In an eloquent essay, Scottish-American historian Niall Ferguson argues that “We are living through a monetary revolution so multifaceted that few of us comprehend its full extent.”

The technological transformation of the internet is driving this revolution. The pandemic of 2020 has accelerated it…

Covid-19 has been good for Bitcoin and for cryptocurrency generally. First, the pandemic accelerated our advance into a more digital word: What might have taken 10 years has been achieved in 10 months. People who had never before risked an online transaction were forced to try, for the simple reason that banks were closed. Second, and as a result, the pandemic significantly increased our exposure to financial surveillance as well as financial fraud. Both these trends have been good for Bitcoin….

What is happening is that Bitcoin is gradually being adopted not so much as means of payment but as a store of value. Not only high-net-worth individuals but also tech companies are investing. In July, Michael Saylor, the billionaire founder of MicroStrategy, directed his company to hold part of its cash reserves in alternative assets. By September, MicroStrategy’s corporate treasury had purchased bitcoins worth $425 million. Square, the San Francisco-based payments company, bought bitcoins worth $50 million last month. PayPal just announced that American users can buy, hold and sell bitcoins in their PayPal wallets. This process of adoption has much further to run…

Some economists, such as my friend Ken Rogoff, welcome the demise of cash because it will make the management of monetary policy easier and organized crime harder. But it will be a fundamentally different world when all our payments are recorded, centrally stored, and scrutinized by artificial intelligence — regardless of whether it is Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or China’s Xi Jinping who can access our data… Rather than seeking to create a Chinese-style digital dollar, Joe Biden’s nascent administration should recognize the benefits of integrating Bitcoin into the U.S. financial system — which, after all, was originally designed to be less centralized and more respectful of individual privacy than the systems of less-free societies.

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Source: Slashdot – Bloomberg Columnist: Bitcoin is Part of a Real Monetary Revolution

From a recent report:
Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux Foundation fellow currently responsible for stable Linux kernel releases, shared the lessons he’s learned as a kernel developer that are applicable to other developers at this year’s Linux App Summit. He started by showing how he could succinctly distill the essence of the talk into a single four-word slide:

“Don’t make your users mad….”

Kroah-Hartman explains that one of Linus Torvalds’ most deeply-held convictions: don’t break userspace. “Other operating systems have this rule as well — it’s a very solid rule — because we always want you to upgrade. And we want you to upgrade without worrying about it. We don’t want you to feel scared. If you see a new release, and we say, ‘Hey, this fixes a bunch of problems,’ we don’t want you to feel worried about taking that. That’s really really important — especially with security….”

If you do make a change, make sure there truly is a compelling reason. “You have to provide enough reason and enough goodness to force somebody to take the time to learn to do something else. That’s very rare.”

His example of this was systemd, which unified a variety of service configurations and initialization processes. “They did it right. They provided all the functionality, they solved a real problem that was there. They unified all these existing tools and problems in such a way that it was just so much better to use, and it provided enough impetus that everybody was willing to do the work to modify their own stuff and move to the new model. It worked. People still complain about it, but it worked. Everybody switched… It works well. It solves a real problem.

“That was an example of how you can provide a compelling reason to move on — and make the change.”

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Source: Slashdot – Greg Kroah-Hartman: ‘Don’t Make Users Mad’

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike brings this report from AFP:
Swiss politicians have voiced outrage and demanded an investigation after revelations that a second Swiss encryption company was allegedly used by the CIA and its German counterpart to spy on governments worldwide. “How can such a thing happen in a country that claims to be neutral like Switzerland?” co-head of Switzerland’s Socialist Party, Cedric Wermuth, asked in an interview with Swiss public broadcaster SRF late Thursday. He called for a parliamentary inquiry after an SRF investigation broadcast on Wednesday found that a second Swiss encryption firm had been part of a spectacular espionage scheme orchestrated by U.S. and German intelligence services.

A first investigation had revealed back in February an elaborate, decades-long set-up, in which the CIA and its German counterpart creamed off the top-secret communications of governments through their hidden control of a Swiss encryption company called Crypto.

SRF’s report this week found that a second but smaller Swiss encryption firm, Omnisec, had been used in the same way.

That company, which was split off from Swiss cryptographic equipment maker Gretag in 1987, sold voice, fax and data encryption equipment to governments around the world until it halted operations two years ago. SRF’s investigative program Rundschau concluded that, like Crypto, Omnisec had sold manipulated equipment to foreign governments and armies. Omnisec meanwhile also sold its faulty OC-500 series devices to several federal agencies in Switzerland, including its own intelligence agencies, as well as to Switzerland’s largest bank, UBS, and other private companies in the country, the SRF investigation showed.

The findings unleashed fresh outrage in Switzerland, which is still reeling from the Crypto revelations.

The first compromised cryptography company “served for decades as a Trojan horse to spy on governments worldwide,” according to the article, citing news reports from SRF, the Washington Post and German broadcaster ZDF. “The company supplied devices for encoded communications to some 120 countries from after World War II to the beginning of this century, including to Iran, South American governments, India and Pakistan.

“Unknown to those governments, Crypto was secretly acquired in 1970 by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency together with the then West Germanyâ(TM)s BND Federal Intelligence Service.”

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Source: Slashdot – Report Claims America’s CIA Also Controlled a Second Swiss Encryption Firm

Tasmania consists of the 26th-largest island in the world and its surrounding 334 islands — an island state of Australia with a population around 540,000 people, according to Wikipedia.

Friday the Tasmanian government “declared that it has become the first Australian state, and one of just a handful of jurisdictions worldwide, to be powered entirely by renewable electricity,” according to one news report:

Tasmania joins the Australian Capital Territory as the only two Australian jurisdictions sourcing all of their electricity from renewable energy sources, and places Tasmania alongside countries like Scotland, Iceland and Costa Rica which have also made the transition to 100 per cent renewable electricity. The milestone was welcomed by environmental groups, saying that it was another example of what is being achieved by state and territory governments that are stepping in to show leadership on energy policy in a vacuum left by ongoing conflict both between and within political parties at a federal level…

Tasmanian energy minister Guy Barnett added that the Tasmanian government would continue to support an expansion of the state’s renewable energy capabilities, as the state looks to grow its role as a supplier of zero emissions energy to both mainland Australia and of green hydrogen into international export markets. “But there is more to do, which is why we have set a target to double our renewable generation to a global-leading target of 200 per cent of our current needs by 2040 — which we recently passed into law following the passing of legislation through both Houses of Parliament,” Barnett added.

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Source: Slashdot – Tasmania Is Now 100% Powered By Renewable Electricity