People have been asking me, "How did you manage to score such a monumental crypto patent before all of these billion and  trillion dollar companies?". The answer is actually quite simple. I understood what crypto and blockchain were, early on.

These videos were all made in the first week of 2014 - over 7 years ago - before the birth of Ethereum!

Foresight and understanding enabled me to see what many others couldn't or didn't. That was back in 2013. Fast forward to 2021, and some of the biggest names on Wall Street still don't have a clue. This means that I still have a distinct advantage!

Reuters reports: Bitcoin is 'economic side show' and poor hedge against stocks: JP Morgan 

For one, you know there's a problem if someone is trying to value a paradigm shifting, inter-industry protocol by using its "production costs"! 

It shows a blatant misunderstanding of how platform-based, paradigm shifts behave - or even of what they are.

Let's take a look at using that logic as applied to the last protocol-based paradigm shift.

What is the "production cost" of the Internet? We can back into that by quantifying the complete operating costs of those entities that actually supply the Internet.

1. The Blended Telecomm net profit margin is 8%
2. Global broadband revenues are $395B (alternative source).
3. Thus, rough, all-in cost of production is about $363B ((199% - 8%) * $395B).

This is the Internet Protocol's applied production cost (the cost to actually use the value of the protocol in real life) - $395B.

Now, how much is the Internet worth? A common sense view...

At a glance

• The value of the internet is difficult to assess, but economists believe its services are worth much more than the cost of internet subscriptions.
• It presents a significant consumer surplus, which is the gap between how much something is worth to us and how much we pay for it.
• Deeply ingrained in society, it is almost impossible to put a monetary value on the internet.

The internet became a global commercial network in the 1990s. Less than three decades later, it is everywhere. Now that we’ve created it and come to rely on it, we inevitably wonder: what is it worth?

Well some studies say in excess of $10 trillion, others $7.8 trillion - all account for.... just the US! As the US is roughly 20% of global GDP, multiply that by 5, and.... you will find that $40 to $50 trillion is a lot more than the cost of production at $395 billion. But wait...

As excerpted from "How Much is the Internet Worth?"

... Most recently, yet more economists – this time Erik Brynjolfsson, Avanish Collis and Felix Eggers – tried yet another tack: in 2017, they asked people already on the internet whether they would give up a particular internet service in return for money.

On average, respondents said they would forgo services such as search engines for US$17,530, email for US$8414 and maps for US$3648.

This study tells us a lot about what people value most about the internet. It also gives us a figure for internet consumer surplus across the US: almost US$8 trillion a year in an economy with a US$20.5 trillion economy.

 

Source: Internet Association data from BEA.

 Indeed, a real-world example now shows what happens when you remove internet access. India’s government turned off internet access in Muslim majority Kashmir in August 2019 in a bid to reduce public protest. The effect even in this poor region was immediate: pharmacies quickly began to run out of medicine; students could not study; news about the region dried up, even within the region itself. The New York Times quoted one local as saying: “There is no life without internet, even in Kashmir.”

At this point, Greenstein says, valuing the internet is a task for which economics lacks the tools.

“It’s no longer a partial equilibrium,” he explains. Or in plainer English: “It’s not a well-grounded question anymore.”

The internet, it seems, is now too deeply ingrained in our society to be assessed with mere money.

Why am I comparing the Internet to Bitcoin? Because I truly understand what Bitcoin, distributed ledger protocols, and the crypto industry are really about. It's the underpinnings of a global value transfer network that has the real potential to easily dwarf the Internet Very much like the Internet exists as the result of its underpinnings in information transfer protocols (IP, or Internet protocol), it is a utility with unprecedented global reach and ability.

It is not a commodity, nor an investment or a security. It is much too monumental to be measured in mere materialistic, one-dimensional Wall Street parlance. Big banks, regulators, investors, the media - many have this all wrong. This is how I was able to score the patent. I knew what it was that I was patenting., while nearly everyone else was looking at price charts and thinking money remittances. Granted, that was almost 8 years ago. Fast forward to today, have the big investment houses learned their lesson?

In the meantime, JP Morgan advisory customers, with friends like these, who needs enemies???.

Now, I'm not a Bitcoin maximalist, nor do I even think that Bitcoin is the most valuable crypto, but that doesn't mean that I will just sit back and ignore the spread of misinformation! If you want to know what I'm into, then just Imagine having the keys to the internet back in 1995. Well, that's where I feel we are in 2021, with the same Luddite movement acting the role o f the naysayer! For my take, read "A Most Powerful Invention Comes to Life"

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Aa lot of crypto industry rags cheered the news that banks were given the regulatory go ahead to use stable coins and the blockchain as a transfer settlement layer. My suggestion is to be careful of what you wish for. The Office of the Comptroller of Currency (a regulatory arm of the US Treasury) released the following note: Federally Chartered Banks and Thrifts May Participate in Independent Node Verification Networks and Use Stablecoins for Payment Activities, as excerpted:

“While governments in other countries have built real-time payments systems, the United States has relied on our innovation sector to deliver real-time payments technologies. Some of those technologies are built and managed by bank consortia and some are based on independent node verification networks such as blockchains,” said Acting Comptroller of the Currency Brian P. Brooks. “The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets recently articulated a strong framework for ushering in an era of stablecoin-based financial infrastructure, identifying important risks while allowing those risks to be managed in a technology-agnostic way. Our letter removes any legal uncertainty about the authority of banks to connect to blockchains as validator nodes and thereby transact stablecoin payments on behalf of customers who are increasingly demanding the speed, efficiency, interoperability, and low cost associated with these products.”

The agency letter concludes a national bank or federal savings association may validate, store, and record payments transactions by serving as a node on an INVN. Likewise, a bank may use INVNs and related stablecoins to carry out other permissible payment activities. In deploying these technologies, a bank must comply with applicable law and safe, sound, and fair banking practices.

Engaging in INVN within the federal banking system may enhance the efficiency, effectiveness, and stability of payments activities and achieve the benefits of real-time payments already enjoyed in other countries. For example, such activities may be more resilient than other payment networks because of the decentralized nature of INVNs, which allows a comparatively large number of nodes to verify transactions in a trusted manner. An INVN also limits tampering or adding inaccurate information to the database because information is only added to the network after consensus is reached among the nodes validating the information.

that blockchains have the same status as other global financial networks, such as SWIFT, ACH, and FedWire. Sounds like good news, right? Well, yes, and no... Banks, by their very business models, are gatekeepers of capital. No one will every really have as much capital on hand to deploy as we bank. Combine that access to capital with implicit and explicit preferential rights given by regulators (we are not all invited to play the game on the same terms, let's face it) and the banks willingness to play hardball as opposed the the blochchain's genesis entrepreneurs coming from mainly an opensource mentality and you may find a recipe for disaster for the entrepreneurial blockhain/token startup. There's near guaranteed doom for the ICO funded startup, as the US regulatory environment is downright vociferous if not lethal!

That leaves self-funded and VC funded ventures - again, limited in scope and depth of creativity. Not everybody has the hook-up for capital! Then there's the open-sourced mindset of the typical blockchain developer or architect. The look at companies that attempt to place their stake in the ground and claim territory for themselves, and say, " But... Can't we all just get along???" Well, on Wall Street, the answer is... No! Or, at least it has been since I've been alive. You have to be part of the old boys club, and that club ain't very big, and even more to the point, it ain't offered to just any or everyone.

So, with that preamble, we have a bunch of the crypto pioneers who came up with many great ideas, yet failed to protect them. Then we came up with banks who took these ideas, and did very little to build upon them, yet stand quite likely to capitalize on them. Let's take Wells Fargo, who apparently has patented the cryptocurrency exchange, and done so right under the nose of the industry. If this is the case, all of you Stellar, Tether, USDC and other USD stable coin aficionados might need to site down and hold on tight. The rug may be snatched from under you. 

Wells Fargo patent number: US10565645B1 United States - 

Systems and methods for operating a math-based currency exchange

Bloomberg reports: Dodd-Frank’s Tentacles Go Deep. They Won’t Be Cut Fast or Easily. It took seven years to put these regulations in place. Is it rational to think they can be removed in less than 4? If not, then the financial's rally may be a tad bit premature and overdone.

Donald Trump is ensuring that financial professionals are no longer legally obligated to put their client’s best interests first by eliminating the Department of Labor's Fiduciary Rule that was to come into effect this April, enacted by the Obama administration. 

I have warned my readers about following myths and legends versus reality and facts several times in the past, particularly as it applies to Goldman Sachs and what I have coined "Name Brand Investing". Very recent developments from Senator Kaufman of Delaware will be putting the spit-shined patina of Wall Street's most powerful bank to the test. Here is a link to the speech that the esteemed Senator from Delaware (yes, the most corporate friendly state in this country). A few excerpts to liven up your morning...

Mr. President, last Thursday, the bankruptcy examiner for Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. released a 2,200 page report about the demise of the firm which included riveting detail on the firm’s accounting practices.  That report has put in sharp relief what many of us have expected all along:  that fraud and potential criminal conduct were at the heart of the financial crisis.

...  Only further investigation will determine whether the individuals involved can be indicted and convicted of criminal wrongdoing.

I have warned my readers about following myths and legends versus reality and facts several times in the past, particularly as it applies to Goldman Sachs and what I have coined "Name Brand Investing". Very recent developments from Senator Kaufman of Delaware will be putting the spit-shined patina of Wall Street's most powerful bank to the test. Here is a link to the speech that the esteemed Senator from Delaware (yes, the most corporate friendly state in this country). A few excerpts to liven up your morning...

Mr. President, last Thursday, the bankruptcy examiner for Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. released a 2,200 page report about the demise of the firm which included riveting detail on the firm’s accounting practices.  That report has put in sharp relief what many of us have expected all along:  that fraud and potential criminal conduct were at the heart of the financial crisis.

...  Only further investigation will determine whether the individuals involved can be indicted and convicted of criminal wrongdoing.