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Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts by Lorne Lantz, Daniel Cawrey

air gap, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, call centre, capital controls, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, currency peg, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, global reserve currency, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Kubernetes, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, margin call, MITM: man-in-the-middle, multilevel marketing, Network effects, offshore financial centre, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, Steve Wozniak, tulip mania, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket, WikiLeaks

Gox-Bitfinex jurisdiction over cryptocurrency exchanges, Jurisdiction order types in cryptocurrency exchanges, The Role of Exchanges risks of, in cryptocurrency trading, Exchange Risk types of cryptocurrency exchanges, Jurisdiction externally owned account (EOA) wallets, Multisignature Contracts F Fabric (Hyperledger), Hyperledger FacebookLibra Association, The Libra Association Novi wallet, Novi false stake attacks, Proof-of-Stake faucets (Ethereum testnets), Authoring a smart contract Federal Reserve (see US Federal Reserve) federated sidechains, Sidechains fiat currencies, Electronic Systems and Trustblockchain-based assets pegged to, Stablecoins mint-based model, The Whitepaper file storage in web applications, Web 3.0 Financial Action Task Force (FATF), Travel Rule, The FATF and the Travel Rule Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation financial crisis of 2008, Electronic Systems and Trust, The 2008 Financial Crisis financial transactions, reliance on trust, Electronic Systems and Trust flash loans, Flash Loans-The Fulcrum Exploitcreating a smart contract for, Creating a Flash Loan Contract-Deploying the Contract deploying the smart contract, Deploying the Contract executing, Executing a Flash Loan-Executing a Flash Loan floatconfiguration 1, Float Configuration 1 configuration 2, Float Configuration 2 configuration 3, Float Configuration 3 timing and managing, Timing and Managing Float Force, Carl, Skirting the Laws forks, Understanding Forks-Replay attacks, Altcoins(see also altcoins) contentious hard forks, Contentious Hard Forks-Replay attacksfork of Bitcoin Cash into Bitcoin SV, The Bitcoin Cash Fork replay attacks vulnerability, Replay attacks different types of, Understanding Forks Ethereum Classic, The Ethereum Classic Fork, Forking Ethereum and the creation of Ethereum Classic fork choice rule in Ethereum 2.0, Ethereum Scaling other Ethereum forks, Other Ethereum forks in proof-of-stake networks, Proof-of-Stake fraud risk as seen by banking audits, Banking Risk Fulcrum attack, The Fulcrum Exploit full nodes (Libra), How the Libra Protocol Works funding amount, Lightning funding transactions, Funding transactions fungible tokens, Fungible and Nonfungible TokensERC-20 standard for, ERC-20 ERC-777 proposed standard for, ERC-777 futures, Derivatives G gambling, on Web 3.0, Web 3.0 gamingpermissioned ledger uses of blockchain, Gaming tracking virtual goods in games, ERC-1155 Garza, Homero Joshua, Skirting the Laws gas, Ether and GasETH Gas Station, Gas and Pricing list of gas prices by opcode, Gas and Pricing GAW Miners, Skirting the Laws GeistGeld, Altcoins Gemini, arbitrage trading on, Arbitrage Trading-Exchange APIs and Trading BotsAPI example, BTC/USD ticker call, Exchange APIs and Trading Bots Genesis block (Bitcoin), Achieving Consensus Gitcoin, Web 3.0 Gnosis, Tokenize Everything government-backed currencies (see fiat currencies) graphics processing units (GPUs), Mining Is About Incentives Grin, Mimblewimble, Beam, and Grin H halting problem, Ether and Gas hard forks, Understanding Forks hardware wallets, Wallet Type Variations, Wallets hash algorithms, Proof-of-Work hash power, Block discovery, How Omni Layer works hash rates, Proof-of-Work Hashcash, Hashcash hashes, Hashcash, Hashes-Custody: Who Holds the KeysBitcoin hash function, double SHA-256, The Merkle Root block, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks, Block Hashes-Custody: Who Holds the Keys of information generated by transactions in Bitcoin, Introducing the Timestamp Server MD5 password hashes, Zero-Knowledge Proof Merkle root, The Merkle Root-The Merkle Root in proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining, Proof-of-Work public key hash on Bitcoin, Public and Private Keys in Cryptocurrency Systems in Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper, The Whitepaper health care, permissioned ledger implementations of blockchain, Health Care height number (block), Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks hex value arguments to smart contract calls, Custody and counterparty risk Honest validator framework, Ethereum Scaling Hong Kong, regulatory arbitrage, Hong Kong hot or cold storage wallets, Counterparty Risk hot wallets, Wallet Type Variations HotStuff algorithm, Borrowing from Existing Blockchains Hyperledger, Hyperledger I IBMIoT interaction by Watson and data storage in Blockchain Platform, Internet of Things toolset offering support for Hyperledger Fabric, Blockchain as a Service identifyverification of, Security Fundamentals identityand dangers of hacking, Identity and the Dangers of Hacking associating with Bitcoin addresses, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering identification services, Private Keys IDEX decentralized exchange, Decentralized Exchange Contracts illiquidity, signs of, Counterparty Risk infinite recursion, Forking Ethereum and the creation of Ethereum Classic information on blockchain industry, Information Infura, Interacting with Code initial coin offerings (ICOs), Mastercoin and Smart Contracts, Tokenize Everything, Initial Coin Offerings-Whitepaperas example of regulatory arbitrage, Initial Coin Offerings DAOs and, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Ethereum, Tokenize Everything founder intentions, Founder Intentions funds collected into multisignature wallets, Multisignature Contracts illegal activities in, Skirting the Laws legal, regulatory, and other problems with, Tokenize Everything Mastercoin, Tokenize Everything motivations for founders versus venture-funding startups, Whitepaper other terms for, Initial Coin Offerings spectrum of ICO viability, Initial Coin Offerings token economics, Token Economics use of Ethereum platform, Use Cases: ICOs whitepaper, Whitepaper intermediary trust, Electronic Systems and Trust internetdata exchange protocols, evolution of, The More Things Change dot-com crash, Tulip Mania or the internet?

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Gox-Bitfinex jurisdiction over cryptocurrency exchanges, Jurisdiction order types in cryptocurrency exchanges, The Role of Exchanges risks of, in cryptocurrency trading, Exchange Risk types of cryptocurrency exchanges, Jurisdiction externally owned account (EOA) wallets, Multisignature Contracts F Fabric (Hyperledger), Hyperledger FacebookLibra Association, The Libra Association Novi wallet, Novi false stake attacks, Proof-of-Stake faucets (Ethereum testnets), Authoring a smart contract Federal Reserve (see US Federal Reserve) federated sidechains, Sidechains fiat currencies, Electronic Systems and Trustblockchain-based assets pegged to, Stablecoins mint-based model, The Whitepaper file storage in web applications, Web 3.0 Financial Action Task Force (FATF), Travel Rule, The FATF and the Travel Rule Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation financial crisis of 2008, Electronic Systems and Trust, The 2008 Financial Crisis financial transactions, reliance on trust, Electronic Systems and Trust flash loans, Flash Loans-The Fulcrum Exploitcreating a smart contract for, Creating a Flash Loan Contract-Deploying the Contract deploying the smart contract, Deploying the Contract executing, Executing a Flash Loan-Executing a Flash Loan floatconfiguration 1, Float Configuration 1 configuration 2, Float Configuration 2 configuration 3, Float Configuration 3 timing and managing, Timing and Managing Float Force, Carl, Skirting the Laws forks, Understanding Forks-Replay attacks, Altcoins(see also altcoins) contentious hard forks, Contentious Hard Forks-Replay attacksfork of Bitcoin Cash into Bitcoin SV, The Bitcoin Cash Fork replay attacks vulnerability, Replay attacks different types of, Understanding Forks Ethereum Classic, The Ethereum Classic Fork, Forking Ethereum and the creation of Ethereum Classic fork choice rule in Ethereum 2.0, Ethereum Scaling other Ethereum forks, Other Ethereum forks in proof-of-stake networks, Proof-of-Stake fraud risk as seen by banking audits, Banking Risk Fulcrum attack, The Fulcrum Exploit full nodes (Libra), How the Libra Protocol Works funding amount, Lightning funding transactions, Funding transactions fungible tokens, Fungible and Nonfungible TokensERC-20 standard for, ERC-20 ERC-777 proposed standard for, ERC-777 futures, Derivatives G gambling, on Web 3.0, Web 3.0 gamingpermissioned ledger uses of blockchain, Gaming tracking virtual goods in games, ERC-1155 Garza, Homero Joshua, Skirting the Laws gas, Ether and GasETH Gas Station, Gas and Pricing list of gas prices by opcode, Gas and Pricing GAW Miners, Skirting the Laws GeistGeld, Altcoins Gemini, arbitrage trading on, Arbitrage Trading-Exchange APIs and Trading BotsAPI example, BTC/USD ticker call, Exchange APIs and Trading Bots Genesis block (Bitcoin), Achieving Consensus Gitcoin, Web 3.0 Gnosis, Tokenize Everything government-backed currencies (see fiat currencies) graphics processing units (GPUs), Mining Is About Incentives Grin, Mimblewimble, Beam, and Grin H halting problem, Ether and Gas hard forks, Understanding Forks hardware wallets, Wallet Type Variations, Wallets hash algorithms, Proof-of-Work hash power, Block discovery, How Omni Layer works hash rates, Proof-of-Work Hashcash, Hashcash hashes, Hashcash, Hashes-Custody: Who Holds the KeysBitcoin hash function, double SHA-256, The Merkle Root block, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks, Block Hashes-Custody: Who Holds the Keys of information generated by transactions in Bitcoin, Introducing the Timestamp Server MD5 password hashes, Zero-Knowledge Proof Merkle root, The Merkle Root-The Merkle Root in proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining, Proof-of-Work public key hash on Bitcoin, Public and Private Keys in Cryptocurrency Systems in Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper, The Whitepaper health care, permissioned ledger implementations of blockchain, Health Care height number (block), Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks hex value arguments to smart contract calls, Custody and counterparty risk Honest validator framework, Ethereum Scaling Hong Kong, regulatory arbitrage, Hong Kong hot or cold storage wallets, Counterparty Risk hot wallets, Wallet Type Variations HotStuff algorithm, Borrowing from Existing Blockchains Hyperledger, Hyperledger I IBMIoT interaction by Watson and data storage in Blockchain Platform, Internet of Things toolset offering support for Hyperledger Fabric, Blockchain as a Service identifyverification of, Security Fundamentals identityand dangers of hacking, Identity and the Dangers of Hacking associating with Bitcoin addresses, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering identification services, Private Keys IDEX decentralized exchange, Decentralized Exchange Contracts illiquidity, signs of, Counterparty Risk infinite recursion, Forking Ethereum and the creation of Ethereum Classic information on blockchain industry, Information Infura, Interacting with Code initial coin offerings (ICOs), Mastercoin and Smart Contracts, Tokenize Everything, Initial Coin Offerings-Whitepaperas example of regulatory arbitrage, Initial Coin Offerings DAOs and, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Ethereum, Tokenize Everything founder intentions, Founder Intentions funds collected into multisignature wallets, Multisignature Contracts illegal activities in, Skirting the Laws legal, regulatory, and other problems with, Tokenize Everything Mastercoin, Tokenize Everything motivations for founders versus venture-funding startups, Whitepaper other terms for, Initial Coin Offerings spectrum of ICO viability, Initial Coin Offerings token economics, Token Economics use of Ethereum platform, Use Cases: ICOs whitepaper, Whitepaper intermediary trust, Electronic Systems and Trust internetdata exchange protocols, evolution of, The More Things Change dot-com crash, Tulip Mania or the internet? evolution of, Electronic Systems and Trust Internet of Things (IoT), permissioned ledger implementations of blockchain, Internet of Things interoperability between different blockchains, Interoperability Interplanetary File System (IPFS), Web 3.0 issuance trust, Electronic Systems and Trust IT systems, permissioned ledger uses, IT Ixcoin, Altcoins J Java, Corda language JPMorgan, JPMorganinterbank payments using permissioned ledger, Payments jurisdiction over cryptocurrency exchanges, Jurisdiction K Keccak-256 hash algorithm, Hashes Know Your Customer (KYC) rules, Banking Risk, DAIon centralized and decentralized exchanges, Know your customer crypto laundering and, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering implementation in Novi wallet, Novi in Singapore, Singapore stablecoins requiring/not requiring, KYC and pseudonymity L LBFT consensus protocol, How the Libra Protocol Works Ledger wallet, Wallets ledgers, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks, Databases and LedgersCorda, Corda ledger distributed verifiable, key properties of, Key Properties of Distributed Verifiable Ledgers Hyperledger Fabric technology, Hyperledger permissioned ledger uses of blockchain, Permissioned Ledger Uses-Payments Ripple, Ripple legal industry, permissioned ledger uses, Legal legal requirements, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology skirting the laws, Skirting the Laws lending services (DeFi), Lending less than 5% rule, Counterparty Risk Libra, Libra-Summaryborrowing from existing blockchains, Borrowing from Existing Blockchains centralization challenges, Novi how the Libra protocol works, How the Libra Protocol Works-Transactionsblocks, Blocks transactions, Transactions Libra Association, The Libra Association Novi wallet and other third-party wallets, Novi Lightning, Lightning, Lightningfunding transactions, Funding transactions nodes and wallets, Lightning nodes and wallets off-chain transactions, Off-chain transactions solving scalability issues on Blockchain, Lightning Liquid multisignature wallet, Liquid liquidity, Arbitrageor depth in a market, Hunting for Bart Litecoin, Litecoin longest chain rule, The mining process lottery-based consensus, Alternative methods M MaidSafe, Understanding Omni LayerICO for, Use Cases: ICOs Maker project's DAI, DAIsavings rates for DAI, Savings Malta, regulatory arbitrage, Malta man in the middle attacks, Zero-Knowledge Proof margin/leveraged products, Derivatives market capitalization, low, cryptocurrencies with, Whales market depthconsiderations in cryptocurrency trading, Basic Mistakes lacking in cryptocurrency market, Cryptocurrency Market Structure market infrastructure, Market Infrastructure-Summaryanalysis, Analysis-Hunting for Bartfundamental cryptocurrency analysis, Fundamental Cryptocurrency Analysis-Tools for fundamental analysis technical cryptocurrency analysis, Technical Cryptocurrency Analysis-Hunting for Bart arbitrage trading, Arbitrage Trading-Float Configuration 3 cryptocurrency market structure, Cryptocurrency Market Structure-Transaction flowsaribtrage, Arbitrage counterparty risk, Counterparty Risk market data, Market Data-Transaction flows depth charts, Depth Charts derivatives, Derivatives exchange APIs and trading bots, Exchange APIs and Trading Bots-Market Aggregatorsmarket aggregators, Market Aggregators open source trading tech, Open Source Trading Tech rate limiting, Rate Limiting REST versus WebSocket APIs, REST Versus WebSocket testing trading bot in sandbox, Testing in a Sandbox exchanges, The Role of Exchanges-The Role of Exchanges order books, Order Books regulatory challenges, Regulatory Challenges-Basic Mistakes slippage in cryptocurrency trading, Slippage wash trading, Wash Trading ways to buy and sell cryptocurrency, Evolution of the Price of Bitcoin whales, Whales market size, Order Books Mastercoin, Mastercoin and Smart Contracts, Tokenize EverythingEthereum and, Ethereum: Taking Mastercoin to the Next Level raising cryptocurrency funds to launch a project, Use Cases: ICOs Meetup.com, Information mempool, unconfirmed transactions on Bitcoin, Transaction life cycle Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST), Privacy Merkle roots, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks, The Merkle Root-The Merkle Rootin block hashes, Block Hashes Merkle trees, The Merkle Root MetaMask wallet, ConsenSys, Walletsusing in writing smart contracts, Writing a smart contract Middleton, Reggie, Skirting the Laws Mimblewimble, Mimblewimble, Beam, and Grin mining, Mining-Block Generation, Evolution of the Price of BitcoinBitcoin, problems with, Ripple and Stellar block generation, Block Generation GAW Miners, Skirting the Laws impacts on market data, Slippage incentives for, Mining Is About Incentives miners discovering new block at same time, The mining process process on Bitcoin for block discovery, The mining process Scrypt, Altcoins transactions confirmed by miner on Bitcoin, Transaction life cycle mint-based currency model, The Whitepaper minting, Important Definitions MKR token, DAI mobile wallets, Wallet Type Variations Moesif’s binary encoder/decoder, Custody and counterparty risk Monero, Monero, Ring Signatures, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering, Blockchains to Watchhow it works, How Monero Works-How Monero Works money laundering, Banking Risk(see also Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules) evolution of crypto laundering, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering-The Evolution of Crypto Laundering Money Services Business (MSB) standards, The FATF and the Travel Rule MoneyGram, Ripple Mt.

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Catch Me If You Can The Evolution of Crypto Laundering FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation The FATF and the Travel Rule Skirting the Laws Avoiding Scrutiny: Regulatory Arbitrage Malta Singapore Hong Kong Bahamas Crypto-Based Stablecoins NuBits Digix Basis Tether Initial Coin Offerings Founder Intentions Token Economics Whitepaper Exchange Hacks Mt. Gox Bitfinex Coincheck NiceHash Other Hacks Bloomberg TV BTC Stolen EtherDelta Redirection CryptoLocker and Ransomware SIM Swapping Summary 9. Other Blockchains What Are Blockchains Good For? Databases and Ledgers Decentralization Versus Centralization Participants Key Properties of Distributed Verifiable Ledgers Ethereum-Based Privacy Implementations Nightfall Quorum Enterprise Implementations Hyperledger Corda DAML Blockchain as a Service Banking The Royal Mint Banque de France China US Federal Reserve JPMorgan Permissioned Ledger Uses IT Banking Central Bank Digital Currencies Legal Gaming Health Care Internet of Things Payments Libra The Libra Association Borrowing from Existing Blockchains Novi How the Libra Protocol Works Summary 10.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

Morgan Are Getting behind Ethereum,” Fortune, February 27, 2017, http://fortune.com/2017/02/28/ethereum-jpmorgan-microsoft-alliance/. Over the course of twelve days in July, they raised $232 million and $185 million: James Mosher, “Initial Coin Offerings Going Way beyond Small Change,” American Institute for Economic Research, July 26, 2017, https://www.aier.org/research/initial-coin-offerings-going-way-beyond-small-change. With easier computation demands: See Vincent Everts’s interview with Ian Grigg, “Millions of Transactions Per Second on EOS.IO Blockchain|Interview Ian Grigg of Block.One,” available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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Estonia ether (ETH) Ethereum adChain ConsenSys and decentralization ether (native currency) history of initial coin offering (ICO) MedRec and open-source innovation as permissionless system Plasma and scalability and security workforce Ethereum Classic (ETC) Ethereum Enterprise Alliance Ethereum Foundation Ethereum Meetup Fabric Factom “fake news” Fibonacci Filecoin financial crisis of 2008 financial inclusion financial sector and central bank fiat digital currency and Hyperledger and permissionless systems and private blockchains and reform See also monetary and banking systems Forde, Brian forks Fourth Industrial Revolution and energy sector and Internet of Things and supply chains and trusted computing Foxconn France Francis, Pope Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner) freemium model Friedman, Thomas Furst, Raif Gage, John Galt, Juan (pseudonym) Gamecredits Gem Gendal-Brown, Richard General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Georgia, Republic of Germany Ghana Global Blockchain Business Council Global Synchronization Log Gnosis GoBitcoin.io God Protocol Goldman Sachs Golem Google Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple (GAFA) governance and Bitcoin and blockchain technology and citizenship and Ethereum and ICANN and re-decentralization of the Internet and regulation and trust Grid Singularity Grigg, Ian Gün Sirer, Emin Harari, Yuval Noah Hardin, Garrett Hardjono, Thomas Harple, Dan hashes health care sector Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Hearn, Mike Hessel, Andrew Hong Kong Howey Test Human Genomics Hyperledger IBM ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) ICO. See initial coin offering (ICO) ICORatings.com ID2020 identity and identification challenges of redefining identity and self-sovereignty identity-financial complex India Industry 4.0 movement initial coin offering (ICO) initial product offering (IPO) innovation and art Creative Commons and creative control and metadata bank institution-building Intel Corp. Inter-American Development Bank Interledger Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Internet of Things (IoT) Internet of Value Internet 3.0 Interplanetary File System (IPFS) IOTA IPFS.

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But lest you think this technology has been entirely consumed by corporate suits and international development staffers, the months during which we worked on this book also coincided with a get-rich-quick mania that dwarfed even the 2013 surge in Bitcoin’s price. This gold rush, spawned by a new blockchain-based crowdfunding tool for startups that’s known as the ICO—initial coin offering—had all the hallmarks of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Much like two decades earlier, the boom was characterized by both a risky, speculative furor and a sense that underneath the money madness lay a transformative new technology and new business paradigm. The startups behind this ICO trend are touting a host of new decentralized applications that could disrupt everything from online advertising to medical research.

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze by Laura Shin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Airbnb, altcoin, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, cloud computing, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, DevOps, digital nomad, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial independence, Firefox, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, hacker house, Hacker News, holacracy, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Internet of things, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, litecoin, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, off-the-grid, performance metric, Potemkin village, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social distancing, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks

Jules Kim’s Twitter profile: ScoobyDoo (@CointrolFreak), Twitter, accessed April 2, 2021, https://twitter.com/CointrolFreak. 17. “Margin Trading,” Poloniex via Wayback Machine, August 17, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20160817225211/https://poloniex.com/support/aboutMarginTrading. 18. Laura Shin, “The Emperor’s New Coins: How Initial Coin Offerings Fueled a $100 Billion Crypto Bubble,” Forbes, July 27, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/07/10/the-emperors-new-coins-how-initial-coin-offerings-fueled-a-100-billion-crypto-bubble/#3f10cbe16ece. 19. Johannes Pfeffer, “The Gnosis Token Auction,” ConsenSys, May 2, 2017, https://media.consensys.net/the-gnosis-token-auction-9c2f59d2387. 20. “The Aragon Token Sale: The Numbers,” Aragon, May 19, 2017, https://blog.aragon.org/the-aragon-token-sale-the-numbers-12d03c8b97d3; Corey Petty, “A Look at the Aragon ICO Investment Distribution,” Medium, May 18, 2017, https://medium.com/blockchannel/a-look-at-the-aragon-ico-investment-distribution-a78f601229d8. 21.

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CHECK your ACCOUNT—your TX may / may have shows up. 3k+ pending TXs still in pool,” Twitter, June 12, 2017, https://twitter.com/myetherwallet/status/874285733707526145. 33. Joon Ian Wong, “Ethereum unleashed the ‘initial coin offering’ craze, but it can’t handle its insane success,” Quartz, June 15, 2017, https://qz.com/1004892/the-bancor-ico-just-raised-153-million-on-ethereum-in-three-hours. 34. Wong, “Ethereum Unleashed the ‘initial coin offering’ craze.” 35. “Global Cryptocurrency Charts: Percentage of Total Market Capitalization (Dominance),” CoinMarketCap, accessed April 2, 2021, https://coinmarketcap.com/charts. 36. “The Status Network: A Strategy Towards Mass Adoption of Ethereum,” Status, accessed April 2, 2021, https://status.im/whitepaper.pdf. 37.

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Having seen what the open, permissionless internet had done to the media and music industries, they knew what happened to those who didn’t at least attempt to innovate: disruption. But before any of those private blockchains could be implemented in any meaningful way, a new idea got the attention of investors large and small: initial coin offerings (ICOs). A cross between a Kickstarter campaign, an IPO, and bitcoin, ICOs enabled projects to raise funds in cryptocurrency by giving people a new token, and they took off, showing how quickly a tsunami of economically incentivized developers could raise money to shake up financial services.

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Coin Offerings The proliferation of cryptocurrencies has begotten a new financial phenomenon that is comparable, in some ways, to the manner in which companies undertake initial public offerings (IPOs), which heralds their public listing on stock exchanges. The analogue in the world of cryptocurrencies is referred to as an initial coin offering, or ICO, although such an offering differs in many ways from an IPO, in terms of both its structure and regulation. Initial Coin Offerings An ICO is a fundraising tool that involves the generation and sale of a set of blockchain-based tokens to finance a particular project or initiative that is usually also blockchain-based. The tokens are sold in exchange for one of the prominent cryptocurrencies or for fiat currencies, and they then become linked to the project they helped finance.

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The following article, which seems to have been written in early 2019, provides a compilation of the top ten ICOs with the largest returns on investment: “Top 10 ICOs with the Biggest ROI,” Cointelegraph, https://cointelegraph.com/ico-101/top-10-icos-with-the-biggest-roi. By late 2020, many of these tokens were worth much less than in 2019. The guilty plea in the ICO fraud case is reported in Patricia Hurtado, “First Initial Coin Offering Fraud Case Ends in Guilty Plea,” Bloomberg, November 15, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-15/first-fraud-case-for-initial-coin-offering-set-for-guilty-plea. The SEC action against Telegram is detailed at https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2019-212. The SEC contended that “the defendants have failed to provide investors with information regarding Grams [the name of the token] and Telegram’s business operations, financial condition, risk factors, and management that the securities laws require.”

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In 2018, the CEO of a German-based start-up called savedroid absconded after raising a reported $50 million through an ICO and private funding. The CEO then posted a YouTube video indicating the stunt had a higher purpose—to advocate for “high quality ICO standards” and precisely to caution against such scams. Initial Coin Offerings Bulk Up Traditional financial centers such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, along with smaller offshore financial centers such as the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands, have hosted a number of ICOs. According to one research outfit, about fifty-seven hundred ICOs had been completed by the end of 2020, raising roughly $28 billion.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Whereas the Google world strains you through sieves of diversity and runs you through blenders of conformity, the new world will subsist on the foundational realities of individual uniqueness and choice. Whereas the Google world is stifling entrepreneurs’ access to the public markets through initial public offerings, which are down 90 percent in two decades, the new world will offer an array of new paths to enterprise. From initial coin offerings and token issues to crowd-funded projects, new financial devices are already empowering a new generation of entrepreneurs. The queues of abject “unicorns”—privately held start-ups worth a billion dollars or more—outside the merger and acquisition offices of Google and its rivals will be dispersed, replaced by herds of “gazelles” headed for public markets at last.2 Whereas Google attempts to capture your eyeballs with ubiquitous advertisements, you will see advertisements at your own volition, when you want them, and you will be paid for your time and attention.

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Under these inauspicious conditions, Buterin directed the completion of the Ethereum platform and launched more than a thousand new company projects. The average funding for each startup was more than two million dollars. They also invented something called the “ICO,” which stood variously for initial cryptoasset offering, initial crowd offering, initial Cayman offering, or initial coin offering, depending on which name the lawyers thought was most likely to appease the baffled regulators. The total funds raised—some eight billion dollars in less than one year—exceeded all money raised in IPOs or in venture capital for related ventures. The largest comparable venture outlay was $127 million for R3, led by ex-Googler Mike Hearn and Wright’s associate Ian Grigg, an effort by the big banks to catch up in blockchain technology.

…

Returning to programming, he launched the revolutionary new Brave Browser that remedies the bad effects of cookies and turns the tables on every top-down Internet empire. He financed Brave with one of the first, most lucrative, and most strategic of crypto-token sales. In this sale, Brave raised some $36 million in a couple hours—which then multiplied when the price of Ethereum’s coin soared. These crypto-token sales, known as “initial coin offerings” (ICOs) are a type of cryptocurrency crowdfunding. In generating these tokens, entrepreneurs have tapped as much as $7 billion in new capital by essentially pre-selling unbundled components of equity in the guise of products to be developed. Ethereum, as an open-source “virtual machine,” allows end-users to construct specific binding programs, scrupulously assuring compliance with regulations.

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts by David Gerard

altcoin, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, Californian Ideology, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, Dunning–Kruger effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, functional programming, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, margin call, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, operational security, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, slashdot, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

Users were reluctant to remove their BTC from Bitfinex because the “price” was highest there (even if unrealisable) and because they loved it as a trading platform. The trapped “USD” also gets used to buy other cryptocurrencies – the price of altcoins tends to rise and fall with the price of bitcoins – and this has fueled new ICOs (“Initial Coin Offerings,” detailed next chapter), as people desperately look for somewhere to put their unspendable “dollars.” This got Ethereum and ICOs into the bubble as well. Even better: on Bitfinex, you can use BTC as collateral to margin-trade on USD, which you can then use to buy more BTC. Which also drives the price up.280 And, of course, you can’t get the USD out, so you might as well buy more cryptos with it.

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He now puts the probability at “<0.1%”, though competent observers would likely consider even that on the high side for a mathematical impossibility.307 ICOs: magic beans and bubble machines There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. – Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas The snappy new phrase for “buy our premined altcoin” is “ICO” (“Initial Coin Offering” or “Initial Crowdfunding Offering”). These are typically tokens running on top of the Ethereum blockchain, usually in a smart contract written to the standard ERC-20 interface.308 There’s no mining involved – you create a smart contract that manages a pile of tokens, sell a small percentage and hold the rest to sell later.

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Hashpower: How much computing power you can apply to mining to guess a hash that gets you the bitcoin reward for adding a block to the blockchain. Hot wallet: software that keeps copies of the private keys for your bitcoins, and sends transactions to and receives them from the Bitcoin network (and eventually, when they go into a block, the blockchain). ICO: Stands for “Initial Coin Offering” or “Initial Crowdfunding Offering”, but in practice means a token that is speculated upon just because speculators can. Hugely popular in the second bubble. Immutable: something that cannot be changed. The blockchain is considered immutable, as any change would change the hashes and be immediately evident.

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

As Salome Parulava and I wrote (Birch and Parulava 2017), these technologies give us the possibility of ‘translucent transactions’, where the technological architecture means continuous instead of periodic auditing long after trades and exchanges have taken place. We will return to explore this concept in the specific context of digital currencies later on. One of the first uses of tokens was, indeed, as money. People began to create cryptographic coins of one form or another, and these became known as initial coin offerings (ICOs). Billions of dollars flowed into the first generation of ICOs, a great many of them to Zug in Switzerland (often referred to as Crypto Valley) because the issuers used Swiss Foundation Law to create the tokens. This is why the opinion of the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), is very important.

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This fund would be used to invest in new technologies for the public sector and to invest venture capital into Estonian companies founded by locals and e-Residents. Eventually, Korjus sees the tokens holding value and being used as a payment method for public and private services, both within the country and globally, which would provide a return on investment to initial coin offering participants. The Estonian example helps us to answer the misleadingly simple question: what is money? Money is something that you can pay your taxes with, of course! If Estonia goes ahead by merging, essentially, currency and bonds into a single, liquid, circulating digital asset, then we will have come full circle, back to the days when government tally sticks were making their way around England.

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Glossary ACU: alternative currency unit AI: artificial intelligence AML: Anti-Money Laundering AMLDV: Anti-Money Laundering Directive API: application programming interface BIS: Bank for International Settlements BRI: Belt and Road Initiative (China) BSA: Bank Secrecy Act (United States) CBDC: central bank digital currency CDD: customer due diligence CDP: collateralized debt position CFA: Franc of the Financial Community of Africa CFSI: Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation CHIPS: Clearing House Interbank Payment System CPS: Crime Pays System CTF: counter-terrorist financing DCA: digital currency area DCEP: Digital Currency/Electronic Payment DeFi: decentralized finance ECB: European Central Bank ECU: European Currency Unit ELMI: Electronic Money Institution ESL: enterprise shared ledger FinCEN: Financial Crimes Enforcement Network FINMA: Financial Market Supervisory Authority ICO: initial coin offering IMF: International Monetary Fund IMFS: International Monetary and Financial System JPMC: JPMorgan Chase SHC: synthetic hegemonic currency HMRC: Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs KYC: Know Your Customer KYZ: Known-bY-Zuck NFC: near-field communication NCSC: National Cyber Security Centre NIST: National Institute of Standards and Technology OFAC: Office of Foreign Assets Control PBoC: People’s Bank of China PEPSI: Pan-European Payment System Initiative PIN: personal identification number Pseudonym: a persistent alias to an identity PQC: post-quantum cryptography SDR: special drawing right SEC: Securities and Exchange Commission SGA (Saga): a partially collateralized stablecoin SHC: synthetic hegemonic currency Sibos: The annual SWIFT banking conference SIM: subscriber identification module, the chip inside a digital mobile phone that links the device to a user SMS: short message service (the GSM text message service) SWIFT: Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications USSD: Unstructured Supplementary Service Data Bibliography Adrian, T., and T.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The projects spanned the lurid, including SpankChain, which promised a way to pay porn actors directly, to the far-fetched such as ASTRCoin, whose tokens purportedly served as claims on various asteroids. The phenomenon gained the name “the ICO.” Instead of an IPO, or initial public offering, this was an “initial coin offering.” The ICO could last a few days or a few weeks, and it involved sending funds—typically in Ethereum or bitcoin—to a project’s online wallet and waiting to receive tokens in exchange. Never in history has there been an easier way to raise more money from more people with such little effort.

…

Soon after, the heiress Paris Hilton tweeted about her eager anticipation to participate in the launch of a token called Lydian that, in a perfect storm of buzzwords, promised to “deliver artificial intelligence marketing on a blockchain.” • • • In Washington, DC, the Securities and Exchange Commission watched all the events of 2017 unfold with surprise and alarm. The blatant scams—and there were plenty of them—were bad, but so was the very premise of Initial Coin Offerings. After all, US law makes it illegal to sell securities to ordinary people without registering with the SEC—a process that’s supposed to make companies follow rules related to accounting and transparency. Yet these ICOs appeared to be doing just that: selling securities. The promoters might call them coins and use a lot of blockchain lingo, but what they were selling looked for all the world like shares of stock or other securities.

…

Thus, the agency would use the DAO episode to put other would-be token sellers on notice: The SEC would treat future ICOs as illegal unless the organizers first registered the coins with the agency. This should have cooled the crypto fever sweeping the United States. It did not. A few months after the news came out, bitcoin hit another all-time high, near $5,000. Ethereum also soared, and so did the hundreds of altcoins riding in their wake. Brazen crypto promoters went forward with initial coin offerings all the same. The SEC is regarded as the powerful policeman of the financial markets. But during the crypto craze of 2017, the agency was caught off guard by the scale of the mania and came across as a mall cop pleading with a mob of rioting teens to settle down. By the second half of 2017, crypto fever had burst into the mainstream.

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum by Camila Russo

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, altcoin, always be closing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asian financial crisis, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Cody Wilson, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, East Village, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hacker house, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, mobile money, new economy, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Turing complete, Two Sigma, Uber for X, Vitalik Buterin

All of that happened in the span of seven days, in only one city. It was New York’s “Blockchain Week,” where the crypto community had gathered to attend the parties and conferences parlaying promises into fortunes. Indeed, in those seven days, sixteen startups raised almost $300 million in a crowdfunding mechanism known as an initial coin offering, or ICO, where anyone, anywhere in the world, could issue cryptocurrencies and sell them to investors equally spread out across the globe. Still, the market had fallen hard after an eye-popping rally, and the question everyone was asking was whether the recent slump was a temporary pullback or the beginning of the end.

…

., under the name “dacoinminster,” and Ron, under the name “ripper234,” went back and forth in the forum for a bit, but ultimately the sale went ahead as planned, raising over 5,120 bitcoins, or around $500,000 at the time. A foundation was set up after the sale and Ron joined as one of seven board members. This was the first time a blockchain startup had raised funds by selling its own digital token. The crowdfunding mechanism would later be known as an initial coin offering, or ICO, a play on words with initial public offering, or IPO. In the case of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, digital coins are only created through a network of computers, which must expend inordinately large amounts of energy to confirm transactions (that is, “mining” coins); receiving coins is a reward granted to those who use their computers to do that work.

…

After that, she started seeing tangible adoption on MyEtherWallet for the first time. As the second half of 2016 progressed, the number of users on the application gradually increased. They were using the wallet to participate in the growing number of token sales—what came to be known as an Initial Coin Offering, or an ICO. The similarity with the phrase “Initial Public Offering,” where relatively established businesses sell shares of a company to investors and list them on stock exchanges, signaled that these ICOs weren’t scrappy token sales for a few thousand dollars, maybe a few million if they were lucky, to bootstrap a blockchain startup like before.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

., 158, 266–67 hydroponics, 204 Hydrostor, 220 Hyperloop, 16–19, 26, 72, 199 hyper-personalization, 120–21 IBM, 28, 35 Watson computer of, 103, 130 ICOs, see initial coin offerings IDs, blockchain and, 58 IKEA, 120, 204 Illinois, University of, 203 illnesses, see disease imaging, medical, 157 see also specific technologies immune system, 164 Imperial College, London, 160 Independent, 140, 155 India, 196 electric cars in, 221 renewable energy projects in, 216 Industrial Revolution, 111–12, 243 Inevitable, The (Kelly), 85 inflammation, 90 initial coin offerings (ICOs), 59, 75–76, 84 innovation: and availability of capital, 73–77 cities and, 82–83, 244 demonetization and, 77–79 internet and, 83 longevity and, 87–91 migration as accelerant of, 238–40 neurobiology and, 81 new business models for, 83–87 saved time and, 71 Insilico Medicine, 166, 167 insurance, peer-to-peer, 183, 185–87 insurance industry, 181–82 autonomous cars and, 184–85 convergence and, 183–89 crowdsurance and, 183, 185–87 data and, 185–86 dynamic risk and, 187–89 origins of, 182–83 sensors and, 188–89 statistics and, 186 intercellular communication, altered, 172 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 212, 227, 241 International Astronautical Congress (2017), 20 International Space Station, 53 internet, 39 browsers for, 32 innovation and, 83 job creation and, 23, 229 “Rising Billion” and, 99–100 self-teaching and, 145 Internet gaming disorder, 246 “Internet of Things” (IoT), 42–43, 104–6 investing, AI and, 195 IQ, 80 Iron Man (film), 37 Iron Ox, 205 Irrawaddy River Delta, 226–27 Itai Madamombe, 200 Iviva Medical, 55 iWatch, 157 Jaguar automobiles, self-driving, 14 JARVIS (fictional AI assistant), 37, 113, 123–24 Jepsen, Mary Lou, 157 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 233 Jews, in flight from Nazi Germany, 238–39 Jobs, Steve, 20, 24, 70–71, 101 jobs, VR and, 248 Johnson, Bryan, 81, 255–56, 257 Johnson & Johnson, 162 Journal of Evolution and Technology, 230 Just Inc., 208 Kamen, Dean, 213–14 Karim, Jawed, 128 Kasparov, Garry, 28, 36 Kelly, Kevin, 85 Kennedy, John F., 73 Kenya, 192 Kenyon, Larry, 70 Kernel, 81, 256 Kibar, Osman, 177 Kickstarter, 74, 109 Kim, Peter, 161 Kimmelman, Michael, 232 Kindred, 108 Kitkit School, 146 Kitty Hawk, 5 Kiva Systems, 108 knowledge, integration of, AI and, 35–36 Kodak, 126 Kotler, Steven, 264 Kroger stores, 107 Kurzweil, Ray, 8, 12, 29, 76, 82, 91, 173 labor, human vs. robotic, 108 Lahtela, Petteri, 41 Lancet, 226 land ownership, blockchain and, 58 Lanier, Jaron, 50 LA Times, 67 “Law for Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” (Germany), 238 “Law of Accelerating Returns,” 8, 12, 29 Leap Motion, 52 Lemonade, 186–87 lending, peer-to-peer, 74, 194–95 Leroy Merlin, 110 leveraged assets, 84 Levine, Mark, 241 LG, 51, 139 LIDAR, 43, 185 Lieber, Charles, deep brain stimulation research of, 253–55, 256 Lifekind, 132 lifespan, extension of, see longevity Light Field Lab, 133–34 LightStage, 133, 134 Lightwave, 137 listening, AI and, 35 lithium-ion batteries, 62, 219–20, 222 Littlewood, John, 80 Liu, David, 67 Lloyd, Edward, 182–83 Lloyd’s of London, 183 loans, micro-, 191–92, 195 locked in syndrome, 141 logistics, robots and, 108 London College of Fashion, 114 longevity, 87–91, 169–79 anti-aging compounds and, 175 average human lifespan and, 173 convergence and, 169, 173, 179 “escape velocity” for, 173 genetics and, 172–73 innovation and, 169 regenerating medicines and, 176–77 senolytic therapies and, 175–76 stem cells and, 90 young blood transfusions and, 90, 178–79 see also aging Long Now Foundation, 232 Lonsdale, Joe, 17 looking, AI and, 34–35 Lovelace, Ada, 87–88 Lovelace, Gunnar, 190 Lowe’s Home Improvement, 107 lung disease, 151–52 Lyft, 195–96, 234 Lyrebird, 121 machine learning, 10, 34 Macintosh, 70–71 McKinsey Quarterly, 83 McNierney, Ed, 145–46 Made in Space, 53 Mad Men (TV show), 117 Magic Leap, 139, 149–50 mail-order business, birth of, 95–96 malaria, 160 Mall of America, 112 malls, 112, 115 Manning, Richard, 202 Mansfield, Mike, 73 manufacturing: impact of 3–D printing on, 54 zero-waste, 226 Marillion, 74 Mars, colonization of, 252 MashUp Machine, 34 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 144, 220 Materials Genome Initiative, 62–63 materials science, 10, 11, 17, 61–63 meat, cultured, 206–8 media: passive vs. active, 130–31 print, 138 medial prefrontal cortex, 21–22 medicine, see healthcare memory, brain implants and, 82 Memphis Meats, 208 Menabrea, Luigi, 88 Messina, Jim, 17 metformin, 175 microbots, 162 micro-loans, 191–92, 195 Microsoft, 33, 114 Microsoft HoloLens, 52 Middleton, Daniel, 129 Mighty Building, 55 migrations: climate change and, 211, 241–42 in human history, 237–40 as innovation accelerant, 238–40 interplanetary, 249–53 from physical to virtual reality, 245–49 urban relocation and, 243–45 military drones, increasing demand for, 10 Ministry of Supply, 109 Minnesota, University of, 163 Mission: Impossible (film), 121 mitochondrial dysfunction, 171 Mitra, Sugata, 145 MIT Review, 145, 146 mobile finance, 190–91 mobile health, 157–58 mobile phones, as quasi-currency, 191–92 mobility, and economic paradigm shifts, 98 Moment, The (film), 141 money: uses of, 189–90 see also cryptocurrencies; finance industry Moon, as space colonization platform, 251 Moore, Gordon, 7 Moore’s Law, 7–8, 28–31, 74 Morgan (film), 130 Morse, Samuel, 38 Mosaic, 32 Moser, Petra, 238–39 Mote Tropical Research Laboratory, 225 motion transfer, 131 movies, participatory, 135 M-Pesa, 192 mPower network, 40 MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), portable, 157 multiple world models, 86 Musk, Elon, 40, 81, 146, 161, 219, 231 Boring Company and, 18–19 brain-computer interfaces and, 255–56, 257–58 Hyperloop and, 16 space colonization and, 20–21, 250, 251–54 Myanmar, 226–27 My Drunk Kitchen (YouTube program), 128 Myers, Norman, 241 Naam, Ramez, 216, 218, 220 Nakamoto, Satoshi (pseudonym), 57 Nalamasu, Omkaram, 63 Nano Dimension, 54 nanotechnology, self-replicating, 63–64, 231 Nanticoke Generating Station, 216–17 Narrative Science, 35 NASA, 6, 233 Mars mission of, 160–61 National Institute on Aging, 179 National Institutes of Health, All of Us project of, 159 National Resources Defense Council, 203 Nebula Genomics, 159 Nefertari, tomb of, 147–48 Negroponte, Nicholas, Ethiopian self-teaching experiment of, 144–46 NeoSensory, 134 Netflix, 125–26 Netherlands, 232 networks, 39–41, 82–83 5G, 39–40, 119, 149 history of, 37–39 “Internet of Things,” 42–43, 104–5 new business models and, 84–87 and nurturing of genius, 80–81 ubiquity of, 39 user-friendly interfaces for, 38 Neuralink, 81, 256, 258 neural networks, 33, 34 neurobiology, innovation and, 81 neuro-modulation, 253–55 neurophysiology, 136 Nevermind (video game), 137 New Balance, 109 New Glenn rocket, 251 New Story, 55 New York Times, 105, 232 nine-dot problem, 81 Nintendo, 52, 140 Nokia, 100–101 norepinephrine, 247 Norway, electric cars in, 221 Novartis, 175 Nuro, 107 nutrient sensing, 171 O3B satellite network, 40 Obama, Barack, 62, 122 Oceanix City, 200 oceans, biodiversity crisis in, 223–24, 225 Oculus Rift, 51 O’Hagan, Ellie Mae, 242 OLEDS (organic light emitting diodes), 139 Omni Processor, 214 Onebillion, 146 O’Neill, Gerard K., 250, 251 One Laptop per Child, 145–46 Oneweb, 40 Opener, 5 OpenGov, 235 Openwater, 157 optical sensors, 43 Organovo, 55 organ transplants, 153–54, 175 Otoy, 133, 134 Oura ring, 42, 44 Outside, 241 overfishing, 223, 225 Ovid, 178 oxytocin, 247 Page, Larry, 5 Panasonic, 222 parabiosis, 178 parking spaces, repurposing of, 16 Parkinson’s disease, deep brain stimulation and, 253–54 Partnership for a New American Economy, 239 Paul, Logan, 129 PayPal, 252 Peabody Coal, 216 Pebble Time, 74 Peele, Jordan, 122 peer-to-peer lending, 74 Peleg, Danit, 109 Pepper (humanoid robot), 107 Perfect Day Foods, 208 perovskite, 63 photosynthesis, 202 physical world, boundaries between digital world and, 118–20 Picard, Rosalind, 137 Pichai, Sundar, 101, 102 Pine, Joseph, 111 Pinker, Steven, 262 Pinterest, 119 Pishevar, Shervin, 17 placental cells, 163–65 Plastic Bank, 85 Plenty Unlimited Inc., 204–5 podcasts, 127 Pokémon Go, 52, 140 pollution, 212, 223, 226 population growth, 213 Porsche, 222 possessions, experiences vs., 112 Postal Service, US, 96–97, 98 poverty, declining rate of, 262 Pratt, Gill, 46 Prellis Biologics, 55 presence, in VR, 50 prevention, existential risks and, 232–33 Prime Air, 107 Prime Wardrobe, 114 print media, 138 productivity: cities and, 244 technology and, 229 product reallocation, 239 Progressive Insurance, 187–88 Project Kuiper, 40 Project Loon, 39–40 proteins: aging and, 170–71 folding in, 167 proteostasis, loss of, 170–71 PTSD, VR and, 148–49 public institutions, impact of exponential technologies on, 23 Pulier, Eric, 59 pulmonary hypertension, 151–52 Qualcomm, 40 Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, 157 quantum computing, 8, 27–32 drug development and, 30, 167 QuantumScape, 222 Quartz, 228 Quayside, 235 qubits (quantum bits), 27–28, 30 R3, 193 radio, 138–39 railways, time standardization and, 96 Ramanujan, Srinivasa, 79–80 Ramchurn, Richard, 141 rapamycin, 174–75 Rea, Andrew, 128 reading, AI and, 35 real estate industry, 181 convergence and, 196–200 Reebok, 109 reforestation, drones and, 224, 227 regenerative medicines, 176–77 Renault, 219 renewable energy, 78, 214, 215–18 convergence and, 217–18 see also specific technologies ridesharing: autonomous cars and, 14–16, 19 car ownership vs., 14–15, 26 flying cars and, 19 Ridley, Matt, 82 Rifkin, Jeremy, 97, 100 Rigetti, Chad, 28, 30 Rigetti Computing, 28, 30, 32 RIPE Project, 203 Ripple, 193 “Rising Billion,” 99–100 Rizzo, Skip, 148–49 Robbins, Tony, 132, 148 robots, robotics, 45–48, 136 as avatars, 25–26 convergence and, 48 demonetization and, 78 disaster mitigation and, 45–46 food industry and, 205 home delivery and, 106–7 human collaboration with, 47, 162, 229 in-store, 107 micro-, 162 surgery and, 161–62 unemployment and, 22, 69, 229 warehouse logistics and, 108 in workplace, 47–48 rockets: intercontinental travel on, 20, 26 interplanetary travel on, 20, 251, 253 Roebuck, Alvah Curtis, 96 Romkey, John, 42 Rose, Geordie, 29–30 Rosedale, Philip, 134, 147–48 Rose’s Law, 30, 31 Rothblatt, Jenesis, 152–53 Rothblatt, Martine, 151–54, 173 Rural Free Delivery Act (1896), 97 Russell, Bertrand, 80 Rustagi, Kevin, 108–9 R.

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But if two gamblers can decide in advance what source to trust as an arbiter of results—say, the sports page of the New York Times—then they can build a blockchain contract that allows them to bet with one another, have the system settle the bet via the pages of the Times, then automatically move the money. It’s a smart contract because it executes itself, without need for human involvement. And it’s for all of these reasons that the tech is exploding. As of 2018, major financial firms like J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America are rolling out crypto-strategies at scale. Initial coin offerings, or ICOs, are blockchain’s version of crowdsourcing (which we’ll explore in depth in Chapter Four) are also exploding, with a market value of almost $10 billion as of 2018. In total, what began less than a decade ago with the sale of two pizzas, will, according to Gartner, Inc., grow to $176 billion by 2025, and could exceed $3.1 trillion in 2030.

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AI is also on the rise, with investments climbing from $5.4 billion in 2017 to $9.3 billion in 2018. And biotechnology experienced a similar boom, rising from $11.8 billion in 2017 to $14.4 billion in 2018. Yet, when it comes to raising staggering sums of money in an eyeblink, little can compare with initial coin offerings (or ICOs). Emerging out of the cryptocurrency realm, ICOs are a new form of crowdfunding underpinned by blockchain technology. Startups can raise capital by creating and selling their own virtual currency—called either “tokens” or “coins.” These tokens give you ownership in the company (or, at least, voting power) and the promise of future profits, or can take the form of a security, representing fractional ownership of a piece of real estate or the like.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Notable among these inventions was the initial coin offering (ICO), which allowed new cryptocurrencies to be developed with distinctively different stories. These currencies were backed, in effect, as shares of corporations. The ICO brought a flood of new narratives, each tied to a particular coin identified with some line of business. It brought back into public esteem the old sport of picking stocks, which had become somewhat tarnished as a fool’s errand. There was something new to talk about. In 2017 alone, there were over nine hundred initial coin offerings for crowdfunded business startups that wanted to raise money for some new venture.

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See also stock market crash narrative creative people: of news media, 75; recurrent narratives due to, 109–10; viral narratives due to, 60 credibility of narratives in a constellation, 28–29 Crimean War, effect of weather forecasting on, 123 Crime of 1873, 157–58, 171 criminology, narrative, 15 crocodile logo, 62 Cronon, William, 79 “Cross of Gold” speech, 167–68 cryptocurrencies: concept of, 3, 4; constellation of related narratives about, 92; gold standard and, 157; initial coin offerings (ICOs) and, 76; lack of definite knowledge about, 96; sold by vending machines, 10. See also Bitcoin narrative “Cult of the Offensive,” 95 cultural change: constellations of narratives behind, 86; narratives as vectors of, xiii; two-step flow hypothesis of, 297 cultural entrepreneur, 71–72 cultural factors affecting contagion rates, 274 Curley, James, 128 cybernation, 202 Daley, Daryl J., 296 databases for studying narratives, 279, 281–82, 284–85.

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See also housing booms housing market: narratives about, before 2007–9 financial crisis, 227; speculative bubbles in, 216–17; surveys of US homebuyers in, 285–86; today’s status of, 226–27 Howard, Milford, Wriarson, 166 Hull, Clark, 195 human interest of economic narratives: added by celebrities, xii, 100–102, 153; impact on events and, 77; many dimensions of, 79–80 human interest of stories, 32 human tragedy narratives in Great Depression, 137, 141 Hume, David, 58, 71 hyperinflation in Germany after World War I, 247, 266 hypnosis narrative, 122 ICOs (initial coin offerings), 76 identity economics, xxi “I Have a Dream” speech (King), 153–54 Iliad (Homer), 174, 314n1 immunity to disease, 20, 289 Index of Consumer Sentiment, 119 Industrial Revolution: labor-saving machinery narrative and, 9; narratives about confidence and, 114; real estate narratives and, 212; as term introduced in nineteenth century, 175 inequality: artificial intelligence narrative and, 273; Bitcoin and fear of, 8–9; burgeoning public attention to, 210–11; decline in modesty narrative and, 150; George’s Progress and Poverty on, 111, 178–79; labor-saving machinery and, 178–79, 180; opposition to gold standard and, 166; origins of the boycott and, 240 infectives in an epidemic, 23, 289; declining contagion rate and, 296 inflation: anger about, 239, 245, 247, 263–64, 265–66; central bank role in control of, 261, 262; cost-push inflation, 258–59, 259f, 260; demand-pull inflation, 258; economic growth and, 319n10; economists’ views of, in 1997 study, 263, 264; highest in US from 1973 to 1981, 262; hyperinflation in Germany after World War I, 247, 266; as negative terminology, 172–73; public views of, in 1997 study, 263–64; runaway US inflation of 1970s, 256; sources of evil blamed for, 263, 266; stock market response to decline in, 29; unusually tame now, 266; wage-price spiral narrative and, 258–62; during wars, 265–66; after World War I, 243–49, 250; after World War II, 255–56 Inflation: A World-Wide Disaster (Friedman), 262 inflation targeting, 261, 262 influencer marketing, 274–75 influenza: new forms and new epidemics of, 271; pandemic of 1918, 108, 198, 252; SEIR model of epidemics of, 294 information cascades, 300 information technology: changing contagion rates and recovery rates, 273–75; communication of stories through, xviii; history of inventions in, 273; for research in narrative economics, 279.

Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and DApps by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Gavin Wood Ph. D.

air gap, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, continuous integration, cryptocurrency, Debian, digital divide, Dogecoin, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, functional programming, Google Chrome, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, litecoin, machine readable, move fast and break things, node package manager, non-fungible token, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, sealed-bid auction, sharing economy, side project, smart contracts, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vickrey auction, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket

hash, defined, Quick Glossary HD wallet seed, Quick Glossary Hellman, Martin, Public Key Cryptography and Cryptocurrency helpeth command-line tool, Inter Exchange Client Address Protocol, EthereumJS helpeth: A Command-Line Utility hierarchical deterministic wallets (BIP-32/BIP-44), Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets (BIP-32/BIP-44)creating from root seed, Creating an HD Wallet from the Seed defined, Quick Glossary extended public and private keys, Extended public and private keys hardened child key derivation, Hardened child key derivation HD wallets (BIP-32) and paths (BIP-43/44), HD Wallets (BIP-32) and Paths (BIP-43/44)-Navigating the HD wallet tree structure index numbers for normal/hardened derivation, Hardened child key derivation key identifier, HD wallet key identifier (path) tree structure, Navigating the HD wallet tree structure Homestead, Quick Glossary, Ethereum’s Four Stages of Development honey pots, Real-World Example: Reentrancy Honey Pot-Real-World Example: Reentrancy Honey Pot hybrid programming languages, Introduction to Ethereum High-Level Languages I IBAN (International Bank Account Number), Inter Exchange Client Address Protocol ICAP (Inter-exchange Client Address Protocol), Quick Glossary, Inter Exchange Client Address Protocol-Inter Exchange Client Address Protocol Ice Age, Quick Glossary, Ethereum’s Four Stages of Development ICOs (see Initial Coin Offerings) IDE (Integrated Development Environment), Quick Glossary immediate-read oracles, Oracle Design Patterns immutable deployed code problem, Quick Glossary imperative programming, Introduction to Ethereum High-Level Languages implicit typecasting, Variable Typecasting index numbers, for normal/hardened derivation, Hardened child key derivation infinite loops, Implications of Turing Completeness inheritance, Contract Inheritance-Contract Inheritance, Class Inheritance Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs)defined, ERC20 workflows: “transfer” and “approve & transferFrom” DoS attacks and, The Vulnerability tokens and, ERC20 workflows: “transfer” and “approve & transferFrom”, Tokens and ICOs inline assembly, Inline Assemblydefined, Quick Glossary Solidity compared to Vyper, Inline Assembly Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Quick Glossary intended audience, Intended Audience Inter-exchange Client Address Protocol (ICAP), Quick Glossary, Inter Exchange Client Address Protocol-Inter Exchange Client Address Protocol interface object type, Contract Definition internal function, Functions internal transaction (message), Quick Glossary, Withdrawing from Our Contract International Bank Account Number (IBAN), Inter Exchange Client Address Protocol invariant checking, The Vulnerability invocation, Transaction Value and Data, Transmitting a Data Payload to an EOA or Contract IPFS (InterPlanetary File System), Quick Glossary, IPFS J Jaxx, Choosing an Ethereum Walletdesktop version, Jaxx mobile version, Mobile (Smartphone) Wallets JBOK wallets, Wallet Technology Overview(see also nondeterministic (random) wallets) JSON-RPC API, The JSON-RPC Interface-Parity’s Geth compatibility mode K Keccak-256 hash function, Quick Glossary, Ethereum’s Cryptographic Hash Function: Keccak-256 key derivation function (KDF), Quick Glossary, Nondeterministic (Random) Wallets key derivation methods, Wallet Technology Overview key exchange protocol, Public Key Cryptography and Cryptocurrency key pairs, Keys and Addresses, Public Key Cryptography and Cryptocurrency key-stretching function, From mnemonic to seed key-value tuple, Ethereum: A General-Purpose Blockchain keychains, Wallet Technology Overview keysextended, Extended public and private keys path naming convention, HD wallet key identifier (path) keys and addresses, Ethereum Addresses and Transactions in this Book, Keys and Addresses(see also cryptography; private keys; public keys) keystore file, Quick Glossary, Nondeterministic (Random) Wallets King of the Ether, Real-World Example: Etherpot and King of the Ether L LevelDB, Quick Glossary libraries, web3.js-Emerald PlatformEmerald Platform, Emerald Platform EtherJar, EtherJar ethers.js, ethers.js Nethereum, Nethereum web3.js, web3.js web3.py, web3.py web3j, web3j library contract, Quick Glossary, Contract Definition libsecp256k1 cryptographic library, Elliptic Curve Libraries light/lightweight client, Quick Glossary, Should I Run a Full Node?

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In principle this can be done such that the gas required to execute the for loop exceeds the block gas limit, essentially making the distribute function inoperable. Owner operations Another common pattern is where owners have specific privileges in contracts and must perform some task in order for the contract to proceed to the next state. One example would be an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) contract that requires the owner to finalize the contract, which then allows tokens to be transferable. For example: 1 bool public isFinalized = false; 2 address public owner; // gets set somewhere 3 4 function finalize() public { 5 require(msg.sender == owner); 6 isFinalized == true; 7 } 8 9 // ... extra ICO functionality 10 11 // overloaded transfer function 12 function transfer(address _to, uint _value) returns (bool) { 13 require(isFinalized); 14 super.transfer(_to,_value) 15 } 16 17 ...

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For example, if a company is selling tokens for an ICO, they can approve a crowdsale contract address to distribute a certain amount of tokens. The crowdsale contract can then transferFrom the token contract owner’s balance to each buyer of the token, as illustrated in Figure 10-1. Note An Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is a crowdfunding mechanism used by companies and organizations to raise money by selling tokens. The term is derived from Initial Public Offering (IPO), which is the process by which a public company offers shares for sale to investors on a stock exchange. Unlike the highly regulated IPO markets, ICOs are open, global, and messy.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

For example, in the UK, security-cleared members of the public should sit on the Intelligence and Security Committee and the Independent Police Complaints Commission. REGULATE BITCOIN Bitcoin and blockchain technologies are exciting but currently running out of control. Where possible, cryptocurrencies should be regulated by the financial authorities (especially so-called ‘initial coin offerings’ and coin exchanges, where money is first raised or exchanged). They should be subject to the same regulations that currently exist to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism. This would require coin exchanges and wallet services to report suspicious transactions where possible, and to even carry out due diligence for customers trading over certain levels.3 The tax authorities also need to urgently update tax guidance for how to pay tax on crypto-assets, and to enforce it.

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Whenever you refresh a web page, an auction is conducted over who will offer the highest amount to show you an advert – this is surely one of the strangest things about the internet. Very few people fully understand how it all fits together, including the advertisers who are paying for it and the regulators who are struggling to get to grips with it. * Chief among them: the centralisation of mining, transaction speed, environmental costs, questionable ‘initial coin offerings’ and the fact that a small number of people own a high proportion of them. * Given a bitcoin was worth around £300 back then, and is now trading at over £5,000, my cup of coffee cost approximately £75 in today’s money. Some of the staff have probably now retired. * Examples of excellent books on technology which do not really consider the way in which technological advances and changes will be shaped by politics include Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 and Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence.

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Ben McKenzie, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, capital controls, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, data science, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, housing crisis, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Jacob Silverman, Jane Street, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uber lyft, underbanked, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Financial freedom came to mean a kind of financial anarchy. Criminals could use crypto to avoid taxes, sanctions, launder money, and collect profits from ransomware. A deluge of cryptocurrencies appeared, not just Ethereum but hundreds and then thousands of others, with the wave cresting during the so-called Initial Coin Offering (ICO) boom of 2017–18. Much like the dot-com IPO boom of an earlier era, it seemed like every day there was another ICO, with many projects hardly different from their peers except on the level of branding. Billions of dollars, some of it of dubious origin, changed hands, as crypto fortunes were made and lost overnight.

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Mining exploded in China in 2016 and 2017, and as the value of Bitcoin and other cryptos rose, the country quickly became the dominant player in the industry, accounting for approximately 75 percent of global mining capacity. The success of crypto in China garnered increased scrutiny from government regulators. In September 2017, just months after CZ founded Binance, Chinese authorities prohibited exchanges from turning fiat into crypto and banned initial coin offerings. CZ responded by moving his operation to Japan, only to have to move it again the following year when Japanese authorities warned against selling cryptocurrencies to the public without a license. Since 2018, Binance has refused to give a location for its global operations, claiming it has no headquarters.

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See also Bankman-Fried, Sam futures contracts Galaxy Investment Partners gambling Garcia, Mario Garlinghouse, Brad The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (Keynes) Gensler, Gary Gerard, David Giancarlo, Christopher Gillibrand, Kirsten Glass-Steagall Act Goldman, William gold standard Goldstein, Jacob Goldstein, Nuke Gomez, Mario Gong, Aaron Gottheimer, Josh Great Depression greater fool theory Griffin, John M. Haber, Stuart Harris, Chad Harris, Jim Harrison, Brett Haspel, Gina Hays, Mark Henson, David (Reverend) Henson, Harold “Hal” Hoegner, Stuart Hogeg, Moshe Howey Test Imas, Alex Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (film) inelastic supply Initial Coin Offering (ICO) Irrational Exuberance (Shiller) “Is Bitcoin Really Untethered?” (Griffin and Shams) James, Letitia Jay-Z Kardashian, Kim Keiser, Max KeyFi Keynes, John Maynard Kim, Francis kimchi premium Kindleberger, Charles Kraken Kullander, Tiantian Lagorio, Claudia launchpad scammer Law on the Issuance of Digital Assets (LEAD) Lay, Kenneth Legkodymov, Anatoly Lehman Brothers Levine, Matt Levitt, Arthur Lewis, Michael Lichtenstein, Ilya Lincoln, Blanche Lords of Finance (Ahamed) Lummis, Cynthia Luna (LUNA) Lying for Money (Davies) MacAskill, Will MacKay, Charles Madoff, Bernie Makarov, Igor manias Marcel (digital artist) Marmion, Jean-François Marroquín, Carlos Mashinsky, Alex Mashinsky, Krissy Massad, Timothy McCaffrey, Mike McConnell, Mitch McKenzie, Ben McKenzie, Patrick medium of exchange Mevrex The Mirror Protocol misinformation Money (Goldstein, J.)

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments by Michael Batnick

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, hindsight bias, index fund, initial coin offering, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, multilevel marketing, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Pershing Square Capital Management, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, short squeeze, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Y Combinator

Regret steers our brain in two distinct ways: We do nothing out of fear that we'll make the wrong decision. “I'm going to hold onto this fund that's done horribly because I can't stand the thought of selling at the bottom,” and it can compel us to do something because we don't want to regret not doing it: “I'm going to buy this ICO (initial coin offering) because I won't be able to live with myself if I miss the next Bitcoin.” You know Steve Jobs and his early partner Steve Wozniak, but the name Ronald Wayne likely means nothing to you. Wayne was the third founder of Apple, but the reason his name is erased from the history books is because in 1976 he sold his 10% stake in the company for $800.4 Apple is currently worth north of $900 billion!

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Brown, Berkshire purchase, 79–81 High‐frequency trading Graham recognition, 7 Hilibrand, Lawrence, 39 Hindsight bias, 148 Hong Kong Land & Development Authority, investments, 40 Housing bubble, 132–133 Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 28 Human beings, motivation, 147 Hutton, Edward, 17 IBM investment, 50 shareholder wealth, 109 trading level, 70 Icahn, Carl, 92 Ignorance, Confidence, and Filthy Rich Friends, (Krass), 27–28 Index funds creation, 47, 52 momentum, 47 “Inflated Treasuries and Deflated Stockholders,” 8 Information impact, 119–120 processing inability, 87 Initial coin offering (ICO), 148 Insolvency, rules, 31 Instagram, Sacca investment, 149 Insurance payments, problems, 134 Intelligent Investor, The, (Graham), 4, 6, 121 Interest rates, Federal Reserve increase, 61 International bonds, US bonds (spreads), 41 Internet stocks, overvaluation, 104 Intrinsic value, determination, 5 Inverse ETF, purchase, 23 Investing purpose, 119 risk management, 23 uncertainty, 23 Investment values, 6 Investors appraisal, 6 cognitive/emotional biases, 5–6 expectations, 120 information usage, 87 preference, change, 47 searches, 5 Irrational confidence, 161 Irrational Exuberance (Shiller), 126 Irving, Henry, 30 Ivest Fund, 49–50 J.C.

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

See Hypertext transfer protocol Huffington Post, 282 The Hyperledger Project, 272–273 Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), 253 Iceland, 44–45 ICO. See Initial coin offering; Initial cryptoasset offering Immutability, 15 Incumbents, 264–273 Indices, 100, 242 for bonds, 102 for broad market, 85–90, 295n4 Inflation, 48, 116, 166 Information, 147, 203, 256 access to, 279 on assets, 173 on core members, 182 flow of, 162 on ICO, 257–258 issuers and, 159–162 online, 210 on tax guidance, 276 trading and, 283 Infrastructure, 140, 192, 217. See also Architecture regulations and, 283 Initial coin offering (ICO), 255–260 Initial cryptoasset offering (ICOs), xv, 247–261 Initial public offering (IPO), 86, 113 for Facebook, 88, 98, 296n6 liquidity and, 250 SEC and, 249 Innovation labs, 273–274 Innovations, xxv adoption of, 140 triggers for, 28 Innovative Investors, 91, 103, 173, 184 alternative investments and, 79–81 bubbles and, 150 framework for, 171 learning and, 283–284 policies and, 271 The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Christensen), 264 Instamines, 48, 183 Insurance blockchain technology and, 269–270 dApps and, 59 for exchanges, 221 growth of, 221 Intel, 247–248 The Intelligent Investor, xxvi, 139 Intermediaries, 18 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 107, 274–277 Internet, xv, 140, 221 beginning of, xxii–xxiii crowdfunding and, 250–254, 256 economy and, 176 Investment products, 171 Investments, xiv, 137 bitcoin and, 70 blockchain venture capital and, 199 cryptoassets as, 31 disruption and, 263 ether for, 61 future of, 279–284 Millennial Age and, 280–282 plan for, 145 retirement and, 69, 232 risk and, 71 taxes and, 274 value of, 85, 89, 90 Investors, xxv, 21, 121 advisors and, 244 angel and early stages, 259–261 bitcoin for, 177 British as, 156–157 class of, 152 crowdfunding for, 250–252 cryptoassets for, 211–229 experiences of, 84 hedge funds access for, 279 hedge funds and, 78 models for, 76, 79 perspective of, 248–249 risk for, 72–73 shares for, 232 speculators and, 138–139 standard deviation for, 73 IPO.

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Often, core protocol developers will also work for a company that provides application(s) that use the proto255col, and that is a way for the protocol developers to get paid over the long term. They can also benefit from holding the native asset since inception. LAUNCHING A NEW CRYPTOASSET WITH AN ICO Initial coin offering (ICO) is the term most commonly used to describe crowdfunding the launch of a new cryptoasset. We’d like to expand this term to refer to initial cryptoasset offering, as the specific use of the term “coin” implies that these are currencies, which as we covered in Chapter 4, is most certainly not the case for all cryptoassets.

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business by Anastasia Nesvetailova, Ronen Palan

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business process, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, critique of consumerism, cryptocurrency, currency risk, democratizing finance, digital capitalism, distributed ledger, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, independent contractor, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ross Ulbricht, shareholder value, short selling, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail

Many business banking customers of RBS and NatWest were informed they were over-geared or underperforming, and as such were transferred to the unit. After the onset of the financial crisis, 16,000 companies were allegedly pushed into GRG (https://senecabanking.co.uk/global-restructuring-group/). ICO (ITO): Initial coin offering (initial token offering). In an ICO, a quantity of cryptocurrency is sold in the form of ‘tokens’ (‘coins’) to speculators or investors in exchange for legal tender or other cryptocurrencies. The tokens sold are promoted as future functional units of currency if or when the ICO’s funding goal is met and the project launches.

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There has been a massive expansion of bitcoin-backed credit nurturing the shadow banking system. Similarly, now that bitcoin is recognized as a currency, financial derivatives based on bitcoin are also available, and those transactions are, as yet, not subject to taxation. Speaking of derivatives and further innovations, we turn to the third facet of crypto sabotage: initial coin offerings (ICOs) and their cousin, initial token offerings (ITOs). In the cyber financial universe, ICO launches mimic an IPO of shares in a traditional stock market, except that an ICO offering is an investment in a company launching a new crypto. In a relatively unregulated environment, the range of ICO/ITO schemes appears to be limited only by their creators’ imagination.

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America by Dan Conway

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, financial independence, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, holacracy, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, initial coin offering, job satisfaction, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, rent control, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart contracts, Steve Jobs, supercomputer in your pocket, tech billionaire, tech bro, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Uber for X, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vitalik Buterin

We are going to need to pull on one another as this thing heats up and the real ride begins. Two hundred people signed up. My first meeting featured a presentation by Martin Koppelman of the prediction market dApp Gnosis, one of the hottest projects at the time. Six months later, it would be valued at an eye-popping one billion after its Initial Coin Offering. I invited my sister Kathleen and a couple of friends who were tech-savvy, mildly interested, and willing to do me a solid. Martin’s presentation was thorough. But it was so unbelievably dry and inscrutable that I wanted to cry. After an hour of him reviewing numbers-heavy slides in a small font with generous tangents featuring a soup of concept words like “random beacons,” “plasma diospheres,” and “the skyline number theory,” he mercifully concluded.

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I talked to Eileen, and we decided to put our mega-firm on hold. We’d keep it small but hopefully lucrative and only take on as much work as the two of us could handle. Despite my uneven business-development track record, there was no lack of other prospective clients. A new phenomenon had sprung up, and it had crypto by the throat: Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). ICOs, like Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) for traditional stocks, are mechanisms for funding new projects. Anyone with ETH or bitcoin could contribute to the development of a project and, in return, receive ownership in the form of tokens, which could be bought and sold like any other crypto asset.

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose by Nik Halik, Garrett B. Gunderson

Airbnb, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, business process, clean water, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Ethereum, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, gamification, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Isaac Newton, Kaizen: continuous improvement, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, market fundamentalism, microcredit, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Skype, solopreneur, subscription business, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, traveling salesman, uber lyft

Speculative investors should be aware there are risks involved in the investment and use of cryptocurrencies, such as fraud and security of the platforms. Cryptocurrencies can be electronically stolen, and there is no recourse for the individual. Other ways to invest in cryptocurrencies include either mining them or participating in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) of new crypto coins. Investing in cryptocurrencies, like all Momentum investments, means higher potential returns and higher potential losses. There’s a lot of volatility, which creates trading opportunities. And there’s been a big market run-up. Yet, cryptocurrencies will continue to have significant long-term potential.

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Harv Elder, Larry email, and productivity rituals emergency preparedness, as protective expense Emerson, Ralph Waldo emotional attachment, and Momentum investments and real estate investments emotional energy energy, amplifying entertainment, as tax deduction entrepreneurship, and academic systems and active income analyzing income opportunities and cash flow and continuous improvement direct sales/network marketing opportunities domain trading opportunities e-commerce opportunities and embracing failure and experimentation fix and flip opportunities and freedom and Growth investments and hiring employees and income growth lack of resources for and letting go and leverage online opportunities and opportunities presented by technology and passion and perfectionism personal service opportunities and quick adjustments to feedback and quitting your job and risk and scalability of businesses and self-employment sharing economy opportunities starting small and strong mindset three levels of and value creation equity growth, and real estate investments estate planning, as protective expense Ethereum Evans, Richard Paul excellence, replacing perfectionism with exercise, and energy amplification exit strategies, for Growth investments for real estate investments expense ratios expenses, and Active Income Ratio cutting and Passive Income Ratio experimentation F Facebook failure, and productivity fear, and building your inner circle and economic cycles and entrepreneurship and opportunity and procrastination and purpose and real estate investments and the Rockefeller Formula and security and strengthening your mindset of taxes federal government assistance, and loans for real estate investments Federal Housing Administration (FHA) feelings of entrapment, and weekend/workweek structure financial capital, and entrepreneurship financial independence, and Passive Income Ratio financial wealth, and Passive Income Ratio 5 Day Weekend, changing your mindset toward work contract for creating a vision for free-time activities five steps of importance of following correct sequence and “mailbox money” myth manifesto and passive vs. active income streams and security vs. freedom and thinking outside the box universal availability of weekend/workweek paradigm 5DayWeekend.com, and Passport codes 5-Second Rule, for impulse buying Fiverr.com fix and flip opportunities fix-up costs, for real estate investments Fon Ford, Henry foreclosure, and tax lien certificates Forleo, Marie foundation step (keep more money) Francis of Assisi (saint) Frank, Ben Frank, Joyce Franklin, Benjamin fraud, and cryptocurrencies freedom, and active vs. passive income creation and boredom and entrepreneurship and generosity and learning when to say no and lifestyle and peace and perfectionism and purpose sacrificing for security and simplicity Freedom Lifestyle freelancing, as entrepreneurial opportunity frequency of work requirements, business ownership (not managing) business ownership (working and managing) royalties and overrides sales subscriptions wage or salary employment Frost, Robert fulfillment, and purpose Fuller, Buckminster G Gardner, Chris generosity Gerber, Michael Gibbs, Marshall goal setting, and Passive Income Ratio and purpose Godin, Seth gold, as Momentum investment opportunity Golightly, Craig Google government social welfare programs, and retirement Grameen Bank gratitude Graybiel, Ann Gretzky, Wayne Groupon Growth investments, and active vs. passive income streams aggressive and conservative strategies for Bank Strategy and cash flow description of and economic cycles for funding Momentum investments minimum criteria for opportunities for Sharelord Strategy storage units tax lien certificates Guitar Institute of Technology (GIT) Gunderson, Garrett H habits, fortifying Halik, Nik happiness, and generosity and materialism hard money lenders, and loans for real estate investments health, and habits health savings accounts (HSA) “HELL YEAH” philosophy Hendrix, Jimi Herodotus Hicks, Bill hidden fees Hill, Napoleon hiring employees hiring your children, as tax deduction hobbies Holland, Danny home expenses, as tax deduction home office deductions homeowner’s insurance Hopper, Grace Hori, Jim hugedomains.com Hulu HyreCar.com I Idea Optimizer impulse buying income, and Active Income Ratio increasing with entrepreneurship and Passive Income Ratio See also cash flow income growth step (make more money) Income Opportunity Score Sheet incorporation Industrial Revolution, vs. Information Age inflation, and employment and failure of conventional investments and investment cycles and real estate investments and Wealth Capture Accounts Information Age Initial Coin Offering (ICO) Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) inner circle, building Instagram installment loans, and credit score insurance, and Bank Strategy Cash Flow Insurance as protective expense structuring to improve cash flow See also specific types of insurance intellectual property intention, and purpose interest, and credit scores and economic cycles and loan restructuring paid on whole life policy loans on savings accounts on tax lien certificates internet expenses, as tax deduction investment assets, analyzing for hidden fees and becoming rich and cash flow purchasing with whole life policy loans resources for types of investment income, and tax rates investment seasons IRAs, vs.

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency by Ian Demartino

3D printing, AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, buy low sell high, capital controls, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forensic accounting, global village, GnuPG, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, initial coin offering, Jacob Appelbaum, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, printed gun, QR code, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, Skype, smart contracts, Steven Levy, the medium is the message, underbanked, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Something about lying down with snakes seems appropriate. The pump-and-dump scheme has seen many iterations during the short history of cryptocurrency. The most damaging instances, however, are the coins that were designed to be a pump-and-dump from the very beginning. A popular way to launch a coin these days is through an initial coin offering (ICO). Any ICO should be considered suspicious, because it has the potential to funnel a huge amount of money to the coin’s issuer. This is because for a coin to be issued in this manner, it has to be pre-mined. There is no “offering” unless there are coins to offer. In a completely fair distribution where initial coins go to the initial securers of the network, there is no reason for a proof-of-work coin to have an initial pre-mine, other than to benefit the creators of that coin.

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Altogether, 3,005 users registered accounts on the pool server, and a total of 5,108 pool workers were created and used.2 Arscoin showed how easy it is to create an altcoin and, intentionally or not, illuminated the pure ridiculousness of the entire altcoin ecosystem. But this particular experiment does not mean there aren’t coins with real uses that have a chance to become truly valuable someday. Through the rest of this chapter, I cover the top altcoins by market cap size—excluding coins still in their ICO (initial coin offering) phase—along with other altcoins chosen because they were either successful in the past or have a unique feature I feel is worth mentioning. No coin developers have paid me to include them on this list, and I am not a significant holder of any of them. This is far from a comprehensive list of all the useful altcoins out there.

Mastering Blockchain, Second Edition by Imran Bashir

3D printing, altcoin, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, cloud computing, connected car, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Debian, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, full stack developer, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, information security, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, litecoin, loose coupling, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, Network effects, new economy, node package manager, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, prediction markets, QR code, RAND corporation, Real Time Gross Settlement, reversible computing, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, single page application, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, web application, x509 certificate

PacktPub.com Contributors About the author About the reviewer Packt is searching for authors like you Preface Who this book is for What this book covers To get the most out of this book Download the example code files Download the color images Conventions used Get in touch Reviews Blockchain 101 The growth of blockchain technology Distributed systems The history of blockchain and Bitcoin Electronic cash Blockchain Blockchain defined Peer-to-peer Distributed ledger Cryptographically-secure Append-only Updateable via consensus Generic elements of a blockchain How blockchain works How blockchain accumulates blocks Benefits and limitations of blockchain Tiers of blockchain technology Features of a blockchain Types of blockchain Distributed ledgers Distributed Ledger Technology Public blockchains Private blockchains Semiprivate blockchains Sidechains Permissioned ledger Shared ledger Fully private and proprietary blockchains Tokenized blockchains Tokenless blockchains Consensus Consensus mechanism Types of consensus mechanisms Consensus in blockchain CAP theorem and blockchain Summary Decentralization Decentralization using blockchain Methods of decentralization Disintermediation Contest-driven decentralization Routes to decentralization How to decentralize The decentralization framework example Blockchain and full ecosystem decentralization Storage Communication Computing power and decentralization Smart contracts Decentralized Organizations Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Decentralized Autonomous Corporations Decentralized Autonomous Societies Decentralized Applications (DApps) Requirements of a Decentralized Application Operations of a DApp DApp examples KYC-Chain OpenBazaar Lazooz Platforms for decentralization Ethereum MaidSafe Lisk Summary Symmetric Cryptography Working with the OpenSSL command line Introduction Mathematics Set Group Field A finite field Order An abelian group Prime fields Ring A cyclic group Modular arithmetic Cryptography Confidentiality Integrity Authentication Entity authentication Data origin authentication Non-repudiation Accountability Cryptographic primitives Symmetric cryptography Stream ciphers Block ciphers Block encryption mode Electronic Code Book Cipher Block Chaining Counter mode Keystream generation mode Message authentication mode Cryptographic hash mode Data Encryption Standard Advanced Encryption Standard How AES works Summary Public Key Cryptography Asymmetric cryptography Integer factorization Discrete logarithm Elliptic curves Public and private keys RSA Encryption and decryption using RSA Elliptic Curve Cryptography Mathematics behind ECC Point addition Point doubling Discrete logarithm problem in ECC RSA using OpenSSL RSA public and private key pair Private key Public key Exploring the public key Encryption and decryption Encryption Decryption ECC using OpenSSL ECC private and public key pair Private key Private key generation Hash functions Compression of arbitrary messages into fixed-length digest Easy to compute Preimage resistance Second preimage resistance Collision resistance Message Digest Secure Hash Algorithms Design of Secure Hash Algorithms Design of SHA-256 Design of SHA-3 (Keccak) OpenSSL example of hash functions Message Authentication Codes MACs using block ciphers Hash-based MACs Merkle trees Patricia trees Distributed Hash Tables Digital signatures RSA digital signature algorithm Sign then encrypt Encrypt then sign Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm How to generate a digital signature using OpenSSL ECDSA using OpenSSL Homomorphic encryption Signcryption Zero-Knowledge Proofs Blind signatures Encoding schemes Financial markets and trading Trading Exchanges Orders and order properties Order management and routing systems Components of a trade The underlying instrument General attributes Economics Sales Counterparty Trade life cycle Order anticipators Market manipulation Summary Introducing Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin definition Bitcoin&#xA0;&#x2013; a bird's-eye view Sending a payment to someone Digital keys and addresses Private keys in Bitcoin Public keys in Bitcoin Addresses in Bitcoin Base58Check encoding Vanity addresses Multisignature addresses Transactions The transaction life cycle Transaction fee Transaction pools The transaction data structure Metadata Inputs Outputs Verification The script language Commonly used opcodes Types of transactions Coinbase transactions Contracts Transaction veri&#xFB01;cation Transaction malleability Blockchain The structure of a block The structure of a block header The genesis block Mining Tasks of the miners Mining rewards Proof of Work (PoW) The mining algorithm The hash rate Mining systems CPU GPU FPGA ASICs Mining pools Summary Bitcoin Network and Payments The Bitcoin network Wallets Non-deterministic wallets Deterministic wallets Hierarchical Deterministic wallets Brain wallets Paper wallets Hardware wallets Online wallets Mobile wallets Bitcoin payments Innovation in Bitcoin Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) Advanced protocols Segregated Witness (SegWit) Bitcoin Cash Bitcoin Unlimited Bitcoin Gold Bitcoin investment and buying and selling bitcoins Summary Bitcoin Clients and APIs Bitcoin installation Types of Bitcoin Core clients Bitcoind Bitcoin-cli Bitcoin-qt Setting up a Bitcoin node Setting up the source code Setting up bitcoin.conf Starting up a node in testnet Starting up a node in regtest Experimenting with Bitcoin-cli Bitcoin programming and the command-line interface Summary Alternative Coins Theoretical foundations Alternatives to Proof of Work Proof of Storage Proof of Stake (PoS) Various stake types Proof of coinage Proof of Deposit (PoD) Proof of Burn Proof of Activity (PoA) Nonoutsourceable puzzles Difficulty adjustment and retargeting algorithms Kimoto Gravity Well Dark Gravity Wave DigiShield MIDAS Bitcoin limitations Privacy and anonymity Mixing protocols Third-party mixing protocols Inherent anonymity Extended protocols on top of Bitcoin Colored coins Counterparty Development of altcoins Consensus algorithms Hashing algorithms Difficulty adjustment algorithms Inter-block time Block rewards Reward halving rate Block size and transaction size Interest rate Coinage Total supply of coins Namecoin Trading Namecoins Obtaining Namecoins Generating Namecoin records Litecoin Primecoin Trading Primecoin Mining guide Zcash Trading Zcash Mining guide Address generation GPU mining Downloading and compiling nheqminer Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) ERC20 tokens Summary Smart Contracts History Definition Ricardian contracts Smart contract templates Oracles Smart Oracles Deploying smart contracts on a blockchain The DAO Summary Ethereum 101 Introduction The yellow paper Useful mathematical symbols Ethereum blockchain Ethereum &#x2013; bird's eye view The Ethereum network Mainnet Testnet Private net Components of the Ethereum ecosystem Keys and addresses Accounts Types of accounts Transactions and messages Contract creation transaction Message call transaction Messages Calls Transaction validation and execution The transaction substate State storage in the Ethereum blockchain The world state The account state Transaction receipts Ether cryptocurrency / tokens (ETC and ETH) The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) Execution environment Machine state The iterator function Smart contracts Native contracts Summary Further Ethereum Programming languages Runtime bytecode Opcodes and their meaning Arithmetic operations Logical operations Cryptographic operations Environmental information Block information Stack, memory, storage, and &#xFB02;ow operations Push operations Duplication operations Exchange operations Logging operations System operations Blocks and blockchain The genesis block The block validation mechanism Block finalization Block difficulty Gas Fee schedule Forks in the blockchain Nodes and miners The consensus mechanism Ethash CPU mining GPU mining Benchmarking Mining rigs Mining pools Wallets and client software Geth Eth Pyethapp Parity Light clients Installation Eth installation Mist browser Geth The geth console Funding the account with bitcoin Parity installation Creating accounts using the parity command line APIs, tools, and DApps Applications (DApps and DAOs) developed on Ethereum Tools Supporting protocols Whisper Swarm Scalability, security, and other challenges Trading and investment Summary Ethereum Development Environment Test networks Setting up a private net Network ID The genesis file Data directory Flags and their meaning Static nodes Starting up the private network Running Mist on private net Deploying contracts using Mist Block explorer for private net / local Ethereum block explorer Summary Development Tools and Frameworks Languages Compilers Solidity compiler (solc) Installation on Linux Installation on macOS Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) Remix Tools and libraries Node version 7 EthereumJS Ganache MetaMask Truffle Installation Contract development and deployment Writing Testing Solidity language Types Value types Boolean Integers Address Literals Integer literals String literals Hexadecimal literals Enums Function types Internal functions External functions Reference types Arrays Structs Data location Mappings Global variables Control structures Events&#xA0; Inheritance Libraries Functions Layout of a Solidity source code &#xFB01;le Version pragma Import Comments Summary Introducing Web3 Web3 Contract deployment POST requests The HTML and JavaScript frontend Installing web3.js Example Creating a web3 object Checking availability by calling any web3 method Contract functions Development frameworks Truffle Initializing Truffle Interaction with the contract Another example An example project&#xA0;&#x2013; Proof of Idea Oracles Deployment on decentralized storage using IPFS Installing IPFS Distributed ledgers Summary Hyperledger Projects under Hyperledger Fabric Sawtooth Lake Iroha Burrow Indy Explorer Cello Composer Quilt Hyperledger as a protocol The reference architecture Requirements and design goals of Hyperledger Fabric The modular approach Privacy and confidentiality Scalability Deterministic transactions Identity Auditability Interoperability Portability Rich data queries Fabric Hyperledger Fabric Membership services Blockchain services Consensus services Distributed ledger The peer to peer protocol Ledger storage Chaincode services Components of the fabric Peers Orderer nodes Clients Channels World state database Transactions Membership Service Provider (MSP) Smart contracts Crypto service provider Applications on blockchain Chaincode implementation The application model Consensus in Hyperledger Fabric The transaction life cycle in Hyperledger Fabric Sawtooth Lake PoET Transaction families Consensus in Sawtooth The development environment&#xA0;&#x2013; Sawtooth Lake Corda Architecture State objects Transactions Consensus Flows Components Nodes The permissioning service Network map service Notary service Oracle service Transactions Vaults CorDapp The development environment&#xA0;&#x2013; Corda Summary Alternative Blockchains Blockchains Kadena Ripple Transactions Payments related Order related Account and security-related Interledger Application layer Transport layer Interledger layer Ledger layer Stellar Rootstock Sidechain Drivechain Quorum Transaction manager Crypto Enclave QuorumChain Network manager Tezos Storj MaidSafe BigchainDB MultiChain Tendermint Tendermint Core Tendermint Socket Protocol (TMSP) Platforms and frameworks Eris Summary Blockchain &#x2013; Outside of Currencies Internet of Things Physical object layer Device layer Network layer Management layer Application layer IoT blockchain experiment First node setup Raspberry Pi node setup Installing Node.js Circuit Government Border control Voting Citizen identification (ID cards) Miscellaneous Health Finance Insurance Post-trade settlement Financial crime prevention Media Summary Scalability and Other Challenges Scalability Network plane Consensus plane Storage plane View plane Block size increase Block interval reduction Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables Sharding State channels Private blockchain Proof of Stake Sidechains Subchains Tree chains (trees) Block propagation Bitcoin-NG Plasma Privacy Indistinguishability Obfuscation Homomorphic encryption Zero-Knowledge Proofs State channels Secure multiparty computation Usage of hardware to provide confidentiality CoinJoin Confidential transactions MimbleWimble Security Smart contract security Formal verification and analysis Oyente tool Summary Current Landscape and What&#x27;s Next Emerging trends Application-specific blockchains (ASBCs) Enterprise-grade blockchains Private blockchains Start-ups Strong research interest Standardization Enhancements Real-world implementations Consortia Answers to technical challenges Convergence Education of blockchain technology Employment Cryptoeconomics Research in cryptography New programming languages Hardware research and development Research in formal methods and security Alternatives to blockchains Interoperability efforts Blockchain as a Service Efforts to reduce electricity consumption Other challenges Regulation Dark side Blockchain research Smart contracts Centralization issues Limitations in cryptographic functions Consensus algorithms Scalability Code obfuscation Notable projects Zcash on Ethereum CollCo Cello Qtum Bitcoin-NG Solidus Hawk Town-Crier SETLCoin TEEChan Falcon Bletchley Casper Miscellaneous tools Solidity extension for Microsoft Visual Studio MetaMask Stratis Embark DAPPLE Meteor uPort INFURA Convergence with other industries Future Summary Another Book You May Enjoy Leave a review&#xA0;&#x2013; let other readers know what you think Preface This book has one goal, to introduce theoretical and practical aspects of the blockchain technology.

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If regulations require Know Your Customer (KYC) checks and detailed information about business transactions to facilitate regulatory process then it might be too much information to share and as a result Bitcoin may not be attractive anymore to some. There are now many initiatives being taken to regulate Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and related activities such as ICOs. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has recently announced that digital tokens, coins and relevant activities such as Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) fall under the category of securities. This means that any digital currency trading platforms will need to be registered with SEC and will have all relevant securities laws and regulations applicable to them. This impacted the Bitcoin price directly and it fell almost 10% on the day this announcement was made.

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In this screenshot the payout is being made to a Bitcoin address for selling hash power: Using the BTC address to receive payouts for selling hash power The screenshot, shown here, shows a sample run of nheqminer on Windows with payouts being made to a Zcash T address for selling hash power: Using Zcash T address to receive payouts for selling hash power Zcash has used ZKPs in an innovative way and they pave the way for future applications that require inherent privacy, such as banking, medicine, or the law. This section completes the introduction to Zcash; readers can explore more about Zcash online at https://z.cash. Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) ICOs are comparable to the Initial Public Offering (IPO). Just as an IPO is launched to raise capital by a firm similarly, ICOs are launched to generate money for a start-up project. The critical difference is that IPOs are regulated and fall under the umbrella of securities market (shares in the company) whereas ICOs are unregulated and do not fall under any strict category of already established market structures.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Singapore’s government has been working on its own form of e-governing, since it has historically led the way with digitizing and automating government services. The British Parliament has begun to automate and encourage crowdfunding and Bitcoin. And both Singapore and Switzerland have innovated by leading the world with legal systems for smart contracts and blockchain initial coin offerings (ICOs). I will discuss more on that later. Japan announced that they are accepting Bitcoin as legal tender in their country. Governments are recognizing that they are in competition for the great minds and capital of the world, and they are being held accountable to their citizenry — a citizenry that is armed with information, communications and community.

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The SEC did claim that one new crypto vehicle, the DAO, was a security, but they are open to allowing other forms to be clear of securities laws. Some countries have been early innovators and beneficiaries of the blockchain industry. Singapore and Switzerland have set guidelines for people to create competing crypto commodities. Both individuals and companies can create commodity offerings or Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) that can have a mission attached to them. I believe that losing the Bitcoin economy would be akin to losing the Internet, so countries should make sure they are well positioned to compete for the Bitcoin entrepreneurs of the world. Bitcoin is here to stay, and the countries that are the most open to it will be the biggest beneficiaries.

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

If you aren’t yet ready to give up your current account and cards and dive into crypto payments with this somewhat motley crew, don’t worry – there are some major would-be players out there, circling the porch. ______________________________________________________________________ 1 An initial coin offering (ICO) is the cryptocurrency industry’s equivalent to an initial public offering (IPO), enabling firms to raise funds to create new coins, apps or services. 2 Shorting is a trading technique whereby investors sell stock they don’t already own, hoping to buy it later at a lower price and thus make a profit. 3 As this book went to press, Bitcoin had surged to well over $50,000.

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P. 45 gift vouchers 53 global financial crisis (2008) 131–2 global payments cost, annual 89 global payments innovation (gpi) 147–8 global reserve currency 246–7, 252, 254 Global Transaction Banking 96 gold 12, 29 gold standard 204, 248 Google 82–3, 111, 147, 158, 169, 182, 184, 220, 222, 224, 225, 234, 271 Google Pay 184–5, 271 government bonds, dollar-based 247 Graeber, David 8–9 Great Recoinage (1816) 203 Great Western Railway 68 Greenspan, Alan 128 ‘grey money’ 29–30 Gross Domestic Profit (GDP) 25, 27, 29, 32, 33, 59, 74, 77, 89, 100, 101, 120, 121, 206, 257 Guardian 35 Guevara, Che 211 guinea coins 203 H Hamilton, Alexander 9 Harfield, Henry 149 Hawala 142–3, 216 hawaladars 143 Heineken, Freddy 27–8 Herstatt Bank 123, 125 Hin Leong 151 Hinrikus, Taavet 146 HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs) 150 Hock, Dee 47 Holland 7–8, 184 ‘honour all cards’ rules 56–7 housing market 127–8 HSBC (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation) 133, 252, 260, 270 Huawei 251–2 Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico 36–7 hyper-inflation 203 I Iberpay 81 illegal activities 25–6, 27–8, 29–30, 33, 46, 164, 167, 199–200, 212–13, 255–64 see also counterfeiting and piracy; cybercrime; fraud; money laundering; robbery image scanning, cheque 67 immigrants and refugees 265, 266 in-app purchases 172, 224–5 India 38, 253–4 cash purge 29–30 instant payment system 81, 82–5, 86, 182, 271 Punjab National Bank fraud 115–16 Tez payment app 185 InfoWars 4 ING 179, 260 initial coin offerings (ICOs) 187, 193, 196 The Innovator’s Dilemma (C. Christensen) 217 instant payment systems 81–6, 144 Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX) 245 interchange fees 42–4, 51, 57, 98, 162, 163 interest charges 7, 13, 90, 99, 212, 215 on credit cards 90 earning 17, 215 margins on account balances 92–3, 100 on overdrafts 99 rates 67, 90, 92, 99, 133, 183, 212 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 66 International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) 151 International Herald Tribune 250 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 17, 202 Interpol 3, 111 The Interview film 112 investment apps 77 invoice payment flows 120–1 iPhones 223–5, 269–70 Iran 64, 243–5, 248–9, 251–2, 262 Iran–Contra scandal 65, 264 Iraq 25 Irish banking strike 8 ISIS 266 Italy, medieval banks in 13–14 iTunes accounts 171, 172 J Jacobsson, Victor 174 Japan 17, 247 JCB cards 55, 78 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) 243–4, 252, 254 JPM Coin 207–8 JPMorgan 56, 133, 150, 158, 206–8, 211, 222, 248, 260, 267 JPMorgan Chase 55 K Käärmann, Kristo 146 Kaspersky Lab 107 Kelly, Jemima 11 Kenya 73–5, 78 KfW 131–2 Khomenei, Ayatollah 64–5 kidnap ransom payments 27–8, 195 Kim Jong-il 30 Kim Jong-un 112 Kissinger, Henry 237 Kiyotaki, Nobuhiro 10 Klarna 162, 174–5, 181, 183, 241 know your customer (KYC) checks 263, 266 Kodak 157 Kontantupproret (Cash Rebellion) 35 Korean War 249 L Latin America 101, 213 Latvia 260 lawsuit against Visa and Mastercard, US retailer 56–7 Laybuy 175 Layfield, Diana 127, 169 Lazarus Group 112–14, 233 ledger entries 11–13 Lee, Aileen 146 legacy infrastructures 72, 156 legal definition of payment 5 Lehman Brothers 55, 131–2, 134, 247 Leoni AG 111 Letter of Credit 149–51 letters of undertaking, Indian banks’ 115 libertarians 204 Libra Association 201, 211–12 Libra/Diem 63, 201–2, 204–6 Lieftinck, Piet 16–17 Link network 59 LinkedIn 110 liquidity 14, 15, 16–17, 19, 121, 122, 126–7, 130–1, 132, 133, 145, 208, 213, 214–15, 217, 231, 247, 272 loans 13–14, 77, 178–9, 215 see also credit cards ‘lock in’ effect 71–2 London Clearing House 118 loyalty programmes 219–20 M M-Pesa 74–5, 78 Ma, Jack 76, 272 Macao 249–50 MacLeod, Henry Dunning 9 Maestro 90–1 magstripe 47, 49, 109 mail order catalogues 50 Major’s Cabin Grill, NYC 40 malware 110, 113–14, 200 Manchester to Liverpool railway 68, 71 Marshall Plan 17 master merchants 164–5 Mastercard 3–4, 41, 42, 50, 53, 55, 56, 57–9, 90–1, 102, 161, 162, 174, 202, 204, 223, 269 Mazur, Robert 255, 263 McCrum, Dan 166 McKelvey, Jim 155 McNamara, Frank 40 medieval banks 13–14 medium of exchange, money as a 202 Melton, Bill 48 Meng Wanzhou 251–2 merchant acquiring 162–7 merchant discount fees 43, 44, 57, 162, 163, 174 Merchant of Venice (W.

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It by Scott Kupor

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, carried interest, cloud computing, compensation consultant, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, family office, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, index fund, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Lean Startup, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Paul Graham, pets.com, power law, price stability, prudent man rule, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, VA Linux, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Crowdfunding is one alternative—in 2017, roughly $1 billion was raised through crowdfunding efforts in the US, an increase of about 25 percent from the previous year. Obviously, this is much smaller than the more than $80 billion of venture capital financing that year, but nothing to dismiss. Initial coin offerings (or ICOs) for digital tokens is another potential candidate to replace venture capital. In 2017, roughly $4 billion was raised via ICOs, about 5 percent of the total US venture capital investments. Some have argued that ICOs are a mechanism for founders to raise both institutional capital and retail capital without having to rely on VCs to finance their growth.

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., 11 fiduciary duties and Bloodhound case, 236–239 to debt holders, 246 in difficult financing scenarios, 232, 236, 237 dual fiduciaries, 201–202, 212 duty of candor, 215 duty of care, 211–212, 215, 217 duty of confidentiality, 212–215 duty of loyalty, 212, 215, 218 and winding down the company, 246 financial crisis of 2008, 59 financial forecasts, 150–151 fixed income, 63 foreign equities, 62 foundations, 55, 57 founders adaptability of, 49 and board of directors, 97–98, 171–172 and capitalization tables, 190–191 and common stock, 93 and company vs. product-first companies, 44–45 departure of cofounders, 94–95, 96–100 egomania in, 47–48 and evaluation of early-stage companies, 43, 44, 49 founder-market fit, 45–47, 131–133 and information asymmetry, 5, 140, 275 and intellectual property, 101–103 leadership abilities of, 47–48 and product development, 49 and stock restrictions in term sheets, 181 and storytelling skills, 134 and taxation, 71 and vesting, 95–97, 99–101, 183, 186–187, 205–206 409A opinions, 205 fraud, accusations of, 218 Freenome, 128 full ratchet, 166 funds of funds, 56 general partners (GPs) and board seats, 179, 214–215 and carried interest, 74–77 and choosing a corporate structure, 93–94 and clawbacks, 80–81 co-investments of, 86–87 compensation of, 73–77 as dual fiduciaries, 202 and equity partners agreement, 88–89 and exit of VC after IPO, 267 and indemnification, 89–90 investments as domain of, 85–86 and LP–GP relationship, 70–71, 85–88 and management fee, 72–74 and managing conflicts, 214–215 obligations of, 87 and state of fund, 84 suspension of, 87–88 and vesting, 89 See also limited partnership agreement Glass-Steagall Act, 54 going to market, 135–138 good corporate governance, 206–207 Google, 10, 25, 41 Gornall, Will, 3 go-shop provisions, 239, 255 governance terms in term sheets, 196–198 Graham, Paul, 20 green shoe, 265 growth assets, 57–58, 61–63 HA Angel Fund (Horowitz Andreessen Angel Fund), 19 The Hard Thing about Hard Things (Horowitz), 18 hedge funds, 57–58, 62 Hewlett-Packard, 18–19 Hindawi, David, 46 Hindawi, Orion, 46 Horowitz, Ben and Andreessen Horowitz, 21–22, 270 angel investing, 19 aspirin/vitamin analogy of, 50 on founders’ leadership capabilities, 47 The Hard Thing about Hard Things, 18 interview with, 12–13, 14 “hurdle rates,” 83 illiquid assets, 64 incentive stock options (ISOs), 104–105, 185 indemnification, 89–90, 183, 253 inflation, 56–57, 61 inflation hedges, 58, 63 information asymmetry, 5, 140, 275 information rights, 282 initial coin offerings (ICOs), 274 initial public offerings (IPOs), 257–268 and alternative forms of financing, 108–109 and conversion to common shares, 160–161 costs involved in, 107 declining number of, 106–109, 160–161, 249 and dot.com boom/bust, 9–10, 15 effects of efficiency rules on, 107–108 and emerging growth companies (EGCs), 261–263 and exit of VC, 2, 266–267 and the green shoe, 265 and initial filing range, 17 and liquidity, 258–260, 265 and lockup agreements, 265–266 mutual funds’ impact on, 108 percentage of venture backed, 3 and pressure on public companies, 109 pricing, 263–265 process of, 260–268 and prospectus, 261, 263 and reasons to go public, 257–260 and road shows, 263 and secondary offering of shares, 267–268 time frame for, 10 Instacart, 45 Instagram, 45, 130 institutional investors, 29–30, 40–41 insurance companies, 56, 57 intellectual property, 101–103 invention and assignment agreements, 101 investment banks, 260–261 investors’ role in venture capital, 29.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

We are in a Wild West phase of crypto. One study suggests that 80 percent of initial coin offerings, or ICOs, were scams in the first place that flouted securities laws. “You have scams that routinely make it into the top ten crypto currencies,” says Ari Paul, the chief investment officer and cofounder of Blocktower Capital Advisors LP, a blockchain and crypto investment firm. “If you buy a top ten basket of crypto you are buying assets I can tell you will go to zero. They are explicit scams,” he told host Kevin Rose on the Modern Finance podcast.24 One in ten initial coin offerings end with coins losing most of their value. Evidence of widespread market manipulation echoes the most profligate practices by some Wall Street firms: pump-and-dump schemes that manipulate the price upward only to later sell the asset at inflated prices, leaving some retail suckers with massive losses; illegal wash trading that buys and sells securities simultaneously to boost trading volume to pique interest; spoofing with fake transactions; and front running that enters buy and sell orders ahead of clients to rip them off.

DeFi and the Future of Finance by Campbell R. Harvey, Ashwin Ramachandran, Joey Santoro, Vitalik Buterin, Fred Ehrsam

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, collateralized debt obligation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, initial coin offering, Jane Street, margin call, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, non-fungible token, passive income, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, rent-seeking, RFID, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, smart contracts, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Doing so allowed Compound to avoid the SEC's securities regulation, freeing the company from security issuance responsibilities. We predict more projects will follow Compound's example in the future, and we expect most to exercise caution before issuing new tokens; many projects learned from the harsh penalties the SEC issued following the initial coin offering boom of 2017.28 Many major market-cap cryptocurrencies have been ruled commodities by the CFTC, exempting them from money-transmitter laws. Individual states, such as New York, however, have regulation that targets brokerages facilitating the transfer and exchange of cryptocurrencies.29 As DeFi continues to grow and the total number of issued assets continues to expand, we expect to see increasingly specific and nuanced regulation aimed at DeFi protocols and their users.

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

Digital Autonomous Organizations Digital firms, also referred to as digital autonomous organizations (DAO), represent the latest advance in digital coding on immutable code.29 In 2016, the first digital financial intermediary, “The DAO,” a n e w co d e ? 195 was launched to much fanfare. Its coders wished to re-invent a financial intermediary in code alone, but The DAO did not operate in a legal vacuum. In the wake of a frenzy in the offerings of tokens or coins in digital ventures to the public, also dubbed “initial coin offerings,” or ICOs after the legacy practice of “initial public offerings” of shares or bonds, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) intervened. It affirmed that ICOs qualify as “securities” that are subject to standard registration requirements, a decision that reached The DAO only posthumously.30 The DAO was a venture capital fund that was built on the Ethereum blockchain.

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See common law entitlements, 44–46, 212, 217, 219, 222–24, 260n8 entrepreneurs, 7, 59–60, 93, 114, 163, 179, 206–7 equity rule, 31–32 Ethereum, 195–97, 201, 272n29 European Central Bank, 79, 260n12 European Commission, 79, 148 European Court of Justice, 70, 156 European Union (EU), 224; bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and, 264n67; capital adequacy and, 73–74; Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and, 156–57, 264n69; corporations and, 72, 249n51; debt and, 106; global code and, 134, 137, 140, 156, 263n48, 264n67; International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) and, 148 eviction, 41, 233 exclusive use rights, 35, 209 exogenous shocks, 118, 188 Facebook, 130 Fannie Mae, 84–85, 94 Federal Home Bank of Chicago, 85 feudal calculus, 5–6, 129, 223 feudalism: capital rule and, 5–6, 205, 211, 223, 276n24; France and, 276n24; legal code and, 5–6, 10, 30, 36, 128–29, 158, 205, 211, 218, 223, 276n24; property and, 30, 36, 128–29, 158, 218 indeX fidelity, 85 Fifth Amendment, 241n9 Financial Stability Board (FSB), 150–51 Financial Times journal, 223 First Amendment, 87 Flemish Weavers, 118 Florence, Italy, 56–58 FMC Corporation, 124 Ford, 247n17 foreclosure, 39, 95–98, 253n44 Fourteenth Amendment, 25 France: Banque de France and, 104; bills of exchange and, 252n31; civil law and, 168, 171–72; Code de Commerce and, 252n31; D’Estaing and, 240n64; exporting law and, 133; feudalism and, 276n24; International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) and, 151; lawyers and, 170–71, 178; legal profession requirements and, 170–72; minting debt and, 85, 93, 102–4; Napoleon and, 133, 242n27; Péreire brothers and, 102–3; property rights and, 218, 242n27; skyrocketing lawyer fees and, 173; Société General and, 85; top global law firms and, 178–79 Freddie Mac, 94 Frederick the Great, 3 free market, 4, 19, 106–7, 128–29 free trade, 38, 121, 123–24, 138 Fuld, Richard, 62–63 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 123 General Electric, 124 General Estates of the Netherlands, 65–66, 276n24 General Motors, 124, 247n17 genetics: BRCA and, 111–14, 116, 127, 130, 214; cease and desist orders and, 113; courts and, 109–16, 127, 211, 214; Crick and, 108–10; enclosure and, 109–12, 115; Human Genome Project and, 109–10; inheritance and, 109; intellectual property and, 107–16, 127–29, 214; legal code and, 108, 110, 114, 116; Mendel and, 108; monopolies and, 109–12, 115; Myriad Genetics and, 112–16, 127–29, 214; National Institutes of Health (NIH) and, 109, 112; nature’s code and, 109–12, 115; patents and, 109–16, 230; privatizing, 111–12; risk and, 111–14, 116, 127, 130, 214; sequencing and, 109–13, 127–28; US Supreme Court and, 109–13, 287 116, 127, 211, 214; Watson and, 108–10; Wilkins and, 109 Germany, 13, 209, 246n7; Bayerische Landesbank and, 85; bills of exchange and, 252n31; civil law and, 168, 238n48; Constitution of, 241n10; credit cooperatives and, 93–94; exporting law and, 133; frustration of contracts and, 271n13; Herstatt bank and, 137; International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) and, 151; Law on Judges and, 268n42; lawyers and, 172–73, 178–79; Lehman Brothers and, 49; Loan Market Association (LMA) and, 262n32; private money and, 101; seat theory and, 70; state power and, 107; subjective rights and, 275n10; top global law firms and, 178; unification of, 267n38 Getzler, Joshua, 40 Gilson, Ronald, 163 Ginnie Mae, 92 global code: arbitration and, 136, 139–43, 146, 152, 154–57, 261n27; assets and, 132, 135–38, 142–50, 154; autonomy and, 134– 35; Bank for International Settlement (BIS) and, 149–50; bankruptcy and, 137, 144–53, 262n42; Belize and, 261n21; bilateral trade and, 122, 132, 136, 140, 154–56, 256n23; Canada and, 138–43, 156–57, 261n17, 261n18, 263n57, 264n69; capitalism and, 132–33; capital rule and, 152–57; central banks and, 151; coercive power and, 132, 154; collateral and, 144, 148, 263n48; common law and, 133, 264n65; Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and, 156–57; conflict of law and, 134–35; contracts and, 135–37, 139, 145–53; corporate law and, 135–36, 155; courts and, 133, 136, 138–46, 150, 152–56, 261n18, 261n21, 262n45; creditors and, 144, 147–50, 262n41, 262n45; debt and, 144, 147, 149–50, 262n41; derivatives and, 143–53, 262n36, 263n49; elitism and, 133; enforcement and, 134, 139–40, 147, 152, 154; expanding private choice and, 134–37; exporting law and, 132–34; intellectual property and, 136, 138, 140, 143; International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and, 154–55; International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) and, 145–53, 261n31, 271n18; investment and, 288 indeX global code (continued) 132, 134–42, 154–57; lawyers and, 135–36, 142–45, 154, 176–79, 261n27; legal code and, 132–33, 143; legal structures and, 134; Lehman Brothers and, 135, 149; Marxism and, 154; NC2 and, 135; New York Arbitration Convention and, 154; patents and, 122, 136–43, 152; priority rights and, 149, 156; private law and, 133, 136, 154; property and, 135–40, 143, 262n45; regulation and, 132, 135, 137, 141, 143, 145, 148, 151–54, 264n58, 264n67; risk and, 146, 262n45; shareholders and, 135; sovereignty and, 135–44, 148, 152, 155, 157, 277n51; state money and, 147; state power and, 138, 141, 154; treaty law and, 136–42, 154–57; United Kingdom and, 151 globalization: capital rule and, 219–23, 277n51; code masters and, 176–79, 270n71; empire of law and, 2; nature’s code and, 121–22 global law, 8–9, 145, 166–67, 176, 178–79 gold coins, 254n55 Goldman Sachs, 49, 100, 175, 203, 248, 255n70, 271n19, 274n57 Google, 129–31, 259n80 government-sponsored entity (GSE), 84, 94, 253n39 Great Depression, 49, 106 Great Financial Crisis, ix–x; bailouts and, 55, 62, 64, 104–5, 151, 226, 247n17; car manufacturers and, 55; Lehman Brothers and, 48–58, 61–65, 70–75, 80, 85, 96, 101, 103–4, 106, 135, 149, 175, 190, 245n4, 246n6, 248n33; misleading information and, 161; put option and, 55; US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and, 182 Greece, 255n66 Greenspan, Alan, 105 growth: capital rule and, 220; code masters and, 166, 175, 267n26, 270n71; elephant curve and, 1, 8; empire of law and, 1, 4, 8, 20, 235n10; minting debt and, 102, 106; nature’s code and, 117; property and, 4 guilds, 128–29, 170, 206, 258n61, 259n70 Guinness brewery, 38 Hague Conference on International Private Law, 136 Harvard Law School, 175, 268n47 Haskel, Jonathan, 115–16 hedge funds, 64, 102, 105–6, 151, 251n5 Herstatt bank, 137 Hewlett-Packard, 124 Hindu law, 177 Hirschman, Albert, 221, 248n42 Hodgson, Geoffrey, 10 homeowners, 59, 80–84, 86, 88, 94–98, 100, 106 House of Lords, 38, 158 housing market, 5, 61, 94 Human Genome Project, 109–10 human rights, 29, 139, 228, 261n21 Ibanez, Antonio, 95–97 IBM, 124 immortality, 50, 55, 65–67 immutable ledgers, 188–90 imperialism, 17, 133 incorporation theory, 69–70, 74, 136, 246n10 India, 122 Indian Removal Act, 34 industrial policy, 118–21 inequality: capital rule and, 223; code masters and, 167; coding land and, 46; empire of law and, 1–3, 6, 21–22, 235n9, 240n69, 240n70 inflation, 15, 101, 106–7, 254n56 inheritance law, 238n48 initial coin offerings (ICOs), 195–96 Inns of Court, 32, 169, 242n29 insurance, 3, 100, 157, 178, 190–91, 271n17 intangible capital, 8; capital rule and, 212, 216; empire of law and, 13; enclosure and, 117; intellectual property and, 13, 24, 115–18, 120–21, 143, 212, 216; patents and, 143, 212 (see also patents); shareholders and, 117 intellectual property: abstract ideas and, 110; Austro-Hungarian Empire and, 120; big data and, 126–31; Canada and, 138–43, 152–55, 261n17, 261n19; capital rule and, 212–13; coding land and, 24, 241n10; copyright and, 11, 115, 256n23; digital code and, 186, 203–4; empire of law and, 3, 5, 11, 19; genetics and, 107–16, 127–29, 214; global code and, 136, 138, 140, 143; intangible capital and, 13, 24, 115–18, 120–21, 143, 212, 216; monopolies and, 109, 115, 120–24; Myriad and, 112–16, 127, 129, 214; nature’s code and, 108–9, 115, 120–30; Netherlands and, 120; patents and, 11, 109–23, 126–30, 136–43, 152, 203–4, 211–15, 230, 256n3, 256n18, 257n24, 257n42, 274n54, 274n57; pharmaceutical industry and, 121–22, indeX 124, 129, 138–42, 152–55, 261n17, 261n19; shareholders and, 114–15; Trade Act and, 121; trademarks and, 11, 115–16, 215; trade secrets and, 126–31; tragedy of the commons and, 109; TRIPS and, 123–25, 136, 138; United Kingdom and, 117–21; United States and, 109, 112, 115, 121–24, 256n23; US Constitution and, 241n10 Intellectual Property Committee (IPC), 123–24 Interamerican Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), 29, 261n21 interest rates, 80, 90, 190 International Capital Market Association, 262n32 International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), 154–55 International Court of Justice, 125, 146 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 64, 79 international private law, 68–69, 136 International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), 145–53, 261n31, 271n18 International Trade Organization, 123 investment: capital rule and, 225–26; cloning legal persons and, 48–53, 60–65, 67, 72, 75, 248n39; code masters and, 160–61, 165, 167–68; coding land and, 25, 37, 45, 241n13; digital code and, 195–97, 200–2, 272n33; empire of law and, 12, 14, 16, 112; entrepreneurs and, 7, 59–60, 93, 114, 163, 179, 206–7; global code and, 132, 134–42, 154–57; intangible capital and, 116–17; minting debt and, 77–86, 91–107, 251n12; nature’s code and, 114; rate of return and, 4–5, 147 invisible hand, 6–9, 225, 236n18 Ireland, 72, 104, 233, 250n57 ISDS (investor-state-dispute-settlement), 136–38, 140, 155–56, 261n22 Islamic law, 177 Japan, 51, 124, 133, 260n3 jingle rule, 247n24 Johnson & Johnson, 124 Johnson v.

How Money Became Dangerous by Christopher Varelas

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airport security, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, cashless society, corporate raider, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, eat what you kill, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Michael Milken, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, pensions crisis, pets.com, pre–internet, profit motive, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Saturday Night Live, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, universal basic income, zero day

They may not trust the bank, but they’ll trust sinking their savings into a currency with little history and unproven legitimacy. That’s how cynical we have become, how disconnected we now are from conventional forms of money. A recent trend in Silicon Valley—which capitalizes on the popularity of cryptocurrency—is to issue an initial coin offering (ICO) when raising funding. With an ICO, companies essentially form their own currency and sell it to investors, who in turn can only use the coin to purchase the products or services of the issuing startup. The startup world is already fraught with risk and inflated promises, and ICOs magnify those problems by injecting the crypto landscape with flimsy new currencies, further corrupting the trust and integrity of that market.

…

Filter hedge funds, 143–44 Heffernan, Barbara, 131–34 Hemingway, Ernest, 311 Hewlett-Packard, 194–95 high-frequency trading (HFT), 242–43 high-yield bonds (junk bonds), 91, 93, 96, 97, 104 Hilibrand, Larry, 64 Holtz, Lou, 151–53, 181 Homo Faber (Frisch), 216 Horowitz, Dale, 51–52, 57, 63, 64, 327 hostile takeovers, 82, 84, 88, 89, 96, 261 Steinberg’s targeting of Disney for, 81–84, 86–91, 98, 102–4, 111 see also corporate raiders Hotel Elysée, 70 housing, 322 mortgage market, 21 Huizenga, Wayne, 160 Hynek, J. Allen, 93 Hynek, Paul, 93, 94 IBM, 228, 240 ICOs (initial coin offerings), 245–46 influencers, social media, 283–84, 291–99, 301–3, 305 Instagram, 284, 294, 295, 297, 303 International Jewelry Center, 12–13, 15 internet, 224, 228–30, 246, 304 data centers and, see data centers dotcom bubble, 175, 211, 214, 228–31, 233–34, 236, 238, 240, 243, 244 e-commerce, 232–33, 244, 245 growth of, 227 internet fame, 283–84, 293, 303–5 influencers, 283–84, 291–99, 301–3, 305 “investment banker” persona, 144–45 Iovine, Jimmy, 169 IPOs (initial public offerings): of AT&T, 197, 198, 207, 208 in Silicon Valley, 228–29 spinning of, 198–200, 210, 212–13, 215 Jackass, 302 Japan, “Suicide Forest” in, 301 Jerry Maguire, 299–300 jewelry industry, 11–14, 42–43 Andonian brothers in, 16–19, 25–29, 31–36, 38–42 author as Bank of America lender in, 5, 7, 9–43, 111, 285, 358 Bank of America and, 9–35 Elmassian brothers in, 25, 31–33, 34, 38 fake robberies in, 30–31 Kagasoff in, 9–12, 14–16, 23–25, 30–31, 34, 35, 38, 42–43, 50 security in, 30 Johnson Wax, 162 Johnston, Ann, 346 Jones, Gary, 337 JPMorgan Chase, 209 junk bonds (high-yield bonds), 91, 93, 96, 97, 104 Justice Department, 291 K2 Sports, 180–81 Kagasoff, Barry, 9–12, 14–16, 23–25, 30–31, 34, 35, 38, 42–43, 50 Kagasoff, Gloria, 14–15 Kagasoff, Nathan, 14–15, 30 Kerrigan, Nancy, 159 Keynes, John Maynard, 66–67, 280 Kidder Peabody, 259 Kinetics, 167 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 349 King, Penn, 46–47, 76–77 King, Will B., 334 Kitsos, Petros, 114, 146 Kjellberg, Felix (PewDiePie), 304–5 Knoxville, Johnny, 302 Knuff, John, 242, 243 Koen, Phil, 238–40 Kotlar, Harry, 14 Kotlar, Helen, 14 Kresa, Kent, 119, 136–38, 146–47 “Last Supper” summit, 124 Las Vegas, Nev., 26–30, 40, 217–19, 280 Lawton, J.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

They seem to believe that some magic elixir exists here, some recipe for innovation that floats in the air and can be absorbed if you drive around with your windows open, smelling the eucalyptus trees. They see people getting rich on things they don’t even understand. Blockchain? Ethereum? Initial coin offerings? So they fly out and have drinks at the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where venture capitalists hang around, as do expensive “companions,” many with Eastern European accents. They eat lunch at the Battery, a members-only private club for social-climbing parvenus in San Francisco.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

You need to have some humility when breaking rules and recognize that you might not understand all the consequences. It’s not always cheating to break the rules, but it is always a high-beta activity, hence the need for caution and compassion. A present-day example of a field where there are both ethical and unethical pirates is the rapid development of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and initial coin offerings (ICOs) as a financing tool. The start-ups that are creating currencies and holding ICOs are operating in a legal gray area and likely breaking rules. Some of these start-ups are ethical pirates who are working to change the rules for everyone. Others are sociopathic criminals who are simply trying to collect as much money as possible before the window closes and devil take the hindmost.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

It was an improvisation but also the harbinger of a whole new kind of governance.11 That was only the start. People are building companies with this stuff now, funding themselves with made-up crypto-tokens that they sell to contributors and users, who hope to cash out in a windfall of speculative magic. These initial coin offerings, or ICOs, have re-created a little-regulated free-for-all like the pre–Great Depression stock markets, before government oversight ruined the dangerous fun. They have democratic potential but mostly anarcho-capitalist adoption. Blockchains will become what we use them for, and we will become creatures of those uses.

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, delayed gratification, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Elisha Otis, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, initial coin offering, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, iterative process, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, QR code, quantum cryptography, ransomware, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, secular stagnation, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Stanford marshmallow experiment, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Walter Mischel, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game

There is nothing wrong with a centralized digital currency, and we may well get such competitors in a free market without government restrictions. But there is something deeply and fundamentally wrong about a centralized currency that adopts a highly cumbersome and inefficient design whose only advantage is the removal of a single point of failure. This problem is more pronounced for digital currencies that begin with an Initial Coin Offering, which creates a highly visible group of developers communicating publicly with investors, making the entire project effectively a centralized project. The trials and tribulations of Ethereum, the largest coin in terms of market value after Bitcoin, illustrate this point vividly. The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) was the first implementation of smart contracts on the Ethereum network.

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles by William Quinn, John D. Turner

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, government statistician, Greenspan put, high-speed rail, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Right to Buy, Robert Shiller, Shenzhen special economic zone , short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, the built environment, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban planning

A bitcoin did not represent anything of value – its worth lay entirely in the fact that it was, for some (mostly illicit) purposes, a superior medium of exchange.2 210 PREDICTING BUBBLES In August 2016, one bitcoin was trading at $555; in the next 16 months its price rose by almost 3,400 per cent to a peak of $19,783.3 This was accompanied by a promotion boom, as a mix of cryptocurrency enthusiasts and opportunistic charlatans issued their own virtual currencies in the form of initial coin offerings, or ICOs. These coins had, on the face of it, no intrinsic value – to entitle their holders to future cash flows would have violated laws against issuing unregistered securities – but they nevertheless attracted $6.2 billion of money from investors in 2017 and a further $7.9 billion in 2018.4 By December 2017, however, it had become clear that bitcoin was hardly being used as a currency at all.

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

To win such a gamble, these entrepreneurs were betting on Cascading Miracles. Some late-stage startups that followed the Cascading Miracles pattern were legendary flops, including Iridium, Segway, and Webvan. More recent examples include Joost, a YouTube competitor from Skype’s founders; numerous Initial Coin Offerings; and a venture I’ll profile, Better Place, whose charging stations for electric cars used robots to rapidly swap depleted batteries with fully charged replacements. Such ventures are often launched by charismatic founders who seduce employees, investors, and strategic partners with an opportunity to help usher in a dazzling future.

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

The start-up CeeSuite has automated the investment banking lifecycle for the vast pool of regional SMEs that could never afford Wall Street banks. Its founders are also creating a virtual accelerator that digitizes the stages and lessons of the start-up process, from crowd-funding investment through initial coin offerings (ICOs) and blockchain-based business models. Cybersecurity companies are thriving in Singapore and expanding from there. Asians are learning and adapting as much or more from each other as from the West. The ride-sharing industry is emblematic of how Western companies are losing out to local rivals for both strategic and cultural reasons.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

A few years later, the death of the Canadian owner of a cryptocurrency exchange left clients unable to access their digital assets.24 To use an eighteenth-century expression, Bitcoin owners had been ‘bubbled’. ‘When the ducks quack, feed them,’ is an old Wall Street adage. The appetite of cyber enthusiasts in 2017 was filled by a deluge of ‘initial coin offerings’. Celebrities rushed to endorse the new cryptocurrencies. Paris Hilton tweeted support for Lydian Coin and Floyd ‘Crypto’ Mayweather, as the retired boxer now styled himself, endorsed several issues over social networks (for which he was later fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission).