la liberté avant tout
By Yaël Ossowski | Devolution Review Admitting you’ve changed your mind is daunting. Even more so when you’ve poured money, time, and effort into promoting a particular cause and idea. For me, that time has come with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and the promise of the underlying Blockchain technology. In the beginning, Bitcoin was something of…
Cryptocurrencies aren’t a store-of-value nor safe haven for anyone’s assets. They’re experiments. In the beginning, Bitcoin was something of a revolution to me. The digital currency represented everything from my rebellious youth. It was a decentralized, denationalized, and digital currency operating outside the traditional banking and governmental system. It used tools of cryptography and connected…
We’re more likely to accept the dogma of Google, Apple, or Microsoft in order to satisfy our daily desire to be connected and loved by the bits, ones, and zeros. Who would have thought that the great decentralized interconnected nature of the millions of computers on the Internet would lend itself to a centralization of…
My debut fiddling with computers was about 20 years ago, in 1996. My dad bought us a Compaq Presario running DOS. My brothers and I were able to learn a few pivotal lines of code, allowing us to boot from the disk and play games like The Incredible Machine, Wolfenstein 3D, and Duke Nukem. After…
By Yaël Ossowski | PanAm Post Worthless, invisible, and impractical. Impossible for the poor to use. A fantasy of the privileged. For devotees of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, these pessimistic criticisms are ceremoniously raised in conversations and articles invoked by skeptics. In the viral YouTube video “Shit Bitcoin Fanatics Say,” the rudimentary objections to the digital currency are laughingly…
By Yaël Ossowski | PanAm Post In Ukraine, the citizen uprising is beyond bloody. In Venezuela, it’s a full blown crisis. All across the world, people are rising up against their governments and demanding a change to the status quo. In several Latin-American countries, the anger against government is just as strong; citizens are frustrated with corrupt politicians, deteriorating security,…
PanAm Columnist Presents Cryptocurrency to Austrian Libertarian Movement Yaël Ossowski writes the “Question the Narrative” column with the PanAm Post, and he is a true international man — dividing his time between Canada, the United States, and Europe. Recently, he introduced bitcoin to a mixture of libertarians and economics enthusiasts in Austria. Here is that presentation. Ossowski says…
By Yaël Ossowski | Watchdog.org When Jeremy Hansen ran for political office in 2012, he had no idea his candidacy would spark imaginations across the country. The assistant professor of computer science at Norwich University in Northfield, Vt., ran for the Vermont state Senate for Washington County on a bold platform of using online technology to ask every citizen their view on a particular…
Par Yaël Ossowski | L’AGEFI (PDF disponsible ici) Si les consommateurs attendaient des indicateurs économiques positifs, ils pourront en trouver un dans la légalisation d’une monnaie alternative dans le pays le plus puissant d’Europe. Dans une décision sans précédent, le Ministère des finances allemand a en effet déclaré que Bitcoin n’est pas qu’une unité comptable acceptable, mais également classifié comme de la monnaie…
If everyday consumers and young people are craving positive economic indicators, they can no doubt turn to the de-facto legislation of an alternative digital currency in Europe’s most powerful country for inspiration. In an unprecedented move, the German Federal Ministry of Finance declared in a statement earlier this month that Bitcoin is not only an acceptable “unit…