Opinion

Three unprecedented things happened with Brexit this week: Prime Minister Theresa May capitulated fully on Britain's financial settlements with the EU, amounting to around £40bn. Brexit Secretary David Davis failed to produce any impact assessments, telling the select committee that the Brexit impact assessments didn't exist, even though he had talked about them at great length. What parliament got was a couple of hastily thrown together ring binders of Wikipedia. However the Conservative-dominated select committee decided this was not a contempt of parliament. An agreement was drawn up between the UK and the EU on the exit process, satisfying the EU that trade talks could proceed. Theresa May conceded the following: Citizens rights would be arbitrated by the ECJ. Those rights would be conferred to family members and partners. In the absence of other agreements, the entire UK would effectively remain in the Customs Union so as to avoid a border in Ireland. Although...

A short FAQ on Bitcoin. What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. It consists of data (information; a string of 1s and 0s), rather than anything physical. It uses mathematical algorithms, or cryptographic algorithms, to determine who owns what money, and prevent people from cheating by stealing money or spending the same money twice. Why is this suddenly interesting? Previous cryptocurrencies needed to be centrally managed. Bitcoin makes the entire process distributed which cuts out a single point of failure, and makes it hard for any government to control and shut down. Won't this piss off a lot of people? Probably. Banks just lost a lot of business. However they will still be able to continue to offer other financial services. Governments don't like it because they no longer have a privileged position, and can't manipulate it. What's the harm? Bitcoin facilitates transactions, and that includes money laundering, buying illegal things and other i...