On February 2, Modern Consensus broke the story that mobile pay startup Circle would be acquiring Poloniex. It was a big scoop, the kind that can put an upstart publication like Modern Consensus on the map. Twitter immediately lit up with talk of the deal and questions about how our little publication had broken such an important story. Predictably, some of that speculation immediately turned first to skepticism and then to outright insults. Ari Paul, the CIO of Block Tower Capital, first tweeted the story to his 95,000 followers. And then he immediately posted a cloying, virtue-signaling apology: I just posted a link to an article asserting that Circle was acquiring Poloniex. Someone helpfully…
-
-
Salon CEO talks to Modern Consensus about turning readers into crypto miners
Does this latest effort by the progressive site reveal a tough media market or is it a gimmick?
As reported Tuesday, Salon is now mining cryptocurrencies in browsers of visitors as an alternative to seeing ads. Does this latest effort by the 23-year-old progressive site reveal the tough market media companies find themselves or is it a gimmick by a small-cap company looking to lure investors with cryptocurrency cred? Modern Consensus spoke with Salon CEO Jordan Hoffner. He doesn’t have the easiest job in media. The company Hoffner has been running for the past couple of years is overshadowed by its own past as it struggles to shine. When it went public in June 1999, Salon raised $25 million and was valued at $107 million. That IPO shook up…
-
Opinion: Bitcoin’s environmental woes may not be so bad after all
Bitcoin gets a lot of heat over a lot of heat
People who are usually up in arms about stuff are up in arms over bitcoin. Specifically, over the huge amount of energy used to process transactions and keep the blockchain going. In early December, environmental news site The Grist published a story by Eric Holthaus. “Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future,” warns the headline which also infers there’s some kind of a clean-energy future to begin with. Paragraph after paragraph paints a grim image of the years to come, where bitcoin miners will guzzle more energy than evil capitalist America by next year and then suck the entire planet’s energy the year after like space aliens or something. The…
