Crypto

You are about to read a half-fiction witty story based on Stuart Hylton’s review of “the making of Modern Britain” and my interpretation of the blockchain’s impact on today’s world. I found it fascinating how the description of the industrial age front-runner technology resembled the awe and fear of blockchain in modern times. Some quotes are so relevant that changing the “railroad company” to “blockchain protocol” would give the same shilling. After several “bubbles” (actually eight so far) and some huge announcements — remember Libra and TON? — I figured it was a good time to coin (pun intended) the history of the emerging technology that could be the biggest innovation in the last 500 years. An intriguing comparison Why bother? From a distance of two centuries, it is difficult to grasp ...

One of the first punitive measures leveled against Russia in response to the military invasion of Ukraine was the implementation of economic sanctions aimed at isolating the country from the international financial system. On March 12, Russian banks lost access to the international payments and messaging network SWIFT, and private sector payment companies, such as Visa, PayPal and Mastercard, were close behind. But while these highly regulated and publicly scrutinized organizations were quick to react to the crisis, concerns quickly mounted that the Russian state, as well as companies and oligarchs associated with it, could turn to digital currency exchanges as a backdoor to side-step sanctions. In the United Kingdom, the Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority asked crypto firms t...

As the Fair Data Society puts it, we are laborers in the data economy. Our personal data — basically, the digital blueprint of our lives — gets collected by platforms we interact with, most often in a non-transparent way. At best, it is used to improve our user experience. At worst, our privacy gets breached, monetized and even weaponized against us. It all started with the emergence and growth of the user-generated web, as seemingly free social media networks, search engines and companies saw a new opportunity of profiting and went into the business of gathering, storing, analyzing and selling user data. By 2022, the data market had grown immensely. According to Statista, a total of 64.2 zettabytes of data had been created, consumed and put online worldwide by 2020. By 2025, this number i...

The United States continues to be a global leader in embracing the cryptocurrency industry thanks to the work of Sen. Patrick Toomey, with the White House being at the forefront of crypto regulation. Last year, President Joe Biden signed a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill — and it included some new legislation that would impact the crypto sector. And more recently, the U.S. president announced a “whole-of-government” approach to regulating cryptocurrency in an across-the-board executive order directing multiple government agencies to answer specific questions on cryptocurrencies. The U.S. for the last year has clearly been seeking to help make the crypto industry more sustainable, which will make it significantly easier for cryptocurrency platforms to operate. But the Stablecoi...

If Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were somehow transported to the present day and given a newspaper, the apparent lack of class conflict would probably make the revolutionaries think they’d won. They would see a society split on all manner of subjects — from identity politics to the correct COVID-19 strategy — but virtually silent on the eternal struggle between labor and capital, the oppressors and the exploited. How different it would be if they’d returned just 10 years ago when the Occupy movement was in full swing, with tent cities springing up in protest against crony capitalism, corporate greed and a reckless, out-of-control financial sector. A decade on, the same problems persist, but they’ve become a barely discernible background hum amid the roiling, raging culture wars. The 1% ma...