Jean-Paul Thorbjornson, an Australian man in his mid-30s with a rural Catholic upbringing, is the founder of Thorchain, a blockchain through which users can swap one cryptocurrency for another and earn fees from those swaps.
Thorchain is permissionless, so anyone can use it without obtaining prior approval from a centralized authority. As a decentralized network, blockchain is built and run by operators located around the world. During her early days, Thorbjornsson herself hid behind the pseudonym “Lena” and used an AI-generated female image as her avatar. But around March 2024, he revealed his true identity as the brains behind the blockchain. More like.
If there’s a central question surrounding Thorchain, it’s this: who is actually responsible for its operation? This matters because in January last year, its users lost over $200 million of their cryptocurrencies in US dollars after Thorchain transactions and accounts were frozen by a single administrator override, which users believed was not possible given its decentralized structure.
Thorbjornsen stressed that Thorchain is helping to realize the original purpose of Bitcoin, which is to enable anyone to transact freely, out of the reach of allegedly corrupt governments. Yet network problems suggest that alternative financial systems may not be much better. Read the full story.
-Jessica Klein
Robots that predict the future
To be human basically means to be a prophet. Sometimes it’s very good. Trying to see the future, whether through the prism of past experience or through the logic of cause and effect, has helped us to hunt, to avoid Creature Hunt, grow crops, form social bonds, and generally survive in a world that does not prioritize our survival.
Today, we are awash in a sea of ​​prophecies so vast and unbelievable that most of us can barely even register them. People’s desire for reliable forecasts is understandable. Yet, no one signed up for an omnipresent, algorithmic oracle mediating every aspect of their lives. A trio of new books seeks to understand our future-focused world – how we got here, and what this change means. Each has their own prescription for understanding this new reality, but they all agree on one thing: prophecies are ultimately about power and control. Read the full story.
-Brian Gardiner
