With Elon Musk set to roll out new Twitter verification options, the need to ensure that accounts cannot impersonate companies, people or trademarks has been heightened. While some of the impersonations have been parody accounts, an activist was able to impersonate Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant, and cause a six…

It is potentially a good hedge against that but that doesn’t make it a good investment now — One of the claims from Bitcoin maximalists is that Bitcoin will be a hedge against inflation. Right at the moment, with inflation as high as it has been in forty years and Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies crashing in value, that claim is not holding up. As Paul Krugman wrote this…

DeSoc, for all its talk, has a very dark element as proposed — There has been much talk recently of a new paper by Weyl, Ohlhaver and Buterin on soulbound tokens and their use to create Decentralised Society or DeSoc. The paper provides a potential way of powering web3 by virtual of tokens that are attached and used to establish unique identities on…

Yes, yes it is and that may be why Musk wants it — One of the hallmarks of blockchains is that they are public ledgers. The record of which wallets have which tokens is available for all to see on Bitcoin, Ethereum and anywhere else. You may not know who actually owns the wallets but there is a record there. Which brings me…

If it is all about better governance, web3 is going to have to come up with a way of knowing who’s there — The “standard” definition of web3 is something like: At the most basic level, Web3 refers to a decentralized online ecosystem based on the blockchain. …

Why pushing Bitcoin towards renewables is unlikely to help anything — Bitcoin has a reputation for being environmentally unfriendly. Mostly this is, as I argued previously, because (a) it uses lots of electricity and (b) that people don’t think this is a good use for that electricity. But, recently, the focus has been on the type of electricity. For instance, Elon…

Let’s take a look at some good reasons — Last week I documented and looked at the reasons why economists don’t like Bitcoin. After this week, it is safe to say that more and more people are with them. That said, as I argued, the reasons economists give for not liking Bitcoin don’t really stack up with their own…

Do their reasons stack up? — As an economist, I’m not a Bitcoin fan. Something seems off about it all. That is a feeling shared by many of my colleagues. But at the same time, because I am one of the economists who has actually studied Bitcoin and blockchains, I hold a fascination with it. As…

A simple benchmark to measure the everyday usability of cryptocurrency — Alan Turing famously proposed an imitation game. This was a thought experiment as to when artificial intelligence may achieve milestones with respect to humans and our ability to accept the intelligence of robots. The Turing Test, as it came to be known, posited a person sitting at a computer screen…