Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cryptocurrencies

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>>> Facebook Wants Its Cryptocurrency to One Day Rival the Greenback
Social-media giant says Libra will be better than Bitcoin. But the company is late to the party and other payment initiatives have stumbled.


Bloomberg

By Kurt Wagner , Olga Kharif , and Julie Verhage

June 18, 2019


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-18/better-than-bitcoin-facebook-unveils-libra-cryptocurrency?srnd=premium


Facebook Announces Plans for Libra: Is it Really a Currency?

Facebook Says Its New Cryptocurrency Will Be Better Than Bitcoin

Facebook Inc. unveiled plans for a new cryptocurrency that the social-media giant hopes will one day trade on a global scale much like the U.S. dollar.

Called Libra, the new currency will launch as soon as next year and be what's known as a stablecoin -- a digital currency that's supported by established government-backed currencies and securities. The goal is to avoid massive fluctuations in value so Libra can be used for everyday transactions in a way that more volatile crypotcurrencies, like Bitcoin, haven’t been.

Read More: Facebook’s Cryptocurrency Project: Who’s In and Who’s Out

Libra is the culmination of a year-long effort to devise an easy way for Facebook users to send and receive money through its messaging services. Private messaging is one of the company’s fastest growing products, and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is embracing this by integrating all Facebook’s messaging products to let users communicate between its different apps.

This focus comes at a time when user growth of the main social network has plateaued in some major markets, and regulators are scrutinizing the company’s frequent privacy failures. Payments are a potential way to turn messaging into a business that complements Facebook’s advertising operation, which generates almost all its revenue.

To come anywhere close to matching the U.S. dollar for utility and acceptance, Libra will need to be widely trusted. So Facebook and its partners are mimicking how other currencies have been introduced in the past.

“To help instill trust in a new currency and gain widespread adoption during its infancy, it was guaranteed that a country’s notes could be traded in for real assets, such as gold,” the companies wrote in a white paper. “Instead of backing Libra with gold, though, it will be backed by a collection of low-volatility assets, such as bank deposits and short-term government securities in currencies from stable and reputable central banks."

Facebook Wants Its Cryptocurrency to One Day Rival the Greenback

The total number of Libra can change, and new digital coins can be issued whenever someone wants to exchange their Libra for an existing fiat currency, so the price shouldn’t fluctuate any more than other stable currencies, according to David Marcus, head of the Facebook blockchain team that’s spearheading the project.

“It would make a scenario where there’s a run on the bank completely impossible, because we are backed one-for-one,” he said. Libra will also be audited, he added, an important step in an industry with limited transparency.

Facebook has closely guarded its crypto plans for more than a year, though many of the details have already been reported by Bloomberg News and other outlets.

Read about how Marcus tapped PayPal talent to build Facebook’s blockchain team.

Marcus, who used to run Facebook Messenger, said Facebook plans to build a new digital wallet that will exist inside Messenger and its other standalone messaging service, WhatsApp. Once Libra is up and running, the currency and the digital wallet should make it easier for people to send money to friends, family and businesses through the apps. Libra will run on the so-called blockchain, a database that can use millions of computers to verify transactions, eliminating risks that come with information being held centrally by a single entity. Facebook created a new subsidiary, called Calibra, to build the new wallet and focus on the company’s blockchain efforts.

Facebook's track record in payments and commerce has been spotty. A few years ago, it began letting people buy flowers or hail an Uber through its Messenger service. Those features have not been huge hits. In 2010, it began offering Facebook Credits, a way to buy virtual goods inside Facebook games. But in 2012 it scrapped Credits, and in 2013 it started working with third-party services like PayPal process some payments. Facebook's revenue from "payments and other service" was less than 2% of total sales in 2018.

The Decline of Facebook Payments

Facebook's payments revenue as a portion of overall revenue has been declining.

If successful, Libra could make Facebook a much bigger player in financial services. That’s a big “if,” though. Cryptocurrency companies have been trying to build cross-border, digital currencies on the blockchain to disrupt traditional banking and payments for a decade. Nothing has caught on at the scale of traditional money yet.

When it finally arrives, Libra will be late to a party that’s been going on so long, many of the party-goers have either left or collapsed. Some past attempts to make coins usable for commerce, such as Bitcoin, haven’t widely caught on yet because price volatility mainly attracted traders and speculators. Predecessor stablecoins, like Tether, have been used by some traders to park funds in during times of high volatility, but have not been broadly adopted for commerce.

Read more about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s early plans for cryptocurrency.

U.S. regulations may represent another hurdle for Facebook. Creating a digital currency doesn’t just require buy-in from financial institutions who need to accept it, and consumers who need to trust it, but it requires approval from regulators, too. The Securities and Exchange Commission has shut down about a dozen businesses issuing their own tokens for violations of securities law. Marcus said Facebook has been in contact with regulators and central banks, but added that the company hasn’t received a “no-action” letter from the SEC yet. That would have safeguarded the project from regulatory action by the agency.

One way Facebook hopes to appease regulators is through the Libra Association, a governing body tasked with making decisions about Libra. At least 27 other firms, including Visa Inc., Uber Technologies Inc. and PayPal Holdings Inc., are part of the group. Marcus described these members as “co-founders,” and said they will have an equal say in how the cryptocurrency is managed.

“Facebook will not have any special privilege or special voting rights at the association level,” said Marcus, the former president of PayPal. “We will have competitors and other players on top of this platform that will build competing wallets and services.”

All Libra Association members are putting a minimum of $10 million into a reserve to help support the cryptocurrency’s value. This buy-in comes with voting privileges. However, the association’s governance structure is still in flux, and most of the group’s crucial decisions, including the creation of its charter, have not yet been decided, according to several members of the group. They asked not to be identified discussing private details.

“Facebook will not have any special privilege”

Libra’s timing could also pose challenges. Facebook is being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission over the company’s privacy practices. Some have called for the company to be broken up, including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Asking consumers to put more trust in the social media giant, and giving Facebook a strong entry into the world of digital payments and banking, will likely draw further criticism.

Opinion: Crypto-evangelists hoped digital currencies would challenge Big Tech’s data control. Zuckerberg has other plans.

The company plans to keep financial data gathered from Libra users separate from Facebook user data. That’s why Facebook’s digital wallet will exist under the Calibra subsidiary, which will house user transaction data on separate servers, Marcus said. If a WhatsApp user uses her Calibra wallet to send money to a friend or pay a retailer, those interactions won’t be stored alongside her social-media profile.

“There’s a clear distinction between Calibra and what Calibra has access to, and what Facebook Inc. has access to,” Marcus said. “It’s very clear that people don’t want their financial data from an account to be comingled with social data or to be used for other purposes.”

<<<

[BottomBounce]

Cup & Handle $NIO

[SunsPowerless]

I honesly guessed that this would happen to him

[SunsPowerless]

I honesly guessed that this would happen to him

[BottomBounce]

$NIO "The NIO House experience at Auto Shanghai 2019 has been as exciting and enjoyable as ever. Thanks to all of the 300,000+ visitors that joined us this year - hope to see you next time!" NIO

We hope that everyone's #AutoShanghai experience has been as valuable and enjoyable as ours. Thanks to all our visitors - over 300,000! - for joining us over the last week. You can find out more about our products and services over at https://t.co/wksilpZJ89 #blueskycoming pic.twitter.com/K7PG9FCWFI

— NIO (@NIOGlobal) April 26, 2019

[BottomBounce]

$NIO is on fire!

#Bitcoin #Ethereum #Cryptocurrencies

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Fwiw, the Bitcoin (GBTC) chart has that 'blast off' look to it right now.
It's already rebounded considerably off the lows, but the chart says 15 could be the next target (currently 10.70).

As Jim Rickards has pointed out, crypto and the underlying DLT/distributed ledger technology has a big future, but Bitcoin and most of the other cryptos don't.

However, Bitcoin is being used as a trading vehicle for speculation, and big players on Wall St have joined in. I remember when the peak came in 2017 -- right after it became possible to short Bitcoin, and then down she went. Now they're running it up again.

Big names like Fidelity are getting involved (see previous post). Despite the hype and craziness surrounding cryptos, the Bitcoin/GBTC chart has actually been relatively orderly. GBTC began trading in 2015, and while the percentage moves of Bitcoin are big, there are well defined support/resistance levels, periodic pullbacks, and consolidations. A surprisingly orderly chart.

Right now it looks ready to blast higher.

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>>> Fidelity Is Really In Love With Bitcoin: Texas Office Filled With Crypto ASICs


5-25-19

Avatar

Nick Chong


https://www.newsbtc.com/2019/05/25/fidelity-is-really-in-love-with-bitcoin-texas-office-filled-with-crypto-asics/


Many cynics say that institutions and other big names in the corporate world aren’t in Bitcoin (BTC) or crypto assets yet. But, this is quickly being proven not to be the case. In a recent tweet, a Bitcoin developer and industry insider revealed that one of the biggest names on Wall Street has and continues to mine BTC.

Fidelity Continues To Mine Bitcoin

According to Justin Moon, Fidelity Investments, one of the world’s largest asset managers and financial institutions, has a “room full of Bitcoin miners (ASICs) at their [Texas] office.” This likely marks the first time that a Wall Street institution, let alone one of the big names, has actually mined BTC and actively participated in public, renowned blockchains. As Moon puts it, “[this is] cypherpunk AF!”

This isn’t the first time that Fidelity was revealed to have actually truly involved itself in cryptocurrency.

In an episode of “Unconfirmed” with Laura Shin, Tom Jessop, an institutional executive-turned-Fidelity’s crypto chief, claimed that as early as 2015 or so, CEO Abigail Johnson was mining Bitcoin in her very own office. What’s more, Jessop stated that an R&D division of the company even once tested an internal Bitcoin payments network.

Ari Paul, the founder & chief investment officer of BlockTower Capital, earlier this year claimed that Fidelity has a cryptocurrency culture that is “bonkers.” The investor remarks that there are “hundreds of passionate advocates” of the innovation from the C-Suite to the lower rungs of the executive ladder, accentuating that Wall Street sees value in this budding ecosystem.

--- @AriDavidPaul
Fidelity’s cryptocurrency culture is bonkers. Literally hundreds of passionate advocates at every level of seniority at the firm. They have more people working on crypto than the 5 biggest crypto funds combined. ----

And, the company is obviously known to be working on a custody and trade execution solution for its 20 thousand-odd institutional clients, a purported majority of which believe that digital assets have a future and a place in their portfolios.

Strong Mainstream Support

This valuable tidbit of information confirms that mainstream players in finance and the corporate world are delving into cryptocurrency. As reported by NewsBTC previously, TD Ameritrade and E*Trade, two of the largest American retail brokerages, are soon expected to launch spot cryptocurrency trading support for their clientele. No dates or deadlines were mentioned, but these plans have been confirmed by sources to be solid.

On the corporate side of things, cryptocurrency has started to see monumental levels of adoption. Announced Thursday, AT&T, a Texas-based American technology giant valued at $234 billion, will be accepting Bitcoin payments for its services through the Atlanta-headquartered BitPay. Per a press release, AT&T is now the first “major U.S. mobile carrier” to provide its millions of customers with the ability to purchase services for cryptocurrency.

Researcher Willy Woo noted that whenever common Joes and Jills use Bitpay to pay their AT&T bill or purchase an item or service through other retailers, which is technically a negative selling pressure on BTC spot, “thousands more will see it and consider buying a few thousands of BTC as an investment.”

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>>> The Biggest Fraud in History


BY JAMES RICKARDS

MAY 20, 2019

https://dailyreckoning.com/the-biggest-fraud-in-history-2/


The Biggest Fraud in History

My readers know that I’m a longtime critic of bitcoin. Bitcoin rose from about $2,000 in May 2017 to $20,000 by December 2017 in one of the greatest asset price bubbles in history.

I argued repeatedly that it was nothing but a massive bubble and that the bubble would probably burst when it hit $20,000.

In late 2017 it did.

Bitcoin crashed from $20,000 all the way to $3,300 by December 2018 — an 83.5% collapse in one year and the greatest recorded asset price collapse in history.

The crash of bitcoin was even more dramatic than the infamous collapse of tulip prices in the tulipomania in Netherlands in the early 17th century.

But suddenly, bitcoin is back in the news.

You’ve probably seen the headlines about bitcoin’s return. Bitcoin rose from $3,900 on March 26, 2019, to $8,100 on May 15, 2019, a gain of 52% in less than seven weeks.

Happy days are here again! Bitcoin mania is back!

60 Minutes even ran a feature on bitcoin last night.

Is this the start of a new rally back to the heights of $20,000? That seems highly unlikely.

Early Friday bitcoin plunged well over $1,000 in a massive flash crash, about 10% in one day. Easy come, easy go.

What caused the crash?

It seems that a bitcoin “whale” unloaded a massive holding.

A “whale” is a term for a cryptocurrency investor with a large amount of units, or “coins.” That gives them significant influence on the market control.

It’s been estimated that less than 450 people or entities own 20% of the entire bitcoin market.

And when someone buys or sells a massive amount, prices can swing dramatically, as we saw on Friday.

It is still not clear if the large sell order was deliberate or an accidental “fat finger” error.

Prices have recovered to some extent, and bitcoin’s trading around $7,800 today. But either way, Friday’s flash crash highlights a major weakness of bitcoin. It can all come crashing down like a house of cards, as bitcoin’s 2017–18 hair-raising plunge proves.

As an asset, bitcoin has very little to offer outside of speculation.

Bitcoin still has no use case except for gambling by speculators or the conduct of transactions by terrorists, tax evaders, scam artists and other denizens of the dark web. Bitcoin is still unsustainable due to extreme demands for electricity in the computer “mining” process.

It is still nonscalable due to the slow and clunky validation process for new blocks of transactions on the bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin has no future as “money” because the supply of bitcoin cannot grow beyond a preset amount.

That feature makes bitcoin inherently deflationary and therefore not suitable for credit creation, which is the real source of any system of money. Bitcoin has been subject to continual price manipulation by miners through wash sales, front-running, ramping and other tried-and-true techniques for price manipulation.

The bitcoin infrastructure has been plagued with hacking, fraud, bankruptcy and coin theft measured in the billions of dollars. Bitcoin may go higher from here; it’s entirely possible. But it will then come crashing down again.

What is bitcoin’s intrinsic worth?

JPMorgan Chase has tried to break it down. They examined bitcoin as a commodity.

To arrive at its worth, JPMorgan Chase estimated the cost of producing each individual bitcoin by looking at factors such as electrical costs, computational power and energy efficiency. I mentioned these factors above.

When they crunched the numbers, what number did they come up with?

JPMorgan Chase estimated the intrinsic value of bitcoin at around $2,400. Let’s assume for now that’s accurate, or a reasonable approximation. Then even at $8,000, we can conclude that bitcoin is severely overvalued.

JPMorgan Chase compared bitcoin’s recent run-up to the bubble it experienced two years ago. Even though it is still far from $20,000, if we see another speculative frenzy it could undergo a similar run. But it would end the same way.

The bottom line is I would advise you to stay far away from bitcoin. Do not get sucked in by the hype.

Sadly, some people never learn. And my guess is that many will get burned all over again.

Read on for more.

Regards,

Jim Rickards

for The Daily Reckoning

<<<

[jjPP]

iETH: iEthereum Apple logo token mystery continues. is Apple the Satoshi behind the slow decentralized distribution??


Here is my prediction: looks like only 5 million tokens remain on the exchanges the rest are in wallets. If a team of investors decide to buy about 2.5 million of the remaining tokens or about 100K worth this price can only go up. My theory is based on simple math. Developers likely own a high percentage. Therefore simple supply and demand.


maybe someone could actually write a meaningful article regarding questions surrounding this token?
information is very sparse.


No reason this token can't go to 5$ per token.

[jjPP]

Apple iETH token: has Apple Corporation commented on any association with Apple iETH Cryptocard? If anyone has any public information please comment. Thanks. iETH is easily a multibillion dollar market cap if so.

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>>> Fidelity Will Offer Cryptocurrency Trading Within a Few Weeks


By Matthew Leising

May 6, 2019


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-06/fidelity-said-to-offer-cryptocurrency-trading-within-a-few-weeks?srnd=premium


Asset manager will target institutional customers, not retail

Crypto markets continue to be plauged by fraud and theft


Fidelity Investments, which began a custody service to store Bitcoin earlier this year, will buy and sell the world’s most popular digital asset for institutional customers within a few weeks, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The Boston-based firm, one of the largest asset managers in the world, created Fidelity Digital Assets in October in a bet that Wall Street’s nascent appetite for trading and safeguarding digital currencies will grow. It also puts Fidelity a step ahead of its top competitors that have mostly stayed on the sidelines so far. The firm said in October that it would offer over-the-counter trade execution and order routing for Bitcoin early this year.

Fidelity would join brokerages E*Trade Financial Corp. and Robinhood in offering cryptocurrency trading to clients, though Fidelity is only targeting institutional customers and not retail investors like E*trade and Robinhood, said the person, who asked not to be named discussing private matters. A study released by Fidelity on May 2 found that 47 percent of institutional investors think digital assets are worth investing in.

“We currently have a select set of clients we’re supporting on our platform,” Fidelity spokeswoman Arlene Roberts said in en email. “We will continue to roll out our services over the coming weeks and months based on our clients’ needs, jurisdictions, and other factors. Currently, our service offering is focused on Bitcoin.”

Fidelity closer to offering crypto trading

According to the survey, which questioned 441 institutional investors from November to February, 72 percent prefer to buy investment products that hold digital assets, while 57 percent choose to buy them directly.

The hurdle to make crypto appeal to more mainstream investors is that it continues to be plagued with fraud, theft and regulatory infractions. The latest case involves the New York attorney general accusing Bitfinex, one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges, of hiding the loss of about $850 million in client and corporate cash. Vancouver-based Quadriga Fintech Solutions Corp., which is going through bankruptcy in Canada, owes 115,000 clients about $193 million in cryptocurrencies and cash after the death of founder Gerry Cotten last year.

Bitcoin has jumped more than 50 percent this year, extending the wild price swings that have attracted many individual investors to the mostly unregulated coin. The original digital currency gained widespread notoriety when it surged 1,400 percent in 2017, before tumbling 74 percent last year.

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[krank7x]

Sentivate The Universal Web


https://sentivate.com

Shaping up to the next 1000x Ethereum :)

[George Blockington]

Decentralized Storage Discussion

What are your thoughts on current decentralized storage projects (Sia, Storj, Filecoin, PPIO, etc.)

In a market that is cluttered with a lot of altcoins that aren't going anywhere, being able to create a serviceable technology that's tied to a coin with real-world value is worth paying attention to.

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>>> Crypto’s Long Road to Acceptance May Have Started Here


In the wake of the 2018 crash, two dozen traders gathered to plan its emergence as a new asset class. Step one: a clearinghouse.


By Alastair Marsh

April 24, 2019


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-25/crypto-s-long-road-to-acceptance-may-have-started-here?srnd=premium


He sent the invitations when the party was over.

Only after the cryptocurrency craze’s collapse hit bottom in December did Standard Chartered Plc veteran Hoe Lon Leng issue his call to the market’s biggest traders: join him to brainstorm making digital tokens part of the world’s financial architecture.

It may seem quixotic, but the goal of the two dozen men gathered Jan. 20 at a resort on Singapore’s Sentosa Island was to create the framework for an orderly market in crypto derivatives—part of every primitive asset class’s journey to acceptance. If they succeed, those hours spent in Sofitel meeting rooms hemmed in between an 18-hole golf course and one of the city-state’s sandy beaches could prove to be a turning point, these true believers say.

“We see this as getting the crypto market into shape in order to absorb the entry of traditional finance firms,” said Simon Nursey, Leng’s former colleague who attended the meeting. (Leng’s crypto initiative is a personal project, and his employer is not involved). “We are witnessing the emergence of a new asset class.”

Such visions underscore the schizophrenic world of cryptocurrencies—digital money that its advocates cheer as the future free from meddlesome officaldom. But alongside finance professionals prospecting for a big score and institutional investors testing it out, a rogue’s gallery of anarchists, criminals and fraudsters has left a stink on virtual currencies that is proving hard to wash away.

“Crypto is now practically a pejorative,” said Eoin O’Shea, a former compliance chief at Credit Suisse Group AG who now runs Temple Grange Partners, a risk and compliance consultancy. “It will need to shake off this taint if it is to go mainstream.”

Yet in the wake of crypto’s 2018 crash, traders flew into Singapore from Hong Kong, Tokyo and New York to join Leng’s caucus.

The gathering brought together traders from firms including Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital Holdings Ltd. and Circle Internet Financial Ltd., which counts Goldman Sachs Group Inc. among its investors, as well as exchanges Binance and Coinbase. Together, the group embodied the first Crypto OTC Roundtable Asia.

They focused on private bilateral derivatives known as over-the-counter contracts, instead of exchange-traded products like Bitcoin futures. Unlike the futures contracts that trade on public markets managed by regulated companies such as CME Group Inc., OTC contracts, including options, are not standardized. They also expose traders to the credit risk of their counterparts.

When Wall Street bankers from firms including Deutsche Bank AG and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in 2005 created a standardized contract for credit default swaps on mortgage-backed securities, the market boomed, until it melted down just a few years later.

While no official statistics exist for bilateral crypto derivatives trading, Nursey estimates volumes total around $750 million per month across swaps and options contracts. That’s a fraction of the trillions that change hands weekly in the interest-rate derivatives market.

The Singapore meeting gave birth to what will be the first clearinghouse for crypto derivatives to increase trading volume and dramatically reduce trading costs. The venture, known as Liquidity Offset Network, should be operational and regulated by the Singapore Monetary Authority as soon as July, said Nursey, 46, who until November was head of foreign-exchange options trading for Asia at Standard Chartered. The network will be the central counterparty, while the services it offers, including margin calculations and confirmation, are known as OTSafe, according to Nursey, who says he’s financing the network along with a silent partner.

The point would be to eliminate the need for traders to post collateral with each of their counterparties, an arrangement that can quickly exhaust all the resources of a small fund. Were the same fund to face a single central counterparty—in this case the clearinghouse—it would need to hold less collateral, he said.

“It’s very hard to grow a market on a bilateral basis,” said Darius Sit, a Singapore-based managing partner at crypto trading firm QCP Capital who helped Leng organize the meeting. “It is almost impossible to arrive at a system both parties see as fair and equal.”

An accepted guide of trading conventions would also help, laying the ground for institutional investors and Wall Street banks to join, said Nursey. A handful of mainstream finance firms are looking at crypto investments or businesses, but most have steered clear.

For Leng, 44, crypto trading is similar to many of the other nascent markets he has seen in a 20-year career at firms including Tudor Investment Corp., Goldman Sachs and now Standard Chartered. He’s even written an introductory guide to crypto.

The violent price swings and makeshift infrastructure for digital assets are reminiscent of the Asian currency derivatives market in late 1990s, which began with a few in-the-know dealers and grew quickly as the contracts became widely adopted, said Leng. OTC derivatives on Bitcoin, Ethereum and the like could also grow rapidly.

CORA will hold a second meeting in Chicago in May to draw more U.S. traders into its initiative. Such a move could be crucial because of the U.S.’s outsize influence, said Rich Rosenblum, co-founder of GSR, a Hong Kong-based algorithmic trading firm focused on digital assets who did not attend the Singapore meeting.

“Due to weak regulatory oversight in Asia, it will be challenging for initiatives of this kind to have an industrywide impact,” said Rosenblum. “Similar efforts in the U.S. have the opportunity to work with more progressive regulators, which may be the deciding factor in what sets the global standards and legal framework of the future.”

<<<

[jjPP]

iEthereum Apple logo ROI 669.19% according to coinmarketcap

is anyone able to comment if Apple has put out a written statement regarding their affiliation with the iETH blockchain?

Thanks.

[gfp927z]

Another reason to avoid cryptos - >>> Quadriga’s Late Founder Revealed Crypto Storage in Old Podcast


By Doug Alexander

February 15, 2019


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-15/quadriga-s-late-founder-revealed-crypto-storage-in-old-podcast?srnd=premium


Gerry Cotten said access keys were kept on paper back in 2014

Customer accounts remain frozen as company searches for codes



Quadriga CX founder Gerry Cotten died in December possibly holding the only keys to C$190 million ($143 million) in cryptocurrencies -- but five years ago, he revealed exactly how his digital exchange stored Bitcoin for its clients.

Cotten was interviewed on the “True Bromance Podcast” in February 2014 when he was living in Vancouver, in which the show’s hosts -- actors Sage Brocklebank and Michael Karl Richards, and producer Brett Michael -- were given a primer on cryptocurrencies and an explanation of his new venture. About an hour in to the rambling discussion, Cotten warned of the dangers of losing passwords needed to access Bitcoin.

“It’s like burning cash in a way," Cotten told his hosts. “Even the U.S. government, with the biggest computers in the world, could not retrieve those coins if you’ve lost the private key. It’s impossible to retrieve those."

The warning resonates now with more than 100,000 customers in light of Quadriga’s current woes. Cotten, who ran Quadriga off his laptop, died while traveling in India, and no one knows how to recover the cryptocurrencies the exchange was holding for clients. Quadriga’s operations have been shuttered and the Vancouver-based firm is reorganizing under court-approved creditor protection with the help of Ernst & Young Inc.

Canadian exchange was early avenue for crypto

While Cotten, who last resided in Halifax, may have changed his procedures over the years, back in 2014 he was a big fan of protecting cryptocurrencies with a very low-tech solution: paper.

“The paper wallet is a great way to store your Bitcoins. Basically, all you need to send Bitcoins is your private key, which is a string of, a ton of numbers and letters," he said. “The best way to do it is take your private key, print it off, store it offline in your safety deposit box, vault, whatever, and then take the public key, which is your address, and use that to send money to it. So that way you can never have your Bitcoin stolen, unless someone, like, breaks into the bank, steals your safety deposit box and gets into your private key and so forth.”

And that’s exactly what he did for his firm in those days.

“At Quadriga CX, we’re obviously holding a bunch of Bitcoins that belong to other people who have put them onto our exchange," Cotten said. “So what we do is we actually store them offline in paper wallets, in our bank’s vault in a safety deposit box because that’s the best way to keep the coins secure.

“Essentially we put a bunch of paper wallets into the safety deposit box, remember the addresses of them," he said. “So we just send money to them, we don’t need to go back to the bank every time we want to put money into it. We just send money from our Bitcoin app directly to those paper wallets, and keep it safe that way."

Winklevoss Twins

Cotten’s measures aren’t unique. Bitcoin advocates Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the brothers who run the Gemini Trust Co. exchange, came up with a similar method to store and secure their own private keys using paper, according to December 2017 New York Times story. The brothers cut up printouts of their private keys into pieces and then distributed them in envelopes to safe deposit boxes around the country, so if one envelope were stolen the thief would not have the entire key.

Gemini has since created a high-tech version of the process to hold client money, and accessing the firm’s so-called digital wallets requires multiple signatures from cryptographically sealed devices never linked to the internet.

Read More: Crypto Exchange Founder Dies, Leaves Behind $200 Million Problem

Cotten explained in the podcast that his early measures left the crypto cache safe even if hackers got into his site.

“It’ll be a little annoying because we’ll have to clean up whatever mess the hackers make, however they won’t actually be able to steal any of the funds," Cotten said, adding that while they could “see the address of where the coins went" hackers couldn’t actually access it.

Now it’s up to the court appointed monitor to attempt to unravel the current mess, whether the keys are stored on paper as Cotten mentioned years ago or in more elaborate forms.

<<<

[gfp927z]

>>> J.P. Morgan Chase Becomes First U.S. Bank With a Cryptocurrency <<<


Excerpt - "global banking is moving toward blockchain, the database technology that drives cryptocurrencies and leaves a clear audit trail that supports a high level of regulatory compliance"

So much for the crypto dream of anonymity and 'no trusted 3rd party' lol. The IMF is also creating a blockchain/DLT system for their SDR/Special Drawing Rights, with the IMF as the 'trusted 3rd party'. Bitcoin and the other cryptos will have no place in this new financial world order.



>>> J.P. Morgan Chase Becomes First U.S. Bank With a Cryptocurrency


MSN Money

by Erik Sherman

2-14-19



https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingandinvesting/jp-morgan-chase-becomes-first-us-bank-with-a-cryptocurrency/ar-BBTAbxW?OCID=ansmsnnews11#page=2


How the mighty have taken a u-turn.

J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called bitcoin a fraud in September 2017 and said, “You can’t have a business where people can invent a currency out of thin air and think that people who are buying it are really smart,” By January 2018 he had walked the remarks back but said he still was “not interested that much in the subject at all.” In February 2018, J.P. Morgan called cryptocurrencies “risk factors” to its business, something it never previously said.

And now J.P. Morgan jpm has become the first bank to offer its own cryptocurrency, CNBC reported. But don’t expect it to become an investment vehicle—at least for now. The cryptocurrency, called “JPM Coin,” is intended for the bank’s wholesale payments business that moves $6 trillion around the world daily.

As long-time former banker and now cryptocurrency industry figure Alan Silbert said of Dimon in a January 2018 tweet, “Backpedaling is the first step in the program towards walking the path.”

There are two reasons J.P. Morgan is on that road. One is strategic. If cryptocurrencies are risk factors, it’s better to be inside than out, potentially watching someone walk away with your business.

The second is competitive. Wholesale cross-border payments involve the movement of large sums between banks as part of the complex dance of international transactions. Those movements have traditionally used wire transfers that can take a day to complete.

But global banking is moving toward blockchain, the database technology that drives cryptocurrencies and leaves a clear audit trail that supports a high level of regulatory compliance. A cryptocurrency can work at the same speed for real-time transactions instead of a wire transfer’s lag, giving the processor a competitive advantage.

Small trials of JPM Coin are expected to start within a few months.

<<<

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Ethereum is at a fundamental low and is poised for a reversal in the next few months.

[FuninUSA]

Ethereum might be next big thing in cryptocurrency

Since bitcoin itself is not supported by authoritative issuing institutions and state power to maintain its authority, uniqueness, it can only get along equally with its other imitators, though it’s the earliest virtual currency.

So far, policy makers around the world are making new regulations, including the aspects of ICO, exchange, and so on. The intricacies of these rules are daunting, just as the variety of digital currencies makes it hard to know which will be the next bitcoin.

Bitcoin priced around $6,400 on Friday, which have over halved since its December highs of around $19,500, reported in FuninUSA news. Since bitcoin has experienced a staggering decline, there are other digital coins that investors might want to consider.

Kelly, founder and CEO of BKCM LLC, an investment firm focused on digital currencies, said that the next big thing in crypto might be ethereum, a decentralized blockchain platform. Here are the reasons.

1. Augur platform—one of the oldest ICOs
Kelly said, the augur platform, which is a decentralized prediction market, has been in development for about two or three years.
“What's interesting about this [is that] this will probably be one of the biggest decentralized apps on top of ethereum,” he said, “if [augur] doesn't slow the system down, that can generally be a positive for ethereum.”

2.Software mining
Ethereum is upgrading, Kelly said. “They [will] go from hardware mining, proof of work, to something called 'proof of stake,' which is similar to a software mining,” he said.In the next couple of months this will start to take effect and have an impact on ethereum, Kelly added.

[Pennybuster]

About CannCo & CannCoin

Cannabis is one of the fastest growing and most lucrative industries in the world today. Poised to become a $31.4 billion-dollar industry, cannabis is now medically available in 29 states in the United States, and totally legalized (for recreational and medical use) in nine states and the District of Columbia. All but four states have approved access to non-psychoactive cannabis extracts, produced for medicinal use.

With the shift in legality around cannabis, we are also observing a shift in culture. If you’re in Los Angeles, dispensary and cannabis delivery billboards are everywhere. In Colorado, dispensaries and cannabis businesses are frequented by tens of thousands of customers, daily. The entertainment industry, too, is taking notice, with new shows popping up regularly that explore the in’s and out’s of the marijuana realm.
However, in spite of all the statewide changes and enormous public support, marijuana is still federally illegal. Cannabis products that are produced in FDA approved facilities and taxed by the government, still can not cross state lines. And in Texas you could be arrested for having the exact same product that is medically and recreationally celebrated in your home state.

While federal policy appears to be softening and federal laws may soon shift, they have not shifted yet. Dispensaries, even in states where cannabis is legal, find it near impossible to work with banks, or find merchant processors that won’t shut them down for selling marijuana.

Many of these businesses went from processing just a few orders — in cash — to having a huge boom in sales. This dramatic increase in sales requires a more sophisticated payment processing system. However, federal laws governing fiat currency have conspired to make that incredibly difficult. Because both banks and merchant processors are governed by unique sets of federal guidelines and restrictions, they are, in many cases, legally unable to accept deposits or process transactions for legally operating cannabis businesses.
To address this problem, CannCo's is creating a blockchain-powered ecosystem that will provide the following services for the cannabis industry and eventually other developing and underbanked markets:

Transparent supply chain management
Business banking and merchant processing
Trade finance
Direct consumer-engagement solutions

With the launch of our native token, the CannCoin, we will to revitalize and restructure the cannabis market by offering robust financial services that have been largely unavailable until now. Given the successful track record of those behind CannCo and our unique blend of experience in the cannabis market, product and software development, and financial markets, we believe we are poised to deliver essential products and solid returns to our investors.



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Report TOS

[Pennybuster]

About CannCo & CannCoin

Cannabis is one of the fastest growing and most lucrative industries in the world today. Poised to become a $31.4 billion-dollar industry, cannabis is now medically available in 29 states in the United States, and totally legalized (for recreational and medical use) in nine states and the District of Columbia. All but four states have approved access to non-psychoactive cannabis extracts, produced for medicinal use.

With the shift in legality around cannabis, we are also observing a shift in culture. If you’re in Los Angeles, dispensary and cannabis delivery billboards are everywhere. In Colorado, dispensaries and cannabis businesses are frequented by tens of thousands of customers, daily. The entertainment industry, too, is taking notice, with new shows popping up regularly that explore the in’s and out’s of the marijuana realm.
However, in spite of all the statewide changes and enormous public support, marijuana is still federally illegal. Cannabis products that are produced in FDA approved facilities and taxed by the government, still can not cross state lines. And in Texas you could be arrested for having the exact same product that is medically and recreationally celebrated in your home state.

While federal policy appears to be softening and federal laws may soon shift, they have not shifted yet. Dispensaries, even in states where cannabis is legal, find it near impossible to work with banks, or find merchant processors that won’t shut them down for selling marijuana.

Many of these businesses went from processing just a few orders — in cash — to having a huge boom in sales. This dramatic increase in sales requires a more sophisticated payment processing system. However, federal laws governing fiat currency have conspired to make that incredibly difficult. Because both banks and merchant processors are governed by unique sets of federal guidelines and restrictions, they are, in many cases, legally unable to accept deposits or process transactions for legally operating cannabis businesses.
To address this problem, CannCo's is creating a blockchain-powered ecosystem that will provide the following services for the cannabis industry and eventually other developing and underbanked markets:

Transparent supply chain management
Business banking and merchant processing
Trade finance
Direct consumer-engagement solutions

With the launch of our native token, the CannCoin, we will to revitalize and restructure the cannabis market by offering robust financial services that have been largely unavailable until now. Given the successful track record of those behind CannCo and our unique blend of experience in the cannabis market, product and software development, and financial markets, we believe we are poised to deliver essential products and solid returns to our investors.



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[gfp927z]

>>> There Is No Such Thing as Cryptocurrency


By James Rickards

May 16, 2018


https://dailyreckoning.com/no-thing-cryptocurrency/



There Is No Such Thing as Cryptocurrency

The next time someone talks to you about blockchain or cryptocurrency, you should politely say to them, “There is no blockchain and there is no such thing as cryptocurrency.”

They’ll look at you funny, as if you’ve been living under a rock or just don’t get the latest thing in technology. Now you’ve got them where you want them.

You then go on to explain, “There is no blockchain. There are thousands of blockchains. There is no single cryptocurrency. There are thousands of cryptocurrencies. And they’re all different!”

That last point is the critical one — “They’re all different.”

It’s the same way you would think about stocks. It may be interesting if the stock market went up or down today, but what you really care about is your particular portfolio of stocks.

If you own IBM (IBM), Walmart (WMT) and Amazon (AMZN), then you care about those stocks. If Boeing (BA) went down, that’s too bad for Boeing holders, but it has no impact on you if you don’t own it.

And no one believes that Walmart and Boeing are interchangeable. They’re completely different companies with diverse business models and revenue prospects.

That’s important to bear in mind because too much of the cryptocurrency discussion these days focuses on generalities and broad-brush statements without drilling down on the particulars.

My readers know that I consider bitcoin (BTC) a dead-end cryptocurrency and would not hold it in a portfolio.

Yet I’m convinced that blockchain technology, or what we call distributed ledger technology (DLT), has a bright future. And cryptocurrencies that perform useful functions in an efficient manner on DLT platforms have a bright future as well.

The key to reaping gains from those potentially successful cryptos involves diligence and research as well as finding the right entry point for an investment.

Generally speaking, the new early-stage cryptos have better prospects than some of the well-known names because developers of the new cryptos have learned from the mistakes of the pioneers.

If you’re a golfer with a foursome on the green, you know it’s advantageous to putt last because you can “go to school” on the missed putts of your partners. You’ll watch their putts, read the quirks on the green and improve your own putting.

It’s the same with cryptos.

The early coins had problems of scalability, sustainability and processing time. That’s why they are dead ends. The newer coins solve many of those problems with improved governance models for validating the ledger and layering solutions for improved processing time.

The new cryptos “went to school” on the mistakes of the old ones.

A second wave or new generation of cryptocurrencies is now emerging with better governance models, more security and vastly improved ease of use.

These new-wave coins represent the future of the cryptocurrency technology. These cryptos have much greater potential to disrupt and disintermediate established payments systems and financial intermediaries such as banks, brokers and exchanges.

It is critical that investors have a robust and reliable method for distinguishing between the dead-end cryptos such as bitcoin and the new-wave cryptos with a chance to disrupt banks the way Uber disrupted taxis or Airbnb disrupted the hotel industry.

Regards,

Jim Rickards
for The Daily Reckoning

<<<

[gfp927z]

>>> The Empire State Moves Against Bitcoin


By James Rickards

April 18, 2018


https://dailyreckoning.com/empire-state-moves-bitcoin/


The Empire State Moves Against Bitcoin

Bitcoin got hammered yesterday after New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced an investigation into some of the major cryptocurrency exchanges.

I’ve been warning about a coming government crackdown on bitcoin for several months, and now we’re seeing it happening around the world.

From China to Japan to South Korea and here in the U.S., the regulators are closing in on bitcoin. And all those who thought their bitcoin was invisible to the IRS are getting a rude awakening these days.

Bitcoin was the classic bubble. Market bubbles are nothing new. In the 17th and 18th centuries we had the Dutch tulip bubble, the French Mississippi bubble and the U.K.’s South Sea bubble.

The 19th century saw bubbles in canal building (1830s), gold (1869) and railroads (1890s). In the 20th and 21st centuries we have seen bubbles in Florida real estate (mid-1920s), stocks (late 1920s), dot-coms (2000) and mortgages (2007).

All of these episodes of investment mania crashed, causing enormous losses for investors. As always, some investors got in early and got out before the crash and walked away with their winnings. But most did not.

Analysts should remind themselves that those bubble winnings of the lucky few represent not wealth creation or rewards for hard work, but a simple wealth transfer from a mass of latecomer losers to a lucky few winners.

That’s hardly a desirable model for finance in particular or society as a whole, not least because the end result destroys confidence in markets and retards normal financial functions for a full generation.

The latest bubble, of course, is bitcoin. Last December as bitcoin was making its way higher from $8,000, I said that bitcoin might go to $20,000 (it did), but that it would surely come crashing down sooner rather than later.

I based this forecast on a Nasdaq chart showing the dot-com bubble of 1996–2000. The hyperbolic rise in the price of bitcoin and dot-com stocks was a close fit, which made the subsequent crash easy to see coming.

Now that bitcoin has crashed more about 70% based on recent lows, the resemblance to the Nasdaq dot-com episode is even more dramatic.

The biggest difference is that the bitcoin rise and fall happened 15 times faster than the Nasdaq collapse. A projection of bitcoin at $2,000 is easily justified.

My own projection is much lower, but either way economic historians will look back on the bitcoin episode as the greatest bubble since the Dutch tulip bubble, maybe greater.

At least with the tulip bubble, the last investors got to keep the tulips. With bitcoin, investors will end up with nothing.

Goldman briefly flirted with cryptocurrencies but eventually came around to the view that cryptos like bitcoin suffer from too many problems.

All of the cryptocurrencies that rely on clunky “proof of work” to validate their blockchains, such as bitcoin, are heading for the scrap heap. They are too slow, too cumbersome and too expensive to compete with Visa, Mastercard and PayPal in the payments space.

The only use case for bitcoin is to support criminal transactions, and even criminals have moved to some other cryptos because they have better security and privacy features. Bitcoin also suffers from slow processing times and other inefficiencies.

Goldman’s assessment is mostly right. However, some coins will survive. And as I’ve argued before, blockchain technology has a bright future.

Goldman also admits that blockchain technology has a future, but caution is indicated because processing speeds are still not as fast as existing systems. The bottom line is don’t invest in cryptocoins but invest in blockchain technology instead.

Regards,

Jim Rickards
Managing editor, The Daily Reckoning

<<<

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[gfp927z]

>>> The SEC Lowers the Boom on Bitcoin


By James Rickards

March 8, 2018


https://dailyreckoning.com/103492-2/


The SEC Lowers the Boom on Bitcoin

I’ve warned repeatedly that government regulators would be putting the squeeze on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Well, the noose just got tighter.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced yesterday that bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies meet the government’s definition of a security and are therefore subject to regulation. Importantly, crypto exchanges must register with the SEC.

Here’s what the SEC said:

If a platform offers trading of digital assets that are securities and operates as an “exchange,” as defined by the federal securities laws, then the platform must register with the SEC…

The SEC staff has concerns that many online trading platforms appear to investors as SEC-registered and regulated marketplaces when they are not.

Bitcoin fell about 10% on the news, back under $10,000. That’s less than half its December 2017 highs around $20,000.

Yesterday’s announcement follows action the SEC took late last month, when it issued a number of subpoenas and information requests to companies dealing in the crypto markets.

Christian Catalini, a professor at MIT, estimates that $270–317 million of the money raised by coin offerings has “likely gone to fraud or scams.”

“We’re seeing the tip of the iceberg,” said Dan Gallagher, a former SEC commissioner, adding, “there is going to be a ton of enforcement activity.”

I agree, and I’ve been saying that for months. But it’s not just U.S. regulators that have made the news.

Shortly after the SEC announcement, Japan’s Financial Services Agency ordered two exchanges to suspend activities for a month. It also penalized four other exchanges.

Japan’s crackdown comes a month after the Tokyo-based exchange Coincheck lost about $500 million in a massive cybertheft.

The bottom line is the bitcoin fans who mock the government and play “catch me if you can” are finding out the hard way that the government has the resources to track them to the ends of the Earth.

Besides the SEC, I explained last week how the IRS is also cracking down on bitcoin. It’s already demanding all records of cryptocurrency transactions from cryptocurrency exchanges including names, addresses, Social Security numbers and bank account information about their clients.

One man got a very nasty surprise when he received an IRS Form 1099 from Coinbase, a major U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange (not to be confused with Coincheck).

It informed him that he owed $2.4 million in taxes, despite his estimate that he only put $8,000 into cryptos. He decided to sit tight in the belief that he does not owe the taxes.

Big mistake.

The IRS will take its copy of the 1099 (the IRS also receives a copy) from the exchange and assert that this man does owe the taxes. The IRS puts the burden of proof on the taxpayer to show they don’t.

Courts have backed up the IRS on this burden-of-proof approach. Just ask Al Capone, the notorious gangster who went to Alcatraz not for extortion and murder but for not paying his taxes! This guy will find this out the hard way how the IRS plays hardball, as will millions of other crypto customers.

The IRS is warming up for a bonanza of tax claims. Cryptocurrency traders who thought they could hide their gains from the IRS should get ready for the mother of all tax nightmares.

Coupled with the latest SEC crackdown, the noose is tightening on bitcoin.

Regards,

Jim Rickards
for The Daily Reckoning

<<<

[gfp927z]

>>> Big Brother Is Coming for Bitcoin


By James Rickards

March 8, 2018



https://dailyreckoning.com/big-brother-coming-bitcoin-2/



Big Brother Is Coming for Bitcoin

Many advocates of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have a naïve belief that their digital assets are “beyond the reach of governments,” “cannot be traced” and “cannot be frozen or seized.”

They’re beginning to learn otherwise.

When it comes to bitcoin, I take a laissez-faire approach. Do your own thing. If you want some bitcoin in your portfolio as part of a diversified bundle of assets, that’s up to you. If you want to speculate in some of the other lesser-known cryptocurrencies, that’s fine, too. You might make a lot of money (I actually recommend one small crypto myself).

My only advice is buyer beware. You need to take the time to understand how it works and what the risks are.

The technology behind cryptocurrencies is usually called the “blockchain,” but a more descriptive term now in wide use is “distributed ledger technology,” or DLT.

There’s no denying that fortunes have been made and still will be made in various DLT applications. While I’m not necessarily a fan of individual cryptocurrencies, I am a believer in this technology.

And here’s the thing:

Governments don’t want to kill the blockchain; they want to control it.

Governments enjoy a monopoly on money creation and they’re not about to surrender that monopoly to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

But governments know they cannot stop the technology platforms on which the cryptocurrencies are based. Blockchain technology has come too far to turn back.

They seek to do so using powers of regulation, taxation, investigation and ultimately more coercive powers, including arrest and imprisonment of individuals who refuse to obey government mandates with regard to blockchain.

Governments, regulators, tax authorities, and the global elite are moving in for the crypto-kill. The future of bitcoin may be a dystopia in which Big Brother controls what’s called “the blockchain” and decides when and how you can buy or sell anything and everything.

Furthermore, cryptocurrency technology could be the very mechanism used by global elites to replace the dollar based financial system.

In 1958, Mao Zedong, the leader of the Communist Party of China and China’s dictatorial leader was confronted with demoralized intellectuals and artists who were alienated by Communist rule. As a policy response, he declared a new policy of intellectual freedom.

Mao declared, “The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science.”

This declaration is referred to as the “Hundred Flowers Campaign” (often misquoted as the “thousand flowers campaign”).

The response to Mao’s invitation was an enthusiastic outpouring of creative thought and artistic expression.

What came next was no surprise to those familiar with the operation of state power. Once the intellectuals and artists emerged, it was easy for Mao’s secret police to round them up, kill and torture some, and send others to “reeducation camps” where they learned ideological conformity.

The Hundred Flowers Movement was a trap for those who placed their trust in the state. It was also a taste of things to come in the form of the much more violent and comprehensive Cultural Revolution of 1964–1974 in which all traces of Chinese bourgeoisie culture and much of China’s historical legacy were eradicated.

Something similar is going on with bitcoin and the Distributed ledger technology (DLT) today. Governments have been patiently watching blockchain technology develop and grow outside their control for the past eight years.

Libertarian supporters of blockchain celebrate this lack of government control. Yet, their celebration is premature, and their belief in the sustainability of powerful systems outside government control is naïve.

Blockchain does not exist in the ether (despite the name of one cryptocurrency) and it does not reside on Mars. Blockchain depends on critical infrastructure including servers, telecommunications networks, the banking system, and the power grid, all of which are subject to government control.

Last year, a group of major companies, all regulated by government, announced a joint effort to develop an open-source blockchain as a uniform standard for all blockchain applications. The group includes JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, State Street, SWIFT, Cisco, Accenture, the London Stock Exchange and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial.

That’s not exactly five guys in hoodies working in a garage. That’s a sign of the corporate-state consortium taking over.

An elite U.S. legal institution called the Uniform Law Commission (ULC), that proposes model laws intended for adoption in all fifty states, also released a proposal called the “Uniform Regulation of Virtual Currency Businesses Act.”

The ULC released a final version of the Uniform Regulation of the law on October 9, 2017. No state has yet adopted the law yet, but several state legislatures are expected to take it up this year.

This new law will not only provide a regulatory scheme for state regulators, but will also be a platform for litigation by private plaintiffs and class action lawyers seeking recourse against real or imagined abuses by digital coin exchanges and facilities. Once litigation begins, anonymity is the first casualty.

Perhaps most portentously, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has weighed in. In a special report dated June 2017, the IMF had this to say about blockchain:


“Distributed ledger technology (DLT), in particular, could spur change in the financial sector. …. DLT can be categorized as “permissionless” or “permissioned” depending on who can participate in the consensus-driven validation process. Permissionless DLTs allow anyone to read, transact on, and participate in the validation process. These open schemes (that underlie Bitcoin, for instance) could be very disruptive if successfully implemented. By contrast, in permissioned DLTs, the validation process is controlled by a pre-selected group of participants (“consortium”) or managed by one organization (“fully-private”), and thus serve more as a common communications platform.” (emphasis added).

IMF releases require expert translation because they are never written in plain English, and the real meaning is always hidden between the lines. But, the thrust of this report language is clear.

The IMF favors “permissioned” systems over “open schemes.” The IMF also favors control by a “pre-selected group of participants” or “one organization,” rather than allowing “anyone” to participate.

This paper should be viewed as the first step in the IMF’s plan to migrate its existing form of world money, the special drawing right or SDR, onto a DLT platform controlled by the IMF. In time, all other forms of money would be banned.

These and other developments all point toward an elite group including the IMF, JPMorgan, the Davos crowd, the IRS, SEC and other agencies converging to shut down the existing free-wheeling blockchain ecosphere, and replace it with a “permissioned” system under “consortium” control.

Big Brother is coming to the blockchain.

Regards,

Jim Rickards
for The Daily Reckoning

<<<

[gfp927z]

>>> Best Bet in Crypto Now Is “Pick and Shovel” Names


By James Rickards

February 28, 2018



https://dailyreckoning.com/best-bet-crypto-now-pick-shovel-names/



Best Bet in Crypto Now Is “Pick and Shovel” Names

My readers know I’m not a bitcoin proponent. I don’t deny that it’s made some people a lot of money. But even with the recent pullback, I believe bitcoin is a massive bubble.

But I’ve also stated my belief in blockchain technology, which is the technology behind bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. There’s great promise here.

And despite what some critics may claim, I’m not some technophobe who doesn’t understand the technology underlying cryptos.

I know it very well. I’ve been studying cryptos since before many of their current owners even heard of bitcoin. I actually worked with the intelligence community years ago to counter ISIS’s use of cryptocurrencies to bypass the international money system.

And in my opinion, bitcoin’s hype has run far ahead of reality. But again, I also believe blockchain technology is for real and has great potential. So just because I’m not a bitcoin cheerleader doesn’t mean I’m opposed to all blockchain-based cryptos.

Let me explain my position a little more…

One of the most familiar metaphors on Wall Street is the distinction between gold miners and those who supply the gold miners with the picks and shovels needed to mine. The classic 19th-century version from the California Gold Rush of 1848–1855 is a prime example.

First comes an unexpected gold discovery. Next comes the “gold rush,” when prospectors pour in from all over the world, stake their claims and begin mining gold. Some make huge discoveries of “gold nuggets as big as your fist!” Those miners can get rich quick and retire early.

But that’s not the typical case. More often the ore is of poor quality, the sluice has little to show and the miner runs out of time and money and walks away broke. The abandoned claim sits idle waiting for the next gold rush or optimistic newcomer.

Meanwhile, all of the miners — both rich and poor — need equipment and supplies. It starts with picks and shovels but also includes clothing, lamps, oil, food, dynamite and more.

Entrepreneurs set up to supply those needs.

The most famous such entrepreneur was Levi Strauss, who headed to San Francisco during the California Gold Rush to establish a dry goods business selling clothes, boots and other items needed by the miners.

The point is that the suppliers of “picks and shovels” make money from the successful and unsuccessful miners. Every miner needs clothes and food whether he discovers gold or not.

Something similar is going on in the cryptocurrency space today.

There are over 1,000 cryptocurrencies in circulation. Some, such as bitcoin, have produced quick riches for a few and huge losses for many more who jumped in at prices above $12,000 all the way up to the all-time high of $20,000.

Bitcoin can be likened to a gold strike with a few big nuggets lying in a stream but not much below the surface to sustain it in the long run.

Most cryptocurrencies have little or nothing to offer. Investors in those “gold mines” will go home empty-handed.

But some cryptocurrencies, particularly those that meet my COINN criteria, described below, have excellent long-term prospects.

Those will be like the Homestake Mine in Lead, South Dakota, that produced gold for its owners for over 100 years.

Meanwhile, there’s a pick-and-shovel aspect to cryptocurrencies as there is to gold mining. To be successful, a cryptocurrency needs a practical use case, efficient processing and a robust validation scheme.

Success also requires adoption by major enterprises such as banks, NGOs, or industry consortia in energy, agriculture, transportation or other major economic sectors. Important developments come not from garage startups but from the major technology companies such as IBM, Intel, Oracle and Siemens.

The more radical crypto advocates may insist on so-called “trustless” systems that offer peer-to-peer transactions without intermediation. The reality is that there are no trustless systems. Even bitcoin requires holders to trust that 51% of the miners won’t validate a block that wipes out their bitcoin, or that bitcoin exchanges are not roach motels set up to steal investors’ money.

With transaction costs high, validation slow and environmental waste from electricity usage nonsustainable, bitcoin’s days are numbered.


Meanwhile, large enterprises with billions of dollars to spend on R&D and implementation are interested in distributed ledger solutions to concrete business problems.

A second wave or new generation of cryptocurrencies is now emerging with better governance models, more security and vastly improved ease of use. These new-wave coins represent the future of cryptocurrency technology. These cryptos have much greater potential to disrupt and disintermediate established payments systems and financial intermediaries such as banks, brokers and exchanges.

It is critical that investors have a robust and reliable method for distinguishing between the dead-end cryptos such as bitcoin and the new-wave cryptos with a chance to disrupt banks the way Uber disrupted taxis and Airbnb disrupted the hotel industry.

That’s exactly what my team and I developed over the past year. Our analytic method is called COINN. Those initials stand for:

Consensus

Open Source

Impenetrable

No-Nonsense Governance and

Nimble

Let’s take those one at a time to show how you can use the COINN method to distinguish between cryptocurrencies that will soon hit the wall and those with a bright future.

Consensus refers to the fact that participants in a cryptocurrency community are able to select the trusted parties who will perform the blockchain validation function.

This works organically in the same way that Google determines which pages are most sought after for a given search request or Wikipedia determines which content to display from among a community of editors and contributors. It avoids the “dictatorship of the miners” that bitcoin forces on users today.

Open Source refers to the fact that the source code for the relevant blockchain is freely available to all participants. This eliminates closed communities such as a central bank “FedCoin” or an IMF-sponsored “SDRCoin” and other permissioned systems.

Impenetrable refers to the security of the relevant blockchain. The bitcoin blockchain is vulnerable to attack by a cabal consisting of 51% of the total mining capacity for bitcoin. Such a group could create a block that steals all existing bitcoins and then validates that block. Your bitcoin would simply disappear with no recourse, and the malevolent miners would control any amount of bitcoin they desired.

Other types of threats include “Sybil” attacks (so-called after the story of a woman named Sybil who suffered multiple personality disorder). In a Sybil attack, a malevolent actor clones itself on a governance whitelist in order to obtain disproportionate voting power that can be used to steal coins. An efficient coin would be immune to such attacks.

No-Nonsense Governance refers to the technical method for validating a blockchain. Bitcoin today relies on clunky proof-of-work in the form of uninteresting math problems that require nonsustainable amounts of processing power and electricity consumption to solve. This is massively wasteful and inefficient.

Ether requires proof-of-stake, which is wasteful in different ways and excludes white hats who will support honest validations but who may lack the resources to establish proof-of-claim. An efficient coin would allow reliable validation without such wasteful effort.

Nimble refers to the ease of use of the coin. Existing cryptos are too slow, too cumbersome and too expensive to compete with Visa, MasterCard and PayPal in the payments space. The only use case for bitcoin is to support criminal transactions, and even criminals are moving to monero and spectrecoin because they have better security and privacy features.

The same criticism about slow processing times and other inefficiencies also applies to popular cryptocoins such as ether and ripple.

Unless a cryptocurrency can offer payments transactions that are easier, faster and cheaper than existing systems such as Visa and MasterCard, it has no future as a currency. The new-wave cryptos do offer this ease of use.

Older cryptos don’t even come close.

Companies that can create or support cryptocurrencies or smart-contract tokens that meet my COINN criteria are the future of the blockchain.

I myself have argued that blockchain technology has a bright future, even though I believe bitcoin does not.

The bottom line is, don’t invest in older cryptocoins that don’t meet my COINN criteria.

Regards,

Jim Rickards
for The Daily Reckoning

<<<

[gfp927z]

>>> The IRS Comes for Bitcoin


By James Rickards

February 28, 2018



https://dailyreckoning.com/irs-comes-bitcoin/



The IRS Comes for Bitcoin

A lot of bitcoin advocates sold the idea that it was invisible to the IRS. Well, not really, I said all along. And now that’s becoming evident, as you’re about to see.

I was reminded of a story from about 15 years ago…

A Swiss banker loaded all of the confidential information on Americans with Swiss bank accounts that he could find onto a CD-ROM. He then flew to the United States and handed the information over to the U.S. Treasury and the FBI.

The banker was in trouble for helping Americans evade taxes, and this was his play to avoid prosecution. He blew the whistle on his clients. What ensued was a 10-year manhunt by U.S. tax authorities to find the tax evaders and many more whose information was not included on the original CD.

The U.S. played rough not by chasing the individuals but by putting pressure on the Swiss banks themselves. The big Swiss banks like UBS and Credit Suisse have huge capital markets and wealth management operations in the U.S. The U.S. told those banks they could either hand over the information or we would shut down their U.S. operations.

They handed it over.

Some of the tax evaders got lawyers, turned themselves in and paid their taxes (plus interest and penalties) to avoid jail time. Others waited and ended up in jail. Today, if you go to Switzerland and try to open a bank account, they will turn you away; they have zero interest in taking on U.S. clients.

Now something similar is happening in cryptocurrencies.

The bitcoin fans who mock the government and play “catch me if you can” are finding out the hard way that the U.S. government has the resources to track them to the ends of the earth.

The IRS is already demanding all records of cryptocurrency transactions from cryptocurrency exchanges including name, address, Social Security number and bank account information about their clients.

Consider the latest developments…

IRS Form 1099 is the form used to report most income other than regular wages that go on the W-2. The person paying the income — it could be a bank, broker or any supplier — files a copy of the 1099 with the IRS and sends one to the income recipient.

It’s the recipient’s job to report the income on their tax return. IRS computers match 100% of the 1099s they receive with what taxpayers put on their tax returns. It’s a kind of computerized audit. Those who don’t report the income may not get a knock on the door, but they will definitely receive an official letter asking the income recipient to explain the discrepancy.


Coinbase, a major U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange (not to be confused with Coincheck), just sent a Form 1099 to one of its customers identified only by the initial “K.”

K was initially freaked out even to be receiving a 1099 from a crypto exchange. What happened to the anonymity in the crypto world?

Apparently, it doesn’t exist, as I have been warning for years.

But when K read the 1099, it got even worse. It showed that he owed $2.4 million in taxes, despite his estimate that he only put $8,000 into cryptos. K has decided to sit tight in the belief that he does not owe the taxes.

Big mistake.

The IRS will take its copy of the 1099 from the exchange and assert that K does owe the taxes. The IRS puts the burden of proof on the taxpayer to show they don’t.

Courts have backed up the IRS on this burden-of-proof approach. Just ask Al Capone, the notorious gangster who went to Alcatraz not for extortion and murder but for not paying his taxes! K will find this out the hard way, as will millions of other crypto customers.

The IRS is warming up for a bonanza of tax claims. Cryptocurrency traders who thought they could hide their gains from the IRS should get ready for the mother of all tax nightmares.

But that doesn’t mean stay away from all crypto investments. Below, I show you why blockchain technology has a bright future — and I say that as a bitcoin skeptic.

Regards,

Jim Rickards
for The Daily Reckoning

<<<

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[gfp927z]

>>> Cryptocurrencies and the Powers That Be


By James Rickards

February 14, 2018



https://dailyreckoning.com/cryptocurrencies-and-the-powers-that-be/



Cryptocurrencies and the Powers That Be

Remember the days (about six months ago) when bitcoin was going to revolutionize banking and disintermediate the mean nasty “banksters?”

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the revolution. Bitcoin itself has hit an air pocket with a 50% price drop since December. Meanwhile, the banks that were supposed to be so dramatically disrupted by bitcoin are taking over the blockchain.

This is not surprising. Disruptive technology does come along from time to time, but established franchises have a way of either fighting back or co-opting the new technology just by buying it.

Uber is disruptive, but London taxi drivers (the best in the world, by the way) have organized to get Uber’s license there revoked. In the same spirit, it was naïve to expect that banks would just sit there and let blockchain technology eat their lunch. All of the major banks have blockchain research and development projects underway.

Japan is the first major economy to declare bitcoin “legal tender” in payment for goods and services. This does not fix a value for bitcoin, and it does not force anyone to use bitcoin, it just keeps bitcoin transactions safe from counterfeiting charges.

The Japanese banks are taking that opening and driving an armored car through it. Japan’s largest bank is creating its own crypto-currency. Valuation won’t be an issue because each coin will be worth exactly one yen. It’s really just an alternative payment system like PayPal.

What it does is allow bank customers to make and receive payments on the blockchain with a yen equivalent, but with much lower costs. Also, because this is a “permissioned” system (customers only may participate with bank approval) verification does not require the clunky proof-of-work of the original bitcoin blockchain.

Distributed ledgers and blockchain are here to stay, but bitcoin is not. The banks will see to that.

Another major argument bitcoin advocates made was that it was invisible to the IRS.

Well, not really. I’m reminded of a story from about 15 years ago…

A Swiss banker loaded all of the confidential information on Americans with Swiss bank accounts that he could find onto a CD-ROM. He then flew to the United States and handed the information over to the U.S. Treasury and the FBI.

The banker was in trouble for helping Americans evade taxes and this was his play to avoid prosecution. He blew the whistle on his clients. What ensued was a 10-year manhunt by U.S. tax authorities to find the tax evaders and many more whose information was not included on the original CD.

The U.S. played rough not by chasing the inpiduals, but by putting pressure on the Swiss banks themselves. The big Swiss banks like UBS, and Credit Suisse have huge capital markets and wealth management operations in the U.S. The U.S. told those banks they could either hand over the information or we would shut down their U.S. operations.

They handed it over.

Some of the tax evaders got lawyers, turned themselves in and paid their taxes (plus interest and penalties) to avoid jail time. Others waited and ended up in jail. Today, if you go to Switzerland and try to open a bank account they will turn you away; they have zero interest in taking on U.S. clients.

Now something similar is happening in cryptocurrencies. The U.S. Treasury is concerned that cryptos are the “new Switzerland” where Americans are hiding income and avoiding taxes. The Treasury is probably right about that. Treasury will use the same hardball tactics against the cryptocurrency exchanges they used against the Swiss banks.


The IRS is already demanding all records of crypto-currency transactions from these exchanges including name, address, social security number and bank account information about their clients. The bitcoin fans who mock the government and play “catch me if you can” will find out the hard way that the U.S. government has the resources to track them to the ends of the earth.

This is just another sign that reality is catching up to the bitcoin market.

I’ve said for years that bitcoin is a fraud, a Ponzi and a bubble all at the same time. I based this on analysis of price activity and certain other technical analyses and some anecdotal evidence.

Critics have always demanded “proof” that bitcoin was a fraud with smoking-gun-type evidence. That was difficult at first because of the secretive nature of bitcoin trading. Yet now the evidence is arriving almost every day.

New hacks are reported, millions of dollars of bitcoin routinely go missing and exchanges are closing with no recourse for investors. What may be one of the biggest frauds in history, this one involving bitcoin, is now coming to light.

One cryptocurrency exchange called Bitfinex owes customers hundreds of millions of dollars in bitcoin held in their accounts. Bitfinex is nontransparent about the funds it actually has on hand and whether its customer funds are really safe.

Bitfinex sponsored another cryptocurrency called tether, which is tied to the U.S. dollar at a one-to-one fixed exchange rate. Customers give tether $1 (or the equivalent in another crypto) and receive one tether in return. The amounts paid for the tether are supposed to be held in reserve to back up the one-for-one promise.

No one knows if tether has the funds or not. Tether recently parted ways with an auditor who was supposed to answer that question, so there is still no transparency. It also seems that every time the price of bitcoin plunged, millions of tethers were issued out of thin air to prop up bitcoin on the Bitfinex exchange.

All of this has raised suspicions that Bitfinex and tether are Ponzi schemes. A couple of weeks ago, the U.S. government sprang into action by hitting Bitfinex and tether with subpoenas demanding information about reserves and the safety of customer funds.

If it turns out the suspicions of fraud are correct, it could start a run on the bank in all cryptocurrency as holders and investors lose confidence in the crypto space generally. That would be bad enough.

But the greater fear is that panic in cryptocurrencies could spill over into regulated stock and bond markets and mark the beginning of another global financial panic.

If that happens, it’ll make the recent correction look like child’s play. And the only safe haven will be physical gold.

Regards,

Jim Rickards
for The Daily Reckoning

<<<

[gfp927z]

>>> Noose Tightens on Bitcoin


By James Rickards

February 14, 2018


https://dailyreckoning.com/noose-tightens-bitcoin/


Noose Tightens on Bitcoin

With everything that’s been happening with the stock market lately, people have forgotten about last year’s biggest investment story:

Bitcoin.

After briefly topping off around $20,000 in December, today it’s trading around $9,000.

A lot of bad news has come to the bitcoin ecosphere. China, for example, recently ordered its banks to stop providing financial services for any cryptocurrency-related transactions.

This is important because customers wishing to buy or sell cryptocurrencies have to start by funding their crypto accounts from conventional banking sources. Also, when customers are ready to cash out of cryptos, they need to move their account balances back to traditional banks.

Without the ability of crypto exchanges and banks to interact, the crypto exchanges are basically roach motels — you can put your money in, but you can’t get it out. Now you can’t even put it in to begin with.

Crypto exchanges also need banking services to pay vendors, employees, electricity companies and others who want to get paid in yuan rather than crypto.

Those transactions will no longer be possible.

This is all part of a broader crackdown on cryptos by China, which sees them as a threat to the People’s Bank of China’s control of the money supply and capital account.

Some crypto enthusiasts shrugged off the news and said, in effect, “No big deal, the business will just move to Taiwan.”

The problem is other jurisdictions are also taking a hard look. South Korea has been considering a ban on cryptos, although there’s a popular backlash to this because so many everyday South Korean citizens bought into the hype last December and bet their life’s savings on bitcoin at prices of $15,000 per coin or higher.

Many of them are now facing financial ruin and want the government to prop up bitcoin so they can recover their losses. Recently, Germany and the IMF have issued calls for global regulation of bitcoin.

This is likely to be a topic of the next G-20 meeting in Argentina. The bottom line is jurisdictions around the world see that bitcoin in particular and many cryptos more broadly are a threat to independent monetary policy and something that can damage their citizens and possibly their economies. The noose is tightening on bitcoin.


But it’s not just governments that have concerns about cryptocurrencies.

After briefly flirting with trading cryptocurrencies themselves, Goldman Sachs has now seen the light and is saying that many of today’s cryptocurrencies are heading to zero.

Goldman’s assessment is mostly right. All of the cryptocurrencies that rely on clunky “proof of work” to validate their blockchains, such as bitcoin, are heading for the scrap heap.

They are too slow, too cumbersome and too expensive to compete with Visa, MasterCard and PayPal in the payments space. The only use case for bitcoin is to support criminal transactions, and even criminals are moving to monero and spectrecoin because they have better security and privacy features.

The same criticism about slow processing times and other inefficiencies also applies to popular cryptocoins such as ether and ripple.

Having said all that, some coins will survive.

The survivors will have two characteristics. The first is an efficient governance scheme for blockchain validation. The second is a use case supported by real enterprises or governments such as payment remittances or international bank settlements.

And Goldman admits that blockchain technology itself has a future, but caution is indicated because blockchain processing speeds are still not as fast as those of existing systems.

I myself have argued that blockchain technology has a bright future, even though I believe bitcoin does not.

The bottom line is don’t invest in cryptocoins (with a few exceptions), but invest in blockchain technology instead.

Regards,

Jim Rickards
for The Daily Reckoning

<<<

[climbing]

$22 Million Traded

What do you guys think about this new game that just started after CryptoKitties? Looks like some have made enormous ETH on this one.

https://medium.com/cryptoclarified/22-million-spent-on-celebrity-trading-card-beta-crypto-celebs-announces-interest-airdrop-for-218f40f261f1

[gfp927z]

Fwiw, Bitcoin is testing the November trading range (6000-8000), and it tested the lower 6000 boundary today. 6000 also represents support from October, so we might see things try to stabilize around these levels. Alternately, there is a support band in the 3500-5000 range from the Aug/Sept period.

Ethereum has held up better, currently testing the Dec/Jan support band of 600-800. If 600 fails then next support band is 400-500 from Nov/Dec.

Litecoin - if 120 doesn't hold then next support would be the 80-100 band from Nov/Dec.

[gfp927z]

Thanks, I'll check them out. My nephew has/had some Ethereum (got in around 450, though not sure if he's still holding). Being a platform, he said it could succeed where regular cryptos can't.

I see Ethereum has held up considerably better than the others, though it did break key support today. A lot of corporations seem to be very interested in the Ethereum platform.

So far I haven't owned any cryptos myself, just follow them loosely. What grabs your attention is the keen interest in blockchain by corporations, nations, and the IMF.

[CuriousWon]

If you search coinmarketcap kin you will be able to see the chart. Not much of a chart at this point really. You can also check out a few KIN whitepapers on kinecosystem.org

They have a vision and the financials to potentially attain it. I thik the KIN rewards engine sounds like it could be a game changer as fae as digital media consumption and production.

The roadmap looks well planned and I think the funding of KIK behind the project has me feeling like it could go somewhere. At the current price for me it is a hopeful lotto play.

Additionally, it is not on any good exchanges yet which is a PLUS for me. I think once it gets on better exchanges and starts being used it will take off. Even if it hits 1 or 2 cents you could be looking at half a mill depending on what you're willing to risk.

[gfp927z]

CuriousWon, >> KIN <<


I was wondering where you can see a chart for KIN? The site I use only has the bigger cryptos, and nothing comes up for the symbol 'KIN'. Also I'm curious why you see KIN as especially attractive? Thanks

I figure the sector could have an oversold bounce soon, but being in a downtrend the 'rule' is to wait for a trend reversal (after putting in a true bottom) prior to going long again. I figure it'll take some time for the sector to really bottom out.

I wonder if the speculative psychology for cryptos has been broken due to the recent carnage? Tough to say, but it's also possible the big players like Goldman will just run them up again for another round of profits.

It's becoming clear that these independent cryptos are just speculative vehicles with (at best) very limited utility as actual currencies. Blockchain technology itself will be widely adopted by corporations and governments, but the real 'crypto' currencies will be issued by nations and the IMF.

The globalists are drooling over blockchain because it means all financial transactions will be digital (no cash) and recorded forever. Their dream is for a cashless society where all transactions can be tracked and taxed. If anyone steps out of line, they can just freeze your account. Blockchain combined with an official trusted 3rd party (ie the government) is a control freak's dream.

The other big appeal for cryptos is from Russia, China, and the BRICS as they try to get away from the US dollar/SWIFT system which allows the US to impose sanctions. But what these countries are setting up are their own official cryptos, which have nothing to do with Bitcoin, Litecoin, etc. The little independent cryptos, the ones that survive, will be relegated
to shady nefarious transactions on the Dark Web like they were before.

[nvidiaforgames]

$NNSR THE OWCP IN ISRAEL OF BLOCKCHAIN READ THIS:
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=138229937

[CuriousWon]

Definitely agree. All the people buying in euphoria in December are selling now and giving up.

I think even with that the market will bounce back...I hope.

Still putting a big bet on KIN. Currently at .0002 something. Grab 10 or 20 million and hold it, thinking a rally will come as the project moves onward. Looking towards the end of the year.

[gfp927z]

Chart support levels to watch -


Bitcoin - 8000, then the band from 6000-8000

Ethereum - 800, then the band from 600-800

Litecoin - 120, then 100, then the band from 80-100

Monero - 200, then the band from 150-200

Dash - 550, then the band from 400-550

Ripple - band from .70-.85

Iota - 1.50, then 1.00



The cryptos may be due for an oversold bounce/rally soon, but best to wait for a real bottom to form imo. The psychology surrounding the cryptos has been severely damaged, so will see if they're still considered a viable speculation once the dust settles. It's possible they may just scrape along at the bottom for an extended period as people move on to other things. But will they rise again? Only time will tell..

[gfp927z]

CuriousWon, With the exception of Ethereum, the charts of the main cryptos look like they could just keep dropping, and might even unwind back down to November levels. If these were stock charts, I wouldn't be buying.

[Marxbys]

$RMRK+CRCW$+CoinTracking($RMRK.0009-0010)
Future Plans for TCC(TheCryptoCompany)
The Crypto-Company Launches First Phase of Trading Operations for Digital Currencies
2 months ago
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 04, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Crypto Company (CRCW), one of the first publicly traded technology companies in the digital currencies and blockchain sector, today announced that it has launched the first phase of its planned trading operations and platforms for digital currencies.
Beginning this week, the Crypto Company’s first group of traders will actively trade the most liquid cryptocurrencies using in-house capital. The Company’s full plans call for the build-out of a full-scale trading floor with high capacity for experienced crypto traders. The company is in the process of spearheading the development of high frequency trading (HFT) and program trading software platforms specifically for the cryptocurrency markets. These future phases are under development and require complex technology due to regulatory and security concerns unique to the crypto markets.
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“The cryptocurrency markets are gaining greater liquidity every day and we believe that The Crypto Company is uniquely positioned to develop the platforms and establish the protocols required for how traders function in the 24/7/365 world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. We look forward to rolling out additional phases of our proprietary technologies and trading operations as they are completed. We expect that the trading operations will be a positive contributor to achieving our goal of profitability in 2018,” concluded Mr. Poutre.
About The Crypto Company
The Crypto Company (CRCW), one of the first publicly traded technology companies in the digital currencies and blockchain sector, offers a portfolio of digital assets, technologies, and consulting services to the blockchain and cryptocurrency markets. Shareholders in The Crypto Company gain diversified exposure to this exponentially growing asset class. To learn more please visit www.thecryptocompany.com.

http://pcgadvisory.com/news/the-crypto-company-launches-first-phase-of-trading-operations-for-digital-currencies/