We can all see the short-term impacts of the coronavirus pandemic: fear, lockdowns, falls in output, restrictions on travel, frictions in supply chains, growing social tension and unprecedented government intervention. […]
Most of us are so used to the concept that saved money grows by earning a positive rate of interest that the idea of negative interest rates comes as a […]
It’s time to reverse the major trend seen since the 2008 financial crisis—centralisation. That’s the opinion of Alex Lipton, an academic and former Wall Street quant who now works at […]
A leaked Europol report suggests that law enforcement bodies are struggling to deanonymise bitcoin transactions passing through Wasabi, a popular ‘mixer’ service. “Things are not looking good” for criminal investigations […]
To understand bitcoin, think of it as a technology rather than as a speculative financial asset, a leading computer scientist said this week. “People often talk about bitcoin as an […]
Entrepreneurs are competing in an intensifying race to design the future standards for the transmission of money. Gauge war The western English town of Gloucester was once the frontline of […]
The leading cryptocurrency’s design features cause it to behave weirdly: the more speculators buy bitcoin, the greater the short-term downward pressure on its price. “There are two features of bitcoin […]
Bitcoin mining is one of the riskiest industries in the world. Now a new financial product aims to make the activity a little less dangerous. Hashrate futures, launched last week […]
In the last decade, everyone has been able to join networks like Airbnb and Uber to rent out their property or labour. The sharing economy now extends to electricity, where […]
If money is ‘the most successful story ever invented by humans’, as Israeli historian Yuval Harari tells us, then the narrative is about to take a fantastical turn. That’s my […]