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The country of El Salvador has picked an architect for his attention-grabbing bid to lure cryptocurrency investment to the small Central American nation. FR-EE founder Fernando Romero is now in charge of the country’s Bitcoin City development and plans to add a new Pacific airport, according to... View full entry
A self-declared “crypto paradise” is coming to a remote island nation in the South Pacific featuring designs from Hong Kong-based firm James Law Cybertecture for what is billed by developers to be the world’s first blockchain-based democracy. Located in Vanuatu, the 800-acre private... View full entry
Liberland’s earthly domain is a constellation of locations and events that gravitate around the unoccupied Gornja Siga. These props, in various stages of construction, share a fundamental quality of ephemerality and mobility, as if recalling their origins as a dream spawned on the internet. — Volume
The self-declared libertarian micronation of Liberland has vanished somewhat from the media's spotlight since its founder and current President, Vít Jedlička, planted the utopia's state flag on Gornja Siga, an unoccupied Danube island between Serbia and Croatia, in 2015. Liberland instantly... View full entry
He imagines a sort of experimental community spread over about a hundred square miles, where houses, schools, commercial districts and production studios will be built. The centerpiece of this giant project will be the blockchain, a new kind of database that was introduced by Bitcoin. — The New York Times
Jeffrey Berns, who owns the cryptocurrency company Blockchains L.L.C., has bought 68,000 acres of land in Nevada that he hopes to transform into a community based around blockchain technology. His utopian vision, which would be the first 'smart city' based on the technology, involves the creation... View full entry
Today, listings from one coast to another tout Bitcoin as a way to make a property transaction. A new collection of haute residences in Hollywood with Los Angeles skyline views go for $1.21 million or its Bitcoin equivalent; in Washington, D.C., two-bedroom condos are on the market for between 36 and 84 Bitcoins. In Austin, the seller of one ranch is offering a “signficant discount” if the buyer pays with Bitcoin. — Curbed
Great longform piece by Andrew Zaleski for Curbed on how Bitcoin, blockchain technology, and other cryptocurrencies have changed—or not changed—the real estate industry. "While there are laws in Arizona and Vermont that allow blockchain technology to play key parts in property sales and... View full entry
Two entrepreneurs have figured out how to heat their homes for free: bitcoin mining.
Bitcoin transactions require a lot of processing power, which creates a lot of heat. So Ilya Frolov and Dmitry Tolmachyov built a wooden cottage in the Russian Siberian town of Irkutsk, and they’re heating it with two bitcoin mines. The men pocket about $430 a month from bitcoin transactions, while keeping the 20 square meter space warm.
— Quartz
A bitcoin vault doesn’t store actual bitcoin units. Technically, what’s being stored are private, cryptographic keys. It’s odd to think of a virtual currency needing physical storage, but just like your most precious photos, even a cryptocurrency needs some kind of material container. — Quartz
The company Xapo is using a decommissioned military bunker to safeguard its customers bitcoins. In this article from Quartz, Joon lan Wong describes his way into the vault storing millions of dollars worth of bitcoins and the numerous portals and gates he had to cross. View full entry
The growing interest in blockchain has morphed its concept into something new. Before, the blockchain was simply the spine of the bitcoin network, but today the technology is being used on a burgeoning list of distributed ledgers with varying degrees of openness, security and complexity.
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Ethereum, a public blockchain platform created by Russo-Canadian programmer Vitalik Buterin...proposes to do away with middlemen everywhere, not just in finance.
— Wired
"Ethereum is a blockchain on steroids designed for more than trading cryptocurrency units or ‘coloured’ assets: developers can use it to build programs that interact with the world based on public rules enshrined in so-called smart contracts."Some architects are already working on utilizing... View full entry
Home-rental company Airbnb has “acqui-hired” the majority of the team behind ChangeCoin, a startup that runs a bitcoin-based micropayments service, according to four people with knowledge of the deal.
The alternative lodging site has been looking at a few bitcoin and blockchain startups, according to two sources, to study what the technology could do for its services.
— Quartz
Have you heard of bitcoin but still can't get your head around the technology behind them?Last fall, I sat down with FOAM, a "decentralized architecture office" that believes the blockchain may revolutionize architecture (and so much more). The interview frames a handy introduction to the... View full entry
