Crypto

I’ve been looking at buying a small property using my crypto savings. Practically, this creates an interesting dilemma as the seller wants the money in his bank account, whereas I’m trying to persuade him to sell with a payment to a crypto wallet. He doesn’t trust crypto wallets, and has never used them. So, what’s…

During May, the floor fell out of the cryptocurrency markets with many losing their life savings. You can question why they had their life savings invested in cryptocurrencies in the first place, but what made the price fall so far, so fast? The answer is a combination of things, the core of which is a…

I was thinking about cryptocurrencies and the fact that most of us have heard of bitcoin and Ethereum. You may have heard of Dogecoin and Shiba Inu. Maybe you even know Cordana and Polygon. But do you know about UNI and Potcoin? Or Putincoin and Trumpcoin? What about Whoppercoin or Catcoin? It seems like madness…

It’s interesting as I found two studies over the past few days that show Dogecoin and shiba Inu coins are the most popular on the net, beating bitcoin. Both reports were analysing Google Trends for searches, not acutally buying or use of crypto. Even so, the reports prove to be interesting. The first report –…

Having spent the last decade saying that cryptocurrencies were rubbish (bankers) or the future (libertarians), I really enjoyed this new report from Thomson Reuters (which you can download for free here if you register). Therefore, thought I’d post the summary and tease you to clickthrough … SPECIAL REPORT: Cryptos on the rise 2022 — a…

I just spotted a spoof story on The Onion which, if you’re not aware, is a humour website of news stories. Their latest one: Study Finds Processing Power Wasted Mining Bitcoin Only Thing Preventing Sentient Computers From Wiping Out Humanity It made me laugh but, at the same time, made me think. Is bitcoin that…

I was reminded the other day of a quote by Ronald Reagan: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” He said this in the 1980s about the government’s view of the economy, but let’s apply it to cryptocurrencies. Initially irrelevant but now mainstream, many…

I’m not sure if anyone noticed but yesterday was the day that Europe voted not to ban bitcoin. It’s been bubbling for a while, as the EU developed a new Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) framework to protect EU citizens who invest in such assets. In many ways, it’s a good thing as, once a…

I haven’t written much about Facebook’s digital currency Diem, as there’s not much to write about. A dead duck from day one, it would never succeed. I said so back when it launched in 2019: The bottom-line is that Facebook may have developed a stablecoin using blockchain to enable global payments within Messenger, Instagram and…

This BBC article … The remarkable items that have been used as currency … got me thinking about tokenisation. The article discusses the use of shells, specifically the seasnail shell called a cowrie, and how it became a global currency by around 1200BC. Although the cowrie is mainly found in the Indian and Pacific Oceans,…