I spent the weekend at the ETH Denver crypto developer conference and left feeling rejuvenated. Thousands of energetic young people, fueled by the desire to build something new and better, converging in one place to learn, code, debate and innovate. Attendance was twice last year’s event, and there was little…

If you’ve never seen the movie “There Will Be Blood” starring Daniel Day Lewis, then now might be a good time. Based loosely on an Upton Sinclair novel that satirizes the early days of the oil industry, it portrays the life of an independent oil man who rises to great…

Markets are like children. They can only learn the most important lessons the hard way, by making mistakes and suffering the consequences. One of my earliest memories is of a visit to a local park with my father and my sister. This park had a big fountain full of fish…

The following in an excerpt from my new book: Re-Architecting Trust, The Curse of History and the Crypto Cure for Money, Markets and Platforms. It provides context on the ongoing breakdown of traditional social medial. The prevalence of digital fakery is an underrated contributor to the breakdown of respect in…

Theodore Roosevelt once observed that nothing in the world is worth doing unless it means effort, difficulty and pain. True for building the Panama Canal, and true enough for building a Web3 protocol — but only if it’s actually decentralized. Crypto has been in turmoil lately. Here a prominent stablecoin…

My thinking on stablecoins has evolved greatly since I started writing about them four years ago. …

I am not an investment professional, and have no opinion on what anyone should do with their money. I also find the speculative side of crypto to be its least interesting. …

First, let’s state the obvious: Bitcoin mining uses a lot of electricity, so it’s bad for the environment. Anyone who claims otherwise is either a salesperson or a fool. Arguing that mining is good for the environment because it encourages investment in renewables is like arguing that smoking saves lives…

Paul Krugman is the gift that keeps on giving. The popular and supposedly progressive columnist has a special talent for prophesizing things that are already demonstrably false. Back in 1998, he predicted that the internet would have no greater impact than fax machines, because “most people have nothing to say…