Cory Doctorow: The Monopoly Web Is Already Here

Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the original Swedish Pirate Party, argues on TorrentFreak that Bitcoin circumvents every single financial regulation, and the government itself, as irrelevant and obsolete. He predicts that the establishment will fight back ruthlessly. "The copyright monopoly war wasn't the war, it was the tutorial mission. The internet generation is using technology to assert its values and its place in society, and the old industrial generation is pushing back hard against irrelevance. Things are about to get much worse." After recalling the history of the copyright wars,....

The anti-monopoly service of Russia has suggested that Russians minting digital currencies at their homes should pay more for the spent electrical energy. The proposal comes after the submission of a bill tailored to regulate cryptocurrency mining to the Russian parliament. Russian Miners Using Household Electricity Should Pay Higher Bills, Anti-Monopoly Body Says Russia’s Federal Anti-monopoly Service (FAS) has designed a scheme to charge amateur crypto miners increased rates for the electricity they use. The agency insists its approach to solving the problem with....

The first Decentralized Web Summit, a gathering of developers striving to make the web open, secure and free of censorship by distributing data, processing and hosting across millions of computers around the world, with no centralized control, was held in San Francisco on June 8 and 9. The Summit was hosted by The Internet Archive, which issued “a call for dreamers and builders ... to spark collaboration and take concrete steps to create a better web.” The event was organized by Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, and Tim Berners-Lee ‒ the “father of the web” ‒ himself, and....

Just recently, a new study has been revealed using blockchain technology and the popular Parker Brothers board game Monopoly. In his study, Blocktech IVS founder and CEO Thorkild Grothe-Møller mixes innovative protocols with a classic board game that operates on the principles of basic economics. Using Blockchain Tech with Monopoly Gives Researcher’s....

Why a Monopoly on Money is Bad! In March of this year, The Economist, publishedan article entitled: Prophets for Today. This article discussed the relative merits of the works of those two great economic heavyweights of the twentieth century: John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) and Friedrich Hayek ( 1899-1992). In his book Denationalisation of Money (1976), Hayek undertook a deep analysis of the theory and practice of concurrent currencies and concluded: "It is an extraordinary truth that competing currencies have until quite recently never been seriously examined. There is no answer in the....