MIAMI, Florida, March 28, 2024 - I am in Miami, only 90 nautical miles from Havana, Cuba. I don’t have any romanticism about Cuba and no urge to visit. It is a dirt poor country where a repressive authoritarian regime starves its people from the most basic necessities, a Soviet Caribbean with empty shelves in government stores and day-long queues for a piece of protein, which on most days of the week is not available. A friend in London recently sent me a pic of his son entering Eton donned i...

View to the English Clock Tower from the Plaza San Martín, Buenos Aires, on my evening stroll in early November 2023 (Source: own archive).I arrived Buenos Aires from Canada on Wednesday 8 November 2023 via São Paulo, the time of year when the northern hemisphere turns towards winter but the south is in full spring. Buenos Aires is a city I know well and love deeply from a previous live, back in the late '90s when I went to learn Spanish there and visited friends I studied with in London. I'v...

Lady Roosevelt apocryphally said that “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people” but she reportedly relished the occasional good gossip herself.Nothing like some good old gossPresumably, Laura Shin’s recent book The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze will have been read by many a great mind who stood at the cradle of Ethereum or who have joined the community since. However it contributes disappoin...

For crypto currencies to become global, state-free money, we have to win the fight against increasing financial de-anonymization, even if we have nothing to hide.

PANAMA CITY, 18 July 2019 - Yesterday was all work; had a ceviche brought up to the room for lunch and only got ready around dinner time. Walked the Casco Antiguo to get a bite and found a $10 Cohiba in some local version of a 7-11 run by Chinese.I first thought it would be a fake cigar but it smoked well. I enjoyed it with a stiff Negroni at the rooftop bar of the Casacasco opposite the hotel, a place that seems popular for corporate outings. I amused myself reading tweets about Facebook’s h...

LOS ALTOS, Ca, July 2014 - In our first blog entry we introduced Participalism as Capitalism’s rebel child. The enabling technology for a Participalist society is emerging as we speak, and quite a few blogs and forums discuss the underlying software. Some of the projects under development, most notably Ethereum (www.ethereum.org) hold the promise to truly unify logic, economics and law in one decentralised protocol. If God’s language is physics, then surely that of human ingenuity is code! Ho...