The latest case against Xi Jinping’s China comes from legendary investor and philanthropist George Soros in the Wall Street Journal. He makes a strong argument against the authoritarian, cult of personality state that is now being reasserted in China. Soros speaks from deep experience, in China as well as in…

The cryptocurrency community has been in a tizzy over tax reporting language in the Biden Administration’s infrastructure bill. There are important matters at stake. As I’ve pointed out, though, the ultimate issue isn’t what most of advocates are focusing on. It’s the regulatory challenge of Decentralized Finance (DeFi). (For those…

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong posted a long tweetstorm about his visit to Washington DC to meet with policy-makers. He linked a video of the Clinton Administration’s 1997 E-Commerce policy rollout as a model the US should use today, based on Al Gore’s statement, “first, do no harm.” …

A really important paper (or technically extended abstract) by Christian Catalini, Ravi Jagadeesan, and Scott Duke Kominers was posted last week. It goes to the heart of the choices facing the blockchain community today. It’s short (6 pages) and equation-free, so it’s more accessible than most technical or economics papers. …

People in the technology world love the word, “disruption.” Though widely mis-used, the concept draws valuable attention to the fact that change is sometimes discontinuous. Nassim Taleb’s idea of the black swan similarly resonated because it emphasized that the present is not always a good guide to the future. The…

There is a comment attributed (almost certainly incorrectly) to Albert Einstein, in which the great physicist was asked to explain how radio works: You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los…