Bitcoin News Roundup for June 22, 2020

With gold up and the price of bitcoin treading water, today we're talking academic piracy and Cambodia's blockchain plot to escape the dollar.

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ABOUT

This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Ciphertrace.

Bitcoin Sees Small Gain as Gold Rallies to One-Month High

Bitcoin is reporting moderate gains on Monday as gold, a safe haven asset, rallies amid renewed coronavirus concerns.

Blackballed by PayPal, Scientific-Paper Pirate Takes Bitcoin Donations

Bitcoin has been used by outlaws of all sorts, but this time the outlaw is a young scientist from Kazakhstan breaking through the paywalls of academic journals.

Crypto Long & Short: What Changed My Mind About Bitcoin Narratives

Is bitcoin having a good year or not? As an industry, we need to work on honing our understanding of the many narratives, and how they can influence value.

Cambodia Plots Dollar-Free Future With Blockchain-Based Payments: White Paper

Cambodia's central bankers are riding their hopes of de-dollarization on a national payments blockchain: Project Bakong.

HOST

Adam B. Levine

Adam B. Levine joined CoinDesk in 2019 as the editor of its new audio and podcasts division. Previously, Adam founded the long-running Let's Talk Bitcoin! talk show with co-hosts Stephanie Murphy and Andreas M. Antonopoulos.

Finding early success with the show, Adam transformed the podcast's homepage into a full newsdesk and publishing platform, founding the LTB Network in January of 2014 to help broaden the conversation with new and different perspectives. In the Spring of that year, he would go on to launch the first and largest tokenized rewards program for creators and their audience. In what many have called an early influential version of "Steemit"; LTBCOIN, which was awarded to both content creators and members of the audience for participation was distributed until the LTBN was acquired by BTC, Inc. in January of 2017.

With the network launched and growing, in late 2014 Adam turned his attention to the practical challenges of administering the tokenized program and founded Tokenly, Inc. There, he led the development of early tokenized vending machines with Swapbot, tokenized identity solution Tokenpass, e-commerce with TokenMarkets.com and media with Token.fm. Adam owns some BTC, ETH and small positions in a number of other tokens.