Tag Archives: Virtual Currencies

Style Over Substance There are many things that could be said about the GOP tax bill.  But one thing is certain.  It has been a great show. Obviously, the time for real solutions to the debt problem that’s ailing the United States came and went many decades ago.  Instead of addressing the Country’s mounting insolvency, lawmakers chose expediency without exception.  They kicked the can from yesterday to today....

  A Useful Infographic When we last wrote more extensively about Bitcoin (see Parabolic Coin – evidently, it has become a lot more “parabolic” since then), we said we would soon return to the subject of Bitcoin and monetary theory in these pages. This long planned article was delayed for a number of reasons, one of which was that we realized that Keith Weiner’s series on the topic would give us a good opportunity to...

A tragedy… get the hankies out! ? [PT] The Instability Problem Bitcoin is often promoted as the antidote to the madness of fiat irredeemable currencies. It is also promoted as their replacement. Bitcoin is promoted not only as money, but the future money, and our monetary future. In fact, it is not. Why not? To answer, let us start with a look at the incentives offered by bitcoin. We saw a comment this week, which is...

A tragedy… get the hankies out! ? [PT] The Instability Problem Bitcoin is often promoted as the antidote to the madness of fiat irredeemable currencies. It is also promoted as their replacement. Bitcoin is promoted not only as money, but the future money, and our monetary future. In fact, it is not. Why not? To answer, let us start with a look at the incentives offered by bitcoin. We saw a comment this week, which is...

See the introduction and the video for the terms gold basis, co-basis, backwardation and contango. Forking Incentives A month ago, we wrote about the bitcoin fork. We described the fork: Picture a bank, the old-fashioned kind. Call it Acme (sorry, we watched too much Coyote and Road Runner growing up). A group of disgruntled employees leave. They take a copy of the book of accounts. They set up a new bank across the...

How We Got Used to Fiat Money Most false or irrational ideas about money are not new. For example, take the idea that government can just fix the price of one monetary asset against another. Some people think that we can have a gold standard by such a decree today. This idea goes back at least as far as the Coinage Act of 1792, when the government fixed 371.25 grains of silver to the same value as 24.75 grains of...

See the introduction and the video for the terms gold basis, co-basis, backwardation and contango. Bitcoin and Credit Transactions Last week, we said: It is commonly accepted to say the dollar is “printed”, but we can see from this line of thinking it is really borrowed. There is a real borrower on the other side of the transaction, and that borrower has powerful motivations to keep paying to service the debt. Bitcoin...

See the introduction and the video for the terms gold basis, co-basis, backwardation and contango. A Fork in the Cryptographic Road So bitcoin forked. You did not know this. Well, if you’re saving in gold perhaps not. If you’re betting in the crypto-coin casino, you knew it, bet on it, and now we assume are happily diving into your greater quantity of dollars after the fork. You don’t have a greater quantity of...

See the introduction and the video for the terms gold basis, co-basis, backwardation and contango. Precious Metals Supply and Demand Report That’s it. It’s the final straw. One of the alternative investing newsletters had a headline that screamed, “Bitcoin Is About to Soar, But You Must Act by August 1 to Get In”. It was missing only the call to action “call 1-800-BIT-COIN now! That number again is 800...

The Crypto-Bubble – A Speculator’s Dream in Cyberspace When writing an article about the recent move in bitcoin, one should probably not begin by preparing the chart images. Chances are one will have to do it all over again. It is a bit like ordering a cup of coffee in Weimar Germany in early November 1923. One had to pay for it right away, as a cup costing one wheelbarrow of Reichsmark may well end up costing two...