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   Best of 2024

  Emerge’s 2024 Person of the Year: AI Visionary Yann LeCun

  Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist and a Turing Award laureate, has long been a pivotal figure in artificial intelligence. During the past year, however, his work has not only continued to push the boundaries of AI research but also sparked critical discussions about how society should approach the opportunities and risks posed by this transformative technology. Born in 1960 in Soisy-sous-Montmorency, France, LeCun has been a driving force in AI innovation. From being the founding director of...

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  Batteries or Bitcoin: Is Mining the Best Use for ‘Excess’ Green Energy?

  For Bitcoin miners the motive to power their operations with renewables is clear–it's economical. Per data from MacroMicro, it costs $26,979 to mine a Bitcoin on average. With the price of the leading cryptocurrency hovering around $28,500, cutting costs is key to fattening miners’ margins. Mining outfits that can tap cheaper energy powered by renewables, such as wind, hydro, or nuclear, are thus at a clear advantage over their competition. What’s more, beyond heftier profits, these miners also...

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  Ethereum Mining Pools Will Survive The Merge—What About the Miners?

  As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues to upend the lives of millions, many Ukrainians have turned to a reliable source of income that’s relatively passive and requires little maintenance: Ethereum mining.  For years, the Ethereum network has depended on thousands of individuals like these Ukrainians to generate ETH, the blockchain’s native cryptocurrency, via an energy-intensive process called “mining.” Individuals, or “miners,” direct computer power to race to solve complex puzzles; the win...

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  How Secure Is El Salvador’s Bitcoin?

  El Salvador made history last fall by becoming the first country to accept Bitcoin as legal tender. Since then, the country’s ballcap-wearing president, Nayeb Bukele, has boasted of buying more than 1,000 BTC for El Salvador’s treasury—and doing it all on his phone.  Bukele’s big Bitcoin experiment can be seen as innovative, reckless, or both–it’s too soon to say for sure. But a broader lack of transparency surrounding the country’s accounting and cybersecurity practices may give both Salvadoran...

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   NFT Revolution

  Sun, Sand, and NFT Tickets: Here Come DAO Music Festivals

  Atop a sun-drenched platform, above sparkling water and under an open sky, 5,000 music lovers will soon come together for Croatia’s Circus Maximus music festival. In the stunning surroundings of Zrce Beach, on the island of Pag, they’ll feast on 360-degree-views of the Adriatic Sea to a soundtrack of electronic beats. But this year, while the festival still features a stellar cast, it’s a party with a difference—one that Circus Maximus organizers hope will pave the way toward a decentralized fut...

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  Can Bitcoin Replace the U.S. Dollar as the World’s Global Reserve Currency?

  Since the end of the Second World War and the Bretton Woods Conference, the U.S. dollar has been the global reserve currency; today, more than 59% of foreign bank reserves are denominated in U.S. dollars, according to the International Monetary Fund. But the dollar's position as the global reserve currency has been looking somewhat shaky of late. Last July, strategists from Goldman Sachs argued that the U.S. government's COVID-19 response, taking in fiscal stimulus packages and money printing,...

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  What Will Happen to Bitcoin After All 21 Million are Mined?

  There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins. That’s it. Once they’re all mined, which should occur in around 2140, no new Bitcoins will enter circulation. The Bitcoin blockchain was designed around the principle of controlled supply, which means only a fixed number of newly minted Bitcoin can be mined each year until a total of 21 million coins have been minted. Once all 21 million BTC have been mined, the network will largely operate the same as it does now, but with one crucial difference for...

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  A Hypothetical Attack on the Bitcoin Codebase

  What keeps the Bitcoin network running is a set of rules. Six hundred and forty six thousand lines of code—that decide how transactions are processed and set Bitcoin’s monetary cap—are stored in a single public repository on file hosting platform GitHub.  Only a select few have access. While Bitcoin’s network is decentralized, this is arguably the most centralized element—and potentially its biggest weakness. What would happen if someone managed to infiltrate this code, and inserted a bug into...

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   Tokenized World

  BUIDL: A 10-step guide to tokenizing an asset

  Have a disruptive idea but can’t seem to find investors?  That’s partly what the ICO boom was all about—entrepreneurs with business ideas but not the capital to get them off the ground.   So they turned to crypto, and built upon the Ethereum blockchain crypto tokens that they’d then sell to retail and institutional investors. The entrepreneurs would then have the capital needed to start building their blockchain-based services, while investors would quietly watch as their initial investment grew...