• Politics,  Regulation

    FTX CEO Comes After SBF Parents

    Bankman and Fried sued by John Ray for alleged lavish treatment

    There’s a Rodney Dangerfield joke, “My high school was tough. After they sacked the quarterback, they went after his family.” We’re now seeing a little bit of that toughness directed at Bankman, Fried and Bankman-Fried family members. Over the weekend, a BusinessWeek cover story ran with the headline “How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Elite Parents Enabled His Crypto Empire.” The story itself was not so bad and there’s no smoking gun — it’s 5,000 words of high-powered parents advising their privileged son. Hardly surprising to anyone who’s followed this case or knew of his parents, whom BusinessWeek says, “both renowned Stanford scholars, [they] opened doors for their son and provided a halo effect…

  • AI,  Healthcare,  Security

    Revolutionizing Healthcare with Blockchain and AI

    How companies are ensuring privacy, transparency and efficiency in critical areas

    Part two of this series exploring the growing intersections of blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) illustrated how this combination is  transforming the blockchain ecosystem. The convergence is growing across a number of industries, and healthcare is a prime example. It’s also a fast-growing one. According to Morgan Stanley, the industry’s average estimated budget allocation to AI is projected to grow from 5.7% in 2022 to 10.5% in 2024. Similarly, blockchain’s market size in healthcare was valued at $1.97 billion in 2022 and is expected to expand at an eye-popping CAGR of 68% from 2023 to 2030. These growth predictions are unsurprising since, used properly, blockchain and AI can be excellent…

  • Regulation,  United States

    What Gensler role in Long Term Capital Debacle Tells us about his war on crypto

    25th anniversary occasions a look at SEC chair’s small part

    This is the 25th anniversary of the September 1998 collapse of Long-Term Capital Management. That was one of the most stunning events in Wall Street history, as the firm allowed its leverage to grow to more than 100 to 1. But it was shocking beyond the sudden evaporation of $4 billion in value—that was a lot of money 25 years ago— but also because the firm had been put together specifically on the basis of its supposed genius for understanding and managing risk. The firm was dominated not by great traders but by intellectual supermen, including Robert Merton and Myron Scholes. Merton and Scholes had won the Nobel prize just…

  • Bitcoin,  Security,  Technology

    Could Quantum Computing Mean the Death of Crypto?

    Interest is growing in cryptography resilient to quantum attacks

    Contained in the bizarre world of quantum mechanics—where physical matter has properties of both particles and waves, and subatomic particles exist in multiple states at one time until observed—may lie the key to unparalleled computational speed. While still highly experimental, governments have been investing in research into “quantum computing” for years, and a recent article in Wired notes that last year venture capitalists “plowed a record $1.8 billion into companies working on quantum computing hardware or software worldwide…nearly five times the amount invested in 2019.” Whereas the basic unit of information in traditional digital electronics is the bit (a logical state with two possible values, typically expressed as 0 and…