US presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren says she'd consider dismantling the tech giants should she ever get the top job. But is this really necessary or even possible?
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An interdisciplinary team from MIT, Wharton and Boston College has created a new blockchain-based system that has the potential to disrupt the global supply chain. Called ‘b_verify,’ the system is designed to help small and medium-size enterprises — especially those in developing nations — get financing from lenders at potentially better terms while mitigating warehouse deposit fraud. The system brings greater transparency to a key part of the supply chain, which can have a big impact on global trade financing. Bverify introduces a series of blockchain technology innovations tailored to facilitate supply chain finance and operations management.
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Today, MIT Technology Review announced the third annual Business of Blockchain event, which will take place on May 2, 2019 at the MIT Media Lab. The event is held in collaboration with the Digital Currency Initiative, an MIT Media Lab research group focusing on cryptocurrencies and their underlying technology, and brings together industry leaders and pioneers in this emerging field to examine the technology, ethics, and impact of blockchains.
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Read MoreOn March 1 of last year, Ariel Gabizon was tidying up a presentation he was preparing to deliver the following day at a financial cryptography conference on the Caribbean island of Curaçao when he spotted a seemingly small mathematical mistake that could, he realized, jeopardize billions of dollars in capital.
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Read More“Maybe we don’t have to store everything ourselves.”
That’s Tadge Dryja, cryptocurrency research scientist at the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, explaining the concept behind his bitcoin scaling solution, “utreexo.”
Based on an idea that has been pursued by developers for many years, utreexo seeks to streamline an aspect of bitcoin’s code that leads to heavy storage requirements over time.
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Read MoreA celebration of 10 years of Bitcoin features DCI's Tadge Dryja story:
““I thought I would go to jail.”
That’s why Tadge Dryja, one of two principal researchers who would go on to envision lightning – what has become arguably the most important innovation in the quest to bring bitcoin to the masses – kept his passion for the technology to himself when he first heard about it in 2011.”
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Read MoreDCI’s Director Neha Narula commented on ‘Gemini Trust ad campaign calling for new regulations’ in an article for The Wall Street Journal
Read MoreYou may not have heard of Vertcoin, a crypto project designed to curtail concentration in mining power in the interests of broad-based participation. But if you care about security, decentralization and open access for cryptocurrencies, then the questions raised by a recent breach of its blockchain will matter to you.
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By KLINT FINLEY 10.15.18 07:36 PM Wired.com
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Today at the WIRED25 Summit, Neha Narula and Alexis Ohanian talked about some of the ways blockchain, the decentralized ledger technology at the heart of bitcoin and other "cryptocurrencies," could press forward through the current slump and actually become useful.
Read MoreDCI Bitcoin Core developer Cory Fields shares his experience disclosing a critical Bitcoin Cash vulnerability.
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This week our colleague Gary Gensler was profiled in The New York Times talking about how Ethereum and Ripple should be classified as securities. DCI director Neha Narula continues the conversation about how cryptocurrencies and tokens should be regulated.
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From the New York Times, Nathaniel Popper profiles DCI Senior Advisor Gary Gensler, former chairman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission ahead of his statements on the regulation of cryptocurrencies to be made at the Business of Blockchain Conference.
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The MIT Technology review interviews Robleh Ali, former manager of digital currency for the Bank of England, now research scientist at the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, on why initial coin offerings are dangerous and how to make them more useful. From the piece:
What do you think are the main misconceptions about ICOs?
The problem with ICOs is they want to ride two horses. The use of the word “coin” implies that the tokens being sold are money. The phrase “initial coin offering” is deliberately evocative of “initial public offering,” which is about a company selling shares to the public. They want to ride the Bitcoin horse by saying, “We’re not a security—it’s just money,” but they also want to ride the “You’re buying into a future enterprise that will be worth a lot of money” concept that’s inherent in the sale of shares. That’s one of the big tensions with ICOs, that lack of clarity, and that’s something that needs to be fixed.
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Neha Narula, director of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, helps PBS NewsHour understand how Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies work. Watch the video below or read the transcript interview with Neha, "This is how Bitcoin works."
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The dot-com bubble of the 1990s is popularly viewed as a period of crazy excess that ended with hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth being destroyed. What’s less often discussed is how all the cheap capital of the boom years helped fund the infrastructure upon which the most important internet innovations would be built after the bubble burst.
Read MoreIn The Truth Machine, Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna demystify the blockchain and explain why it can restore personal control over our data, assets, and identities; grant billions of excluded people access to the global economy; and shift the balance of power to revive society’s faith in itself. They reveal the disruption it promises for industries including finance, tech, legal, and shipping.
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Gensler, former Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), will teach graduate classes at MIT Sloan on public policy and the private sector, as well as on the functioning of global markets. He will also work with Media Lab Director Joi Ito, including as senior advisor to the Lab's Digital Currency Initiative and the Ethics and Governance of AI (Artificial Intelligence) project.
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