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New York’s Superintendent of Financial Services, Benjamin M. Lawsky, has issued a public order that confirms the state is now accepting applications for digital currency exchanges. Perhaps most notably, however, was that Lawsky indicated that these businesses will be regulated under new New York regulation, which he committed to having in place by the end of the second quarter of 2014. In his remarks, Lawsky struck his usual balance of at once recognizing the promise of digital currencies and stressing that related business activities need to be conducted in a responsible and lawful manner.

Troubled Japan-based bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox has filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection, an ancillary form of bankruptcy that will complement its primary Tokyo District Court claim issued on 28th February. US Chapter 15 bankruptcy provides specific protections in cases of cross-border insolvency, and is based on UN model law. Both Japan and the US have adopted Chapter 15 bankruptcy in an effort to better protect the interests of shareholders and maximize the value of debtor assets in cross-border bankruptcies.

The Federal Reserve’s seemingly endless program of quantitative easing (QE) begun under Ben Bernanke, and continuing at a slightly slower pace under Janet Yellen, has some of the punditry and much of the electorate up in arms. With good reason. Implicit in quantitative easing is the horribly obtuse notion that central banks can produce real economic growth through their monetary machinations. If only life were so simple. Back in the world of the reasonable, the sole purpose of money is as a stable measure of value that facilitates the exchange of goods and investment. Quantitative easing, by its very name,...

Future generations of Bitcoin billionaires may someday look back on 2014 with knowing smiles. Here was a year when thefts spread, exchanges collapsed, rates gyrated like a teenager’s moods. And yet the buying of bitcoins showed no signs of abating. The past week was particularly extreme. The apparent suicide of an American business executive in Singapore was investigated for possible ties to her Bitcoin investments. A California man fingered as the currency’s mysterious inventor reacted to his sudden fame by asking that journalists buy him lunch. After finishing his meal at a sushi restaurant, he went on to deny any...

Bitcoin believers were shaken to their digital souls when Mt. Gox, the world’s largest exchange, defaulted on $470 million worth of deposits and closed. The virtual currency was supposed to provide a safer, more private and less costly alternative to money issued by governments, but lacking the imprimatur of a sovereign is failing. Fundamentally, money provides a secure place to keep your wealth—you can store your savings for later use at a government guaranteed bank. And it eliminates the inconvenience of barter—a necessity for even the most rudimentary market economy. Money permits a nightclub singer to buy bread from a...

My public high school wasn’t the best, but we did have an amazing history teacher. Mr. L, as we called him, brought our country’s story to life. So when he taught us about the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, Andrew Jackson’s campaigns to force at least 46,000 Cherokees, Choctaws, Muscogee-Creeks, Chickasaws, and Seminoles off their ancestral lands, my classmates and I were stricken. ....................................................... But then it was lunchtime, and we pulled out our wallets in the cafeteria. Andrew Jackson was there, staring out from every $20 bill. We had been carrying around portraits of a mass...

On March 2nd 2014 Flexcoin was attacked and robbed of all coins in the hot wallet. The attacker made off with 896 BTC, dividing them into these two addresses: 1NDkevapt4SWYFEmquCDBSf7DLMTNVggdu1QFcC5JitGwpFKqRDd9QNH3eGN56dCNgy6 As Flexcoin does not have the resources, assets, or otherwise to come back from this loss, we are closing our doors immediately. Users who put their coins into cold storage will be contacted by Flexcoin and asked to verify their identity. Once identified, cold storage coins will be transferred out free of charge. Cold storage coins were held offline and not within reach of the attacker. All other users will...

Just before the bankruptcy of the Mt. Gox bitcoin digital-money (or virtual-currency) exchange, Japanese finance minister Taro Aso predicted the inevitable failure. “No one recognizes them as a real currency,” he told reporters. “I expected such a thing to collapse.” I totally agree with Mr. Aso. For weeks and weeks I have been tweeting and broadcasting that bitcoin is not real money. It is not a reliable medium of exchange, nor is it a reliable store of value. It has no central-bank regulation, network operations, or even centralized issuance. And because of its wild price fluctuations, bitcoin can never...

The Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange in Tokyo filed for bankruptcy protection Friday and its chief executive said 850,000 bitcoins, worth several hundred million dollars, are unaccounted for. The exchange's CEO Mark Karpeles appeared before Japanese TV news cameras, bowing deeply. He said a weakness in the exchange's systems was behind a massive loss of the virtual currency involving 750,000 bitcoins from users and 100,000 of the company's own bitcoins. That would amount to about $425 million at recent prices. The online exchange's unplugging earlier this week and accusations it had suffered a catastrophic theft have drawn renewed regulatory attention to...

Some savvy bitcoin investors have a solution to cyberthieves and instability shaking online exchanges: They print out their virtual savings and hide them in the real world. The shuttering this week of bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox and fears that hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the virtual currency have been lost or stolen are pushing investors to tighten their security. Touted by advocates as a new, digital type of money that could one day replace real-world cash, bitcoins can also be stored like traditional currencies, locked up in a safe, or hidden in a shoe box. Enthusiasts around the world...

The Federal Reserve Board doesn't have the authority to regulate bitcoin, Fed Chair Janet Yellen said Thursday. "To the best of my knowledge, there's no intersection at all in any way between bitcoin and banks the Federal Reserve has the ability to supervise or regulate," Yellen told members of the Senate Banking Committee. "The Federal Reserve simply does not have authority to supervise or regulate bitcoin in any way." Yellen was responding to questioning from Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who sent the Fed and other banking regulators a letter on Wednesday calling on them to ban—or at least curb—the decentralized,...

A US senator is asking the federal government to take this remarkable step: completely ban Bitcoin. Joe Manchin, a Democratic senator representing West Virginia, sent a letter Wednesday to the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and other regulators characterizing the virtual currency as encouraging "illicit activity" as well as being "highly unstable and disruptive to our economy."

Check out Mt. Gox, the site of what was the largest bitcoin exchange at one point, and you'll find a blank page. The site is now unavailable, and the exchange appears to be on the verge of collapse -- a number of Bitcoin companies announced Mt. Gox was planning to file for bankruptcy after technical problems and an apparent major theft. Customers have been unable to withdraw their money since Feb. 7. An alleged Mt. Gox document circulating on the Internet that can't be confirmed said the company had lost more than 744,00 Bitcoins in a theft that had gone unnoticed...

Concerns about high debt and an overvalued currency are sucking gold imports into China, according to a new report from Lombard Street Research. It adds that the authorities may possibly be moving in the direction of using gold in a plan to make the yuan an international currency. China's official reserves of gold stand at 1,054 metric tons, that's worth about $45 billion. This figure has not been updated since 2009 and Lombard says the number may not be accurate because since that last update imports of gold and domestic production amount to over 4,500 metric tons.

I had come to you once before, my Free Republic good guy friends, for advice on what penny stocks are all about. In doing further research, I keep running across the concept of bitcoin. Somehow, I cannot find a place to start about learning what bitcoin is. It used to be simple. You read the cereal box where is said, "Send three Cornies Box Tops with check, cash, or money order for $2.95 to order your own see-into-the-future goggles. Be sure to specify whether you want the red or blue model." There's no such place on the internet. If you...

Chronic problems have been flaring up in financial markets lately, and some of them may emanate from the United States. Yet none of these issues have seriously damaged the exalted status of what Washington Irving once called “the almighty dollar.” In fact, a familiar pattern has been emerging: When the world’s financial system runs into trouble, the position of the dollar as the world’s crucial currency becomes more formidable. Eswar S. Prasad, a Cornell economics professor and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has written a thoughtful new book that clarifies this counterintuitive phenomenon. Its title is “The Dollar Trap:...

The Federal Reserve (or Fed) has assumed sweeping new powers in the last year. In an unprecedented move in March 2008, the New York Fed advanced the funds for JPMorgan Chase Bank to buy investment bank Bear Stearns for pennies on the dollar. The deal was particularly controversial because Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, sits on the board of the New York Fed and participated in the secret weekend negotiations.1 In September 2008, the Federal Reserve did something even more unprecedented, when it bought the world’s largest insurance company. The Fed announced on September 16 that it was giving an...

SocGen: An Economic 'Perfect Storm' Is Brewing Rob WileFeb. 2, 2014, 8:46 PM    Last weekend at Davos, Nouriel Roubini told BI's Joe Weisenthal that it seemed markets had sailing into a perfect storm, resulting in lots of volatility. "...Between Chinese PMI of 50, Argentina letting its currency go, noises coming politically from Ukraine, Turkey, and Thailand … [the] contagion is not just within emerging markets but also affects advanced economies' equity markets. This evening Société Générale says, that, indeed it sure looks like we have. In a note to clients titled "Perfect Storm Brewing As Policy Turns,"...

A person begins heavy drinking in order to get drunk and stay drunk. Eventually, unless he stops and deals with reality, he drinks just to stay sane—until his health collapses. Likewise, a person may get high from heroin but later need the drug just to stay functional. Creating continual flows of new currency “stimulus” works in a similar fashion on the economy. Thus far, the Fed’s (now slightly reduced) monetary stimulus has kept the stock market rising. But there are signs that the drug may no longer work to get Wall Street high. According to the Financial Times, “Stocks suffer...

Celente isn’t suggesting that a massive collapse is going to happen in the future. He says we’re already in it – and it’s taking hold right before our eyes across the entirety of the globe: