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posted by martyb on Monday April 23 2018, @01:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the eggs-and-baskets dept.

This hasn't been the best week for WikiLeaks, to put it mildly. Coinbase has shut off the WikiLeaks Shop's account for allegedly violating the cryptocurrency exchange's terms of service. In other words, the leak site just lost its existing means of converting payments like bitcoin into conventional money. While Coinbase didn't give a specific reason (it declines to comment on specific accounts), it pointed to its legal requirement to honor "regulatory compliance mechanisms" under the US' Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

This doesn't prevent WikiLeaks from accepting cryptocurrency, but it will have to scramble to find an alternative if it wants to continue taking digital money from customers buying shirts and coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, the organization is less than thrilled -- it's calling for a "global blockade" of Coinbase, claiming that the exchange is reacting to a "concealed influence."

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/21/wikileaks-loses-coinbase-account/


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 23 2018, @11:58PM (1 child)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday April 23 2018, @11:58PM (#670944)

    the dollar has lost around 98% of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve became responsible for managing it.

    As compared to what other readily exchangeable currency during the same period (1913-present)?

    Not talking about precious metal coins - those aren't exchangeable in the open market, and they have a nasty bid/ask differential when you go to use them.

    For example, in the late 1970s, I watched the evening news with my parents - I knew how to compute CAGR and, being bored (it was the 1970s after all), I calculated the rate of return for gold as it bounced up and down on the evening news reports. While my bank account might have been paying ~5% on my massive $240 balance, I could see that with good market timing of gold, I could make >8%. So, I watched and (accurately) predicted a trough in the market and bought a 1oz Krugerand for $220 - slightly more than the evening news price, but I figured that was just market fluctuations - it was still a good buy, it went to $230 shortly thereafter. I watched it bounce up and down for weeks, and finally got to my CAGR target of 8%, took the Krugerand back to the coin shop and sadly learned about purchase price commission margin - it cancelled my gains to worse than bank rates of return... hell no, not selling yet. I waited for months, watching it bounce up and down, caught a peak and made a kingly 9% CAGR on my investment even after the coin shop took their cut. End of demonstration, margins suck, but you can still do well even with them. Ironic closing: Triumphantly, I watched the evening news in the following days as the price of gold sank back down, even below bank interest again, then... within less than a week after I sold, Iran took the hostages and gold doubled overnight, peaking around $880 per ounce within a month.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @12:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @12:43AM (#670958)

    After WWII, the devastated countries realized that the only way to keep the global currency system working was to based every currency on the U.S. dollar, which was based on the Gold Standard, but then to maintain the enormous power that this gave the United States, the U.S. government unilaterally took the U.S. dollar off the Gold Standard, taking with it all other currencies of the planet.

    So, your question is meaningless, because everything leads back to the U.S. dollar, and all modern governments have adopted the same central planning of their currencies. We're in new, uncharted monetary territory, where the whole globe is engaged in counterfeiting.

    And, the only thing that literally millennia of history can teach us is that when governments may counterfeit, they do, and the results are always catastrophic failure.