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 blockchain will change your life
Until the mid-1990s, the internet was little more than an arcane set of technical standards used by academics. Few predicted the profound effect it would have on society. Today, blockchain—the technology behind the digital currency bitcoin—might seem like a trinket for computer geeks. Read More...
Central banks explore blockchain to create digital currencies
“If you can’t beat them, join them,” could well be the mantra for the world’s central bankers. Having watched as bitcoin went from obscure experiment in digital money to a currency with a market value of almost $10bn, they themselves are now experimenting with digital Read More...
Venezuelans are turning to bitcoin as the bolívar crumbles
Venezuela’s currency has lost so much of its value that people have given up on counting the notes—they just weigh piles of cash. So far this year, the bolívar has lost nearly half its value compared to the dollar, while inflation has shot up as much as 15 times. That’s Read More...
Swiss railway ticket machines to sell Bitcoin digital currency
From next week railway travelers in Switzerland will be able to trade Swiss francs for Bitcoins using ticket machines. The Swiss railway services SBB says it has been testing customer demand for Bitcoin across the country and had decided to launch a two-year pilot project. “There have been few Read More...
Crowdfunding: the new buzzword for academics needing research money
When Professor Dave Goulson decided to study the impact of pesticides on bees, he didn’t rate his chances of getting funding from one of the big research councils. The University of Sussex biologist turned to the public, raising almost £8,000 through crowdfunding for the screening for Read More...
Capital One is trying to bring the blockchain to health care
Capital One is going to test out blockchain for health care claims and analytics, the company announced Monday. The banking giant is teaming up with mix of partners including blockchain startup Gem, the health care API platform firm PokitDok, and analytics companies Viewpost and ClearGraph, in Read More...
Couples desperate for children turn to crowdfunding fertility
Humans, like other animals, live to reproduce. And when they can’t, they’re willing to pay a lot for a helping hand. In America, some use credit cards, 401(k)s, and even loans to pay for in vitro fertilization that can cost as much as $12,000 for each round. Read More...
Blockchain platform developed by banks to be open-source
A blockchain platform developed by a group that includes more than 70 of the world's biggest financial institutions is making its code publicly available, in what could become the industry standard for the nascent technology. The Corda platform has been developed by a consortium brought together by Read More...
How blockchain can help democratize the sharing economy
The sharing economy enables everyone to turn any asset (homes, cars, etc.) into a productive piece of capital. Eventually, we may get to a life without ownership. You own nothing. You rent everything. You do this because it’s cheaper: you pay pennies or fractions of pennies per day to have a bed Read More...
Central banks consider bitcoin’s technology, if not bitcoin
Blockchains allow several different players to keep a shared spreadsheet using cryptography and so-called consensus mechanisms that provide a way to agree on which transactions happened at what time. For the central banks, the promise of the technology is that it would allow them to track every Read More...