…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.
The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
-Jorge Luis Borges.
Month: March 2015
Eris: in plain English
A plain-English explanation of Eris at the Tomorrow’s Transactions forum in London a few weeks back.
A dark knight is better than no knight at all
Great piece by Brett Scott:
Thus we find Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs brimming with optimistic expectations of disruption and future success, proclaiming the word of blockchain rebellion as a universal tool of empowerment for all, contrasting themselves to the parasitic Wall Street banker. The critical observer, though, might just take a step back, and conclude that this is really just one group of elites fighting another group of elites for control of the ramparts of power, both invoking the interests of Average Joe in the process.
Read the whole thing.
Doing the Consult Hyperion FinTech podcast
Listen to the whole thing here.
A Bitcoin IPO such as Coinbase could trigger mainstream merchant adoption
Nothing about a Bitcoin industry IPO would make Bitcoin work any less badly than it currently does.