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T WELVE YEARS after bitcoin was born, governments are still struggling to cope with cryptocurrencies. Britain has banned Binance, a crypto exchange and the European Union’s regulators want transactions to be more traceable. On August 3rd Gary Gensler, the head of America’s Securities and Exchange Commission, said cryptocurrency markets were “rife with fraud, scams and abuse” and called on Congress to give his agency new regulatory powers. The price of bitcoin, the biggest cryptocurrency, gyrates with regulators’ every word. Governments have an obligation to fight the deception, tax evasion and money laundering that plagues the crypto world. Police seizures of bitcoin suggest that they are becoming more zealous. The harder issue they must grapple with is whether cryptocurrencies threaten the financial system. Were bitcoin to collapse, our crypto “stress test” suggests that its holders would lose hundreds of billions of dollars but that the fallout would be manageable. Yet there … [Read more...] about Why regulators should treat stablecoins like banks

I N THE LATE 1980s Zambians, inspired by the changes sweeping through eastern Europe, demanded the end of their own one-party state. In 1991 Kenneth Kaunda, the country’s founding president, reluctantly agreed to multiparty elections. He lost. But in leaving office willingly, even personally removing the presidential pennant from his car, Kaunda ensured that his country was a trailblazer for democracy. By the end of the decade nearly every country in Africa had gone to the polls. During the commodities boom of the 2000s the economy of the continent’s second-largest copper producer grew by about 7% per year. Though far from perfect, Zambia seemed more likely to become the next Botswana (democratic and middle-income) than the next Zimbabwe (despotic and wretched). How things have changed. Since it took office in 2011 the Patriotic Front ( PF ) has failed Zambians. In particular, under Edgar Lungu, president since 2015, corruption, human-rights abuses and poverty have all spread. … [Read more...] about Zambia’s election is crucial, but it’s not a fair fight

T HE GREAT hope of the 1990s and 2000s was that the internet would be a force for openness and freedom. As Stewart Brand, a pioneer of online communities, put it: “Information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.” It was not to be. Bad information often drove out good. Authoritarian states co-opted the technologies that were supposed to loosen their grip. Information was wielded as a weapon of war. Amid this disappointment one development offers cause for fresh hope: the emerging era of open-source intelligence ( OSINT ). New sensors, from humdrum dashboard cameras to satellites that can see across the electromagnetic spectrum, are examining the planet and its people as never before . The information they collect is becoming cheaper. Satellite images cost several thousand dollars 20 years ago, today they are often provided free and are of incomparably higher quality. A photograph of any spot on Earth, of a stricken … [Read more...] about The promise of open-source intelligence

Tunnel 29. By Helena Merriman. PublicAffairs; 352 pages; $28. Hodder & Stoughton; £20 T HE PLAQUE at 7 Schönholzer Strasse, in the trendy Prenzlauer Berg district of east Berlin, is easy to miss. Yet it marks one of the most astonishing episodes in the grim history of communist East Germany. For it was from here, in September 1962, that 29 East Berliners escaped to freedom via a narrow, 120-metre tunnel underneath the wall that had cleaved their city in two a year earlier. “Tunnel 29”, by Helena Merriman, a British journalist and broadcaster, began as a popular podcast, aired by the BBC in 2019 to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the wall. Happily, the written account is no less captivating. The hero of the tale is Joachim Rudolph, whom Ms Merriman interviewed extensively in 2018. A young engineering student with a tragic family history, Mr Rudolph flees East Berlin less than two months after the wall’s construction—before concrete reinforcements, … [Read more...] about The remarkable tale of the tunnel under the Berlin Wall

“D RINKING THE Kool-Aid”, meaning to unquestioningly adhere to a belief or system, is often used jokingly by people unaware of its awful origin in Peoples Temple, a 20th-century religious community. (Jim Jones’s followers in Guyana in fact committed suicide by putting cyanide into Flavor Aid, a different drink.) The cult had its own internal lexicon, too. The Temple’s acolytes celebrated the birthday of one man, Jones himself, on “Father’s Day”. “Churchianity” was a term for the Christianity observed by America’s middle class. “Revolutionary suicide” was the group’s final act. Heaven’s Gate, another cult that ended with a mass suicide in 1997, used similarly bizarre jargon. A new book, “Cultish” by Amanda Montell, examines the role of language in binding people to organisations of all kinds. The group may be an ordinary workplace, a fan club or a circle of friends, but it can also include institutions that make it hard to escape their orbit and, at worst, that inflict grievous … [Read more...] about A new book explores “cultish” language