Our main story this morning is about Dubai and government-backed cryptocurrencies. The Department of Economic Development announced yesterday, that it will soon release a stablecoin, emCash, short for Emirates Cash, a digital equivalent to the Emirates Dirham, their fiat currency. Residents of Dubai will soon be able use emCash to pay for tuition fees, utility bills and also retail purchases. But is a government-backed cryptocurrency a good idea? It's not hard to imagine a dystopian future where the government has data about the finances and spending habits of every single citizen, as well as aggregate data which they can analyze to death.

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A new study has been published yesterday by researchers from Princeton and the Florida International University suggesting China now has the power to destroy Bitcoin, if it wishes to do so. Their numbers show Chinese mining pools now account for 74 percent of the hash power, up from 50% in 2015. This opens the door to a 51% attack, but it also has other, unexpected consequences. If I were them, I would rather weaponize Bitcoin to destabilize the economies of other countries. And this new study suggests this is, indeed, a distinct possibility.

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Binance announced yesterday that it will donate all the listing fees to charity. This PR stunt has very low if any downside risk for Binance. The ICO market is dead and projects which lost 50 or even 80% of the USD value of their funds raised won't pay the exchange millions of dollars even if they wanted to. And, let's not forget, any money channeled into a charity is tax free.