The Beatles’ use of technology on their new song carries some useful lessons for the rest of us. — Gen Xers like me remember cassette tapes as a rather crappy tool for listening to music, let alone making it. Cassettes would inevitably either wear out or get “eaten” — which is to say hopelessly mangled — in the guts of your Walkman. It makes The Beatles’ new song, released…

#Web3Weekly: Oct. 22–28, 2023 — The token market racked up a second straight week of big gains, raising traders’ confidence that crypto winter is definitively over. A few key numbers that illustrate the rally’s winners and losers so far: $220 billion: The two-week increase in the global token market’s valuation. In percentage terms, valuation has…

Bitcoin’s big rally is a great opportunity to revisit some timeless market wisdom. — An uncannily timely quote from the great business journalist Charles Dow, uttered in 1900: “There is always a disposition in people’s minds to think that existing conditions will be permanent. When the market is down and dull, it is hard to make people believe that this is the prelude to…

An insider-y but layman-friendly look at U.S. monetary policy — I used to think digital money is harder to understand than the old-fashioned kind. But that was wrong. It’s just harder to take for granted as a feature of everyday life. To put it a different way, most of the perfectly reasonable questions people tend to ask about cryptocurrencies could…

Everyone from bitcoiners to Matt Gaetz is worried about it. (They have very different ways of showing it, though.) — If it seems obvious to you that purposefully igniting a massive, unnecessary political crisis in America would be an awful way to protect the U.S. dollar’s global status, congratulations. You are not Matt Gaetz. The far-right Republican congressman set off chaos in the U.S. House last week by ousting the…

With SBF’s trial set to start this week, oversight of the token market is controversial as ever. What have we learned? — To borrow a phrase from my favorite movie about Wall Street, I suspect prosecutors’ case against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is “a Grenada.” But we’ll soon know for certain, since his trial on federal fraud charges is scheduled to begin in New York on Tuesday. Like it or not, the…

A correspondent’s dispatch from the Caribbean holds important lessons for crypto fans and skeptics alike. — Cointelegraph’s Joe Hall just returned from Cuba, where he attended the island’s first big bitcoin meetup. (Or at least the first one at which an English-language journalist with a video camera was present.) Hall’s report from the trip is eye-opening stuff indeed. In particular, I recommend it to anyone from…

#Web3Weekly: July 2–8, 2023 — This post is adapted from the latest edition of my newsletter #Web3Weekly. If you would like to receive it in your inbox every Sunday, subscribe here. I’ll be honest. Now that the calendar has turned to July, part of me wants to take a summer break like when I was…

#Web3Weekly: June 25 to July 1, 2023 — This post is adapted from the latest edition of my newsletter #Web3Weekly. If you would like to receive it in your inbox every Sunday, subscribe here. Launching a new token? Our affiliate Bitbond can help. Their intuitive platform for creating tokens takes you through the process in minutes. No software…