The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything

millions and millions of people own U.S. dollars, which means precisely that some bank has a list and there is an entry for them on that list. It’s probably not in Excel, but same basic idea: The bank has a list of dollars in its accounts, the list is not kept via any sort of consensus mechanism or blockchain or whatever; the bank just keeps the li... See more

A very hard unsolved problem, in fact, is how to make it private. The idea of using it for money laundering is absurd. It's the worst way to do it. Everything is public and exposed.

Technology, however, is creating trust between the unlikeliest of characters, even in the nefarious world of the “Darknet” – an encrypted network of secret websites that allows the exchange of illegal assets such as drugs, stolen financial data, and firearms (Reiff, 2020). The great oxymoron is that it is populated by hundreds of thousands of vendo... See more