Ep13: Weekly Cryptocurrency News 10/31/18
Consensus Network: Cryptocurrency News & Education
Release Date: 10/31/2018
EP36: Buy, Borrow and Die: Bitcoin Style
Consensus Network: Cryptocurrency News & Education
I am in a financial position that may seem somewhat unusual to you. You see, the IRS rewards me for my real estate investments by taxing me less. If, on the other hand, I keep my income in the bank, or invest it in traditional equities or bonds, the IRS shows me no mercy! Admittedly this is by design. I am a real estate professional. One of the great benefits to that designation is that all of my passive losses flow through my personal tax returns. In other words, all that depreciation and mortgage interest I get by investing in real estate not only builds my net worth, but SAVES me money in...
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EP35: Cryptocurrency and Asymmetric Risk with Teeka Tiwari
Consensus Network: Cryptocurrency News & Education
Up to 10 percent of my liquid assets are in very risky stuff—specifically digital assets and startups. A lot of people people think I am being irresponsible—particularly because I have a captive audience with whom I have influence. Now if I was shooting at the hip and telling you to put all your money in this stuff, I would understand. But even highly volatile investments (ie. gambling) may have their role in your portfolio. To be clear, every year, I allocate no less than 80 percent of the money I invest into real estate through . There are many “wealth advisors” out there who...
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EP34: Bull Markets in the Least Ugly Economy in the World!
Consensus Network: Cryptocurrency News & Education
I am a lousy trader. I’ve said it before and I fully recognize this fact. That’s why, I try very hard to stay focussed on investing rather than trading. Nevertheless, I still get trapped in behaviors that I invariably regret. For example, you may know that I am a believer in bitcoin. I truly believe this will be one of the best investments of my lifetime over the course of the next few years. That’s why when it dropped to $3100, I should’ve bought some more. But, I didn’t because I got greedy. I figured it might drop even more so I waited. The end result was that by the time I bought...
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EP33: Crypto thaw and Crypto Law
Consensus Network: Cryptocurrency News & Education
This past week or two got a lot of people excited. Bitcoin broke through $5K and seemed to be headed to $6K. The usual bulls were out stomping on the grave of the crypto bears. But then the New York Attorney General filed a complaint against Bitfinex, one of the largest crypto trading platforms. It had to do with a stable coin called Tether and how Bitfinex dipped into its funds to cover other shortfalls. This is an old story that the AG has finally moved on so it should not have been a surprise. That said, any news in the digital currency world seems to create a PTSD like response and because...
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EP32: The Separation of Money from State
Consensus Network: Cryptocurrency News & Education
It’s funny how long lasting paradigms perpetuate without question for centuries without being questioned. It used to be in most places, specific religions were mandated by the government to its people and heretics were persecuted. Of course that still exists in many parts of the world but the point is that a large part of the world does not see that as simply status quo anymore. If you live in the United States, for example, you would likely feel very uncomfortable with the idea that the government chose your place of worship, what you ate or drank, and what you wore. Why is that?...
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EP31: Blockchain, Crowd Wisdom, and AI with Cindicator
Consensus Network: Cryptocurrency News & Education
As the story goes, in 1906, the great statistician Francis Galton observed a competition to guess the weight of an ox at a country fair. Over 800 people entered that contest. Galton, being a numbers guy was curious about how the crowd faired with its guesses. What he discovered was that the average guess, 1,197lb, was extremely close to the actual weight of the ox at 1,198lb. No one person had made a guess as good as that of the combined wisdom of the crowd. Since then, there have been lots of examples of this kind of crowd intelligence and it has become a science unto itself. Meanwhile,...
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EP30: Dentacoin? What?
Consensus Network: Cryptocurrency News & Education
Let’s talk about some things happening in the crypto space right now. Nasdaq launched real-time information on two new indices linked to the crypto asset market —Bitcoin liquid index (BLX) and Ethereum Liquid Index (ELX) were both incorporated into the Nasdaq platform on February 25th. This is sort of like the Nasdaq composite with the end goal to bolster mainstream adoption by fusing crypto assets into traditional entities like the stock market. Bitcoin surpassed PayPal in yearly transaction volumes in 2018 with $1.3 trillion dollars more then doubling PayPal with just over...
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Ep29: Power Ledger: Peer to Peer Energy
Consensus Network: Cryptocurrency News & Education
We’ve had a lot of high profile folks on the show lately that represent the “bitcoin maximalist” crowd. In other words, they believe that bitcoin is the only worthwhile blockchain and that every other project/token out there is a “shitcoin”. There is all sorts of terminology for this—the bitcoiner, the multicoiner, the nocoiner, and then there is the full spectrum in between. What am I? Well, it’s funny because a couple of years ago I would have been one of those people who said, “blockchain not bitcoin”. Why?…Because I didn’t understand bitcoin as well as I do now....
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Ep28: Does Crypto Need Rules?
Consensus Network: Cryptocurrency News & Education
I’ve been off the air for a while with Consensus Network through the holidays. The good or the bad news is that there isn’t a lot of movement in bitcoin prices. Infrastructure continues to grow and projects continue to develop throughout crypto winter. Even though prices aren’t moving dramatically, the technology and laws around it are. My guest today is at ground zero for all of those developments. Her name is Amy Wan. The last time I interviewed her, it was for Wealth Formula about real estate crowdfunding. She’s consistently been at the forefront of technology and...
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27: Crypto 202 with Chris Coney
Consensus Network: Cryptocurrency News & Education
We are in a bear market with cryptocurrency. There is no doubt about that. How long will it last? I have no idea.However, one day a bull market shall return just as the dotcom’s did after the bubble burst in the late 90s. Then we will see the blockchain versions of Amazon and Apple skyrocket in value. In the meantime, it is winter.Now is the time where you learn about projects and buy them at a steep discount. The truth is that the vast majority of these cryptocurrencies will never recover. But the ones that do will come back with a storm.So how do you spend your time if you want to be part...
info_outlineConsensus Network Weekly Crypto News October 31, 2018
Today is the 10th anniversary of the Bitcoin white paper!
Wednesday October 30th, 2018
Cryptocurrency Market Capitalization: $203 billion
Bitcoin Price: $6308 on Coinbase
JP Morgan Chase to Tokenize Gold Bars: Yes. You heard that right. Chase, who’s CEO called bitcoin a fraud and said he would fire any of his employees who traded it, seems to have capitulated to the reality that blockchain and cryptocurrencies are actually real and can be very useful. Specifically, JP Morgan will use their enterprise blockchain network Quorum, which is ethereum based, to tokenize gold bars. They also see the tokenization of many other commodities as a reality. Jamie Dimon—what a f’ng hypocrite!
Coinbase raises another $300 Million to Fix Bitcoin’s Problems: Coinbase raised another $300 million in funding with institutional investors giving it a value of $8 billion. According to coinable officials, they are going to use that funding to “accelerate the adoption of cryptocurrencies and digital assets.”
Plans include:
- Global expansion to increase the number of cryptocurrency users.
- Expanding the number of coins in offers.
- Creating applications for bitcoin and crytocurrencies.
- Bringing established financial institutions into the digital asset space.
Coinbase says it will continue to build infrastructure between fiat and crypto in regulated markets around the world and will add features and crypto assets to it’s custody offering.
Bitcoin Becomes Less Volatile than Amazon! According to data released by Chicago Board of Options Exchange (CBOE), the current volatility of bitcoin is as low as that of Apple stocks and more stable than Amazon and Netflix. Of course I believe that’s just because of lower trading volume right now. We actually did see a bit of a sell-off yesterday. But let me take this opportunity to talk about volatility. Bitcoin’s market capitalization is literally 1/10th of Amazon and Apple. Therefore, we expect it to be more volatile. When bitcoin has a market capitalization of $1 trillion or more, I fully expect it to have a far less volatile profile over-all. That’s what the critics of bitcoin as a store of value are missing. They say it’s too volatile to be a store of value. I agree with that… right now. But when it grows by 10X or 100X, you won’t see the same issues. It’s math.
A Bitcoin Wrapped in an Ethereum Smart Contract? Last week we talked about how Goldman Sachs made a huge investment into crypto custodian BitGo. BitGo recently announced that it, along with partners, are launching a fully ERC20 bitcoin token called WBTC.
My first response to hearing this was…why? Is it like the Crunchwrap Supreme at Taco Bell where they put a soft tortilla around a crunchy taco to make it taste that much better?
In all seriousness, there is value to this WBTC thing. First, it will allow BTC trades on decentralized exchanges and also facilitate various transactions on the ethereum network. Ethereum has an extensive smart contract developer ecosystem which bitcoin does not (it’s digital money not a contract).
Launch will be in 2019. Let’s see if it takes off.
That’s it for this week on Consensus Network’s Weekly Crypto News!
Make sure to send you questions and comments to [email protected]