If you owned a share of an experimental technology, how much of it would you give up to help that technology grow? Startup founders do this calculus whenever they raise capital. Ten years ago today, a developer named Laszlo Hanyecz did it with bitcoin. Hanyecz is known as the first person to use bitcoin in a commercial transaction. On May 22, 2010, when bitcoin was a little over a year old, he bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. The day is now known as “Bitcoin Pizza Day.” With one bitcoin now worth $9,500, this is apparently a joke and Hanyecz’s $45 million pizzas are the punchline. The joke is also a parable, illustrating the competition and interplay between three potential uses of bitcoin. The first is speculation. Bitcoin’s nosebleed-inducing decade of upward price movement is what driv...

Binance is trying its hand at decentralized stablecoin governance. The exchange joined the distributed oversight team that approves contracts and code changes on Equilibrium, a DeFi outfit behind the EOSDT stablecoin. EOSDT contracts hold nearly $10 million in collateral according to the Equilibrium website. Announced Friday, Binance now has oversight power over new EOSDT smart contracts. As a party to Equilibrium’s multisignature hierarchy, Binance will grant – or conceivably withhold – its approval to all contracts prior to release. That authority had been exclusive to block producers EOS Nation and EOS Cannon. Now, it also includes Binance and fellow newcomer eosfinex, the decentralized exchange developed by Bitfinex. “You can also consider it as establishing a four-eyes principle for E...

The Louisiana State Senate is about to consider a bill to regulate and license virtual currency businesses. Sponsored by state Rep. Mark Wright (R-77), HB701 sailed through the state House of Representatives with unanimous approval, and is being referred to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Consumer Protection and International Affairs. If passed, the legislation would establish Louisiana’s first crypto licensing regime. Crypto businesses would have to apply with the state’s Office of Financial Institutions (OFI), fork over executives’ fingerprints, subject their “experience, character and general fitness” to investigation – and perhaps the business premises as well – and pay a nonrefundable registration fee, among other requirements. Registrants licensed by states with comparable regimes ...

How the myth-making around Satoshi reinforces what makes bitcoin unique in the landscape of global monies. On Wednesday, a batch of coins mined just a month after bitcoin’s birth were moved. It was the first time since August 2017 that any bitcoin from early 2009 had been transferred, and the action set Bitcoin Twitter on fire. While a number of bitcoin archaeologists quickly and persuasively argued the tokens were almost assuredly not mined by bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, it was a moment that reinforced the living history in the bitcoin ecosystem.  In this episode, NLW looks at what makes the Satoshi mythology powerful:  And while the battles within the bitcoin community around interpretation may look more like the early history of religions than like a business ecosystem, NLW argues...