Who invented pants?

Our weekly opinion piece and overview View this email in your browser   CoinDesk Weekly is sponsored by  November 12, 2017 Don't Wanna Know Who's behind the mask? Sometimes it doesn't matter, and knowing the answer may do more harm than good. Cryptocurrency development is a case in point.  Read more in the THE TAKEAWAY below.       TOP TRENDS ON COINDESK Fork-o-rama The week's news was dominated by forks – in the senses of both splinter projects and software upgrades. First, bitcoin cash, which was born as a fork (the former variety) of bitcoin, completed a hard fork (the latter type) of itself. Then, another forked-off currency, bitcoin gold, had a rocky launch – one miner described it as a maddeningly chaotic situation, though not in so many words.  And as the week came to close, a curiosity surfaced: even though the contentious Segwit2X hard fork of bitcoin was canceled, it appears there are as many as 150 nodes out there still running the code. Reminds us somehow of the mysterious distress signal beamed from the abandoned radio tower on television's "Lost."  Extra fork credit: Taylor Pearson, who we quoted on the virtues of forking in this newsletter two weeks ago, expands on his argument in a new CoinDesk op-ed.             Futures fracas Bitcoin futures could start trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as soon as next month, CME Group CEO Terry Duffy said. But despite his colleague Leo Melamed's recent prediction that such instruments would "tame" the notoriously volatile cryptocurrency, others in the futures trading community are worried. Interactive Brokers warned that a huge swing in the price of bitcoin could financially cripple a clearing member of the CME and, in turn, the exchange itself. To mitigate this risk, Thomas Peterffy, chairman of Interactive Brokers, asked regulators to quarantine clearing of any bitcoin futures, such that they would be handled on a separate system from the rest of the market.  Hip to be Square A limited number of users of Square's Cash App have quietly been given the option to buy or sell bitcoin within their accounts. While many bitcoin users on Twitter were giddy at the prospect that retail bitcoin buyers in the U.S. will finally have a credible alternative to Coinbase, for now it's just a pilot. "We want to do an experiment and say, OK, is this real? Do customers actually want to be able to do this?" Square's chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, told CNBC. See all CoinDesk stories   ⭐ COINDESK SPONSOR ⭐ Custody for your Crypto Assets Protect and secure your assets with itBit, a regulated Trust Company, and Custodian. With itBit, all assets are backed by regulatory capital reserves, and you can verify custody account balance and holdings 24/7 with personalized access and customer support. Learn More   QUOTE OF THE WEEK   "It turns out, it's not that many. It's a few million every week, which is still a long ways from serving the full Earth's population." – Blockstream's Christian Decker, on the transactional capacity of the Lightning Network, which he and other researchers proposed supplementing with another scaling layer. THE TAKEAWAY  For all we know, the first cave-dweller to rub two sticks together was a misogynist. Or maybe just a mean person. Even if so, fire is still useful for cooking. Richard Wagner and Henry Ford were nasty anti-Semites. But we can still appreciate the beauty of the Ring Cycle and the efficiency of the assembly line. In other words, the identity or character of the creator has little, if any, bearing on the value of the creation. That's why the mainstream media's obsession a few years ago with unmasking Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of bitcoin, was so silly. We've seen what bitcoin does, we know how it works, the code is public. The focus on who exactly wrote it would be laughable if it weren't also destructive. Quite apart from doxxing poor old Dorian Nakamoto and rewarding Craig Wright with the limelight, these circuses distracted public attention from the much more interesting questions about money and society raised by Satoshi's work and by the projects it inspired. Questions like: Why did it still take days to transfer money between bank accounts when an unknown geek had demonstrated that value could be zapped across the globe in minutes? Could capital controls still work in the age of the internet (if they ever did) – and if not, is that really a bad thing? And what do you mean, I don't actually own the stocks in my portfolio?   But far too many people in my profession are less interested in engaging with big ideas than in talking about other people. As President Trump would say: Sad! Yet this is one more way bitcoin opens up new vistas. When you spend time exploring the rabbit hole of cryptocurrency, it inevitably gets you thinking about identity – when it's important, when it isn't, and why. To be sure, there are times when knowing someone's identity is helpful, even critical. Businesses often need to know something about their customers to prevent fraud or assess credit risk, for example. Some scam artist has recently been impersonating CoinDesk and sending phishing texts with our name on it to people in the Netherlands – now there's someone who deserves to be unmasked, along with other consequences.  But there are other times when identity can serve to cloud people's judgment. And not even the bitcoin community has been immune to this problem.  In a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) submitted in March, as the scaling debate was heating up, Chris Stewart, co-founder of SuredBits, described the danger:  "We are seeing the politicization of protocol level changes. The critiques of these changes are slowly moving towards critiques based on who is submitting the BIP – not what it actually contains. This is the worst thing that can happen in a meritocracy." To address this, Stewart proposed requiring BIPs to be submitted pseudonymously. "This means a BIP can be proposed and examined based on its technical merits," he wrote. And if a developer wanted to claim credit after a BIP was accepted, Stewart included a way for them to cryptographically prove authorship – preempting another Craig Wright-style drama.  In a conversation a few weeks ago, when the Segwit2x fork was still expected to happen and bitcoin tribalism had reached a fever pitch, Stewart gave another reason why technologists might want their ideas to be discussed without attribution. "I think more people need to be conscious of their online persona – it can have dire consequences," Stewart told me, citing as an example the recent swatting of a prominent bitcoin engineer. "I'm guessing anyone that is a strong persona in this space is getting a lot of harassment." So the next time someone asks you who you think Satoshi is, don't indulge in gossipy parlor games. Instead, make them think by answering with a question: "Who invented pants?"   – Marc Hochstein   MORE BACKGROUND: Dorian Nakamoto Launches Legal Fund to Refute Newsweek Claims Dorian Nakamoto Hires Lawyer, Denies Knowledge of Bitcoin Bitcoin Community Raises Cash for Dorian Nakamoto and Hal Finney Craig Wright Won't Provide More Proof He Created Bitcoin Coders Named After Harry Potter Characters Join Bitcoin's 'Mimblewimble' Share Tweet READER COMMENT OF THE WEEK   "How would that be any different than a bad year for oranges?" – Chuck Milliken, on Interactive Brokers' warning about the risks of allowing bitcoin futures on the CME. Beyond CoinDesk... OTHERS ARE TALKING ABOUT More than three years after the collapse of Mt. Gox, "not a single customer has recouped a single cent, crypto or otherwise," Reuters reports in a lengthy investigative piece. Mark Karpeles looks trim and fit now, though! Who says cryptocurrency mining is wasteful, serving no social purpose? Vice profiles Bail Bloc, a New York area charity that mines Monero using donors' processing power and uses the coins to bail people out of jail who can't afford to do so themselves. If you think bitcoin is expensive in the $7,000 range, try living in hyperinflation poster child Zimbabwe, where according to Fortune the cryptocurrency is going for almost double that. ... But wait, Quartz says that's baloney. We link, you decide.  Who's been buying into all these ICOs? Asian investors, according to the Financial Times. UPCOMING EVENTS (see more in our full listing) November 19: BitBrum, Birmingham City, UK November 22: Blockchain Summit-Crypto Valley, Zug, Switzerland November 25: Blockchain Summit Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine November 28: Consensus: Invest, New York, NY November 29-30: BlockShow Asia 2017, Singapore WHAT WE'VE BEEN UP TO Consensus: Invest is fast approaching. More than 1,000 people from 47 different countries have registered to attend our Nov. 28 conference in New York with a jam-packed agenda covering trading strategies, custodianship, regulatory and tax issues and what's ahead for this young asset class in 2018. Only a few seats left – if you're an institutional investor seeking to learn about the opportunities in crypto tokens, this is a must-see event.  Got suggestions on how to make this newsletter better? Want to write an opinion piece for CoinDesk? Just feel like trolling our managing editor? Email marc@coindesk.com, or tweet @MarcHochstein. And follow us @CoinDesk.  Until next week...   Copyright © 2017 CoinDesk, All rights reserved. You're receiving this email because you subscribed for updates on our website. Our mailing address is: CoinDesk 636 Avenue of the Americas New York City, NY 10011 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? 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