Blockchain

Thursday

Paige Aarhus

Should the EU diversify – with blockchain?

The European Investment Bank has warned that the EU is not investing enough in blockchain — the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies — and artificial intelligence. In a report released Tuesday, the EIB wrote that the EU is falling behind both China and the US in these two areas, with the funding gap estimated at between €5 billion and €10 billion annually. This is problematic because, as the bank argues, AI and blockchain are two of the most significant disruptive technologies of our time, and they will have a major impact on the future economy. At present, the US and China account for more than 80 per cent of annual equity

Thursday

John Phipps

It’s almost touching that the NFT world sees itself as radical

Some things are explained so many times that they become unexplainable: we can only relate to them as something complicated that needs to be explained. The global financial crisis was like this. Crypto-currencies were like this too. The newest thing that exists to be explained is the world of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. NFTs are collectible digital objects. They are created with a technology called the blockchain, which unalterably and uniquely records their provenance. This means that if I mint an NFT of an image — a cartoon of Donald Trump, say, sitting naked astride the Capitol — I can prove definitive ownership of the image, no matter how many

Sunday

Yiannis Baboulias

The free speech row tearing apart the tech community

Donald Trump’s Twitter suspension after the riot at the US Capitol made headlines around the world. What was less reported, however, was that as the then-President was suspended, so too were tens of thousands of right-wing accounts. Their social media refuge was Parler, another micro-blogging platform. Parler markets itself as a ‘free speech-focused and unbiased alternative to mainstream social networks’. Whatever its intentions, in recent years the platform has become a cesspit of extremist content. So extreme, in fact, that Amazon banned Parler from its hosting services earlier this month. The case is now going through the courts, after Parler launched a lawsuit. What makes Parler an interesting case is