The Industrial Revolution swept through England in the 19th Century like a wildfire. It changed the world greatly and was one of the reasons why the sinister slave trade was outlawed as the industries in the United Kingdom needed a robust and thriving market in Africa to sell their goods to.

One group of workers in England was not happy with the revolution as they erroneously felt that the machines would replace their human labour. This group of workers was known as the Luddites and physically broke the machines to prevent their immediate ‘redundancy’.

History repeats itself because man in his usual frailty learns the stories but never the salient lessons. The Central Bank of Nigeria behaved like the modern-day Luddites with the banning of cryptocurrency on February 5, 2021. Their reasons were that it was used to finance terrorism and it is largely unregulated.

The reasons given by the CBN are largely asinine and don’t reflect a regulatory authority who is in tune with the digital banking realities of the 21st century. Ever since cryptocurrency commenced in 2009 allegedly by an anonymous Japanese trader, it has passed through the fire to become a globally accepted means of exchange today. There were initial scepticisms as a result of its unregulated nature. Wall Street and many American banks warned the American public of the risks inherent in dealing with it. The world’s wealthiest investor, Warren Buffett, aired his views on its high risks as well as its unregulated nature. There were also concerns as to its volatility as it rises and falls faster than the speed of light.

However, the narrative is now changing as many of the world’s global banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs etc now have cryptocurrency desks. Many banks in Europe have followed suit with the Central Banks in those countries becoming compliant in its risks management. They have not banned it outright as that will amount to the futile attempt of killing a fly with the sledge hammer. Many people especially the younger generation are heavily involved in its trading and usage. In a world that is rapidly changing, no thanks to the disruptive effects of technology, banning it will be extremely anachronistic.

There is massive youth unemployment in Nigeria as the National Bureau of Statistics puts it at over 21%. Many youths here have taken their economic destiny into their own hands by trading in it and using it to bring home the bacon. The ill-thought-out directive has only compounded their financial woes. Why are the economic policies of the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), so anti-people? Recall the ban Treasury bills to individuals which was a steady source of revenue for many economically strangulated Nigerian youths.

A major reason that stands out is that of the financing of terrorism but the truth of the matter is that terrorism financing or money laundering can still be done through the regular banking system without the use of crypto currencies. When the Tamil Tigers ravaged Singapore for about twenty-five years before their eventual defeat, were they crypto currencies? When the Al-Qaeda terrorist network attacked the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, were they cryptocurrencies? When terrorists bombed the London Underground on July 7, 2005, were there cryptocurrencies? It is tragic that our regulatory officials are digitally lazy and want to be left behind like the Luddites in the days of yore.

Nigeria has the second largest volume of crypto currency trading in the world put at about $500 million. What message is this ban sending to foreign investors? Why do we keep having our economic policy inconsistent? At a time when youth unemployment, insecurity, poverty with our recent naming as the poverty capital of the world, what we need are public policies that will greatly stimulate the ailing economy and not further strangulate it. What the so-called ‘Giant of Africa’ needs are jobs, jobs and more jobs, an enabling environment for the private sector to come in as well as for foreign direct investment to be created. This archaic policy does the exact opposite of what this economy so badly needs.

Fintech as well as online payment solution companies like Paypal have begun to accept cryptocurrencies as a medium of payment. It would have been only a matter of time for the local ones like Paystack, Fluterwave etc to follow suit. You can imagine the financial exclusion to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars by this policy! Many foreign investors especially the portfolio investors would have been more comfortable with the use of cryptocurrency as it would better aid the movement of their investments to their home countries. There would have been no harm for the CBN to have set up a department for cryptocurrency regulation to minimise the risks inherent with it. Risk management is part and parcel of any business and it has assumed the status of a full-fledged profession especially in the financial sector. The intellectual sloth of the CBN is highly unacceptable in the 21st century and is rather unfortunate that while the rest of the world is rapidly moving forward, we are stuck in the Stone Age like cave men.

Tony Ademiluyi, Ikeja, Lagos State

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"In a world in which governments and companies continually encroach on personal liberties via surveillance and outright control, Bitcoin shines like a beacon of freedom." - Andy Edstrom & Peter McCormack The anti-bitcoin narratives are going to flood in and have already started. We need to be ready for it, and that’s why this piece by Andy Edstrom & Peter McCormack is a required listen/read. How do we answer the Fed, how do we respond to the propaganda and the ignorance? Find out in another of Bitcoin Magazine’s incredible recent pieces title, “Winning Hearts & Minds for Bitcoin”

Check out the original at the link below, plus the incredible library of articles dropping every day at the link below: oin

Mentioned at the beginning of the show is BtcMag’s page dedicated to everything busting the Energy FUD, keep it for quick reference:

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On February 5, 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria announced to deposit money banks, non-bank financial institutions, and other financial institutions the ban on accounts dealing in payments and exchanges involving cryptocurrencies. According to the circular, the reason was largely because of risks associated with such transactions, hence ordering the immediate closure of customer accounts used in trading crypto in Nigeria.

This new regulation came as a total shock to many Nigerians. Particularly as cryptocurrency has gained a considerable acceptance amongst the Nigeria youth over the years  in the face of the naira plummeting value in the parallel foreign exchange market. In fact, according to a recent stat by a crypto marketplace, Paxful, Nigeria is presently ranked the world’s second-largest Bitcoin by trading volume. According to a report by QZ Africa, Nigerians have traded 60,215 Bitcoins or over $566 million in five years.

Going by the foregoing, there is such a huge potential in the Nigerian financial markets with crypto being a major unit of commerce. In 2020, many major fundraising campaigns, large foreign remittance funds and cross-border payments were made in Bitcoins. One of which was pioneered by Feminist Coalition in 2020. Through cryptocurrency, this women’s rights advocacy group was able to crowdsource donations from across the world for the #EndSARS protests using BTC Pay despite the CBN shuttering Nigerian bank accounts associated with the movement. If this is not changing the financial narrative, challenging traditional banking services and decentralising monetary systems, then what is?

As most crypto wallets and trading accounts predominantly belong to the Nigerian youths, it is essentially difficult to separate the economic implications of the CBN crypto ban directive from them. By and large, they constitute the major players and beneficiaries of the trading industry. And consequently, they will be the worst hit, as many young people have become increasingly aware of the benefits of trading in cryptos as a way of investing their funds in assets and also securing financial stability. Even despite their somewhat concomitant volatile values and unpredictable rise or fall in prices.

Analysing this policy from a critical perspective, the question has to come from whether it was intended for the right purpose or not. In 2017, the CBN issued a circular warning Nigerians against the use of digital currencies, stating such currencies were used in terrorism financing and money laundering. That was before the bank again warned that transactions in the currencies were untraceable by a central network base, thereby making them liable to abuse by criminals and fraudsters in 2018 — stating they were not legal tenders in Nigeria.

Yes, that is understandable. But what our central bank needs to know is that cryptocurrencies are almost the same as fiat currencies, albeit with no reliance on a banking system. And it should not be related to Ponzi schemes at all. It is a legit currency and widely-adopted by higher income countries and large economies — even some companies are now considering paying employees’ salaries in $BTC. It is also essential for an equitable participation in the global economy and driving financial inclusion in the long run. More than anything, it only seeks to transform the conventional financial system with innovative and efficient solutions that are critical to pushing finances, investments, transactions and exchanges beyond boundaries. And as well closing existing wide gaps in the financial markets and shaping the digital future of money with blockchain technology. It may pose serious challenges to the apex bank, but at least not now.

In any case, in the lieu of making crypto transactions and deals no longer possible on third-party platforms to counter anonymity, the CBN can leverage the National Identification Number and Bank Verification Number. This will facilitate traders and users to verify their identity before they can process transactions and deals on the Nigerian-based platforms. Also, they can have a report of crypto inflow and transactions from miners who are the financial platforms and institutions and make them comply with strict cybersecurity procedures to ensure transparency and legitimacy of transactions. This will go a long way in reducing financial payments in the form of fraud, ransom and black market sales.

That said, we are in the digital age that has created various new career pathways for the Nigerian young people and other millennials around the world. We now have a generation referred to as ‘Gen Z’ and who are well-accustomed to new waves of technology, particularly the blockchain and actively exploring the concept of Internet entrepreneurship. In fact, crypto trading has over time become an in-demand and high-income skill of the new, digital economy. Our young people earn income through peer-to-peer transactions and run blockchain firms. So, trading cryptocurrencies, investing in crypto assets and storing values have since become a source of livelihood for them. And no doubt, this has immensely contributed to the exponential growth of the blockchain ecosystem in Africa. And most particularly making Nigeria as the core and strategic hotbed of crypto trading on the continent.

While Binance, the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange platform, has temporarily suspended deposits in Nigerian naira, we can only hope the situation improves soon. And that the CBN reviews the crypto ban and its financial policies in this regard to suit the emerging financial market, and as such make the regulation win-win.

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All rights reserved. This material, and other digital content on this website, may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or in part without prior express written permission from PUNCH.

Contact: [email protected]

Nouriel Roubini is right about BTC, Tether and the criminal cartels that pump the prices of BTC while laundering out real fiat profits through their exchange partners. While tax evasion and general financial malfeasance is problematic enough, one has to wonder what else is occurring with the laundered funds, as it is well known that Bitcoin has a sordid history of being utilized in gray and black market business—like The Silk Road, which has links to Bitcoin.com and supported by Roger Ver. Despite the romantic, libertarian view of Bitcoin subverting the oppression of the centralized fiat economy, in reality, they were engaging in drug smuggling, assassination markets and human trafficking. To be fair, some interesting civil disobedience was occurring as well, but the immorality of their deeds far outstripped any political footing that could have been established in the early era of Bitcoin. 

But, while some of Bitcoin’s ideology of civil disobedience and the hope of building a shining new economy upon the distributed ledger was exciting for a time, the Bitcoin Civil War side-tracked the project heavily. Once Dread Pirate Roberts and The Silk Road was closed down, nastier websites emerged, and so too did some of the shadiest venture capitalists in the world—necessitating the split of the Bitcoin protocol away from the BTC economy in 2017. But that requires some context.

What is Bitcoin actually for? 

The Bitcoin protocol is a rule set that enables the creation of a secure, public data distribution network that allows frictionless payments across an open ledger. It secures that data across multiple cooperating systems so that the integrity of valuable data is maintained even amid attack, while also enabling millions of economic interactions to occur between consenting parties. 

Bitcoin data is money in the sense that any commodity can be money, but the thing that gives the network itself value is the ability to secure and properly price any and all data in real time. That also includes valuable data included in the ledger itself—such as video content, audio or anything else of value that can be saved and served back to the world in perpetuity—a digital Library of Alexandria. That data can also include provably scarce tokenized gold, stocks, bonds and an infinite array of financial vehicles as well as an unlimited deployment of tokenized fiat currency that eliminates the global need for ACH, Swift, MoneyGram and Western Union—as long as it scales, anyways. 

In short, Bitcoin is data money. Hence the name: bit=data coin=money. 

The Bitcoin Civil War, Abridged 

Unfortunately, in the era spanning 2014-2016, venture capitalists created media entities such as CoinDesk and Cointelegraph, development groups such as Blockstream and MIT Digital Currency Initiative, exchanges like Coinbase and Bitfinex, and they hired professional social engineers like Gregory Maxwell and Samson Mow to subvert the narrative of Bitcoin across Twitter, Reddit, BitcoinTalk and other channels of discussion about bitcoin’s roadmap and capabilities. 

These are Blockstream’s Venture Investors: a group of strategic partners shared by most of the major players in the BTC economy. Most of the pictured firms share advisors and board members, making the case for a well-connected racket masquerading as independent firms. Let’s highlight two stand-outs: 

In the 2014-2016 era, these VC-backed usurpers of Bitcoin were able to gut the protocol—turning off most of its capabilities and painting the rhetoric that Bitcoin was merely digital gold, not meant to scale, not meant for the average person to transact upon, and making it impossible to utilize any form of tokenized data as a form of value. They replaced Bitcoin’s economically useful features with a Ponzi scheme-based investment thesis, and replaced professional economists with investment influencers and social media glitz. Rather than building businesses or assisting the economy in moving value on chain, they created the “HODL” meme and deployed a wall-to-wall narrative of “buy Bitcoin” in order to absorb the wealth of unsophisticated investors for the sake of their ever-growing need for settlement liquidity. 

They also built out infrastructure between their connected entities to take transactions off the BTC network and connect them through their privately controlled networks to throttle the flow of BTC to stay within rails that make them money without ceding their power or requiring actual liquidity for movement.

The need for artificial settlement liquidity would be solved by the creation of “Tether” in the same era, and by the same group of financially connected scammers.

Tether: US dollars, but worse

Due to the massive subterfuge campaign, real Bitcoiners left the BTC project to the cabal of well-funded, well-connected criminal cartels who run it today. Bitcoin’s unbounded protocol is set in stone on the Bitcoin SV (Satoshi’s Vision) network, where it can be built upon by real businesses who require reduced global payment friction or increased global data integrity. Bitcoin SV users do not have to worry about petty squabbles or technocratic take-overs any longer. 

But in the absence of Bitcoiners creating an honest and open economy on BTC, iFinex Corporation (parent company to Bitfinex, Tether and all of their subsidiaries) colluded with their partners to conjure up limitless liquidity out of thin air. While BTC advocates criticize the money-printers of the Federal Reserve out of one side of their mouth, they insulate Tether (USDT) from criticism, and defend it violently out of the other! 

Tether has been under investigation for over five years due to their inability to secure banking partners, registered custodians or submit to third party audit. As such, rumors of their fractional reserve holdings made their way to various offices of financial regulation enforcement, and ultimately to the New York Attorney General’s Office. Under pressure in 2019, Tether was forced to admit that the USDT coin is only backed 74% by cash “and short term securities,” calling into question the reserves from which any of BTC’s liquidity and price action is derived. 

In 2020, the supply of Tether has gone up over 400% and the rate of inflation of the supply of Tether is increasing. Just last week, Tether added nearly a billion dollars to the circulating supply amid increasing pressure from the NYAG’s office to come clean about the nature of their reserves especially since both retail and institutional investors have fiat rails on which to buy BTC if they choose. Why spend USD to buy USDT to buy BTC, if you could simply buy BTC directly from USD with registered custodians, OTC desks or directly from mining pools?

Well, research has shown that Tether isn’t being used to make purchases at all, but rather Tether exists specifically for wash trading on and between VC-owned exchanges to stabilize and pump the price of BTC artificially in order to cash out real fiat currency from the private ledgers of those exchanges by connected insiders. Around 95% of BTC trading volume is faked, according to the Wall Street Journal, which begs the question: how much of BTC’s price is truly stored value at all? 

Where is Roubini mistaken? 

His criticisms of BTC are valid, but BTC’s weak points are a product of it no longer being bitcoin. 

BTC is a project that was overtaken by a shadowy group of wealthy criminals who control the narrative. It has been hamstrung to only work within their for-profit silos, a significant portion of the influencers have ties to sex crimes, and the price and liquidity comes almost entirely from market manipulation. 

Fortunately, in all the ways that BTC is a bad form of digital money, Bitcoin SV is superlative: 

In short, Bitcoin SV is a sound money system deployed as a frictionless, electronic cash, connected to a global public ledger and powered by a world-class super computer network. 

We commend Nouriel Roubini for his criticisms of the technical and cultural problems with the BTC network, and we invite him to take another look at the bitcoin protocol that has been restored on Bitcoin SV. We believe it to be superlative in all of the ways which BTC has failed, and we believe it is the single best network in the history of the world for monetizing and serving and spending valuable data.

New to Bitcoin? Check out CoinGeek’s Bitcoin for Beginners section, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about Bitcoin—as originally envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto—and blockchain.

If the trick to living well with technology is balance—between scrolling and occasionally mustering up the energy to leave the house and see friends—2020 has not only tipped these delicate scales but managed to ensure that they were laid waste altogether. With billions of people isolated in their homes across the world with nothing but their screens to help them socialize, teach, learn, and work, many are discovering that digital relationships are a poor substitute for flesh and blood connections. We have gorged too much, too mindlessly, on this thing that ultimately doesn’t serve us awfully well, it seems; the only way forward is to deny, absolve ourselves, and repeat.BOOKS IN REVIEW

Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside arrives in our oversaturated digital moment as a welcome reprieve, reminding us that there is more to technology than our thumbs hovering over our phones, unable to escape ourselves. Wang, who is the creative director at Logic magazine, visited a number of new businesses across China’s countryside during the past year to document the ways in which rural towns have become the engines of global consumer capitalism. Technology is steadily changing how work is done in these far-flung places. In a village in the southern province of Guizhou, chickens are tracked with Fitbit-like ankle bracelets; a 25-year-old man in the eastern province of Anhui remotely controls drones that spray pesticides on crops all over the country; in the southwest, small communities are being turned into manufacturing zones for online shopping.

Stories about technology, Wang (who uses “they”/”them” pronouns) writes, often focus on cities, influenced by the bias of what theorist Jack Halberstam has deemed “metronormativity.” While metronormativity posits that “rural culture and rural people are backward” subjects who must be “saved” by “internet, technology, and media literacy,” Wang’s travels show the centrality of China’s countryside to global life. What does it mean to hold on to the binaries of “rural versus urban, natural versus man-made, digital versus physical” at a time when—as one of Wang’s case studies shows—nearly all the Halloween costumes worn by children in suburban America come from one tiny remote village in western China? It is only by bringing the supposed periphery into the center that we can begin to unpack the ties that bind us and see the systems that make our lives tick.

Many Western narratives about contemporary China draw on the language of contradictions: the “gleaming skyscrapers alongside ramshackle food stalls, the chaos of crowds tracked by surveillance cameras, the steam of a wok reflecting the blue light of an iPhone.” Wang finds this play with predetermined symbols unsatisfactory; they deliver myth at the expense of actual insight. “I know you’re here writing about a book about Chinese technology, but the only way to understand China’s future is through its past,” the author’s great-uncle, a former doorboy at a local Western restaurant who is still haunted by memories of famine in the nation, tells Wang.

The countryside commands a mythic status in the narrative of the modern Chinese state. During the civil war with the Nationalists from 1927 to 1949, Mao Zedong had strongholds in rural areas and mobilized peasants to “encircle cities from the countryside”; when he established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, he made the countryside the site of his agrarian-centered revolution. As power has flowed to the cities over recent decades, resentments have accrued around the hukou system, a government household registration system that disincentivizes people from migrating by limiting their access to social benefits to which they would be entitled elsewhere, such as education and insurance. But mass migration to the cities for better jobs continues regardless.

Economists warn that China now faces an “agrarian transition,” which could further accelerate migration to urban sites as small-scale farming is supplanted by industrialized agriculture. In 2010, a state-affiliated think tank identified China’s 750 million rural workers—particularly dissatisfied younger workers living on the margins of a city—as a key threat to the government’s legitimacy: “Policy-making must confront the pressing reality that migrant workers now dominated by a younger generation will remain in towns and cities.” The government, in response, has spurred efforts to construct a “new socialist countryside” over the past decade, marshaling technology giants to develop a place, Wang writes, “filled with peasants starting e-commerce businesses, small-scale manufacturing, new data centers, and young entrepreneurial workers returning to their rural homes.”

The titular blockchain chicken farm is one such effort to forge a new countryside, itself doubling as a way to cool down social discontent about food safety. This is a perennial concern in China: headlines over the years have warned of human hair being ground up in soy sauce and bubble tea balls being made with plastic peas. In the quiet Sanqiao village, two hours from the southwest megacity of Chongqing, farmer Jiang oversees the local blockchain chicken operation in his area. Launched by Lianmo Technology, the project affixes free-range chickens with a tamper-proof ankle bracelet that tracks their steps and location, logging this information through a blockchain ledger, which provides data on the chickens in an efficient format. Chickens are further tested every two weeks for the presence of illegal antibiotics. A QR code affixed to each ankle bracelet takes the (largely middle-class) consumers to a website where they can see the data of the chicken’s life cycle and be assured that the chicken they are consuming is sufficiently free-range. Although the project’s future is uncertain—last year, Lianmo ordered 6,000 blockchain chickens, but there is no such order this year—Jiang remains optimistic, Wang reports. But the problem is, Jiang continues, that while his region is remote, pollution-free, and enjoys fresh air and clean soil, “the villagers don’t quite know how to put a dollar value on that.”

Blockchain, now hailed as a way to ensure social trust, ironically has its roots in a paranoid way of thinking. We can’t trust institutions, and every system will have bad actors, the thinking goes, so why not create a decentralized “ledger” where records are distributed and synced among many people—in the case of the blockchain chickens, they include the farmers, the inspectors, and the consumers—ideally making the project impervious to a single effort to sabotage it? But as Wang observes, “technical systems are legible only to a select few,” and judging by the audiences of the bitcoin conferences held in California, these few are overwhelmingly white and male.

A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.

It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”

And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.

Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese youth known as shehui ren, those who believe they cannot advance to the “upper-middle-class life promised to them in advertisements” and who reject conventional values of jobs, marriages, and families, turn to live-streaming platforms and lifestyles that valorize the hustle.

One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.

Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside arrives in our oversaturated digital moment as a welcome reprieve, reminding us that there is more to technology than our thumbs hovering over our phones, unable to escape ourselves. Wang, who is the creative director at Logic magazine, visited a number of new businesses across China’s countryside during the past year to document the ways in which rural towns have become the engines of global consumer capitalism. Technology is steadily changing how work is done in these far-flung places. In a village in the southern province of Guizhou, chickens are tracked with Fitbit-like ankle bracelets; a 25-year-old man in the eastern province of Anhui remotely controls drones that spray pesticides on crops all over the country; in the southwest, small communities are being turned into manufacturing zones for online shopping.

Stories about technology, Wang (who uses “they”/”them” pronouns) writes, often focus on cities, influenced by the bias of what theorist Jack Halberstam has deemed “metronormativity.” While metronormativity posits that “rural culture and rural people are backward” subjects who must be “saved” by “internet, technology, and media literacy,” Wang’s travels show the centrality of China’s countryside to global life. What does it mean to hold on to the binaries of “rural versus urban, natural versus man-made, digital versus physical” at a time when—as one of Wang’s case studies shows—nearly all the Halloween costumes worn by children in suburban America come from one tiny remote village in western China? It is only by bringing the supposed periphery into the center that we can begin to unpack the ties that bind us and see the systems that make our lives tick.

Many Western narratives about contemporary China draw on the language of contradictions: the “gleaming skyscrapers alongside ramshackle food stalls, the chaos of crowds tracked by surveillance cameras, the steam of a wok reflecting the blue light of an iPhone.” Wang finds this play with predetermined symbols unsatisfactory; they deliver myth at the expense of actual insight. “I know you’re here writing about a book about Chinese technology, but the only way to understand China’s future is through its past,” the author’s great-uncle, a former doorboy at a local Western restaurant who is still haunted by memories of famine in the nation, tells Wang.

The countryside commands a mythic status in the narrative of the modern Chinese state. During the civil war with the Nationalists from 1927 to 1949, Mao Zedong had strongholds in rural areas and mobilized peasants to “encircle cities from the countryside”; when he established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, he made the countryside the site of his agrarian-centered revolution. As power has flowed to the cities over recent decades, resentments have accrued around the hukou system, a government household registration system that disincentivizes people from migrating by limiting their access to social benefits to which they would be entitled elsewhere, such as education and insurance. But mass migration to the cities for better jobs continues regardless.

Economists warn that China now faces an “agrarian transition,” which could further accelerate migration to urban sites as small-scale farming is supplanted by industrialized agriculture. In 2010, a state-affiliated think tank identified China’s 750 million rural workers—particularly dissatisfied younger workers living on the margins of a city—as a key threat to the government’s legitimacy: “Policy-making must confront the pressing reality that migrant workers now dominated by a younger generation will remain in towns and cities.” The government, in response, has spurred efforts to construct a “new socialist countryside” over the past decade, marshaling technology giants to develop a place, Wang writes, “filled with peasants starting e-commerce businesses, small-scale manufacturing, new data centers, and young entrepreneurial workers returning to their rural homes.”

The titular blockchain chicken farm is one such effort to forge a new countryside, itself doubling as a way to cool down social discontent about food safety. This is a perennial concern in China: headlines over the years have warned of human hair being ground up in soy sauce and bubble tea balls being made with plastic peas. In the quiet Sanqiao village, two hours from the southwest megacity of Chongqing, farmer Jiang oversees the local blockchain chicken operation in his area. Launched by Lianmo Technology, the project affixes free-range chickens with a tamper-proof ankle bracelet that tracks their steps and location, logging this information through a blockchain ledger, which provides data on the chickens in an efficient format. Chickens are further tested every two weeks for the presence of illegal antibiotics. A QR code affixed to each ankle bracelet takes the (largely middle-class) consumers to a website where they can see the data of the chicken’s life cycle and be assured that the chicken they are consuming is sufficiently free-range. Although the project’s future is uncertain—last year, Lianmo ordered 6,000 blockchain chickens, but there is no such order this year—Jiang remains optimistic, Wang reports. But the problem is, Jiang continues, that while his region is remote, pollution-free, and enjoys fresh air and clean soil, “the villagers don’t quite know how to put a dollar value on that.”

Blockchain, now hailed as a way to ensure social trust, ironically has its roots in a paranoid way of thinking. We can’t trust institutions, and every system will have bad actors, the thinking goes, so why not create a decentralized “ledger” where records are distributed and synced among many people—in the case of the blockchain chickens, they include the farmers, the inspectors, and the consumers—ideally making the project impervious to a single effort to sabotage it? But as Wang observes, “technical systems are legible only to a select few,” and judging by the audiences of the bitcoin conferences held in California, these few are overwhelmingly white and male.

A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.

It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”

And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.

Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese youth known as shehui ren, those who believe they cannot advance to the “upper-middle-class life promised to them in advertisements” and who reject conventional values of jobs, marriages, and families, turn to live-streaming platforms and lifestyles that valorize the hustle.

One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.

Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or ies about technology, Wang (who uses “they”/”them” pronouns) writes, often focus on cities, influenced by the bias of what theorist Jack Halberstam has deemed “metronormativity.” While metronormativity posits that “rural culture and rural people are backward” subjects who must be “saved” by “internet, technology, and media literacy,” Wang’s travels show the centrality of China’s countryside to global life. What does it mean to hold on to the binaries of “rural versus urban, natural versus man-made, digital versus physical” at a time when—as one of Wang’s case studies shows—nearly all the Halloween costumes worn by children in suburban America come from one tiny remote village in western China? It is only by bringing the supposed periphery into the center that we can begin to unpack the ties that bind us and see the systems that make our lives tick.

Many Western narratives about contemporary China draw on the language of contradictions: the “gleaming skyscrapers alongside ramshackle food stalls, the chaos of crowds tracked by surveillance cameras, the steam of a wok reflecting the blue light of an iPhone.” Wang finds this play with predetermined symbols unsatisfactory; they deliver myth at the expense of actual insight. “I know you’re here writing about a book about Chinese technology, but the only way to understand China’s future is through its past,” the author’s great-uncle, a former doorboy at a local Western restaurant who is still haunted by memories of famine in the nation, tells Wang.

The countryside commands a mythic status in the narrative of the modern Chinese state. During the civil war with the Nationalists from 1927 to 1949, Mao Zedong had strongholds in rural areas and mobilized peasants to “encircle cities from the countryside”; when he established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, he made the countryside the site of his agrarian-centered revolution. As power has flowed to the cities over recent decades, resentments have accrued around the hukou system, a government household registration system that disincentivizes people from migrating by limiting their access to social benefits to which they would be entitled elsewhere, such as education and insurance. But mass migration to the cities for better jobs continues regardless.

Economists warn that China now faces an “agrarian transition,” which could further accelerate migration to urban sites as small-scale farming is supplanted by industrialized agriculture. In 2010, a state-affiliated think tank identified China’s 750 million rural workers—particularly dissatisfied younger workers living on the margins of a city—as a key threat to the government’s legitimacy: “Policy-making must confront the pressing reality that migrant workers now dominated by a younger generation will remain in towns and cities.” The government, in response, has spurred efforts to construct a “new socialist countryside” over the past decade, marshaling technology giants to develop a place, Wang writes, “filled with peasants starting e-commerce businesses, small-scale manufacturing, new data centers, and young entrepreneurial workers returning to their rural homes.”

The titular blockchain chicken farm is one such effort to forge a new countryside, itself doubling as a way to cool down social discontent about food safety. This is a perennial concern in China: headlines over the years have warned of human hair being ground up in soy sauce and bubble tea balls being made with plastic peas. In the quiet Sanqiao village, two hours from the southwest megacity of Chongqing, farmer Jiang oversees the local blockchain chicken operation in his area. Launched by Lianmo Technology, the project affixes free-range chickens with a tamper-proof ankle bracelet that tracks their steps and location, logging this information through a blockchain ledger, which provides data on the chickens in an efficient format. Chickens are further tested every two weeks for the presence of illegal antibiotics. A QR code affixed to each ankle bracelet takes the (largely middle-class) consumers to a website where they can see the data of the chicken’s life cycle and be assured that the chicken they are consuming is sufficiently free-range. Although the project’s future is uncertain—last year, Lianmo ordered 6,000 blockchain chickens, but there is no such order this year—Jiang remains optimistic, Wang reports. But the problem is, Jiang continues, that while his region is remote, pollution-free, and enjoys fresh air and clean soil, “the villagers don’t quite know how to put a dollar value on that.”

Blockchain, now hailed as a way to ensure social trust, ironically has its roots in a paranoid way of thinking. We can’t trust institutions, and every system will have bad actors, the thinking goes, so why not create a decentralized “ledger” where records are distributed and synced among many people—in the case of the blockchain chickens, they include the farmers, the inspectors, and the consumers—ideally making the project impervious to a single effort to sabotage it? But as Wang observes, “technical systems are legible only to a select few,” and judging by the audiences of the bitcoin conferences held in California, these few are overwhelmingly white and male.

A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.

It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”

And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.

Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese youth known as shehui ren, those who believe they cannot advance to the “upper-middle-class life promised to them in advertisements” and who reject conventional values of jobs, marriages, and families, turn to live-streaming platforms and lifestyles that valorize the hustle.

One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.

Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”

Many Western narratives about contemporary China draw on the language of contradictions: the “gleaming skyscrapers alongside ramshackle food stalls, the chaos of crowds tracked by surveillance cameras, the steam of a wok reflecting the blue light of an iPhone.” Wang finds this play with predetermined symbols unsatisfactory; they deliver myth at the expense of actual insight. “I know you’re here writing about a book about Chinese technology, but the only way to understand China’s future is through its past,” the author’s great-uncle, a former doorboy at a local Western restaurant who is still haunted by memories of famine in the nation, tells Wang.

The countryside commands a mythic status in the narrative of the modern Chinese state. During the civil war with the Nationalists from 1927 to 1949, Mao Zedong had strongholds in rural areas and mobilized peasants to “encircle cities from the countryside”; when he established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, he made the countryside the site of his agrarian-centered revolution. As power has flowed to the cities over recent decades, resentments have accrued around the hukou system, a government household registration system that disincentivizes people from migrating by limiting their access to social benefits to which they would be entitled elsewhere, such as education and insurance. But mass migration to the cities for better jobs continues regardless.

Economists warn that China now faces an “agrarian transition,” which could further accelerate migration to urban sites as small-scale farming is supplanted by industrialized agriculture. In 2010, a state-affiliated think tank identified China’s 750 million rural workers—particularly dissatisfied younger workers living on the margins of a city—as a key threat to the government’s legitimacy: “Policy-making must confront the pressing reality that migrant workers now dominated by a younger generation will remain in towns and cities.” The government, in response, has spurred efforts to construct a “new socialist countryside” over the past decade, marshaling technology giants to develop a place, Wang writes, “filled with peasants starting e-commerce businesses, small-scale manufacturing, new data centers, and young entrepreneurial workers returning to their rural homes.”

The titular blockchain chicken farm is one such effort to forge a new countryside, itself doubling as a way to cool down social discontent about food safety. This is a perennial concern in China: headlines over the years have warned of human hair being ground up in soy sauce and bubble tea balls being made with plastic peas. In the quiet Sanqiao village, two hours from the southwest megacity of Chongqing, farmer Jiang oversees the local blockchain chicken operation in his area. Launched by Lianmo Technology, the project affixes free-range chickens with a tamper-proof ankle bracelet that tracks their steps and location, logging this information through a blockchain ledger, which provides data on the chickens in an efficient format. Chickens are further tested every two weeks for the presence of illegal antibiotics. A QR code affixed to each ankle bracelet takes the (largely middle-class) consumers to a website where they can see the data of the chicken’s life cycle and be assured that the chicken they are consuming is sufficiently free-range. Although the project’s future is uncertain—last year, Lianmo ordered 6,000 blockchain chickens, but there is no such order this year—Jiang remains optimistic, Wang reports. But the problem is, Jiang continues, that while his region is remote, pollution-free, and enjoys fresh air and clean soil, “the villagers don’t quite know how to put a dollar value on that.”

Blockchain, now hailed as a way to ensure social trust, ironically has its roots in a paranoid way of thinking. We can’t trust institutions, and every system will have bad actors, the thinking goes, so why not create a decentralized “ledger” where records are distributed and synced among many people—in the case of the blockchain chickens, they include the farmers, the inspectors, and the consumers—ideally making the project impervious to a single effort to sabotage it? But as Wang observes, “technical systems are legible only to a select few,” and judging by the audiences of the bitcoin conferences held in California, these few are overwhelmingly white and male.

A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.

It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”

And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.

Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese youth known as shehui ren, those who believe they cannot advance to the “upper-middle-class life promised to them in advertisements” and who reject conventional values of jobs, marriages, and families, turn to live-streaming platforms and lifestyles that valorize the hustle.

One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.

Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”

The countryside commands a mythic status in the narrative of the modern Chinese state. During the civil war with the Nationalists from 1927 to 1949, Mao Zedong had strongholds in rural areas and mobilized peasants to “encircle cities from the countryside”; when he established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, he made the countryside the site of his agrarian-centered revolution. As power has flowed to the cities over recent decades, resentments have accrued around the hukou system, a government household registration system that disincentivizes people from migrating by limiting their access to social benefits to which they would be entitled elsewhere, such as education and insurance. But mass migration to the cities for better jobs continues regardless.

Economists warn that China now faces an “agrarian transition,” which could further accelerate migration to urban sites as small-scale farming is supplanted by industrialized agriculture. In 2010, a state-affiliated think tank identified China’s 750 million rural workers—particularly dissatisfied younger workers living on the margins of a city—as a key threat to the government’s legitimacy: “Policy-making must confront the pressing reality that migrant workers now dominated by a younger generation will remain in towns and cities.” The government, in response, has spurred efforts to construct a “new socialist countryside” over the past decade, marshaling technology giants to develop a place, Wang writes, “filled with peasants starting e-commerce businesses, small-scale manufacturing, new data centers, and young entrepreneurial workers returning to their rural homes.”

The titular blockchain chicken farm is one such effort to forge a new countryside, itself doubling as a way to cool down social discontent about food safety. This is a perennial concern in China: headlines over the years have warned of human hair being ground up in soy sauce and bubble tea balls being made with plastic peas. In the quiet Sanqiao village, two hours from the southwest megacity of Chongqing, farmer Jiang oversees the local blockchain chicken operation in his area. Launched by Lianmo Technology, the project affixes free-range chickens with a tamper-proof ankle bracelet that tracks their steps and location, logging this information through a blockchain ledger, which provides data on the chickens in an efficient format. Chickens are further tested every two weeks for the presence of illegal antibiotics. A QR code affixed to each ankle bracelet takes the (largely middle-class) consumers to a website where they can see the data of the chicken’s life cycle and be assured that the chicken they are consuming is sufficiently free-range. Although the project’s future is uncertain—last year, Lianmo ordered 6,000 blockchain chickens, but there is no such order this year—Jiang remains optimistic, Wang reports. But the problem is, Jiang continues, that while his region is remote, pollution-free, and enjoys fresh air and clean soil, “the villagers don’t quite know how to put a dollar value on that.”

Blockchain, now hailed as a way to ensure social trust, ironically has its roots in a paranoid way of thinking. We can’t trust institutions, and every system will have bad actors, the thinking goes, so why not create a decentralized “ledger” where records are distributed and synced among many people—in the case of the blockchain chickens, they include the farmers, the inspectors, and the consumers—ideally making the project impervious to a single effort to sabotage it? But as Wang observes, “technical systems are legible only to a select few,” and judging by the audiences of the bitcoin conferences held in California, these few are overwhelmingly white and male.

A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.

It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”

And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.

Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese youth known as shehui ren, those who believe they cannot advance to the “upper-middle-class life promised to them in advertisements” and who reject conventional values of jobs, marriages, and families, turn to live-streaming platforms and lifestyles that valorize the hustle.

One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.

Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”

Economists warn that China now faces an “agrarian transition,” which could further accelerate migration to urban sites as small-scale farming is supplanted by industrialized agriculture. In 2010, a state-affiliated think tank identified China’s 750 million rural workers—particularly dissatisfied younger workers living on the margins of a city—as a key threat to the government’s legitimacy: “Policy-making must confront the pressing reality that migrant workers now dominated by a younger generation will remain in towns and cities.” The government, in response, has spurred efforts to construct a “new socialist countryside” over the past decade, marshaling technology giants to develop a place, Wang writes, “filled with peasants starting e-commerce businesses, small-scale manufacturing, new data centers, and young entrepreneurial workers returning to their rural homes.”

The titular blockchain chicken farm is one such effort to forge a new countryside, itself doubling as a way to cool down social discontent about food safety. This is a perennial concern in China: headlines over the years have warned of human hair being ground up in soy sauce and bubble tea balls being made with plastic peas. In the quiet Sanqiao village, two hours from the southwest megacity of Chongqing, farmer Jiang oversees the local blockchain chicken operation in his area. Launched by Lianmo Technology, the project affixes free-range chickens with a tamper-proof ankle bracelet that tracks their steps and location, logging this information through a blockchain ledger, which provides data on the chickens in an efficient format. Chickens are further tested every two weeks for the presence of illegal antibiotics. A QR code affixed to each ankle bracelet takes the (largely middle-class) consumers to a website where they can see the data of the chicken’s life cycle and be assured that the chicken they are consuming is sufficiently free-range. Although the project’s future is uncertain—last year, Lianmo ordered 6,000 blockchain chickens, but there is no such order this year—Jiang remains optimistic, Wang reports. But the problem is, Jiang continues, that while his region is remote, pollution-free, and enjoys fresh air and clean soil, “the villagers don’t quite know how to put a dollar value on that.”

Blockchain, now hailed as a way to ensure social trust, ironically has its roots in a paranoid way of thinking. We can’t trust institutions, and every system will have bad actors, the thinking goes, so why not create a decentralized “ledger” where records are distributed and synced among many people—in the case of the blockchain chickens, they include the farmers, the inspectors, and the consumers—ideally making the project impervious to a single effort to sabotage it? But as Wang observes, “technical systems are legible only to a select few,” and judging by the audiences of the bitcoin conferences held in California, these few are overwhelmingly white and male.

A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.

It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”

And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.

Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese youth known as shehui ren, those who believe they cannot advance to the “upper-middle-class life promised to them in advertisements” and who reject conventional values of jobs, marriages, and families, turn to live-streaming platforms and lifestyles that valorize the hustle.

One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.

Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”

The titular blockchain chicken farm is one such effort to forge a new countryside, itself doubling as a way to cool down social discontent about food safety. This is a perennial concern in China: headlines over the years have warned of human hair being ground up in soy sauce and bubble tea balls being made with plastic peas. In the quiet Sanqiao village, two hours from the southwest megacity of Chongqing, farmer Jiang oversees the local blockchain chicken operation in his area. Launched by Lianmo Technology, the project affixes free-range chickens with a tamper-proof ankle bracelet that tracks their steps and location, logging this information through a blockchain ledger, which provides data on the chickens in an efficient format. Chickens are further tested every two weeks for the presence of illegal antibiotics. A QR code affixed to each ankle bracelet takes the (largely middle-class) consumers to a website where they can see the data of the chicken’s life cycle and be assured that the chicken they are consuming is sufficiently free-range. Although the project’s future is uncertain—last year, Lianmo ordered 6,000 blockchain chickens, but there is no such order this year—Jiang remains optimistic, Wang reports. But the problem is, Jiang continues, that while his region is remote, pollution-free, and enjoys fresh air and clean soil, “the villagers don’t quite know how to put a dollar value on that.”

Blockchain, now hailed as a way to ensure social trust, ironically has its roots in a paranoid way of thinking. We can’t trust institutions, and every system will have bad actors, the thinking goes, so why not create a decentralized “ledger” where records are distributed and synced among many people—in the case of the blockchain chickens, they include the farmers, the inspectors, and the consumers—ideally making the project impervious to a single effort to sabotage it? But as Wang observes, “technical systems are legible only to a select few,” and judging by the audiences of the bitcoin conferences held in California, these few are overwhelmingly white and male.

A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.

It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”

And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.

Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese youth known as shehui ren, those who believe they cannot advance to the “upper-middle-class life promised to them in advertisements” and who reject conventional values of jobs, marriages, and families, turn to live-streaming platforms and lifestyles that valorize the hustle.

One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.

Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”

Blockchain, now hailed as a way to ensure social trust, ironically has its roots in a paranoid way of thinking. We can’t trust institutions, and every system will have bad actors, the thinking goes, so why not create a decentralized “ledger” where records are distributed and synced among many people—in the case of the blockchain chickens, they include the farmers, the inspectors, and the consumers—ideally making the project impervious to a single effort to sabotage it? But as Wang observes, “technical systems are legible only to a select few,” and judging by the audiences of the bitcoin conferences held in California, these few are overwhelmingly white and male.

A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.

It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”

And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.

Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese youth known as shehui ren, those who believe they cannot advance to the “upper-middle-class life promised to them in advertisements” and who reject conventional values of jobs, marriages, and families, turn to live-streaming platforms and lifestyles that valorize the hustle.

One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.

Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”

A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.

It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”

And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.

Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese youth known as shehui ren, those who believe they cannot advance to the “upper-middle-class life promised to them in advertisements” and who reject conventional values of jobs, marriages, and families, turn to live-streaming platforms and lifestyles that valorize the hustle.

One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.

Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”

It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”

And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.

Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese youth known as shehui ren, those who believe they cannot advance to the “upper-middle-class life promised to them in advertisements” and who reject conventional values of jobs, marriages, and families, turn to live-streaming platforms and lifestyles that valorize the hustle.

One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.

Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”

And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.

Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese youth known as shehui ren, those who believe they cannot advance to the “upper-middle-class life promised to them in advertisements” and who reject conventional values of jobs, marriages, and families, turn to live-streaming platforms and lifestyles that valorize the hustle.

One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.

Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”

Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese youth known as shehui ren, those who believe they cannot advance to the “upper-middle-class life promised to them in advertisements” and who reject conventional values of jobs, marriages, and families, turn to live-streaming platforms and lifestyles that valorize the hustle.

One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.

Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”

One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.

Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”

Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”

Save for the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s hardly an issue in recent times that has generated so much interest and such instant and diverse reaction as the ban placed on cryptocurrencies transaction by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

It was four years ago in 2017 that the CBN foresaw the danger that cryptocurrency transactions portend for the nation’s economy and promptly slammed a ban on it, warning Money Deposit Banks (DMBs) and Other Financial Institutions to steer clear of opening their platforms and channels to traders and others dealing in cryptocurrencies. The CBN, then in 2017, on January 12 to be precise, sent a circular to banks and other financial institutions on virtual currency operations in Nigeria, saying the emergence of virtual currencies has attracted investments in payments infrastructure that provide new methods of transmitting value over the internet.

The circular, signed by Director, Financial Policy and Regulation Department, Kevin N. Amugo, described these virtual currency (VC) transactions as largely untraceable and anonymous, making them in his words, “susceptible to abuse by criminals, especially in money laundering and financing of terrorism.”

The circular indicated that virtual currencies are traded in exchange platforms that are unregulated all over the world. Consequent upon this loophole, Amugo warned that “consumers may lose their money without any legal redress in the event these exchanges collapse or lose business”.

Foreseeing a potential danger in the developing virtual currency payment products and services and their interactions with other new and existing payment products and services, he said there was an urgent  need for guidance, as he put it, “to protect the integrity of the Nigerian financial system”.

Specifically, Amugo warned that “there is need to address the money laundering/terrorism financing risks associated with VC exchanges and any other institutions that act as nodes where convertible virtual currency activities intersect with the regulated fiat currency financial system”.

Having laid the groundwork underlying its concern and the associated and potential risks with the emerging trend, the CBN urged banks and other financial institutions to adopt the underlying measures until it reaches a final decision on the matter. As it clearly stated in its narrative in the originating circular four years ago, the CBN advised the DMBs and other financial institutions to ensure that they “do not use, hold, trade and/or transact in anyway in virtual currencies, and as well ensure that existing customers that are virtual currency exchangers, have effective Anti- Money Laundering/Counter Financing Terrorism controls that enable them to comply with customer identification, verification and transaction monitoring requirements.

The CBN said where banks or other financial institutions are not satisfied with the controls put in place by the virtual currency exchangers/customers, the relationship should be discontinued immediately and that any suspicious transactions by these customers should immediately be reported to the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit.”

The apex bank explained that because virtual currencies are issued by unregulated and unlicensed entities, cryptocurrencies’ use in Nigeria goes against the key mandates of the CBN, as enshrined in the CBN Act, as the issuer of legal tender in Nigeria. It added: Virtual Currency Transactions, such as bitcoin, ripples, monero, Litecoin, dogecoin, onecoin and similar products are not legal tenders in Nigeria, thus any bank or institutions that transact in such business does so at its own risk.”

Thus the latest action of the CBN to slam a ban on cryptocurrency transactions should not come as a surprise to anyone, crypto dealers inclusive. They are in the purview of the regulator, entities with no legal backing.

The follow-up letter of February 5, 2021 to DMBs, Non-Bank Financial Institutions and OFIs initialled by the Directors of Banking Supervision and Payments Systems Management Department, Bello Hassan and Musa I. Jimoh, came as an enforcement of an otherwise subsisting directive to arrest an illegal enterprise. Which is why the CBN’s letter was more pointed.

It said: “The bank hereby wishes to remind regulated institutions that dealing in crypto currencies or facilitating payments for cryptocurrency exchanges is prohibited. Accordingly, all DMBs, NBFls and OFls are directed to identify persons and/or entities transacting in or operating cryptocurrency exchanges within their systems and ensure that such accounts are closed immediately,” adding that “breaches of this directive will attract severe regulatory sanctions.”

SEC aligns with CBN

With the CBN window on crypto transactions closed, some other affected dealers came with the argument that the CBN had overreached itself, pointing out that the regulation and administration of cryptos lie with the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC). How wrong. SEC was to issue a statement in no time, aligning with  CBN’s declared vision, saying it has joined CBN to ban crypto trading. SEC said it received inquiries on a perceived policy conflict between its September 11, 2020 statement on Digital Assets, Classification and Treatment and the February 5 CBN circular.

The Commission said there were no contradictions or inconsistencies, but that last year’s statement was to provide regulatory certainty within the digital asset space, due to the growing volume of reported flows, pointing out that as the regulator of the banking system, the CBN identified certain risks that threatened investors’ protection.

“For the purpose of admittance into the SEC Regulatory Incubation Framework, the assessment of all persons (and products) affected by the CBN Circular of February 5, 2021, is hereby put on hold until such persons are able to operate bank accounts within the Nigerian banking system,” SEC said.

Crypto trading ban list

Nigeria is not alone on Crypto currency trading ban. Several countries have been on that turf for long before the CBN joined the league, as it were.   Some other African countries like Algeria, Morocco and Libya have laws prohibiting cryptocurrency trading outrightly. South Africa, on the other hand, is proposing new regulations that protect its citizens from frauds using the platforms.

The list includes Asian countries, among them China, Bangladesh and Nepal. Others are Iran, Ecuador, and Bolivia, to mention but a few.

CBN’s timely intervention

The CBN’s deft move to prohibit transactions in bitcoins trading, or VCs, was not haphazard, it was calculated and timeously executed. It was becoming obvious that beyond the criminality associated with virtual currency transactions, trading and payments, the medium was already and substantially deflecting a major source of the country’s source of foreign exchange earnings – diaspora remittances.

Resources, or rather foreign currencies that are usually rooted through the CBN, were now being accessed and warehoused in other channels and entities outside the reach of the apex bank.

Besides the loss of revenue to the Federal Government, the CBN was no longer in a position to track and monitor how these forex earnings were being applied, nor able to ascertain the identities of those involved in the transactions.

In addition, a significant contributory portion to the stock of the nation’s foreign reserves was gradually being threatened.

For and against crypto ban

The CBN’s ban against banks and other financial institutions from engaging in cryptocurrency transactions has sent shockwaves across the country. The reason for the huge debate is evident. Available data from Paxful—a cryptocurrency trading platform – showed Nigeria was second only to the US in volume terms as among the highest downloaders of crypto wallets.The total value of all cryptocurrencies globally grossed the $1 trillion mark in January 2021.

According to reports, “the decision of the apex bank to ban cryptocurrency transactions was aimed at safeguarding the economy from the adverse effects of unregulated cryptocurrency trading’’. Some analysts have said dollar inflows meant for the  foreign exchange market and foreign reserves were being channelled into the cryptocurrency market.

Research & Consulting firm, Afrinvest West Africa’s Managing Director, Abiodun Keripe said the apex bank had observed a dangerous trend, where foreign capital inflows into Nigeria were being diverted to cryptocurrency markets with zero regulation. Keripe said the nation’s cryptocurrency market recorded over N2.2 billion daily turnover. The market, he added, remained vibrant where upwardly mobile and youths earned income but was unregulated.

Alluding to CBN’s concern on its ability, or inability to regulate this crypto market, Keripe said Nigeria lacks digital assets needed for effective monitoring and regulation that would enable Nigerian regulators to track crypto exchanges across the world. He underlined the sheer volume of transactions involved in cryptocurrency deals as revealed in the stock exchange, saying the Nigeria Stock Exchange records an average of N2 billion daily transactions, and that the cryptocurrency market is in excess of that, and Nigeria is the biggest crypto market in Africa.

Keripe agreed that funds, which previously entered the country as diaspora remittances are now flowing into the cryptocurrency market after CBN tightened policy mandating International Money Transfer Operators (IMTOs) to pay diaspora remittances beneficiaries in dollars.”

The CBN, like many other major central banks around the globe, is cautious about the use of bitcoins because of the threats its usage posed to the financial system. While noting that no central bank in the world would sit back and not address threats to the financial system it regulates, the CBN has observed that cryptocurrencies had been used for laundering illicit funds, defrauding unsuspecting investors, scams and monetising ransomware as was the case with the unnamed commercial bank in Nigeria.

Keripe has equally stressed the need for Nigerians to be cautious in transacting in cryptocurrencies since they were highly volatile and not regulated by any central bank in the world, nor insured by the government of any major economy.

He said the apex bank had watched as diaspora remittances inflow to the country dropped by over $2 billion in the third quarter of 2020. “Diaspora remittances dropped from about $5 billion quarterly inflows to $3 billion in the third quarter of 2020. The statistics could even be worse,” he explained when the fourth-quarter data is released. And these reduced inflows are having a negative impact on the foreign reserves and naira stability,” he said, adding that the CBN cannot regulate and track assets within the crypto market, because of the cumbersome nature of its operations.

“Due to the downturn in the economy, Nigerians in the diaspora now use crypto to move funds home, which means forex market will continue to dry up fueling high premium between official and parallel market rates and making it difficult for the reserves to provide a buffer for the local currency,” he stated.

He said although genuine dealers are available, their operations, regrettably are now used to pay for kidnapping ransom. He therefore urged the apex bank to develop technology that connects to the crypto exchanges, track funds flow for effective regulation.

“The CBN holds the responsibility of protecting the nation from financial risks hence the need to ensure that financial dealings within the country follow set rules and regulations. Cryptocurrency, he said is not the currency of any nation, and there is no law yet.

Advocates of cryptocurrencies

Among critics of the CBN’s ban of cryptocurrency is the former Deputy Governor, Financial Systems Stability at the CBN, Prof.  Kingsley Moghalu, who faulted the blanket ban on trading on cryptocurrency.

According to him, instead of what he termed, the “knee-jerk reactionary step’’ of the apex bank, it ought to have engaged in deep thinking and be more innovative to be at the front of the curve. Moghalu told ARISE TV that during his time at the apex bank, there were a lot of innovations about how to ensure the stability of the financial system.

The CBN should come up with regulations on this area of financial dealings, demand Know Your Customer (KYC) for the crypto exchanges and corporate entities trading on such assets. This will help in identifying who is trading and validating their identity, and fish out fraudsters,” he advised.

He said: “Cryptocurrencies are one more facet of a process that continues throughout history which is innovation. Let me remind you that paper money or what we call fiat money which is legal tender as ordered by governments, has not always been in existence through creation,” saying paper money has had its ups and downs, but still remains the currency in the world today.’’

He explained that cryptocurrencies are virtual currencies that people use online to purchase goods and services, adding that one could not obtain a cryptocurrency without a legal tender, but that cryptocurrency value is not aligned to the normal legal tender.

“It has a value on its own and some people will say it is not backed by any fundamental legislation, but there are many reasons,” he said.

“One of them is that many people just want the freedom to exchange value without having to go through the restrictions of fiat money that is issued by the central banks. “Also, there’s a political dimension, that is why it is called freedom money, saying many people around the world who are protesting for human rights or when regimes, try to restrict their rights because cryptocurrencies do not go through the central bank.

“They find that they are able to still communicate with themselves and do transactions that bypass sovereign authorities,” he said, adding that central banks have never been comfortable with cryptocurrency.

On the ban, Moghalu said: “I would have preferred some deep thinking about how to come up with a regulatory framework that restricts the use of cryptocurrency or subject it to some sort of surveillance that alerts the CBN if there are serious abuses that can affect financial system stability.

“The CBN has to be concerned about the financial system stability and that is what it should be concerned about. So you have to be able to monitor and see if these signs are coming, but to ban a financial institution from having an account associated with cryptocurrency exchange or cryptocurrency trading seems to me a bit odd, it was not necessarily the best approach to the problem, that is what I think even though I understand why they did what they did, Moghalu added.

In this audio interview, CoinDesk’s Leigh Cuen and Venezuelan journalist Javier Bastardo talk about cryptocurrency and the media industry.

Caracas-based bitcoiner and journalist Javier Bastardo has covered the crypto scene in Latin America since 2017. In that time he’s been living partially off bitcoin, thanks to BTCPay server and a variety of employers that pay in crypto, like CoinTelegraph Espanol. 

“Even when I’m trying to report in an unbiased way, I’m really bullish on crypto,” Bastardo said. “Bitcoin could be useful to other Venezuelans.”

Beyond holding it as savings, many Venezuelans use cryptocurrency as the fastest way to obtain dollars. Bastardo said there is more in common between crypto readers across the Americas, both Latin America and North America, than similarities within local geographies. 

“We’re talking to a very specific audience, even if I’m writing in Spanish and you’re writing in English,” Bastardo said, referring to CoinDesk writers in New York and California. “We are more connected than I would be with a person who writes about politics in Venezuela … The way they [crypto audiences] look for information is very particular to the types of viewers that we have.” 

See also: India May Be Starting Its Biggest Bitcoin Bull Run Yet

Despite the struggle to identify reliable narratives, many readers make financial decisions based on media reports and social media trends. Media production and financial markets have always been intertwined, for better or worse. This is especially true of cryptocurrency markets. 

“They [crypto readers] are already against journalism, against the information industry. They have more anger about the information,” Bastardo said, describing the challenge of making media for this niche audience. “They need the narrative to keep going about adoption, about mainstream, yea, bitcoin will save us. It’s weird, because we have an active scene but it’s little.”

While the outrage associated with crypto coverage may be unique, the dynamic of media-driven markets is hardly new. After all, the financial outlet Bloomberg reportedly gave bonuses to reporters for “market-moving” stories and many American outlets offer bonuses for web traffic, which may incentivize sensationalism. These policy decisions come from the top, as with most business models, and rarely originates from the newsroom itself. 

See also: The Mounting Evidence of a New Bitcoin Bull Market

From his perspective, Bastardo said it’s unclear whether North American media, including but not limited to crypto journalism, is deliberately biased.

“I really don’t know if the things we see on CNN or CNBC are identified with some party,” he said. “We have those narratives that show [U.S. President] Trump is a really good [president] and others that show him as a really bad president. This is a problem in the whole media industry.” 

In particular, he said some crypto content creators might be “aligned” and “trying to push some agendas,” but that it’s unclear what is really going on with the overlap between journalism and cryptocurrency marketing. For example, he said people overhype and sensationalize stories of bitcoin usage in Venezuela, which can be both dehumanizing and misleading. It becomes even harder for readers to decipher because some of the most trusted sources in the crypto industry are individuals without journalistic training or oversight. This creates even more opportunities for freelancers with bold personalities, but a more challenging environment for readers seeking relatively objective information. 

“We have a similar way to get information in Venezuela, but it’s worse because we don’t really have open media,” he said. “But the crypto-related media, I don’t know if the writers are biased … I don’t know if this is true. This is only an opinion.”

Bitcoin newsCryptocurrency newsTwo different books published under name have recently appeared on .According to Amazon, both of the books Wave and Ripple Design Book and The Official Bitcoin Coloring Book are scheduled for release on June 28. The profile of the author makes it clear that he indeed claims to be the same Satoshi Nakamoto who created bitcoin (BTC):Satoshi Nakamoto is the renowned inventor of Bitcoin.The authors profile also states that 100% of his book royalties to support STEM and environmental education programs serving underprivileged youth. The store descriptions of the books themselves seemingly contain inside jokes about the cryptocurrency space and the myth of Satoshi Nakamoto.Wave and Ripple Design Book, for instance, appears to hint at both the Japanese roots of the bitcoin creators pseudonym, as well as to Ripple ():A wonderful selection of wave and ripple designs curated by Satoshi Nakamoto. [] Yuzans designs were often used by Japanese craftsmen in the early 1900s to adorn their wares with wave and ripple patterns.The second book, The Official Bitcoin Coloring Book, contains less subtle jokes such as stating that it has been printed on a brilliant white paper. The product page also displays editorial reviews by Etheorum creator Vitallike Buttering, J.P. Morgain CEO Diamond James, and billionaire investor and Chairman of the Bored Buffet Warden, all misspellings of individuals and organizations famous within the space.As Cointelegraph recently , have claimed to be the mysterious Satoshi over the last 10 years, but their assertions have always been met with skepticism and have lacked any substantive evidence.At the end of May, a citizen residing in copyright to bitcoins white paper, claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto. This copyright claim came on the heels of an identical one by Craig Wright, who has long himself to be the inventor of bitcoin, despite public backlash and his own periodic slip-ups while maintaining that narrative.

One of the things I was hearing all the time when I was in the banking world was OK, but this bitcoin thing, it doesnt have any intrinsic value, mentioned Ambre Soubiran, CEO of cryptocurrency market-data startup Kaiko.And this is something to which I obviously completely disagree, she continued. How can you say that having a system that enables permissionless transference and a decentralized and secure way to digitally transfer ownership [doesnt have value]? Just that system and the fact that it works and that it has been working for 10 years has value and thats the intrinsic value in my eyes.Soubiran spoke with CoinDesk for the newest episode of Bitcoin Macro, a pop-up podcast sequence that includes the audio system and themes of CoinDesks upcoming Invest: NYC convention on Tuesday, Nov. 12.The occasion will discover bitcoins function within the monetary system because it finds its place within the world macro group. No longer written off as some ignorable area of interest, extra persons are asking: Is bitcoin a macro asset? Is it a safe-haven asset? How will it carry out within the subsequent recession?, CoinDesks head of technique, Nolan Bauerle, talks with Soubiran about:The macro origins of bitcoin.The shifts within the bitcoin narrative over time.Why the ICO increase was a seminal second for exterior markets to achieve extra curiosity within the cryptocurrency house.Why the function of bitcoin as a protected haven is contextual to native politics and economics.Why HODLing conduct reveals the promise of bitcoin as a future protected haven.The immediate-term dangers to bitcoin within the case of a world recession.What order-book information suggests concerning the state of the markets.Listen to the podcast right here or learn the entire transcript beneath.

Things are settling in on the third day of Blockchain Week.Tuesday saw Nym’s Harry Halpin give an in-depth demonstration on how to shield your transactions, while Vitalik Buterin  he made the previous day.  Here’s what my colleague Nikhilesh De watching for throughout the day: 9:00 - 10:00 a.m. ET Oxford: From Cyber Security to Cyber Future - WorkshopDavid Shrier, Oxford futurist, breaks down the interconnections between cyber-worlds, data privacy and crypto. 10:00 - 1:00 p.m. Is Crypto Ready for the Travel Rule?A star-studded panel discusses the FATF’s Travel Rule, a financial regulation that could reshape the direction of the crypto industry. Amy Davine Kim of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, Noah Perlman of Gemini and Jeff Horowitz of Coinbase, among others, are scheduled to make an appearance. 11:30 - 1:00 p.m. First Principles for a Decentralized Future Hosted by World Economic Forum, this program featuring Clovyr’s Amber Baldet, Hyperledger’s Brian Behlendorf and the inimitable Meltem Demirors, and many more, will examine how the cryptographic tools being built today can preserve their underlying values.  1:00 - 2:00 p.m. Financial Exclusion: Does Crypto Fix This?One of the chief use cases of crypto is to provide financial infrastructure for emerging markets and those excluded from the banking system. Carlos Acevedo, Karen Bhatia, Susan Oh and Tyrone Ross – all currently testing blockchain for social solutions in New York City – will ask and answer the question: Can crypto bank the unbanked? 2:00 - 4:30 p.m. DeFi Risk and Regulation WorkshopCrypto lawyers, builders and founders dive into the regulatory schemes that may affect the nascent DeFi industry.  5:00 - 5:55 p.m. Don't Bank on the Banks: Borrowing and Saving With CryptoGreg DiPrisco, head of business development at the Maker Foundation, will demonstrate how the interconnected world of DeFi can replace and improve upon traditional banking.  6:00 - 7:00 p.m. Research Hub: Crypto Research Happy HourJoin CoinDesk Research’s happy hour to close out the third full day of Consensus: Distributed.  The CoinDesk 50 is an annual list celebrating the movers and shakers of the crypto industry. We've already highlighted , , , , ,  and the , and will continue to announce five new names a day until the end of Blockchain Week. Today we look at why Bitcoin is still king. You can read the    Bitcoin Is KingWith so many cryptocurrencies and “blockchain solutions” it’s remarkable, yet unavoidably clear, that Bitcoin is still the most exciting project to watch in this space. This cryptocurrency project isn’t run by a group of youthful researchers publishing their homework in the hopes of stress-testing models with other people’s money. Bitcoin isn’t a lifestyle brand, even if some zealots congregate around it. It is just money, already today. It is a tool and not a promise. It’s value doesn’t rely on any single company. And that’s why, while startup dreams come and go like fashion trends, bitcoin remains resilient.  #NYBWGivesCoinDesk has joined Gitcoin, The Giving Block and Ethereal Summit to support charities helping communities in difficult times. We're raising $100,000 and giving you a voice through the quadratic funding model.  and how to donate. In addition,  created an original piece of artwork, shown above, as a part of Consensus: Distributed. The art, inspired by love, unity and technology, will be up for auction this week. Follow  on Twitter to find out how to bid — the proceeds will go to the same cause. IRS Solicits Contractors to Help Examine Crypto Traders’ Tax ReturnsThe Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is  on their crypto holdings. R3 Corda Partners With Kaleido After Ethereum Startup Spins Out of ConsenSysR3, the company behind distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform Corda, is  with news of a partnership with blockchain-in-the-cloud startup Kaleido. The announcement comes following Kaleido’s emergence as a standalone company last month.  Telegram Abandons TON Blockchain Project After Court Fight With SEC Telegram founder Pavel Durov wrote in his public channel Tuesday that the Telegram Open Network project would be discontinued due to the company's ongoing legal fight with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Stablecoin Supply Breaks $10B as Traders Demand Dollars Over BitcoinThe value of assets for all  Tuesday, having surged by over 70% in just two months, according to Coin Metrics. Stablecoin supply growth comes as more cryptocurrency traders choose to trade alternative cryptocurrencies (or altcoins) using dollar-backed digital tokens instead of bitcoin. 17,000 People Have Filed Claims for Refunds From QuadrigaCX, Auditor EY SaysThese individual claims have been filed for  totaling anywhere from $167 million to more than $300 million depending on how the assets are valued. Last night, the CoinDesk Research team spoke with crypto fund experts and managers about sector shifts and opportunities. CoinDesk’s  counted "four whiskey drinks, three beers" on the panel. To access all of the deeper cuts available through Consensus: Distributed,  , our virtual conferencing platform. You can create an account through Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook or set one up manually on . Your profile will be the way you match and network with others. As soon as you're set up, you’ll be directed to a dashboard showing other registrants. Brella is easy to use and has a number of features to help you through this virtual experience. There are multiple tracks of simultaneous programming happening inside Brella. You’ll also be able to browse the entire agenda, bookmark sessions and build your own schedule. Brella is a great networking tool as well, be sure to check out some of the social features available in-page, and reach out to the people and organizations that pique your interest.  The Problem With MoneyListen to former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers discuss why the problem with the current monetary system is "" Generation Crypto Freelance journalist Jess Klein writes about an emerging psychographic of people who see the world through the lens of decentralization. Unset by the traditional bounds of age, country or class, Generation C is bound together by a willingness to question mainstream narratives and an unceasing desire to topple undeserving authorities. The  of leading crypto figures -including Preston Byrne, Ameen Soleimani and Tamara Frankel - will publish at 8:00 a.m. ET.

From mid-December to early January, Tron (TRX) grew over 2,000% — yes, that’s 2,000% growth in just three weeks. Almost everyone's heard of Tron, but do you know exactly what it is? Or are you still asking yourself, "what is Tron coin?".

If the case is the latter, you're in the right place!

By the end of this guide, we will have covered everything you need to know to answer the question "what is Tron coin?". As well as the basics, I'll also introduce you to:

Let's get started!

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To fully understand what is Tron coin, we need to start from the very basics. Tron is a decentralized entertainment and content-sharing platform that uses blockchain and peer-to-peer (P2P) technology.

You can think of it as a next-generation social media outlet on which you can create and share content with anyone, anywhere in the world. Tronix is the basic unit of accounts in Tron’s blockchain. It is the currency that pays you for your content, and is often referred to as its ticker symbol, 'TRX'.

People who enjoy social media, online gambling, and other forms of online entertainment, will enjoy Tron.

Using the Tron cryptocurrency’s ecosystem, not only can you share content with other people, but you are compensated as a content creator for the content and data that you create. This model serves in direct opposition to how traditional social media companies, such as Facebook, monetize user data.

They often do it without the user knowing, reaping in the benefits for themselves. When you use Tron cryptocurrency, you are in control of your data and you will be compensated for your content.

TRX already has some big partnerships, such as the one with oBike. The largest bike-sharing company in Southeast Asia (oBike), based in Singapore, launched its own token, oCoin. The token was launched on Tron’s network. oCoins have real-world utility, as the coins can be used to buy rides on the oBike’s platform. The company enables users to earn oCoins just by choosing to ride oBikes.

Other major partnerships include the one with a semiconductor giant, Bitmain, who is a leading producer and designer of ASIC chips used for Bitcoin mining. Bitmain’s Antminer S9 is one of the hottest products used in the Bitcoin mining community. So when anyone asks you what is Tron coin, don't forget to mention their huge network of partners.

Zag- S&W, another one of Tron’s partners, is a leading international law firm that focuses on commercial and corporate law. This is a promising addition, because the firm is part of the Legal 500, which has an extended network to some of the biggest companies in the world.

This partnership will offer comprehensive support in digital asset transactions, operations, risk management, and legal adaptation across jurisdictions. As Tronix is listed on more and more exchanges, the need for legal support only increases. This partnership is very strategic.

This is not a surprising move from the non-profit foundation behind Tron.

The Tron Foundation is a non-profit entity based in the Southeast Asian industrial strong-arm of Singapore. The foundation mainly engages in operating the Tron crypto network in the principles of openness, fairness, and transparency in supporting Tron’s development team.

The team behind the Tron Foundation considers regulation and compliance to be the highest of values. They have approval by the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority and they are under the supervision of the Company Law of Singapore.

Still wondering, what is Tron coin? Learning more about the founder, Justin Sun, will help you understand the coin better.

The leader of the Tron Foundation is the young Justin Sun, who has an insanely impressive background for someone at any age, let alone, someone who is 27. To start with, he founded the Peiwo app which already has 10 million users. Justin Sun has led Peiwo to become the first live streaming app to receive cryptos. The Peiwo app is one of the leading members of the online audio content community.

Forbes listed Sun as 30 under 30 in Asia. So when someone asks you what is Tron coin or why to choose Tron coin, always keep his successful founder in mind. He is also the protégé of Jack Ma who is the founder of the Ali Baba group. Jack Ma handpicked Justin Sun to study at the prestigious Jack Ma Hupan University, which has a lower acceptance rate than Princeton.

Justin Sun is also a graduate from the University of Pennsylvania. While the relationship between Ali Baba and Tron is still unclear, some of the top developers from Ali Baba are leaving Alibaba to go to Tron, which makes the issues even more clouded.

Beyond Jack Ma, Sun surrounded himself with an even wider team of all-star mentors, including Feng Li and Tim Berners-Lee. For those of you that don’t know, Feng Li is an advisor of Ripple and led investment at Coinbase. Tim Berners-Lee is famous for inventing the World Wide Web.

Beyond the team, there are a growing number of key influencers in crypto that believe the TRX coin will succeed, including Hacker Noon.

The biggest benefit of using Tron crypto is that you are empowering artists and content creators all over the world into having ownership over the content they create.

Tron is leading a movement that some refer to as the third web. Although it sounds futuristic, the third web, or web 3.0, will enable people to use the internet as it was originally intended to be used for - as a decentralized, open network.

During the dotcom bubble, the internet had taken a turn away from its decentralized origin. Social media giants in Silicon Valley built on top of the infrastructure that was given to them and rewired it so that Tech Giants could make money from user data. Cambridge Analytica is the case and point of this system. However, in the Third Web, Tron will put the power back in the users' hands, so that they are in control of their own data.

By using Tron crypto, you are leading the internet back down its original path. You are putting data back under your control where you have the choice of not disclosing or monetizing data for your own gain. So one of the answers to what is Tron coin is something that will lead the internet back to its original purpose.

From a developer’s standpoint, Tron is also special because it’s currently being built in a way that allows the use of any high-level language for smart contracts. This means developers in the future will be able to use whichever programming language they prefer to build on top of the open-software design.

One of the biggest products developed on Tron thus far is crypto puppies. Just after crypto kitties were first released, Tron attempted to play off the upcoming Chinese year of the dog. Tron dogs are still selling for the equivalent of $18. This is just one of many examples of successful products on the network.

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To help you fully understand what is Tron coin, I will give you a glimpse into how this coin's transactions work.

Like many other digital currencies, TRX coin transactions occur on a public ledger. On this public ledger, the history of each transaction can be traced all the way back to the first transaction. The transaction model that TRX uses is similar to the transaction model that Bitcoin uses. The only difference is that Tron has improved Bitcoin’s model by providing additional security. The model TRX uses is called UTXO.

In a UTXO model, there is a basic output which is an amount of money sent to a TRX user’s address alongside a set of rules that will unlock that specific set amount. The final product is an output that is called the UTXO.

But to fully understand what is TRX, you don’t really have to know too much about the UTXO model. That is more so for the developers and nerds who might know more than they should (not that there's anything wrong with that at!).

You should focus on the bigger picture, sticking to the overall utility that Tron delivers to people who want to regain control of their data and still use social media.

Since you already have a pretty good idea about what is Tron coin, time to discuss its potential. Justin Sun’s relationship with Jack Ma begs the question of whether there will be a merger or convergence of the two entities in the future. Any such news would be monumental and certainly catapult Tronix down an already well-trodden path to success.

Tron is still brand new and it is just getting started. But still, you can’t be too overly optimistic.

Tron crypto may fail to grow because of the way Justin Sun handles communication, which at times has angered investors. Sun has the reputation to deliver updates that simply announce that a big announcement will be announced in the future, which is understandably quite frustrating. People also view Sun as being too youthful and perhaps too naive to run a blockchain that has the magnitude of Tron.

Other negative shots to Tron and Justin Sun’s reputation surfaced in early 2018 when news circulated about Tron using some of Ethereum’s code and violating Ethereum’s copyright license. This has since been corrected. Around the same time, there were also rumors regarding Justin Sun cashing out $1.2 billion worth of his own coins. This turned out to be a false rumor, too.

Some consider that string of mudslinging as a FUD campaign in an attempt to destroy Justin Sun’s reputation. Sun’s reputation often comes under fire when people ask, "what is Tron coin?". Regardless, the coin is only at year one of a road map that spans all the way until 2023. In other words, it’s still very early days for Tron, so news like this will vanish in time.

Look at Jed McCaleb from Stellar. People forgot all about Mt. Gox when news about the Stellar partnership with IBM surfaced. Again, it’s early days for Tron.

If you are using Tron’s platform, the reputation around it has been pretty good thus far. The budget seems to prioritize security, which I can gather from Tron’s recent hire of a highly-demanded security engineer, Jorge Guo. He has received acknowledgment for his work from the likes of Google, Qualcomm, Huawei.

Guo will handle all research and development for Tron’s security.  He helps answer security-centered questions related to the topic, "what is Tron coin?".

When it comes to holding TRX itself, you just have to be smart.

Like holding a secure passcode, you need to treat however you store your coins very sensitively. You can choose to store the coins in a wallet, like the Ledger Nano S, but if you use a wallet like that, be sure to write down your private key. If you don’t write down your private key, you can lose your coins forever.

Since cryptocurrency is decentralized, many wallets do not store your information at all. They do not have backups of your username and password. You cannot have an email sent to you to reset your password if you forgot it. You need to have the private key you are given access to when you signup. That’s it. That’s the only way to get into your account.

The same can be said about buying Tron coins, too. You should always choose a reliable cryptocurrency exchange platform (or a trustworthy payment middleman), and make sure that all of the security measures are in-check - only by doing so can you remain assured that no harm will come to your funds and assets in the purchasing process, and afterwards.

Just like any other digital asset, Tron can be exploited, and its security can be breached. That is a risk that you have to take in the age of digitization. You can follow basic security techniques like securing your private keys using a hardware wallet. Such techniques will increase your ability to protect your assets.

However, maybe you are your own biggest enemy when it comes to abusing TRX. Like other digital currencies, you can use it to do some pretty illegal stuff when it comes to tax evasion or illegal trading (although it should be known that Justin Sun’s TRX will be locked until 2021, so he cannot touch his supply like c-suite executives on Wall Street).

Like many other coins or really just assets in general, TRX can be used for the likes of hiding money or tax evasion. As a matter of fact, up to 36% of Bitcoin owners plan to commit tax fraud this year, according to an article by the Motley Fool.

As regulation on cryptocurrencies increases, there is less room for criminals to use cryptocurrency illegally. Concepts such as KYC (Know Your Customer) are becoming more prominent to identify and verify people using digital currency. KYC is good for the identification of asset owners, but in a way, KYC also benefits the owners themselves by reassuring them of the legitimacy of the platform they are using.

Insider trading can also take place with Tron just like it may occur for any other coin. Suspicion of insider trading is rampant in crypto. No unusual rumors concerning Tron and insider trading have surfaced barring the debunked rumor concerning Justin Sun taking a billion USD worth of TRX for himself.

Sun taking money for himself should not lead you to believe that Tron is a bad coin if you’re still trying to answer the question "what is Tron coin", though.

Across aspects through and through, TRX coin is solid. The technology and the personnel behind Tron come with little concern. The team is slowly being built with developers from Alibaba and other tech giants. Justin Sun is young, but that just means he is of the same generation that cryptocurrency is — he understands a youthful audience. This coin is definitely worth watching.

With an energetic young leader in Justin Sun, this coin is going places. The founder is one of the most well-connected people in crypto. The fact that he can call Jack Ma, the founder of the Ali Baba Group, as well as the founder of the World Wide Web, members of his inner circle shows how powerful he really is. Think of Justin Sun’s network when you answer the question "what is Tron coin?".

Have you ever heard the quote "show me who you surround yourself with, and I’ll show you who you are"? This quote applies to business mentorships, too. Justin Sun’s first-degree network, as well as his vision for the future of Tron, are powerful assets. This project is still very new, and I am terrifically excited to see what the future holds for Tron!

Now, if you've come to the conclusion that you'd like to purchase yourself some Tron coins, you should note that this should be done only on trustworthy cryptocurrency exchanges. For example, Binance is one such exchange - buying Tron here would look a little something like this:

Alternatively...

If you're not keen on buying Tron coins from a cryptocurrency exchange, you could actually purchase it via Simplex - a payment processing company. This way, you'll be able to buy your Tron coins with a credit or debit card, and be sure that your payment is secure and fast, too.

Also, don't forget to find a wallet to store your Tron coins in. Many users recommend the Ledger Nano S - it's surely one of the most secure cryptocurrency wallets out there!

Leave your genuine opinion & help thousands of people to choose the best crypto exchange. All reviews, either positive or negative, are accepted as long as they’re honest. We do not publish biased reviews or spam. So if you want to share your experience, opinion or give advice - the scene is yours!

Death Recorded: Naomi Wolf and the Bitcoin Cash 51% AttackBy TL;DR: At roughly the same time, two seemingly unrelated events happened, shedding light on language usages importance in getting basic facts correct. Celebrated feminist author Naomi Wolf recently claimed homosexual men were routinely executed in Victorian London, causing widespread modern condemnation and scorn. Similarly, cryptocurrency news outlets ran headlines insisting a 51% attack on the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) blockchain occurred during its latest network upgrade hard fork, throwing the projects very viability in doubt. As subsequent, careful analysis of both shows, neither is true.Death Recorded, Naomi Wolf, Bitcoin CashWithout appeal to cabals or grand conspiracies, sometimes a narrative is so juicy and ripe it writes itself. Wokeness seeps through modernitys pores, and various historically oppressed groups and subcultures are beneficiaries of earnest revisionism. Even if one spent no time thinking about homosexual men and their plight, doubtful anyone would argue theyve not had a wonderful time of things when it comes to legal protection.Everyone listen to Naomi Wolf realize on live radio that the historical thesis of the book she's there to promote is based on her misunderstanding a legal term pic.twitter.com/a3tB77g3c1 Edmund Hochreiter (@thymetikon) May 23, 2019And so, it isnt difficult to believe author and polemicist Naomi Wolfs assertions such men were put to death in England during the Victorian era. Wolfs bona fides are strong: Rhodes Scholar, trusted advisor to major US progressive politicians, and relatively recent recipient of an Oxford Doctor of Philosophy degree in English literature. Shes often pronounced a thought leader of Third Wave Feminism.Her latest book, an extension of that 2015 doctorate, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, was the focus of an interview she gave to the BBC 3s program, Free Thinking later last month. During the interview, Wolf triggers presenter Matthew Sweet by insisting several dozen executions of homosexuals were carried out during that time based on records she found to have been categorized as death recorded. One tiny problem. Death recorded actually proves Wolf wrong, and has the opposite meaning of the one she ascribed. Death recorded meant a kind of reprieve, of not being executed.51% AttackAgain, this isnt the work of some blogging yahoo. Naomi Wolf is the progressives progressive, ticking all the right opinions on all the correct boxes. The BCC 3 and its host are hardly known for their anti-homosexuality, so that cant be it. Instead, live as it happened, Sweet does what good interviewers and journalists do: double checks and challenges assumptions. Its a remarkable piece of audio, and well worth a listen. To her credit, at least initially, Wolf, though clearly caught off guard, appears to understand the books central thesis has been effectively gutted.For whatever reason, cryptocurrency news outlets have not reached such a level of maturity and basic journalistic standards. When technical debt, a code bug, was exploited during the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) scheduled network upgrade hard fork of 15 May 2019, outlets were quick to seize on its implications relative to the projects detriment. And when a Crypto Twitter personality rediscovered what he termed as BCH being hit by 51% attack from just 2 miners, off to the implication races media ran.Entire articles mulled Bitcoin Cashs demise, and especially from outlets who literally never cover BCH unless the story is decidedly negative. All of them turned on the word attack. There was little-to-no discussion about how the BCH community was actively talking about, considering, in rather frank and stark terms, all that had occured during what was expected to be a fairly uneventful upgrade. The Honest Cash platform, for example, hosted two competing accounts, both by professed BCH supporters, here and here.In fact, like Sweet to Wolf, it wasnt really until cryptocurrency exchange/bank Coinbase issued their deep dive, digging into the minutiae of what exactly happened regarding a so-called attack, that real perspective was given. Regarding one of the attackers, researchers noted, We find it remarkable that BTC.top derived the technical solution to recover BCH funds mistakenly lost by users, choosing to send the coins to their intended recipients rather than claiming the funds for themselves. That conclusion, curiously, didnt make headlines. Theres been no follow up from cryptocurrency media outlets since giving their readers decidedly skewed perspectives. No discussion of honest nodes. Instead, theyre left with the mistaken assertion death recorded means execution.DISCLOSURE: The author holds cryptocurrency as part of his financial portfolio, including BCH.CONTINUE THE SPICEand check outour piping hotVIDEOS.Our podcast,The CoinSpice Podcast, has amazing guests. Follow CoinSpice onTwitter. Join ourTelegramfeed to make sure you never miss a post. Drop some BCH at themerch shop weve got some spicy shirts for men and women. Dont forget to help spread the word aboutCoinSpiceon social media.LATEST STORIESDinner with Warren Buffett and Justin Sun? Binance CEO CZ Says He Cant Make ItPatreon Alternative Bitbacker.io Acquired by Boost VC-Backed Flote.appRipple Killer? 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Image: Blockchain illustrated – courtesy Simply Explained – Savjee You Tube channelLet me say upfront that I have stayed clear of the exuberance and hype over cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and the over 2,000 others called “altcoins” currently listed on CoinMarketCap.com and others listed on other sites. Also, I have never owned nor traded any cryptocurrencies.On the other hand, I recognise the value and potential uses of blockchain technology, originally described by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta in 1991, as a means to cryptographically secure a chain of blocks to timestamp digital documents so they cannot be backdated or tampered with.Blockchain technology remained mostly unused until 2009 when “Satoshi Nakamoto”, the mysterious individual or group which developed Bitcoin and adapted blockchain technology coupled with “Satoshi’s” proof-of-work data to create a secure, distributed, robust, digital ledger used to record all Bitcoin transactions, which makes detection of any compromised blocks easy and makes it extremely difficult for hackers, even with the most powerful and fast computers to compromise all the distributed blocks across the network of participating computers.Would it shock readers when I say that the primary objectives behind Bitcoin and the altcoins are socio-political and that these have similarities with those of the hippie counterculture of the 1960s?The quest to create alternatives to established lifestyles, societies, economic relationships, cultures, mores and so forth is as old as civilisation.Aside from their outward manifestations such long hair, tie dyed clothing, permissive attitudes towards sex,  consumption of marijuana and LSD and so forth, the core of the hippie movement was to create a communitarian, environmentally sustainable mode of living close nature based upon cooperation, sharing and democratic communal living, adoption of eastern religions, New Age, mysticism and other spiritual beliefs; all as an alternative in opposition to the “establishment” values and mode of existence of mainstream society of their time.A similar countercultural movement which preceded the hippies of the 1960s was the Wandervogel (Wandering Free Spirits or Wandering Birds) movement in Germany from around the end of the 1800s to the early 1900s up until the time of Nazi Germany before World War II.This movement arose along with the opposition amongst farmers, rural people, the landed aristocracy, nobility, artists, intellectuals and others to the rise of industrialisation in Germany at the time, and it was during this period that the “Green” movement started in Germany, leading up to the environmental movements today.It’s believed that the Wandervogel movement in Germany influenced the hippie movement in North America and Europe in the 1960s, and whilst the hippies are very much off the public’s radar screen today, besides some surviving hippie communes and individuals living an alternative lifestyle; however the alternative hippie spirit and ethos of the 1960s continues even until today, amongst countercultural youth of the 1960s who later became part of mainstream “establishment” society.Manifestations of that countercultural hippie spirit and ethos can be seen in movements such as Free and Open Source Software, which sought to communally and cooperatively create alternatives to proprietary software.It can also be seen in the idealism amongst some early Internet pundits back in the 1990s who saw the Internet and the World Wide Web as providing them with another shot at creating an alternative, borderless society with a perfectly free market environment in Cyberspace, in which any enterprising youth with a computer and Internet access in his or her bedroom could compete on par with established large corporations across borders and even beat them “David versus Goliath” style.It should be noted that “Satoshi Nakamoto” created Bitcoin around 2008, when there was a crisis within the “establishment” financial system, when there was much public anger over the U.S. government’s bailout of the “too big to fail” banks in the United States whilst banks there were foreclosing the homes of people with low credit ratings who had taken out generous sub-prime mortgages only to find that they could not pay and were turfed out into the street.There also was much public anger against the Federal Reserve system comprised of 12 non-governmental, regional Federal Reserve banks the U.S. which serve as that country’s central bank and much public anger directed at the “banksters” at the time.It was within this atmosphere of anger and mistrust of the “establishment” banking and financial system that “Satoshi Nakamoto” created Bitcoin, intending it to be a viable, alternative currency system which people can use to buy and sell goods and services across borders privately and in a parallel universe to and independently of “establishment” currency systems, which it also would undermine and hand “power back to the people”.However, most of the narrative online about cryptocurrencies today does not mention blockchain at all nor does it mention much about cryptocurrencies being use to buy and sell. Instead, the narrative is mostly about Bitcoin’s and altcoins’ exchange rates with the very much established and regulated, “establishment” currencies, such as the U.S. dollar and others which Bitcoin was originally developed to circumvent.Today, instead of being used as alternative currencies in Cyberspace, Bitcoin and the altcoins which followed in its wake, are treated as asset classes to be speculated upon and traded on cryptocurrency markets, just like stocks and shares are traded on stock markets, and exactly the same technical indicators and tools used to analyse stock price trends and likely price movements are also used to analyse Bitcoin and altcoin stock price trends and likely price movements. Look no further than the CoinMarket Cap and Coinbase sites.Whilst this is not investment advice, however readers who are interested to further understand the technical indicators mentioned in the above paragraph may want to follow the daily You Tube videos on Bitcoin and altcoin price trends and likely future price movements by professional trader Crypto Kirby.Once again we emphasise that the above is not investment advice but only for readers’ knowledge and that neither this writer nor Enterprise Trade Views suggests that readers invest or not invest in Bitcoin or altcoins.If readers choose to invest, they do so at their own risk, as the prices of Bitcoin and altcoins are highly volatile, being largely driven by market sentiment and have been observed to be subject to suspected manipulation by the “big boys” a.k.a. “whales”.This is because unlike listed companies’ share prices, market prices of commodities or the exchange rates of national currencies (despite being fiat), the prices Bitcoin and most altcoins lack strong underlying fundamentals, such as revenue and profit track record, expectations of future profitability, expectations of future demand for commodities, the health of national economies and so forth, which ensure likely continued market demand for them and a greater likelihood of medium or long term share price, commodity price or currency exchange rate appreciation, despite short term fluctuations driven by speculative buy and sell forces acting upon prices and exchange rates.This does not mean that the prices of Bitcoin and some altcoins may not rise to respectable levels again and provide respectable returns for investors, or that investor and speculator enthusiasm for them has petered out.After all, a few of those Internet startups such as Amazon.com, Uber, Grab, Airbnb, independent bloggers and so forth did manage to undermine “establishment” retail stores, taxi companies, hotels, news media, music publishers and so forth, however a handful startup social media sites, including and video hosting startups, as well as startup search portals back in the 1990s and 2000s have grown into giant corporations dominating cyberspace today, whilst most have fallen by the wayside.Likewise, this writer expects that like the massive dotcom shakeout and consolidation of 2000 – a.k.a. the “dotcom bust”, the several thousand listed cryptocurrencies out there are heading for a “crypto bust”, with the weaker ones dropping out, leaving a handful of the more well established and popular ones including Bitcoin filling the void left behind and grow to dominate “cryptospace”.Already today, many content creators hosted free-of-charge on these giant social media sites are complaining about how these sites are now censoring and even excluding creators of content deemed “inappropriate” or “fake” from their sites, whilst such content creators, not having signed any binding contract or agreement with their host, have no legal recourse against being restricted or evicted. He who hosts creators’ content for free calls the tune.If that’s anything to go by, and if indeed, a handful of remaining cryptocurrencies grow to dominate “cryptospace”, we may well hear complaints about their market power and dominance.Already, Bitcoin and altcoins which were conceived to challenge the financial “establishment”, have now become de-facto, part of that “establishment”, to use that old hippie term.Visit our sister media channel, Enterprise IT News for your dose of the latest technology and solutions in Malaysia.If you would like to have your say published in ETV, write in or submit your articles to EnterpriseTV.my@gmail.com.Only contributions that are RELEVANT will be selected.

Professor Nuria Lorenzo-Dus is a linguist at Swansea University. Within the department, she convenes and teaches the second-year undergraduate module Discourse Analysis, as well as the third-year module Language in the Media. She also supervises undergraduate dissertations and PhDs which focus on how different institutions (e.g., political parties and the media in the UK) use language to construct particular identities for vulnerable groups, such as individuals living in poverty or suffering from mental health. As the academic year ended, I managed to catch up with Nuria to chat about her work. What’s your area of specialism in Applied Linguistics? Within Applied Linguistics I focus on Discourse Analysis, and when I do Discourse Analysis I’m always interested in institutional contexts of communication; quite often contexts that are mass-mediated. So, that used to be broadcasting but nowadays I am much more concerned with digital platforms. So, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram? So, what kinds of things do you work on, in relation to these new media environments? For the past four years I have been working on various aspects of digital trust and influence. What I mean by that is how, when we communicate in digital environments, such as online forums and social media, we may seek to get others to place their trust in us, rather than in other people who may be competing for their attention or to get ‘their voices heard’ in those public spaces. My research asks: how do we seek to influence others, or get them to trust us, through the way we express our views and opinions digitally? In doing that, I have focused on those seeking to influence, or seeking to gain our trust, who are not doing it for positive reasons. Well, one context I’ve been looking at is online grooming, specifically how online groomers seek to develop trust in them from the victims. This is for deceptive purposes (interviewer’s note: sexual abuse). I look at how they seek to influence children’s behaviour through the language they use. Sounds quite ‘dark’. How do you manage to separate yourself, personally, from the material you investigate and focus on the work of language analysis? It is indeed a most distressing topic, especially as I am also a parent of young children. However, it is an issue that requires urgent attention from researchers and where linguists in particular can make a most valuable contribution. Is this the only project you’ve worked on recently? No, not at all.  Another, recent, example would be online radicalisation, which I have been working on as part of my involvement in the Swansea University founded Cyberterrorism Project. So, I’ve been examining online propaganda magazines published by jihadist groups. The language and images used in these magazines are a means by which these groups try to attract and recruit others to their ideology. But most recently, within this strand of my research, I’ve been looking at far right extremist groups in the UK and Australia –  how they use social media, specifically Twitter and Facebook. This research project is led by a Swansea colleague in the College of Law and Criminology: Dr Lella Nouri. It asks what do these groups seek to achieve? Is it to mobilise people? Or is it recruitment? What themes and narratives do they construct in their messages, and through which specific uses of language, for example, which sociolinguistic styles? Which groups have you been looking at in particular? Well, recently Swansea University’s Cyberterrorism Project held a conference Terrorism and Social Media  (interviewer’s note: Nuria was part of the organising committee) and I co-presented work done on the far right extremism project using two groups as our case study: the UK group Britain First and an Australian group called Reclaim Australia; some of the funding for this research came from Edith Cowan University in Australia and some from Swansea University’s CHERISH-DE centre. When you say ‘language’ is it just ‘words’ you’re talking about here? No, when I say language I mean language in context, and always as part of a complex, though fascinating, semiotic system that also includes images, sounds, non-verbal communication and any other sign-based means. I know, from discussion with some of our third-year students, you have just finished another project. What’s that? Yes, I’ve recently completed a research project funded by Swansea University’s CHERISH-DE Centre into trust in crypto-drug markets. So, those are places in the dark web in which people sell and buy drugs. And, in my case, we’ve been looking at all the forums (a c. 250 million word corpus) in what is considered the flagship of crypto-drug markets: Silk Road. The research project has examined how trust is sought, developed and assessed by buyers and sellers in that crypto-drug market. Ah, I can see that connection between language and the very human issue of trust and influence. But what’s unusual or innovative is the context? That’s right. In all these projects, you can see the common theme is the salience and relevance of language in achieving trust and influence, always considering how digital environments may shape and be shaped by the process. You know, it’s not the same to persuade using a 140-character limit (for Twitter) than when you have a much more flexible limit (e.g. a feature article in an online magazine or a non-character restricted forum post). It’s also different when people have an aspect of illegality surrounding the communicative environment, that is, when they’re aware that their actions may be subject to law enforcement activity. So yes, the interconnected issues of trust and influence unify the themes of my research, which examines them within emerging communication platforms in our digital era. Does your work mean that you collaborate with other academics or institutions? How ‘applied’ is your research? To the first part of your question – yes, most of the time, really. I’ve enjoyed working with scholars from other disciplines – mainly criminologists, psychologists, sociologists, historians and, lately, security studies experts. But (and this is relevant to the second part of your question) it’s not only with academics that I collaborate! I think it’s important in the kind of applied work that I do to reach out from the ‘academic ivory tower’ and engage with the real world. So, I work with many stakeholders. Well, regarding my work on online grooming communication, I’ve developed a partnership with the NSPCC, which involves the development of materials that will support professionals who work with children – principally social workers. These children may have been subject to online grooming, or may be vulnerable to it. In June this year, we presented key project findings at a specialist session at the annual NSPCC How Safe national conference which was attended by stakeholders such as the government and private businesses, and the interest in our work has grown substantially through this dissemination and collaboration. With the crypto-drugs market project I’ve also been in direct contact with the Home Office and local law enforcement in South Wales, as well as a workshop presentation on the use of linguistics methods for investigating crypto-drug markets for the UN. Really, it’s key that we extend our knowledge beyond academia and Applied Linguistics is a discipline that provides many opportunities for activities and work beyond traditional education contexts. Actually, as part of the dissemination, knowledge exchange and engagement activities linked to the projects I’ve outlined, I was at the Universidade de Brasilia in May this year to talk to academics and students there about my research into digital trust and influence.  And discussion always lead to further discussions about current and potential future projects. So, while I was there, the idea of collaboration on the issue of far-right extremists’ use of social media was discussed, as they have similar issues in Brazil. Collaboration is infectious! In what way do students studying Applied Linguistics at Swansea benefit from the research that you do? I think the students benefit directly from my research-led teaching. By that I mean that I always include examples of my latest project in my courses – I change my curriculum and teaching materials every year to make sure they’re topical and relate to cutting-edge research. So, in the past academic year, for Language in the Media, the 3rd year students worked on communicative means of persuasion in crypto-drug markets, and the second-year students on Discourse Analysis worked on the speech act of requests in online grooming chat logs. So, in this way, the projects are relevant to potential careers (that involve project work) and they get a taste of what it’s like to do applied research. I have also applied for SPIN project placements (student paid internships) and three years ago, through a collaborative SPIN with the College of Law and Criminology, students from the college were able to spend four weeks at a leading centre for terrorism studies located within the University of Massachusetts Lowell. They also took part in a summer school at Swansea University where they were taught interdisciplinary methods, including corpus linguistics, for researching into online radicalisation. They subsequently presented their research and I’ve co-published work with them (see here). Again, this year I have another SPIN project where two of our students are working on online grooming communication. This is not only with me but also the larger research team that involves NSPCC professionals. This is good as it exposes them to stakeholders, state of the art research,and collaborative working during their undergraduate studies. Well, I have recently secured a two-year funded Leverhulme Trust Award for a project which concerns language barriers in the youth justice system. Specifically, we will investigate assessment interviews with young people who have come into contact with the youth justice system. A move away from the digital environment, then? Yes, for this one. Although the project does not examine digital contexts, it is nevertheless concerned with how best to develop effective communication  between youth justice workers and young people  who have come into contact with the youth justice system, for which interpersonal trust is essential . One of the project’s specific aims is to stimulate a shift towards examining the role and impact of professional language use on the communicative efficacy of assessment processes in the Youth Justice System. We believe that the effectiveness of communication in Youth Justice interviews depends in part on how Youth Offending Team practitioners carry out these interviews, as well as on how willing and able the young persons are to contribute to them. Will this be another collaborative project? Yes. The principal-investigator in the project is a renowned criminologist, Professor Stephen Case, from Loughborough University. And we are also working with Dr Ralph Morton who is an early career researcher at Loughborough. So, what form will this project take? Well, it started in March 2017 and will run for 24 months. We are working with recorded interviews done by youth justice assessment teams in England and Wales. What we’re looking at is how they can make sure their communication with young people in the system is as effective and positive as possible. We will be able to offer suggestions and recommendations for enhanced practice. So the idea, really, is to support both the professionals and the young people. We will be involved in the co-creation of materials to help day-to-day practice. We plan to use Conversation Analysis as our main analytic framework. Ensuring our work is fully compliant with best practice in research ethics is paramount in this project. In terms of recording real-life interactions (interviews, specifically) between youth justice professionals and young people, for example, we are particularly mindful of perceptions of intrusion depending on our recording choices (e.g., video versus audio?) into what is a high-stakes, real-world setting. An easy one now! What do you love about language and applied linguistics? Not so easy – there’s so much Alexia! Ok, I’ll re-phrase: what is so important about language and Applied Linguistics? Why do a degree in it? One of the things I love the most about studying language is that, as you can see, it enables you to work with, and learn from, colleagues from other disciplines, as well as from a wide range of professionals. I often say to them ‘everybody needs a linguist’ at the onset of our collaboration and they look at me as if to say, ‘we’re not quite sure.'” But they always end up with: “ok, yes, we do need a linguist on our research team!” I love how language, and research into language, is so central to almost every aspect of human behaviour. The issues I am interested in cannot be fully understood without a strong linguistic focus.  A number of stakeholders and other disciplines have a keen interest in trust and influence in digital environments, but have not considered the key part played by   language. Yet, if you take the worrying issue of online grooming, for example, you soon realise that it is a communicative process, that it’s about persuading someone to do something for you. Ok, there is also likely an element of coercion involved, but it’s about using language to attain particular goals.  Language is key. So, I guess that I love how fundamental language is to anything that is human. If there is anything that makes us human, it’s language and how we use it, which is precisely what my research focuses on, across a range of contexts. It allows me to work across a number of disciplines in and out of academia, advancing human knowledge. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

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Auto Coin Cars customers are generally high net worth people who can also make the most of the personal privacy that features crypto payments and count on an instantaneous crypto-fiat exchange getting rid of cost changes.Some of Auto Coin Cars sports and efficiency lorries are provided just to crypto users in closed auctions. These vehicles are the greatest quality designs provided by the U.K.s leading car experts. According to the platform, all of them are thoroughly picked, featured complete history and remain in spotless condition validated by independent reports. The initially such auction will be kept in late 2019. Potential purchasers can sign up now and get information about monthlys offerings, in addition to the conditions of involvement.Auto Sales With Crypto Payments Are a Promising Market The specific niche Auto Coin Cars runs within is most likely to grow in the future. 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