” Rep. Emmer was hopeful that further discussions might let them proceed

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. They never have a chance. David can never know for sure, but he suspects that forex was how his father stumbled upon Stallion Wings, a cryptocurrency investment firm promising incredible returns. ° ° ° Lin and Aaron Sternlicht run a boutique addiction services firm in New York City catering to high–net worth

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are effectively valueless are often described as Ponzi schemes, which are regulated under American law by the Securities and Exchange Commission. In my opinion, the cryptocurrency industry represents the largest Ponzi scheme in history.” I hit the red button and glanced up. Thirty feet away, on the dais above me,

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bought every CEL token in the market at least one time and in some instances, twice.” Given the opaque and largely unregulated nature of the cryptocurrency industry, there was little stopping Celsius from engaging in what would otherwise constitute blatant fraud. While the euphoria of the crypto bubble lasted, such

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. While the bank served a wide variety of clients, from law firms to real estate developers to taxi medallion businesses, it had recently ventured into cryptocurrency. At the time of its closure, Signature held approximately $100 billion worth of assets, and $16.52 billion in digital asset–related client deposits.

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the failures was alarming, I couldn’t help but notice that two of the three collapsed banks had significant exposure to the volatile world of cryptocurrency, and the third (SVB) counted as clients the crypto companies Ripple, BlockFi, Circle, Avalanche, and Yuga Labs, among others. I thought back to the

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Critics’ Corner. Thank you to Stephen Diehl for being as generous to fellow skeptics as he is eloquent in his deconstructions of the myths surrounding cryptocurrency. Thank you to Molly White for chronicling the absurdities of crypto and Web3 through her website web3isgoinggreat.com. I’m grateful for the work

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Harriet Agnew, “Jim Chanos: ‘We are in the golden age of fraud,’” Financial Times, July 24, 2020. 4 A few thousand cryptos: CoinMarketCap, “Today’s Cryptocurrency Prices by Market Cap,” https://Coinmarketcap.com. 4 An estimated forty million Americans: Pew Research Center, November 11, 2021. 5 In his 2019 book: Robert

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FTX Shareholders Facing Wipeout,” Bloomberg, January 10, 2023. 52 42% of men: Michelle Faverio and Navid Massarat, “46% of Americans who have invested in cryptocurrency say it’s done worse than expected,” Pew Research Center, August 2022. 53 “In theory, the difference seems to be”: Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language

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against the world’s largest crypto exchange,” Washington Post, April 1, 2022. 92 crypto took off in China . . . to avoid capital controls: Karen Yeung, “Cryptocurrencies help Chinese evade capital and currency controls in moving billions overseas,” South China Morning Post, August 26, 2020. 92 Binance has . . . no headquarters: Patricia Kowsmann

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down as FTX CEO as his crypto exchange files for bankruptcy,” CNBC, November 11, 2022, https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/11/sam-bankman-frieds-cryptocurrency-exchange-ftx-files-for-bankruptcy.html. 228 “ ‘God Mode’ to short coins . . .”: Alex Mashinsky (@Mashinsky), Twitter, December 3, 2022, https://twitter.com/mashinsky/with

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District Court (Southern District of New York), December 21, 2022, https://www.cftc.gov/media/8021/enfftxtradingcomplaint122122/download. 237 In January 2023: Giulia Heyward, “Cryptocurrency giant Coin-base strikes a $100 million deal with New York regulators,” NPR, January 4, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/01/04/1146915338/coinbase

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-settlement-cryptocurrency-exchange-new-york-dfs. CHAPTER 13: PREACHER’S FATHER 243 a story about his dad, Hal: Multiple interviews with David Henson in 2022; reporting

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to Stop Issuing Binance Stablecoin,” Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2023. 262 the government charged . . . Bitzlato: press release, “Founder and Majority Owner of Bitzlato, a Cryptocurrency Exchange, Charged with Unlicensed Money Transmitting,” US Attorney’s Office (Eastern District of New York), https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/founder-and-majority

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-owner-bitzlato-cryptocurrency-exchange-charged-unlicensed-money. 264 Silvergate made a “risk based decision”: Rachel Louise Ensign, “Crypto Bank Silvergate to Shut Down, Repay Deposits,” Wall Street

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(1936) Commodity Exchange Authority (CEA) Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) cooling out the mark COVID-19 pandemic Credit Suisse Cressey, Donald Crypto Critics’ Corner (podcast) cryptocurrency. See specific topics Cultish (Montell) Damon, Matt Davidson, Warren Davies, Dan Davies, Kyle decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) decentralized finance (DeFi) Dell, Michael Democratic Party

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P. multi-level marketing scheme (MLM) Murdoch, Lachlan Mushegian, Nikolai Musk, Elon Nadkarni, Tushar Nailwal, Sandeep Narrative Economics (Shiller) National Bureau of Economic Research National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team National League Championship Series naturally occurring Ponzi schemes Neuner, Ran New Republic Newsome, Jim New York magazine New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) New

Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts

by Lorne Lantz and Daniel Cawrey · 8 Dec 2020 · 434pp · 77,974 words

Altchains Bitcoin Improvement Proposals Understanding Forks Contentious Hard Forks The Bitcoin Cash Fork Altcoins Litecoin More Altcoin Experiments “2.0” Chains NXT Counterparty Privacy-Focused Cryptocurrencies Dash Monero Zcash Ripple and Stellar Ripple Stellar Scaling Blockchains SegWit Lightning Other Altchain Solutions The Ethereum Classic Fork Summary 4. The Evolution to Ethereum

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quick, highly detailed, and accurate technical overview of the blockchain sector. Moe Adham, CEO, Bitcoin ATM provider Bitaccess Mastering Blockchain Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies, Smart Contracts, and Decentralized Applications Lorne Lantz and Daniel Cawrey Mastering Blockchain by Lorne Lantz and Daniel Cawrey Copyright © 2021 Lorne Lantz and Daniel Cawrey

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Bitcoin) and MetaMask (Ethereum). Pros User controls keys Can be used mostly offline for better security Cons No one desktop wallet is best for all cryptocurrencies Desktop security must be maintained by the user A mobile wallet is an app-based wallet, found in the app stores for Android or iOS

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is used in more private implementations of blockchain. Stakeholders In addition to a protocol network, wallets, and miners, there are other stakeholders in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. These may be centralized services or for-profit businesses, and they provide important functionality needed in the ecosystem. There are five categories of stakeholders

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privacy chains available today. Research has proven that in some instances, using hashes can compromise privacy in cryptographic systems. These systems could include blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, since they use hashes on a publicly viewable ledger. Zcash uses a technology called Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs)

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Ethereum. Improving Bitcoin’s Limited Functionality Bitcoin was the first decentralized consensus protocol to apply the concept of scripted money—that is, the idea that cryptocurrency transactions could transmit funds depending on the true/false status of running a limited program. Initially, many saw bitcoin as “programmable money,” but scripted

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platform coupled with the ability to create tokens on top of the Ethereum blockchain made it an ideal automated fundraising apparatus for jump-starting various cryptocurrency projects. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations In an effort to further the ethos of decentralization in the Ethereum ecosystem, the concept of a decentralized autonomous organization

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Buterin began emailing around a whitepaper proposing a new protocol based on elements of Bitcoin, Mastercoin, and other projects. This document was disseminated throughout the cryptocurrency community, and developers and backers began to accumulate. Buterin made a public announcement of the Ethereum project in February 2014. A Swiss-based nonprofit

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executes the transaction using the details that were submitted in step 1. This confirmTransaction call occurs in block #7458500. Decentralized Exchange Contracts Before Ethereum, every cryptocurrency exchange had to be controlled and managed by a company—a centralized authority. Centralized exchanges still exist, with popular examples including Coinbase, Bitstamp, and

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operate in different jurisdictions and therefore must comply with different levels of regulatory oversight. Figure 6-5 illustrates. Figure 6-5. Four types of cryptocurrency exchanges Cryptocurrency exchanges are bound by the laws of the jurisdictions they operate in. Figure 6-5 shows four categories that exchanges may fall into: International exchanges

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Here are a few of the most well-known data sources: CoinDesk Skew Glassnode TradingView Each offers different datasets and tools. There are also specialized cryptocurrency information sources that it’s good to know about, such as block explorers and transaction flow tracking systems. Block explorers A block explorer enables the

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or wallet) is completed. Transaction flows The ability to track transaction flows on the blockchain can help when analyzing trading patterns. Tracking the movement of cryptocurrency can be much easier than tracking fiat currency. This is especially true when transfers are happening between wallets, exchanges, and other services because these

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diminishing its purchasing power and store of value properties. Minting is algorithmically fixed, or relegated to authorities within a system. Burning Used to decrease a cryptocurrency supply, burning involves the destruction of assets. This destruction is done by system authorities. By reducing circulation and lessening supply, this can cause the price

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system with accounts and payments built in. However, some organizations don’t particularly see the benefit of this. Permissionless systems need accounts, payments, and cryptocurrencies to properly incentivize users, but that may not necessarily be the case for permissioned ledgers. In the permissioned world, providing infrastructure for payments and accounts

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instead of centralized rent-seeking (e.g., targeted advertising on social networks or taking a fee like online marketplaces do). Decentralization Versus Centralization Early cryptocurrency proponents embraced decentralization as a core part of the technology. However, many other blockchain platforms—particularly those being developed for organizations—are much more centralized

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were on the longest chain. At each fork, the new “longest chain” must contain all these checkpoints. Ethereum-Based Privacy Implementations Public blockchains and cryptocurrency networks don’t make good implementations for businesses. This is because many organizations need to keep control of their information for competitive reasons, compliance, or

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Monero, How Monero Works whitelisting, Counterparty Risk adjustable blocksize cap (Bitcoin), The Bitcoin Cash Fork adoption of blockchain, The Future of Blockchain airdrops, disbursement of cryptocurrencies via, Airdrops airgapped computers, Counterparty Risk altchains, Understanding Forks altcoins, Understanding Forks, Altcoins-Counterpartyearlier, sample of, Altcoins Litecoin, Litecoin other, More Altcoin Experiments Amazon

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Quantum Ledger, Blockchain as a Service analysis, Analysis-Hunting for Bartanalytics services for cryptocurrency blockchains, Analytics fundamental cryptocurrency analysis, Fundamental Cryptocurrency Analysis-Tools for fundamental analysistools for, Tools for fundamental analysis Tullip Mania or the internet, Tulip Mania or the internet? technical

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for Consensus Byzantine fault-tolerant agreement, RippleHotStuff algorithm, Borrowing from Existing Blockchains C Cardano, Blockchains to Watch Casper algorithm (proof-of-stake), Ethereum Scaling CCXT (CryptoCurrency eXchange Trading Library), Open Source Trading Tech cell phone porting attacks, Security Fundamentals central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), Central Bank Digital Currencies centralizationcaused by proof

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, Analytics channels (Lightning), Lightning Chaum, David, DigiCash Chia, Alternative methods Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), partnership with Royal Mint, The Royal Mint China, central bank cryptocurrency, China Coburn, Zachary, Skirting the Laws Coin ATM Radar website, Evolution of the Price of Bitcoin Coinbase, Wallet Types: Custodial Versus Noncustodial, Custody Coinbase Pro

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communication complexity, Other Altchain Solutions crypto laundering, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering-The Evolution of Crypto Launderinghow funds are laundered, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering cryptocurrencies, Cryptocurrency Fundamentals-Summaryadditional, Mastercoin introducing notion of, Mastercoin and Smart Contracts backing DAI multi-collateral token, DAI and blockchain, leading to new platforms for the web

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attacks on passwords, Zero-Knowledge Proof difficulty of discovering valid block hash, Block discovery DigiCash, DigiCash digital bonds, Banking digital money, Bitcoin Predecessors(see also cryptocurrencies) creation of, in B-Money, B-Money use of hashing to limit double spend, Hashcash digital signaturesmultisignature system, Hash Time Locked Contracts, Lightning Schnorr

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decentralized version of, Altcoins dot-com crash, Tulip Mania or the internet? double spend problem, Hashcashin Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper, The Whitepaper dumping of a cryptocurrency, Wash Trading E E-gold, E-Gold EEA (Enterprise Ethereum Alliance), The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance Elements open source project, Liquid Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm

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(ECDSA) encrytionsecp256k1 function, Public and Private Keys in Cryptocurrency Systems signing and validating transactions with, Signing and Validating Transactions Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) secp256k1 function, Generating keys Enigma, Skirting the Laws, Privacy

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Electronic Systems and Trust IT systems, permissioned ledger uses, IT Ixcoin, Altcoins J Java, Corda language JPMorgan, JPMorganinterbank payments using permissioned ledger, Payments jurisdiction over cryptocurrency exchanges, Jurisdiction K Keccak-256 hash algorithm, Hashes Know Your Customer (KYC) rules, Banking Risk, DAIon centralized and decentralized exchanges, Know your customer crypto laundering

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Verifiable Ledgers Hyperledger Fabric technology, Hyperledger permissioned ledger uses of blockchain, Permissioned Ledger Uses-Payments Ripple, Ripple legal industry, permissioned ledger uses, Legal legal requirements, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology skirting the laws, Skirting the Laws lending services (DeFi), Lending less than 5% rule, Counterparty Risk Libra, Libra-Summaryborrowing from existing blockchains

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Price of Bitcoin whales, Whales market size, Order Books Mastercoin, Mastercoin and Smart Contracts, Tokenize EverythingEthereum and, Ethereum: Taking Mastercoin to the Next Level raising cryptocurrency funds to launch a project, Use Cases: ICOs Meetup.com, Information mempool, unconfirmed transactions on Bitcoin, Transaction life cycle Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST),

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Laundering paired with scalability, Mimblewimble blockchain protocol, Mimblewimble, Beam, and Grin privacy-focused blockchains, PrivacyMonero, Blockchains to Watch-How Monero Works Zcash, Zcash privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, Privacy-Focused CryptocurrenciesDash, Dash Monero, Monero Zcash, Zcash private blockchain networks, Privacy private blockchains, The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance private keys, Public/private key cryptography(see

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tokens on a blockchain, Tokens on the Ethereum Platform recovery seed, Recovery Seed recursive call vulnerability, Forking Ethereum and the creation of Ethereum Classic regulationof cryptocurrency exchanges, Jurisdiction FATF and the Travel Rule, The FATF and the Travel Rule FinCEN guidance and beginnings of, FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of

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Regulation-FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation regulatory challenges in cryptocurrency market, Regulatory Challenges-Basic Mistakes regulatory issues with ICOs, Tokenize Everything regulatory arbitrage, Avoiding Scrutiny: Regulatory Arbitrage-Crypto-Based StablecoinsICOs as example of, Initial

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on Bitcoin, An Early Vulnerability exchanges taking care of private keys, Counterparty Risk flash loans exploiting vulnerabilities in DeFi platforms, The Fulcrum Exploit fundamentals for cryptocurrencies, Security Fundamentals-Recovery Seed identity and dangers of hacking, Identity and the Dangers of Hacking information security in decentralizing finance and the web, Privacy

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push and pull transactions, ERC-777 third-party auditors of, Fungible and Nonfungible Tokens Uniswap contract viewable on Ethereum, Infrastructure social media, campaigns to influence cryptocurrencies, Tools for fundamental analysis soft forks, Understanding Forks software development, changes from use of cryptcurrency and blockchain, Web 3.0 software forks, Understanding Forks

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software wallets, Wallets Solidcoin, Altcoins Solidity language, Authoring a smart contract South Korean exchanges, Regulatory Challenges speculation in cryptocurrency, Market Infrastructure, Tulip Mania or the internet? spoofing, Wash Trading spot exchanges, The Role of Exchanges Square’s Cash App, Brokerages stablecoins, Stablecoins-KYC

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problems with, Crypto-Based Stablecoins-TetherBasis, Basis Digix, Digix NuBits, NuBits Tether (USDT), Tether TrueUSD, TrueUSD USDC, USDC use by unregulated exchanges, Jurisdiction stakeholders in cryptocurrency ecosystem, Stakeholders-Informationanalytics services, Analytics brokerages, Brokerages custody solutions, Custody exchanges, Exchanges information services, Information STARKs, STARKs state channels, Other Altchain Solutions stealth addresses (Monero

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decentralized exchanges, Decentralized Exchange Contracts Tether use case for tokenization, Tether token economics in ICOs, Token Economics tokenizing everything, Tokenize Everything use to create new cryptocurrencies on blockchain protocols, Understanding Omni Layer Torcoin, Alternative methods trading bots and exchange APIs, Exchange APIs and Trading Bots-Market Aggregators trading technology, open

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to overcome, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks intermediary, Electronic Systems and Trust issuance, Electronic Systems and Trust trustless sidechains, Sidechains Tulip Mania, Fundamental Cryptocurrency Analysis 2.0 chains, “2.0” Chains two-factor authentication, Security Fundamentals U Ulbricht, Ross, Catch Me If You Can unconfirmed/mempool (transactions on

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on Ethereum, Infrastructure token listing on, Token listing Unobtainium, More Altcoin Experiments unspent transaction output (see UTXO model) US agencies and regulatory bodies regulating cryptocurrencies, FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation US Dollar Coin (USDC), USDC US Federal Reserveblockchain implementation, US Federal Reserve raising interest rates to control housing

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asset service providers (VASPs), requirement to provide user data on transactions, The FATF and the Travel Rule VmWare blockchain, Blockchain as a Service volatility of cryptocurrencies, Fungible and Nonfungible TokensMaker creating stable asset from volatile markets, DAI Voorhees, Erik, Skirting the Laws voting-based consensus, Alternative methods W wallets, Wallet

Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead

by Kenneth Rogoff · 27 Feb 2025 · 330pp · 127,791 words

: Unique or Prototypical? Chapter 15. The Tokyo Consensus Chapter 16. Fixed Exchange Rates Redux Part IV. Alternative Currencies Chapter 17. Global Currencies Chapter 18. Cryptocurrencies and the Future of Money Chapter 19. Central Bank Digital Currencies Part V. The Perks and Burdens of Being the Dominant Currency Chapter 20. Perks

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arising from very high debt. Anyone who doesn’t believe that very high debt is a free lunch must be in favor of austerity. With cryptocurrencies, the nuttiness goes in both directions, including those who think they will supplant the dollar and those who think Bitcoin is a scam. Although

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trouble pivoting in a fast-moving global economy. To show how lost Kodak’s management became: In January 2018, the company announced KodakCoin, a cryptocurrency, which initially led to a doubling of the company’s stock price but ultimately failed.9 Xerox eventually entered a joint venture with Fuji to

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by gold or any physical commodity, but only by trust in the issuing authority; we will come back to this topic in chapter 18 on cryptocurrencies.) Today, the euro is easily the most important alternative to the dollar in international trade and finance. The overwhelming share of trade among the

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represent virtually every country in the world. Hence the appeal of supposedly stateless world currencies, as we turn to next. CHAPTER 18 CRYPTOCURRENCIES AND THE FUTURE OF MONEY Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have significant uses in the global underground economy that undeniably give them long-term value. And, as we shall

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economy is massive—easily 20 percent of global GDP, on par with the economic size of Europe. However, there is absolutely no chance that any cryptocurrency will supplant the dollar as the dominant currency in legal, tax-compliant transactions, except perhaps in a post-nuclear apocalyptic Mad Max dystopian future.

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Except for the intense lobbying efforts against regulation, it should not be all that difficult to at least ringfence the use of cryptocurrencies, especially as the vast majority of people engage with cryptocurrencies using “exchanges” that are far easier to regulate than blockchain transactions themselves. That is because most people find trading

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make them much easier, in principle, for the tax authorities, law enforcement, or a court to trace. And the same would be true for cryptocurrency exchanges if they were subject to regulations fully parallel to those banks are subject to. Without getting into the weeds, let’s just say that

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at present, this is far from always the case. Using exchanges, individual investors don’t really need any cryptocurrency savvy. They can acquire cryptocurrency, say bitcoin or ether, by paying in fiat currency such as the dollar, making use of the exchange’s user-friendly interface; the

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of your crypto, should you wish to have it exchanged back into dollars, fluctuates with the market. Meanwhile, since not everyone asks for their cryptocurrency back at the same time, the exchange can make handsome profits by lending its holdings at rather high interest rates. All of this indeed makes

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the exchange, and there probably won’t be until the sector becomes regulated more in parallel with legacy banks, which unfortunately may not happen until cryptocurrencies become part of some much larger financial crisis. Again, the government ultimately holds the key levers, even if that realization has not fully sunk

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in. Of course, even if there were no exchanges (that is, no crypto banks), cryptocurrencies could still exist on the blockchain, but they would be far less useful in transactions, and there would still be many steps governments could take

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to rein in blockchain transactions. We will come back to this. Without the liquidity exchanges provide, however, the challenge cryptocurrencies pose to fiat currencies would be far smaller. The dollar would be nothing without the banking and financial systems that stand behind it. Right now

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, the government will eventually either steal it or regulate it into submission. Dyed-in-the-wool crypto believers may think it is impossible to regulate cryptocurrency; one hears “the code is the law” or “crypto is censorship resistant.” The problem with this logic—as I have already emphasized—is that

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even if governments cannot ban cryptocurrencies entirely, they can certainly create laws that make them difficult and expensive to use, and thereby quash the network effects needed for any

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would have in the days before deposit insurance and government bailouts became the norm. The only difference is that FTX was housing deposits linked to cryptocurrency rather than fiat currency. Almost overnight, FTX’s founder, Samuel Bankman-Fried (SBF), went from being feted everywhere as the tech world’s newest

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borrowed from Steve Jobs. After the firm’s ignominious collapse, my children told me I had to stop wearing it.) Despite having written forcefully on cryptocurrency regulation in my 2016 book and then later contributing to a Group of Thirty report on the topic in 2019, I had not previously paid

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much attention to SBF when, in April 2022, I was invited to appear on a new weekly cryptocurrency show that Bloomberg had launched. The show was mainly aimed at crypto enthusiasts. The producer asked whether I would be willing to appear on the

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would rant about the Securities and Exchange Commission and its head Gary Gensler. Why can’t the SEC be more supportive or at least leave cryptocurrencies alone so that great financial innovation can continue apace? they would ask. On the other hand, it was worrisome to read that SBF and

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lobbying, FTX produced a clever ad for the 2022 Super Bowl featuring the comedian Larry David constantly dismissing the great inventions of history leading up cryptocurrency exchanges. It was a lot cheerier than Crypto.com’s exceedingly dark Super Bowl ad in which the actor Matt Damon tells the audience

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get; he was certainly still projecting great confidence about his firm’s future. In for a penny, in for a pound, one supposes. Other cryptocurrency leaders have rightly said that one cannot paint the whole space with SBF’s brush; there have always been con artists in finance, yet banking

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and finance have survived and thrived. Cryptocurrency’s vulnerability to runs, though, is a much deeper problem that is not so easily dismissed. At the opposite end of the spectrum from

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as a guest star on NBC’s Saturday Night Live comedy show, the price for dogecoin dropped sharply after Musk’s character facetiously described the cryptocurrency as “a hustle,” and one can find endless other examples.12 Bubble behavior, however, is not the whole story. Just as Yuval Noah Harari

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’s explanation of money offers far too much hope to bitcoin evangelists, the idea that cryptocurrency is good for nothing except speculation ignores cryptocurrencies’ killer app: the sprawling underground economy. Perhaps this is because very few economists think about the underground economy, since they

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true value of national output. Thanks to big data, however, that situation is changing. The issue is so fundamental to understanding whether bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies might have genuine uses in making payments, and not just as speculative assets, that one cannot ignore it. The World Bank, in an extensive

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for decades—governments that focus on the benefits and fail to look at the costs are being penny-wise and pound-foolish.15 If private cryptocurrencies can compete in this market, not to mention expand it because they can be used online, the potential rents are huge. By the way,

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estimates of a 32 percent average across developing economies appear quite plausible. What does all of this have to do with the value of cryptocurrency? Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) may have little legitimate use in legal, tax-compliant transactions, but if it is indeed widely used in facilitating trade in the

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one wallet to another.21 We have already noted that the overwhelming majority of bitcoin trades go through exchanges, which, again, are basically to cryptocurrencies what banks are to paper currency. Taking advantage of the fact that some exchanges with worldwide footprints have posted all their trades, including the exact

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an early crypto pioneer who had moved back to the mainland. It will be interesting to see the extent to which bitcoin (or other cryptocurrency) comes to serve as a substitute for hundred-dollar bills as a store of value for those who might be in need of a fast

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the global black-market value of blood diamonds and that can be used for terrorist financing? They seem to have no problem with indexing to cryptocurrencies. Indeed, though it is difficult to prove definitively, one strongly suspects that a part of goods trade between Russia and China has made use

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of cryptocurrencies to evade U.S. financial sanctions. Even if bitcoin per se is not being used directly in this trading, bitcoin could serve as collateral

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it can be costly for authorities and, in the case of international transactions via an offshore exchange, requires a high level of international cooperation. If cryptocurrency is used to commit a terrorist attack, such cooperation will be relatively easy to achieve. For small tax-evasion cases, say a Nigerian citizen

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most important. Both have their value fixed at one dollar, although on occasion they trade for less. Stablecoins have become popular over time precisely because cryptocurrency prices are so volatile. Indeed, tether is more traded than bitcoin, although as of mid-August 2024, bitcoin has a far larger market cap

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tether and $34 billion for USDC).24 Central bankers tend to be far more open minded about integrating stablecoins into the financial system than integrating cryptocurrencies with their wildly gyrating prices. Dollar-linked stablecoins provide a potential alternative to bank debit accounts and credit cards as a payment mechanism. If

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the regulation issues are really very similar to old-fashioned banking and must be taken up if stablecoins continue to grow in importance. In sum, cryptocurrencies can definitely compete for business with the dollar in the global underground economy, and this is a source of fundamental value. However, naive crypto evangelists

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could be like having your own Venmo account at the central bank. Or it could be a central bank token, or even a government-sanctioned cryptocurrency, depending on its privacy properties. Indeed, as we shall see, there are dozens of alternative approaches to implementation, some so different that it is

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one major central bank head explained to me a decade ago in commenting on my 2016 book’s call for introducing coherent regulation, “Right now, cryptocurrencies don’t seem to be doing any serious harm, and we don’t want to get in the way of all the innovation.” Nowadays,

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efficiency and financial inclusion, essentially improving the legacy financial system rather than replacing it. A side benefit is that the process helps them better understand cryptocurrencies, including how to potentially regulate them. For some countries, another rationale is equally important: deflating if not necessarily dethroning the dollar—at a minimum,

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the difficulties of this step, but restrictions would almost certainly be imposed. The Securities and Exchange Commission has been quite creative in putting restrictions on cryptocurrencies (too creative according to its critics), and the same methods could be applied, which presumably even a crypto-crazed president would allow. In the

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volatile, the rest of Asia will also be forced to strike a new balance, given China’s importance in global trade. The rise of cryptocurrencies and central bank digital currencies that aim to create new non-dollar pipelines for global finance are expressions of this demand. Nothing major has happened

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: How to Make Sense of the New Japan and Why It Matters (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2020). 9. Kevin Roose, “Kodak’s Dubious Cryptocurrency Gamble,” New York Times, January 30, 2018. 10. Over the same period, greater Rochester, including its sprawling suburbs, has grown slightly. 11. Justin Murphy,

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. 20. Kenneth Rogoff, “The Case for a World Carbon Bank,” Journal of Policy Modeling 45, no. 4 (July/August 2023): 693–701. Chapter 18. Cryptocurrencies and the Future of Money 1. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper Collins, 2015) (translated from original Hebrew edition

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District of New York, “Tornado Cash Founders Charged with Money Laundering and Sanctions Violations,” press release, August 23, 2023. 21. Jonathan Wheatley and Adrienne Klasa, “Cryptocurrencies: Developing Countries Provide Fertile Ground,” Financial Times, September 5, 2021. 22. Clemens Graf von Luckner, Carmen M. Reinhart, and Kenneth S. Rogoff, “Decrypting New

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225 Biden, Joe (President, United States), 8, 216, 281 Big Tech, 186–87, 203 bitcoin, 182, 189, 192–93, 194–95, 197, 257. See also cryptocurrencies Blaine, David, 177 Blanchard, Olivier, 54, 265, 327 n.10 Boughton, James, 131, 132 Brady, Tom, 189 Brazil, 165, 235 Banco do Brasil, 142–43

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pandemic. See pandemic Crazy Rich Asians, 205 Croatia, 15 Crockett, Andrew (General Manager, Bank for International Settlements), 77–78 CrowdStrike outage, 201 Crypto.com, 189 cryptocurrencies, 182–98, 289, 290 blockchain transactions, 184–85, 186, 193, 196 exchanges, 184–85, 188, 193, 198 fiat currency compared, 182–85 KodakCoin, 28

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173–81 history of, 185 paper money, 185 reserve, 176, 213 safe, 156, 242 vehicle, 4, 47, 194. See also central bank digital currencies (CBDC); cryptocurrencies; dominant currency; and specific currencies currency board, 148 currency unions, 46–47, 154–55. See also European Union current account, 135, 220, 302 n.10

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mark (Germany), 42, 53, 120, 299 n.6 Diamond, Douglas, 150 “Diamond-Dyvig” multiple-equilibrium, 150 digital currencies. See central bank digital currencies (CBDC); cryptocurrencies Dimon, Jamie, 189 disinflation, 254 Dog Day Afternoon, 168 dollar (Hong Kong), 138 dollar (U. S.), 111 as collateral, 211–12 dominance of, xii, 1

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inflation-adjusted, 224 managed float, 112 volatility of, 119. See also fixed exchange rate exchange rate anchor, 127 exchange stabilization fund, 133 Facebook, 94 Libra cryptocurrency, 200 Faia, Ester, 225 Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 140 Federal Reserve (U. S.), x, 2, 59, 255, 283, 290 bailouts, 55, 140,

Fixed: Why Personal Finance is Broken and How to Make it Work for Everyone

by John Y. Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai · 25 Jul 2025

relatives, and more likely to learn about specific profitable investment opportunities. While these network effects can sometimes lead people astray—as when friends recommend risky cryptocurrencies or a fraudulent Ponzi scheme, such as the one infamously operated by Bernard Madoff—more often they are a further source of advantage for wealthy

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-interested advisers and salespeople. On the other hand, overconfident financial illiterates with high self-confidence may invest recklessly, perhaps betting aggressively on individual stocks or cryptocurrencies. Such people are harder to influence with good advice. They may resist some forms of sales pressure, but they remain susceptible to “hot tips” about

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when dealing with a system that seems distant and forbidding. A recently visible manifestation of this trend is the zealous advocacy for blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies as the solution to a rigged system of financial control run by faceless financiers. Alas, such unorthodox solutions are typically far worse than formal financial

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fire. In this part of the chapter, we discuss three commonly used alternative approaches and explain their perils. We focus on traditional alternatives rather than cryptocurrencies, which we defer to our broader discussion of financial technology in chapter 8. Money under the Mattress One alternative that appeals intuitively to many people

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be misused to make the problems of personal finance even worse. As one example, we show how the impressive innovations in blockchain technology have created cryptocurrencies that are dangerous speculative investments for individual investors. We lay out principles for regulating financial technology to realize its potential while controlling risks. In chapter

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payments systems in China such as Alipay and Tencent; high-tech electronic payments in India backed by the Unified Payments Interface (UPI); and, of course, cryptocurrencies. Interestingly, payments technology is being deployed more quickly and effectively in emerging economies, which are unencumbered by legacy systems, than in more advanced economies. As

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to design financial instruments and operate markets without relying on large, regulated financial institutions. DeFi institutions have arisen that mimic the functions of traditional finance: cryptocurrency exchanges, for example, are the crypto equivalent of both stockbrokers and stock exchanges. We argue that these institutions are in fact more dangerous to ordinary

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to read or understand, and it is difficult for courts to intervene to enforce commonsense solutions to fraud and abuse. Paradoxically, the user privacy that cryptocurrencies facilitate poses a serious problem: tracking down scammers is unusually difficult given the ease of concealing identities in crypto transactions.15 Such problems have led

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agreed contingencies, thus further reducing the reliance on financial intermediaries. Providers of distributed ledgers compete with one another, issuing a bewildering array of “tokens” or cryptocurrencies that serve as a medium of exchange for transactions on particular blockchains or across blockchains. There is much to like about DeFi, and there is

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the seventeenth century (from chapter 3), on a much grander scale. As people have come to understand that direct ownership of cryptocurrencies is inconvenient and hazardous, they have turned to cryptocurrency exchanges and other intermediaries to provide more convenient access. The second danger is that these exchanges are virtually unregulated and have

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’s distrust of traditional finance has led them to do business with far less trustworthy financiers. While this danger has been mitigated for the largest cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, by the entry of regulated exchange-traded funds, it remains a risk for the far larger set of more obscure

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cryptocurrencies. A third danger is simply that cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and speculative investments, as demonstrated by figure 8.2, which plots the price of Bitcoin from inception through early

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2024. The value of a cryptocurrency ultimately depends on the amount of economic activity that will take place on its underlying blockchain, but this activity is hard to forecast because it

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rise in crypto prices in 2021 was followed by a spectacular collapse in 2022 and an equally spectacular spike in 2024—a salutary reminder that cryptocurrencies are not in any sense safe stores of value despite the common exhortation of crypto believers to “HODL,” or “hold on for dear life.” Finally

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in the summer of 2021 from crypto exchange platform Coinbase—“Millions of Brits Understand Crypto. Do You?”—seems sadly ironic. It is particularly unfortunate that cryptocurrencies have special appeal to communities that have been poorly served by traditional finance. In the United States, African Americans have a grim history with the

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to African Americans by celebrities such as LeBron James and Spike Lee, and African Americans are twice as likely as white Americans to believe that cryptocurrencies are regulated by the government.26 This is a regrettable case where understandable suspicion of traditional finance has led Black households to a more exploitative

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.investing.com, accessed January 17, 2025. DeFi not only poses dangers to its users; it also raises issues for society more broadly. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are rapidly becoming the payment vehicle facilitating illicit transactions and criminal activity around the world, and we should therefore have strong moral reservations against encouraging

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shut down, the use of crypto as a vehicle for this type of activity has been increasing.27 Paradoxically, according to Europol, the volatility of cryptocurrencies has inhibited their use as a payment vehicle. This is because criminals are savvy about the deleterious effects of crypto fluctuations on the value of

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exchanges of Bitcoin, must be monitored and recorded by “miners,” who employ vast amounts of computing power to extend the blockchain and are rewarded with cryptocurrency holdings. The required computations use prodigious amounts of electricity, estimated by the US Energy Information Administration to account for at least 0.6% and possibly

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. It is easy, especially in the current febrile environment, to be accused of being Luddites when expressing hesitation about the wonders of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. We are optimistic about the possibility of distributed ledger technology to improve the functioning of the financial system, for example with smart contracts that automatically

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pay out when verifiable contingencies materialize. However, we remain skeptical of the usefulness of cryptocurrencies in their current form, which appear to be a highly efficient technology to separate unwary investors from their hard-earned money. Getting the Good while

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tech-enabled financial product, especially accompanied by visible or voluble advertising. John vividly remembers seeing, as one example of such advertising, a poster advertising speculative cryptocurrency on escalators in the London Underground in the summer of 2021: “Missed Doge? Get Floki. Flokiinu.com.” Dogecoin was originally created as a joke alternative

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to Bitcoin, with deliberately abundant supply. The Floki Inu cryptocurrency was named after Elon Musk’s Shiba Inu dog. Both cryptocurrencies are “memecoins” whose value depends on their appeal to a community rather than their usefulness in blockchain transactions.33 If

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yet been successfully provided in a decentralized manner and which still rely on public payments infrastructure. As an aside, despite the increasing value of many cryptocurrencies, they remain expensive ways to execute transactions, particularly small ones.4 Although high-quality financial infrastructure promotes economic development, it is not always the case

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rules and financial advertising standards even in new and informal contexts such as social media promotions. Finfluencers and celebrities who endorse financial instruments such as cryptocurrencies should be required to follow advertising standards, disclose that they are being compensated for their endorsements, and give evidence that they are themselves users of

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are less liquid, with redemption only possible after twelve months, and early redemption even beyond this point incurring interest-rate penalties. 21. Tether (USDT), a cryptocurrency stablecoin, likewise pays no interest, although some holders earn interest by loaning out their USDT holdings. Christmas clubs, popular in working-class communities in both

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4, 2022, https://techcentral.co.za/africrypt-investors-push-for-charges-against-cajee-brothers/206356/. For an introduction to FTX and the criminal use of cryptocurrencies, see Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall (Crown Currency, 2023). 23. The crypto exchange CoinDesk lists several different

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, 2022, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/05/20/why-the-crypto-crash-hit-black-americans-hard. 26. See “Tracking electricity consumption from US cryptocurrency mining operations,” US Energy Administration, February 1, 2024, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364. 27. See Nick Bilton, American Kingpin: Catching the

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example, is at least $1 per transaction in normal times and exceeded $100 per transaction in April 2024, when the Bitcoin blockchain became congested. The cryptocurrency XRP has transaction fees of a fraction of a penny, but it is used primarily by banks that continue to rely on the public payments

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, 229; funding sources for, 234, 289n37; in starter kit, 247 adverse selection, insurance and, 141–142 Affordable Care Act (2010), 316n27 African Americans: appeal of cryptocurrencies for, 192–194; Freedman’s Savings Bank collapse and, 193, 277n32; marketing aimed at, 274n9. See also race Africrypt exchange, 191 age, financial literacy and

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managing, 72–73 credit scores, 90; effect on cost of mortgage, 116; how to increase, 282n28 credit screening, race and, 303n19 crypto booms, 44, 47 cryptocurrencies, 68; appeal to communities poorly served by traditional finance, 192–193; dangers of, 179, 190–195; facilitating illicit transactions, 194; memecoins, 197; miners, 194; as

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part of payments system, 184; private keys and, 190–191; transaction fees, 305n4; volatility of, 192, 193 cryptocurrency exchanges, 191–193, 303n23; lack of regulation of, 188–189 crypto intermediaries, high interest rates promised on stablecoins, 88 crypto scams, 188, 303n23 current accounts

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borrowing; loans debt collectors, 95–96 debt trap, 93, 228–229 decentralized finance (DeFi), 187–188; controlling risks of, 195–199; defined, 190. See also cryptocurrencies deductible (excess), 142–144, 252, 296n39 default, social networks and loan, 71–72 default options, 211, 212, 213–214 defined benefit (DB) pensions, 153–155

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): accessibility of, 180–182; algorithmic discrimination and, 189, 197–198; benefits of, 180–184; customization of financial products and, 182–183; decentralized finance and the cryptocurrencies, 190–195; ease of comparing products and, 183; exacerbating inequality, 189; financial digital footprints, 242–243, 269n32; harvesting of personal data, 186–187; lack of

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; funding sources for, 234, 289n37; moving, lock-in, and, 121–122; paying off early, 119; in starter kit, 246–247 Flaubert, Gustave, 306n12 Floki Inu cryptocurrency, 197 fluctuating income, coping with, 80–85 Foundation series (Asimov), 184–185 401(k) accounts, 158, 160, 163; contribution limits, 297n7; defaults, 299n22; target date

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opportunities, 71–72, 89, 280–281n15 FTX, 191 future, downweighting against present, 47–49 gambling: acceptance of risk and, 130–131; fintech encouraging, 185 gamification: cryptocurrency and, 197; manipulation of customers with, 185 Garber, Alan, 145 gender gap: in financial literacy, 33, 34–35; multiple-choice tests and, 270n5 gig economy

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, Pierre-Carl, 22 micro-pensions, 257 Microsoft millionaires, 44, 47 middle class: growth of in emerging economies, 10–11. See also global middle class miners, cryptocurrency, 194 minimal financial resources, families with, 81, 82, 280n9 Mitchell, Olivia, 22 mobile phone penetration, 180, 181 money: keeping “under the mattress,” 69–70; psychological

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raised, 56–58 prime borrowers, 90, 92, 307n18 privacy, cheaper credit and, 91 privacy paradox, 187 privacy policies, fintech firms and, 186–187 private key, cryptocurrency and, 190–191 prize-linked savings accounts, 223, 240, 241 probability, conditional, 41–42 property taxes, deferred for retirees, 261, 316n36 prospect theory, 291–292n7

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, 54, 61; when to refinance, 119–120 Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP) (Canada), 240, 310n42 registered investment advisors (RIAs), 227 regulation: of celebrity endorsements, 227; cryptocurrency exchanges and lack of, 191–192; of DeFi products, 195–199; of deposit insurance, 188–189; fencing off investments from poorer people, 25–26; fragmentation

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, 240, 281n19, 314n8. See also retirement savings savings accounts: linked to transaction accounts, 239; prize-linked, 223, 240, 241; in starter kit, 239–241 scams: cryptocurrency, 188, 303n23; pension, 68, 277n33 Schneider, Rachel, 80 Schumer, Charles, 205 Schumer box, 205–206 second-order stochastic dominance, 296n39 secured debt, mortgages as, 100

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fintech (financial technology) temptation, financial decision making and spending, 31, 47–49, 84–86 Tencent, 184 term life insurance, 253 Terra Luna, 281–282n23 Tether (cryptocurrency stablecoin), 281n21 Thaler, Richard, 209, 211–212 Thomas, Stefan, 191 Thompson, Brian, 296–297n47 titles, financial, 226, 227–228, 312–313n65 Tobin, James, 292n11 Total

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), 265n6 transaction accounts: linked to savings accounts, 239; starter kit, 237–239, 241. See also checking accounts; savings accounts transaction fees: capping, 217–218, 225; cryptocurrency, 305n4; disclosure of, 207 transferred balances, 283n43 transparency: in insurance, 252, 316n27; in mortgage offers, 288–289n36; in rating loan servicers, 246 Treasury bonds, rates

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UPS, emergency savings accounts and, 222, 313n5 Upstart, 242–243 usury, 218 Vanguard, 220 variable annuities, 300n33 Venmo, 184 Vestager, Margrethe, 189 volatility (variability): of cryptocurrencies, 194; effect on investment of, 289n41; of income, 80, 280n2, 280n7; of spending, 81; standard deviation as a measure of, 131, 280n2; of stock returns

Money in the Metaverse: Digital Assets, Online Identities, Spatial Computing and Why Virtual Worlds Mean Real Business

by David G. W. Birch and Victoria Richardson · 28 Apr 2024 · 249pp · 74,201 words

Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis based on the vision of a player-owned economy. The story goes that, spurred on by the success of online gaming, cryptocurrency, Pokémon, World of Warcraft and NFTs, the Sky Mavis founders Trung Thanh Nguyen, Aleksander Leonard Larsen and Jeffrey Zirlin set out to combine the

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Cyberia. Here is an example. One of the virtual worlds that has attracted a lot of attention is called Decentraland, and players can connect a cryptocurrency wallet to their account. This of course means that people can pay using forms of digital assets, which points us towards the world of ‘

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tokens cannot be copied: they can only be transferred from one owner to another. Tokens Taking on board Narula’s view that what he calls ‘cryptocurrencies and blockchain-style technologies’ will be integral to any efforts to build and maintain a bridge for the transfer of value within a metaverse, we

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more decentralized environment of web3. Token cusp We are writing this book in the shadow of the so-called crypto winter: a period of depressed cryptocurrency and cryptoasset trading activity following the well-documented collapses of major crypto players such as Three Arrows Capital and Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX.

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The impact those collapses had on retail cryptocurrency holders and concern from regulatory bodies regarding the threat to global financial stability has spurred activity to create better regulatory frameworks based on ‘same activity

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that close to a billion dollars had been involved in criminal activity. We could well see a strange and interesting twist in the world of cryptocurrency that has no equivalent in the analogue world of notes and coins: black and white money, or clean and dirty money (an idea that

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goes back to the earliest days of cryptocurrency), in which some bitcoins will be worth more than others! Maybe a few years from now exchanges will be quoted two BTC–USD pairs:

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banks (central bank digital currencies) and, more generally, at the world of ‘stablecoins’. Stablecoins The wild and unpredictable historic oscillations in the prices of cryptocurrencies made them unsuitable for use as a medium of exchange, so people began to look at the idea of stablecoins that would have more predictable

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when, according to the anonymous team behind Iron, it suffered a ‘large-scale crypto bank run’ (Osipovich 2022). In fact, the idea of a cryptocurrency that has its value stabilized by algorithms is where the term ‘stablecoin’ originated. In practice, however, it has proved difficult for such algorithms to maintain

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and the concept of stablecoins has been extended to digital currencies that have their value pegged to something external to their ledgers (as distinct from cryptocurrencies that have no value beyond their ledgers). Asset stablecoins Such ‘asset-backed’ stablecoins emerged early in the evolution of the space because market participants

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the same. In fact, dollar stablecoins seem to have performed as safe-haven assets during market turmoil, thus proving to be more trusted than cryptocurrencies, and they will surely perform the same role in the Metaverse. Stable demand Whether we are talking about US dollars or Canadian dollars or Singapore

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demand for stablecoins – if there was not, they would not exist. Professor Eswar Prasad, writing on the future of money, said that ‘bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that started it all, may not have much of a role to play in this monetary future’, because stablecoins of one form or another might

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contrast, the stablecoins backed by algorithms cannot be guaranteed under all conditions and even those stablecoins that are over-collateralized in risky assets such as cryptocurrency cannot be guaranteed to hold their pegs under all conditions. 6 If you are interested, Dave discussed this perspective in some detail in his

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including lending and borrowing platforms, trading platforms, insurance protocols and more. Notable examples include Uniswap, which is a decentralized exchange that facilitates peer-to-peer cryptocurrency trading using automated market maker technology.10 Yearn Finance, another DeFi protocol operating on Ethereum, offers users yield farming techniques to maximize investment returns. By

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an example to show how these protocols work in practice. The functions provided by the protocol are as follows. Asset deposits. Users can deposit supported cryptocurrency assets (such as ETH, DAI, USDC) into the Compound protocol. Each asset has its own interest rate, determined by supply and demand. Interest rates.

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and demand of each asset. If a particular asset has a high demand for borrowing, its interest rate will increase. Borrowing. Users can borrow cryptocurrency assets by using their deposited assets as collateral. The maximum borrowing limit is determined by the collateral ratio, which is typically below 100% to mitigate

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accrued interest, back into the user’s wallet. Using these functions, the Compound protocol provides a decentralized means for users to both lend and borrow cryptocurrency assets with transparent and automated interest rate mechanisms. At the time of writing, the protocol had some $1.2 billion total value locked. The

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may in fact subvert discussion and undermine understanding of the whole topic. While we may be few against many, we will continue to distinguish between cryptocurrency and tokenized assets of one form or another, whether they are traded in a centralized market or a decentralized one. We therefore undertake to

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on art and music, the fact is that the first financial services are already up and running within them. DeFi is real, whatever happens to cryptocurrency In the middle of 2022 the Wall Street Journal said that ‘the crypto party is over’ (which is surely the case) and went on

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be huge and that DeFi protocols will have a serious role to play in the next generation of financial services while simultaneously being sceptical that cryptocurrencies will have a major role. Actually, this has long been the view of some serious players in the financial services mainstream. Larry Fink, the

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the Ping An Global Voyager Fund, said on stage at Money20/20 Asia in Singapore that tokens in finance are ‘a much bigger story than cryptocurrencies’, and he suggested that institutional strategies and scenario plans should be updated immediately to take into account the new technology. His focus was on

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that might shape the future financial ecosystem. This innovation can be traced back to the following three fundamental characteristics, which are of interest well beyond cryptocurrency markets. The algorithmic automation of financial activity, such as market-making, to support the pooling of assets of small-scale and large-scale actors

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financial markets that are built on the pillars of tokens, transparency and trust will indeed be the next generation. It seems to us that – whether cryptocurrencies survive the coming storm of regulation, central bank digital currencies, instant payments and digital identity – institutional markets will ultimately use the new infrastructure to trade

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Trade Bank of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for money laundering conspiracies designed to generate revenue for North Korea through the use of cryptocurrency. According to court documents, North Koreans applied for jobs in remote IT development work and passed employment checks by using fake – or fraudulently obtained –

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identity documents. These workers would then request payment in cryptocurrency and whisk their earnings back to the motherland (US Attorney’s Office, District of Columbia 2023c). Running a business in the Metaverse will require some

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the need to hire and fire in the Metaverse might prove to be an important vector for digital identity in the mass market. * * * 1 Cryptocurrency players are subject to the same concerns as mainstream financial institutions and we do not doubt they take the rules just as seriously. Coinbase, for

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by the way. This is a universal problem. There was a similar data catastrophe in Turkey in 2021 when the founder of the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange Thodex vanished. It turned out that he had taken not only the money but also the KYC data that he had been required to

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by amateur archaeologists or quantum computers. The obvious question, then, is: why would anyone want to be their own bank? Perhaps Alice has some cryptocurrency that is stored safely on a USB interface hard wallet protected by a long pass phrase. Naturally, with security in mind, perhaps she rolled it

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exchange problems resulting in people losing money in one way or another. Not your keys, not your coins. That is the mantra. The serious cryptocurrency players therefore only use exchanges for doing business, and they move their virtual cash to safer places once they have completed a transaction. Under this

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other ways to store secret keys and pass phrases, of course, and new technology can help. Some of the delegates at the Consensus 2016 cryptocurrency conference were sceptical when Dave shared his preferred strategy for securing digital objects, which was to convert the security key into a QR code and

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phrase) to access their crypto wealth, they are screwed if they lose those keys (or forget the recovery phrases). What is more, there are cryptocurrency owners who simply drop dead, taking their passwords with them. The amount of buried treasure will therefore only grow as more people forget their passwords

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personally think that bitcoin is worthless’ (Schnell 2021), JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon once said that if the bank’s customers wanted to buy cryptocurrency, the bank would give ‘legitimate’ access but would not custody their holdings. But why not? We were very interested to see banks starting to

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). State Street, which provides custody services to institutional investors, is a good example. It launched a digital finance division to expand into areas including cryptocurrency and tokenization. The new division was led by Nadine Chakar (the bank’s head of global markets), who told The Banker at the time that

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place that would otherwise not take place (Crane & Bodie 1996). Cryptoassets are a perfect example of this. Back in 2020 almost all Americans with cryptocurrencies said that they would or might use their bank to buy and sell them (Shevlin 2021), illustrating the key role of bank incentive functions

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indicates that growing the loans business is firmly in its sights. As these merchants become able to accept various digital forms of payment (stablecoins and cryptocurrency included), the longer-term role for banks isn’t necessarily certain. Clarisse Hagège, a former banker and the founder of Dfns, tells a similar story

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be different’. An interesting example comes from the world of sports, where an enterprise called WAGMI United planned to buy a British football team using cryptocurrency. The WAGMI United backers (which included Gary Vaynerchuk (the president of the Philadelphia 76ers), Tiger Global and Slow Ventures) were keen on decentralized ownership,

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that relatively few people vote in practice. * * * 7 Until recently, the system relied solely on Ether as collateral but it has now expanded to other cryptocurrencies. Part IV The wallets Having explored the fundamental technologies, the building blocks of metaverses, and the new product and service opportunities that arise in that

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from being a payment scheme into a Home Screen Super App. PayPal savings, shopping, bill payments, rewards, gift cards, buy-now-pay-later and cryptocurrency are coming together in a single app that you need only log into once to have access to a spectrum of related services (Muhn 2021

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beyond payments to include deeper integration with IoT devices, the incorporation of more advanced security technologies like biometric encryption, and possibly a move towards supporting cryptocurrency transactions. Market trends suggest a continuing shift towards digital wallets, with Apple Wallet positioned to potentially lead these changes. Agents If this picture is correct

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to work on their behalf. Ultimately, the company collapsed when the CEO suddenly vanished along with the cash (Schroeder 2023). Africrypt, another South African cryptocurrency trading outfit, made similar claims and, again, the company collapsed and its directors vanished. And don’t think that these scams are confined to the

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can put any ERC-721 token1 up for collateralization, and then other users can compete to offer loans. Once accepted, the loan is paid as cryptocurrency to the owner. The NFT is locked up in an NFTfi smart contract, and it is returned, of course, once the loan is repaid.

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move from remediation to prevention (Blicq 2022). Digital assets. A few insurers offer coverage for exchange hacks (e.g. cyberattacks, ransomware and theft of cryptocurrency and NFTs) and NFT marketplace hacks. As coverage options are limited (due to volatility and costs), the increase in Metaverse activity will inevitably create a

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platform interoperability too. Financial services in the Metaverse At the end of 2022, over on Wall Street, JP Morgan said that the demand for using cryptocurrencies as a payment method was falling off. Meanwhile, on Main Street, the Walmart CTO Suresh Kumar was saying that crypto would become an important

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that question depends (as so many of these things do) on what you think ‘crypto’ is. Crypto and assets If you think that ‘crypto’ means cryptocurrencies (e.g. bitcoin, Dogecoin, etc.), then these views appear to be at odds, with Wall Street saying one thing and Main Street saying another.

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– dollars, gold, Walmart Points or whatever. When it comes down to it, then, there is no conflict between the view that the use of cryptocurrencies for payments is going nowhere and the view that the use of digital assets for payments will be everywhere! This is an interesting area to

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different wallet’. The OpenWallet Foundation collaboration offers a way to solve this. The white paper also calls out the importance of being able to support cryptocurrencies in a secure and non-proprietary way. The promise is powerful and, if it is realized, we agree with the foundation’s assertion that ‘

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for wholesale investors, and it provides them with access to an actively managed portfolio of digital assets, comprising ‘highly liquid digital assets, identified within the cryptocurrency markets’ Top 20 assets by market capitalisation’. The DigitalX Bitcoin Fund. This does what it says on the tin, but in a way that

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

by Jacob Silverman · 9 Oct 2025 · 312pp · 103,645 words

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The Rust Programming Language, 2nd Edition

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

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The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire

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War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers

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Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex

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A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income

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

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Engineering Security

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12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next

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Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

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Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

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Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence

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Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster

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Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy

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The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning

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Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller

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

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A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction

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When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach

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The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century

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Angrynomics

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The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt

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To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

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

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Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

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Roads and Bridges

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The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality

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The Rust Programming Language

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Playing With FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early): How Far Would You Go for Financial Freedom?

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Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy

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

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Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy

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Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery

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Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life

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Future Sex

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The Soul of Wealth

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

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Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights Into North Korea's Enigmatic Young Dictator

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

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The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated

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Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

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