Business

Authored by Peter St.Onge via The Mises Institute,

The value of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, just like any other kind of money, comes fundamentally from what you can do with it. As a follow up to What Backs Bitcoin, I want to dig into that value.

The idea, which comes from Austrian economist Carl Menger, is that just as a shovel’s value comes from its ability to dig, a currency’s value comes from its ability to help you do two things: transactions and savings.

Regulators may be skeptical of the burgeoning ICO market, where outright fraud isn’t uncommon, but that isn’t stopping some of the world’s largest audit and consulting firms from trying to win their business.

The Brooklyn prosecutors who won a guity verdict against former pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli over the summer are demanding the “Most Hated Man in America” forfeit $7.4 million in cash and assets as part of his punishment.

In order to do this, Bloomberg says Shkreli will likely need to surrender the $5 million bail he posted in late 2015, and the one-of-a-kind Wu Tang Clan album he purchased for more than $2 million shortly before his former company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, was exposed for hiking the price of Daraprim, a live-saving AIDS drug, by 5,000%.

Volatility Index Futures (VX)

VIX futures spiked up to 13.47 during the session before reversing 12% lower and closing back down at 11.88.  Today's 13.47 intraday high was just: