By Laura Desmond The hype around blockchain is massive. To hear the blockchain hype train tell it, blockchain will now: Solve income inequality Make all data secure forever Make everything much more efficient and trustless Save dying babies   What the heck is a blockchain, anyway? And can it really do all these things? Can […]

 By Laura Desmond ICO funds have poured in at record levels and in 2017 the overall market capitalization grew to over $US130 billion. It seems you can just add the words “blockchain, cryptocurrency, token” and investor dollars will hunt you down. Every day multiple new ICO launches promote their “ERC-20, industry first and get in […]

By Laura Desmond Development of Bitcoin‘s core protocol could alleviate many scalability issues facing Bitcoin. Advancements on the new Lightning Network could allow for fast, inexpensive, and convenient retail transactions.   History of the Lightning Network The Lightning Network is a layer on top of the blockchain that utilizes smart-contracts to execute transactions. Such a system enables payments […]

By Laura Desmond Young adults are hungry for the ad industry to be better. They are right. “I block ads because I believe ads can be so much better.” This was a direct quote from an advertising student at the University of Texas. I visited campus recently and had the opportunity to talk informally with advertising […]

Christian Louboutin wants to make something very clear: He loves women. “My first inspiration is women, I will probably always remain the same,” he says, reclining on a  velvet sofa in his new Sydney boutique, his fourth in Australia (there are two boutiques in Melbourne, one on the Gold Coast, as well as concessions in […]

Washington-President Donald Trump received a top-level visitor from North Korea on Friday who came bearing a letter from the country’s dictator Kim Jong Un as the two sides work toward a meeting between the two world leaders. Trump was meeting in the Oval Office with Kim’s envoy, Kim Yong Chol, a former spy chief and currently the […]

WASHINGTON –The Latest on President Donald Trump’s consideration of pardons and sentence commutations (all times local): 10 p.m. President Donald Trump has pardoned Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative commentator he claims “was treated very unfairly by our government!” D’Souza had pleaded guilty to campaign finance fraud. Trump says he’s also thinking about clemency for celebrity lifestyle […]

Beer, iPhones and plane tickets are all likely to get more expensive in the next few months thanks to President Donald Trump. Trump’s announcement that he’s slapping steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and the European Union on Friday has major big-picture implications for the U.S. economy and global trade. But, in the short term, […]

Apple has used its June Worldwide Developers Conference to release new iPhones in the past. Will it this time? While early rumors pointed to Apple possibly using Monday’s event in San Jose to introduce an improved iPhone SE, it now seems that Apple’s smaller, cheaper iPhone will get its update alongside the rest of the line […]

  An account of another alleged “sonic attack” has surfaced, this time from a U.S. government employee in China. The employee reported “subtle and vague, but abnormal, sensations of sound and pressure,”according to a U.S. Embassy health alert. The episode mirrors reports from American diplomats in Cuba in late 2016, and fuels the debate among scientists […]