Top Citi Exec Ray McGuire Leaving Bank To Run For Mayor Of New York City

Top Citi Exec Ray McGuire Leaving Bank To Run For Mayor Of New York City

Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/16/2020 – 11:40

Former Citi top executive Ray McGuire is leaving the bank and is joining the crowded Democratic field running for mayor of New York City. McGuire is currently vice chairman of Citigroup and chairman of banking, capital markets and advisory. 

He told CNBC: “We’re in a war for the survival of this great city. Without a doubt we can do this. From the streets to the suites.”

Citi’s CEO and CEO of the bank’s institutional clients group told employees in a memo on Thursday that McGuire would be leaving to “explore opportunities that will allow him to pursue his lifelong passion for public service.”

He joins a crowded Democratic field for mayor where the ethos between the candidates seems to be “Bill De Blasio is incompetent“. We highlighted days ago that Maya Wiley, a former top attorney for current Mayor Bill De Blasio, had also joined the race. 

“Electing the same kinds of people, bringing the same old broken promises over and over again and expecting things will be different, that’s the risk we cant afford right now,” Wiley had said last week. She called into question De Blasio’s leadership in her campaign announcement. 

McGuire/CNBC

McGuire is going to be joined by friend and CEO of Infor Charles Phillips and Valerie Jarrett, a longtime advisor for Barack Obama. Phillips has said he will co-chair McGuire’s campaign. 

He told CNBC: “NYC faces its largest economic challenge in decades and we need to execute with purpose and efficiency. Ray is the right person to lead and unify the city to create something better when we get through this. He took the time to prepare and he’s more than ready to outwork everyone.”

Film director Spike Lee is expected to also be added as a co-chair of the campaign in coming weeks. 

McGuire recently authored a preface to a Citi report called “Closing the Racial Inequality Gaps” where he said: “Yet even today, with all those credentials and as one of the leading executives on Wall Street, I am still seen first as a six-foot-four, two-hundred-pound Black man wherever I go — even in my own neighborhood. I could have been George Floyd.”

 

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As Good As It Gets For Home Sellers?

As Good As It Gets For Home Sellers?

Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/16/2020 – 11:20

Submitted by Market Crumbs

We haven’t written about the real estate market in a couple of months, but the story remains the same. Mortgage rates continue to hit record lows while a diminishing housing supply continues to drive home prices higher.

Last week saw the average contract interest rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage drop marginally to 3% from 3.01% the previous week. Total mortgage application volume fell by 0.7% for the week as refinance activity fell slightly by 0.3% and applications to purchase a home fell by 2%, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s seasonally adjusted index.

Despite refinancing activity still standing 50% higher than the same period last year, the annual increase was as high as 100% earlier this year. Although the previous week did see the highest refinance volume since mid-August when it rose by 8%.

“There are signs that demand is waning at the entry-level portion of the market because of supply and affordability hurdles, as well as the adverse economic impact the pandemic is having on hourly workers and low- and moderate-income households,” MBA economist Joel Kan said. “As a result, the lower price tiers are seeing slower growth, which is contributing to the rising trend in average loan balances.”

Home prices continue to rise at a pace that puts home ownership far out of reach for many Americans. According to Redfin, the median home sold for a record high $319,769 in the four weeks ending September 27. The 14% year-over-year increase marked the largest jump since 2013.

Redfin found that the average home sold for 99.4% of its asking price, which is the highest the company has ever recorded. About half of the homes that went into contract during the same period had an offer accepted within the first two weeks of being on the market. Redfin says the number of active listings on the market dropped to an all-time low in September as there are now 28% fewer homes for sale than during the same period last year.

“The question on everyone’s mind is ‘how fast can prices keep rising?,'” Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather said. “This is likely to be as good as it gets for home sellers, who definitely have had it very good for a very long time.”

With the housing market on an absolute tear, the million dollar question remains whether it’s a good time to rush and buy a house or hold off and hope prices will come down to earth.

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Afraid of Foreign Election Meddling? Worry More About America’s Sick Political Culture.

cnpphotos181161(1)

For a people famously disinterested in events outside their own borders, Americans offer up a lot of rent-free space in their minds to foreign political operatives. Liberals fret that Russians plot nefarious schemes to support President Donald Trump’s reelection effort, while conservatives worry that Chinese and Ukrainian energy companies are funneling funds to Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden through his son.

That foreign players have fiddled with U.S. elections in recent years is no revelation, though it seems unlikely that the efforts had much impact. That so many Americans find it believable that major presidential candidates are foreign-backed puppets is less testimony to the effectiveness of overseas scheming than to the fraught nature of U.S. political culture.

In an already volatile political climate, The New York Times recently reported that “President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is most likely continuing to approve and direct interference operations aimed at raising President Trump’s re-election chances, a recent C.I.A. analysis concluded.” That squares with warnings from RAND Corporation that “Russia might try again to manipulate and divide U.S. voters through social media.”

Both analyses are just a hair more than speculative—the CIA has “moderate confidence” in its findings—but they follow up on reports of Russian dirty tricks in the 2016 election involving hacked emails released through Wikileaks and incendiary social media posts from front groups that were supposed to set Americans against one another (more than they already are, that is).

For anybody at this late date who doesn’t have at least a rough familiarity with the shenanigans, they’re covered in Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s report on the subject. While Mueller’s team uncovered a remarkable amount of political sleaziness and the tacit approval of the dirty tricks campaign by the Trump team, “ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.”

That means Russia’s efforts were covert (not causally linked to the source) and carried out without the active participation of a contender for office. That, according to the University of Hong Kong’s Dov Levin, who studies such interventions, is the sort of fiddling that has a low likelihood of having an impact.

“Without the domestic actor’s cooperation in providing information (or ‘local knowledge’) about the electorate’s preferences and the best ways to intervene in its favor, the great power will usually see its chances of succeeding as too low to justify an electoral intervention,” he wrote in a 2016 paper published in International Studies Quarterly. Likewise, “a covert intervention carries far lower chances of a backlash due to the inherent secrecy in the provision of the electoral aid. However, the lower risk comes with reduced effectiveness.”

By contrast, coordinating with a party and openly endorsing its candidate—or threatening to, for example, cut aid if a disfavored candidate wins—carries more risks but a higher chance of success.

That’s not to say that covert operations are unknown—they make up the majority of the 117 electoral interventions by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R./Russia between 1946 and 2000 that Levin studied (yes, America has been a major offender when it comes to sticking its nose into other people’s elections). But covert operations still require a significant commitment, such as the millions of dollars the U.S. funneled to a Thai political party for that country’s 1969 elections.

By comparison, email leaks and hundreds of thousands of dollars for Twitter and Facebook political ads, even when coordinated by Russia’s modestly funded Internet Research Agency, is awfully low-rent. The campaign seems crafted less to affect the U.S. election than to let the officials of post-Cold War Russia flex atrophied muscles and—after the efforts were disclosed—convince the Russian public that their country is still an international player.

That same perspective needs to be applied to New York Post reports of Ukrainian and Chinese business executives paying Hunter Biden for access to his presidential-hopeful father. If verified, the correspondence published by the Post would confirm suspicions that Hunter Biden’s main asset through his many sketchy business dealings over the years has been his last name.

But a politician’s relative peddling promises of access is evidence of garden-variety corruption of the sort that plagues politics in good times and bad. It’s not confirmation of accusations that the politician is a foreign asset and “the Chinese Communist Party’s candidate for president,” as a very briefly serving former acting U.S. Attorney General alleges.

Which is to say there’s no proof that Biden is a willing participant in foreign political intervention covert, overt, or any other sort.

What we’re seeing through all of this is less evidence that foreigners are gaming American elections in any serious way than that Americans have eroded their own political culture. More to the point, too many of us now question the decency and the legitimacy of political opponents.

Fifty-five percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats say the party opposing their own is “not just worse for politics—they are downright evil,” according to a 2019 YouGov survey. Thirty-four percent of Republicans and 27 percent of Democrats say the other party “lack the traits to be considered fully human—they behave like animals.”

“We find pronounced willingness by both Democrats and Republicans to dehumanize members of the out-party,” four political scientists noted in a 2019 paper published in Political Behavior. “By depriving political opponents, to even a small extent, of the complex thoughts and scruples we often associate with humanity, we make them easier to stereotype and we may more readily ascribe simpler, more base, and even nefarious, motivations to them.”

As a result, too many of us don’t just decline to vote for candidates we don’t like, or simply disagree with their supporters. Instead, those “others” must be utterly malevolent, dangerous, and unworthy of respect, with “base, and even nefarious, motivations” that may well include being willing servants of sinister foreign masters.

Foreign governments may try to exploit America’s political fractures. They may do so to actually shift the outcomes of our elections or to play to the audience at home. But Americans can only blame themselves for turning a centuries-old democracy into a playground for low-budget dirty tricks.

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Afraid of Foreign Election Meddling? Worry More About America’s Sick Political Culture.

cnpphotos181161(1)

For a people famously disinterested in events outside their own borders, Americans offer up a lot of rent-free space in their minds to foreign political operatives. Liberals fret that Russians plot nefarious schemes to support President Donald Trump’s reelection effort, while conservatives worry that Chinese and Ukrainian energy companies are funneling funds to Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden through his son.

That foreign players have fiddled with U.S. elections in recent years is no revelation, though it seems unlikely that the efforts had much impact. That so many Americans find it believable that major presidential candidates are foreign-backed puppets is less testimony to the effectiveness of overseas scheming than to the fraught nature of U.S. political culture.

In an already volatile political climate, The New York Times recently reported that “President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is most likely continuing to approve and direct interference operations aimed at raising President Trump’s re-election chances, a recent C.I.A. analysis concluded.” That squares with warnings from RAND Corporation that “Russia might try again to manipulate and divide U.S. voters through social media.”

Both analyses are just a hair more than speculative—the CIA has “moderate confidence” in its findings—but they follow up on reports of Russian dirty tricks in the 2016 election involving hacked emails released through Wikileaks and incendiary social media posts from front groups that were supposed to set Americans against one another (more than they already are, that is).

For anybody at this late date who doesn’t have at least a rough familiarity with the shenanigans, they’re covered in Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s report on the subject. While Mueller’s team uncovered a remarkable amount of political sleaziness and the tacit approval of the dirty tricks campaign by the Trump team, “ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.”

That means Russia’s efforts were covert (not causally linked to the source) and carried out without the active participation of a contender for office. That, according to the University of Hong Kong’s Dov Levin, who studies such interventions, is the sort of fiddling that has a low likelihood of having an impact.

“Without the domestic actor’s cooperation in providing information (or ‘local knowledge’) about the electorate’s preferences and the best ways to intervene in its favor, the great power will usually see its chances of succeeding as too low to justify an electoral intervention,” he wrote in a 2016 paper published in International Studies Quarterly. Likewise, “a covert intervention carries far lower chances of a backlash due to the inherent secrecy in the provision of the electoral aid. However, the lower risk comes with reduced effectiveness.”

By contrast, coordinating with a party and openly endorsing its candidate—or threatening to, for example, cut aid if a disfavored candidate wins—carries more risks but a higher chance of success.

That’s not to say that covert operations are unknown—they make up the majority of the 117 electoral interventions by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R./Russia between 1946 and 2000 that Levin studied (yes, America has been a major offender when it comes to sticking its nose into other people’s elections). But covert operations still require a significant commitment, such as the millions of dollars the U.S. funneled to a Thai political party for that country’s 1969 elections.

By comparison, email leaks and hundreds of thousands of dollars for Twitter and Facebook political ads, even when coordinated by Russia’s modestly funded Internet Research Agency, is awfully low-rent. The campaign seems crafted less to affect the U.S. election than to let the officials of post-Cold War Russia flex atrophied muscles and—after the efforts were disclosed—convince the Russian public that their country is still an international player.

That same perspective needs to be applied to New York Post reports of Ukrainian and Chinese business executives paying Hunter Biden for access to his presidential-hopeful father. If verified, the correspondence published by the Post would confirm suspicions that Hunter Biden’s main asset through his many sketchy business dealings over the years has been his last name.

But a politician’s relative peddling promises of access is evidence of garden-variety corruption of the sort that plagues politics in good times and bad. It’s not confirmation of accusations that the politician is a foreign asset and “the Chinese Communist Party’s candidate for president,” as a very briefly serving former acting U.S. Attorney General alleges.

Which is to say there’s no proof that Biden is a willing participant in foreign political intervention covert, overt, or any other sort.

What we’re seeing through all of this is less evidence that foreigners are gaming American elections in any serious way than that Americans have eroded their own political culture. More to the point, too many of us now question the decency and the legitimacy of political opponents.

Fifty-five percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats say the party opposing their own is “not just worse for politics—they are downright evil,” according to a 2019 YouGov survey. Thirty-four percent of Republicans and 27 percent of Democrats say the other party “lack the traits to be considered fully human—they behave like animals.”

“We find pronounced willingness by both Democrats and Republicans to dehumanize members of the out-party,” four political scientists noted in a 2019 paper published in Political Behavior. “By depriving political opponents, to even a small extent, of the complex thoughts and scruples we often associate with humanity, we make them easier to stereotype and we may more readily ascribe simpler, more base, and even nefarious, motivations to them.”

As a result, too many of us don’t just decline to vote for candidates we don’t like, or simply disagree with their supporters. Instead, those “others” must be utterly malevolent, dangerous, and unworthy of respect, with “base, and even nefarious, motivations” that may well include being willing servants of sinister foreign masters.

Foreign governments may try to exploit America’s political fractures. They may do so to actually shift the outcomes of our elections or to play to the audience at home. But Americans can only blame themselves for turning a centuries-old democracy into a playground for low-budget dirty tricks.

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How Will Bitcoin Lead to More Freedom?

Salin and May

Katie Haun has one of bitcoin’s most improbable conversion stories. As an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, she prosecuted the two corrupt federal agents working the Silk Road case and created the federal government’s first cryptocurrency task force. “I’m the prosecutor who helped put some of the earliest bitcoin criminals in jail,” she boasted in a 2018 speech. 

But while learning about bitcoin as a crime fighter, it dawned on her “how profoundly this technology could change how we do all sorts of things.” Haun is now a general partner at the venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, where she co-leads its crypto funds with over $350 million raised since 2018. The firm is betting on blockchain as a new computing platform that will, among other things, create a decentralized financial system and fulfill the web’s original promise as an open network controlled by its users. 

Blockchain computing “feels like the early days of the internet, web 2.0, or smartphones all over again,” according to a16z’s crypto thesis. Haun also sits on the board of the nonprofit organization overseeing Facebook’s cryptocurrency project Libra. At a 2019 congressional hearing, David Marcus, head of the company’s blockchain group, assured lawmakers, “Let me be clear and unambiguous: Facebook will not offer the Libra digital currency until we have fully addressed regulators’ concerns and received appropriate approvals.”

In their embrace of regulation, Haun and Marcus are at one extreme of the cryptocurrency community; on the other end, are the so-called bitcoin maximalists who have a name for projects like Libra: “shitcoin.”

“I would not be interested in bitcoin if governments didn’t want to ban it,” the software developer Pierre Rochard tweeted in 2017.

In a December 2019 essay titled “Cryptocurrency Is Most Useful for Breaking Laws and Social Constructs, Open Money Initiative Founder Jill Carlson wrote that cryptocurrency wasn’t designed to solve “mainstream problems.” It’s a tool used by “freedom fighters and terrorists, by journalists and dissidents, by scammers and black market dealers,” by “sex workers” or people “procuring drugs on the internet”—the type of person Katie Haun once worked to put in jail. Bitcoin maximalists, like Rochard, believe that governments will eventually attempt to ban bitcoin because it’s destined to replace fiat money, which will, among other things, eliminate their power to print money to finance the welfare-warfare state.

The divide over whether this technology is a tool for changing society by working within the system or by disrupting it from the outside predates the invention of bitcoin by a few decades. It traces back to a 1987 debate between the physicist Timothy C. May and the economist and entrepreneur Phil Salin, two early internet visionaries, whose difference of opinion laid the groundwork for the “cypherpunk” movement—a community of computer scientists, mathematicians, hackers, and avid science fiction readers whose work and writings influenced the creation of bitcoin, WikiLeaks, Tor, BitTorrent, and more. (Reason is publishing a four-part documentary series on the cypherpunk movement. The first two installments are available here and here.)

The bitcoin maximalists often use the “shitcoin” moniker to refer to cryptocurrency projects that are outright scams, technologically flawed, or cheap imitations of Satoshi  Nakamoto’s invention, when in reality the world only needs one currency. Bitcoin, they maintain, is best understood as sound money, and Silicon Valley’s infatuation with “blockchain technology” is “a great example of ‘cargo cult science,'” as the economist Saifedean Ammous wrote in The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking.

But the community’s divide is also partly rooted in a disagreement over whether cryptocurrency is essentially a technology of resistance that derives value from being impervious to government interference and control, or whether it’s a tool for transforming society from within, in which case government regulation won’t sink the entire enterprise. A careful look at the debate that started with May and Salin in the 1980s helps us understand the best arguments of both sides.

BlackNet: ‘A Technological Means of Undermining all Governments’

In 1987, before the launch of the World Wide Web, May and Salin were part of a small community of West Coast science fiction–obsessed technologists mulling the implications of a decentralized, global information network running on personal computers. It was clear to May and Salin that the internet would remake the world, but they disagreed on what kind of software would serve as the linchpin.

Salin saw technology as a way to gradually drive down the transaction costs that impede human activity, making it feasible to interact in ways that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. “I’m interested in how to lower costs,” Salin told Reason in 1984. “The Austrian [School of Economics] insight is that any industry run as a planned economy for any time should be fertile ground for an entrepreneur.”

In 1986, he started the American Information Exchange, or AMIX, one of the first e-commerce startups. Salin, whose intellectual hero was the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, envisioned AMIX as a global marketplace for the buying and selling of local expertise that would enhance human cooperation and gradually replace central planning.

In a 1991 essay, Salin envisioned a “fluid, transaction-oriented market system, with two-way feedback” that could result in “crowding out monolithic, mostly government bureaucracies.” The same language could be applied to many projects in the modern cryptocurrency space. Facebook’s Libra, for example, promises to use blockchain technology to move money around the world in a manner that’s “as easy and cost-effective” as “sending a message or sharing a photo.” The project’s backers maintain that enabling “frictionless payments” for the 1.7 billion people around the world without access to banking will do wonders for alleviating poverty. Those frictions are mostly created by government regulation; what’s implicit in Facebook’s pitch is that those rules will be gradually crowded out, though not overthrown.

After being introduced to Salin by his friend Chip Morningstar, a computer scientist, in December 1987, May drove out to Redwood City, California to meet Salin and hear his pitch for AMIX. He grasped the idea immediately, but it bored him. “People aren’t going to be selling meaningless stuff, like surfboard recommendations,” May recalled telling Salin.

May didn’t think AMIX was a scam, like many modern cryptocurrency ventures that earn that descriptor shitcoin. But he was interested in upending society and didn’t see how AMIX would have much of an impact. 

May suggested to Salin that he reconceive of the project as an anonymous platform for selling company trade secrets, “such as plans for that B-1 Bomber or a process for a technology.” In a thought experiment, May later called his idea “BlackNet,” writing in a pretend advertisement for the service that it would turn “nation-states, export laws, patent laws, national security considerations and the like” into “relics of the pre-cyberspace era.”

In a series of personal notes following his meeting with Salin, which May shared with Reason prior to his death in 2018, he mused that BlackNet was a “technological means of undermining all governments.” Though some might say that “‘it won’t be allowed to happen’ technology would ‘probably make it inevitable,'” he wrote.

May’s ideas about BlackNet evolved over the years. In 1986, a friend had given him a photocopy of Vernor Vinge’s 1981 novella True Names, in which hackers inhabit a virtual world called the “Other Plane” where the government can’t decipher their real identities. It had a big impact on May, who melded the “Other Plane” with “Galt’s Gulch” from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which was a safe haven for rational and productive people protected from government coercion and taxation by an invisible shield. Instead of the Colorado mountains, May’s cyberspace Galt’s Gulch would exist on the internet, with cryptography providing protective cover.

“Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure,” May wrote in his 1988 manifesto, “so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions.”

Bitcoin isn’t BlackNet or a Galt’s Gulch in Cyberspace—it’s a decentralized form of non-governmental money. But it’s designed to be impervious to outside tampering so that the government can’t destroy it or undermine its value, and is roughly in keeping with May’s vision of an unstoppable technology. “The nature of sound money…lies precisely in the fact that no human is able to control it,” Ammous wrote in The Bitcoin Standard. Bitcoin “exist[s] orthogonally to the law; there is virtually nothing that any government authority can do to affect or alter [its] operation.”

The American Information Exchange: Exploiting the ‘Grey Areas’ 

The computer scientist E. Dean Tribble, who worked with Salin at AMIX, calls May “the shock jock” of the cypherpunk movement. “BlackNet is not a goal,” he says. “BlackNet is a negative consequence.”

Morningstar, the pioneering computer scientist who Salin hired to oversee the building of AMIX, recalls his boss’s skepticism of May’s ideas about escaping “the strictures and dysfunction of the mainstream-governed world.” The establishment “has had a long history of confronting new challenges and somehow having its way.”

Salin died of cancer in 1991 at age 41. His friend and colleague Mark S. Miller, a computer scientist, would flesh out the case that technology impacts society by gradually transforming it from within. Miller drew an analogy to a genetic takeover in biology, in which an alternate way of doing things slowly takes the place of an existing paradigm. 

Projects like AMIX, which was centrally controlled by a company, didn’t need to be completely “incorruptible” to have an impact because of all the grey areas where regulation doesn’t apply. Permissionless innovation pushes society in the direction of more freedom and decentralization. For example, “when people started doing credit card transactions over the internet, nobody knew if it was legal,” Miller tells Reason, “but they just started doing it.” 

Miller doesn’t consider Libra to be a worthless project despite Marcus’ commitment to cooperate with regulators. Once it starts operating, Miller says, there could still be experimentation happening “at the margins.” There could also be gateways to “trading between Libra and something permissionless,” which would help expand the cryptocurrency space.

Miller’s writings have often focused on how rules baked into computer code could replace aspects of the legal system. Along with K. Eric Drexler, the father of nanotechnology, he co-authored a series of papers applying economic insights to software design, which influenced the work of the computer scientist, legal scholar, and early cypherpunk Nick Szabo.

It was Szabo who coined the term “smart contracts“—self-executing arrangements written in code, and a common feature in today’s cryptocurrency projects. Szabo analogized his concept to a vending machine: A buyer drops in a coin and a machine provides the candy bar. “The fundamental logic here is automating ‘if-this-then-that’ on a self-executing basis with finality,” Szabo wrote. He also offered the example of a smart contract for auto repossession: “If the owner fails to make payments, the smart contract invokes the lien protocol, which returns control of the car keys to the bank.” 

A divide in the community over the definition of a smart contract also relates back to Salin’s debate with May. Do smart contracts have to be shielded from third-party interference to be worthy of the name? What if a government regulator has the power to stick a hand into the metaphorical vending machine to stop the candy bar from dropping into the slot? Does that undermine the purpose of smart contracts?

Miller and Morningstar consider AMIX to be “possibly the first smart-contracting system ever created” because it used software to mediate transactions between two parties. Deals on AMIX combined a written component, like a traditional contract, and a self-executing component: once a buyer and seller agreed on a price for a service, payment would be carried out by software. If there was a dispute, it would be resolved by humans.

AMIX software ran on a central server, meaning the company or a government regulator could theoretically interfere with the execution of a sale. According to Morningstar and Miller, the potential for interference doesn’t undermine the purpose of the smart contract.

“A smart contract that trusts a third party removes the killer feature of trustlessness,” wrote Jimmy Song, a bitcoin maximalist and influential figure in the space, in his 2018 essay, “The Truth About Smart Contracts.” 

Song applies his critique to a popular crypto business model, which Miller has also written about: using smart contracts to trade physical assets, such as land. Countries like Sweden and Georgia have explored operating a land registry that uses blockchains and smart contracts. Szabo explored this idea in a 1998 paper that predated blockchains and bitcoin titled “Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority.“

Physical assets are traded with smart contracts through what’s called tokenization. A property is assigned a digital tag with a corresponding private key. A seller uses that key to transfer ownership to the buyer, much like a bitcoin transaction. The record of ownership is encoded into a blockchain, which is a type of shared public database, so all parties know that it hasn’t been corrupted.

“There is an intractable problem in linking a digital to a physical asset whether it be fruit, cars or houses,” Song wrote. It “suffers from the same trust problem as normal contracts” because “physical assets are regulated by the jurisdiction you happen to be in.”

So if a judge refuses to honor that tokenized transaction, or a conqueror shows up at the door with an army, the smart contract will have accomplished nothing. “Ownership of the token cannot have dependencies outside of the smart contracting platform,” wrote Song, who sees smart contracts as useful only in systems like bitcoin, where the digital token itself holds value.  

Miller offered a rebuttal to this argument in a lecture titled, “Computer Security as the Future of Law” in 1997, predating Song’s article by 21 years. He laid out a vision for a gradual takeover of the existing law by smart contracts. We live in a world where different systems of rules are layered on top of each other, he explained. When Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky played chess, they had to abide by the rules of the board, dictating, for example, that bishops can only move diagonally. They were simultaneously governed by another set of rules because the two men were “biological creatures…embedded in physics.” A Macintosh operating system is another example of a system that imposes a set of rules spelled out in software embedded in another set of rules—i.e., legal strictures, physics, and biology.

The rules on these different layers impact each other. For example, the physical world and the legal world have distinct sets of rules, but in legal disputes “physical possession has extraordinary influence in the actual outcome of the dispute, even if abstractly the law would have it otherwise.” If an object that belongs to you is in another person’s house, taking them to court to get possession of that object is rarely worth the hassle.

AMIX integrated computer-mediated contracts and human negotiated contracts. It’s true that humans, including government regulators, could override a transaction on AMIX, but for practical reasons that was unlikely to occur very often. Therefore, smart contracts on AMIX would have fulfilled their purpose in the vast majority of cases by reducing transaction costs with computer-mediated contracting.

Miller elaborated on this idea in a discussion of land registries in “The Digital Path: Smart Contracts and the Third World,” a 2003 paper that he co-wrote with Marc Stiegler. It acknowledges that a smart contracting system, “unlike government-based title transfer,” won’t be “backed by a coercive enforcement apparatus,” but the authors proposed various add ons to make it more likely that participants will “treat these titles as legitimate claims,” including a community rating system, and video contracting—an idea first proposed by Szabo—in which a conversation is recorded testifying to the validity of the arrangement in question. 

These tools don’t guarantee that governments will honor and enforce smart contracts, but there’s also a high cost to ignoring them. Szabo summed up this idea best in his 1998 paper: “While thugs can still take physical property by force, the continued existence of correct ownership records will remain a thorn in the side of usurping claimants.” 

Miller, Morningtar, and Tribble, who were involved with AMIX in the 1980s, have come together once again to try and make good on Salin’s vision. Miller and Tribble co-founded a startup called Agoric, which seeks to build a secure smart-contracting system that could serve as the backbone of a more decentralized internet, luring some high-level computer scientists away from comfortable jobs at the biggest software companies in Silicon Valley.

May passed away suddenly in 2018 at age 66. In the months leading up to his death, he was feeling disgusted with the proliferation of cryptocurrency conferences and regulated blockchain ventures. “I think Satoshi would barf,” he told CoinDesk. “Attempts to be ‘regulatory-friendly’ will likely kill the main uses for cryptocurrencies, which are NOT just ‘another form of PayPal or Visa.'” 

In May’s view, society still faced a “fork in the road…freedom vs. permissioned and centralized systems.” There are no grey areas.

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New Biden Email Obliterates Burisma ‘Debunking’ Over Fired Prosecutor; Giuliani Teases More Devastating Releases

New Biden Email Obliterates Burisma ‘Debunking’ Over Fired Prosecutor; Giuliani Teases More Devastating Releases

Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/16/2020 – 11:00

After footage emerged of Joe Biden bragging about withholding $1 billion in US loan guarantees unless the country’s chief prosecutor Victor Shokin was fired, the MSM scrambled to cover for the former Vice President – ‘debunking’ claims that Biden’s quid-pro-quo had anything to do with the fact that Shokin was investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company which hired Hunter Biden to sit on its board.

“The firing of Shokin was universally urged by Ukraine’s benefactors,” writes the Washington Post, citing former Ukrainian foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin. Yet, beyond hearsay, there’s zero evidence Shokin was corrupt.

Except that Shokin’s successor, Yiuri Lutsenko, said in a January 2019 deposition that Shokin is ‘honest,’ while Shokin says that Burisma founder Nikolay Zlochevsky hired Hunter Biden and his associate Devon Archer ‘to protect himself,’ according to the depositions which were released by the US State Department.

Now, a new email has emerged from Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden and Devon Archer laying out a series of “deliverables” he sought for the company, according to Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson.

Devon Archer (left) with Joe and Hunter Biden

In the Nov. 2, 2015 email, which has not been independently verified (though the Biden camp did not dispute their authenticity), Pozharskyi told Biden and Archer that he wanted “high-ranking U.S. officials to express their ‘positive opinion of Burisma.'”

“The scope of work should also include organization of a visit of a number of widely recognized and influential current and/or former US policy-makers to Ukraine in November,” wrote Pozharskyi, adding that the goal was to “bring positive signal/message and support on Nikolay’s issue to the Ukrainian top officials above with the ultimate purpose to close down for any cases/pursuits against Nikolay in Ukraine.“

Watch:

 More via the Daily Caller:

Pozharskyi was critiquing a consulting proposal from Blue Star Strategies, a Democratic public relations firm that eventually worked for Burisma.

Hunter Biden served on the board of directors of the Truman National Security Project with Blue Star Strategies co-owner Sally Painter.

The documents are purportedly from Hunter Biden’s computer.

Giuliani teases more to come

Meanwhile, in a Friday interview with Fox & Friends, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani – whose hands the Biden emails fell into after a Delaware computer shop owner said a man he believes to be Hunter Biden dropped off the laptop for repair in April, 2019 but never picked it up – teased much more to come.

In addition to devastating emails which reveal Hunter offering to introduce his father to a Burisma adviser, and that he made millions of dollars to make ‘introductions’ in China, the laptop contains several pictures of Biden smoking crack, as well as a purported sex tape. According to OANN‘s Chanel Rion, there are ‘underage obsessions’ which ‘makes Anthony Weiner’s down under selfie addiction look normal.’

More from American Thinker‘s Mark Anderson:

If just a quarter of what Rudy Giuliani alleges is true, the evidence contained on the laptop is, finally, the true smoking gun.  This isn’t some salacious accusations bundled by a hired spy relying on Russian disinformation and gossip.  It’s Hunter’s own laptop.  That fact alone could be an enormous blow to the Biden campaign.

Giuliani released bombshell after bombshell in a video released Wednesday evening after the media did their best to censor the N.Y. Post article — making the social media censorship even more damning to those who tried to hide it from the public.  Since receiving the copy of the hard drive, Giuliani has been poring through it, carefully documenting and preparing his prosecution.  What he says he found is the actual evidence of payments, the money-laundering scheme they used, “illegal money for bribes,” and how “some of that money from Ukraine … went to Joe Biden.”

Like a prosecutor laying out the case, Giuliani leads off the video with this: “In future days, you will see texts, emails, and photos that demonstrate crimes committed by the Biden crime family — in China (probably most of all), Russia, and several other countries.”

The use of “the Biden crime family” is no mere hyperbole.  Before Rudy Giuliani was “America’s Mayor,” he was one of America’s top prosecutors, which included bringing down mafia crime families.  And he has evidence — from Hunter — that implicates not only Hunter and Joe Biden, but also James (Joe’s brother) and Sara (James’s wife).  One set of payments from China went to a triad of Bidens: James, Hunter, and Sara.  Don’t worry, Giuliani says — you’re going to see it in the texts, not making it up.

The fact he was one of America’s top prosecutors makes the ending of the video even more damning: “I’ve been in this business a long time.  This is the biggest cover-up I have ever seen.  And it is the biggest government scandal, I’ve ever heard of.”

Getting back to the beginning, Giuliani continued his introduction, saying, “China has all of the photos that we have — which means [Hunter] is, really, a massive national security threat to the United States.  Since his father lies — about all of this — it’s an easy area of extortion.“

Believe it or not, it gets worse from there for Joe Biden.

Laying out the case further, Giuliani points right at the defendant, accusing Joe of “certainly [committing] a crime.  Because some of that money from Ukraine, illegal money for bribes, went to Joe Biden.”

Remember: these are all accusations after Giuliani has read through the emails, the texts, and the contents of the hard drive.  Unlike the Facebook/Twitter “fact-checker” minions, Giuliani has seen the evidence.

In one of the more damning statements, he says, “China has so many different transactions, it’s going to take a couple of days, if not a week, for us to sort all through them.  But we have them.  … And, basically, this is money that goes to Hunter Biden, James Biden, Sara Biden…and the Biden family.”

He also has evidence of how the money flowed — thanks to a text from Hunter Biden to his daughter, Naomi, that was found on the hard drive.  Giuliani says the text was discussing money, “but in it, [Hunter] makes a very big mistake.  He explains the distribution scheme that the Biden crime family has used for years.”

The text reads, “I love you all, but I don’t receive any respect.  And that’s fine, I guess.  Works for you apparently.  I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years.”

Giuliani interrupts his reading of the text to wonder why Hunter was paying for everything for the family.  Because, Giuliani speculates, Hunter was getting the money, and they were keeping it, from Joe, so he wouldn’t have to report it.  But he paid, for example, for his half-sister’s entire college education.

Giuliani then returns to the text for the coup de grâce: “It’s really hard.  But don’t worry unlike Pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.”

“Pop” is Hunter’s name for his dad, Joe Biden.

All of this is really just Rudy’s opening statement.  If the evidence about to be rolled out is even remotely on par with his opening statement, it will be beyond explosive, given the source: Hunter’s own laptop.

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How Will Bitcoin Lead to More Freedom?

Salin and May

Katie Haun has one of bitcoin’s most improbable conversion stories. As an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, she prosecuted the two corrupt federal agents working the Silk Road case and created the federal government’s first cryptocurrency task force. “I’m the prosecutor who helped put some of the earliest bitcoin criminals in jail,” she boasted in a 2018 speech. 

But while learning about bitcoin as a crime fighter, it dawned on her “how profoundly this technology could change how we do all sorts of things.” Haun is now a general partner at the venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, where she co-leads its crypto funds with over $350 million raised since 2018. The firm is betting on blockchain as a new computing platform that will, among other things, create a decentralized financial system and fulfill the web’s original promise as an open network controlled by its users. 

Blockchain computing “feels like the early days of the internet, web 2.0, or smartphones all over again,” according to a16z’s crypto thesis. Haun also sits on the board of the nonprofit organization overseeing Facebook’s cryptocurrency project Libra. At a 2019 congressional hearing, David Marcus, head of the company’s blockchain group, assured lawmakers, “Let me be clear and unambiguous: Facebook will not offer the Libra digital currency until we have fully addressed regulators’ concerns and received appropriate approvals.”

In their embrace of regulation, Haun and Marcus are at one extreme of the cryptocurrency community; on the other end, are the so-called bitcoin maximalists who have a name for projects like Libra: “shitcoin.”

“I would not be interested in bitcoin if governments didn’t want to ban it,” the software developer Pierre Rochard tweeted in 2017.

In a December 2019 essay titled “Cryptocurrency Is Most Useful for Breaking Laws and Social Constructs, Open Money Initiative Founder Jill Carlson wrote that cryptocurrency wasn’t designed to solve “mainstream problems.” It’s a tool used by “freedom fighters and terrorists, by journalists and dissidents, by scammers and black market dealers,” by “sex workers” or people “procuring drugs on the internet”—the type of person Katie Haun once worked to put in jail. Bitcoin maximalists, like Rochard, believe that governments will eventually attempt to ban bitcoin because it’s destined to replace fiat money, which will, among other things, eliminate their power to print money to finance the welfare-warfare state.

The divide over whether this technology is a tool for changing society by working within the system or by disrupting it from the outside predates the invention of bitcoin by a few decades. It traces back to a 1987 debate between the physicist Timothy C. May and the economist and entrepreneur Phil Salin, two early internet visionaries, whose difference of opinion laid the groundwork for the “cypherpunk” movement—a community of computer scientists, mathematicians, hackers, and avid science fiction readers whose work and writings influenced the creation of bitcoin, WikiLeaks, Tor, BitTorrent, and more. (Reason is publishing a four-part documentary series on the cypherpunk movement. The first two installments are available here and here.)

The bitcoin maximalists often use the “shitcoin” moniker to refer to cryptocurrency projects that are outright scams, technologically flawed, or cheap imitations of Satoshi  Nakamoto’s invention, when in reality the world only needs one currency. Bitcoin, they maintain, is best understood as sound money, and Silicon Valley’s infatuation with “blockchain technology” is “a great example of ‘cargo cult science,'” as the economist Saifedean Ammous wrote in The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking.

But the community’s divide is also partly rooted in a disagreement over whether cryptocurrency is essentially a technology of resistance that derives value from being impervious to government interference and control, or whether it’s a tool for transforming society from within, in which case government regulation won’t sink the entire enterprise. A careful look at the debate that started with May and Salin in the 1980s helps us understand the best arguments of both sides.

BlackNet: ‘A Technological Means of Undermining all Governments’

In 1987, before the launch of the World Wide Web, May and Salin were part of a small community of West Coast science fiction–obsessed technologists mulling the implications of a decentralized, global information network running on personal computers. It was clear to May and Salin that the internet would remake the world, but they disagreed on what kind of software would serve as the linchpin.

Salin saw technology as a way to gradually drive down the transaction costs that impede human activity, making it feasible to interact in ways that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. “I’m interested in how to lower costs,” Salin told Reason in 1984. “The Austrian [School of Economics] insight is that any industry run as a planned economy for any time should be fertile ground for an entrepreneur.”

In 1986, he started the American Information Exchange, or AMIX, one of the first e-commerce startups. Salin, whose intellectual hero was the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, envisioned AMIX as a global marketplace for the buying and selling of local expertise that would enhance human cooperation and gradually replace central planning.

In a 1991 essay, Salin envisioned a “fluid, transaction-oriented market system, with two-way feedback” that could result in “crowding out monolithic, mostly government bureaucracies.” The same language could be applied to many projects in the modern cryptocurrency space. Facebook’s Libra, for example, promises to use blockchain technology to move money around the world in a manner that’s “as easy and cost-effective” as “sending a message or sharing a photo.” The project’s backers maintain that enabling “frictionless payments” for the 1.7 billion people around the world without access to banking will do wonders for alleviating poverty. Those frictions are mostly created by government regulation; what’s implicit in Facebook’s pitch is that those rules will be gradually crowded out, though not overthrown.

After being introduced to Salin by his friend Chip Morningstar, a computer scientist, in December 1987, May drove out to Redwood City, California to meet Salin and hear his pitch for AMIX. He grasped the idea immediately, but it bored him. “People aren’t going to be selling meaningless stuff, like surfboard recommendations,” May recalled telling Salin.

May didn’t think AMIX was a scam, like many modern cryptocurrency ventures that earn that descriptor shitcoin. But he was interested in upending society and didn’t see how AMIX would have much of an impact. 

May suggested to Salin that he reconceive of the project as an anonymous platform for selling company trade secrets, “such as plans for that B-1 Bomber or a process for a technology.” In a thought experiment, May later called his idea “BlackNet,” writing in a pretend advertisement for the service that it would turn “nation-states, export laws, patent laws, national security considerations and the like” into “relics of the pre-cyberspace era.”

In a series of personal notes following his meeting with Salin, which May shared with Reason prior to his death in 2018, he mused that BlackNet was a “technological means of undermining all governments.” Though some might say that “‘it won’t be allowed to happen’ technology would ‘probably make it inevitable,'” he wrote.

May’s ideas about BlackNet evolved over the years. In 1986, a friend had given him a photocopy of Vernor Vinge’s 1981 novella True Names, in which hackers inhabit a virtual world called the “Other Plane” where the government can’t decipher their real identities. It had a big impact on May, who melded the “Other Plane” with “Galt’s Gulch” from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which was a safe haven for rational and productive people protected from government coercion and taxation by an invisible shield. Instead of the Colorado mountains, May’s cyberspace Galt’s Gulch would exist on the internet, with cryptography providing protective cover.

“Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure,” May wrote in his 1988 manifesto, “so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions.”

Bitcoin isn’t BlackNet or a Galt’s Gulch in Cyberspace—it’s a decentralized form of non-governmental money. But it’s designed to be impervious to outside tampering so that the government can’t destroy it or undermine its value, and is roughly in keeping with May’s vision of an unstoppable technology. “The nature of sound money…lies precisely in the fact that no human is able to control it,” Ammous wrote in The Bitcoin Standard. Bitcoin “exist[s] orthogonally to the law; there is virtually nothing that any government authority can do to affect or alter [its] operation.”

The American Information Exchange: Exploiting the ‘Grey Areas’ 

The computer scientist E. Dean Tribble, who worked with Salin at AMIX, calls May “the shock jock” of the cypherpunk movement. “BlackNet is not a goal,” he says. “BlackNet is a negative consequence.”

Morningstar, the pioneering computer scientist who Salin hired to oversee the building of AMIX, recalls his boss’s skepticism of May’s ideas about escaping “the strictures and dysfunction of the mainstream-governed world.” The establishment “has had a long history of confronting new challenges and somehow having its way.”

Salin died of cancer in 1991 at age 41. His friend and colleague Mark S. Miller, a computer scientist, would flesh out the case that technology impacts society by gradually transforming it from within. Miller drew an analogy to a genetic takeover in biology, in which an alternate way of doing things slowly takes the place of an existing paradigm. 

Projects like AMIX, which was centrally controlled by a company, didn’t need to be completely “incorruptible” to have an impact because of all the grey areas where regulation doesn’t apply. Permissionless innovation pushes society in the direction of more freedom and decentralization. For example, “when people started doing credit card transactions over the internet, nobody knew if it was legal,” Miller tells Reason, “but they just started doing it.” 

Miller doesn’t consider Libra to be a worthless project despite Marcus’ commitment to cooperate with regulators. Once it starts operating, Miller says, there could still be experimentation happening “at the margins.” There could also be gateways to “trading between Libra and something permissionless,” which would help expand the cryptocurrency space.

Miller’s writings have often focused on how rules baked into computer code could replace aspects of the legal system. Along with K. Eric Drexler, the father of nanotechnology, he co-authored a series of papers applying economic insights to software design, which influenced the work of the computer scientist, legal scholar, and early cypherpunk Nick Szabo.

It was Szabo who coined the term “smart contracts“—self-executing arrangements written in code, and a common feature in today’s cryptocurrency projects. Szabo analogized his concept to a vending machine: A buyer drops in a coin and a machine provides the candy bar. “The fundamental logic here is automating ‘if-this-then-that’ on a self-executing basis with finality,” Szabo wrote. He also offered the example of a smart contract for auto repossession: “If the owner fails to make payments, the smart contract invokes the lien protocol, which returns control of the car keys to the bank.” 

A divide in the community over the definition of a smart contract also relates back to Salin’s debate with May. Do smart contracts have to be shielded from third-party interference to be worthy of the name? What if a government regulator has the power to stick a hand into the metaphorical vending machine to stop the candy bar from dropping into the slot? Does that undermine the purpose of smart contracts?

Miller and Morningstar consider AMIX to be “possibly the first smart-contracting system ever created” because it used software to mediate transactions between two parties. Deals on AMIX combined a written component, like a traditional contract, and a self-executing component: once a buyer and seller agreed on a price for a service, payment would be carried out by software. If there was a dispute, it would be resolved by humans.

AMIX software ran on a central server, meaning the company or a government regulator could theoretically interfere with the execution of a sale. According to Morningstar and Miller, the potential for interference doesn’t undermine the purpose of the smart contract.

“A smart contract that trusts a third party removes the killer feature of trustlessness,” wrote Jimmy Song, a bitcoin maximalist and influential figure in the space, in his 2018 essay, “The Truth About Smart Contracts.” 

Song applies his critique to a popular crypto business model, which Miller has also written about: using smart contracts to trade physical assets, such as land. Countries like Sweden and Georgia have explored operating a land registry that uses blockchains and smart contracts. Szabo explored this idea in a 1998 paper that predated blockchains and bitcoin titled “Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority.“

Physical assets are traded with smart contracts through what’s called tokenization. A property is assigned a digital tag with a corresponding private key. A seller uses that key to transfer ownership to the buyer, much like a bitcoin transaction. The record of ownership is encoded into a blockchain, which is a type of shared public database, so all parties know that it hasn’t been corrupted.

“There is an intractable problem in linking a digital to a physical asset whether it be fruit, cars or houses,” Song wrote. It “suffers from the same trust problem as normal contracts” because “physical assets are regulated by the jurisdiction you happen to be in.”

So if a judge refuses to honor that tokenized transaction, or a conqueror shows up at the door with an army, the smart contract will have accomplished nothing. “Ownership of the token cannot have dependencies outside of the smart contracting platform,” wrote Song, who sees smart contracts as useful only in systems like bitcoin, where the digital token itself holds value.  

Miller offered a rebuttal to this argument in a lecture titled, “Computer Security as the Future of Law” in 1997, predating Song’s article by 21 years. He laid out a vision for a gradual takeover of the existing law by smart contracts. We live in a world where different systems of rules are layered on top of each other, he explained. When Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky played chess, they had to abide by the rules of the board, dictating, for example, that bishops can only move diagonally. They were simultaneously governed by another set of rules because the two men were “biological creatures…embedded in physics.” A Macintosh operating system is another example of a system that imposes a set of rules spelled out in software embedded in another set of rules—i.e., legal strictures, physics, and biology.

The rules on these different layers impact each other. For example, the physical world and the legal world have distinct sets of rules, but in legal disputes “physical possession has extraordinary influence in the actual outcome of the dispute, even if abstractly the law would have it otherwise.” If an object that belongs to you is in another person’s house, taking them to court to get possession of that object is rarely worth the hassle.

AMIX integrated computer-mediated contracts and human negotiated contracts. It’s true that humans, including government regulators, could override a transaction on AMIX, but for practical reasons that was unlikely to occur very often. Therefore, smart contracts on AMIX would have fulfilled their purpose in the vast majority of cases by reducing transaction costs with computer-mediated contracting.

Miller elaborated on this idea in a discussion of land registries in “The Digital Path: Smart Contracts and the Third World,” a 2003 paper that he co-wrote with Marc Stiegler. It acknowledges that a smart contracting system, “unlike government-based title transfer,” won’t be “backed by a coercive enforcement apparatus,” but the authors proposed various add ons to make it more likely that participants will “treat these titles as legitimate claims,” including a community rating system, and video contracting—an idea first proposed by Szabo—in which a conversation is recorded testifying to the validity of the arrangement in question. 

These tools don’t guarantee that governments will honor and enforce smart contracts, but there’s also a high cost to ignoring them. Szabo summed up this idea best in his 1998 paper: “While thugs can still take physical property by force, the continued existence of correct ownership records will remain a thorn in the side of usurping claimants.” 

Miller, Morningtar, and Tribble, who were involved with AMIX in the 1980s, have come together once again to try and make good on Salin’s vision. Miller and Tribble co-founded a startup called Agoric, which seeks to build a secure smart-contracting system that could serve as the backbone of a more decentralized internet, luring some high-level computer scientists away from comfortable jobs at the biggest software companies in Silicon Valley.

May passed away suddenly in 2018 at age 66. In the months leading up to his death, he was feeling disgusted with the proliferation of cryptocurrency conferences and regulated blockchain ventures. “I think Satoshi would barf,” he told CoinDesk. “Attempts to be ‘regulatory-friendly’ will likely kill the main uses for cryptocurrencies, which are NOT just ‘another form of PayPal or Visa.'” 

In May’s view, society still faced a “fork in the road…freedom vs. permissioned and centralized systems.” There are no grey areas.

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Upcoming Virtual Harvard Kennedy School of Government Event on My Book “Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom”

Free to Move—Final Cover

On October 22, 4-5:30 PM eastern time, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government will be hosting me for a virtual talk about my new book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. The event is free and open to the public. You don’t have to have any Harvard connection to participate. Anyone interested can register here.

In addition to my talk, there will be commentary by Harvard economics Professor Edward Glaeser, one of the world’s leading experts on urban development and interjurisdictional mobility. It is an honor to take part in this event with him!

This presentation is co-sponsored by the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.

The Introduction to my book, which provides an overview of the rest, is available for free download here. I have pledged to donate 50% of all royalties from the book to charities supporting refugees.

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Upcoming Virtual Harvard Kennedy School of Government Event on My Book “Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom”

Free to Move—Final Cover

On October 22, 4-5:30 PM eastern time, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government will be hosting me for a virtual talk about my new book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. The event is free and open to the public. You don’t have to have any Harvard connection to participate. Anyone interested can register here.

In addition to my talk, there will be commentary by Harvard economics Professor Edward Glaeser, one of the world’s leading experts on urban development and interjurisdictional mobility. It is an honor to take part in this event with him!

This presentation is co-sponsored by the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.

The Introduction to my book, which provides an overview of the rest, is available for free download here. I have pledged to donate 50% of all royalties from the book to charities supporting refugees.

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Tesla’s “Gigafactory” In Berlin Just Had The Water Shut Off For Not Paying The Bill

Tesla’s “Gigafactory” In Berlin Just Had The Water Shut Off For Not Paying The Bill

Tyler Durden

Fri, 10/16/2020 – 10:40

While Elon Musk was busy making high school style “420” and “69” jokes on Twitter, the water at his $400 billion company’s latest project – the construction of a Gigafactory in Berlin, Germany – was being turned off for non-payment.

It’s likely a wonderful glance into what the priority structure looks like at Tesla.

There are multiple reports coming out of Germany that Tesla had to stop their construction as a result of the water being turned off, according to electrek.

One German publication, Heise said: “Tesla is temporarily unable to continue building its factory in Grünheide near Berlin. The Strausberg-Erkner water association turned off the water because Tesla did not pay the money, said association spokeswoman Sandra Ponesky on Thursday in Strausberg.”

The company also said it sent Tesla “several warnings” but that the company didn’t respond until the water was actually turned off. A spokesperson for the water company told AP: “The 14-day notice period has expired. We can’t treat Tesla any differently than other customers.”

“Dude, you paid the water bill this month, right?”

“Locals initially expressed concern about water management at the project when it was first announced,” electrek wrote this week. Tesla had to change its water consumption plan as a result. 

Back in January 2020 we highlighted that Elon Musk was going to war with German Environmentalists about the building of the new Gigafactory. Thousands of trees needed to be cut down in order to make space for Tesla’s new building. Nothing like saving the planet by leveling a couple of forests, right Elon?

The building is slated to start production in July 2021 and is working on a tight schedule. Tesla has said it’ll be producing its new battery cell on site, and that this battery will be used to produce the European Model Y. 

Electrek said of the water being turned off: “That’s not surprising for Tesla at this point, and it highlights one of the company’s biggest problems: communications. Obviously, it’s not a money problem.”

Of course is isn’t. Right?

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