Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Bill Gates Is Involved in Non-Bitcoin Digital Money
During a Q&A on Reddit Monday, Gates said his philanthropic foundation is involved in different types of efforts to enable the use of digital money for low-cost payments in poor countries. “Unlike Bitcoin it would not be anonymous digital money,” he said.
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Where are all your posts about Bitcoin today Robert? "Bitcoin makes a near full recovery","Bitcoin sturdy in the face of market site collapse","Turns out the 'glitch' was with Mt. Gox, Not Bitcoin","Bitcoin trades at 24 hour high after Gox debacle", etc
ReplyDeleteOh, you're not going to publish those are you? Color me shocked.
Um, just saw this on the ZeroHedge blog: "Bitcoin plunged another 15% or so from its bounce highs this morning as volatility has picked up dramatically in the virtual currency. The reasons are numerous: JPMorgan has come out with a scathing attack - "bitcoin looks like an innovation worth limiting exposure to;" CoinDesk reports that major exchanges are under a "massive and concerted attack" by a bot system - creating a "fog of confusion" over the system; and perhaps most critically, BitStamp has followed Mt.Gox and halted withdrawals "due to inconsistent results from their bitcoin wallet" - due to the DDoS attacks..."
DeleteNo matter what anyone thinks of Virtual payment systems-currencies, the hit piece by JP Morgan is almost comical, amounting to pure Statist-Central Bank 101 propaganda: "Unlike other asset markets, FX rarely welcomes newcomers for the simple reason that launching a widely-used currency traditionally required creating a sovereign or supra-sovereign entity with a central bank to issue the unit and manage its supply over time. Hence the audacity of bitcoin: it is a stateless, virtual and peer-to-peer currency, so exists only digitally and is associated with no sovereign, central bank or bank payments system. It is also incredibly illiquid extremely volatile and often caricatured."
TPTB and the state are alarmed and apparently trying to take action when it comes to competitive payment systems.
Back in 2007, I was an investor in a company involved in this type of technology - Net1 UEPS (NYSE: UEPS). I sold several years ago because their only client was the government of South Africa, who used their technology to distribute social security and welfare payments. They also got the (almost certainly crony) contract to do the same thing in Iraq.
ReplyDeleteThe technology basically is a credit card that doesn't require an online connection - it uses encryption to transfer funds without having to 'phone home' in real time. Instead, the transactions are uploaded to the bank's central systems some time later, perhaps at the end of the day. This is useful for countries that don't have the infrastructure to do real-time electronic payment processing.
I guess the point is, virtual payment technologies have been around for a lot longer than BitCoin, and there's plenty of other systems competing in this same space.
"Bill Gates Is Involved in Non-Bitcoin Digital Money"
ReplyDeleteSoooo, that means we can look forward to the financial blue screen of death?
[Just wonderful...]