Hokay. Strap in. Fuckin' A. Now note the quote above and how it relates to the quote below: Yes and mostly no. So there are regulations when it comes to the exchange of cryptocurrency for fiat currency (where "fiat" is "every currency you understand"), such as Washington's SB 5031 or New York's BitLicenses. But the whole point of cryptocurrency is the security of the currency - the very value it provides as a marker for the exchange of goods and services - is not in the backing of a central government with rules and regulations and reserves and mints. It's in the cryptographic strength of the algorithm that stores the transactions made with that currency ("crypto" "currency"). Fundamentally, "money" is a balance sheet whereby everyone knows what everyone else has. The simplest way this works is if everyone has chits and markers that indicate value (cash). If you're a bank, you write down on your ledger how much cash people have given you. The government can inspect your books (your ledger) and if things don't balance out, you're probably guilty of embezzlement. But the sanctity of that ledger is fundamentally up to the bank, backed by whoever insures that bank (the FDIC in the US), backed by whoever stands behind that insurance (the US Government). With cryptocurrency, the verification of the balance sheet is provided by the algorithm. Everyone with a copy of the blockchain - the "distributed ledger" - has a record of every transaction made. Every node on the network has a record of every transaction, which they update via a distributed protocol similar to BitTorrent ("bit" "coin" - get it?). This has two fundamentally seismic impacts: (1) governments can no longer govern, control or influence value, transactions, currency flows, interest rates or any other aspect of commerce and the exchange of value (2) governments can no longer insure, protect, stabilize or defend value, transactions, currency flows, interest rates or any other aspect of commerce and the exchange of value. So. On the one hand, you have people speculating in cryptocurrency because you put money in and it's grown bigger when it comes back out. And on the other hand, you have people speculating in cryptocurrency because HOLY FUCKING SHIT it's the biggest innovation in economics since the invention of fiat money in 1000AD. When they set off Trinity at Alamogordo, there were scientists who thought there was an outside chance it could ignite the atmosphere and kill every living thing on earth in a giant planetary fireball. They figured it was an outside chance, but they simply had no data as to what a runaway fission reaction in atmosphere would do. Cryptocurrency is the economic equivalent of nuclear power. It is more than an inflection point, it is a discontinuity in the equation. Good idea? Bad idea? Not the way to look at it. Regulated? Unregulated? The whole point is cryptocurrency is beyond regulation. There will be regulations where cryptocurrency touches "normal" money - and there should be - but once it's on the blockchain, it's in the hands of the ones and zeroes. I don't pay attention to crypto currency. If I'm being honest, it strikes me as pretty sketchy.
Are there regulations on crypto currency yet? Does it look like some might pop up in the future?
More questions. So have any governments done anything about Cryptocurrency to either support it or stifle it, or is everyone taking a "Wait and See" approach? Doesn't the fact that some currencies seem to be subject to crazy speculation and meteoric increase in value hint that things could be unstable and/or easy to manipulate? Similarly, don't the block chain thefts and hacks we've read about this past year also point to the idea that maybe it's not as secure as we thought? Wouldn't the anonymous nature of transactions actually be a negative, because you don't actually always know who you're dealing with, which would cause concerns in accountability, legitimacy, etc.?
More answers. A few examples: The Federal Reserve's working paper on adopting Distributed Ledger Technology (blockchain) Vladimir Putin discussing moving the Ruble to Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin Singapore/D&T's wargaming of moving Singapore onto Ethereum Japan and Thailand now using Ripple (XRP) as clearinghouse 47 Japanese banks adopting XRP The manipulation you see is entirely due to the low market capitalization in cryptocurrency trading. As of this writing, there's about 44 billion dollars in Bitcoin, about 21 billion dollars in Ethereum and less than 100 billion dollars in all cryptocurrencies. Apple, by comparison, has something like $250 billion cash on hand - they could buy all the cryptocurrency in the world (theoretically) more than twice over. By market cap, Bitcoin is worth about as much as Ford right now. But by volume, trading can get pretty active. Again, right now, 26 million shares of Ford have changed hands in the past 24 hours - a light trading day for Ford as Yahoo tells me they average 39 million shares a day. At $10 a share, that's $260m in Ford value changing hands daily. Right now there's 1.1 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin changing hands, and that doesn't include Bitcoin Cash, which didn't even exist two days ago. Multiply that by the fact that if you buy shares of Ford, you have a pretty good idea what you're getting. It's a car company. It's been around a hundred years. Bitcoin? Five years ago it was nerd poker chips. Now all of a sudden it's worth $2700 each. And contrary to popular opinion about financial prognosticators, they're a bunch of business majors with minimal understanding of the underpinnings of economics and cryptocurrency is a fundamental shock to the underpinnings of economics. We're in deeply theoretical territory and that amplifies uncertainty a great deal. No. All the thefts and hacks you've seen relate to either the security of exchanges - services where cryptocurrencies are exchanged for fiat money or other cryptocurrency - or tokens - a subsidiary marker of value that uses an existing blockchain for infrastructure but has its own rules and utility. We're in the wild wild west here, no doubt but where shit gets hinky is where people come in. The fact that "Magic the Gathering Online Exchange" had $450 million worth of bitcoin to lose says a lot about the naivete of many of the players in the cryptocurrency space. That the crazy cryptokidz went from "ICOs are the bestest!" to "ICOs are snake oil!" (the correct opinion) in the space of three weeks says more. Again, this is a space without the SEC or the FDIC. A fool and his money are soon parted and cryptocurrency is currently a wretched den of scum and villainy. The underlying technology, however, is of seismic import and it's possible that network effects are pronounced enough now that the cryptos we currently have will be the cryptos we keep. Nobody uses Friendster. Everybody uses Facebook. The trick is in knowing whether we're looking at Friendster or Facebook right now. Anyone who has the cryptographic key to a cryptographic address for a cryptographic wallet is that wallet. To put it in Oldey-Tymey-SpyNoveley terms, dealing with cryptocurrency is effectively transacting with a numbered Swiss bank account. For better or worse.So have any governments done anything about Cryptocurrency to either support it or stifle it, or is everyone taking a "Wait and See" approach?
Doesn't the fact that some currencies seem to be subject to crazy speculation and meteoric increase in value hint that things could be unstable and/or easy to manipulate?
Similarly, don't the block chain thefts and hacks we've read about this past year also point to the idea that maybe it's not as secure as we thought?
Wouldn't the anonymous nature of transactions actually be a negative, because you don't actually always know who you're dealing with, which would cause concerns in accountability, legitimacy, etc.?
I think it's kind of good to see government's getting involved in the currency and it'll be interesting to see how they continue to interact with it down the road. In my mind, I think it gives the currency some mainstream legitimacy and makes it less underground. At the same time, I tend to think the more often than not government involvement in the market in general and currency in particular acts as a much needed support to keep things from falling apart. The Swiss bank account analogy is a good one and kind of fits how I viewed things. Personally, I peg it a bit more on the "worse" side of the scale, but that's due to personal perception and hangups and I readily acknowledge that. The one thing about cryptocurrency that confuses me is that I literally don't see its value nor why it's rising (in fact, I thought there was less than $100 in cryptocurrency). The way I understand it is, mining bitcoin involves your computer doing math, you're sharing math with other people, then you get bitcoins. What the hell is that math for? Why is it worth anything to begin with? When I think about real money (let's not bring fiat into this, unless absolutely necessary because damn that shit's confusing and looking at it makes me understand why some people want to go back to the gold standard), I think of it in terms of physical goods. I know how much standard goods such as flashdrives, bags of dogfood, etc. cost. I can compare them to bigger things, such as a new television is x number of flashdrives, a new car is x number of televisions, and a new house is x number of cars. I can compare those values to time, I have to work x hours to buy a television or a month's worth of rent is worth x dollars. I can even use that information to compare my wealth to the wealth of others, whether I'm comparing my living arrangements with theirs or my monthly pay to theirs or whatever. In fact, I often do, then I get all salty about social stratification and rant on Hubski about it whenever the topic comes up. On the other hand I see something like bitcoin or ethereum or something, and I have no baseline to compare it to other than what someone else says it's worth. If someone says 1 Bitcoin is worth $2,000 I'd think that's weird, because as best as I understand it, it doesn't do anything. It just sits there. It'd be like someone bringing me a stick from my own backyard and saying that's worth $2,000. Seriously. That's really fucking weird. It doesn't do anything. It's just a stick. When you combine my non-understanding of its value with a perception of lawlessness and instability around it, I'd like to hope it's understandable why I find this whole experiment really sketchy. I hope you don't think I'm dogging on you guys or cryptocurrency. It's just, I read your answers this morning and this whole thing has been tumbling in my mind all day. I'm on Wikipedia now trying to figure shit out.
I am firmly of the opinion that the best way to understand something is to teach it to someone else. As such, you're doing me a favor. And, for the sake of flavor, know that I am started this from a cafe table five feet west of the fountain at the courtyard of the Montage Beverly Hills, having just spent $9 for an iced coffee and a croissant, and am finishing it in an utter shithole near downtown LA (with four inches of fancy watch catalogs on the coffee table). Now. In everyone's mind, you mean. There's no way to really have this discussion without a fundamental (and rudimentary) discussion of what money actually is. Fundamentally, money is a shorthand for the exchange of value; the whole point is not what it represents, but what it accomplishes. "Fiat" money simply means money that isn't backed by anything. If you think your dollar coin should be backed by an ounce of gold, this concept makes you upset. If you had your way, however, you could only ever have as many dollars in the game as you have ounces of gold. It means that the act of buying, selling or doing means the act of moving gold around. Pretty quickly, the gold becomes figurative and it doesn't take long to recognize that the gold is an impediment. It's like a catalyst in chemistry: you need the gold there in order to initiate the reaction, but you have just as much gold when you're done as you did when you started. So really, a marketplace is a conceptual framework where your value and my value can interact, no gold necessary. Your 40 hours a week of accounting has an agreed-upon value within society; my fifteen widgets an hour's worth of cobbling has an agreed-upon value within that same society and money allows me to exchange thirty widgets for you doing my quarterly tax returns without you needing my widgets. The best thing that marketplace can be is transparent. It should allow our society to freely exchange value without any disruption, as fast as humanly possible. Right now, this is done by a large system of interconnected computers. Each country has their own system. In the US, it's FedWire, FedACH and EPN, which collectively handle about 120 trillion dollars a year in transactions. BUT these transactions take up to three days to clear because it's a bunch of computers, it's antiquated and on and on and on. Not always and not often - there are a bunch of crediting systems that because the players know it'll happen quicker than that, advance the money. But fundamentally, three days. The second best thing that a marketplace can be is stabilizing. This is what the Federal Reserve does - it basically moderates the flow of money, buying some up and taking it out of circulation, then releasing it to increase how much is available for commerce. NOTE THAT THIS IS A GROSS OVERSIMPLIFICATION but the fact of the matter is, central banks control how much money there is, which controls how much money is worth, which if done right, means that you don't need to worry about burning Deutsche Marks to keep warm in the winter of 1937 and shit. Simply put: the money in your pocket is worth society agrees it's worth, with some added tinkering from central banks to make sure that number benefits society. Sometimes they screw up. That's world banking in a nutshell. Fundamentally, cryptocurrency replaces that large system of interconnected computers. If banks control it (Ripple, Hyperledger), the whole system moves the same only more efficiently. But if nobody controls it (Bitcoin, Ethereum) the whole system moves differently only more efficiently. It's still an exchange for moving value around; it's still just markers. Above, I discussed how the marketplace basically sets a societally-agreed-upon structure for the exchange of value. What that marker is, again, doesn't fundamentally matter…SO LONG AS THINGS ARE STABLE. But things are never truly stable; the Pound is down something like 20% since Brexit, for example. When a country is unstable, the value of its currency falls compared to other currencies - apparently Warcraft money is currently worth more than Venezuelan money right now. When a country is robust, its currency rises. Bitcoin rises because people are buying it on the assumption that it will be worth more in comparison to other currencies. That's it. It falls because people think it won't be worth as much as they thought. When Bitcoin was introduced, it was worthless because almost nobody knew about it, nobody would take it, and nobody knew what to do with it. Now? Now half the world has heard of Bitcoin even if a tiny percentage understand what it is or what it does… and everybody knows you can use it to buy ransom payments, drugs and murders. But that's Bitcoin. Ethereum is different because fundamentally, Ethereum is required to buy time on the Ethereum Virtual Machine, a worldwide distributed computer capable of running applications, smart contracts and other simple (and less-simple) peerless, unmanaged financial transactions. Ethereum actually has intrinsic value of its own, unlike Bitcoin. Not only that but if Ethereum successfully switches from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake (more in a minute), simply having ether will permit the collection of interest on loaning out that ether to stakers. This is one reason why Ether has gone 30 cents to $227 in eighteen months. That's "mining." Mining is the act of doing the cryptographic work necessary to solve the puzzle that awards new, never-existed-before bitcoins. If you solve the problem right, there are no longer (for example) one million bitcoins, there are now one million and one bitcoins and one of those bitcoins is awarded to you. The math is necessary to have all the different nodes of the network online, and all verifying that all transactions are accurate and true. You can't fake a bitcoin transaction; you would need more than half of all the bitcoin nodes in the world to agree with your faking. In order to verify that everybody has the same transactions cryptographic problems must be solved. The problems are harder than they need to be for the sake of proving the transaction; they are designed so that a new coin is created on a schedule that works for the currency. Bitcoin aims for ten minutes. They increase the difficulty of the math so that the target generation rate stays relatively constant. If they didn't there'd be runaway inflation as the number of solvers went up. Yes. Exactly. And the Efficient Market Hypothesis says you don't have to know, because since it's being bought and sold by everybody, everybody will figure out what it's worth by buying and selling it. As the applications for bitcoin or ethereum go up, the price goes up. As its applicability to live goes down, the prices go down. The fact that it's such a disruptive technology lends credo to the instability of prices; nobody really knows what cryptocurrency is worth, so everyone's sentiment is subject to flux. Dollars don't do shit either. Again, markers. What are the markers worth? Well, you can do a lot more with US dollars than you can with Zimbabwean ones. Next questions?In my mind, I think it gives the currency some mainstream legitimacy and makes it less underground.
The one thing about cryptocurrency that confuses me is that I literally don't see its value nor why it's rising (in fact, I thought there was less than $100 in cryptocurrency).
The way I understand it is, mining bitcoin involves your computer doing math, you're sharing math with other people, then you get bitcoins. What the hell is that math for? Why is it worth anything to begin with?
On the other hand I see something like bitcoin or ethereum or something, and I have no baseline to compare it to other than what someone else says it's worth.
If someone says 1 Bitcoin is worth $2,000 I'd think that's weird, because as best as I understand it, it doesn't do anything. It just sits there.