Posted on 07/30/2020 3:50:25 PM PDT by Enlightened1
As Bitcoin and gold hit 2020 highs, Uphold unveils a revolutionary new product redefining “store of value” for a panicked age.
It’s physical gold. It’s crypto. It’s government-backed. It’s a new product from a Silicon Valley company mutating gold and crypto into a single unit. And it’s as deeply fear-soaked as anything since, well, 2020.
Today Uphold, a digital investment platform based in San Francisco, announced what it calls “a better form of gold”: Universal Gold. Users can buy the gold crypto UPXAU — a token verifiable on the Ethereum blockchain and audited by the security firm CertiK — and Uphold instantly contracts to buy physical gold from the Government of Western Australian.
From that moment, the investor owns the gold. She can spend parts of it using her Uphold credit card, or take physical delivery: Uphold will send the FedEx FDX +1.9% guy with the click of a mouse.
UPXAU is to crypto finance what “clicks and mortar” was to e-commerce, a simultaneous merger of the digital and the physical.
It all started back in March, when one of Uphold’s investors, a dyed-in-the-wool gold bug, stumbled upon GoldPass, an Australian government program issuing certificates that guaranteed physical delivery of gold. He immediately called Uphold CEO J.P. Thieriot who used the program to create the Universal Gold token.
“The gold is held with the Perth Mint, the largest refiner of new gold in the world,” says Thieriot. “The mint issues a gold certificate, one token equals one certificate which equals one ounce. One-to-one-to-one. When you buy the token, you’re buying gold. It’s not hypothecated, it’s not fractional. You’re buying gold.”
Thieriot hopes this appeals to paranoid gold bugs who have long wrestled with the problem that buying physical gold
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Think it's cool you can put this on a debt card and use it.
This is a way to preserve your purchasing power and being able to use it on the spot at will.
What exactly is meant by “take physical delivery”. Do I have to go to Australia if I want the gold instead of the token? You might want to look up the origin of the term “wildcat”, as in wildcat banks.
As for the crypto tokens being loaded on a debit card, since there is no price structure based on these tokens there will have to be an exchange each time a purchase is made. You are aware the IRS considers the sale of virtual currency to be the sale of an asset with income tax implications, right?
So Uphold creates a gold-backed centralized (LOLWUT) token. This is not the first such chimera. Tokenizing gold is like having a horse pulling an automobile.
I look forward to the day when gold is economically extracted from sea water or successfully mined from the Kuiper asteroid belt. Only bitcoin is provably scarce.
The government of Western Australian? Hmmm....
Keynes called it a "barbarous relic". Governments hate gold. A government gold certificate is fools gold.
No! No! and adamantly No!
Crypto gold?! No, it's not a thing!
I remember when Santo Gold was a thing.
Promises to pay are as history proved time and time again, worthless. If you do not hold it, you do not own it. The US Comex gold and silver exchange has been having historic delivery problems since March. Don’t get sucked in, default is very, very near.
I’d like to take this opportunity to announce our new crypto system:
CryptoAmmo. Available in several different denominations: 9mm, .45 ACP, 5.56X45, 7.62X39, 7.62X51 available now. Other denominations coming soon!
We store your ammo online in Secure Blockchain. Keep it Crypto so the government can’t seize it, and looters can’t steal it to use against you.
PM me for details!
Here is what the article says,
““The gold is held with the Perth Mint, the largest refiner of new gold in the world,” says Thieriot. “The mint issues a gold certificate, one token equals one certificate which equals one ounce. One-to-one-to-one. When you buy the token, you’re buying gold. It’s not hypothecated, it’s not fractional. You’re buying gold.”
Thieriot hopes this appeals to paranoid gold bugs who have long wrestled with the problem that buying physical gold is hard to do. It’s expensive to store, often incurring monthly custody fees of around 0.4%, and has traditionally been expensive to liquidate and turn into cash.”
Yes I am well aware of the IRS view of crypto. I use a program called Coin Tracker. It works with Turbo Tax. Anyhow, you set up an API key with the Exchanges you use along with your wallets, and it does all the calculations for automatically for you. It was actually recommended by Turbo Tax.
Yes there are capital gains if you make money, but at the same time there are losses too. It works both ways.
Although I think some of the coins, like XRP, will soon be considered currencies and not securities or commodities. Bitcoin and Ethereum are already considered not securities. I learned yesterday from a late 2019 publication by the new Comptroller Brian Brooks about his view on XRP. He is the guy who said last Wednesday or Thursday that banks can now custody crypto. Which the crypto/digital market has picked up since.
The tokenization is going to happen because the Feds broke the last system. Of course they will blame Covid 19 for it.
Haha!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.