Archive for the ‘cryptocurrency’ Category.

The Fallacy that is Cryptocurrency

In his fundamental book, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange, English economist William Stanley Jevons explains that currencies address a central economic problem: the coincidence of wants. The phrase describes the conundrum inherent to barter where the parties of the transaction have to agree to sell and buy each other’s goods.The obvious challenge is the improbability of the wants, needs and events that would enable such a transaction occurring at the same time and the same place. In absence of this double coincidence of wants, the parties need to agree on an acceptable substitute: a medium of exchange. While Jevons included the latter function in his definition of money, his thinking was necessary informed by and limited to the technologies of his time.The following is a review of the definition of money, the state of currencies and their potential trajectory with consideration of current technologies, including blockchain-based solutions and so-called “cryptocurrencies”.

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In the first federal decision finding that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission hasn’t shown a digital asset offered in an initial coin offering is a security, a judge in San Diego, CA has turned back a request from the SEC for a preliminary injunction against the backers of the Blockvest ICO.

U.S District Judge Gonzalo Curiel of the Southern District of California, who previously granted the SEC’s ex parte request for a temporary restraining order and froze the assets involved in the ICO, found Tuesday that the SEC couldn’t show that investors bought into the Blockvest offering with the expectation of making a profit from the efforts as others—part of the three-part “Howey” test for the definition of a security under the the 1946 U.S. Supreme Court decision in SEC v. W.J. Howey Co.

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International Manipulation Fund?

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an organization of 189 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world. To the casual observer the IMF has directed its attention mostly towards monetary concerns. Therefore it is unsurprising that the IMF weight into the discussion on virtual currencies (VCs) and the underlying distributed ledger systems.

The quality of the answers you get are usually correlated with the quality of the questions you ask. In case of the International Monetary Fund’s ‘Staff Discussion Note’s on Virtual Currency’, the questions are being asked inside of a very narrow and very dark cardboard box with a peep-hole directed to the past one hundred years. When analysing the function of virtual currencies as money, the IMF paper simply declares it as falling short of the legal definition of money (page 15) and cites the usual definition of money including recent historic background.

Innovators in the cryptocurrency space must feel like Henry Ford when being told that his car was falling short of being a horse.

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2016/sdn1603.pdf

US falls further behind in emerging cryptocurrency market

While US regulators keep making anouncements with little content in reference to the treatment of cryptocurrencies, countries like Switzerland are moving fast to embrace these new financial tools

The national railway company of Switzerland, Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), recently announced a new service. Starting on November 11, Swiss customers will be able to buy bitcoins from over 1,000 SBB ticket machines.

And, Swiss private bank Falcon is now offering their clients to store and trade bitcoins direclty via their cash holdings. A clear move that signals the traction the virtual currency is gaining even in slow-changing asset management.

The group’s new blockchain asset management service is being offered in partnership with cryptocurrency broker Bitcoin Suisse.