When someone buys a used car, they are buying not only the vehicle in front of them but its entire past, the miles it has traveled, the accidents it has survived, the repairs it has needed, and the care or neglect it has received, and yet this past is largely invisible, knowable only through documents…
Read MoreFor most of the history of commerce, buying something well has demanded time, attention, and a certain amount of skill, as a shopper who wanted the best price had to compare sellers, watch for sales, read reviews, and, in some settings, summon the nerve to haggle, all of which rewarded those with the patience and…
Read MorePredicting the future is one of the most valuable and difficult tasks that individuals, businesses, and societies undertake, and the methods used to do it, from expert opinion to opinion polls to statistical models, all have well-known limitations. Experts are often overconfident and prone to bias, polls capture only stated intentions at a moment in…
Read MoreFarming is a business with a peculiar and unforgiving financial rhythm, in which money flows out of an operation long before it flows back in. A farmer must buy seeds, fertilizer, and other supplies at the start of a season, and pay for labor and equipment throughout the growing period, yet receives no income until…
Read MoreDecentralized finance is built from a set of basic financial building blocks, including lending markets, exchanges, and other protocols, that each perform a single, well-defined function and that can be freely combined in countless ways to create far more complex financial products. Earning the best possible returns from these building blocks, however, is a genuinely…
Read MoreIn financial markets, the same asset can trade at different prices in different forms at the same moment, and the gap between those prices can be a source of profit for those who know how to capture it. A cryptocurrency like Bitcoin trades at one price for immediate delivery, called the spot price, and at…
Read MoreIn the ordinary digital world that most people inhabit, forgetting a password is a minor inconvenience, since almost every service offers a way to reset it, typically by sending a link to an email address or a code to a phone, restoring access within minutes. This convenience rests on a foundation of central authorities, the…
Read MoreThe idea that data and algorithms could help prevent crime before it happens has long held a powerful appeal, promising to make policing more efficient, more objective, and more effective by directing limited resources to where they are most needed. Beginning in the early years of the last decade, police departments across the United States…
Read MoreAlmost everyone holds a scattered collection of loyalty rewards they will likely never fully use, points accumulated in airline programs, stars in coffee apps, store credits, and miles in credit card schemes that all sit locked inside the closed systems of the various companies that issued them. These rewards all share a common and deeply…
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