Worklife
Learn about how you can achieve a better work-life balance, and check out the latest news about the world of work, including advancements on ideas like the four-day work week and universal basic income.
How Japan prepares to recognize bitcoin as method of payment on April 1
In February, Bitcoin.com reported that the first Japanese bill containing digital currencies, recognizing Bitcoin as a method of payment, was expected to enter into force sometime in April. Last week, the Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA) officially announced that the exact date for this Read More...
Blockchain technology is making peer-to-peer energy trading a reality
The blockchain technology that facilitates transactions for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin could revolutionize the power industry. Blockchain offers a reliable, low-cost way for financial transactions to be recorded and validated across a distributed network with no central point of authority. As in Read More...
China’s central bank thinks digital currency can do one thing cash can’t
China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), has been working to develop its own digital currency. Having recently completed a trial run of its cryptocurrency based on blockchain technology, the PBoC is moving closer to becoming one of the first central banks to issue Read More...
Why I used crowdfunding to bring a truckload of plastic trash to Stockholm
A container of plastic garbage pulled into Stockholm a couple of weeks ago. Then the garbage was dumped onto the floor of the National Museum of Science and Technology, in a big dusty pile. On purpose. And a global crowdfunding campaign helped pay for it. Before I tell you how we accomplished that, Read More...
Forget bitcoin. The blockchain could reveal what’s true today and tomorrow
As far back as the 1880s, people stood on the curb outside the New York Stock Exchange taking bets on political elections, and newspapers would report the odds as a way of predicting the results at the polls. In the years since, economists refined the concept, and more recently, prediction markets Read More...
Bitcoin is changing the way companies go public
Electronic cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, will disrupt money finance as we know it. These currencies have the potential to create peer-to-peer money without the need for government regulation. Cryptocurrencies can also be used for companies going public without going to the stock exchange. That Read More...
Blockchain could redistribute value to make the sharing economy more fair
The traditional economic model was dominated by large companies that have top-down hierarchical organizations providing services to passive consumers. Now, companies like Google, Uber and AirBnB represent a shift operating online platforms where most value is generated by the users. The problem Read More...
Economics professor turns to crowdfunding to pay salary
A professor of economics has turned to crowdfunding to pay his salary because universities “no longer provide the time and freedom they once gave to original thinkers”. Steve Keen, who is currently employed full time at Kingston University but expects to remain there next year on a Read More...
How will the rise of crowdfunding reshape how we give to charity?
Last September, a Chicago resident named Joel Cervantes Macias spotted an 89-year old man named Fendicio hawking Mexican ice pops–they’re called “paletas”– out of a street cart. The man looked too old to be working, but Macias only had so much spare cash (and so much Read More...
How blockchain applications will move beyond finance
To understand the transformation that’s being brought about by blockchain technology, it’s useful to start with its largest implementation to date: bitcoin. In the fall of 2014 my colleague Catherine Tucker and I conducted a large-scale experiment at MIT, in which 4,494 undergraduate Read More...