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Crypto currency endeavours

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odysseus2000
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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#403388

Postby odysseus2000 » April 11th, 2021, 11:58 am

If you go back to 2008 and look at what commentators were saying about the money printing, one finds many who were talking about it leading to very high inflation like the 70's or in more extreme cases like the inflation of 1930's Germany.

This didn't happen.

I am arguing that one of the reasons for their being none of the predicted inflation is that there was never any shortage of goods or services and that stopped business from raising prices. By contrast compared to the 70's there was a shortage of oil, caused by the oil producing nations cutting off supplies. Additionally there were serious limits to how many manufactured goods could be produced and the service sectors were similar constrained.

All of these things changed. China became the workshop of the world. Computers enabled many new entrants into service sectors business and mobile communication raised the efficiency still further and a host of new business models emerged like the low cost airline sector, the mobile phone industry, etc. So that rather than shortages of goods or services there was over supply of these things for all this newly printed money to be spent on.

You may have a completely different explanation as to why all the money printing did not lead to inflation and that would be interesting to read.

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#403426

Postby seekingbalance » April 11th, 2021, 4:10 pm

Sorry, no difference of opinion here - I think you are spot on. Sure there is clear inflation in some areas, services in particular, but across the board the globalisation of everything makes supply and demand a much different equation than in decades gone by.

The sheer speed at which China and some other manufacturing powerhouses can ramp up production, change direction, is leagues ahead of what ever was possible in the past. And transportation is bigger, faster (notwithstanding blocking the Suez Canal!) than ever before in history, with airline capacity available for speed and variation for urgent goods.

The new moves for higher minimum wages in the US may cause some inflation, but it is interesting how little this impacts end prices for most goods - Amazon and Walmart already have moved to $15 minimums and neither of them seem to be adversely affected.

All that said, I think the driver for crypto is not inflation, even though many old school pundits say otherwise. But to me this is just a reflection of the fact that they don’t understand it, so have tried to fit in the “gold” box.

The use cases for decentralised finance, global money movement, blockchain security, smart contracts when buying and selling goods and services are what it is really all about. I heard a great story from Mark Cuban in the US recently - football clubs selling season tickets to fans are then subject to the secondary market and can often end up with a preponderance of “away” fans that they do not want as fans sell their tickets on. If the club issued the tickets as NFTs (basically electronic tickets on steroids) they can include in the ticket code a facility where for certain games they, the club, automatically receive 50%, 75% or whatever amount they decree, for any onward sale. This sort of tech could revolutionise sports, music, theatre ticketing, collectibles, book sales, music sales.

A further example - the Kings of Leon (a pop group) recently released the first ever album issued as an NFT. They released it in multiple “tiers” with one of them including front row seats at future concerts. Great for the bands, and the true fans, and they can also include such clauses as I mentioned above, where if the fan resells the ticket for an individual concert, the Kings of Leon get a cut of the sale, automatically as part of the smart contract embedded in the ticket.

Bitcoin may be digital gold, but everything else in the space can be very different.

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#404120

Postby odysseus2000 » April 14th, 2021, 10:31 am

Coinbase, the crypto currency exchange, is expected to IPO on the Nasdaq today, Wed 14-July-2021.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coinbase ... 29607.html

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#404137

Postby NotSure » April 14th, 2021, 11:24 am

odysseus2000 wrote:Coinbase, the crypto currency exchange, is expected to IPO on the Nasdaq today, Wed 14-July-2021.


Be interesting to see how that goes. On the one hand, it adds a lot of legitimacy to the 'crypto space'. On the other, it just feels like the sort of thing that will one day be looked back on as the peak of 'crypto madness'.

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#404224

Postby odysseus2000 » April 14th, 2021, 4:01 pm

I made two mistakes on coin, first it is April, not July and it is a direct listing, not an IPO or SPAC:

https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1382320 ... 26754?s=20

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#404346

Postby odysseus2000 » April 14th, 2021, 10:12 pm

Volatile first day for coin:

https://twitter.com/0_ody/status/138244 ... 56585?s=20

For day traders there was an easy $90 + per share short after the initial prints.

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#405308

Postby NotSure » April 19th, 2021, 11:40 am

Looks like Bitcoin is not as decentralised as I have been led to believe - while the block chain is 'everywhere', the mining infrastructure seems to be much less dispersed if this article is correct, with almost half of it in Xinjiang Province (home of the Uighurs):

China’s Xinjiang Blackout and Bitcoin Hashrate Correction Caused BTC Price Crash

It’s no less than a major bloodbath in the crypto market as the Bitcoin (BTC) price is down 8.5% tanking below $57,000 levels. At press time, BTC is trading at a price of $$56,971 with a market cap of $1.089 trillion. This solid price crash resulted in nearly $10 billion in Bitcoin liquidations in an hour’s time.

Well, investigating a bit about it, it turns out that the blackout in China’s Xinjiang region caused almost half of the Bitcoin network to go offline in 48 hours. This blackout was due to maintenance after the massive flooding and security issue at power stations in China.

China’s Xinjiang province powers a huge chunk of Bitcoin miners. With this blackout, the BTC has rate collapsed significantly leading to further price correction.

Almost half the Bitcoin network has gone offline in just 48hrs. https://t.co/G7wD3grOEw pic.twitter.com/KihtY1nAhl

— Charles Edwards (@caprioleio) April 18, 2021.....


https://coinmarketcap.com/headlines/news/chinas-xinjiang-blackout-and-bitcoin-hashrate-correction-caused-btc-price-crash/

Does this mean that China's Xinjiang Province is almost capable of a '51% attack' should they choose to cooperate?

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#405312

Postby odysseus2000 » April 19th, 2021, 11:50 am

NotSure wrote:Looks like Bitcoin is not as decentralised as I have been led to believe - while the block chain is 'everywhere', the mining infrastructure seems to be much less dispersed if this article is correct, with almost half of it in Xinjiang Province (home of the Uighurs):

China’s Xinjiang Blackout and Bitcoin Hashrate Correction Caused BTC Price Crash

It’s no less than a major bloodbath in the crypto market as the Bitcoin (BTC) price is down 8.5% tanking below $57,000 levels. At press time, BTC is trading at a price of $$56,971 with a market cap of $1.089 trillion. This solid price crash resulted in nearly $10 billion in Bitcoin liquidations in an hour’s time.

Well, investigating a bit about it, it turns out that the blackout in China’s Xinjiang region caused almost half of the Bitcoin network to go offline in 48 hours. This blackout was due to maintenance after the massive flooding and security issue at power stations in China.

China’s Xinjiang province powers a huge chunk of Bitcoin miners. With this blackout, the BTC has rate collapsed significantly leading to further price correction.

Almost half the Bitcoin network has gone offline in just 48hrs. https://t.co/G7wD3grOEw pic.twitter.com/KihtY1nAhl

— Charles Edwards (@caprioleio) April 18, 2021.....


https://coinmarketcap.com/headlines/news/chinas-xinjiang-blackout-and-bitcoin-hashrate-correction-caused-btc-price-crash/

Does this mean that China's Xinjiang Province is almost capable of a '51% attack' should they choose to cooperate?
is

It will be interesting to see if this is viewed as a temporary inconvenience or a major red-flag. Looking at the current price there has been a bit of recovery, but we need more price discovery:

https://twitter.com/0_ody/status/138409 ... 90827?s=20

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#405333

Postby NotSure » April 19th, 2021, 12:31 pm

In other news....

Bank of England statement on Central Bank Digital Currency

The Bank of England and HM Treasury have today announced the joint creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Taskforce to coordinate the exploration of a potential UK CBDC.

Published on 19 April 2021

News release

The Bank of England and HM Treasury have today announced the joint creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Taskforce to coordinate the exploration of a potential UK CBDC. A CBDC would be a new form of digital money issued by the Bank of England and for use by households and businesses. It would exist alongside cash and bank deposits, rather than replacing them.

The Government and the Bank of England have not yet made a decision on whether to introduce a CBDC in the UK, and will engage widely with stakeholders on the benefits, risks and practicalities of doing so.

The Taskforce aims to ensure a strategic approach is adopted between the UK authorities as they explore CBDC, in line with their statutory objectives, and to promote close coordination between them. The Taskforce will:

* Coordinate exploration of the objectives, use cases, opportunities and risks of a potential UK CBDC.
* Guide evaluation of the design features a CBDC must display to achieve our goals.
* Support a rigorous, coherent and comprehensive assessment of the overall case for a UK CBDC.
* Monitor international CBDC developments to ensure the UK remains at the forefront of global innovation.

The Taskforce will be co-chaired by Deputy Governor for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, Jon Cunliffe, and HM Treasury’s Director General of Financial Services, Katharine Braddick. As appropriate other UK authorities will be involved in the Taskforce........



https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/2021/april/bank-of-england-statement-on-central-bank-digital-currency


(To any Bill Hicks fans), this feels like "government approved rock'n'roll" - that is, not very appealing....

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#405342

Postby murraypaul » April 19th, 2021, 12:48 pm

From my point of view the pound already is a central bank digital currency.
There is nothing I need to do that requires actual notes or coins, and I haven't written a cheque in over a decade.

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#405343

Postby odysseus2000 » April 19th, 2021, 12:50 pm

notsure
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/20 ... l-currency


(To any Bill Hicks fans), this feels like "government approved rock'n'roll" - that is, not very appealing....


It will be interesting to see if they are considering a fixed value, i.e. something that can not be de-valued by more mining or something that is essentially a fiat currency in a digital wrapper with the central bank able to increase supply as it seems fit.

If the latter it will undermine some of the advantages of a crypto-currency.

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#405345

Postby NotSure » April 19th, 2021, 1:00 pm

murraypaul wrote:From my point of view the pound already is a central bank digital currency.
There is nothing I need to do that requires actual notes or coins, and I haven't written a cheque in over a decade.


Exactly - unless (as described by Ody above) they fix or hard-limit the supply, and everyone trusts them to deliver on this, then what is the point? And anyway, they could do that without the use of a CBDC. I think a major appeal of crypto is the lack of central control - that's kind of the point, as I see it. As such, the phrase CBDC is oxymoronic.

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#405358

Postby murraypaul » April 19th, 2021, 1:27 pm

This sounds like they are fed up of being asked about crypto, so are setting up a committee to come back in a years time and tell them it is stupid idea, which they already knew.

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#405387

Postby odysseus2000 » April 19th, 2021, 2:44 pm

murraypaul wrote:This sounds like they are fed up of being asked about crypto, so are setting up a committee to come back in a years time and tell them it is stupid idea, which they already knew.


if this is indeed the modus operandi, it seems guaranteed to increase the number of people involved in crypto currencies.

Given where we are now I think crypto currencies are too useful and convenient to do anything but grow strongly and to be strongly embraced by the private sector.

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#405789

Postby NotSure » April 21st, 2021, 10:14 am

murraypaul wrote:This sounds like they are fed up of being asked about crypto, so are setting up a committee to come back in a years time and tell them it is stupid idea, which they already knew.


It gets worse - they are calling it 'Britcoin'....

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/uk-launches-taskforce-potential-bank-england-digital-currency-sunak-2021-04-19/

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#405927

Postby ursaminortaur » April 21st, 2021, 7:40 pm

NatWest won't serve business customers who accept payments in cryptocurrencies.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/21/natwest-will-refuse-to-serve-business-customers-who-accept-cryptocurrencies

NatWest will refuse to serve business customers who accept payment in cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, which the UK lender has categorised as “high risk”.

Morten Friis, a NatWest board member and head of its risk committee, said the bank was taking a “cautious approach” to cryptocurrencies, and would closely monitor any change in tone from the UK regulator, which has warned that consumers stand to lose all their cash by investing in crypto assets.

“We have no appetite for dealing with customers, whether taking them on as new clients or having an ongoing relationship with people, whose main business is backed by an exchange for cryptocurrencies, or otherwise transacting in cryptocurrencies as their main activity,” Friis said during an online shareholder event on Wednesday.

“We think of cryptocurrencies as high risk and we’re taking, for that reason, a cautious approach to this. It’s an area where regulation is very much in evolution and we’ll obviously respond to that as things change”, he explained.

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#405947

Postby murraypaul » April 21st, 2021, 8:40 pm

It is rather contradictory story.

The Guardian text suggests that any business would be affected:
NatWest will refuse to serve business customers who accept payment in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, which the UK lender has categorised as “high risk”.


While the actual quote from NatWest doesn't say that at all:
“We have no appetite for dealing with customers, whether taking them on as new clients or having an ongoing relationship with people, whose main business is backed by an exchange for cryptocurrencies, or otherwise transacting in cryptocurrencies as their main activity,” Friis said during an online shareholder event on Wednesday.


That says they don't want crypto companies, not that they don't want companies that accept crypto as payment.

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#406074

Postby NotSure » April 22nd, 2021, 10:45 am

murraypaul wrote:That says they don't want crypto companies, not that they don't want companies that accept crypto as payment.


Then it appears to contradict that again further down.

I wonder if it is at all related to this: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/16/fca-launches-proceedings-against-natwest-over-alleged-money-laundering.

I'm guessing that if dealing with companies deep into crypto, it's going to be hard to ensure no laundering is going on?

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#406075

Postby murraypaul » April 22nd, 2021, 10:49 am

The story is spreading, but the new articles all just seem to be sourced from the Guardian article, there doesn't seem to be any independent reporting.

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Re: Crypto currency endeavours

#406104

Postby odysseus2000 » April 22nd, 2021, 11:45 am

NotSure wrote:
murraypaul wrote:That says they don't want crypto companies, not that they don't want companies that accept crypto as payment.


Then it appears to contradict that again further down.

I wonder if it is at all related to this: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/16/fca-launches-proceedings-against-natwest-over-alleged-money-laundering.

I'm guessing that if dealing with companies deep into crypto, it's going to be hard to ensure no laundering is going on?


Cathy Wood of Ark says that she has spoken to the FBI regarding money laundering and was told that Crypto currencies are much easier to track and investigate for such activities than are traditional ones.

There are all kinds of wild arguments swirling around Crypto currencies, most of which make no sense to me and look like the media trying to create as much FUD as possible to get as many advertising eyeballs as possible.

Regards,


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