Bitcoin

Gary Gensler, a top financial regulator in both the public and private sector, spoke with Nathaniel Popper of The New York Times about virtual currencies and the need for regulation. This fall, Gensler will hold dual appointments at Sloan and the Media Lab, “where he will write and teach about the potential he sees for blockchains to change the financial world.”

Paul Solman of PBS NewsHour talks with computer scientist Neha Narula to explain how Bitcoin works. “Part of Bitcoin’s threat model is that no single entity ends up getting a majority of the processing power in the network,” says Narula. “If somebody got 51 percent of the processing power in the network, they could theoretically rewrite history and change the state of transactions in the ledger.”