This Year's Misadventures In The Cryptoverse

Looking back over the posts on these pages over the past few years (and my Twitter feed!), readers may wonder if I've focused on anything other than Britain's political woes. Fortunately, I've been distracted by numerous legal developments, covered extensively on The Fine Print, Keynotes, Ogier Leman's "Insights" pages, LinkedIn and, most recently, Mastodon. A prominent theme is commentary on attempts to introduce legal certainty and controls into the volatile world of cryptoassets, alas too late to avert the string of collapses that have peaked (so far) with FTX... Contagion still lurks and has crossed into traditional financial firms, including Australian pension funds. Two main thoughts leap out from the morass:

• Tech evangelists should stop pleading for ‘light touch regulation’ and explain any significant externalities associated with their technology which need to be addressed. There may be no ‘choke points’ within the energy guzzling Bitcoin protocol itself but consider the role of crypto-exchanges, wallet custodians and decentralised finance (DeFi) operators that enable lending, trading and so on: FTX demonstrated that greed and stupidity still lurks around crypto-tokens, so the tech still needs regulatory tools to guard against related human misconduct; and

• Similarly, the fact that major venture capital firms invested in FTX while receiving investments through FTX's trading arm - and their due diligence seems to have 'missed' the complete absence of ‘traditional’ governance/controls - raises questions about (a) potential tracing claims by FTX clients' assets into the VCs' funds; and (b) whether FTX was effectively an unincorporated association with an array of corporations designed to encourage the idea that it was a 'traditional' corporate group, such that the participants may have unlimited liability... 

The last point should also be considered by those proposing formal recognition of  'decentralised autonomous organisations' (DAOs) which also tend to involve related companies and other 'body corporates' for various purposes.
Well, at least that's off my chest.

Welcome To The Fediverse!

Now that both Facebook and Twitter have confirmed my hypothesis that Web 2.0 'Facilitators' (who solve your problems) could eventually be shunned as merely Institutions (who solve their own problems at your expense), I've finally embraced the fediverse - a network of independently hosted servers running open standard communication protocols. In my case, Mastodon, running on ActivityPub. 

Web 2.0 vs The Fediverse is a little like King Arthur stumbling across an anarcho-syndicalist commune.

And, hey, no advertising!

My research on where to base myself began with an excellent SCL Tea & Tech session with Neil Brown and Simon Forrester, followed by a review of Mastodon documentation, then a trip to the Join Mastodon page to find a hosted server that seemed like the right home and would have me and seems serious about maintenance and moderation... a process that really makes you think about what matters to you! 

Setting up was just as easy as setting up in any of the Web 2.0 social network services.

Trickier is finding whom to follow, and deciding how to curate your new online 'instance' - again an opportunity to think quite hard about what matters to you and how you want to communicate. I'm planning not to follow many people or post much until I've that figured out. Maybe I'll set up several different accounts, following different themes, just as I have separate blogs, email addresses, communication apps and Web 2.0 social media presences some of which may need to fall away...

How Many British Prime Ministers Will Be Sacrificed On The Altar of Brexit?

Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak... the list goes on. I give Sunak a month. As detailed again and again in these pages, Reality will keep reaping its way through politicians who think that Britain can grow, let alone thrive, without free movement of goods, services, capital and labour between itself and its neighbours - who just happen to have clubbed together in the world's largest trade bloc.

Cameron baulked at even attempting Brexit. May stupidly thought she could trigger the process yet fudge the result. Johnson lied about the consequences of a deal that he secretly planned to renegotiate. Truss tried to magic her way out of the vicious economic spiral in the full glare of the financial markets spotlight; while Sunak is so pathetic as to find himself skewered by the dog-whistle promise that Britain will refuse to admit any refugees.

What the next candidate will offer the few remaining Tory faithful is anyone's guess, but unless he or she decides to join the Single Market & Customs Union, it will be another short stay in Number 10.