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PEER-REVIEW I've updated my epic BITCOIN ACADEMIC PAPER DATABASE  by adding over 280 new papers that were published in 2015. You can download it, and I've also included a link to a separate Google doc where you can make suggestions for papers that might have been missed. If you'd like to read about how I've built the database and the sources I've used, check out my piece about it from last year. Don't expect it to be perfect - there are omissions and the citations are not always error-free - but it's a pretty comprehensive start for anyone looking to embark on furthering the state of knowledge on Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain more generally. The quality of papers is... um... variable and obviously I haven't had a chance to actually read most of them (as there are now over 550 in total), so don't be surprised if some are not as 'academic' or robust as you might like. That said, the quality of papers has - in general - improved over ...

LUNAR ECLIPSE Note: This essay originally appeared in the book Supramarkt: How to Frack the Fatal Forces of the Capitalocene . Available for republishing under CreativeCommons I worked as a financial derivatives broker in London from 2008 to 2010, at a company clinging on for life in the midst of the financial crisis. That is not a particularly long time to work as a broker, but I was never aspiring to it as a career. I was a left-wing activist steeped in the tradition of Marxian political economy and deep-ecology environmentalism, and with a background in anthropology and international development. I was on a quasi-anthropological adventure on the ‘dark side’, immersing myself in the culture of high finance in an act of subversive exploration. HIGH FINANCE I say ‘quasi-anthropological’ because it is not exactly like I approached it with a formal academic mindset, and I was never attached to an academic institution. There are professional anthropologists like Karen Ho and Caitlin Za...

Please note: Part 1 of this essay appeared in the Feb 2015 edition of Contributoria . It is published and modified here under a Creative Commons license. PART 1 (3500 Words) A 900 million microsecond primer on high-frequency trading In the time it takes you to read this sentence, a high-frequency trading (HFT) algorithm, connected to a stock exchange via “low latency” trading infrastructure, could make, perhaps, 1,000 trades. I say 'perhaps', because it really depends on how long you pause on those commas I put in the sentence. If you’re an individual with great respect for commas you might give the algorithm a chance to throw in a few hundred more orders. Let’s just clarify this. That means computers owned (or leased) by a firm somewhere can 1) suck in data from a stock exchange, 2) process it through a coded step-by-step rule system (algorithm) to make a decision about whether to trade or not, 3) send a message back to the exchange with an order for shares of ownership in a ...