In an unusual move, Tesla has reportedly asked some suppliers to return part of the money it paid them for work already completed. According to the Wall Street Journal, which reviewed a memo Tesla sent to a supplier last week, the electric auto maker said it is asking suppliers for refunds to help it reach profitability. This stokes concerns about the company’s cash flow, despite earlier assurances from Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk that it will be profitable in the third and fourth quarters of this year.

After months of production delays for the Model 3, Tesla recently hit a major milestone, announcing earlier this month that it reached its 5,000-per-week production target for the vehicle.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the memo, sent by one of Tesla’s global supply managers, said the company is requesting back a “meaningful” portion of its payments since 2016. Tesla described it as not only important for Tesla’s operations, but an investment in the company’s long-term growth that will also benefit its suppliers.

Tesla declined to comment about the memo to the Wall Street Journal, but said it is seeking price reductions on some projects, including several dating back to 2016, that it has not issued final acceptance on. It also told the newspaper that requests like the memo are standard in procurement negotiations between auto manufacturers and their suppliers.

But if Tesla is indeed asking suppliers for money back on past work to help it achieve profitability, as opposed to reduced prices on future work, it adds to concerns about company’s cash flows. It may also make some suppliers reluctant to work with Tesla. As manufacturing consultant Dennis Virag told the Wall Street Journal, “it’s simply ludicrous and it just shows that Tesla is desperate right now. They’re worried about their profitability but they don’t care about their suppliers’ profitability.”

TechCrunch has contacted Tesla for comment.

Don’t look now, but July 25 is sneaking up mighty fast. Why should you care? That’s the day prices go up on all passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2018, which takes place on September 5-7. If you want to attend one of the best tech conferences for all-things startup and — depending on the type of pass you select — save up to $1,200 in the process, then stop what you’re doing and go buy your passes today. Seriously, why wouldn’t you?

You simply don’t want to miss this event, and we’ll tell you why. Disrupt San Francisco 2018 — the largest Disrupt event we’ve ever produced — is the only Disrupt event happening in North America this year. We’re dedicating our time, resources and talent to making this the biggest, boldest Disrupt show ever.

More than 10,000 attendees will descend on Moscone Center West (our new venue with three times the floor space) to see the latest technologies from hundreds of early-stage startups. More than 1,200 of those startups — along with other exhibitors — will showcase a staggering array of technology in Startup Alley. All tech industries are welcome to exhibit, but you’ll find a special focus on these categories: AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, Biotech, Fintech, Gaming, Healthtech, Privacy/Security, Space, Mobility, Retail or Robotics/IoT/Hardware.

You’ll enjoy three programming-packed days of presentations from world-class speakers — known movers and shakers, plus rising stars, too — who will share their insight and experience. You’ll hear from the likes of Marillyn Hewson, the chairman, president and CEO of Lockheed Martin, Cyan Banister, a partner at Founders Fund and Mike Judge of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” fame. You’ll find the full lineup of speakers here.

We also went full tilt on Startup Battlefield by increasing the prize money to a tidy $100,000 in non-equity cash. We’re hard at work evaluating the applicants — it’s a highly selective process — but we can assure you that this startup pitch competition will be an epic battle for the ages. Boo-ya!

If you’re an early-stage startup founder or looking to invest in one, then you need to know about CrunchMatch. It’s our free, curated business match-making service that helps connect founders with investors who share similar business goals. You’ll receive an invitation to CrunchMatch when you buy a Founder, Investor, Startup Alley Exhibitor Package or Insider Pass to Disrupt SF.

There’s so much more to do, see and experience at Disrupt SF ’18, including interactive workshops and Q&A Sessions, our Virtual Hackathon, unparalleled networking opportunities and, of course, the TechCrunch After Party.

Disrupt San Francisco 2018 takes place on September 5-7, and you have until July 25 at 5 p.m. PST before our pass prices increase. Avoid buyers’ remorse and grab your tickets today.

For the nearly 20 percent of Americans who experience severe online harassment, there’s a new company launching in the latest batch of Y Combinator called Tall Poppy that’s giving them the tools to fight back.

Co-founded by Leigh Honeywell and Logan Dean, Tall Poppy grew out of the work that Honeywell, a security specialist, had been doing to hunt down trolls in online communities since at least 2008.

That was the year that Honeywell first went after a particularly noxious specimen who spent his time sending death threats to women in various Linux communities. Honeywell cooperated with law enforcement to try and track down the troll and eventually pushed the commenter into hiding after he was visited by investigators.

That early success led Honeywell to assume a not-so-secret identity as a security expert by day for companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Slack, and a defender against online harassment when she wasn’t at work.

“It was an accidental thing that I got into this work,” says Honeywell. “It’s sort of an occupational hazard of being an internet feminist.”

Honeywell started working one-on-one with victims of online harassment that would be referred to her directly.

“As people were coming forward with #metoo… I was working with a number of high profile folks to essentially batten down the hatches,” says Honeywell. “It’s been satisfying work helping people get back a sense of safety when they feel like they have lost it.”

As those referrals began to climb (eventually numbering in the low hundreds of cases), Honeywell began to think about ways to systematize her approach so it could reach the widest number of people possible.

“The reason we’re doing it that way is to help scale up,” says Honeywell. “As with everything in computer security it’s an arms race… As you learn to combat abuse the abusive people adopt technologies and learn new tactics and ways to get around it.”

Primarily, Tall Poppy will provide an educational toolkit to help people lock down their own presence and do incident response properly, says Honeywell. The company will work with customers to gain an understanding of how to protect themselves, but also to be aware of the laws in each state that they can use to protect themselves and punish their attackers.

The scope of the problem

Based on research conducted by the Pew Foundation, there are millions of people in the U.S. alone, who could benefit from the type of service that Tall Poppy aims to provide.

According to a 2017 study, “nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) have been subjected to particularly severe forms of harassment online, such as physical threats, harassment over a sustained period, sexual harassment or stalking.”

The women and minorities that bear the brunt of these assaults (and, let’s be clear, it is primarily women and minorities who bear the brunt of these assaults), face very real consequences from these virtual assaults.

Take the case of the New York principal who lost her job when an ex-boyfriend sent stolen photographs of her to the New York Post and her boss. In a powerful piece for Jezebel she wrote about the consequences of her harassment.

As a result, city investigators escorted me out of my school pending an investigation. The subsequent investigation quickly showed that I was set up by my abuser. Still, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration demoted me from principal to teacher, slashed my pay in half, and sent me to a rubber room, the DOE’s notorious reassignment centers where hundreds of unwanted employees languish until they are fired or forgotten.

In 2016, I took a yearlong medical leave from the DOE to treat extreme post-traumatic stress and anxiety. Since the leave was almost entirely unpaid, I took loans against my pension to get by. I ran out of money in early 2017 and reported back to the department, where I was quickly sent to an administrative trial. There the city tried to terminate me. I was charged with eight counts of misconduct despite the conclusion by all parties that my ex-partner uploaded the photos to the computer and that there was no evidence to back up his salacious story. I was accused of bringing “widespread negative publicity, ridicule and notoriety” to the school system, as well as “failing to safeguard a Department of Education computer” from my abusive ex.

Her story isn’t unique. Victims of online harassment regularly face serious consequences from online harassment.

According to a  2013 Science Daily study, cyber stalking victims routinely need to take time off from work, or change or quit their job or school. And the stalking costs the victims $1200 on average to even attempt to address the harassment, the study said.

“It’s this widespread problem and the platforms have in many ways have dropped the ball on this,” Honeywell says.

Tall Poppy’s co-founders

Creating Tall Poppy

As Honeywell heard more and more stories of online intimidation and assault, she started laying the groundwork for the service that would eventually become Tall Poppy. Through a mutual friend she reached out to Dean, a talented coder who had been working at Ticketfly before its Eventbrite acquisition and was looking for a new opportunity.

That was in early 2015. But, afraid that striking out on her own would affect her citizenship status (Honeywell is Canadian), she and Dean waited before making the move to finally start the company.

What ultimately convinced them was the election of Donald Trump.

“After the election I had a heart-to-heart with myself… And I decided that I could move back to Canada, but I wanted to stay and fight,” Honeywell says.

Initially, Honeywell took on a year-long fellowship with the American Civil Liberties Union to pick up on work around privacy and security that had been handled by Chris Soghoian who had left to take a position with Senator Ron Wyden’s office.

But the idea for Tall Poppy remained, and once Honeywell received her green card, she was “chomping at the bit to start this company.”

A few months in the company already has businesses that have signed up for the services and tools it provides to help companies protect their employees.

Some platforms have taken small steps against online harassment. Facebook, for instance, launched an initiative to get people to upload their nude pictures  so that the social network can monitor when similar images are distributed online and contact a user to see if the distribution is consensual.

Meanwhile, Twitter has made a series of changes to its algorithm to combat online abuse.

“People were shocked and horrified that people were trying this,” Honeywell says. “[But] what is the way [harassers] can do the most damage? Sharing them to Facebook is one of the ways where they can do the most damage. It was a worthwhile experiment.”

To underscore how pervasive a problem online harassment is, out of the four companies where the company is doing business or could do business in the first month and a half there is already an issue that the company is addressing. 

“It is an important problem to work on,” says Honeywell. “My recurring realization is that the cavalry is not coming.”

Blockchain technologies have a well-earned reputation for hacking and fraud, but the recent theft of more than twenty million dollars of second-tier cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Gold, Verge, and ZenCash was a fundamental attack on the core mechanisms that allow cryptocurrencies to function. The way that most blockchains (including Bitcoin and Ethereum) function now is called Proof-of-Work; miners must solve hard computational problems to add new blocks of transactions to the chain and the majority (i.e., 51%) of the computational power can determine what transactions appear in the public ledger.

In May and June, these second-tier cryptocurrencies suffered from what is called a “51% attack”, where attackers rented more processing power than the honest participants of the network, enabling them to control the transaction register and engage in nefarious behavior. For instance, an attacker could steal from an exchange by sending a deposit of compromised cryptocurrency, cashing it out, and then striking the initial deposit from the public ledger.

There was a time not so long ago when nine-figure venture capital rounds weren’t a near-daily feature of tech business news.

But now funding rounds of $100 million or more cross the wires with stunning frequency.

The era of supergiant rounds is now the new normal. This is attributable, in part, to billions of dollars flowing into new venture capital funds — the largest of which are raised by the oldest, most entrenched firms — and competition from relative newcomers, like SoftBank.

Q2 2018 may have set new records for worldwide VC deal and dollar volume in this post-dot com cycle, but that belies an important fact: Investors are dumping the bulk of capital into a relatively small number of companies. The rise of supergiant rounds wound up in a “takeover” of the market.

The chart below shows the proportion of capital raised in rounds of $100 million or more, tracing the period between Q1 2017 and the end of Q2 2018.

Just a little over a year ago, in Q1 2017, nine and 10-figure venture capital deals accounted for a healthy 35 percent of global dollar volume. Five quarters later, in Q2 2018, $100 million-and-up deals accounted for a majority — some 61 percent — of equity funding into upstart technology companies.

It’s not just that these mega-rounds are eclipsing smaller counterparts as a percent of dollar volume totals. Supergiant rounds also appear to be driving most of the growth in reported dollar volume, as the chart below shows.

Between Q1 2017 and Q2 2018, reported dollar volume in sub-$100 million deals grew by around 42 percent. By that same token, dollar volume in nine and 10-figure venture deals ballooned by about 325 percent over that stretch of time.

Granted, this is all based on recorded data in Crunchbase. And like all private-market databases, Crunchbase is subject to some reporting delays. Those delays primarily affect seed and early-stage rounds, which tend to be smaller. Still though, unless billions of dollars in small rounds get added to recent quarters, these figures are likely to remain relatively stable.

Why the takeover?

The obvious question to ask here: Why are $100+ million rounds more prevalent these days, and what explains their slow-motion takeover of the global venture capital market?

As with most things, the answer is, “it’s complicated, and it depends.” The rise and reign of supergiant rounds is a phenomenon that emerges from a confluence of different factors:

• The SoftBank effect. Much hay has been made about SoftBank’s ludicrously large $100 billion Vision Fund, a pool of capital raised partly from large sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. With this pool of capital, SoftBank can commit hundreds of millions of dollars to each deal, and the fund intends to invest in 70-100 unicorns over its five-year investment period. In doing so, SoftBank is building an index fund of emerging technology companies.
• The rise of supergiant funds. This is a related but separate phenomenon from the SoftBank effect. Venture firms are raising ever-larger funds to compete with SoftBank for room in attractive venture deals. It’s likely that investors are trying to outdo each other by offering more money to companies. Why take money from Investor A when Investor B is offering more capital on comparable terms?
• Companies are able to stay private longer. Although the IPO window is very much open for tech companies, it’s not like there is a line out the door. Many of the most highly valued companies are still far from profitable and simply aren’t ready for the scrutiny brought on by going public. With more capital available, companies can raise more in late-stage venture rounds now than what many companies raise in their IPOs.
• A shift toward preemptive funding. Because of all this money floating around, investors may be investing more money earlier than they have in the past. Rather than using a catalyzing event, or some marked improvement in metrics to justify raising a new round, some companies raise money from their existing investors just because they can. Venture investor Elad Gil calls these “preemptive rounds.”

It really does seem like mega-rounds are here to stay. And, based on just the last couple of weeks, it looks like the third quarter is likely to see a continuation of the trend.

Here are just a few examples from the first weeks of Q3: e-cigarette maker Juul is raising $1.2 billion, self-driving car company Zoox just raised $500 million, Chinese cafe chain Luckin Coffee raised $200 million and scooter and bike giant Lime raised $335 million in a Series C round.

Bigger funds are able to invest in bigger rounds. And as competitors raise big rounds, it becomes more strategically important for companies to also raise big rounds. It’s a positive feedback loop. What stops the fundraising arms race, though, remains to be seen.

Snapcash ended up as a way to pay adult performers for private content over Snapchat, not just a way to split bills with friends. But Snapchat will abandon the peer-to-peer payment space on August 30th. Code buried in Snapchat’s Android app includes a “Snapcash deprecation message” that displays “Snapcash will no longer be available after %s [date]”. Shutting down the feature will bring an end to Snapchat’s four-year partnership with Square to power the feature for sending people money.

Snapcash may have become more of a liability than a utility. With apps like Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, and Square Cash itself, there were plenty of other ways to pay back friends for drinks or Ubers, so Snapcash may have seen low legitimate usage. Meanwhile, a quick Twitter search for “Snapcash” surfaced plenty of offers of erotic content in exchange for payments through the feature. It may have been safer for Snapchat to ditch Snapcash than risk PR problems over its misuse.

TechCrunch tipster Ishan Agarwal provided the below screenshot of Snapchat’s code to TechCrunch. When presented with the code and asked if Snapcash would shut down, a Snapchat spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that it would, explaining: “Yes, we’re discontinuing the Snapcash feature as of August 30, 2018. Snapcash was our first product created in partnership with another company – Square. We’re thankful for all the Snapchatters who used Snapcash for the last four years and for Square’s partnership!” The spokesperson noted that users would be notified in-app and through the support site soon.

Snapcash gave Snapchat a way to get users to connect payment methods to the app. That’s increasingly important as the company aims to become a commerce platforms where you can shop without leaving the app. Having payment info on file is what makes buying things through Snapchat easier than the web and draws brands to use Snapchat storefronts.

We’ll see how Snapchat plans evolve its commerce strategy without this driver. Earlier this month, TechCrunch revealed that Snapchat’s code contained mentions of a project codenamed “eagle” that’s a camera search feature. It was designed to allow users to scan an object or barcode with their Snapchat camera and see product results in Amazon. But since our report, mentions of Amazon have disappeared from the code. It’s unclear what will happen in the future, but camera search could give Snapchat new utility and monetization options.

Snapcash won’t be a part of that future, though. Given Snapchat’s cost-cutting efforts including layoffs, its desperate need to attract and retain advertisers to hit revenue estimates its missed, and its persistent bad rap as a sexting app, it couldn’t afford to support unnecessary features or another scandal.

Over the course of a weekend we got a glimpse at some of the coming seasons and movies for various sci-fi, superhero, and other types of highly-anticipated fan-favorite franchises from the San Diego Comic-Con this year.

Here’s a quick selection of some of the ones shown over the weekend:

Aquaman

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

Godzilla: King of Monsters

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Disenchantment

Arrow: Season 7

Marvel’s Iron Fist Season 2

Doctor Who

Nightflyers

Titans

The Walking Dead: Season 9

Black Lightning

Young Justice

Legacies

Star Trek: Discovery — Season 2

DC’s Legends of Tomorrow

The Flash

Supergirl

Glass

Shazam

The Gifted

Legacies

Trill Project, founded by three high school girls, recently launched out of private beta to help people safely express themselves online. For those unfamiliar with the word “trill,” it’s a combination of “true” and “real.” An investor described it to me as a positive Yik Yak .

Trill Project began as a community for teenagers, especially for transgender teens who felt like they didn’t have a safe space to be themselves. It has since expanded it to a platform for everyone to express anything from their struggles with addiction, mental illnesses to workplace issues.

“We’re reinventing the narrative of social networking and we kind of elevate social media by being private and anonymous,” Trill Project co-founder Georgia Messinger told TechCrunch over the phone.

On Trill Project, everything is anonymous (there are no usernames) and monitored by 50 moderators around the clock. Trill Project also has machine learning algorithms as work to learn from reported posts to be able to recognize problematic posts in the future. And if someone feels unsafe or thinks someone has figured out their trill identity, they can always just change it.

In addition to wanting to prevent bullying and harassment, Trill Project wants to be helpful to those suggesting they want to harm themselves or those reporting being hurt by others. That’s why Trill Project has partnered with non-profit organizations that specifically support people experiencing mental health crises.

Trill Project will always be free to the users, but the idea is to possibly license its machine learning algorithms, sell ad space and sponsorships for communities, Trill Project co-founder Ari Sokolov told TechCrunch.

Anonymous social networks, of course, are nothing new. Startups like Whisper, Secret and Yik Yak have all tried and arguably failed.

“People have tried before but as teenagers in particular, we really are closer to our users,” Messinger said. “It gives us access and insight those companies have been lacking.”

Trill Project is currently participating in Founders Bootcamp, an accelerator for high schoolers. Through the accelerator, Trill Project has received $50,000 in funding. Next month, Trill Project intends to start raising a seed round.

The blockchain is in the middle of a major hype cycle at the moment, and that makes it hard for many people to take it seriously, but if you look at the core digital ledger technology, there is tremendous potential to change the way we think about trust in business. Yet these are still extremely early days and there are a number of missing pieces that need to be in place for the blockchain to really take off in the enterprise.

Suffice it to say that it has caught the fancy of major enterprise vendors with the likes of SAP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon all looking at providing some level of Blockchain as a service for customers.

While the level of interest in blockchain remains fluid, a July 2017 survey of 400 large companies by UK firm Juniper Research found 6 in 10 respondents were “either actively considering, or are in the process of, deploying blockchain technology.”

In spite of the growing interest we have seen over the last 12-18 months, blockchain lacks some basic underlying system plumbing, the kind any platform needs to thrive in an enterprise setting. Granted, some companies and the open source community are recognizing this as an opportunity and trying to build it, but many challenges remain.

Obstacles to adoption

Even though the blockchain clearly has many possible use cases, some people still have trouble separating it from its digital currency roots, and Joshua McKenty, who helped develop Open Stack while working at NASA and now is head of Cloud Foundry at Pivotal, sees this as a real problem, one that could hold back the progress of blockchain as an enterprise technology.

He believes that right now bitcoin and blockchain are akin to Napster and peer to peer (P2P) technology in the late 90s. When Napster made it easy to share MP3 files illegally on a P2P network, McKenty believes, it set back business usage of P2P for a decade because of the bad connotations associated with the popular use case.

“You couldn’t talk about Napster [and P2P] and have it be a positive conversation. Bitcoin has done that to blockchain. It will take us time to recover what bitcoin has done to get to something that is really useful [with blockchain],” he said.

Photo by Spencer Platt/Newsmakers – Getty Images

A recent survey by Deloitte of over 1000 participants in 7 countries found that outside the US in particular this perception held true. “When asked if they believed that blockchain was just “a database for money” with little application outside of financial services, just 18 percent of US respondents agreed with that statement versus 61 percent of respondents in France and the United Kingdom,” the report stated.

Richie Etwaru, founder and CEO at Hu-manity and author of the book, Blockchain Trust Companies sees it as a matter of trust. Companies aren’t used to dealing from a position of trust. In fact, his book argues that the entire contract system exists because of a total lack of it.

“The hurdle [to widespread blockchain adoption in the enterprise] is that those who have traditionally designed or transformed business models in large enterprise settings have systematically and habitually treated trust and transparency as second, sometimes third level characteristics of a business model. The raw material needed are the willingness and executive level alignment and harmonization around the notion that trust and transparency are the next differentiators,” Etwaru explained.

The volatility of new technology

Blockchain was originally created as a system to track bitcoin (digital currency) ownership, and it’s still used extensively for that purpose, but a trusted and immutable record has great utility to track virtually anything of value and enforce a set of rules. We have seen companies like po.et trying to use it to enforce content ownership, Hu-manity, which wants to enforce data ownership, and the IBM TrustChain consortium to track the provenance of diamonds from mine to store.

Photo: LeoWolfert/Getty Images

Rob May, who is CEO at Talla and whose company helped launch a blockchain called BotChain to track the authenticity of bots, says finding good use cases could help ultimately determine the technology’s success or failure. “Blockchain has a bunch of different use cases, and they are usually either all lumped together or poorly understood separately,” May said.

He believes that in many instances today, companies don’t understand the advantages of blockchain, which he identifies as immutability, trust and tokenization, the latter of which can help finance blockchain initiatives (but which can also contribute to confusion with digital currency use cases).

“Right now, businesses are missing real blockchain opportunities and instead throwing blockchain in places where it doesn’t belong. For example, they are trying to use it for smart contracts, and that stuff isn’t ready. They also try to use it for cases that require a lot of speed, and again blockchains aren’t ready,” he said.

Finally, he says, if you don’t require immutability, trust and tokenization, you might want to consider a different approach other than blockchain.

Please identify yourself

Like any network, identity will be at the core of any blockchain network because it is imperative that you understand whom you are communicating with. Charles Francis, a senior analyst at Accenture says for now blockchains will remain private for the most part, but authentication will become increasingly important as we eventually have blockchain-to-blockchain communications.

Photo:  NicoElNino/Getty Images

“Initially blockchain-to-blockchain connections will be manually set up and you will manage your network in a private model and bad actors will be immediately obvious,” he explained. But he believes that we will require a system in place to ensure we are authentically who we say we are as we move beyond private networks.

Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow and VP of Blockchain says that there will come a time when there are multiple networks and we will need to set up systems for them to communicate. “There won’t be one blockchain network to rule them all. It’s a very safe bet. Once you make that statement, these systems need to work together,” he said. “All [the different pieces of networks] need identity and the identity better play across networks. My identity on one network better be the same on another network,” he explained.

For Etwaru it comes back to trust, and a trusted identity would be a natural extension of that. “Transformational blockchain use cases require a network of trading partners to start to operate in a more trusted and transparent way, not just one individual,” he said.

Moving toward adoption

All this said, there is still a steady march toward adoption in the enterprise. As Talla’s May says, there may be open questions, but that just represents a big opportunity for smart companies. “If you are interacting with a network instead of a single company, whose throat do you choke when something goes wrong? I think you will see many companies in the blockchain space do what Red Hat did for Linux. Enterprises need consulting help and better frameworks to think about how [blockchain] networks will work, since Ethereum isn’t a product per se in the traditional sense,” he said.

Gil Perez, SVP for products and innovation, as well as head of digital customer initiatives at SAP says he’s seeing companies with real projects in production. “It is beyond just wanting to do something. We’re doing large scale implementations and pilots. For example, we did one in the pharmaceutical industry with over a billion transactions,” he said.

In fact, SAP has a total of 65 companies working on various projects at different stages of progress at the moment. Perez says the next level of adoption will require a way to involve multiple parties, not just a single company, as with a supply chain example, which involves moving goods and paperwork across multiple countries involving many individuals.

Photo: allanswart

He also points out the importance of making sure there is good data because ultimately, if you have bad data in an immutable record, that is going to be a serious problem. That requires the companies involved to come together and agree to a common system to enter and agree upon each piece of information that moves through the system and that is a work in progress.

May sees blockchain technology transforming the way we do business in the future and providing a more standard way of interacting than today’s hodgepodge of vendor approaches.

“Now that blockchain is here, what if we could launch a standard and have shared marketplace by all apps in a space? So as a developer, you write your [application] add-on one time and it works with any [similar application] that supports that standard, and they share one giant marketplace. But how do you get them to share a marketplace? Blockchain and tokens provide decentralization and incentives such that, if you set the right rules, maybe you could do it. That could be transformational,” he said.

As with any new technology, the more it scales the more the tools and adjacent technologies are required. We are still in the early stages of discovering what those are, and before the technology can take off in a big way, we will need more underlying infrastructure in place. If that happens, blockchain could be just as transformational as May suggests.

Data, they say, is the new oil, and open public data is the new commons. Give the people the facts, and they will use them to make informed decisions. Right? Except that’s not the bureaucratic instinct. Bureaucrats fear the free flow of information. And all too often they’ll try to quench it by intoning the magic word “security,” and if that doesn’t work, “terrorism!“, in the most idiotic ways and places possible.

This is a wide and general rule: whenever some tinpot official says something painfully dumb has to be done Because Security, the odds are better than even that they’re lazy, lying, and/or incompetent. (Think of this every time e.g. your work password expires and you’re required to change it.) There are so many specific examples that it’s hard to choose just one — but, conveniently, recently an old friend of mine stumbled across an example of this so vivid and unforgettable that I can’t not write about it.

The situation is explored in depth here, but to summarize: Gavin Chait, an independent development economist, asked local authorities in the UK to provide data on business properties registered in those areas, including whether those properties were vacant or not. A fifth of them were already publishing that information to their open-data websites; easy enough.

The value of that information should be obvious: determining economic trends over time, and making predictions; tracking the retailpocalypse, if and when it occurs; measuring the lifespan of businesses; more precisely estimating values and the timing of business real-estate development and investment; etcetera. Quite dry, if you ask me, but the kind(s) of thing which economists love.

So, naturally, Westminster City Council basically responded by claiming that this kind of open data would breed terrorism. No, wait, it gets worse! The forms of malicious activities which they claim would be encouraged by the open publication of registered business property data include, as mentioned, terrorism, but also identity fraud, money laundering, drug consumption, crack houses, and … wait for it … the horror! the horror! … “meeting places for young people, and rave parties.”

Obviously the vast pool of nefarious young people, terrorists, crack house builders, and ravers who are apparently poised to invade, once this Maginot Line of obscurity is breached, would never be able to find any vacant properties without the publication of this data. Truly, Westminster City Council is holding back a veritable tsunami of terror, identity theft, and drug abuse by keeping this toxically dangerous data away from our collective prying eyes.

It’s absurd, it’s painfully stupid, and I hope that Gavin’s forthcoming appeal overturns this risible idiocy. But it also an example of two worrying trends: locking up data which should be open, and the notion that the claim “it’s for security reasons,” no matter how ludicrous those reasons may be, is an unchallengeable magic spell which trumps any other consideration.

Public data should be a commons, not a treasure hoarded behind lock and key. But data can be the new oil. I suspect that’s one big reason why bureaucrats instinctively want to keep it to themselves. (Before you quote “information wants to be free” at me, please keep in mind that that’s only half of what Stewart Brand said.)

“It’s for security,” though — that’s what really enrages me. No one should ever get to shut down conversation with the magic word “security.” Indeed, the opposite should be true: that claim should require far more supporting evidence than any other justification. Let’s hope we get to live in that world some day.