Stories by Josh Quittner
Why Do You Think It's Called Discord?
I don’t recall exactly when Ryan Bubinski started berating me about migrating to Discord. Most likely his Discord blitz began during one of our many-times-a-day Zoom meetings around three months ago. Now I live out my days hearing the sonar beep of Discord notifications every few minutes. And then I go to sleep and hear it in my bad dreams. Thanks a lot, Bubinski. Bubinski is our CTO and the person with whom I formulated the idea for Decrypt in early 2018. While we always knew we wanted to ma...
DAO or DIE!
The other night I lay curled up in bed, sobbing. “Now what?” asked my wife. “Nothing!” I lied. “Are the Twitter boys being mean again?” she asked, giving me a hug. “No!” I lied again. In fact, yes: earlier in the day, two O.G. web influencers that I have admired and followed for years had been very mean about crypto. It started when one of them, a Web 2 guy with 580k followers, tweeted that virtually every project on a blockchain is a fraud. “There’s no value in using those technologies,” he sa...
Why Does Jack Dorsey Hate Ethereum?
“Jack hates Eth,” one of Decrypt’s wags posted to our Slack workspace last night. This was right after Twitter boss Jack Dorsey tweeted his endorsement of a Twitter add-on, “Vicariously,” that helps people get out of their Twitter filter bubble via remixing their Lists: I used @getvicarious to create and sync a list of all accounts I’m following, set that list to be reverse chron, named it “Latest” and pinned it, and now I can quickly swipe between ranked (algorithm) and all tweets as they happ...
Alas, John McAfee, We Hardly Knew Ye
There’s an old saying in journalism that goes something like: Scoundrels are way more fun to cover than normies. Say what you will about John McAfee—and today, when news of his apparent suicide in a Barcelona jail seeped out, people said a lot—the 75 year old was a blast to cover. John McAfee Found Dead in Spanish Prison Cell: Report From his first entrance onto the national stage in 1992, as the human face of the novel computer virus known as Michelangelo, he generated all the excitement and...
Decrypt Gets a New Editor-in-Chief, an Executive Editor and a Publisher
We're thrilled to announce some big news for Decrypt: crypto journalist Daniel Roberts, Editor-at-Large at Yahoo Finance, is joining our team as Editor-in-Chief. In addition, Jeff John Roberts, longtime staff writer at Fortune and author of the newly released “Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street,” will come on board as Executive Editor. Daniel and Jeff have been at the forefront of crypto journalism precisely because of their abi...
Decrypt Diaries: Why We Built on IPFS
One of the core ideas of Decrypt is to use the Web 3.0 technologies that we cover. Decentralized tech isn’t just an idle curiosity to us: In the coming months, our goal is to actually become a Web 3 medium. To that end, last fall, we started chatting with Juan Benet, one of the seminal figures in the burgeoning movement to decentralize the Web. A Stanford University computer science grad, Benet, 32, is the father of the Interplanetary File System, a remarkable protocol that will help us move De...
Hello, Web3 world: HackFS builders ready for Filecoin launch
One by one, from all over the world, the builders log on to the live, HackFS webcast. “Hi from Korea,” says Apple Kim, whose words appear in the virtual conference’s chat sidebar. “Hei fra Oslo,” says Thor Kamphefner. “Hello from Portland, Me,” says Matthew Johnson. “Hi guys,” says Angel Molina, from somewhere in the world. “What a time to be alive XD.” It’s July 6, yet another day in the endless doldrum of stay-at-home quarantine days—but this day, for these people at least, offers a bit of...
More layoffs at ConsenSys
ConsenSys, the Brooklyn-based Ethereum incubator, today announced it was laying off 14 percent of its workforce in response to the coronavirus crisis. The 91 people who were affected were notified today. Founder and CEO Joseph Lubin delivered the news at an all-hands meeting over Zoom this morning. “I considered many levers we could pull to weather this storm,” Lubin said. “I consulted numerous people both inside and outside of the company. I pursued conversations with potential investors. I rev...
Ethereum incubator ConsenSys restructures again
ConsenSys, an incubator of Ethereum-based projects, announced today that it was restructuring the company, and laying off 14% of its workforce. The news was delivered by ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin at an all-hands meeting this morning at the company's Brooklyn headquarters, and was attended by more than 500 others who work remotely around the world via Zoom. As Lubin addressed the staff, at times emotionally, dozens of employees spontaneously sent ASCII hearts via Zoom's chat feature. Lubin...
Does Google have a crypto problem?
In an apparent change in its Play Store policy, Google removed the popular crypto browser MetaMask from the Android store this week. The deplatforming came to light yesterday on the heels of the Internet giant unilaterally removing hundreds of crypto video sites from YouTube. Though the video deletions appear to be in the process of being reversed—the company told Decrypt yesterday that the Christmas Eve Purge was done in error—as of 10 a.m. California time, MetaMask was still unavailable on the...
Neal Stephenson: I’m not Satoshi Nakamoto
SAN FRANCISCO—There are some people who think that the great cypherpunk writer Neal Stephenson could be Satoshi Nakamoto. They make a fairly compelling case. Sadly, they’re wrong. “I couldn’t be. So I’m not,” he told Decrypt in an interview today. Stephenson, whose books (including Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon), have done more to help us envision the future than just about anyone writing speculative fiction, was the headliner at the annual Blockstack Summit in San Francisco today. He was inter...
The pro who runs Coinbase Pro
The view from Coinbase’s new offices in San Francisco’s Financial District is pretty sweet. Even in a city known for its beauty, the panorama of the Bay from the company cafeteria on the 18th floor is gasp inducing. The view inside Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the United States, is almost as rosy these days. It’s valued at $8 billion following $525 million in investments from a who’s who of venture capital, including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Y Combinator and Tiger Glob...
Hong Kong regulates crypto funds
For the first time, Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission—the equivalent of the U.S.'s Security and Exchange Commission— has published rules and regulations for fund managers handling crypto assets. The rule making comes at a time of intense political crisis—and unprecedented levels of bitcoin trading in the formerly independent port city, which is pushing back against pressure from China mainland. The commission, which has been studying "virtual assets"—its term for crypto—for some mont...
Straight outta beta: CoinBulletin
We wanted to call your attention to a new department—known internally at Decrypt as "CoinBulletin"—which quietly fluttered into existence on our beloved site over the past few weeks. Now, when you tap or click on "Coins" in the left-hand Menu bar, you'll call up a page that lists a dozen of the top coins. Click on the coin you want, and you can read the latest news and call up a graph that charts its price—though far better looking, it's pretty much like what you would find on many crypto sites,...
Wanted: Way more DeFi projects
CryptoKitties aside, the most successful use cases for Web3 technology so far are decentralized-finance companies. That’s partly why Tachyon, an accelerator backed by Brooklyn-based incubator ConsenSys, is looking to help fund up to 15 DeFi startups. But hurry kids! The application period to get your $150,000 in funding ends on September 16. Tachyon’s managing director, Gabriel Anderson, said that the accelerator’s current push is around open finance: “This is where we think the next great Web3...
Crypto's civil discussion of the century
Perhaps you’ve attended one of the various, crypto-related “Debates of the Century” during the past year, pitting New York University’s Nouriel Roubini, a crypto skeptic, against a variety of pro-crypto grandees? Well, brace yourself for what promises to be the Civil Discussion of the Century: Ethereum co-founders Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Lubin square off for a pleasant chat at the upcoming Ethereal Summit in Tel Aviv on September 15. Buterin and Lubin will be joined by Yoni Assia, Founder & C...
Great sign for the ecosystem: Crypto devs are as bullish as ever
Never mind last year’s crushing bear market in crypto. Developers are undaunted, continuing to write code at roughly the same pace as they did during the height of the bull market, according to a surprising new analysis released today. The analysis comes via Electric Capital, a digital-asset management firm that invests in programmable money and blockchain tech. Its team “fingerprinted” more than 27,000 code repositories and 22 million code commits in Github, to create a report that looks at th...
Steve Bannon: Still bullish on Bitcoin
What does former "Trump Whisperer" Stephen Bannon have in common with crypto-celeb Brock Pierce? Bannon, as a Goldman Sachs banker, took over the virtual currency trading outlet, Internet Gaming Entertainment, from Pierce, its founder, who was forced out in June 2006. That's a long way of saying that Bannon knows crypto about as well as anyone. He gets it at a fundamental level. So it should surprise exactly no one that his comments during a CNBC interview were especially pro-crypto. "Cryptocurr...
Ethical advertising in crypto
Each morning, when we look at email sent to editor@decrypt.co, we find a handful of messages from sketchy organizations, and possibly fake people, asking how much we'd charge for "paid placement" of an article. Here's a typical one: Hi, We were checking out your website, decryptmedia.com, and really like what we see, so we wondered if you’d be interested in a written-for-you article to publish on the site? Though our content would reference one of our clients, we will also make sure the piece is...
New report ties recent Bitcoin price jump to Bitfinex
A number of independent researchers have concluded that “a single actor” caused the recent spike in Bitcoin on April 2. Whether the actor was a lone whale, a group of big investors acting together—or a crypto exchange trying to jump start the sluggish market, as one analyst suggested today—remains a mystery. Late last week, the Cambridge, Mass., blockchain-analytics firm Coinmetrics was first to tweetstorm its findings. At the same time, our old friends at Crypto Integrity, an ad hoc group of a...
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