The Bangladeshi taxi driver in Dubai finds out I'm from Ireland and asks me if I know Kevin O'Brien. I don't. Who is he? "The cricket player!" says he, amazed that I don't know this. I tell him

Bitcoin has a built-in problem. Each new block is limited in size to one megabyte of information, which in effect limits the number of transactions in each block, meaning that the network can process around

Focusing on the price of bitcoin and its ups and downs, as tends to happen in media reporting about bitcoin, tends to miss out on the fact that an entire infrastructure has grown up around bitcoin. It’s

The idea of a blockchain began to form in the early 1990s but it was Satoshi Nakamoto who incarnated the first working blockchain in 2009 with the launch of bitcoin. A blockchain is a type of digital ledger

In 2018, it’s still common for authorities to comment confidently that bitcoin is mostly used by criminals to launder money. The better educated understood that only a simple-minded criminal would use

There was good reason for Satoshi Nakamoto to disguise his real identity when he came up with the idea for bitcoin. Governments don’t take kindly to those who contravene state policy on the creation of

When the early Internet was being built, a philosophical question emerged: who should own the software? The radical fringe of the hippie generation of the 1960s, which crossed in places into the area occupied

There was a time, within the last three decades, when financial news stayed in the financial press. Banking, thought to be work for conservative, cautious managers, was characterised by the 3-6-3 rule:

In the late 1990s, as people were discovering the potential of peer-to-peer networks on the internet, a site called FriendsReunited offered to re-unite you with former schoolmates, a kind of perpetually

Bitcoin’s early promoters relied initially on chat forums to build support, but found also some willing media support, mostly from digital culture blogs. Many of these early players also earned or bought

In the early days of the internet, getting information into and out of the net was complicated, unless you knew some coding. Web browsers solved that problem, providing an interface between the user and

For an underground online marketplace for drugs, guns and other illegal services and products, the Silk Road was an implausibly grand name. The idea, though, was brilliant, and built on two technological

The story of MtGox, the first major bitcoin site, is surely worthy of a film. The bitcoin exchange was but the newest version of a simple technology that was already rocking the entertainment industry:

On Tuesday 28 November 2017, the Financial Times ran its first print headline story about bitcoin: “Bitcoin record triggers unease among traditional marketplaces”. The record increase referred to was an

Few grasped it at the time, but reggae is arguably the only style of music that effortlessly transcended the digital divide once synthesisers and programmable drums became part of the musical lexicon.

Okay, so maybe you've figured out where this is going as we head towards the digital breakthrough in the mid-1980s which totally divided reggae fans, many of whom regarded the new sounds as too mechanical.

Version 'pon version... With a library of killer reggae cuts built through the 1970s, a good sound could play an original cut, a DJ version, an instrumental and a dub of the same tune. Take this one below