The Brain Bar is central Europe’s leading festival of ideas and technology. This year, the event featured Jeffrey Tucker as the opening keynote to speak about cryptocurrent and blockchain technology and its meaning and future. Here is a video wrap up of the event.
Tether is a highly capitalized cryptoasset that is distinguished in the space by maintaining a dollar peg to the price of its asset. The growth of this asset has been incredible, as has been the speculation that it maintains too close a relationship with the exchange Bitfinex. It has even been accused of manipulating prices to its own advantage. This latter claim is highly doubtful, and traces mainly to its record of trading to the
Storing Bitcoin should be simple. A Bitcoin wallet can be generated from a list of 12 or 24 pseudo-random words (the “mnemonic recovery phrase”). With some wallets, the same words will generate a valid wallet for most existing cryptocurrencies. This word list can be written on paper and placed in a safe (known as “cold storage”), or simply memorized. No other equipment is needed to receive Bitcoin transactions. For an individual, the simplicity of recovering one’s
What’s the future of Bitcoin? How big will it get? What innovations can we expect in the future? Economist Tuur Demeester lays out the three phases of Bitcoin development.
Understanding how Bitcoin ownership works requires understanding what it means to “own” a single Bitcoin address. At a practical level, Bitcoin ownership means the ability to send some amount of Bitcoin from one address to another or to cryptographically prove that one has that ability by “signing” a Bitcoin address. At a technical level, ownership means the possession of the private key which is used to sign a Bitcoin transaction. A Bitcoin address is an
If you read on the topic of money’s history from any mainstream textbook, you will already know the drill. In the past, money took many forms. It was shells, pelts, salt, and various metals. Finally we got paper money, credit institutions, then central banks. At this point, we are told, history was complete. The final and best form had arrived. The state would be in charge of money forever. All that was left was to
The classic criticism against the gold standard is that it was too costly. Why are these guys wasting resources to suit up, dig into mountains, desperately seeking a finite resource, and slogging the results all the way to Treasury Department? This is all just silly. We know how to make money: you print it. It’s far cheaper to print than mine. A paper standard will save a tremendous amount of resources that can go to
I constantly get the question: why do we need this blockchain thing anyway? Here is why. Every society with a vibrant commercial life exalts private property as an institution. The entrenchment of this institution occurs in three stages. All three are essential. The first stage is to create private property itself. This is usually done out of the necessity of getting enough to eat. Contrary to every socialist claim, this doesn’t happen through magic or
What is the future of banking, central banking and financial intermediation in a world in which cryptocurrency is dominant? Let’s speculate a bit, with the proviso that no one can fully anticipate how these markets will evolve. We can find hints in the speech by IMF head Christine Lagarde at a Bank of England conference in September 2017. She dropped some words that likely sent some chills down a few spines in the audience. She
It was the second week of February 2013 when I first ventured a public opinion that Bitcoin is the real deal. The dollar exchange rate was at $25, on its way toward another run-up and crash that had been the pattern for two years. I had just returned from a conference where some Bitcoiners surrounded me and force-fed me the information I needed to know. It would take another two months before I wrapped my
