Closing tabs, below are some stories and links that at least tangentially intersect with this space.  Also, great post by Richard Brown: A simple explanation of fees in the payment card industry

• Should We Kill The $100 Bill? from NPR (2/3 of them are overseas, some used as a safe-haven)
• Hackers Steal $1.65 Million in NXT from BTER Exchange from CoinDesk (they’re sending extortion messages via the blockchain; and community is “voting” to hardfork/rollback the hack, removing the purpose and advantage of having a decentralized blockchain)
• Big Data Requires a New Kind of Expert: The Econinformatrician from Big Data Econometrics
• Depository Trust Corporation Company Breakdown by Taariq Lewis (see also the “Clearing” category from Richard Brown)
• The Gold Standard and Price Inflation by David Andolfatto (see also: Why Are Banks Holding So Many Excess Reserves? by Todd Keister and James McAndrews)
• For Merchants, Bitcoin Shows More Pop Than Potential from The New York Times
• The Man Who Really Built Bitcoin from Technology Review (Peter Todd says he wasn’t quoted correctly)
• The Limits of Moore’s Law Limits from EE Times (this touches on the discussion of ASICs in Andrew Poelstra’s paper which I critiqued in chapter 3)
• Ratings Firm Coinist Tackles Trust Problem with Bitcoin 2.0 Projects from The Wall Street Journal (Coinist, a ratings site for digital coins and assets)
• European Banking Authority takes hard line on regulation of Bitcoin/virtual currencies from Lexology
• Gavin Andresen Suspects Ponzis in Bitcoin Cloud Mining from Cryptocoins News
• Bitfinex: cascading margin calls resulting in flash crash from Matlab Trading
• Fun fact: Dutch banks launched a Digital Cash system in 1996 – still running – soon to be dismantled. on reddit
• On the Sovereignty of CryptoCurrencies — What Bitcoin can Learn from Somaliland by Casey Kuhlman (see also: Guess that makes me a tory by Preston Byrne)
• The Disruptive Potential of Bitcoin: Why Everyone in Financial Services Should Care by Celent (I heard that they used my 2nd book without citation, nice flattery if true)
• Digital identity cards: Estonia takes the plunge from The Economist
• Regulating Cryptocurrencies in the United States: Current Issues and Future Directions by Sarah Jane Hughes and Stephen T. Middlebrook
• Bitcoin: An Innovative Alternative Digital Currency by Reuben Grinberg (older, the first legal review paper on Bitcoin)
• SEC Rule 613 – Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) Plan — National Market System (“NMS”) Plan from Deloitte (impacts HFT)
• Safety and Soundness examination (this is something that an entity like Coinbase could have to pass and fulfill if it is deemed a depository institution)
• Replevin and bailment (I mention nemo dat in passing in the book, replevin is how this is handled)
• The Last Straw for Bitcoin by Ryan Straus (a year old but very germane, talks about irrevocability)
• Shift Is Developing A Debit Card That Lets You Spend Digital Currency, Loyalty Points And Regular Money from TechCrunch
• The Escalating Payments War from Bank Tech (see also: Amazon Unveils Mobile-Payments Service for Local Shops)
• Satoshi’s hashrate from Organ of Corti (Neighbourhood Pool Watch, really good blog)
• Annual Dijkstra prize: Alternative methods of achieving distributed consensus with computing systems
• What’s the matter with PGP? from A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering
• Trust Atom: Enforceable Digital Contracts (Yurii also developed GitChain)
• Viacoin Team Implements Smart Contract Protocol Built on Altcoin Block Chain from CoinDesk (fork of Bitcoin and Counterparty with the goal of implementing Tree Chains)
• Let’s Talk Bitcoin #133 The Digital Divide (Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, “bitcoin” is nowhere near the bottom echelon)
• Painting the tape (something older securities exchanges did in the past and something that could be happening in the digital currency space; tangent Watered stock)
• The Top 20 Edgy and Incisive Internet Quotes of 1990-1995 from Imagining the Internet (early ’90s predictions)
• Coinsetter brings biometric facial recognition and fingerprint scanning to Bitcoin security from Leaprate
• Venture Capitalists Get Paid Well to Lose Money from Harvard Business Review (I suspect the returns and performance by VCs heavily invested in the Bitcoin space will probably be poor for now due to a dearth of real revenue generating activities)
• Map of Coins a visualized history of the cryptocurrency world from the first bitcoin whitepaper up to present days (looks a little like fragmentation of Linux distros)
• O(1) Block Propagation by Gavin Andresen (talks about the issues discussed in Chapter 2 and 3 and a potential solution regarding propagating headers)
• Mnet and Mojonation from several notable people including Zooko Wilcox O’Hearn and Bram Cohen (it used digital currency)
• Proceed
 at
 Your
 Peril:
 Crowdfunding 
and
 the
 Securities
 Act
 of
 1933 from Joan
 MacLeod
 Heminway and Shelden 
Ryan 
Hoffman
• Epedigree