I was about to wrap up for the night when I decided to take another look at some smart contracts.
I wasn’t expecting anything interesting, of course. Over the past few weeks I had seen countless yield farming clones launch with the exact same pitch: stake your tokens with us and you could be the next cryptocurrency millionaire. Most were simply forks of well-audited code although some tweaked bits and pieces, sometimes with catastrophic results.
Stefan Thomas has just two chances left to get his hands on his $240m (£175m) fortune.
Thomas is a San Francisco-based computer programmer, and a decade ago he was given 7,002 bitcoins as a reward for making a video explaining how the cryptocurrency works.
The bitcoin and cryptocurrency community has been set alight by news payments giant PayPal PYPL+0.6% will allow its 346 million users buy and spend bitcoin and a handful of other major cryptocurrencies.
A loan from strangers that doesn’t require the user to sacrifice any of their own money? It’s possible, on one condition: individuals must repay the lender in the same transaction that issued the funds. That sounds strange, doesn’t it? What can you do with a loan that needs to be paid back seconds later?
LAGOS/LONDON: Four months ago, Abolaji Odunjo made a fundamental change to his business selling mobile phones in a bustling street market in Lagos: He started paying his suppliers in bitcoin.
Uniswap is a set of computer programs that run on the Ethereum blockchain and allow for decentralized token swaps. It works with the help of unicorns (as illustrated by their logo).
Traders can exchange Ethereum tokens on Uniswap without having to trust anyone with their funds. Meanwhile, anyone can lend their crypto to special reserves called liquidity pools. In exchange for providing money to these pools, they earn fees.
If ever there were a business with dark clouds on the horizon, it should be printing paper currency, otherwise known as banknotes. In the United States the production of bills falls upon the U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing, but for much of the rest of the world— from Armenia and Peru to Thailand and Swaziland, money is actually printed by a handful of companies, dominant among them, Munich, Germany’s Giesecke & Devrient.
If it weren’t for horses, Joey Krug might not have ever gotten into ethereum. Growing up in the small farming town of Knoxville, Illinois, he and his younger brother used to ride their bikes through fields of corn and soybeans looking for trouble. One day, when he was about 9 years old, Krug came across the farm of a local school teacher, who raised and rode horses. He instantly fell in love with the powerful creatures, and pedaled home as fast as he could to ask his parents for one.
