A cryptocurrency exchange in South Korea collapsed on Tuesday after it suffered a second cyberattack in eight months and lost a large amount of its digital-currency reserves. This spooked Asian investors who sold Bitcoin (and other cryptos).
Embedded into Bincoin’s genesis block by Satoshi Nakamoto on January 3, 2009, the day Bitcoin went live, was a message which is now well-known throughout the Bitcoin community. This message, taken from The Times newspaper of that day, read “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”.
As we countdown to the launch of bitcoin futures trading on the CBOE (10 December) and CME (18 December), the big banks – via the Futures Industry Association - have suddenly got cold feet about the risks. We don't blame them, somebody's going to get hurt, the only question is who. The banks are worried it could be them. The FIA’s “primary” members include all of the usual suspects like JPM, Goldman, Citi, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, etc. The risk they are most concerned about relates to clearing houses which, ultimately, they stand behind.
Authored by Dr. D via Raul Ilargi Meijer's The Automatic Earth blog,
Bitcoin is all the rage today, and as it crosses over $10,000, a 10-bagger for the year, we should look at what it is, what it isn’t, and why it’s become so popular.
Note my observations are those of a layman – which may be more useful than those of a programmer – but also those of a skeptic, which I’ll get to at the end.
"Whatever [Bitcoin] is, I missed it... It looks and smells like all the bubbles I have seen throughout history." - billionaire investor Jim Rogers
Authored by Constantin Gurdgiev via True Economics blog,
There is a much-discussed in the crypto-sphere chart making rounds these days, plotting Bitcoin price dynamics against the historical bubbles of the past:
The chart is striking. Albeit simplistic. See Note 1 below for a technical argument on the chart timing.