Ep 12. Fed outage, NFT soars & more

Each week, I cover the &#8220;So what?&#8221; of 5 key crypto stories in about 5 minutes. Let&#8217;s go. <br/><br/>This week:<br/><br/>Federal Reserve Outage<br/><br/>MIT to strengthen bitcoin<br/><br/>Coinbase is $100B <br/><br/>NFT record art sale <br/><br/>Dubai Fund sells bitcoin, buys Cardano and Polkadot<br/><br/>Federal Reserve outage exposes single point of failure<br/><br/>Federal Reserve Bank&#8217;s payment systems were out of service for several hours due to an operational error. <br/><br/>The impacted services include but not limited to FedACH, FedWire, FedCash, and settlement<br/><br/>FedACH system handles direct deposits of payroll, Social Security and income tax refunds as well as scheduled payments for mortgages and utility bills. It supported 62 million transactions a day in 2019. <br/><br/>So what?<br/><br/>The outage disrupted payment transactions across the economy and highlighted the single point of failure. A pattern could be emerging as FedACH had 2 disruptions in 2019. <br/><br/>Recently, I read Sandworm by Andy Greenberg, this book helped drive home the point that the next great war might be fought in cyberspace. High traffic systems with a single point of failure built on dated technology are attractive targets. <br/><br/>The US might be better served by a more resilient decentralized system perhaps one that leverages blockchain technology <br/><br/>MIT to strengthen bitcoin<br/><br/>MIT&#8217;s Digital Currency Initiative has launched a 4-year R&D effort to strengthen bitcoin security <br/><br/>The program has been endorsed by cryptocurrency industry leaders<br/><br/>So what?<br/><br/>Bitcoin ascended from an obscure project to a robust network that secures over $1 trillion in value due to millions of hours invested by open-source developers <br/><br/>The program will contribute neutral, expert resources to improve the robustness of Bitcoin protocol and security. This could include exploring new programming languages and pre-emptive investigations against possible attacks<br/><br/>