I wrote something brilliant recently that was cut from the piece of which it was a part. The piece as a whole concerned a certain blockchain named Cartesi and the related token, known as CRTA. One of the distinctive things about Cartesi is that it allows programmers to do some of their work "off blockchain," that is, in a way that will be opaque to other programmers working on the same system. Developers of "smart contracts" on Ethereum use "on chain" virtual machines. But developers on Cartesi generally use Linux to create the contracts rather than using blockchain-specific VMs. So: what about the name? The term "Cartesi" pays honor to the philosopher Rene Descartes, founder of modern philosophy. This much was covered in the story that I wrote recently for Breaking Daily News. What was cut was a bit in which I believe I identified specifically WHY Descartes received this honor. Yes, the nerdish types who invent refinements to Ethereum's ...
Posts
Blockchain technology, sometimes more formally called distributed ledger tech, or DLT, is a multi-functional advance, the economic importance of which is still uncertain. As a simple matter of definition, DLT refers to a system in which a record of transactions maintains itself digitally in a way not dependent on any one hardware device, and accessible throughout a peer-to-peer network. DLT, pioneered in connection with Bitcoin, and then the other cryptocurrencies, has escaped that bottle, and turns out to have a lot of applications. Quicker settlement is the easy point to make about blockchains in finance. The likelihood that this will have important consequences for trading is a natural next realization. Distinct, and less intuitive, there is the idea of “smart contracts,” as explained by Vitalik Buterin in his 2013 white paper. It is precisely in order to enable smart contracts that Buterin’s Ether, in contrast to Satoshi’s Bitcoin, is built with a more robust code, en...
So: someone created a website called "Nakamoto Family Foundation" only three days before posting there a 21 page essay that purports to be an excerpt from a forthcoming book, or series of books, to be called Duality. It isn't obvious why that was the chosen frame for getting the message out. There were plenty of other ways in which he/she/they could have gone about this. Contacting Wired, for example. The folks at Wired have covered the whole Who-and-where-is-Satoshi question for a long time, with some intensity. They would have published this 'excerpt' in a heartbeat. In fact, somebody (an alleged "proxy" for the alleged Satoshi) did contact Wired around the time the publication appeared, apparently to make sure they knew about it and would spread the word. But if they had wanted Wired to publish it, then the editors might have had questions that the pseudo-Satoshi didn't want to answer. So: what IS the message? Apparently, the message is...
By "alpha seekers" for the purposes of this list I mean the managers of funds that invest actively in a range of markets, and that work to do better than average (by various benchmarks). This is a list of big stories of the year ending from their point of view, and it differs from a more general list of financial/economic top stories, which I will present tomorrow. This, 2016, has been an eventful year for seekers of alpha, their counterparties, and their service providers. For example, the Federal Trade Commission cut a deal with Herbalife this year, disappointing those seekers of alpha who had hoped the FTC would crack down on it as a pyramid scheme. A short side analyst for Macquarie was rather dramatically excluded from a Pax Global earnings briefing, laying bare some of the tensions in the financial community in Hong Kong. And "reverse carry" seemed to rise to prominence in the world of foreign exchange. But in my quite arbitrary and selective count, none...