Every week, millions of people who describe themselves as unable to save any money manage to find a few dollars for a lottery ticket. This is not a contradiction so much as a clue. Traditional saving asks a person to give up a small pleasure now in exchange for a larger, delayed, and frankly boring…
Read MoreSomewhere between the lottery ticket machine and the change counter at a grocery store, a growing number of Americans have started noticing a new kind of terminal: a squat, brightly lit kiosk with a touchscreen, a bill acceptor, and a logo referencing Bitcoin or crypto. These machines, most commonly called Bitcoin ATMs or crypto ATMs,…
Read MoreA packet of seeds looks like the simplest object in agriculture: a name on the front, a picture of the mature plant, a few lines about days to germination, and a scattering of dried embryos inside. But that packet carries a claim that is almost impossible for the person buying it to verify. It says…
Read MoreFor the owner of a small business, bookkeeping is the work that never quite gets done. It is rarely the reason anyone starts a company — few people open a bakery or a landscaping business because they love categorizing expenses — and yet it sits underneath everything, quietly determining whether the business can pay its…
Read MoreVideo games occupy a strange and precarious place among the cultural works of the last half century. A film from the 1970s can usually be found and watched, a novel from the 1950s can be pulled from a library shelf, and a song from any era is a search away, but a video game from…
Read MoreA decade ago, the moment of tipping was a quiet, private negotiation between a customer and their own sense of fairness. At a sit-down restaurant, the bill arrived on a small tray, the diner did some mental arithmetic or reached for a calculator, and wrote a number on a line. At a coffee counter, a…
Read MoreDecentralized finance arrived with a promise that was, in its purest form, radically open: anyone with an internet connection and a digital wallet could lend, borrow, trade, and earn yield without asking permission from a bank, a broker, or a government. No account application, no credit check, no gatekeeper deciding who was allowed in. For…
Read MoreFor most of cryptocurrency’s short history, the assets sitting in people’s digital wallets were things to hold, trade, or watch rather than things to spend. A traveler who had accumulated bitcoin or ether over several years might have felt wealthier on paper, but when it came time to book a flight home for the holidays…
Read MoreFor most of the past decade, sharing a bike or scooter in a city has meant opening an app owned by a single, venture-funded company. That company bought the fleet, hired or contracted the people who charge and rebalance it, set the prices, and absorbed the losses when scooters were stolen, vandalized, or simply wore…
Read More
