It was a dark and smoky night this past Tuesday in San Francisco. The fires of Northern California had blanketed the tech mecca with some of the worst air quality in the world. The streets were empty and the town had a surreal cyberpunk post-apocalyptic feel, but that didn’t stop Boost VC’s Adam Draper from partaking in an epic “AMA” (“ask me anything”) with the Crypto Underground. Down a dimly lit alley, in the basement of a coworking space, dozens of blockchain founders gathered to hear insights from one of Bitcoin’s biggest proponents. Draper, who was an early investor in Coinbase, talked about how its co-founder Brian Armstrong introduced him…
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Crypto’s superhero fixation has a dark side
Is plutocracy a bug or a feature?
“The technologies that we are creating today will literally give us super powers,” Adam Draper told a trendily dark, shockingly empty, incredibly large conference room in the Aria Resort in Las Vegas, where World Crypto Con 2018 was being held. It was before 11 a.m. on a Thursday, and Adam was standing on stage alongside his father, the well-known venture capitalist Tim Draper (who himself is the son and grandson of venture capitalists). “We’ll probably live 200 years and I don’t know, will get from one place to another just by thinking about it,” the younger Draper enthused. “And think about like, how people from 50 years ago, if they…
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Wade Love proves that a skill learned in college can be used later in life. In this case, that skill was chugging beer (photo by Brendan Sullivan for Modern Consensus)Guy chugs beer and wins a $6,000 crypto mining computer
The party has everything: billionaires on Skype, people tearing up money, and look over there—is that a contest to win a miner?
The floor of the penthouse at Hotel on Rivington is littered beer foam and torn U.S. dollar bills. Max Keiser, the colorful commentator for RT—the Russian government’s mainstream propaganda cable network—tore the bills during his keynote speech while making a point about fiat money being worthless. This is the end of blockchain’s big Consensus conference. The consensus on Consensus is that blockchain technology will transform the world. But tonight it will transform the future prospects of one partygoer who won a $6,000 mining rig for chugging a beer. The opulent party was one of the few events listed during Consensus that was open to the public. One of the great…
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ABC's John Donvan and the winning side of the debate (FT's Gillian Tett and University of Chicago's Eric Posner) at The Manhattan Institute’s Adam Smith Society's national meeting (Photo by Brendan Sullivan for Modern Consensus).How a group of pro-free market types lost their faith in bitcoin in just an hour
Two bitcoin millionaires lose a debate with an editor and a law professor
A lively afternoon debate of some of the top minds in business, finance, technology, and law left its hitherto bitcoin-friendly audience with some serious FUD: fear, uncertainty, doubt. The Manhattan Institute’s Adam Smith Society—a group of free market-advocating MBA students and business people—hosted the lively debate Saturday with Intelligence Squared U.S. at its national meeting. The proposition, “Bitcoin is more than a bubble and here to stay,” was supported by legendary venture capitalist Tim Draper and Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. On the opposition side was Financial Times U.S. managing editor Gillian Tett and University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner. Going into the discussion, a slim plurality (39 percent) of…
