The gift card has become one of the most familiar objects in modern commerce, a small rectangle of plastic or a string of digits in an email that represents a promise of value to be redeemed at some future date, and it has grown into an enormous business because it is so convenient a way…
Read MoreFor all the progress that electric vehicles have made in displacing the gasoline engine, the simple act of paying to charge one of them remains a surprisingly clumsy experience, a tangle of plastic cards, smartphone applications, and account logins that stands in awkward contrast to the sleek technology of the cars themselves. A driver who…
Read MoreWhen a family decides to bring a dog or cat into their home, whether by purchasing a purebred puppy from a professional breeder or adopting a rescue animal from a local shelter, they place an extraordinary and often unexamined amount of trust in pieces of paper and the unverified claims of strangers, accepting a pedigree…
Read MoreFor the tens of millions of people who rent their homes, a paradox sits at the heart of their financial lives, which is that the single largest and most regular payment most of them make, the monthly rent, generates almost no lasting benefit to their financial reputation, even as years of paying it faithfully and…
Read MoreWhen 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 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 popular vision of self-driving vehicles has long focused almost entirely on the remarkable engineering challenge of teaching a single car to perceive its surroundings and to navigate safely through the world without any human driver at the wheel. Yet as autonomous vehicles begin to move from research projects toward genuine real-world deployment, a different…
Read MorePublic blockchains were built, from their very inception, on a principle of radical and uncompromising transparency. Every single transaction is recorded on a shared public ledger that anyone in the world can freely inspect, a design that allows the network to function without any trusted intermediaries and lets anyone, anywhere, independently verify that the rules…
Read MoreA baseball signed by a legendary player, a jersey worn during a championship game, a rookie card pulled from a pack decades ago, these objects can each be worth small fortunes, and their value rests almost entirely on a single fragile assumption, that they are genuine. A signature is just ink on leather, a game-worn…
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