Crypto

I was reflecting, which is dangerous. I was reflecting on my antipathy towards bitcoin as, like most bankers, it appeared to be a bit of a scam with no asset behind it. Then I woke up to what the libertarians have been saying to me all along: any currency is a scam. The US dollar…

I’ve not talked much about bitcoin on the blog lately*, but I have tweeted a lot about it. The key take-away? It’s not going away. People have said bitcoin is dead thousands of times. In fact, there’s a website dedicated to the subject, tracking and tracing the death of bitcoin: Most Recent Death: Cryptocurrencies –…

Welcome to the World of Next A few years ago, a friend of mine had an idea. It was to create a digital exchange between anything that anyone believed was of value. You may value USD, €, CN¥ or other currencies. Equally you may value BTC, ETH, XRP or other cryptocurrencies. For some, we value…

In a fascinating move Venezuela, which has been a basket-case economy ever since Hugo Chavez died in 2013, has dropped their national currency (the bolivar) and any ties to the US dollar, and decided to link their national currency to bitcoin instead. This follows years of hyperinflation where the bolivar – both the old and…

Three years ago, I blogged about Ant Group’s strategy for AI, Blockchain, Cybersecurity and more. At the time, I noted: Ant Financial have more blockchain patents than any other company in the world and they have the most live blockchain-based production systems. That was in 2018. By the end of 2020, the situation is even…

I’d just written my two pieces last week about non fungible tokens (NFTs) … WTF is an NFT? NFTs show why banks must focus upon digital asset management … when I spotted a fellow blogger and colleague who I respect, Sebastien Meunier, had written about them too. In Sebastien’s case, he writes that they’re a…

Watching the mainstream news show the other day, it finished with an item about NFTs, non-fungible tokens. It’s not the sort of thing that I would have expected most pensioners sitting having their night-time cup of cocoa watching the news would expect to see or hear about, but hey, I’m not a news programmer. Then…

I haven’t commented much on bitcoin’s (BTC) recent surge, as I’ve been watching and waiting, but it is something. Just in case you didn’t notice, the value has moved from a low of under $5,000 per BTC in March 2020 to around $50,000 per BTC today. But it’s not just BTC: it’s Ether, Bitcoin Cash,…

A year ago, I invested $1,000 in bitcoin. Today, that’s worth $10,000. OK, I made those figures up. I actually invested and have invested and keep investing in bitcoin and, more importantly, ether – the currency of Ethereum – in which I have more confidence for the future. I don’t sell them – HODL guys,…

Andreesson Horowitz’s Chris Dixon shared a presentation about crypto and blockchain during the holiday break.  Interesting, but is it good? Not sure, but I’m not going to make big predictions about tokenisation, regulation and the price of bitcoin in January 2022. Instead, I asked Janis Legler  to do this. Janis is Chief Product Officer…