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An article on Ars Technica notes the continuing slide downward of Bitcoin prices (down below $9,000 per coin from a December peak of $19,500). It also notes some recent news about Facebook ads and crypto, SEC Action against a different cryptocurrency project, and rumors about a still different coin's possibility of insolvency.
Meanwhile, rumors are swirling about Tether, a cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to the United States dollar. Tethers are supposed to be redeemable for dollars at any time, but in recent months Tether has struggled to gain access to the conventional banking system and has failed to produce a financial audit demonstrating its solvency.
I'm not sure if the article is connecting unconnected stories of problems or if the theme of trouble in crypto-land generally is valid. But this quote got me to thinking how much the state of cryptocurrency may be like the Free Banking Era in the United States in the 1800s and the Wildcat Banking that signaled its demise. We discuss cryptocurrency a lot on Soylent, but are the troubles of various operators all linked or is it unrelated coincidence?
[Ed. Note: The linked story at Ars Technica was updated to report that the price of one BitCoin dropped below $7000. As of this writing, coinbase reports the price dropped to about $6400 (Javascript required). Note this price is still $5500 ahead of where it was this time last year when it had just inched above $1000.]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @12:55PM (2 children)
... way before the internet or smartphones, we had these things called John Bull printing sets.
They were fun. You had a little rack and rubber letters that you could slide in and make your own badges with a stamp pad; the bigger ones even had pictures you could print too.
One day we had the bright idea of printing our own money with it. This soon caught on at school and we managed to persuade the younger kids to sell us stuff for it. Soon we had accumulated a large pile of other kids' stuff, while they ended up with all the 'money'. We then realised we could print more, and we did - lots more - causing rampant inflation and rendering most of the other kids' 'money' worthless.
The Headmaster got wind of all this, and it didn't end well. He confiscated all the 'money', made us give back all the stuff to the kids we had 'bought' it from, put us in detention and wrote to our parents.
Kids, eh?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @03:09PM
In doing so, you probably learned more about how money works than most other people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2018, @01:59PM
Wow.
That's just how things are going in Argentina.
Except it is the starving military just taking the "stuff" for themselves, instead of giving it back to the "kids."
If your headmaster had a bit of prescience, he would have turned it into an economics/government lesson.
Perhaps it could have spread worldwide and we wouldn't have such messed up economies in the world.