SoylentNews

All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us [soylentnews.org] writes:

An article on Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] 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 [wikipedia.org] 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?

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