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WASHINGTON -- The baffling Bitcoin boom is either an exercise in self-delusion -- a high-tech Ponzi scheme that will come crashing down -- or an imaginative new Internet technology that will ultimately change how millions of people around the world conduct everyday business. There is little middle ground. Called a "digital currency," Bitcoin originated in early 2009 with a software program written by Satoshi Nakamoto. Who is Nakamoto? Good question. It's a pseudonym, and we don't know who's behind it -- whether man or woman; individual or group; American, Japanese, Russian or some other nationality. But what seems clear is...

When it comes to figuring out the main reason why every brick and mortar store in your local town is not accepting bitcoin as payment, you don’t need to look much further than price volatility. There are plenty of people who like the idea of a decentralized currency not controlled by any government, but the reality is that these same people only want to accept currencies that are relatively stable. After all, a store cannot plan for the future or pay for supplies, employees, and other costs when they don’t know what the value of each sale will be after...

China National Gold Group Corporation General Manager Sun Zhaoxue has come out and told the world media that the US is suppressing the gold price. The reason for America’s manipulation of gold is to ensure US Dollar dominance on the world stage. America has by default ended up with the world’s reserve currency and therefore gets the world to work for them in exchange for an ever increasing supply of printed greenbacks. He also went on with an excellent analysis of America’s war against Europe and the Euro using their investment banks. Another good insight from Sun Zhaoxue is that...

Earlier we pointed out that mortgage origination at Wells Fargo - the bank's bread and butter - is crashing at an unprecedented pace, and as per the conference call, Q1 isn't looking any better. Naturally, it stood to reason that the bank would seek alternative business and product lines to supplant the declining revenue it used to generate when it would originate some $100 billion in mortgages every quarter, now half that number. However, not even in our wildest dreams did we predict just what this "alternative" product would be. Because, as the FT reports, Wells Fargo, the largest US...

Bitcoin ATMs are coming to the city. Josh Harvey, co-founder of Lamassu, showed off the first bitcoin dispenser at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show and has found quite a bit of interest for the $5,000 machines. The machine, designed and manufactured in Portugal, looks like a typical deli ATM — but functions more like a vending machine. You put in US dollars and receive bitcoins back on your phone.

The price of bitcoin has, once again, reached $1,000 on popular bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox. The first time the price of bitcoin reached this level was on 27th November after interest in the cryptocurrency spiked across the world, but primarily in China. A few weeks later, the price started to tumble after China’s central bank imposed restrictions on the involvement of the country’s banks and third-party payment processors in bitcoin. On 5th December, the central bank said Chinese financial institutions were no longer permitted to work with bitcoin exchanges or other bitcoin companies. That same day, the price fell from...

The Day the Dollar Dies America’s financial Pearl Harbor is coming December 6, 2015, 3 p.m. HKT, Hong Kong Twenty-one men representing China’s most powerful institutions file into a conference room atop the ICC Tower looming over Victoria Harbor. The Politburo Standing Committee has mustered the CEOs of China’s four largest banks, Sinopec, and several other state-owned multinationals, plus officers from the Central Military Commission and a pair of academics from China’s top technology universities. The general secretary formally opens the meeting.“As you know, the United States of America continues to manipulate its currency,” he begins. “It is devaluing...

Whether you’re in Las Vegas, Nevada for the annual Inside Bitcoins Convention or just traveling for a legal way to party Silk Road-style, this desert boomtown is sure to tap your wallet with its world-class destinations that indulge any and all passions. Now, you likely know the big attractions – Caesars Palace’s opulent Roman architecture, the Bellagio’s serene fountains, but Vegas is also home to a burgeoning underground bitcoin community that is just as happy to empty your digital currency reserves. Even better with gift card providers like Gyft offering access to merchants, retailers and daily deal providers on their...

You’ve all heard about Bitcoin. No one knows who created it, although some writers have made very educated guesses about the identity of the pseudonymous creator. I have sometimes wondered whether Bitcoin is the product of some transnational criminal organization or rogue state that wants to undermine developed economies by casting their payment systems into doubt. I am less concerned with Bitcoin’s origin than with its flaws. I shall enumerate those flaws forthwith. Bitcoin enables fraud and other criminal activities. This is absolutely the single most salient feature of Bitcoin’s anonymity. Conventional currencies are indeed subject to laundering and counterfeit....

Recently, a friend came up to me and asked "Raghu, how do I obtain bitcoins?" I stared at him with an empty, blank look. Despite all the recent talks about bitcoins and their growing popularity, even with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) getting involved, I realised that I knew absolutely nothing about the bitcoin except the fact that it was associated with the Silk Road - an illegal online black market that used bitcoins as its defacto virtual currency to enable regular folks to obtain all sorts of illegal items easily and anonymously. I had no idea what bitcoins...

Cody Wilson rattled lawmakers and law-enforcement agencies with a plastic gun created from a 3-D printer, home computer and blueprints he posted online for anyone to download. Now, the 25-year-old law-school dropout is about to launch software aimed at covering the tracks of financial transactions made with bitcoin, the virtual currency that has exploded in popularity among spenders and speculators—and raised concerns among regulators that it might be used for illegal activity. "We need an anonymous cash online," says Mr. Wilson, who oversees from his apartment near the University of Texas at Austin about a dozen self-described antiestablishment techies working...

Bitcoin is the name of a group of peer-to-peer payment networks that serve as an open-source form of digital currency that was originally introduced in 2009 by a software developer with the alias of 'Satoshi Nakamoto." Bitcoin currency is created as rewards to "miners" for providing the computing power to solve difficult math problems to maintain the "blockchain" of internet transactions in the currency. Unlike online credit cards and PayPal systems that allow buyers to claim their money back, bitcoin permanently transfers value. The bitcoin cyber-economy compassed of merchants, users, service providers, and startup enterprises has flourished for the past...

It’s the festive season, and if there is a bitcoin fan among your friends and family, then they may have given you some of the virtual currency in your Christmas stocking. If so, what should you do with it? There are several options for you as a new bitcoin owner. We’ll tell you about them here, but before you start, please don’t do what Bloomberg TV anchor Adam Johnson did. Fellow anchor Matt Miller gave bitcoins to Johnson as a Christmas gift on air. They came in the form of a paper wallet (see below), which Johnson showed to the...

Bitcoin is rapidly becoming part of the everyday lexicon. Following David Woo's investigation, National Australia Bank's Emma Lawson looks at its creation, use, and quality as "currency," and find that Bitcoin meets most, but not all the conditions required to be a currency. Lawson concludes Bitcoin may not be the most efficient monetary system, given the costs to create, and that the supply set-up can be seen as both an advantage (hyperinflation is not possible) but also a disadvantage (there are conditions which may create deflation). But, if enough people believe in it, and use it, it may be here...

On the flat lava plain of Reykjanesbaer, Iceland, near the Arctic Circle, you can find the mines of Bitcoin. To get there, you pass through a fortified gate and enter a featureless yellow building. After checking in with a guard behind bulletproof glass, you face four more security checkpoints, including a so-called man trap that allows passage only after the door behind you has shut. This brings you to the center of the operation, a fluorescent-lit room with more than 100 whirring silver computers, each in a locked cabinet and each cooled by blasts of Arctic air shot up from...

Overstock.com – the American internet retailer with over a billion dollars per year in sales – will accept Bitcoin starting in 2014. As Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne told the Financial Times: I think a healthy monetary system at the end of the day isn’t an upside down pyramid based on the whim of a government official, but is based on something that they can’t control. If there’s going to be some part of the population which adopts it… I think that we’ll get that business. And the people who switch to it will respect that we started adopting it. Europe...

A paper currency system contains the seeds of its own destruction. The temptation for the monopolist money producer to increase the money supply is almost irresistible. In such a system with a constantly increasing money supply and, as a consequence, constantly increasing prices, it does not make much sense to save in cash to purchase assets later. A better strategy, given this scenario, is to go into debt to purchase assets and pay back the debts later with a devalued currency. Moreover, it makes sense to purchase assets that can later be pledged as collateral to obtain further bank loans....

Haters gonna hate, but the “Bitcoin bubble” meme has become the financial equivalent of a viral online cat video – wildly popular but pretty vacuous. In an effort to separate fact from fiction, ConvergEx's Nick Colas reviews 11 bitcoin myths (and dispels them). Still, there’s no doubt that the public is entranced: there are now 3x more Google searches for “bitcoin” than “Western Union”, and 33x more than for “Gold coins”. We started writing about bitcoin back in February because it was – and still is – a fascinating invention (for better or worse). How it plays out, we will...

It was inevitable that a few short days after Wall Street lovingly embraced Bitcoin as their own, with analysts from Bank of America, Citigroup and others, not to mention the clueless momentum-chasing, peanut gallery vocally flip-flopping on the "currency" after hating it at $200 only to love it at $1200 that Bitcoin... would promptly crash. And crash it did: overnight, following previously reported news that China's Baidu would follow the PBOC in halting acceptance of Bitcoin payment, Bitcoin tumbled from a recent high of $1155 to an almost electronically destined "half-off" touching $576 hours ago, exactly 50% lower, on very...

Make no mistake, the Bitcoin opportunity is creating a fast evolving trillion dollar new market in cryptocurrency eCommerce and more importantly mCommerce or mobile-Commerce. The future of cryptocurrencies is being secured right now with the launch of many new apps to enable digital cash, electronic payments and secure eWallets using cryptocurrencies via smart phones and other digital devices such as secure pens, sophisticated crypto-watches and customised memory sticks. Cryptocurrency adoption is growing very fast, in a similar exponential curve to the adoption of the world wide web in the years following 1995 or even the spread of electric power exactly...