(For the record, this is an ancient link list, from the pre-coronavirus days, remember? /GL)

Virtual Non-Con Conference, April 3-5, 2020
https://noncon.org/

Is it Copernicus—exploring the decentralization of money and power
https://isitcopernicus.art/

Blockdam—a decentralized autonomous experiment (from Amsterdam)
https://blockdam.nl/

Comic book: Tristan Roulot et Djibril Morissette-Phan Crytpomonnaie, le futur de l’Argent (via Patrice)
http://www.egeablog.net/index.php?post/2019/07/26/Cryptomonnaie-%28Morissette-et-Roulot%29

Theory of the Crypto-Partizan and other interesting essays by Erik Cason (via Pit Schultz)
http://cryptosovereignty.org/theory-of-the-crypto-partisan/

Katika Kuenreich’s blog on the social impact of ‘digitalization’ (German-English)
http://social-credit.org/

Rapper Akon created his own city (plus currency) in Senegal called ‘Akon City’ (via Patricia)
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/akon-city-senegal-trnd/index.html

Irish drug dealer loses £46m bitcoin codes he hid in fishing rod case (via Patrice Riemens)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/21/irish-drug-dealer-clifton-collins-l46m-bitcoin-codes-hid-fishing-rod-case

How a Web Design Company Crowdfunded Millions and Completely Disappeared
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3a854w/how-a-web-design-company-crowdfunded-millions-and-completely-disappeared

“So everyone knows that IOTA has been turned off for many days now, but do you also know that: – the main client (Trinity) was actually a Trojan because of a compromised third-party dependency? – all private keys that used this client are potentially stolen?” @ercwl

Trinity Attack Incident Part 1: Summary and next steps (via Emin)
https://blog.iota.org/trinity-attack-incident-part-1-summary-and-next-steps-8c7ccc4d81e8

Interview with MoneyLab #8 artists The Demystification Committee by Andrea Karch
https://www.neroeditions.com/docs/interface-chaos/

Blockchains & Digital Financial Inclusion: De-Risking by Re-Risking in the Eastern Caribbean and Eastern Europe
https://www.blockchainresearchnetwork.org/blockchains-legitimacy-and-digital-financial-inclusion/

Altsbit hacked
https://twitter.com/altsbit/status/1225319347687653377

Digital Publishing starts to make money, thanks to platforms 🙁
https://www.axios.com/digital-media-publishing-profits-venture-capital-d08277c3-cde4-49e7-9d8a-615dc22c000b.html

Is CZ hiding his criminal side behind the popularity of Binance?
https://www.asiacryptotoday.com/is-cz-hiding-his-criminal-side-behind-the-popularity-of-binance

IOTA cryptocurrency shuts down entire network after wallet hack
https://www.zdnet.com/article/iota-cryptocurrency-shuts-down-entire-network-after-wallet-hack/

Paying for content, subscriptions, access to exclusive social media is the new trend. The free is for the written-off junk humans, the plebs, sub-proleratiat lower middle classes…”A proposed new social network is hoping to entice millions of people to pay to get close to superstars of technology, business, and academia, according to a pitch deck sent to MIT Technology Review. The nascent site, called Column, already has major connections, per the deck: it involves the man who created the legal strategy that killed the gossip blog Gawker and says it has the support of Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel—who, however, denies it.”

ps. From an Eduard de Jong’s email on blockchain as religion:

“It’s a believe! A believe in the existence of the Solution, the Solution will all powerful, it will right all wrongs and end human misery. The Solution has been revealed to humankind in the form of Bitcoin. This believe, has amassed a following and hence sprouted a religion: now we have a god: Blockchain, its son: Bitcoin and a holy spirit: Human Ingenuity. This religion demands sacrifices: to forget all understanding of human nature, to ignore all knowledge of human processes and to destroy all IT infrastructure that does not use Blockchain.

This religion deeply reflects our age. 150 years of human ingenuity has brought humanity massive improvements of living and has wrought havoc on the environment with a clear, imminent threat to end human existence. In this dark, anxious world, Blockchain brings hope, Bitcoins shines a bright light of the existence of a Solution.

You can’t take away someones believes. It’s not a matter of opinion of rational reasoning: With the new Blockchain religion, the overwhelming evidence that it doesn’t really work, not at a scale that makes sense or with the refinement needed by its users, evidence that it makes things worse, likely, a lot worse, seems to confirm its believers ever more strongly in their believe.

Such is the world we live in. There might well come a moment interacting with Blockchain zealots will no longer be relevant…

Cheers, Eduard”

Peter Sunde on Bitcoin
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1214625163607715840

Who Pays the Muse? Reports from the Edge of Art and the Blockchain #5 by Ruth Catlow
https://medium.com/arteia/who-pays-the-muse-c6655d3d798c

Just in case you didn’t know: the dark secrets of cryptocurrencies
https://hackernoon.com/what-are-the-dark-secrets-of-cryptocurrencies-x65f3rt5

BBC crime podcast series (via Patricia de Vries)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07nkd84/episodes/downloads

Debunking Blockchain-The case for centrally administered, but highly distributed, financial utilities by Douglas Jackson
https://www.academia.edu/36633553/Debunking_Blockchain_The_case_for_centrally_administered_but_highly_distributed_financial_utilities_-_in_progress.docx

What is Stability? The Time of Alternative Money by Dick Bryan and Akseli Virtanen (via Tiziana Terranova)
https://medium.com/econaut/what-is-stability-50655254124

Blockchains for Good Prize (Brussels, February 10, 2020)
https://www.ngi.eu/event/blockchains-for-social-good/

Blockchain Cuties Universe
https://blockchaincuties.com/presale?utm_source=cointelegraph&utm_medium=refferal&utm_content=armygeneral

Lex Sokolin: We Made No Progress, Other Than All the Progress We Made
https://www.coindesk.com/we-made-no-progress-other-than-all-the-progress-we-made

Blockchain and business: Looking beyond the hype (via Eduard de Jong)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/blockchain-and-business-looking-beyond-the-hype/

Bitcoin battered: The worst crypto catastrophes of 2019–Millions in cryptocurrency stolen, exit scams, and countless arrests were made in connection to crypto criminal schemes this year (idem)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/bitcoin-battered-the-worst-crypto-catastrophes-of-2019/

Darknet Marketplace Plans $146M ICO for Global Expansion (via Emin)
https://cointelegraph.com/news/russia-darknet-marketplace-plans-149m-ico-for-global-expansion

Cryptocurrency rocked by massive Bitcoin fraud
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cryptocurrency-rocked-massive-bitcoin-fraud-002556949.html

BTX Nonsense: Blame the Investigators (Coindesk still believes in ‘the markets’)
https://www.coindesk.com/chainalysis-report-on-plustoken-scammers-blamed-for-mondays-crypto-selloff

About Incognito
https://incognito.org/node.html

Money research in Malawi
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sunduzwayo_Madise

Revealing the Offshore World (panel in Paris, July 2019, via The Syllabus)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEtZeg4RTBs

BlockV: Platform for Human Engagement (talking about the blokechain… ugh)
https://www.blockv.io/team/

Silvio Lorusso’s highlights of MoneyLab #7
https://networkcultures.org/entreprecariat/moneylab-7-two-highlights/

Vitalik Buterin on Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later
https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/11/22/progress.html

Jack Parkin: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money
https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2019.1678262

Loki: private transactions, decentralized communication (white paper, via Sam de Silva)
https://loki.network/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/LokiWhitepaperV3_1.pdf

Bio metaphors and even more evidence for rightwing libertarian dominance of crypto
https://www.coindesk.com/watch-thiel-capitals-eric-weinstein-talks-about-the-nature-of-money

ALEXANDRA – movie by Anna Brynskov (via Inte Gloerich)
A design fiction on a humanoid blockchain system that controls friendships, based on the work balance in the household.

How do we design this kind of system in a ‘good’ way in terms of politics? Is consensus a sustainable model of governance? What would happen if this system was scaled to a city level? Do we want algorithms to interfere with our friendships? Is Alexandra’s role as an assistant a female stereotype?

Movie: https://vimeo.com/375672337

The Rise of Digital Neo-Colonialism
https://hackernoon.com/the-rise-of-digital-neo-colonialism-rc1h3xdr

Libra Colonialism (via rbyn)
https://medium.com/cryptolawreview/libra-colonialism-1510dca29ad

“Why I’m building a curated crypto art market.” (via Maisa)
https://medium.com/@christina_steinbrecher/introducing-blockchain-art-2fbbdac3f31c

About blockchain.art
https://www.blockchain.art/about

Libra: Is it Really about the Money? (via nettime)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3441707

Class action lawsuit alleges Bitfinex’ Tether cost crypto market $1.4T
https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/10/08/class-action-lawsuit-alleges-bitfinex-tether-cost-cryptocurrency-market-1-4t/

Libra’s trueism: Bitcoin is digital gold, not a currency
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/06/facebook-executive-david-marcus-says-bitcoin-is-an-investment-not-currency.html

Rana Forroohar: How big tech is dragging us towards the next financial crash (via Patricia)
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/08/how-big-tech-is-dragging-us-towards-the-next-financial-crash

Talking about Feminist Economics and Blokechain… Introducing the Epstein Token