The Size of the Crypto Economy: Calculating Market Shares of Cryptoassets, Exchanges and Mining Pools

Cryptoassets and related actors such as crypto exchanges and mining pools are now fully integrated into mainstream economic activity. A necessary corollary is that they have attracted heightened regulatory and investor scrutiny. Although some rules and obligations apply uniformly across all economic actors in a given sector, many others, such as antitrust laws and some financial regulations as well as investor decisions are informed by actors’ relative economic size—meaning that those with larger market shares can become more attractive regulatory or investing targets. It is therefore a foundational issue to properly measure the economic footprint of economic actors in the crypto economy, for otherwise regulatory oversight and investor decisions risk being misled. This has proven a remarkably difficult exercise for multiple reasons including unfamiliarity with the underlying technology and role of involved actors, lack of understanding of the applicable metrics’ economic significance, and the unreliability of self-reported statistics, partly enabled by lack of regulation. Acknowledging the centrality of cryptoasset size in a number of regulatory and policymaking areas and the fact that previous attempts have been incomplete, simplistic, or even plainly wrong, this paper presents the first systematic examination of the economic footprint of cryptoassets and their constituent actors—mining pools and crypto exchanges. We aim to achieve a number of objectives: to introduce, identify, and organize all relevant and meaningful metrics of crypto economic actors market share calculation; to develop associations between metrics, and to explain their meaning, application, and limitations so that it becomes obvious in which context metrics can be useful or not, and what the potential caveats are; and to present rich, curated, and vetted data to illustrate metrics and their use in measuring the shares of crypto economic actors in their respective markets. The result is a comprehensive guidance into the size of the crypto economy.

Accessible and Inclusive City: Can Kingston Jamaica Measure Up?

There is a global thrust towards including and integrating persons with disabilities in the mainstream of society. This has intensified since the establishment of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2006 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 by the United Nations. One foundational issue addressed in these documents is that of access to public facilities and mobility. In this article, I assessed the situation of the Anglophone Caribbean, using the city of Kingston Jamaica as the point of departure. Kingston is the largest city in the Anglophone Caribbean and acts as a gateway to other destinations in the region. It has a population of approximately 1 million and there is a high concentration of persons with disabilities living in this geographical space.

Reconsidering the Foundations of Thermodynamics from an Engineering Perspective

Currently, there are two approaches to the foundations of thermodynamics. One, associated with the mechanistical Clausius-Boltzmann tradition, is favored by the physics community. The other, associated with the post-mechanical Carnot tradition, is favored by the engineering community. The bold hypothesis is that the conceptual foundation of engineering thermodynamics is the more comprehensive. Therefore, contrary to the dominant consensus, engineering thermodynamics (ET) represents the true foundation of thermodynamics. The foundational issue is crucial to a number of unresolved current and historical issues in thermodynamic theory and practice. ET formally explains the limited successes of the ‘rational mechanical’ approaches as idealizing special cases. Thermodynamic phenomena are uniquely dissymmetric and can never be completely understood in terms of symmetry-based mechanical concepts. Consequently, ET understands thermodynamic phenomena in new way, in terms of the post-mechanical formulation of action. The ET concept of action and the action framework trace back to Maupertuis’s Principle of Least Action, both clarified in the engineering worldview research program of Lazare and Sadi Carnot. Despite the intervening Lagrangian ‘mechanical idealization of action’, the original dualistic, indeterminate engineering understanding of action, somewhat unexpectedly, re-emerged in Planck’s quantum of action. The link between engineering thermodynamics and quantum theory is not spurious and each of our current formulations helps us develop our understanding of the other. Both the ET and quantum theory understandings of thermodynamic phenomena, as essentially dissymmetric (viz. embracing complementary), entail that there must be an irreducible, cumulative historical, qualitatively emergent, aspect of reality.

The synergistic effect of self-assembly and visible-light induced the oxidative C–H acylation of N-heterocyclic aromatic compounds with aldehydes

Constructing carbon–carbon bonds through oxidative cross-coupling between two hydrocarbon compounds is regarded as a foundational issue in green chemistry.

Innovation and reciprocity in applied linguistics

Applied linguistics is a discipline of design: it solves language problems by suggesting a plan, or blueprint, to handle them. These designs are sometimes promoted as highly innovative. Yet, are innovative language courses and tests in all respects truly new? This article will argue that most historically significant turning points in applied linguistic design demonstrate continuity with previously designed solutions. This was so for communicative teaching as well as for audio-lingualism. In testing, both interactive designs and socially responsible concerns have built on the past. Like innovation, reciprocity in design in applied linguistics is a foundational issue. How much reciprocity is there in the realms of language testing, language course design and language policy making? Why do we not explicitly check whether the design of a course should be as responsibly and carefully done as a test? How can we learn more from language policy development about making tests more accessible and accountable? What can test designers learn from course developers about specificity? There are many useful questions that we never seem to ask. The article will look across different levels of applied linguistic artefacts (language courses, language tests and language policies) at how we can enrich the principles of responsible design. We can continue to be surprised by innovation in the designed solutions that our profession provides, but we should also work on our understanding of what constitutes a responsible design framework. That foundation enables us to evaluate both the fleeting and the enduring in the new.

Making Visible “The Invisible Hand”

Agent-based computer simulation is the central (revolutionary) challenge for the future of Social Sciences. The foundational issue of the Social Sciences is the micro-macro link, the relation between cognition and individual behavior and social self-organizing and complex structures. There are no approaches for understanding its (causal) mechanisms better than computer simulation. Special attention should be devoted to the “immergent” top-down feedback on the agent control system. This chapter also attempts to explain a techno-political revolution allowed by distributed computing, and in particular “agents”; agent-based simulation, agents embedded in the smart environment, and agents as representing and mediating in human negotiation and agreement. The social “planning” was doomed to fail for intrinsic political and cognitive limits. MAS and Social Simulation will provide a platform/instrument for social policies, for planning and decision-making; and for focused monitoring and participation. However the solution of the “problem” can never been merely “technical”. The solution requires processes of political negotiation and decision.

PHOTOGRAPHICALLY BASED KNOWLEDGE

Pictures are a quintessential source of aesthetic pleasure. This makes it easy to forget that they are epistemically valuable no less than they are aesthetically so. Pictures are representations. As such, they may furnish us with knowledge of the objects they represent. In this article I provide an account of why photographs are of greater epistemic utility than handmade pictures. To do so, I use a novel approach: I seek to illuminate the epistemic utility of photographs by situating both photographs and handmade pictures among the sources of knowledge. This method yields an account of photography's epistemic utility that better connects the issue with related issues in epistemology and is relatively superior to other accounts. Moreover, it answers a foundational issue in the epistemology of pictorial representation: ‘What kinds of knowledge do pictures furnish?’ I argue that photographs have greater epistemic utility than handmade pictures because photographs are sources of perceptual knowledge, while handmade pictures are sources of testimonial knowledge.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Nature, Nurture, and the Development of Exceptional Competence

The nature and nurture of exceptional competence is a key foundational issue for gifted education. This special issue is intended to present the most current thinking about the issue by a group of leading psychological researchers from diverse traditions. The introduction of the following 5 articles is organized around 3 themes: (a) nature versus nurture (additive influence of each), (b) nature and nurture (reciprocation and interaction of the 2), and (c) nature in nurture (nature mediated by, or revealed through, nurture). It is argued that the progression from the nature-nurture debate to interactionist perspectives, to a further consideration of nature and nurture as working as 1 system, represents a more refined and deeper understanding of the role of nature and nurture in the development of exceptional competence.