Taler is a new electronic payment system under development at Inria. Today, this website only presents the advantages our system is expected to provide. We expect to make the payment system available to the general public in 2016.

Why has Bitcoin failed? It has failed because the community has failed. What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money that lacked “systemically important institutions” and “too big to fail” has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse. The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have broken down, and as a result there’s no longer much reason to think Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system.

Then I got to thinking. Screw the dodgy world of heterodox economics. Let’s go full-on fantastical and look at sci-fi. There IS actually a model out there that deals fairly realistically with a post scarcity economy. Not only that, it actually takes into account the difficulties of migrating from a capitalist society to a post scarcity society incrementally. It’s not just a theory in a vaccum.

It’s called Star Trek.

Why has the “Made in Germany” brand thrived over the last 15 or so years, even as “Made in Japan” grinds toward irrelevance? All the more extraordinary, Germany has flourished in a savagely competitive global environment despite high labor costs, an overvalued euro and any number of regional financial crises. Its secret: adapting and innovating in ways Japan Inc. cannot even seem to contemplate.

Enligt min mening är direktpension sedan länge är bättre än pensionsförsäkring. Och mina beräkningar ger resultatet att en direktpension ger bättre chans till avkastning om pengarna sätts direkt i exempelvis fonder och aktier än i en vanlig kapitalförsäkring på marknaden.

Här är svaren på de tre viktigaste frågorna när du ska pensionsspara i ett aktiebolag.

The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom asserts that the protocol is incentive-compatible and secure against colluding minority groups, i.e., it incentivizes miners to follow the protocol as prescribed.

We show that the Bitcoin protocol is not incentive-compatible. We present an attack with which colluding miners obtain a revenue larger than their fair share. This attack can have signi cant consequences for Bitcoin: Rational miners will prefer to join the sel sh miners, and the colluding group will increase in size until it becomes a majority. At this point, the Bitcoin system ceases to be a decentralized currency.

We all know that inequality has been rising and the average American household has been suffering. There is a myth that says all this suffering is necessary, that extreme inequality is the by-product of a rapidly growing economy—or worse, that it’s a good thing because it motivates everyone to work hard and climb the long ladder to the One Percent. § Even a brief glance at the historical record reveals just how perverted this hypothesis is.

There's plenty of psychological research to show that when we spend using physical notes and coins, we spend more sensibly. Of all forms of payment, cash is the most "transparent" – the one that connects us most directly to the fact that we're parting with our money. That's also why, as the behavioural economist Dan Ariely has argued, cashlessness seems to be associated with increased dishonesty: it's easier to cut ethical corners involving money, while continuing to think of yourself as an honest person, when you're psychologically distanced from the money involved. "We are moving to a situation which allows people to rationalise dishonesty to a much, much higher degree," Ariely told Wired Magazine last year.

Welcome! Quantopian is building the world’s first algorithmic trading platform in your browser. We provide tools and infrastructure for you to learn, create, and test trading strategies - while protecting your intellectual property. Your algorithms are yours and kept private.

Zipline is a financial backtester for trading algorithms written in Python. The system is fundamentally event-driven and a close approximation of how live-trading systems operate.

Zipline is currently used in production as the backtesting engine powering Quantopian (https://www.quantopian.com) -- a free, community-centered platform that allows development and real-time backtesting of trading algorithms in the web browser.