Cryptocurrency

It's almost touching that the NFT world sees itself as radical

Some things are explained so many times that they become unexplainable: we can only relate to them as something complicated that needs to be explained. The global financial crisis was like this. Crypto-currencies were like this too. The newest thing that exists to be explained is the world of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. NFTs are collectible digital objects. They are created with a technology called the blockchain, which unalterably and uniquely records their provenance. This means that if I mint an NFT of an image — a cartoon of Donald Trump, say, sitting naked astride the Capitol — I can prove definitive ownership of the image, no matter how many

Are cryptocurrency transactions the future?

To most of us, cryptocurrencies remain an esoteric world, beloved by nerds and incomprehensible to the rest of us. Does Visa’s announcement this week that it will now process payments directly in a cryptocurrency called USDCoin change that, and hasten us to a day when we will all have cryptocurrency accounts which we use to do our day-to-day shopping? You don’t need to understand the mathematics of cryptocurrencies and blockchain to work out that the prospect of shopping with crypto is rather concerning for two reasons. Firstly, cryptocurrencies are an unregulated Wild West. While the pound in your pocket is backed by the Bank of England and the pound in