10 best long reads about crypto in 2023 – Cointelegraph Magazine

With the end of the year just days away, we're taking a look back at 12 months' worth of features, interviews and columns to highlight the best of the best.

Ethereum founder Joe Lubin on how the team broke up; John McPhee's widow talks about the questions surrounding his death, the ethics of orange pill babies, the subtlety of labeling, remaking – and much more.

From his childhood living in a ghetto on the east bank of the Yamuna River in Delhi to starting the $6 billion Polygon Blockchain, Sandeep Nailwal has an incredible rags-to-riches story.

Now happily ensconced in the futuristic, air-conditioned urban landscape of Dubai, he told the magazine that he was born in 1987 in a farming village called Ramnagar.

His parents married when he was still a teenager and Nilwal moved to Delhi to try his luck when he was just four years old. They wound up in slums on the east bank of the river, often called Jamna-par.

“Imagine the Bronx in New York,” Nilwal said. “It was like step-three. Even now, there's a very ghetto-ish environment when you go.” Read more…

Janice McAfee, the widow of tech impresario John McAfee, is still in mourning. “She's been doing odd jobs to support herself” She's out of money and can't continue until the autopsy records are released.

Since the death of crypto guru and anti-virus pioneer John McPhee in a Barcelona prison two years ago, she has remained in an undisclosed location in Spain, saved from homelessness only by the kindness of her friends.

In September, a Catalan court ruled that John McAfee had died by suicide and that the case had been successfully closed, but her husband still did not know what happened, so she could not move on.

Read more…

Joe Lubin It explains what happened when two co-founders pushed each other in 2014 and Ethereum is truly becoming the “world's computer”.

A narrative has grown up around two of Ethereum's most important co-founders, Joe Lubin and Vitalik Buterin, to explain how they went in different directions a decade ago.

It suggests the pair fell in love with the future of blockchain, with the idealistic 20-year-old Buterin deciding to turn Ethereum into a nonprofit foundation, while Lubin and others wanted to promote the technology through a for-profit company.

“That's not really what happened,” the billionaire said during an in-depth interview in Tel Aviv with the founder of Ethereum infrastructure and software company Consensus.

“What happened was that people were looking for a way to explain why these two people were dropped from the project. And it was a convenient way to name it. But that was not the reason they were touched.”

Read more…

Ethereum's ERC-4337 “smart tags” standard is a game changer for user-friendly crypto payments and mainstream adoption.

For years Bitcoiners have repeated the mantra “Be your own bank”. But in reality, storing any kind of crypto in a wallet is much closer to stuffing money under your mattress than in a complex financial institution like a bank.

This is all about to change with the announcement of Ethereum, also known as “smart tokens” and “account summarization,” and all blockchains compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, BNB Smart Chain, Avalanche, and Gnosis. Chain.

Years in the making, the new ERC-4337 standard turns a crypto wallet into something with all the features of a real bank.

“A bank gives you the same features without having to trust a bank,” said Yoav Weiss, a security researcher at the Ethereum Foundation.

Read more…

So, have you struck it rich with crypto? You may want to move to one of these countries to keep your new wealth.

Tax compliance is a nightmare. And crypto tax – which includes various innovative methods and products that have no analogues in traditional finance – is 10 times worse.

Complicating matters further, the global industry operates across borders and regions. But there are certainly better and worse countries for the new crypto-rich to establish themselves as tax havens — even if it's Americans who have their hands full with the IRS wherever they are.

Read more…

What is it about crypto trading that makes some users vulnerable to drug addiction and how can they get help?

Although documented statistics on cryptocurrency trading and drug abuse are hard to come by, addiction experts are treating an increasing number of crypto traders.

Abdullah Boulad, founder and CEO of Balance Luxury Rehab, told the magazine that many crypto traders struggle with drug addiction. “Our customer base is diverse, but this is a unique demographic that we've seen increase in recent years,” says Boulad.

According to Bullad, the high intensity of cryptocurrency trading combined with 24/7 accessibility encourages some to use stimulants to keep up the momentum. “Substances such as amphetamines, cocaine and excessive caffeine use are common among these individuals,” Bollad said.

Read more…

Bitcoiners want to pass on their values ​​to the next generation, and BTC Children's Books aims to help. But is it education or indoctrination?

“Any child who doesn't learn about Bitcoin is missing out,” said Bitcoin advocate Ben de Waal.

De Waal revealed that his 12-year-old daughter, Samantha, convinced “a couple” of her classmates and teacher to get on the bitcoin bandwagon, even though she wasn't trying to “turn the whole school orange.”

Thanks to her upbringing in the “Bitcoin family,” Sam is now a Bitcoin ambassador of sorts, nicknamed The Bitcoin Kid.

Two years after reading her first Bitcoin book, Sam met and gave a talk about Bitcoin on the big stage at BTC Prague 2023 in mid-June.

Oh, and she should follow Michael Sailer's approach to micro-strategy.

Read more…

Flooded with NFTs and BRC-20 tokens, Bitcoin has suddenly become a worse version of Ethereum. There are conflicting ideas about how to fix it.

In the year The core developers and miners who signed the network's Taproot update in November 2021 never thought this would be the outcome. Bitcoin now faces many of the problems that plagued Ethereum for years, including scam memecoins and shitcoins, monkey-image NFTs that increase block space and transaction fees.

The network must deal with Minerable Value (MAV) events, whereby miners profit by re-ordering pending transactions.

“I'm so mad at myself because I don't know,” says Quantum Economics founder Matty Greenspan, a bitcoiner since 2013.

“It took me until these guys started promoting JPEGs on Bitcoin and said, ‘Oh my gosh, what have we done?'

Some Bitcoiners on Bitcointalk and Twitter refer to ordinary NFTs and BRC-20 tokens as an attack on Bitcoin, a Taproot exploit, or simply spam that clogs the network.

Read more…

Ethereum's rebranding — powered by the middleware protocol EigenLayer — is a controversial innovation that has had some bright minds worried about potential problems over the past year.

Rebooking involves reusing the reserved or locked ETH tokens to earn payments and rewards. The recaptured tokens help secure and authenticate other protocols.

Proponents believe that the retake will squeeze more security and rewards out of the already held ETH and grow the crypto ecosystem in a healthy way based on Ethereum's trust mechanisms. Retention can be used as a security precursor to send Ethereum trust generated by its validators to other projects.

However, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and several key devs worry that restocking is an inevitable house of cards. Some of those Ethereum devs have already proposed a fork to stop resuming.

Read more…

For every real blockchain project using artificial intelligence to create a better world – like Dr. Ben Goerzel's Singularity.net – there are 100 coins like AI Doge, combine the words “AI” and “crypto” together. Signs of whiplash.

Magazine spoke with founder Ilya Polosukin, Framework Ventures founder Vance Spencer, MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen, Richard Ma from Quantstamp, Ralph Kubly from Casper and others to discuss some key hysterical-free, real AI use cases in crypto and blockchain.

Plus, we've included reasons why you shouldn't necessarily believe the talk. Check out the different episodes here:

Number 1: The best currency for AI is cryptoNo. 2: AIs can run DAOs. 3: Smart Contract Audits and Cyber ​​Security Vol. 4: Fighting AI Lies with Blockchain 5: Crypto-Based AI Markets and AI Financial Analysis

Another great summer read:

Are DAOs overrated and ineffective? Lessons from the front lines

Many argue that DAOs have failed to deliver on their promise, but developers are coming up with new solutions.

Break into Liberland – hide guards with inner-tubes, tricksters and diplomats

Visiting Liberland – the crypto micronation between Croatia and Serbia – requires tricks and diplomatic defenses to avoid border guards.

Peter McCormack's Real Bedford Football Club puts Bitcoin on the map.

Real Bedford is rising through the leagues and building a following around the world thanks to owner Peter McCormack's passion for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin 2023 is holding ‘shitcoins on Bitcoin' in Miami

Shitcoins and NFTs invaded Bitcoin 2023, but most attendees didn't seem to mind. Is it possible to usher in a new era of formal magic internet money?

‘Beautiful and ass-back': Jameson Loop's first impression of Bitcoin

Bitcoin OG Jameson Lopp says he doesn't think any developers should be allowed to ossify the protocol “deep into Bitcoin”: “There's a lot of work to be done.”

Best standard features:

AI Eye: ChatGPT insults, Q* ‘breaks encryption', outrage over 99% fake sites

Become a New NFT Artist with the ‘Soft shill taco method' – Terrell Jones, NFT Creator

D&D Nukes NFT Ban, ‘Get-To-Kill' Zombie Shooter, Illuvium: Zero Hot Take — Web3 Gamer

Multichain saga lays off users, Binance fires 1,000 employees: Asia Express

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Andrew Fenton

Based in Melbourne, Andrew Fenton is a journalist and editor covering cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has worked as a film journalist for News Corp Australia, SA Wind and national entertainment writer for Melbourne Weekly.

Follow the author @andrewfenton