Five Minute Blockchain • Newsletter No. 35: "Regulation is coming" • How and why people in Ukraine use crypto currencies • TikTok will get paid subscriptions • "Bitcoin is no payments network"
May 25, 2022 • Newsletter • Issue Nr. 35
Five Minute Blockchain
Trust, content and blockchain.
This newsletter is brought to you by TruBlo. This research project will fund 45 early-stage blockchain ideas to explore new options for "trusted content on future blockchains".
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Updates this week
Estimated reading time: 3 min 21 seconds
TRUST
WELCOME TO THE ZOMBIE CRYPTOCALYPSE
An interview with David Gerard, author of "Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain".
Question: It sounds like you’re saying, one, crypto is all nonsense, but, two, the nonsense will continue indefinitely, because as long as you can invent money out of thin air, you can find a sucker to buy it. Unless governments step in to say you can’t do certain things anymore.
David Gerard: Yes. The good news is, there's regulation coming. Treasury is looking at this stuff very closely because they basically have to make sure that these crypto bozos cannot screw up the actual economy where people live. And they would absolutely screw it up because they're idiots. And they got a taste of that in 2019 when Facebook did its Libra cryptocurrency or tried to, and every regulator, central bank, and finance ministry in the world said, "No, you are bloody not." Because Facebook didn't know what they were doing and they were really arrogant about not caring that they didn't know what they were doing. So basically, about a month later, the entire US government, Democrats and Republicans were united in this, squashed it like a bug."
WEB3 IS GOING JUST GREAT
A website called "Web 3 Is Going Just Great", which started in December 2021, works as a timeline website "outlining some of the flaws in projects under the umbrella of web3—cryptocurrencies, distributed finance, NFTs, etc." The creator is Molly White, a software engineer and a contributor to Wikipedia "who combs through news and crypto sites to find the day’s most prominent scams, schemes, and rug pulls."
HOW UKRAINE’S WIDE USE OF CRYPTOCURRENCY IS PLAYING OUT DURING THE WAR
Interview with Michael Chobanian, the president of the Blockchain Association of Ukraine. The text provides many insights why people in Ukraine usually don't trust banks and why they transfer assets to crypto in times of war.
CONTENT
TIKTOK TO LAUNCH LIVE SUBSCRIPTIONS FOR CREATORS
TikTok is ramping up its competition with Twitch, YouTube and others with this week’s launch of TikTok LIVE subscriptions, a new program that will allow creators to generate recurring revenue via payments from their top fans.
NEED FOR GLOBAL PRIVACY REGULATION
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is putting more pressure on governments to work toward a global data-privacy agreement as digital communication tools continue to grow in importance, European officials said.
ACTOR PLEADS BUYER TO RETURN STOLEN NFT
Actor and producer Seth Green was robbed of several NFTs this month after succumbing to a phishing scam that inadvertently threw a monkey wrench into the plan for his new animated series. The forthcoming show was developed from characters in Green’s expansive NFT collection, but in light of the recent hack, the project’s blatant crypto optimism has become a tragically ironic reminder of the industry’s shadier side.
BLOCKCHAIN
BITCOIN HAS NO FUTURE AS A PAYMENTS NETWORK
Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and chief executive of FTX, says "the bitcoin network is not a payments network and it is not a scaling network".
RAY DALIO SPEAKING IN DAVOS
Quote: "We have at least four crises, which are interwoven. We have high inflation … we have an energy crisis… we have food poverty, and we have a climate crisis. And we can’t solve the problems if we concentrate on only one of the crises."
Asked about digital money he said: "Blockchain Is Great, but let’s call It digital gold"
FLOWCARBON: START-UP FUNDED BY EX-WEWORK CEO GETS 70 MILLION FUNDING
Quote: Flowcarbon’s protocol helps projects sell tokenized carbon credits to companies looking to reduce their carbon footprint. The credits can then be traded on crypto exchanges, the company says.
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