Hello, blockchain! IRS, Enigma hack, music, Brexit, boiler rooms

Let’s get a proper crypto blog going — the blog of the book — because yet another blog to run is just what I need …

(My commiserations to the cryptographers and cryptologists who read that fifth word and died a little inside. I’m afraid it’s becoming proper finance jargon. And even chlorine won’t clear it up.)

Some stories from the past few days to start us off:

• The IRS looks into the value of the Bitcoin blockchain as prosecution futures, after only 802 people in the US actually told them about any bitcoin losses or gains in 2015.

• The most hilarious crypto hack of the week: hackers get $476k by sending a phishing email to everyone on the Enigma ICO’s Slack chat server. They got the password because the CEO, Guy Zyskind, used the same password for the web server, the Github, the Slack instance and … the Ashley Madison aspiring-adultery site that got hacked two years ago. Security? “Move fast and break things,” evidently.

• A sensible article on music and blockchains by Alan Graham. This piece is about right on the blockchainy side: the technology is seriously just not up to the promises in any direction, and particularly not for music.

• How could we make Brexit go even better than it already is? Maybe we could … add a Blockchain!

• Vicious statist suppression of entrepreneurial fintech innovators continues. I suppose it saved time setting up an actual ERC-20 token.

In book news:

• I can now say “actually, I wrote a college text.”

• There’s now a photo of me up on the about page, doing my best to look earnestly trustworthy.

• A nice writeup at Alan Cross’s A Journal Of Musical Things.

• Some surprisingly positive words about the book from a crypto fan: “To me it showed what bitcoin and the cryptocurrency realm needs to work on and what pitfalls to avoid.”