If you’re transmitting value that substitutes for currency, FinCEN’s Bank Secrecy Act will probably apply. This is about activities, not status or labels. | Continue reading
Crypto exchange hacks are incredibly rare, and only happen every month or so. Here’s hoping there’s no big Bitcoin price crash before withdrawals are back on! | Continue reading
Reggie Fowler was indicted on Tuesday. The US Government has filed a motion to detain him as a flight risk. And it’s amazing. | Continue reading
A roundup of the latest news in Tether’s New York legal troubles, and that inconvenient near-billion-dollar hole in their accounts. | Continue reading
Ordinary people project all manner of things onto the word “blockchain.” This leaves them wide-open to con men. | Continue reading
Smart contracts are fundamentally bad software engineering, part 666 in a never-ending series. | Continue reading
Patients having some sort of “control” over their own medical data is a perennial favourite blockchain pitch. We may have found the source. | Continue reading
What do Telegram have to provide by October 2019? And why partner with Wirecard, who are currently trying to get Financial Times journalists prosecuted for writing about them? | Continue reading
I got a new gadget. Let’s see if it helps. | Continue reading
You might think that glibly advocating a nonexistent technical solution for a centuries-long political conflict is somehow “fatuous” and “offensive.” But if you think in a m… | Continue reading
China is pushing out Bitcoin, starting immediately. What will this do to Bitcoin? | Continue reading
There’s stuff you can’t say in a proper magazine with offices and so on. So here’s a few outtakes from the Decrypt article on ShapeShift and CipherBlade. | Continue reading
Remember that time your bank manager died, and suddenly all your money was gone? | Continue reading
Even if you’re not in the UK, this will affect you — because all the regulators talk to each other, as they try to understand crypto. | Continue reading
Despite Brendan Eich tweeting for about five days to defend Brave’s previous behaviour, his web browser is no longer displaying apparent donation pages for creators who never signed up. | Continue reading
Not answered: just how KodakOne’s “artificial intelligence” is supposed to automatically divine the correct email address to send a notice concerning any random web page. | Continue reading
I’m pretty sure Nikolai Durov is confident nobody could outsmart him here — he’s thought about it really hard, after all. But what happens when someone comes at the Telegram Open Network with a ham… | Continue reading
Finance journalists need to stop treating crypto as an efficient market that responds to concerns. It’s a thinly-traded unregulated playground for whales, out to wreck the margin traders. | Continue reading
I’m writing an albatross of a book review. The book fingers Szabo as the most likely candidate for Satoshi Nakamoto. So I thought I’d share my pain. | Continue reading
The ICO failed, and nobody’s getting paid. Except ICOx Innovations. Also, one of the developers they stiffed is holding their Post-Licensing Portal software hostage | Continue reading
We need to catch up with KodakOne and KodakCoin. But first, let’s catch up with their competitor — Copytrack. | Continue reading
In a bubble, Bitcoin miners can do very well. But what bubbles do is … pop. | Continue reading
My back-to-basics “what actually is a blockchain?” talk, tuned to market researchers. The Q&A at the end was good too. | Continue reading
What to do if you were foolish enough to run an ICO in the US and want to make good. | Continue reading
Control addiction, and the fallacy of big data. | Continue reading
A podcast interview with Matthew Aaron of Crypto 101 — going through Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, chapter-by-chapter. | Continue reading
Scene: King Solomon’s court. Two harlots, LUKE-JR and ROGER VER, rock up in front of KING SOLOMON with a baby called BITCOIN. | Continue reading
If you’re a public company, it’s probably a bad idea to claim the SEC’s explicit approval for your operations. | Continue reading
Saar Wilf, founder of Initiative Q, just emailed a response to my June post and October followup. With his permission, I’m reprinting it here. | Continue reading
I’m so sorry.(not sorry really) | Continue reading
My June post on Initiative Q takes off, I talk on BBC Radio about it, and Q’s economist talks about Bitcoin. | Continue reading
The widely-reported quote was: “For every use of blockchain that you would consider today there is a better technology.” The full transcript goes into more nuance. | Continue reading
A fully-worked example of Silicon Valley tunnel vision, where bitcoiners’ dreams of the grim meathook post-apocalyptic Mad Max petrolpunk future have come true. | Continue reading
If a dollar costs 85 cents … you have to wonder what’s up with that dollar. | Continue reading
Everipedia is not going to revolutionise the world of knowledge production. | Continue reading
A talk for the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway. A basic overview of the engineering and computer science problems of blockchain and smart contract promises. On video! | Continue reading
Requiring a particular deep implementation is bad — and especially because of unrealisable hype. | Continue reading
Business students are actively seeking out courses on “blockchain.” This one is very optimistic — and leaves its students susceptlble to the hype. | Continue reading
DPW would do far better just selling the electricity locally. This plan doesn’t make sense as a business. | Continue reading
It wasn’t widely circulated — but I have a copy of the KodakOne Confidential Offering Memorandum. The official, authoritative statement of what WENN Digital are trying to sell you. | Continue reading
To be fair, even an accredited investor should realise that if you’re buying “unicorn gold,” the name might be a warning sign. | Continue reading
ICO tokens are (almost certainly) securities — and promotional bounty programmes are a sale of securities. | Continue reading
Advancing the cause of DRMed JPEGs with a bit of applied blockchain. | Continue reading
How the eye-watering margin leverage on crypto exchanges works in practice, and what happens when things go wrong. | Continue reading
The slapstick comedy horror saga of a plucky little blockchain startup who aren’t quite ready for every state-level hacker in the world, or more than eleven voters. | Continue reading
Jemima Kelly from FT asked Grant Shapps just one question about the OpenBrix ICO, and hilarity ensued. | Continue reading
Assassination markets on Augur are in the news lately — but I think their practical problem’s going to be the SEC and CFTC — who really don’t like bucket shops. | Continue reading
The text of of my article “Approach Blockchain with Caution,” from last week’s City A.M. | Continue reading