Tag: bitcoin

Bill Black: Bitcoin Frauds Keep Growing

By William K. Black, Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives via Bill Black: Bitcoin Frauds Keep Growing

Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say

SAN FRANCISCO — A concentrated campaign of price manipulation may have accounted for at least half of the increase in the price of Bitcoin and other big cryptocurrencies last year, according to a paper released on Wednesday by an academic with a history of spotting fraud in financial markets. via Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated… Continue reading Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say

Bitcoin Wound Up Being Just As Broken as the Corrupt Banking System It Was Trying to Kill

Bitcoin Wound Up Being Just As Broken as the Corrupt Banking System It Was Trying to Kill

Bitcoin became a thing based largely on the enthusiasm of the same types of people who pushed gold to $1,921 an ounce in 2011 – not surprisingly, this was shortly after Congress’ Big Red Shoes performance in the debt-ceiling crisis that August. Both were based on the notion that Congress, the Fed and the European Union were running traditional currency into the ground. This was always a crazy idea. It was a reaction to emergency monetary policy rooted in a mix of a misunderstanding of what former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke was doing and cultural-political alienation that dates back to the right’s reaction to the sixties, if not the dawn of time. …
But the real point is that if you have to even ask what Bitcoin is, Bitcoin really isn’t much

The value of bitcoins stolen seems to be greater than the value of bitcoins traded for goods and services not related to bitcoin speculation. When you point this out you are branded a hater.

Bitcoin Schadenfreude

Bitcoin Schadenfreude

Just think about it: billions in value in bitcoins just waiting to be stolen by anybody. Russia and China (and other nations) have huge digital warfare operations that could target those bitcoins, either officially or extracurricularly. No matter how cryptographically safe, systems can be penetrated through hardware or personnel. And no government guarantees! I wonder who will write them insurance knowing this?

Dunning-Krugerrands. Bitcoin looks like a good idea if you know literally nothing about the history of financial regulations. Why those regulations exist and what problems they solved.

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I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying… Continue reading Untitled