May 27–29, 2025 · The Venetian, Las Vegas Let me tell you my favourite fact in all of finance, and I promise you need to know absolutely nothing about computers to enjoy it. When Bitcoin’s mysterious inventor switched the thing on in January 2009, he tucked a little message into its very first entry — […]
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Spring 2025 · Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai I want you to picture the scene, because I do not think I could invent it. Fifteen thousand people, seventy per cent of them chief-something-or-others, gathered on the Dubai coastline to discuss the future of global finance — and the official programme offered them ziplines, a climbing wall, cold
April 8–10, 2025 · Carrousel du Louvre, Paris Consider the geography for a moment, because nobody involved seems to have noticed how funny it is. Some ten thousand people gathered to debate the future of money in the Carrousel du Louvre — which is, to be precise about it, a shopping centre in a basement,
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February 18–21, 2026 · National Western Centre, Denver The mascot is a buffalo crossed with a unicorn. It is called the Bufficorn, and nobody involved appears remotely embarrassed about this. Tickets to the world’s largest Ethereum gathering are free; there is an official event called the Finality Party, and among the speakers you will find
February 18–20, 2025 · Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre Here is a fact I find quite astonishing, and it is the key to this entire event. Trading cryptocurrency is banned on the Chinese mainland. It is licensed, regulated and actively courted in Hong Kong — a city that is part of China. Somewhere in
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This is the question everybody is actually asking, usually somewhere around the second glass of wine, and it deserves a proper answer rather than a hedge dressed up as balance. Can I tell you what it cost me to learn this? For years, I wanted somebody — anybody, ideally somebody clever and expensive to tell
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Bitcoin has been declared dead more than four hundred times, by one popular tally that gleefully keeps count. It has made early believers extraordinarily rich and late arrivals considerably poorer. It has been banned, ridiculed, celebrated, and then quietly bought by the very institutions that spent a decade sneering at it. So what on earth
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Let me start with a confession. “Decentralised finance” is one of those phrases flung about constantly and explained clearly rarely. It sounds important. It sounds technical. And a great many of the people nodding along to it in conversation are doing precisely that — nodding along. I was one of them for an embarrassingly long
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Part 4 of 4 — what blockchain is genuinely good for, and what it is not. Here is the part nobody leads with, because it doesn’t sell tickets. Blockchain is slow. It is expensive. It is fragmented into hundreds of chains that cannot speak to one another. Seventeen years after the first block was mined,
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Part 3 of 4 — when the ledger stops recording and starts doing. Bitcoin proved that a shared ledger could record who paid whom without a soul in the middle vouching for any of it. Which is a marvellous achievement, and also — if you and I are going to be honest with one another
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