Crypto

The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has slammed the rise of cryptocurrencies insisting the costs to mine bitcoin is ‘enormous‘ and that the energy consumption is worrying, declaring current costs of electricity consumption used to mine the coins are “double the electricity consumption of Scotland.” The UK’s leading banker claims that cryptocurrencies will…

I just read an interesting new report from Deloitte about blockchain. They tracked the history of 86,034 blockchain projects hosted on GitHub since 2009 to pull out “key lessons” on where the blockchain industry is going and its long-term prospects. Here are some of the highlights: More than 26,000 blockchain projects were started in 2016,…

I’m often asked how bitcoin works, where to buy them and how does it relate to blockchain and differ from ethereum, etc, etc. I was going to write a blog about it but Daniel over on Invest in blockchain beat me to it. He has also kindly let me republish his blog here, so here we go…

Unless you have been asleep for the last year, you cannot have failed to catch the buzz around bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum’s Ether and Ripple’s XRP. There are even some coins that were created as a joke that are getting significant investments, such as Dogecoin. Dogecoin was created as a way to…

Someone made the comment on my platform piece about what happens when there are no Jack Ma’s or Mark Zuckerberg’s, as the whole thing is decentralised? I guess that this is logical as my last line was that government control of cryptocurrencies is “not so easy for cryptocurrencies that have no head office or central…

I was recently recorded on Roger Edwards’ podcast talking about FinTech, cryptocurrency and corporate change. Roger is a marketing strategist focused upon the insurance industry, and produces regular podcasts about said subject.  You can checkout his website here, and here’s the low-down of our chat: On the show this week, I talk to leading commentator and…

I am tempted to predict the price of bitcoin for the end of 2018 but know I’d be wrong, so I’m not. It could be $1 or $1 million. I’m not going to forecast it, as there are over 1,000 digital currencies out there and who knows which will be the winner long-term. However, one…

I’m often talking about digital identity and struggle with the subject. This is because the meeting of ID2020 I attended at the United Nations 18 months ago, talked about the issues of digital identity and poverty, and how the poorest are the most susceptible to human trafficking and slavery: How the system crushes the poor Most…

In mid-December 2017, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published a really interesting 32-page paper on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). The timing wasn’t great as most of the City was out getting smashed at Christmas parties, so I thought it best to put it aside until the New Year hangovers were out of the way…

Innovate Finance has been working with the Department of International Trade (DIT) on a report on blockchain and the future of financial services. The report was developed with the help of the Economist Intelligence Unit and is now available here. The Executive Summary is as follows: From Concept to Reality: How Blockchain will Reshape the Financial…