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Additionally, the study — led by researchers at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley — says the apps that are improperly collecting and sharing data are all included in Google’s Designed for Families program.

Researchers from the International Computer Science Institute say the majority of popular, free children's Android apps are tracking data on kids in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, a federal law that regulates data collection from users who are under 13 years old.

Others are still not convinced. Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, told Vox this week that bitcoin’s price remains too volatile for it to be considered a worthwhile currency. “In order to make a cryptocurrency work, you need stability,” he said in the interview, published Wednesday. “The value has to hold. So, what you need is an entity that will take, say, dollars, and give you cryptodollars one-for-one and vice versa. But we know what these institutions are; they’re called banks.”

To get some answers, I reached out to Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley. Weaver teaches a course on blockchains and seems to think the technology is, at best, misguided and, at worst, a fraud. So I asked him to lay out his case in the simplest possible terms.