• OPINION

  Crypto markets aren't all the same

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 23/01/2018

  » There's a compelling reason to consider what's going on with cryptocurrencies a purely speculative boom-and-bust roller-coaster: Over a three-month period, the prices of all the top coins and tokens are rather strongly correlated, going up and down in unison. What does that make them if not the 21st-century incarnation of tulip bulbs?

• OPINION

  Stock market is a lot like bitcoin now

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 08/02/2018

  » Just as President Donald Trump had nothing to do with the stock market's rise, despite the almost 60 boastful tweets he has posted about it since being elected, he has nothing to do with the recent stock crash. Instead, praise the machines -- and blame them, too.

• OPINION

  Welcome to the year of censored social media

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 04/01/2018

  » This year, don't count on the social networks to provide its core service: an uncensored platform for every imaginable view. The censorship has already begun, and it'll only get heavier.

• OPINION

  The cyber whodunnit and the global blame game

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 21/12/2017

  » The US government has officially attributed to North Korea the WannaCry ransomware attack, which encrypted hundreds of thousands of computer drives around the world in May, 2017. And yet as with a series of other highly public cyberattack attributions, little evidence for the claim was made public. It's time for the cybersecurity world to follow the advice of the Rand Corporation and set up an unbiased international consortium that would seek to attribute attacks based on a common set of rules.

• OPINION

  Until it gets hacked, e-government sounds just great

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 23/11/2017

  » A group of Czech security researchers earlier this year discovered a way to steal identities from electronic ID cards used in a number of countries, known in the cryptography industry as a ROCA vulnerability. So far, the vulnerability has caused problems in Estonia -- the country with perhaps the most comprehensive e-identification and e-government system in the world -- and in Spain. Former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a tireless promoter of his country's e-democracy, has said that other countries and institutions have the same problem, too; they're just not talking openly about it. He's very likely right.

• OPINION

  Outrage is no tool to bring change

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 29/11/2017

  » Tony Hovater, the Ohio man whose profile in The New York Times caused much indignation last weekend, would have been in jail or at least under close police surveillance if he lived in Germany. In the US, Mr Hovater is free to keep posting swastika-filled pictures on Facebook -- but the writer and editors who published a piece about him that was bleakly neutral in tone face ferocious anger for "normalising" the Nazi sympathiser.

• OPINION

  Digital currencies can hurt the US

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 06/12/2017

  » Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's announcement that the Latin American country will issue a cryptocurrency called the petro to overcome a "financial blockade" by the US probably mirrors the thinking of other maverick regimes. The possibility of sanctions-busting, and generally finding a way to work outside the Western-dominated global financial system, makes cryptocurrencies attractive to non-Western nations, and the more so to rogue regimes.

• OPINION

  Coup against Mugabe is really nothing to celebrate

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 17/11/2017

  » As leader of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe has survived longer than Stalin in the Soviet Union and Mao in China. If it's coming to an end -- which seems likely given his apparent inability to emerge from house arrest after the military took charge -- it's worth reflecting on the mistakes he made to end such a remarkable run.

• OPINION

  Authoritarian cryptocurrencies are on the march

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 18/10/2017

  » With Russia and China both embracing the idea of sovereign cryptocurrencies, it's time to ask a simple question: Why is a technology threatening to decentralise money so attractive to highly centralised, authoritarian regimes?

• OPINION

  No, separatism isn't the continent's next major crisis

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 03/11/2017

  » Those who are always on the lookout for the next European crisis -- Brexiters not least among them -- have latched on to Catalonia's symbolic "secession" as another sign that Europe isn't working well. The Catalan events, however, merely confirm that today, Western European countries are secession-proof -- too fat to fail. Belgium, the country where ousted Catalan First Minister Carles Puigdemont is hiding out from prosecution (or, to Catalan secessionists, leading a government in exile) is another example.

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