Tortoise Media: Making sense of Web3 with Luke Gbedemah — with Stephen Diehl, Geoffrey Huntley and David Gerard

I did a panel last night, with Stephen Diehl and Geoffrey Huntley, for Tortoise Media: what on earth is “Web3”? The levels are all over the place, so get ready to adjust the volume on the fly. But our content was excellent, and it’s worth the effort. It runs a bit over an hour. [YouTube]     I’ll just add here my rant at the media from the end,...

7h

The prehistory of NFTs

by Amy Castor and David Gerard This is a draft of part one of the history chapter for our planned NFT book. Corrections and nitpicking are most welcomed! This stuff is a bit tangential to NFTs and we may cut a lot of it later. Part two will be over on Amy’s blog. Don’t forget to sign up for Amy’s Patreon! [Amy Castor; Patreon]     How did the...

1d

Your guide to the crypto crash — Terra UST, Bitcoin and El Salvador 

I’ve done multiple media interviews in the past week, all asking the same three questions: How did Terra’s UST and LUNA crash? Please explain it from scratch, to people who know nothing about any of this, in three sentences. How’s El Salvador doing with Bitcoin going down? Is this THE END OF CRYPTO?? In order: I’ve got explaining the crash of...

5d

News: UST fallout, Central African Republic fallout, Coinbase Custody not safe in bankruptcy, Catalonia and Russian bitcoins

Please do sign up for the Patreon — your $5 or $20 a month really does help a lot. Patrons also get a couple of “Bitcoin: It Can’t Be That Stupid” stickers — just send me your postal address. [Patreon] If you’d like to get the books signed by the author (with stickers too), I have both in stock — go to this post. £25 the pair, plus postage £6 UK, £10...

2w

Foreign Policy: The Cryptocurrency Crash Is Replaying 2008 as Absurdly as Possible

This is a version of my writeup of the UST crash for the more general Foreign Policy audience — one that will understand that mentioning “2008” is the air-raid sirens going off. [Foreign Policy, paywalled] The main difference is a simpler and less technical explanation of how UST worked and how it crashed, some mention of Bitcoin hitting $25, 500 this...

2w

Terra’s stablecoin does its own 2008 crisis — UST crashes and takes Bitcoin with it

Over the last few days, the TerraUSD (UST) algorithmic stablecoin lost its $1.00 peg. Terra’s attempts to rescue UST crashed the price of Bitcoin. Terra built itself its own small 2008 financial crisis with “stable” assets built from chained boxes of worthless trash, and the whole thing fell over in a stiff breeze and crashed Bitcoin in the process....

3w

Boundary 2: Creationism on the Blockchain — review of George Gilder, Life After Google

In December 2018, David Golumbia, author of The Politics of Bitcoin, posted on his Facebook about the new book Life After Google: The Fall Of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy (Regnery, 2018) by George Gilder. As it happened, a friend who was a Gilder fan had asked what I thought of Gilder’s ideas on blockchain. So I got a copy of the...

4w

The Central African Republic adopted Bitcoin last week — full text of the law

On Thursday 21 April 2022, the Central African Republic passed by voice vote a law to enable cryptocurrency use: “Regissant la Cryptomonnaie en Republique Centrafricaine” (Regulating Cryptocurrency in the Central African Republic). The President, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, signed it into law on Friday 22 April. The news hit the press in the rest of...

4w

News: Sam Bankman-Fried on DeFi ponzinomics, Grayscale ETF comments, Binance and Russia, El Salvador

I’m doing a debate at Durham Union on Friday 29 April: “This House would ban cryptocurrencies.” There will apparently be video. Jemima Kelly from the Financial Times is also arguing this side. I promised to get together a list of our talking points for Friday, so I wrote this post instead. It’ll be all right on the night! [DUS] Support my work by signing...

5w

NFT news: Bored Apes hacked on Instagram; Sina Estavi’s $277 Dorsey tweet

Don’t forget to sign up to the Patreon. Your $5 or $20 a month really does help. [Patreon] Click here to get every new post emailed to you as it goes up!   source   All my apes, influenced Someone hacked the official Bored Ape Yacht Club Instagram account earlier today, Monday 25 April. The hacker posted to the Bored Apes Instagram announcing...

Apr 2022