Crypto Fools’ Day is, of course, January 9. In cryptocurrency, every day is January 9.
- I’m doing an Intelligence Squared event in July: Blockchain: Quantum leap forward or digital snake oil? It’s on Monday 2 July at 7:00pm at the Emmanuel Centre, SW1P 3DW. Other speakers are blockchain researcher Primavera De Filippi, author Jamie Bartlett and the founder of Liberland, Vít Jedlička. Moderator is BBC economics editor Kamal Ahmed. Tickets are £30 full price, £15 student.
- MailChimp, a bulk email sender, is shutting down mass mails for ICOs and crypto offerings. Not listed is the likely actual reason — a lot of these are blatant spam that wasn’t asked for, and MailChimp would quite like GMail to still accept mail from it.
- Aggrieved ICO traders are going to sue Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yandex for … banning crypto ads. “A special cryptofund will be created to finance the legal action, which can be supported through donations.” Good luck, guys!
- In further good news for Bitcoin, Reddit isn’t taking Bitcoin for Reddit Gold, its paid membership programme, any more. Apparently this is because Coinbase are deprecating their old merchant accounts for a new system that involves the merchant holding crypto balances on Coinbase, rather than converting it straight to actual money for you.
- The Venezuelan Petro is so bad that even Bitfinex is steering clear of it. Furthermore, “all contractors and employees of Bitfinex, wherever situated, are prohibited from transacting in the PTR.”
- Sichuan Province is not only pushing out the miners — it’s demolishing a lot of the overbuilt hydroelectric power that they were using, because the local residents want their rivers back.
- Laws written to facilitate “blockchain” or “distributed ledger technology” tend to be hastily cobbled-together and incoherent trash. This should surprise no-one.
- Told you so — Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality. In particular, Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation trying out Hyperledger at the behest of Digital Asset Holdings — “Basically, it became a solution in search of a problem.” Per Matt Levine: “Yes! The blockchain project worked! But also so would a database run by a trusted central counterparty such as, just to throw one name out there, DTCC.”
- Binance sounds like the dodgiest exchange yet. I’m surprised the guy let them run a photo.
- Nicholas Weaver posts a five-minute talk as to why cryptocurrencies are trash, in four slides.
https://twitter.com/ncweaver/status/980486064514068481
- The book is $3.49 on Kindle Canada this month! I’m quoted in Vice about crypto miner malware. Rob Rogers posts a blog review of the book. Jonathan Pinnock has posted a followup about his viral tweet in my favour.
yesssss i'm excited to get into "Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain" – thanks @davidgerard! pic.twitter.com/iijYGc1dnM
— Ali Alkhatib (@_alialkhatib) March 27, 2018
Reading Attack of the 50ft Blockchain by David Gerard pic.twitter.com/kCZiENRz4k
— Pumpkin Spite Latte (@likecrazypaving) March 14, 2018
- And, of course, the weather.
The Lightning Network is straightforward and simple! Here's how it works pic.twitter.com/qff2Ijsqq4
— Buttcoin (@ButtCoin) March 30, 2018
https://twitter.com/fhuysmans/status/979004755459657728
This morning's musings on #blockchain, #innovation and "creative" job titles – blockchain sages and evangelists. cc: @NancyNakamoto @izakaminska @GhelaBoskovich @LedaGlyptis @LizLum pic.twitter.com/OQ9X50ojeW
— Virginie O'Shea (@virginieoshea) March 21, 2018
When someone assembles a list of the "top people in cryptocurrency" and it contains a fair bit of overlap with the people you'd also include in a list of "top convicted criminals now working in cryptocurrency".
— Tom Morris 🏳️🌈 (@tommorris) March 26, 2018
The “Bitcoin is still early days, adoption is right around the corner!” argument reminds me of the infamous Itanium sales forecast chart pic.twitter.com/U91cJ9BhUp
— Buttcoin (@ButtCoin) March 30, 2018
Every day, helpless graphics cards are purchased by cryptocurrency miners and put in mining rigs when they should be used for gaming systems.
Donate now to stop GPU abuse. #GPURescue pic.twitter.com/qTTn2ShJfa
— CORSAIR (@CORSAIR) March 30, 2018
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Its depressing that every economist parrots the same universally received opinion that Mark Carney etc recite being that BTC might not necessarily work but the underlying blockchain technology is revolutionary and world changing.
An append only ledger can indeed be revolutionary. Just think of all the things we could do with it. For example a business could record all their sales and purchases in such a ledger and produce a set of accounts annually.
It could be used to record all the speeches, questions and answers and day to day life of the house of commons – we could call such an immutable blockchain Hansard.
Even in cricket, all match scores could be recorded, along with records of batsmen’s innings, bowling statistics etc etc and this could be made available as a distributed immutable ledger called Wisden, the nodes of which people could securely host in their own homes in the form of books.