A Slow Awakening: 2016 in US Blockchain Policy
At the PYMNTS' Innovation Project 2013 conference, former US vice president Al Gore made waves by speaking out in favor of bitcoin and the potential of the distributed ledger technology that drives the cryptocurrency. "I think the fact that within the bitcoin universe an algorithm replaces the functions of [the government] … is actually pretty cool," Gore said. "I know that there are a lot of innovators that are out there that are trying to … come up with new models and I look forward to that." And 2016 saw governments on both the local and national levels come to the same conclusion as....
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The world of blockchain technology has seen its fair share of investments throughout the years. Just last year, in 2015, a new record for VC funding was noted. But the recent charts by WeUseCoins seems to indicate the blockchain investment bubble is about to burst. It is not entirely surprising the year 2016 may see a dip in blockchain investments. Other....
As Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in The New York Times, an ongoing global political awakening means more politically enlightened people, who hold a better understanding of colonialism and empire, and share a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo. As he wrote: For the first time in history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. Global activism is generating a surge in the quest for cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world scarred by memories of colonial or imperial domination. In the US, this is expressed via the....
The European Central Bank is finally launching its major quantitative easing (QE) in order to fight the euro zone’s slide towards deflation. But with the evident failure of this monetary policy so far and the emergence of negative interest rates, is the ECB creating the perfect storm for virtual currencies as a viable alternative? From March this year until September 2016 the ECB will buy €60 billion (US$68 billion) of assets a month, a total of €1.1 trillion over the given period. Moreover, the President of the ECB, Mario Draghi, left room to extend the program if necessary. The ECB has....
You can add R Jesse McWaters, financial innovation lead at the World Economic Forum (WEF), to the growing chorus of industry voices warning that we’ve reached a "peak" when it comes to the hype surrounding blockchain technology. "I’m trepidatious about inflated expectations re: the blockchain," McWaters said in a new interview, the comments coming as he described the ongoing "awakening" he’s seen among major financial institutions in regards to the technology. While even the WEF itself has lauded blockchain as a global....
Will Bitcoin growth slow in 2016? BargainFox and Georgi Georgiev do not think so. In fact, they have even put together an infographic presenting 33 indicators that bitcoin growth is not slowing down this year. However, as we looked closer, only some can be considered indications of growth in 2016 - more than half are merely FYI facts, others are open to interpretation. We contacted the author to clarify his intention, but received no comment. What follows is our brief overview of the infographic. We divided the indicators into those that are likely to mean continued growth of bitcoin,....