Displaying items by tag: Currencies

On or about February 23rd, 2014, Mt. Gox (on of the larger bitcoin exchanges) collapsed. The MSM (mainstream media) had a field day...

I warned everybody that the fall of Mt. Gox was simply a poorly managed small business getting its just dues. To correlate the fortunes of Mt. Gox with the fortunes of the Bitcoin ecosystem is akin correlating the fortune of the World Wide Web with that of Pets.com or Alta Vista in the 1990s. Sounds silly doesn't it? Well, fast forward 3 weeks from the Gox'd experience and this is what we find... The week after the media frenzy regarding Mt. Gox started to fade, the price of BTC (bitcoins) started a dramatic phase of price stabilization. This apparent price stabilization was verified by the very dramatic drop in standard deviation.

If we drill down to the weeks in question, we find... 

This price stabilization has occurred even before the wide scale adoption of UltraCoin. 

As always, I'm looking for:

1. financial capital
2. intellectual capital
3. developers, management and sales/marketing expertise.

If you have any of this in abundance, hit me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Eliminate the bitcoin volatility risk with BitPay's guaranteed exchange rates. ... Import your BitPay sales into QuickBooks, to report and reconcile your bitcoin  ...

In addition, there are cutting edge products being introduced by tall, handsome, charsimatic and highly intelligent entrepeneurs who have a long track record of out gunning Goldman et. al. that allow anyone to hedge Bitcoin volatlity against any prominent fiat currency.

Back to those Goldman guys...

Wilson and Ursua include this graph showing volatility of Bitcoin versus the Argentine peso, the yen, the euro, the pound, and U.S. inflation. It's not even close. 

But wait a minute! If the largest payment processors absorb the volatility and market risk of their customers, then Goldman must assuredly be referring to the currencies above from an investment perspective, no?

Yes! Bitcoin is truly volatile, indeed, but the guy at Goldman are cheating, hoping that the rest of us don't know our finance and/or basic common sense. You see, they are looking at just one side of the equation - the side that favors fiat currencies and disfavors bitcoin. You see, risk is the price of reward. For every reward you seek, you pay a price in risk. The goal, as a smart investor, is to pay little risk for much reward. Goldman is trying to make it appear as if you are paying nothing but risk for bitcoin and getting little reward in return. Let's see how that pans out when someone who knows what they're doing chimes in. From the BoomBustBlogresearch report  Digital Currencies' Risks, Rewards & Returns - An Into Into Bitcoin Investing For Longer Term Horizons:

You see, with high volatility (aka, risk), it's hard to earn your cost of capital, not to menton surpass it. Isn't that right, employess of Goldman Sachs? Let me jog your collective memories, as excerpted from the BoomBustBlog post on When the Patina Fades… The Rise and Fall of Goldman Sachs???

GS return on equity has declined substantially due to deleverage and is only marginally higher than its current cost of capital. With ROE down to c12% from c20% during pre-crisis levels, there is no way a stock with high beta as GS could justify adequate returns to cover the inherent risk. For GS to trade back at 200 it has to increase its leverage back to pre-crisis levels to assume ROE of 20%. And for that GS has to either increase its leverage back to 25x. With curbs on banks leverage this seems highly unlikely. Without any increase in leverage and ROE, the stock would only marginally cover returns to shareholders given that ROE is c12%. Even based on consensus estimates the stock should trade at about where it is trading right now, leaving no upside potential. Using BoomBustBlog estimates, the valuation drops considerably since we take into consideration a decrease in trading revenue or an increase in the cost of funding in combination with a limitation of leverage due to the impending global regulation coming down the pike.

 Now that we see how hard it is to truly produce Alpha, I query thee... What do you think would happen if a financial maverick, an out of the box thinker who's different from all of those other guys, got a seed round of funding for the most disruptive product to hit the finance world since the printing press? What if that seed round was for $8 million dollars, with a preferred A series coming right behind it? What would such a cash flush company do, being one of the most cash flush Bitcoin companies in the world? Hmmmnnn!!!

Speakin' of Goldman Sachs...

I anticipate being in the market very soon for (I'm not thier yet, but hopefully very soon):

CTO - Chief Technology Officer

COO - Chief Opertating Officer

General Counsel

CMO - Chief Marketing Officer 

CFO - Chief Financial Officer

As well as skilled Java and Blockchain developers.

Hit me via reggie at ultra-coin.com if you have an interest in coming on board.

Here is the next segment in the presentations given at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami Beach.

My Twitter followers know that I attended the North American Bitcoin Conference in S. Beach Miami last weekend. Here are some keepsakes from the visit as well as a video answer to the new media pop financial pundit, Peter Schiff's assetion that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value.

The proprietors of a Bitcoin ATM, due to appear in the states next month.

Bitcoin is highly volatile. It also experienced astonomical returns. That we all know. What I wanted to know was the true source of those returns. Some say it's speculation, some say is fundamentally derived. Most say things they have no business saying. I believe it's fair to say that bitcoin adoption will increase, and increase rapidly. It makes sense to believe said adoption will increase bitcoin's price. It's interesting in that history doesn't necessarily support that assumption though, as trading volume and daily returns have a low (or sometimes even negative) correlation.

I believe I have amassed one of the biggest libraries of bitcoin investment and financial data available in a very short period of time. I will start distributing this data via forensic reports to all paying subscribers as of tomorrow. Professional and Institutional subscribers will recieve some very, very advanced trading strategies that I have discovered that appear to still be making some pretty big short term returns as well. They are not simple, they proffer more than a little risk, but they are capable of some very material returns.

On a different front, it is also widely known that bitocoin's high volatility hampers its use by many would be vendors and institutions. I have created a solution, which I have illustrated in the following video - a brief demo of the early code of our Zero Trust Currency Contracts and an explanation of what they do.

Those who are interested in getting in on our closed beta, please email me at reggie at boombustblog dot com. Paid subscribers to my blog (click here to subscribe) get first crack, then those who are influential in the business, corporate finance guys, etc. and/or the high net worth crowd. I'm trying hard to get the beta rolled out today, but you know how this software development stuff goes. As of now, we're right on schedule for a beta release last week. :-)

Although this is a mere introduction, paying subscribers can catch a preview with  Digital Currencies' Risks, Rewards & Returns - An Into Into Bitcoin Investing For Longer Term Horizons

Note: New subscriber content available below.

I have created derivatives for Bitcoin that work exclusively on the Bitcoin network. They are capable of literally replacing the role of the large money center and investment banks. YES! This is a big thing. I will hopefully have a limited use beta example of the first product for the viewers of the show to experiment with. These products have been designed as zero trust contracts (meaning it was designed to eliminate the human judgment factor, thereby nearly completely automating the entire transaction). Currently, trust issues that the conventional OTC banking system products incur severely hamper free flowing capital markets. Greed begets inefficiencies. Digital zero trust contracts (as opposed to physical legal contracts) “theoretically” eliminate litigation and court involvement and expensive dispute resolution through means of the legal system. My BoomBust contracts allows anonymous parties to swap exposure in and out of Bitcoin from many widely traded currencies. (USD, EUR, YEN, CNY, etc.).

The state of the capitalist union today is ripe for Bitcoin activity to explode if knowledge of the platform spreads. Just to list a few catalysts:

1. The lack of trust in the world’s reserve currency, the USD.
2. The financial controls in the world’s most populous nations, India and China.
3. The Pan-European sovereign debt crisis
4. The confiscation of bank deposits in Cyprus (EU Bank Depositors: Your Mattress Is Starting To Look Awfully Attractive - Bank Risk, Reward & Compensation) and Ireland (As Forewarned, Irish Savers Have Just Been "Cyprus'd", And There's MUCH MORE "Cyprusing" To Come) and eventually anywhere banks are overleveraged and/or undercapitalized.
5. The billions of the great “unbanked” of the world, in both 3^rd world nations and even in the most developed nations on earth, ex. right here in the US.
6. The paltry returns on loans and bank deposits as well as the unsubstantiated bubble returns on risk assets – all stemming from the Fed’s unprecedented 6 year global ZIRP real time experiment. I commented on this back in 2008 (A real life, real time example of the Great Global Macro Experiment)and it’s still running strong.

Possible uses for the BoomBust contracts:

Simple investment/speculation

Those who want to gain exposure to a foreign or digital currency can easily enter into a swap to gain said exposure without actually having to purchase said currency (other than BTC, of course).

Hedging

The swap can be used as a simple hedge for any party that has large exposure to BTC, USD, EUR, etc., such as a retailer with low margins and high volume, ex. Chinese widget manufacturer or smartphone OEM, that accepts bitcoin but wants to hedge out the volatility and market risk. The BoomBust contracts can be layered, levered and/or compounded to make more complex hedges as well.

Capital flight/mobility & Banking System Bail-in protection

Parties who are domiciled in free flowing capital hostile states that have tight capital controls, ex. China, India, and now France with its 75% effective wealth confiscation scheme, etc. that have banned or limited BTC trading by banks and/or individuals can take advantage of the BoomBust contracts to gain multi-currency exposure without explicitly violating the law. Take note that the systems with the tightest capital controls have been the one’s exhibiting the most aggressive stance to bitcoin. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to understand what Bitcoin is and what it can do. I stand to educate the masses. See below…

Cyprus banks closed on a Friday and announced confiscation of assets over the weekend. These BoomBust contracts could have been used to move monetary value outside of the Cyprus banking system assuming the participants had a store of Bitcoin (it is rumored that this is how some of the Russian money was removed over the weekend). Let’s assume a small businessman would like to purchase $1M euro worth of bitcoin, yet is concerned that the BTC volatility may cause more of a loss than the Cypriot capital controls. He buys the BTC then hedges his large BTC position into EUR. He proceeds to do that with a quarter of his monthly cashflows, building up a sizeable, fully hedged position in cyberspace (thus, effectively offshore) and outside of the fragile Cyprus banking system. The Cyprus banks pull the trigger to confiscate funds and the Russian bank depositor has significant funds mobile and ready to deliver anywhere in the internet connected world within minutes, even on a Sunday afternoon.

Another example of dealing with a company with tight capital controls would be India. India has extremely tight capital controls that have (IMHO) hampered its economic progress relative to China, despite having similar populations and the advantage of a large indigenous English speaking population stemming from British occupation (easier to do business with the larger capitalist nations when more of your constituents speaks the native tongue).

India has effectively outlawed trading in bitcoin, but Indians can still participate in the evolution of money by taking advantage of the liberalised remittances scheme of the Central Bank of India, a person can remit up to 75,000 USD offshore annually. These monies can end up in a Bitcoin friendly jurisdiction (amazingly enough, like the US), and be used to purchase BTC hedged, via BoomBust contracts, back into rupees or the currency of choice.

This can also work the other way around, which would actually be quite advantageous to the Indian government and potentially make them rethink the real world practicality of capital controls. Even in a country that has capital controls and fears Bitcoin may threaten its banks, a decentralized near friction free currency exchange would be beneficial solely do to international remittances from expats in foreign workers. A real world example are Indians that I know who lose significant money because of PayPal and Western Union fees (not to mention bank wire fees). Indians can send BoomBust digital contract rupee locked BTC home on a deferred basis. The registered exchange or ATM in India however could only be one-way so that it only accepts BTC from the Indian general public in exchange for rupees and not the other way around.

Spread Arbitrage

On Dec 13^th, the EUR/USD exchange rate was roughly .78x, thus if one were to have sold 1 BTC into EUR than purchased USD, a $10.66 spread could have been realized over buying the USD with EUR directly.

Notice the differences in prices throughout the SAME MARKETS, contingent upon exchange.

I am happy to discuss this with institutional and professional subscribers whenever possible.

All paying subscribers (click here to subscribe) can download this introduction to our institutional level report on investing in cryptocurrencies:  Digital Currencies' Risks, Rewards & Returns - An Into Into Bitcoin Investing For Longer Term Horizon. There will be much more to follow in the upcoming days. Below is the brief summary as how we have computed the following ratios:

Excess Risk Adjusted Return

Excess Risk Adjusted Return is defined as returns over and above the required return on asset based on its risk characteristics. BITCOIN being a very volatile asset, the required return of the currency has been computed using the CAPM (Capital Asset Pricing Model) approach. CAPM equation requires a variable known as Return on Market Portfolio (a portfolio comprising of all risky assets, conventional as well as alternative assets like antiques, currencies, private equity investments, etc.). For equity investments, general Market Index shall suffice but in our case the investment is altogether different (Digital Currency) and the conventional market index will be a bad proxy. Best Proxy in our case shall be a diversified Currency Portfolio – comprising all global as well as digital currencies. As such there exists no known proxy/Index consisting all Currencies, We have approximated it by using MSCI – EM Currency Index. The Index comprises a basket of 25 emerging market currencies. 

Excess Risk Adjusted Return = (Return on Asset) – (Required Return on asset based on its risk characteristics)

Return on Asset (Ra) = Return on B ITCOIN for different periods like 3M, 6M 12M, etc.

Required Return on Asset = RFR + β * (Rm – Ra)

RFR = Current US I year Treasury Yield

Beta = Covariance of (Returns on Asset & Returns on comparable Index) divided by Variance of (Index Returns)

Rm = Long term return on comparable Index, (in our case which is the Currency Index return comprising 25 Emerging Market currencies)

What's so eery is that now even Ben Bernanke and I actually agree upon something... 

“Digital currencies may hold long-term promise, particularly if the innovations promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system._” 

US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke

So, what is money? According to Wikipedia: 

Money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given socio-economic context or country. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past, a standard of deferred payment. Any kind of object or secure verifiable record that fulfills these functions can be considered money.

When currency is stable, money can serve all four of the functions above. Things get trickier when currencies are not stable. If we were all to be honest with ourselves, we'd have to query, "What fiat currency is truly stable over time?".

When unstable currencies or engineered forms of financial capital are brought into play the fourth aspect of defined money (and the least addressed) gains significantly in importance. Here we must differentiate and distinguish between true capital (economic capital) which comprises physical goods that explicitly and directly assist in the production of other goods and services, e.g. hammers for carpenters, paintbrushes for painters, wrenches for plumbers, tooling for factories, etc., and financial capital. Financial capital is funds provided by lenders and/or investors to businesses and entrepeneurs to purchase economic capital (ie.equipment) for producing real goods and services.

To explain why the 4th aspect of money's definition is important, yet often and in my opinion purposely ignored, let's examine the three concepts of capital maintenance in terms of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS): (1) Physical capital maintenance (2) Financial capital maintenance in nominal monetary units (3) Financial capital maintenance in units of constant purchasing power.

1. Physical (economic) capital - We have covered already.
2. Financial capital in monetary units is best described as basic accounting. It's how most financial reporting is done in the states (and in Europe). It fails to take into consideration the constant destruction of value of the fiat currencies, an aspect of the definition of money that is a foundation of money itself!
3. Financial capital measured in constant purchasing power - something that effectively never happens. It is the "Real" value of money, adjusted for destructive aspects, ex. inflation, particularly purposeful inflation brought upon by a banking system that attempts to adjust and control the prices of goods and services for its own end (as opposed to the end that will benefit the masses) through the artificial manipulation of the value of the means of exchange, the currency.

Financial capital is provided by lenders for a price, commonly known as interest. This  price to attain financial capital is not the only cost though, for the price of the financial capital provided by lenders through things such as debt does not take into account the cost of currency maintenance destruction, or the purposeful manipulation of the currency value by the lender or lending system to which the lender belongs to to further its own means. This is why the prudent may wish to identify a single standard of deferred payment to avoid purposeful manipulation (otherwise known as cheating) by transacting in a denominator of debt that the participant believes to be dropping in value, ie. fiat currency!

Relation to debt-based society

A debt in any form is essentially a deferred payment. The fourth definintion of money, standard of deferred payment,  is usually what the debts are denominated in. The value of any and all money – including the most liquid and deep, ex. dollars or euros, or the oldest and revered, ex. gold and silver, or the newest and least understood, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies – may fluctuate over time via inflation and deflation and often through direct manipulation and unforeseen results that stem from the same. The value of deferred payments (the real level of debt) likewise fluctuates.

Money, as Leading Economists Such As Paul Krugman Appear To Know It, Is Obsolete - There's a New Sheriff In Town

The definitions of money mentioned above are predicated upon the assumption that money must be dumb! What I mean by this is that money was defined in a time when the store of value was an inanimante object designed to represent a simple binary concept of buy or sell, that had no abilities other than to look or appear as if it had the value believingly bestowed upon it by society - or at least two of the participants in a particular transaction. What if money in this digital day and age was smart? What if money was able to do things besides just sit there and be called money?

Here's an example...

Historically, and up until now, deferred payment was/is based on enforceability of debts and rule of law. The rule of law, particularly engagement within the legal system is destructively expensive, time consuming and essentially the antithesis of friction free commerce, ex. capitalism. The rule of law is generally not relied upon when debts are unlikely to be collectable. For illegal transactions, or for low or zero trust transactions, gold or diamonds may be preferred as the medium of exchange and in those circumstaces there is no recourse in case of counterfeit currency (bogus, bank peddeled Mortgage Backed Securities, fake US dollars, etc.) is being used. — and there is rarely any deferral of payment: if there is, it will most likely be stated in dollars - which brings us back to where we started.

What if currency was smart enough to act upon a predetermined set of parameters, even after being released to the payee? What if trust never had to be a factor in negotiation fo payment, even in a negative trust environment? What if the highly ineffecient legal system could be wholly avoided in the risk/reward calculation of a monetary transaction? Would the existence of this possibility, in essence, demand a 5th definition for money - intelligence and/or malleability? You see, the cryptographic digital currencies are smart as compared to the dumb dollar or euro, or yen or yuan! It is this intelligent ability to control money during a transaction and even post transaction, the abilty to instruct money to disburse iteslf only open mutual agreement by all parties present, that appears to elude the prominent MSM economists of today. 

Furthermore, dumb money as purely fiat is truly without physical value or utility value as a physical or digital commodity. It derives its value by being declared by a government to be legal tender; that is, it must be accepted as a form of payment within the boundaries of the country, for all debts, public and private - including taxes, where in the US, it is the only currency accepted. Laws in place such as these essentially imbue fiat money with the value of any of the goods and services that it may be traded for within the nation that issues it. The fact remains though, the value of fiat money is held in belief and belief only, enforced by the whims of government. With this being the case, there is no true utility argument to be made for fiat currencies, including the USD.

Digital cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, however, have an implicit edge on the fiat currencies in that its utility (or use value) is dramatically leveraged as compared to fiat because it comes part and parcel with its own, virtually unassailable transmission system. In essence, this means that if Bitcoin, the USD and the EUR were cars, BTC would be the only one that comes with its own international roads open 24/7 that were able to bypass all of the toll roads and bridges, everywhere there was an Internet connection - not to mention power itself with a virtual fuel that was limitless and had no costs. Now, if one were to think of it, such an aspect is so valuable and useful (as in utilitarian) that not only does it qualify for significant use value, but in the very near future one could wonder how the world ever got along without it. Does this mean that a sixth aspect of the definition of money needs to be added - autonomous transferability!

This is why I say there's a new sheriff in town and the old schoolers whose eyes are not yet open should recognize that the future of money is here!

According to famed economist and NY Times pundit Paul Krugman, "To be successful, money must be both a medium of exchange and a reasonably stable store of value. And it remains completely unclear why BitCoin should be a stable store of value."

I counter these widely believed assumptions with the fact that the USD, the world's reserve currency, has not been a stable store of value. As a matter of fact, from its underpinnings (as described in the BoomBustBlog link below) and throughout its history, the dollar has consistently lost its value over time to inflation. Thus, as per Krugman, the USD is not successful!

As per Wikipedia:

To be widely acceptable, a medium of exchange should have stable purchasing power (Value) and therefore it should possess the following characteristics:

1. Value common assets
2. Constant utility [I have explained the constant utility of Bitcoin above, a utility which trumps the relatively dumb dollar]
3. Low cost of preservation [the cost of preservation is a fraction of that of the dollar, with constant reprinting of physical dollars and coins and the power, machinery and labor required to do so; as well as the recircutlation of those new bills, not to mention the destrcution of the old bills]
4. Transportability [This is moderately difficult with large amounts of physical bills, but much easier with the digital manifestation of those physical bills that most institutions deal with. The mere existence of the banks as necessary intermediaries and middlemen add signficant, and in this day and age of P2P technology, unnecessary costs and frictions and rules. This hampers portability significantly - no transfers on weekends and bank holidays, no low margin business models due to artificially high transaction costs, big up Visa, Mastercard and Paypal!)
5. Divisibility
6. High market value in relation to volume and weight [Bitcoin can't be beat in this regard]
7. Recognisability
8. Resistance to counterfeiting [A currency based on cryptography, need I say more?!]

As quoted from the Wikpedia link above:

"fiat money is the root cause of the continuum of economic crises, since it leads to the dominance of fraud, corruption, and manipulation precisely because it does not satisfy the criteria for a medium of exchange cited above. Specifically, prevailing fiat money is free float and depending upon its supply market finds or sets a value to it that continues to change as the supply of money is changed with respect to the economy's demand. Increasing free floating money supply with respect to needs of the economy reduces the quantity of the basket of the goods and services to which it is linked by the market and that provides it purchasing power. Thus it is not a unit or standard measure of wealth and its manipulation impedes the market mechanism by that it sets/determine just prices. That leads us to a situation where no value-related economic data is just or reliable.^[3][4]" 

I will continue this missive in part 2 of the series wherein I will announce my efforts in bringing the beneftis of smart money to light. I'm sure these concepts and products will blow your socks off, even if you are an old school economist! For those who don't follow me, this is who I am. - Who is Reggie Middleton? I believe track record speaks louder than Op-Ed columns, degrees or TV show appearances. Let me know if you agree...