Bitcoin....who's gotten into it?

[skaredshtles]

It's a sign!

Trouble is... I can't tell if it's a BUY or a SELL signal.

[4matic]

The "Bloomberg bottom" working pretty well.

[stalefish3169]

Not going to lie and say it was easy to set up, but got my Ledger Nanos S and Scatter set up so I am now earning EOS by leasing my EOS on https://www.chintai.io/. Total game-changer! I missed out on the really good 0.75% 7 day lease rates a few days ago, but am still pretty happy to be getting around 0.25% on my 2 leases (https://eos.chintai.io/exchange/EOS7D).

Can't wait for the BlockOne REX (Resource Exchange) version to come out!

[Skidog]

Can't wait for the BlockOne REX (Resource Exchange) version to come out!

Me too I can hardly contain my excitement.



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[reckless toboggan]

[stalefish3169]

Me too I can hardly contain my excitement.



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Free money.

[byates1]

read something that echoed my thought; that it was never intended as an investment vehicle.

it was never intended as an investment(get rich quick, complain on tgr) vehicle.

to be clear, i'm no staunch supporter of online gambling.

carrion.

[stalefish3169]

Pretty good mainstream article (But BTC is innovating so fast that you don't even need the internet anymore https://blockstream.com/satellite/).

http://time.com/5486673/bitcoin-vene...authoritarian/

TIME › Annotations
Why Bitcoin Matters for Freedom
ALEX GLADSTEIN DECEMBER 28, 2018
IDEAS

Gladstein is Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation.

In the border city of Cúcuta, Venezuelan refugees stream into Colombia, searching for food to feed their families. Years of high inflation, projected to top 1 million percent, has turned bolivares into scrap paper. More than 3 million Venezuelans have fled since 2014, and 5,500 exit for good each day. According to the United Nations, the exodus is “on the scale of Syria” and is now one of the world’s worst refugee crises. As Venezuelans escape, they leave with close to nothing, desperate and vulnerable.

Because they live under authoritarianism, Venezuelans have no way to reform the policies that have destroyed their economy. They can’t hold their rulers accountable through free and fair elections or campaign for change without fear of reprisal. As they stand in hours-long lines for rationed groceries and medicine and watch their life savings disappear, it can seem like there are no options.

But innovation happens at the edge. Today, Venezuelans are adopting and experimenting with Bitcoin to evade hyperinflation and strict financial controls. Speculation, fraud, and greed in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry have overshadowed the real, liberating potential of Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention. For people living under authoritarian governments, Bitcoin can be a valuable financial tool as a censorship-resistant medium of exchange.

Take, for example, remittances. After ravaging the domestic economy, the Venezuelan regime is now taking a cut of money coming in from abroad. New laws force Venezuelans to go through local banks for foreign transactions, and require banks to disclose information on how individuals get and use their money. According to Alejandro Machado, a cryptocurrency researcher at the Open Money Initiative, a wire transfer from the United States can now encounter a fee as high as 56% as it passes from dollars to bolivares in a process that can last several weeks. Most recently, Venezuelan banks have, under pressure from the government, even prevented clients using foreign IP addresses from accessing their online accounts.


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To circumvent this bureaucracy, some Venezuelans have started to receive bitcoin from their relatives abroad. It’s now possible to send a text message to your family asking for bitcoin, and receive it minutes later for a tiny fee. Government censorship isn’t possible, as bitcoin isn’t routed through a bank or third party and instead arrives into your phone wallet in a peer-to-peer way. Then you can, moments later, sell your new bitcoin into fiat through a local Craigslist-style exchange, or load it onto a flash drive (or even memorize a recovery phrase) and escape Venezuela with complete control over your savings. A popular alternative – have your family wire money to a bank in Colombia, walk across the border to withdraw, then walk back to Venezuela with cash in hand – can take far longer, cost more, and be far more dangerous than the Bitcoin option.

Venezuela isn’t the only place where people can use Bitcoin as an escape valve. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe printed endless amounts of cash and inflated the savings of his citizens into nothing, but his successors can’t print more bitcoin. In China, Xi Jinping can track all of your transactions on Alipay and WePay, but he cannot orchestrate mass surveillance on all Bitcoin payments. In Russia, Vladimir Putin can target an NGO and freeze its bank account, but he can’t freeze its Bitcoin wallet. In a refugee camp, you might not be able to access a bank, but as long as you can find an Internet connection, you can receive bitcoin, without asking permission and without having to prove your identity.

Naturally, we must pay attention to the dark side of emerging technology. Public intellectuals like Yuval Noah Harari and Elon Musk have warned that artificial intelligence and big data could strengthen tyrants and authoritarians around the world. Regimes in Venezuela, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are even trying to mutate and centralize Bitcoin’s concept of peer-to-peer digital money to create state-controlled cryptocurrencies like the Petro, which could allow them to more effectively censor transactions, surveil user accounts, and evade sanctions.

But decentralizing technologies can provide a countering force. Beyond Bitcoin, there are encrypted communications apps and browsers like Signal and Tor, privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies like Zcash and Monero, mesh networking devices like goTenna, and censorship-resistant storage systems like IPFS. By building on and investing in tools like these, we can ensure that our cities, social networks, and financial systems don’t turn into tools of surveillance and control.

Cash remains one of the best ways to exercise free speech. Paper or metal money is virtually anonymous, and can be used without government surveillance. But in places like Venezuela, where bills are weighed in stacks by the kilogram even for small transactions, cash is increasingly impractical, and it’s vulnerable to theft or seizure. And from China to Sweden, governments and companies are driving us toward a cashless world. It’s essential that we explore electronic money that can preserve the peer-to-peer quality of cash for future generations. When you pay someone with software like Venmo, you might use three or four financial intermediaries, even though the recipient might be standing in front of you. Each intermediary can potentially censor, surveil, and profit. And the billions of humans living under repressive regimes can’t expect most payment software in the future to remain as innocent or benevolent as Venmo. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written, Bitcoin is “an insurance policy against an Orwellian future.”

To be sure, Bitcoin is still a nascent technology, and doesn’t offer cutting-edge usability, speed, or privacy. But engineers are constantly working to bring those attributes to Bitcoin by building better apps and on-ramps, upgrading the base protocol, and creating new second layer technologies like the Lightning Network, which could eventually mask and dramatically scale the number of possible bitcoin transactions per second. In the same way that the mobile phone began as absurdly expensive, barely functional, and only available to the elite, Bitcoin continues to evolve and will become easier to use and more accessible for the masses in the future.

Less than 1% of the world’s population — no more than 40 million people — have ever used Bitcoin. But, according to the Human Rights Foundation, more than 50% of the world’s population lives under an authoritarian regime. If we invest the time and resources to develop user-friendly wallets, more exchanges, and better educational materials for Bitcoin, it has the potential to make a real difference for the 4 billion people who can’t trust their rulers or who can’t access the banking system. For them, Bitcoin can be a way out.

Contact us at editors@time.com.

IDEAS

TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

http://outline.com/NAKTnV

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[CovertM]

Cue Gundlach going on cable news to talk about bitcoin's predictive signal around risk on/off. Bitcoin topped in December 2017, equities topped in January 2018 before going down. Bitcoin bottoming here low 3k, maybe equities in January after redemption armageddon is over?

Huh?? Not Quite
https://www.macrotrends.net/2490/sp-500-ytd-performance

[stalefish3169]

ETH back from the dead? Up around 80% after falling well below $100 a few weeks ago. Seems like approaching ETH hard fork and associated block reward reduction may be getting priced in now.

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[Skidog]

#foolsgold

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[stalefish3169]

#foolsgold

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So you're a Bitcoin maximalist?

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[stalefish3169]

Muh teh bitcoinz is for fraudz.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/three-c....co/pemQJyWQyG

 WSJ ›

Annotations


Three Former Credit Suisse Bankers Arrested for Involvement in Mozambique Debt Deals

MATT WIRZ JANUARY 03, 2019

Three former Credit Suisse Group AG bankers were arrested Thursday in London in connection with a $2 billion fraud scheme, according to a statement by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The U.S. has charged the bankers, the former finance minister of Mozambique and an executive of Privinvest Group with engaging in bribes and kickbacks of at least $200 million to enrich themselves and Mozambique government officials.

The...

Three former Credit Suisse Group AG bankers were arrested Thursday in London in connection with a $2 billion fraud scheme, according to a statement by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The U.S. has charged the bankers, the former finance minister of Mozambique and an executive of Privinvest Group with engaging in bribes and kickbacks of at least $200 million to enrich themselves and Mozambique government officials.

The alleged co-conspirators diverted the money from $2 billion of debt deals Credit Suisse and other banks arranged for Mozambique government-owned companies in 2013 and 2014, according to a grand jury indictment filed by the U.S. District Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

“No action has been taken against Credit Suisse,” a spokeswoman for the bank said. “The indictment alleges that the former employees worked to defeat the bank’s internal controls, acted out of a motive of personal profit and sought to hide these activities from the bank.”

Spokesmen for Privinvest and the government of Mozambique couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

The indictments follow reporting by The Wall Street Journal on irregularities in the debt deals and on the connections between Credit Suisse and Privinvest, a naval contractor owned by Lebanese businessman Iskandar Safa.



http://outline.com/qj3p6b



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[mcsquared]

I don't see how supports your arguments for Bitcoin. Some people got caught stealing from a bank? That wouldn't happen with bitcoin!! The getting caught part at least.

[stalefish3169]

I don't see how supports your arguments for Bitcoin. Some people got caught stealing from a bank? That wouldn't happen with bitcoin!! The getting caught part at least.

Go back and read how every third post or so is about how Bitcoin is only used for fraudulent purposes and how we need trusted third parties to keep us safe from bad things.

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[Bunion 2020]

Cmon Matt you have to admit that at least a part of the BTC selling point at the beginning was to be able to make anon purchases.

[Mustonen]

Go back and read how every third post or so is about how Bitcoin is only used for fraudulent purposes and how we need trusted third parties to keep us safe from bad things.

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So, because some people die when they’re wearing helmets, the argument for helmets is invalid?

The argument against the trusted third party is absurd anyways.

[stalefish3169]

BTC price coiling up like a spring inside of this wedge. Which way is it going to pop?

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[pureshred]

Buying btc here is fine by me. I don't think it will be *the* long because of the strong overhead supply at 6k, but 4k-->6k is very achievable.

Agreed. Not a lot of s/r levels in the 4.5k ish to 6k ish range, and btc hasn't yet tested 6k after plunging through it Nov 14, so it could hit 6k quick. Could be a great long to 6k and/or short at 6k.

[ICantLogIn]

yelp that sux

[skaredshtles]

yelp that sux

BUY! BUY! BUY!!!

[stalefish3169]

BTC price coiling up like a spring inside of this wedge. Which way is it going to pop?

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Down. It went down. Lol

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[stalefish3169]

No BTC ETF. Looks like it was already priced in, but we'll see.

[skaredshtles]

Related: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/bitc...ain-tech-.html

[stalefish3169]

Related: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/bitc...ain-tech-.html

Cab drivers claim Uber and Lyft going to zero.