From the Front Page - The Ether Review
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Ether Review #71 - David Bailey on Po.et & the MtGox/BTC-e Connection
August 12th, 2017 by
Arthur S. Falls David Bailey, CEO of BTC Media, discusses the recent shutdown of BTC-e and its mysterious connection to the MtGox hack which led to the exchange’s demise in 2014. He also introduces Po.et, a revolutionary proof-of-existence blockchain platform. The arrest of Alexander Vinnik and seizure of the BTC-e website by the FBI in late July shed some long-awaited light on the cold case of the 650,000 bitcoins which went missing from MtGox over several years from 2011 to 2013. Upon his arrest, WizSec re...
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Ether Review Legal #4 - MME, the Beating Heart of Crypto Valley
August 6th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Luka Müller and Dianne Schepers of MME — the Swiss law firm famous for running the Ethereum crowdsale — discuss jurisdictional constraints, Crypto Valley, novel crypto-asset classes and the “second wave” of tokenization.
With 25 previous “token generating events” and 60 pending projects, MME is a clear leader in the crypto law realm. The firm is now welcoming a “second wave” of clients; companies from the legacy economy which are seeking ways to enter the blockchain w...
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Ether Review Legal #3 - The Simple Agreement for Future Tokens
July 25th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Juan Benet and Jesse Clayburgh of Protocol Labs, and Ryan Zurrer of Polychain Capital, discuss the Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT). Inspired by Y Combinator’s “Simple Agreement for Future Equity”, the SAFT standardizes the legal framework surrounding token issuance and governs the nature of the transactions involved (i.e. the deployment of capital and distribution of tokens).
The complex legal environment surrounding tokens, especially in the US, has led many entrepreneurs to ...
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The Ether Review #70 - CoinList Battens down the Hatches with Watertight Token Launch Compliance
July 21st, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Juan Benet and Jesse Clayburgh of Protocol Labs, and Ryan Zurrer of Polychain Capital, discuss CoinList, a platform for token-backed networks to raise money through pre-launch token sales.
While planning the Filecoin token sale, the team at Protocol Labs developed a method of accreditation for US investors in order to comply with securities law. Realising the importance of such a system for the whole ecosystem, they partnered with AngelList to develop this into a platform on which other proje...
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Ether Review #69 — IOTA & the Post-Blockchain Era
July 18th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls David Sønstebø, co-founder of IOTA, discusses this next-generation post-blockchain platform designed to serve as the backbone for the Internet-of-Things (IoT).
IOTA is a groundbreaking new open-source distributed ledger that does not use a blockchain. Its innovative new quantum-proof protocol, known as the Tangle, gives rise to unique new features like zero fees, infinite scalability, fast transactions, secure data transfer and many others.
Because the Tangle uses a Directed Acyclic Grap...
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The Ether Review #68 — Numerai, The Last Hedge Fund
July 6th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Xander Dunn and Richard Craib discuss Numerai, a new kind of hedge fund built by a network of data scientists. The Numerai platform crowdsources machine learning by releasing encrypted data sets to data scientists, incentivising them to develop machine learning algorithms to analyse the data. Scientists then bid their predictions to the hedge fund by staking funds, and are paid returns in Numeraire, the platform’s native cryptocurrency.
By abstracting its financial data to be only machine-...
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State Change #44 — A New Approach to Ending Slavery
June 30th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Today, we look at the problem of modern slavery and how it intersects with wildlife conservation. This subject is brought to the fore by growing interest in using blockchain technologies to illuminate the business processes which conceal the presence of slavery. Our guests are Brian Iselin, founder of SlaveFreeTrade.org, and Bubba Cook, Western and Central Pacific Tuna Programme Manager for the World Wildlife Fund.
This episode was co-hosted and edited by Alexis Kenyon. Inevitably, some of th...
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Ether Review Legal Discussion #2 The Legality of Raising Money Using Tokens
June 28th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls In today’s discussion we look at the legality of raising money through token launches, the potential risks involved, and approaches to improving the safety of these new bearer assets. We also examine the term ICO in depth and find that terminology, while relevant is second to the nature of the offer and state of the project involved. Following the discussion is an interview With Peter Van Vaulkenburg recorded at Devcon 2, applying the Howy test to TheDAO.
weekinethereum.com
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The Ether Review #67 — Celebrating Erik Voorhees Week with Erik Voorhees!
June 11th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls In this, the sixty seventh episode of The Ether Review, we set out to understand Prism, Shapeshift’s new non-custodial synthetic asset built on the Ethereum network. In reviewing this episode I feel I was unsuccessful in achieving this. However, the peripheral conversation about Erik’s view of the space is extremely enlightening, especially writ large in his positioning of Shapeshift. The Bitcoin scaling debate, the future of digital assets, the financial world’s response — it’s al...
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State Change #43 - The Battle for your attention, Meher Roy, Simon de la Rouviere
June 6th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Recalling State Change #40 Weaponized AI propaganda machine, we discussed at length the value of attention. Today we take this subject to it’s maximum extend. Software engineer Simon de la Rouviere and biochemical engineer Meher Roy shed light on how the battle for our attention is the basis for the online economy. We see it in the business models of two of the biggest companies on earth — Facebook and Google. That ever present question of how blockchain will affect these dynamics hangs...
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The Ether Review #66 - Gnosis, Martin Köppelmann
May 28th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls After a stunning token launch Gnosis has become a classic example of the hope for greater and more powerful decentralized applications. Founder Martin Köppelmann walks us through the project's genesis, growth, and road to success
https://twitter.com/koeppelmann itunes.apple.com/podcast/the-ethe…id899090462?mt=2
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State Change #42 The Use of Knowledge in Society, Jeffrey Tucker, Kirk Dameron, Stephen Macaskill
May 24th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls While today decentralization seems like a revelation, one thinker more than any other stands as its chief proponent. In 1945 Friedrich Hayek bucked the post war fashion of command-control thinking and announced the futility of central economic or societal planning. His essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society, is a concise and accurate argument for the organizing principles of the internet, horizontal organizations, and blockchain networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Guests: Jeffrey Tucker: CLO...
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State Change #41 Unpacking Digital Identity - Christian Lundkvist, Stephen Wilson
May 19th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Today we compare in-depth the self-sovereign and federated models of identity. Why is our means of proving who we are important? Well, for one thing, relying on an authority which doesn’t have our best interests at heart to manage our identity is one of the many problems exploited by the decentralized propaganda machine described last episode.
Our guests today are Christian Lundkvist, senior technologist at ConsenSys and Chief Architect and Researcher of the uPort self sovereign identity pl...
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State Change #40 Weaponized AI propaganda machine, Amanda Gutterman, Berit Anderson, Brett Horvath
May 17th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls The surprising outcome of the last US Presidential election brought attention to the effect fake news and social media manipulation can have on public thought. Today we are going to take a deep look at what exactly took place, while considering possible solutions to the problems we uncover. Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath, Co-founders of Scout.ai, join us to discuss their investigative piece, The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine, while media and marketing guru Amanda Gutterman of Co...
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State Change #39 Technologies of Social Organization — Vinay Gupta, Joseph Lubin
May 14th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Technology enables new forms of social organisation. That statement is itself a truism, but as we see technological development accelerate, our means of organising ourselves is constantly changing.
Our guests today are Joseph Lubin and Vinay Gupta. Joe is the Founder of ConsenSys and co-founder of Ethereum. He has a background in robotics, software engineering, and wealth management. He also had a short stint as CEO of a Jamaican record label. Vinay Gupta is the inventor of the Hexayurt emerg...
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Ether Review Legal Discussion #1 — Challenges in Blockchain Law
May 14th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls In Brief: A walkthrough of the pressing legal issues in blockchain today. Over the last few months a varying group of legal professionals from New Zealand, Australia, and the USA have been meeting to discuss current events, challenges, and peculiarities in the interaction between blockchain and law. As facilitator I suggested we might record the sessions. This is the first to be published. Attendees: Arthur Falls: Host of The Ether Review, State Change, Director of Media, ConsenSys Alex Sims...
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The Ether Review #64 — Conversations with the Swarm
May 1st, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls In Brief: Swarm City, once Arcade City, is one of the most ambitious, and controversial projects in the Ethereum ecosystem. Having shed their founder, the remaining team have made considerable development progress. More than just a would be ride sharing DApp, Swarm City aims to provide an exchange infrastructure for any two sided market place.
Swarm City Mayor Bernd Lapp and Architect Michael Thuy discuss the deeper intricacies of 2 sided market transactional infrastructure in a social settin...
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The Ether Review #63 — Meet DAD, the Digital Aussie Dollar
April 26th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls In Brief: Tokenizing fiat currency in a way that is compatible with our existing financial infrastructure and legislation is no easy feat. The consequences however reach across the entirety of industry, the economy, and society.
Nick Addison is the CTO of AgriDigital, an agricultural finance company first covered in episode 45 of TER. As part of his work at AgriDigital, Nick is researching ways to port the existing financial infrastructure into the blockchain age. It’s not easy, but as the ...
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The Ether Review #62 — The Biggest City in Blockchain Pt 2
April 16th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Matt Hale of Divvi is the first speaker in the second half of the conversation we began last week. Divvi is a Sydney based decentralized energy market startup. The huge scale of residential solar deployment makes Australia a uniquely appropriate environment for this kind of solution. We also look at the challenges of breaking into the highly regulated and cartel run infrastructure space. Secondly Luke Anderson, describes the dilemma of selecting blockchain as an appropriate solution to a problem...
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The Ether Review #61 - The Biggest City in Blockchain Part 1
April 11th, 2017 by Arthur S. Falls Last week I was honoured with the privilege of representing New Zealand at the inaugural ISO/TC-307 Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies standards committee meeting. The event was hosted by the secretariat, Standards Australia. 18 nations attended. The event itself will be the subject of a blog post when I get around to writing it.
While at the meeting, blockchain legend Nick Addison wrangled together a who’s who of blockchain entrepreneurs for a round table discussion. We convene...
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