Author: Wired Magazine
IF PEOPLE WHO buy cryptocurrencies intended only to hold on to them as speculative investments, there’d be no real need for crypto wallets. Exchanges and online brokerages that convert dollars to, say, bitcoin would store all that digital currency for you like so much money in a bank account. But crypto wallets (aka “blockchain wallets”), which have been around since the early days of Bitcoin, serve a lot of purposes beyond just HODLing that cryptocurrency with no fees. Wallets can also store digital collectibles like NFTs that you might want to buy, sell, trade, or transfer to someone else, or even to another wallet you…
In early June, a prerecorded video informed citizens of El Salvador that they were about to participate in a grand experiment. The speaker was Nayib Bukele, the country’s 40-year-old president, who declared that he had a plan for a better future: Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency would become legal tender in the country, he said—a global first that would elevate it to the same legal status as the US dollar, El Salvador’s national currency since 2001. This would help the jobless, he added, and those left behind by banks. But for a plan meant to help struggling Salvadorans, they were conspicuously absent; Bukele wasn’t even speaking…
Last January, a growing group of retail investors congregating on a subreddit called r/wallstreetbets took to the zero-commission trading app Robinhood and bought stock of GameStop en masse. Despite the ailing video game retailer’s dubious fundamentals, they catapulted its price from $17.25 at the beginning of the month to over $500 by January 28. The event sent shockwaves across the world’s trading floors, made headlines, and caused a lot of general bemusement. Screeds on r/wallstreetbets defined the motive of these investors’ trading: to give a beating to the hedge funds that had been betting against GameStop’s stock. That would happen via a devilish shuffle…
In some parts of the developing world, cryptocurrency is changing lives for the better. In 2021, Bitcoin went mainstream. Wall Street set its eyes on the world of crypto, with hotshot investors like hedge funder Paul Tudor Jones leading the pack; The Economist went from calling the cryptocurrency “useless” in 2018 to arguing that it belongs in most portfolios; tech CEOs Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk gamely crossed swords about Bitcoin’s merits at a conference run by an asset management firm. Popular opinion lags a bit: Many people still believe cryptocurrency is a giant, global get-rich-quick scheme. Others simply dismiss the entire thing as a…
FACEBOOK’S METAVERSE, OR Meta’s metaverse, isn’t just being touted as a better version of the internet—it’s being hailed as a better version of reality. We will, apparently, “socialize, learn, collaborate, and play” in an interconnected 3D virtual space that Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes as an “embodied internet.” This space, Zuckerberg claims, won’t be created by one single company, but rather by a network of creators and developers. First problem: 91 percent of software developers are male. Second problem: You’ve been living in a version of metaverse for years—and, having taken over video games, it’s now coming for the world of work.…