Spend enough time in San Francisco, peering into the cyberpunk future, and you may find that weird things start seeming normal. Fleets of self-driving cars? Yawn. A start-up trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth? Sure, why not. Summoning a godlike artificial intelligence that could wipe out humanity? Ho-hum. You may even find yourself, as I…
The pitch from “ZMoney” arrived on the encrypted messaging app Signal just days before Donald J. Trump’s presidential inauguration. “ZMoney” was Zachary Folkman, an entrepreneur who once ran a company called Date Hotter Girls and was now representing World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency firm that Mr. Trump and his sons had recently unveiled. Mr. Folkman…
Last month, Paolo Ardoino, the chief executive of the cryptocurrency company Tether, joined business executives and U.S. lawmakers for a private lunch at the Willard, a luxury hotel near the White House. For years, Tether had faced accusations that it lied about its finances and allowed crime to flourish on its platform. But at the…
A quiet honor student who had recently graduated from Immaculate High School in Danbury, Veer Chetal was about to begin studying at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 2022, he completed a “future lawyers” program, and a story that year on the Immaculate website showed a photo of a smiling kid with glasses wearing a…
At the end of a three-hour hearing last month, Senator Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona, sided with a group of Republicans in a hotly contested debate. He voted to advance the GENIUS Act, a bill backed by the cryptocurrency industry. “It’s clear that digital assets are here to stay,” Mr. Gallego said after the Senate…
Two of President Trump’s sons announced on Monday that they were investing in a new Bitcoin mining venture, an expansion of the family’s business interests in the crypto industry. Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. said they would join forces with the Bitcoin mining company Hut 8 to create a firm called American Bitcoin. Bitcoin…
World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company started by Donald J. Trump and his sons, announced on Tuesday that it was planning to sell a digital currency called a stablecoin, deepening the president’s financial ties to crypto as his administration relaxes enforcement of the industry. The stablecoin would be known as USD1, the company wrote in…
In 2016, three New York commodities traders — Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo and Brannin McBee — fell in love with cryptocurrencies. They were using Bitcoin to bet on pool games and fantasy football and were captivated by its wild swings in price. They soon decided to create more digital currencies through a process called “mining,”…
On the night of Feb. 21, Ben Zhou, the chief executive of the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit, logged on to his computer to approve what appeared to be a routine transaction. His company was moving a large amount of Ether, a popular digital currency, from one account to another. Thirty minutes later, Mr. Zhou got a…
This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions. kevin roose Well, Casey, it finally happened to me this week. I was radicalized by Elon Musk. casey newton…
