Last month, when digging through a library of Satoshis writings, I found an email thread that piqued my interest.

Anonymous Writer: You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography.

Satoshi: Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the heads of centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.

To this day, Satoshi remains anonymous as the founder of Bitcoin. His anonymity is the key feature of Bitcoins design and, presumably, a crucial piece in the assets decentralization. Satoshis continued anonymity has prevented governments from truly controlling the supply of Bitcoin, making it akin to a commodity rather than a financial instrument. Even with China continuously making efforts to regulate and ban Bitcoin, the asset continues to come back stronger.

But can anonymity benefit other crypto currencies and even stablecoins?

In the same way we are all Satoshi, we are all John, Paul, George and Ringo, says John L. of Float Protocol.

I first met with the founders of the decentralized stablecoin protocol FLOAT, over Zoom to ask a few questions about their project. During our conversation about team development, it became apparent that John and Paul were not their real names. After a brief inquiry, they explained to me that the team drew inspiration from the Beatles, using their names as pseudonyms.

As the project outlives us, there may be another John and another Paul. What matters is that they step in the same role and continue to serve the project in a similar way, says John L. of Float Protocol.

Over the last year we have seen a meteoric rise in the popularity of stablecoins. From USDT, with a market cap of $70 billion, and USDC, with a market cap of $32 billion, to other exchange-specific coins such as Binance-USD and the Gemini Dollar, it seems stablecoins are becoming increasingly more integral as DeFi outpaces the legacy financial system. Even central governments have started taking note, rolling out their own government-sponsored digital currencies - most notably, Chinas Digital Renminbi.

These digitized alternatives, however, are still pegged to fiat, and with it, carry the flaws of the centralized financial legacy system. First, anything tied to the dollar will face increasing regulatory scrutiny. Just this week, the SEC subpoenaed Circles records, the company behind USDC. Second, most stablecoins are U.S. centric in a time when much of the world is looking for opportunities to avoid the pitfalls of hyper-dollarization. Third, the value of the dollar is at the mercy of the decision-making capabilities of just a few individuals leading the Federal Reserve. Since the dollar was unpegged from gold in 1971, the expansionary monetary policies implemented by the Federal Reserve has steadily eroded its value.

In answer to this, many new stablecoins are displaying a design paradigm shift. Algorithmic stablecoins are unpegged, and collateralized by a diverse collection of assets. Several notable projects have been deployed over the last two years including RSR by Reserve, XST by SORA, OHM by Olympus, RAI by Reflexer Labs, and most recently, FLOAT by Float Protocol.

Float recently completed a $1.2 million raise, aptly referred to as a treasury diversification round. Participants included Eden Block, AAVE founder Stani Kulechov, Akropolis founder Ana Andrianova, and popular DeFi investor Santiago Santos, along with several DAOs, including MCV and the LAO. According to the team, Float is designed to be a native internet currency, functioning in a way that satisfies the three major properties of legitimate money - as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account, and is designed to provide a decentralized alternative to inflationary, dollar-pegged stablecoins.

Float Protocol answers the problems of USD inflation, crypto volatility, and regulator scrutiny of stablecoins with groundbreaking elegance and simplicity, says Dermot ORiordan of Eden Block.

The protocol utilizes a two-token system - FLOAT, the stablecoin that ties its value to a collection of digital assets, and BANK, the protocols governance token. BANK can fluctuate in price, absorbing volatility, while FLOAT aims to be relatively stable while still reflecting market conditions. The starting price during issuance was set, very cleverly, at $1.618 - the golden ratio in mathematics. Notably, the protocol reached a record total value locked of $1.5 billion, one of the highest of its peers. Since then, the price has floated, as its collateral is ETH, expanding in a bull market and contracting during bearish periods, but with smoothness and low-volatility.

The protocol utilizes Dutch Auctions, which are not only efficient due to their game-theoretical nature but they are also flash-loanable. This allows for a capital efficient and profitable opportunity for traders and arbitrageurs alike, says Paul M, lead developer at Float Protocol.

In an increasingly heightened regulatory climate, it seems that anonymous teams are onto something. Stablecoins have been drawing the attention of the Biden administration, due to the perceived risks for consumers and the traditional financial system. As U.S. officials continue to make stablecoins the focal point of regulatory control over crypto markets, many predict that stablecoins will soon be the first to face comprehensive regulation. And with the wounds of the 2008 financial crisis still fresh in the minds of many officials, it seems likely that stablecoins will be declared systemically important and, therefore, placed under strict regulation.

If DeFi hopes to avoid the pitfalls of the traditional financial system, it is important that stablecoins move away from being tied to those same traditional systems. Collateral diversification, algorithmic design and anonymous founding teams might just make the perfect combination to make decentralized finance a reality.

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Meet Float Protocol - The Algorithmic Stablecoin Built By An Anonymous Team - Forbes

Telecommunication network above city, wireless mobile internet technology for smart grid or 5G LTE ... [+] data connection, concept about IoT, global business, fintech, blockchain

In 2015 The Economist magazine hailed blockchain as the trust machine, capable of replacing governance structures, displacing institutions, and bringing a new level of transparency to transactions and information, with implications across public life.

In the years since, the technology has produced trillion-dollar decentralized financial markets and a slew of innovation over blockchains especially in financial services, with the rise of bitcoin, stabelcoins, decentralized finance or DeFi, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), and other industries such as shipping, logistics and supply chains are starting to scale use cases.

OECD research, however, shows little breakthrough in blockchain innovation in government and minimal impact in the public sector - the technology is often described as a solution in search of a problem. While the technology is rapidly maturing, we are starting to see governments take an interest in blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) in areas such as tax, standards and certification, digital identity, and data privacy.

For governments, assessing blockchains disruptive potential is both a practical challenge and a philosophical one. The raison detre of many public institutions is the provision of public goods, and the underwriting of rights and the social contract functions that blockchains pioneers sought to replace with cryptography, networks, and protocols. Whether this technology will be used to displace or complement traditional governance models is an open question, as is its ability to deliver such transformation.

This years opening discussion at the OECDs 4th Annual Blockchain Policy Forum addressed several the main opportunities and challenges at the intersection of technology and governance to disentangle blockchains promise from reality and explored the extent to which the technology can and should be guided by governments towards better models of social and economic connection.

In global trade, the leaders in blockchain technologies are the Indo-Pacific based governments like China and Singapore. Trade is the lifeblood of this region which is considered the global trading hub. China and Singapore have been early to understand the benefits of the blockchain for supply chain management, not just for the provenance and tracking of goods, but for tax, customs, and digital rights.

Blockchain has dramatically scaled the 14th century Venetian innovation of the double-ledger into a theoretically infinite multidimensional ledger which is public, open, transparent, and immutable, and secures access using cryptography. Its like another layer of the Internet, with greater resilience against cybercrime, and integrates multiple stakeholders in much better management of the economy, says Alex Sandy Pentland, MIT professor and director of MIT Connection Science.

In a world with geo-political turbulence and trade headwinds, digital leadership in sectors like central bank digital currencies and supply chains using new digital technologies really matter welcome to the digital space race. The intellectual property, technologies, and standards in blockchain are now being used to gain a global foothold in trade. Importantly, this is helping to drive rapid adoption with low friction use cases and easy to access services.

Blockchain is helping counties that are early movers and leaders in this space to position themselves to generate decades of industrial, societal, and economic growth.

Governments need to learn how to adopt and adapt to polycentric governance models to better engage the broad range of actors and stakeholders required to compete in the digital world without having to create new overarching bureaucratic institutions, says Primavera De Filippi, permanent researcher at the National Center of Scientific Research in Paris (CNRS) and faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Most of the blockchain DLT technologies are developed in open source with large pools of developers participating by voting through digital protocol governance models which extend in many protocols to other entities becoming governance nodes. This is akin to a large mutual society and is risk adjusted both by the volume of experienced participants and stakeholders and its polycentric nature.

There are two big benefits for governments building out their programs on the blockchain; the first is COLLABORATION governments can attract a larger and more diverse range of stakeholders to build out and adopt the digital infrastructure for trade, tax, identity, financial services, etc., and use the power of the crowd this is markedly different to large enterprise software projects which have significant concentration risks including the number of commercial stakeholders that can engage. The second is CERTIFICATION governments can move away from using sticks by offering carrots to stakeholders that exhibit measurable compliant behaviors this could dramatically change the way we look at regulation and compliance.

This is all achievable through smart contracts on the blockchain and can be accomplished now without new contract law if we adopt functional equivalence for smart contracts, just as we adopted it moving from paper to electronic contracts. The only big decision that governments need to make upfront is whether to use public or private blockchains, or a mix, and this decision merits significant consideration of the specific use case, says De Filippi.

Adds Pentland, there is a great transfer of soft power taking place with blockchain technologies, and when it comes to trade, it is Indo-Pacific led. It is important as the systems grow that they focus on a level of interoperability with each other through standards, to ultimately deliver the benefits that distributed ledger technologies offer multi-dimensional participation. If countries seek to go down the walled garden route, interoperability will go down the drain and the global trade system will be open to further arbitrage opportunities by those that seek to exploit this situation.

Governments and industry must recognize that blockchain is now mature, here to stay, and ready to use, today. The technology is more than a decade old and the underlying technologies of distributed databases, cryptography, and peer to peer networking have been with us since the dawn of computing.

Software developers are delivering blockchain use cases to market quicker than most industries, governments, and regulators can keep up with that is the power of the polycentric networked crowd. There is more innovation going on outside your four walls than inside, and you need to know how to plug into it.

As is often the case, it is the systematic factors coupled with institutional bias that are barriers to governments and managers understanding how and when to mobilize new innovative technologies and methods for society, and in many instances, few are really incentivized to make it happen.

The blockchain revolution provides the platform to engage large numbers and dimensions of stakeholders in the economy through shared mutual governance the major incentive is already there, it is baked into the governance model greater and more efficient economic participation in the economy.

Governments would be wise to be serious about prioritizing the digital space race. If the revolution is tokenized, it will be because large public blockchain consensus protocols are tokenizing it, and large swathes of global business and consumers are using it.

You can watch this panel and learn more about this and much more from the OECDs 4th Annual Blockchain Policy Forum.

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Will The Revolution Be Tokenized: Governments, Blockchain, And The Digital Space Race - Forbes

WASHINGTON On July 28, Diana Toebbe posted a Facebook message looking for a babysitter to take care of her children early on the coming Saturday morning for five to six hours.

Later the post, visible only to friends, was updated with the word *FOUND*. And on that Saturday, Ms. Toebbe accompanied her husband, Jonathan, to south-central Pennsylvania.

Unbeknown to Ms. Toebbe, she and her husband were being watched by the F.B.I. as they left their home in Annapolis, Md. And the bureaus agents continued to watch in Pennsylvania as Jonathan Toebbe removed from his shorts pocket a 32-gigabyte memory card hidden in a sealed Band-Aid wrapper, which he then, according to court papers, placed in a container set up by an undercover F.B.I. operative.

The Toebbes, accused by the U.S. government of trying to sell some of Americas most closely guarded submarine propulsion secrets to a foreign government, are scheduled to appear in federal court in West Virginia on Tuesday. They will face charges related to violating the Atomic Energy Acts prohibition on sharing nuclear know-how.

For now, the big questions surrounding the couple what country they are accused of trying to sell the nuclear secrets to, and what motivated them to take the risk remain unanswered.

Mr. Toebbe was described by acquaintances as a diligent and organized grad student in nuclear physics who was commissioned in the Navy as an officer and expert in submarine propulsion. He continued as a civilian in the Navy after finishing his military service, considered by some a plum assignment for the most talented nuclear physicists.

Ms. Toebbe was a 10-year veteran of the Key School, a progressive private school in Annapolis, where she taught history and English. There, according to parents, she was prone to talking about her Ph.D. in anthropology from Emory University and her love of knitting. She was a respected adviser, both formally and informally, at the school.

You could just tell she was insanely smart, said Craig Martien, 20, a 2019 graduate of Key School who worked closely with Ms. Toebbe on the yearbook and an after-school anthropology club. She was very friendly and down-to-earth, and I got along with her very well.

When Mr. Martien went off to Williams College, he brought along a toy squid that Ms. Toebbe had knitted. Like other Key graduates, Mr. Martien described her as a strong feminist and very liberal.

She was taken aback by President Donald J. Trumps 2016 election, he said, and mentioned several times that she was considering moving to Australia.

She said she couldnt stand the current state of politics and actually had found some job opportunities over there, he said.

On social media platforms, Ms. Toebbe shared photographs of her dogs, her children, meals cooking on the stove, a family vacation and selfies ordinary scenes of an ordinary life, one far different than the amateur cloak-and-dagger act portrayed in the F.B.I. affidavit.

Having made contact with the as-yet undisclosed other country about providing submarine secrets, the Toebbes were reluctant to expose themselves in an in-person meeting, according to the narrative laid out in court documents by the F.B.I. But their apparent desire for cryptocurrency payments led them to agree to the undercover operatives demand they deposit information in a dead drop location a decision that ultimately exposed their identity to the F.B.I.

Evidence in the court documents suggests the foreign country the Toebbes allegedly tried to sell the information to was an ally, or at least something of a partner, since it cooperated with the F.B.I. as the sting operation unfolded. While some experts speculated France could have been the target, French officials said they were not involved in the incident.

The hearing on Tuesday will be short. So far as the government knows, neither Jonathan nor Diana Toebbe has a lawyer. Prosecutors asked the court on Monday to hold Mr. Toebbe rather than granting him bail, saying he could face life in prison and was a flight threat. The magistrate judge could also set a hearing date for the couples continued detention.

Public records searches turned up no signs of financial distress that could provide a motivation for them to try to sell American secrets.

Yet the F.B.I. affidavit portrayed the couple as willing to take risks for the promise of payments in a cryptocurrency called Monero.

In February, F.B.I. agents, posing as a representative of the foreign country, proposed an in-person meeting. The response, which was signed Alice, a common placeholder name in military cryptography, wrote that face to face meetings are very risky for me, as I am sure you understand, according to the affidavit. The writer then proposed passing information electronically in exchange for $100,000 in the cryptocurrency.

Please remember I am risking my life for your benefit and I have taken the first step. Please help me trust you fully, the note to the undercover F.B.I. agents read.

The F.B.I. agents then pressed for a neutral drop location. The response came a few days later: I am concerned that using a dead drop location your friend prepares makes me very vulnerable, the note from Alice said, according to the affidavit. If other interested parties are observing the location, I will be unable to detect them. I am not a professional, and do not have a team supporting me.

The note went on to propose that the writer would choose a drop location for the encrypted files. The F.B.I. agents responded that they would give first $10,000 then $20,000 in cryptocurrency at a drop location of their choosing.

I am sorry to be so stubborn and untrusting, but I cannot agree to go to a location of your choosing, the response from Alice said. I must consider the possibility that I am communicating with an adversary who has intercepted my first message and is attempting to expose me.

The writer next proposed that the country provide reassurance by sending a signal from its complex in Washington over Memorial Day weekend.

Writing from an encrypted Proton mail account, Alice said the signal had been received, and agreed to drop the material at the location chosen by the undercover operative a mistake in tradecraft, some experts said.

It was somewhat surprising that someone who has studied submarine warfare follows the F.B.I.s direction to surface for these supposedly clandestine drop offs, said Michael Atkinson, a former inspector general for the intelligence community.

The willingness on the part of the country to convey the unspecified signal suggests its cooperation with the United States throughout the investigation. Mr. Atkinson said it was very unusual for a foreign country to allow its embassy or other facility to be used to send a signal to a suspect being pursued by the F.B.I.

Mr. Atkinson, now a partner at the law firm Crowell & Moring, said a similar false flag operation by the F.B.I. involving a government scientist trying to sell secrets to an ally resulted in a prison sentence of 13 years after a plea bargain.

At the Key School, where Ms. Toebbe taught, and in their Annapolis neighborhood, colleagues, students and neighbors tried to process the arrest of the couple and the accusations against them.

Luke Koerschner, 20, a 2019 Key School graduate now at Michigan State University, was in Ms. Toebbes advisory group for four years. He described her as very friendly and welcoming, an outgoing teacher who loved to cheer on her students in the schools cornhole tournaments.

Matthew Nespole, the head of the Key School, said he was shocked and appalled to learn of the charges against the Toebbes and that the school supports the administration of justice by the F.B.I. and NCIS, and will cooperate with the investigation. The Key School placed Ms. Toebbe on leave indefinitely.

Julian E. Barnes reported from Washington, and Brenda Wintrode and JoAnna Daemmrich from Annapolis, Md. Kitty Bennett contributed research. David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington.

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Submarine Spy Case Involved a Babysitter and a Band-Aid Wrapper - The New York Times