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.

With all of the brouhaha over Bitcoin and the downright irresponsible reporting by the mass media, I've decided to reveal the progress of my "UltraCoin: The Future of Money!!!" venture. What you see in the next few paragraphs should elucidate even the most blinded to the prospects and potential of the Bitcoin protocol and why I've always said that the price of the actual cryptocurrency is absolutely irrelevant (much as the price of AOL was highly irrelevant to the prospects of the Internet in 1993).

 I know I said the MSM has simply butchered accurate coverage of Bitcoin, but this piece in Fortune Magazine was right on the money: 

 "[UltraCoin] is a shot directly across the bow of the financial industry. Still in early development, BTC Swap is planned to facilitate a variety of what Middleton calls "Zero-Trust Digital Contracts," which recreate financial functions in software code by matching offered and desired transactions between parties without the need for intermediary institutions. Because these contracts are automated, instantaneous, and executed with assets already represented in the Bitcoin blockchain, Middleton says they eliminate counterparty risk while also subtracting conventional banking and brokerage fees.

The most immediate function Middleton envisions for his system is for hedging bitcoin against existing national currencies. With bitcoin's valuation still showing huge volatility, Middleton claims the availability of distributed hedging will both ensure the value of bitcoin for individuals holding the asset and provide systemic stability. (Given persistent skepticism, there should be plenty of takers to short bitcoin against the dollar.) And the entire system relies on decentralization for its security and integrity: "My contracts are peer-to-peer," says Middleton. "If you hack my servers, there's nothing to get."

Find it hard to believe? Even children can do it...

So, how does this work? Well, let's start from the beginning.

The vast majority of the world does their spending out of a wallet like this, or using currency-like instruments such as these (both physical and digital) contained in the wallet. The problem is all of these devices are "dumb" and rely on central authority figures (government, servers, banks, etc.). So...

Along comes Bitcoin with its decentralized currency that solves many of these issues. Bitcoin is also kept in wallets, like these...

These Bitcoin wallets give you considerably more freedom with your money, sending it faster, cheaper and with more privacy than the conventional wallet above. Of course, the typical Bitcoin wallet hasn't even scratched the surface of what's possible with this new technology. As a matter of fact, the tech is so over-encompassing and transformative that the mass media and even much of the specialized media simply CANNOT wrap their minds around what's about to happen to the worlds of money, finance and investment!

I've taken a radical step with this tech that makes even the newest Bitcoin wallets look old hat in comparison. What makes UltraCoin different from everything else?

So, what is UltraCoin?

Unlike Bitcoin wallets, it allows you to literally take control of both your money and gain exposure to financial assets such as stocks, bonds, forex, options, futures, oil, gas, commodities and precious metals. 

You can even design your own "smart contracts" directly within the wallet itself.

This stuff above is a pretty big difference from... this, eh?

And that's how we come round robin back to that first graphic with my kids trading currency exposures.

Of course, Wall Street is fearful. Why shouldn't they be? If the public realized the extent of the middleman markup they pack into otherwise low value-add services and product margin, there would be a mass revolt. When you create these products and services on a peer to peer basis, it's extremely hard to overcharge to the extent a recent MBA recipient with little to no real world experience can recieve 7 or 8 digit compensation. Don't believe me and my proclamations of fear? Witness the drivel that comes out of the the analyst's reports:

Theres' Something Fishy In The House Of Morgan, Pt. 2: Bitcoin Fear, Envy & Loathing

Does the Mainstream Media Assist Wall Street In Hypocritical Hypothesis For Fear Of The Next Paradigm Shift?

I'm looking for:

1. Financial Capital
2. Intellectual Capital
3. Active and prolific traders to help beta test my wallets. 

If you are or know of any of the above, hit me up with a link to your LinkedIn and/or Wikipedia profile via reggie AT ultra-coin.com. You can also join me to trade live Bitcoin and currency exposures at 40 Broad Street, Friday at 6 pm if you wish. Equities, Silver and Gold exposures will be available next week and possibly by Friday as well. 

This is a very educational show put on by Kim Greenhouse of "It's Rainmaking Time". She is one of the very few who eschew the soundbite driven media economy and chooses the long format, deep dive approach. While it may be too long for ADD crowd, it digs deep into a not so simple subject to foster understanding and comprehension. This was a pretty good show with an interesting cast of guests:

• Reggie Middleton - brash blogger, entrepenurial investor and founder of UltraCoin ZeroTrust financial contracts
• RootEleven founder, visionary, and Bitcoin programmer Andreas Antonopolous, who will explain why Bitcoin is like "the internet for money".
• Bitcoin trader and programmer Dave Scotese will provide deep thinking about what makes Bitcoin so important, and why the public should be involved in its development.
• Sam Guzik, one of the most sophisticated and knowledgeable SEC lawyers regarding crowdfunding and investment, will cut through the hype, misinformation, and wrong perceptions surrounding equity crowdfunding to highlight current SEC conditions and real opportunities in the crowdfunding arena.

This show is over an hour and a half long and I don't want the contet to be avoided simply because of its length, so I have included a hyperlinked menu below to assist in navigating to the topcis of your individual interests.

• 3:59 - The discussion starts
• 11:20 - The future of Bitcoin
• 13:14 - The distributed blockchain
• 14:15 - Hacking Bitcoin, the $10 billion bounty!
• 16:15 - Reggie Middleton's ZeroTrust contracts
• 21:50 - Winkelvoss bros., Bitcoin ETFs, institutiona investor participation in cryptocurrencies24:13 - The SEC's potential perspective27:10 - Who is Satoshi Nakamoto and is he really DARPA in disquise?
• 28:45 - Arbitrage opportunities
• 30:39 - Does Moore's Law apply to cryptocurrencies?
• 31:59 - Privacy vs Anonymity in Bitcoin
• 36:29 Q&A - How do you get bitcoin and who get's paid?
• 39:30 More about ZeroTrust contracts, what happens when contractual conditions are not met?
• 42:17 - Is Bitcoin really unhackable?
• 46:33 - How to hack Bitcoin? Well, the US dollar has been hacked several times with bail-ins, QE that turns your money into worthless paper, etc.
• 48:35 Is Bitcoin a speculative bubble? And a direct challenge to Peter Schiff!!!
• 53:52 Crowdfunding for equity, how to, why and when?

Bloomberg reports Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, Britain’s biggest government-owned lender, is on track for its largest pretax loss since 2008 after setting aside 3.1 billion pounds more ($5.1 billion) for legal and compensation claims. We will delve into this report in detail, but first a little background so we're all viewing 20/20.

I've been spending a lot of time rebuilding the banking system as software over a cryptocurrency framework. Basically, I'm building a more efficient, more "Trustworthy" financial system. Many are doubtful of these endeavors. I say, don't underestimate the effort. For one, a more efficient, more trustworthy system is sorely needed. Here we are, 7 years after the start of the great financial trainwreck that I'm known for predicting, and I'm still at it doing the same thing to the same industry. This is only possible when there's a structural problem in the industry. A problem that rapid advancements in technology are ripe to solve.

On Thursday, 11 April 2013 I penned, I Illustrate How The Irish Banking Cancer Spreads To The UK Taxpayer And Metastasizes Through US Markets! wherein I clearly illustrated that RBS is materially understating its liabilities AND even went so far as to include links to the SEC and the UK banking regulator so that US/UK taxpayers and investors can notify our erstwhile regulator(s) to the potential of financial shenanigans. The root of the problem is that RBS has materially under-reported its liabilities (in my oh so humble opinion.) Those that stress tested RBS (the same erstwhile professionals that allowed the Irish banks to pass their stress tests 3 months before they started collapsing) apparently overlooked humongous swaths of liabilities. 

The amount of evidence that I produced to back my claims was prodigous...

What happened behind closed doors?

Ulster Bank gave a first floating charge in favor of the Central Bank of Ireland (an arm of the European Central Bank) and the Financial Services Authority of Ireland. U.S. investors would have had to rely on the contents of The Royal Bank of Scotland's 2008 Annual Accounts which apparently (in my opinion) concealed the existence of the CRO registered charges to the Bank of Ireland.

Now, back to the Bloomberg article...

The provision includes 1.9 billion pounds for lawsuits and fines tied mostly to the sale of $91 billion of mortgage-backed securities from 2005 to 2007, the lender said yesterday. It follows agreements Deutsche Bank AG, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and UBS AG (UBSN) struck with U.S. regulators to settle claims they didn’t provide adequate disclosure about mortgage-backed debt sold in the housing bubble that preceded the 2008 financial crisis.

Are they referring to claims similar to the ones I made that RBS  bought Ulster Bank full of unrecognized mortgage crap, levered up off it and hid the debt? I strongly suggest my readers brush up on how The Irish Banking Cancer Spreads to the UK.

More than five years after giving RBS the biggest bank bailout in history, the government still hasn’t been able to cut its 80 percent stake.

... “When the crisis broke, the bank was involved in a number of different businesses in multiple countries that have subsequently faced heavy scrutiny by customers and regulators,” McEwan, 56, said in yesterday’s statement. “The scale of the bad decisions during that period means that some problems are still just emerging.”

... The charges led the bank to cut its forecast for its core Tier 1 capital ratio, a measure of financial strength. RBS expects the ratio will be about 11 percent at the end of 2013, or as much as 8.5 percent under the latest rules set by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. That’s down from the company’s estimate of 11.6 percent and 9.1 percent in November.

“Fronting up to our past mistakes is very expensive, but RBS is a much stronger bank that can deal with these costs on its own while running a good capital position,” McEwan said on the call. “Dealing with these litigation and conduct issues is essential if we are to move the bank forward.”

Well, I still haven't noticed them come clean on the Ulster Bank charge issue. If they really are going to "Front[ing] up... past mistakes" then they really need to address this, no? If the Ulster Bank charges are included in the Basel capitalization guidelines, then RBS needs a bailout, and needs one Now! It doesn't end their though. On Monday, 20 May 2013 I queried Who is RBS? Royal BS... or the Royal Bank of Scotland, to wit:

"An independent Scotland would have an exceptionally large banking sector compared to the size of its economy - with banking assets of more than 1250 percent of Scottish [gross domestic product] - making it more vulnerable to financial shocks and the volatility of the sector," the Treasury report said on Monday.

The report pointed out Scotland's banking exposure would dwarf that of Iceland and Cyprus, two countries that faced severe banking collapses in recent years. Iceland's banks, for example, had assets equivalent to 880 per cent of GDP, while Cyprus, which faced a banking crisis in March, had total banking assets of around 700 per cent of GDP.

The report as cited by the article then goes on to make more direct comparisons to Cyprus, not unlike I did two months ago, but with Ireland (see As Forewarned, The Irish Savers Have Just Been "Cyprus'd", And There's MUCH MORE "Cyprusing" To Come). 

"At the end of September 2012, the two largest banks – the Cyprus Popular Bank and Bank of Cyprus – had assets in the region of 210 per cent and 175 per cent of Cyprus's GDP respectively."

"It is worth noting that, if Scotland became independent, its banking sector would be similarly concentrated (with two large players, Bank of Scotland and Royal Bank of Scotland and a number of smaller firms), and that an independent Scotland's domestic banking sector would be likely to be significantly larger than that of Cyprus (assuming no change to firms' domicile arrangements)."

I penned, I Illustrate How The Irish Banking Cancer Spreads To The UK Taxpayer And Metastasizes Through US Markets! wherein I clearly illustrated that RBS is materially understating its liabilities AND even went so far as to include links to the SEC and the UK banking regulator so that US/UK taxpayers and investors can notify our erstwhile regulator(s) to the potential of financial shenanigans. The root of the problem is that RBS has materially under-reported its liabilities (in my oh so humble opinion.) Those that stress tested RBS (the same erstwhile professionals that allowed the Irish banks to pass their stress tests 3 months before they started collapsing) apparently overlooked humongous swaths of liabilities. The charge documents referred to in the aforelinked article are definitively not apparent in the recent bank stress testing’ conducted by the European Banking Authority, at least not in the summary results that the EBA have made available. For those who are still skeptical, I beg thee reference the RBS Stress Test download.

To think, there are actually many who query as to why I seek to make a more efficient financial system...

With the latest advances in technology, I can literally replace large swaths of bank functions with software. Software that doesn't lie, cheat, steal, or screw you for a bonus! Zero Trust software...

If the RBS/Ulster Bank mortgage-backed secutities would have been traded through UltraCoin, rehyppthecation, double-spending, over-leverage, and thrice pledged assets would have been a thing of the past. These contracts are overollateralized (200%) and use no leverage, yet still hold the promise of significant return, not to mention a mere fraction of the cost of the big bank stuff. Will the dawn of this technology herald the end of fractional reserve banking as we know it?

Let it be known, Wall Street banks' profit margin IS my business model!!!

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