News: Me at Intelligence Squared, MailChimp bans crypto, ICOs suing over ad bans, Reddit drops Bitcoin, Bitfinex avoids Petro, Sichuan demolishes hydro, bad blockchain laws, Wall Street not so blockchain

Crypto Fools’ Day is, of course, January 9. In cryptocurrency, every day is January 9.

  • 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.”
  • 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.”
  • Nicholas Weaver posts a five-minute talk as to why cryptocurrencies are trash, in four slides.

 

https://twitter.com/ncweaver/status/980486064514068481

 

 

 

  • And, of course, the weather.

 

 

https://twitter.com/fhuysmans/status/979004755459657728

 

 

 

 

 



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One Comment on “News: Me at Intelligence Squared, MailChimp bans crypto, ICOs suing over ad bans, Reddit drops Bitcoin, Bitfinex avoids Petro, Sichuan demolishes hydro, bad blockchain laws, Wall Street not so blockchain”

  1. 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.

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