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  • News & article

    Social media needs bigger clean-up

    News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 31/07/2018

    » The plunge of Facebook and Twitter shares last week shows that both companies are hostages to investors' unrealistic perceptions of how quickly they should grow even as they purge bots and trolls. Moving to eliminate all fake and malicious accounts, as well as making new ones very hard to register, would be scary given these inflated expectations.

  • News & article

    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.

  • News & article

    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?

  • News & article

    Facebook's new mission looks well nigh impossible

    News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 17/01/2018

    » If Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is sincere in a recent post about gradually taking the media element out of "social media", he's striking a powerful blow for tech self-regulation, as well as preparing to pay a heavy price for the evolution of his vision. But getting the genie back into the bottle may be too difficult even for Mr Zuckerberg, and, in any case, his creation's problems go far beyond his proposed fix.

  • News & article

    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.

  • News & article

    Turnover tax on global technology giants is sheer folly

    News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 20/09/2017

    » Ten European Union countries' finance ministers have signed a letter calling for a tax on the revenues of multinational tech companies that have been hiding away their European profits. But European leaders should proceed with caution, because a turnover levy may not be the best solution to this multi-billion-dollar problem.

  • News & article

    Political correctness won't help sort out Uber's woes

    News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 16/06/2017

    » There's a disconnect between the way Uber, the ride-hailing company, is trying to transform itself and what it really needs to fix to become a sustainable business. Instead of reconsidering its business model and protecting itself against a regulatory backlash, it has decided to go politically correct.

  • News & article

    Blockchain test could change Russia

    News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 08/06/2017

    » Russian President Vladimir Putin and his economic team have long been under the impression that, to wean the country off its oil dependence, they needed a major leap in some specific area of technology that wasn't yet dominated by Western, Chinese or Japanese tech giants. Their latest hopes are being pegged to the Ethereum blockchain platform.

  • News & article

    US-EU trade negotiations getting hung up on politics

    News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 31/08/2016

    » Germany's vice-chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, says talks about a major trade deal between the European Union and the US have failed, though "nobody is really admitting it". That statement should be taken with a grain of salt, but the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) appears to be doomed, at least until after elections in the US and major European countries.

  • News & article

    Catch some Pokemon and get a glimpse of the future

    News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 20/07/2016

    » One of the interesting debates over Pokemon Go, the addictive smartphone game that 9.5 million Americans play -- and probably a lot more than that now -- is whether it's truly augmented reality (AR), an up-and-coming companion technology to virtual reality (VR).

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