Lack of data is certainly not one of the issues at the table when discussing energy production and carbon emissions. Well-known sources for the former include the UN Statistics Division, the International Energy Agency (IEA), the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), and British Petroleum (BP). 
The latter publishes an annual report while IEA data is behind a paywall. EIA offers open data access to a vast number of resources, including international carbon emissions. The main source for the latter is the Global Cabon Project created in 2001 and operating as an international partnership. The World Bank has carbon emissions data starting in 1960, but updates seemed to have stopped in 2014. The Global Carbon Atlas, initially funded by the BNP Paribas Foundation, is a good secondary source
Category: Economics
ICOs: Endangered Species
As expected, ICOs are finally cooling down. There are several reasons for this. First, ICO oversight by regulators in many countries has substantially increased. Regulators are poking not so much into new ICOs. Instead, they are doing deep dives into those that have already been completed and going after those who look fraudulent. Second, the token market is in a massive downswing. Some tokens have lost at least 90 percent of their value thus leading to substantial loses for ICO investors. As a result, crypto tokens have become much less attractive.
Third, many of the successfully completed ICOs are having a hard time showing or delivering on the ground results in spite of massive infusions of capital. While lack of maturity and technology constraints might play a role here, it may also
Uncertainty and Artificial Intelligence
In a world where perfect information supposedly rules across the board, uncertainty certainly poses a challenge to mainstream economists. While some of the tenets of such assumption have been already addressed – via the theory of information asymmetries and the development of the rational expectations school, for example, uncertainty still poses critical questions.
For starters, uncertainty should not be confused with risk. The latter in a nutshell can be quantified using probability theory. Based on existing data and previous behavior, we could say predict there is a 75 percent chance investments in the stock market can yield a 25 percent reward in say 5 years. This is not the case for uncertainty as here the outcome is entirely unknown. In other words, we have no idea what is going to
The Scale of the Blockchain Scalability Constraints
According to latest estimates, global Internet penetration was close to 54 percent by the end of 2017. That is roughly 4 billion people. 
Figures for the number of unique cell phone users show that 5 billion people have access to the technology.1 BTW, this means that 1 billion people have a cell phone but are not connected to the Internet. But that is another story.
Armed with this numbers, I asked a business acquaintance who is a blockchain enthusiast and practitioner if the most popular blockchain platforms could effectively cater to all those users. Answer: “Not at this moment. But do not worry, we are working on it.”
The reason for this stems from the scalability constraints the most reputed blockchain platforms face. As I see, the scalability issue is related to three factors: 1.
Endnotes
| 1. | ⇧ | BTW, this means that 1 billion people have a cell phone but are not connected to the Internet. But that is another story. |
Bitcoin Inequality
In the short and medium term, technology and inequality seemed to be positively correlated. In the long term, however, things are not as clear-cut. With the right policies and democratic institutions in place, technology could become a catalyst to reduce income and wealth inequality. Historical evidence from last century clearly supports this claim. Will digital technologies of the 21st Century follow the same path?
The long-term is still quite a few years away for digital technologies such as AI and blockchains. In this post, I will look at the world of Bitcoin and explore its links to income and wealth inequality. I will assume the Bitcoin network is a country on its own with defined financial ties to the rest of the world mostly via crypto exchanges and miners.
Last May, the total
Blockchain Mining Costs and Revenues
In a previous post, I pushed the idea that mining is part of the real sector of the blockchain economy. Unlike financial speculation, mining requires investment in hardware, electricity, space, human resources, etc. This also applies to small miners who undoubtedly will have to defray a lower investment amount but who can join a mining pool to share mining revenues. Also, miners face intense competition which in turn is a reflection of the high level of profitability in the sector.
Mining calculators seem to proliferate in the web. Such sites offer potential mining investors a rough idea of how much they can make on a daily and/or monthly basis given the current price of the crypto being mined and the hashing the investors is willing to purchase. For example, I am told that if I buy Bitcoin
Checking ICOs, Again
It has already been three months since I last checked the ICO scene. At the time, I suggested ICOs were probably slowing down. New data seems to confirm this but all points to other trends not detected before. Figure 1 presents the latest data
ending on 31 May. 159 ICOs were successfully completed between March and May raising over 4 billion dollars. The data includes the Telegram wh.ich collected over 1.7 billion dollars in spite of not holding a public ICO phase. Telegram can indeed be seen as a statistical “outlier” making last April the most successful month ever. Note that the number of successful ICOs did not increase overall. March matched February with 57 ICO but was much more skinny regarding resources. April and May are fatter but do not exceed the number of ICOs of the previous
The Real Sector of the Blockchain Economy
Most cryptocurrencies are now over 60% down from their December 2017 peak. While prices are still quite volatile, the trend for the last five months is decidedly downwards. While some still expect a recovery to the glorious days of last year, others see overvaluation all around accompanied by a financial bubble about to burst. Comparisons to the good old dot-com boom and subsequent crash of 20 years ago are cited as empirical evidence of what is coming. 
Indeed, the current blockchain boom has similarities with the previous one. But there are also some fundamental differences springing from by the very nature of what we can call the blockchain economy. The first one is the marriage between technology and finance. Not that in the past the financial sector refused to use new technologies.
Blockchain Mining Revisited
Blockchain mining cannot catch a break when it comes to environmental sustainability. This is especially true for Bitcoin mining which seemingly has an insatiable appetite for electricity. A recent paper suggests that by 2020 Bitcoin mining will consume as much energy as Australia. While these estimates are not exempt from criticism, mining does not appear to be best friends with sustainable development, at least not for now. An alternative way to look at this issue is to compare Bitcoin’s mining power use to that of cloud-based providers who have now become well-established tech corporations. Such comparison should be made not only in absolute terms (gigawatts) but also in relative fashion by considering, for example, the total population being served by these platforms and networks.
In
Democracy and Capitalism: Friends or Foes?
The post-WWII era can be arguably defined as the golden age of democratic capitalism – at least from the perspective of developed or industrialized countries. Rebuilding Europe and pumping capital into Japan triggered a long economic boom that lasted until the 1980s – notwithstanding the infamous 1973 oil crisis. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 opened new markets to capital investment and recruited new members to the democracy club thus providing a much needed second wind to the then declining golden age. 
During that same period, democracy, defined narrowly, continuously expanded in developing countries, including those that became independent nations in the 1960/70s. By the end of the last Millennium analysts and observers were openly speaking about the third wave of democratization,