Crypto

I’m talking so much about decentralised finance (DeFi) these days. I guess because I’m grappling with whether DeFi can replace CeFi (centralised finance). This tension is real. Can a world without borders on a global network replace the world with borders in a centralised network? It’s hard to say, but it’s fascinating to watch. A…

I don’t write often about the Wild West cases of  Cryptoland – well, I do actually – but this latest one is a pearler so, here we go! I’m adding this to the ten (no, twenty, thirty, forty, hundred or more) cases of bad actors in the Cryptoland. In this case Alex and Krissy Mashinsky, a…

Sometime today or tomorrow, a major moment in history will happen. No, not the Queen’s coffin arriving at Westminster Abbey, it’s The Merge! What’s The Merge? It’s when Ethereum merges with Beacon Chain and moves from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). It’s a major move called the Merge, and sets Ethereum apart from most other crypto…

Coindesk just ran a series of articles about the relationship between cryptocurrency and sins. The sins vary from money laundering to crime and porn and, in an interesting variant, the financial system has only ever progressed thanks to crime and sex, something I’ve written about a lot before. Here are a few key paragraphs from…

When a central banker says the old system needs a regeneration, then something obviously has gone wrong. Swiss Re’s Chief Economist Jerome Haegeli stated that “we are in a crisis” in “slow motion” thanks to food, energy, and supply-chain shocks, in an interview last week. “You need crisis times for the shift in the macro regime”…

In what seems to be a series of posts, I’m going to hone in on the centralised versus decentralised view of the world. Here’s Part One! Thanks to my friend Dharmesh, I watched this 25 minute video from Coin Bureau the other day. The presenter is Guy Turner https://www.coinbureau.com/who-is-guy/ who is very articulate and credible….

I find the world weird these days. Maybe it’s because I’m a grumpy old man. The flakiness ranges from schemes that are obviously trash to doing extreme activities that my father and grandfather would never have done. Examples? Skydiving, hanging off skyscrapers, diving with sharks, standing by gorillas and such like. Strangely, I’ve done all…

Building on yesterday’s blog, it is very easy to portray the whole cryptocurrency marketplace as a scam, Ponzi scheme, Wild West and a place where you tread carefully as it is a minefield. In some ways, it is. There are plenty of things out there designed to just rip you off. There are also techie…

I stumbled across a tweet about Nomad, a cross-chain bridge, that had just had almost $200 million of crypto assets hacked: The cross-chain token bridge Nomad was exploited, with attackers draining the protocol of virtually all of its funds. The total value of cryptocurrency lost to the attack totalled near $200 million. Nomad, like other…

I blogged yesterday about the huge difficulty of proving I owned something, its history and provenance. This is actually something TV shows are made about and there is one on the BBC called Fake or Fortune, where our hosts and experts travel the world trying to prove if a rare item is real or fake….