Jeff Fong

Tech investor Tim Draper wants to see California split six ways. His plan would dissolve California into six separate states by cutting along existing county lines and, of course, Silicon Valley would be one of the new states born out of the…

Bitcoin's price took another tumble on Wednesday, as China's largest exchange announced that it was no longer allowed to accept deposits. This comes on the heels of the Chinese Central Bank banning financial institutions from dealing in Bitcoin. The…

Rio de Janeiro's popular tourist beaches have once again come under attack. Favela youths are swooping down en masse in what are known as arrastões (Portuguese for "dragnets"). During these raids, the mob steals everything in sight, beats anyone who…

Twitter’s impending IPO has investors salivating. The company boasts as many as 400 million registered users and advertising revenue that should be close to the $1 billion mark by the end of next year. The company's IPO is expected to bring in as…

Pundit Brenton Smith recently wrote a piece on the role of credit default swaps (CDS) in the 2008 financial crisis. He argued that the “naked” CDS (in which investors can bet that certain institutions will default without having an offsetting…

In a recent article published at Slate, Jonathan Rees claims that widespread adoption of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) will be “disastrous for students and most professors." While Rees does present a few valid criticisms, he ignores the areas…

Disruptive technology is a game changer. It’s something that seems to come out of nowhere, upsets incumbent firms that don’t adopt it (or at least adapt to it), and generally heralds a big jump forward in some sector or industry. Companies that are…

This weekend, Bitcoin enthusiasts from around the world will descend on San Jose, California for the Bitcoin 2013: The Future of Payments conference. The conference will include panels on tech, economics, regulatory issues, and importantly,…

This will be the last post for my series on Bitcoin. Check out my Pundit Blog if you're just joining in and want to read from the beginning. But before I close out my final thoughts on the conference and Bitcoin as a whole, there were two other…

There was something I learned at the conference that warrants its own post before I close out the series.  Among merchants dealing in Bitcoin, many are starting to offer discounts for paying in BTC instead of USD-I heard as much as 40% from some…

Lightning Room presentations got off to a great start.  Highlights included a presentation by John Light on Open Personal Cloud Communities. Personal Clouds as a concept would enable all the functionality of social networking without the need for…

The second half of the Lightening Room presentations kept pace with the first half's eclectic mix of presenters.  Steve Kubby presented on his work with legalizing medical marijuana and shared his company's plan to create a whole range of products…

The Lightning presentations were varied and covered a range of interesting topics. Here are a few of the highlights.   Roman Snitko delivered a presentation on applying the Bitcoin protocol to creating new regimes for corporate governance. The…

Good morning Bitcoin enthusiasts! It's day two of Bitcoin 2013: The Future of Payments. I'll be volunteering all day in the Lightening Room which will be hosting shorter, thirty-minute long presentations covering a grab-bag of topics.   The line up…

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss started out their keynote speech with a little bit of Bitcoin history, covering major landmarks like the mining of the genesis block, the first Bitcoin purchase, and the more recent buzz following the Cyprus bank…

I've officially made my first run through the conference's booth section. Here are a few of the highlights. Alpha Point: Another Bitcoin exchange headquartered in SF. They offer the standard range of services, but are focusing on traders and…

Bitcoin 2013 is just getting underway and it's already starting to look interesting. In line for my registration, I spoke with entrepreneurs from Los Angeles, New York, and somewhere in Idaho so the representation seems fairly diverse.

There’s a dangerous tendency to judge Bitcoin by whether or not we think it can replace the fiats, the answer dictating how serious we takes the whole project. But this fixation on the plausibility of Bitcoin as the new international reserve…

The way in which Bitcoin typically gets portrayed, it often conjures up images of rich techies, American libertarians, and European depositors preparing for the worst. But this focus on Bitcoin as a first-world project ignores the enormous potential…