No, you can’t own a fucking color, you absolute lunatic — The world of crypto is full of scams, grifts, and absolutely foreseeable flops. The underlying ideology of crypto — the much-vaunted “system design” — starts from the principle that systems are most stable when they appeal to each participant’s self-interest, rather than their solidarity, generosity or empathy. This is an…

Last fall, El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender. I traveled there to see what it looks like on the ground. — Right after I hopped out the back of a pickup in El Zonte, El Salvador, I recognized I wasn’t in an ordinary beach town. El Zonte’s welcome sign had two Bitcoin logos, its cafes offered 75% Bitcoin discounts, and its trash cans sported the Bitcoin emblem. I’d been hitchhiking my…

“Jack was always a slightly restrained volcano.” — For three weeks running, Jack Dorsey has relentlessly attacked the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. Dorsey’s assailed the company’s vision for a new, crypto-powered internet, which it calls Web3. …

Meet Whit Diffie, the man who invented public key cryptography and brought encryption to the masses — Longtime tech journalist Steven Levy’s new book, Facebook: The Inside Story, details how Mark Zuckerberg transformed a tasteless dorm room social networking experiment into the world’s biggest social networking business. In honor of that release, we thought we’d share an excerpt of an earlier Levy book, Crypto, about a man…

The first two eras of the internet During the first era of the internet — from the 1980s through the early 2000s — internet services were built on open protocols that were controlled by the internet community. This meant that people or organizations could grow their internet presence knowing the rules of the game wouldn’t change later…

Loopholes in lending laws are allowing cryptocurrency users to escape taxes — and the government can’t keep up — Wealthy families and merchants first conjured up the idea of offshore banking in 19th century Europe, seeking a place to store funds away from tax-hungry governments in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. Since then, it’s been a race to the bottom. …