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, […]
Paris Blockchain Week Read More »
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
Consensus Hong Kong – 2025 Read More »
Let me make the case for the least thrilling thing in crypto. Most stories in this industry arrive dressed as revolutions. Tear down the banks, storm the citadel, replace the whole rotten edifice with something pure and mathematical. XRP’s story is not that story. XRP’s story is a plumber. It has no interest whatsoever in
XRP: The Boring One That Might Actually Win Read More »
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
The case for Bitcoin Read More »
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
Bitcoin: The Money Nobody Controls Read More »
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
DeFi: The Financial System With No Head Office Read More »
There is something nobody prepares you for when you leave a long career. Not the paperwork. Not the practicalities. Not even the identity crisis, though that arrives reliably enough, usually around week three, when the novelty wears thin, and the silence gets loud. What nobody prepares you for is the temptation to — go back.
Twenty-Four Years. Then One Decision – Part 4 Read More »
When the offer came, I was not entirely sure what I expected to feel. Shock, perhaps. Anger. That particular sting of being told a role you have given years of your life to is no longer required — the small, undignified indignation of it. What I actually felt, sitting at the kitchen table with that
Twenty-Four Years. Then One Decision – Part 3 Read More »
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,
The Blockchain Series – Part 4 Read More »
