Buying and selling things with cryptocurrencies is hard. Every time you make any transaction, it’s recorded in the blockchain, a digital ledger. That takes up a ton of resources, such as hard drive space. But a new technology called the Lightning Network could offer a way to speed up the process. It’s a huge change in how cryptocurrencies could work. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood spoke about it with Timothy Lee, a reporter at the tech news site Ars Technica.   

When the markets are extremely volatile, it is common to want to find a scapegoat. And you might be thinking: It’s got to be the algorithms, right? Two kinds are used in Wall Street trading: those that optimize trades that humans make and those that take risks on their own. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with Michael Kearns, a professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, who creates algorithms that are used on Wall Street. He said that generally, the algorithms are not to blame for drops in the market. 

At the heart of every new business is its name — domain name, in fact. We might be a mobile internet kind of world, but the website is still king, and your URL still matters.  Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with Jen Sale, a domain broker for Evergreen, which specializes in acquiring and selling premium one-word domain sites, like robot-dot-com.  

In the future, what will make us choose one product over another? It probably won’t be things like screen size or brightness. It’ll be more subtle attributes, like which phone is “smarter” than another. Apple is a company that’s known for making great products, but will those devices continue to be the best five years from now? Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks about it with Forrester analyst Julie Ask. 

When hackers broke into the credit reporting agency Equifax last year, they stole the Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and driver’s license numbers of over 140 million people. There was speculation that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would crack down on credit agencies and require better data handling. But this week, we found out that while there still might be consequences over the Equifax breach, they won’t come from the CFPB. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks about it with Patrick Rucker, who had the exclusive for Reuters.

Market volatility aside, why does a company decide to go public?  Is it just to repay investors, or is it about scaling the product, or is it about having a big branding event? Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with venture capitalist Annie Lamont about why tech companies decide to go public, and why fewer are taking the leap. 

This week, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan decided they want to get into the health care business, forming a nonprofit that could provide insurance for their employees. This made us wonder: why does Amazon, which began as a retailer, think it can solve the problems of health care? And what is not in the scope of its ambition?  In our regular segment, Quality Assurance, where we take a second look at a news story of the week, Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks about it with Alexander Nazaryan, Senior Writer for Newsweek.

We’re looking at the media streaming landscape for live events. Why is it possible to watch television on some devices but not all? Why can some of us watch NFL games while out in the world, but not all of us? Because, hey, you might happen to be in the yarn aisle at a Michael’s and want to stream an NFL game. That happened to Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood. She talks with Joan Solsman, a senior reporter at CNET, about why she couldn’t. 

The next generation of wireless infrastructure is known as 5G. And it could have implications for not just how fast our phones get data, but also for driverless car infrastructure, and our ability to communicate in virtual reality. How close are we to having the 5G infrastructure in place, and what are the hold ups? Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with Sundeep Rangan, director of the research center NYU WIRELESS, and a professor of electrical engineering.