News 'Diet'Laszlo Hanyecz has the honor of conducting the first commercial Bitcoin transaction: trading 10,000 bitcoin for about $30 worth of pizza. Ten years later, those bitcoin would be worth $91 million. He apparently has no regrets. “It was a really interesting system but nobody’s using it,” Hanyecz said. “If nobody’s using it, it doesn’t matter if I have it all.”  You’re reading Blockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why they’re significant. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here. Blockchain Bites will publish next on Tuesday, May 26. Happy Memorial Day to our U.S. readers. This one transaction, conducted about a year after Bitcoin’s inception, was the proof-of-concept necessary for a whole emergent...

A headline in MIT Technology Review caught my attention this week: “The pandemic is emptying call centers. AI chatbots are swooping in.” COVID-19’s perfect storm – a global public health crisis, an economic meltdown and a surge in online connectivity – could accelerate what World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In creating imperatives for both cost-cutting and software-dependent innovation, the pandemic is bringing us closer to an economy dominated by integrated networks of digital devices. This raises all sorts of vital questions. But here we’ll just drill down into one: what kind of money will this new society need?  It’s likely that long-term unemployment will be a defining condition of this emerging machine-dominant economy. We’re not just ta...

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Jill Carlson, a CoinDesk columnist, is co-founder of the Open Money Initiative, a non-profit research organization working to guarantee the right to a free and open financial system. She is also an investor in early-stage startups with Slow Ventures. Have you ever been to a place where time had a different quality? Maybe you grew up in a rural area of the Midwest and upon moving to New York were struck, like many before you, by its whirlwind cadence. Maybe you grew up in a bustling capital city but, upon visiting a coastal seaside town, you fell in love with the slower, sleepier pace of life. I have spent most of my life residing in places where time moves pretty quickly, kept ticking along by semesters, quarters, deadlines, bills to pay, money to make and errands to run. When traveling, I...

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