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  • Millennials Are Obsessed with Cryptoassets

    Posted on by Azrael 2 Comments

    Millennials Are Obsessed with Cryptoassets

    Now, this is revealing. The New York Times ran a piece on Bitcoin with this sentence: “from less than a cent in early 2010 to around $2,600 currently.” The problem is that when the story went live, the price was actually $3,400.” An editor didn’t think to check it, because he or she didn’t know to do so.

    This is how quickly these markets are moving. Not even the people assigned to be experts know enough to do a competent edit.

    And this is precisely why so many of us are constantly intrigued by these markets.

    Cryptofriends 

    Last week, when the NYT story was being filed, I was sitting at the national convention of the Young Americans for Liberty, feeling a vague sense of discomfort for one ridiculous reason. It had been a full day since I had talked with anyone about cryptoassets. So I grabbed the nearest dude and threw out a couple of observations. He lit up. He could talk ICOs, trading platforms, obscure coins and services, with the best of them. Soon others arrived. Then more. Pretty soon we had a big crowd, all talking and thinking about these bizarre new ways to invest.

    Pretty interesting. I could never have assembled such a posse of group discussion if I had been talking about bank stocks and the S&P 500. Too boring. The crypto market, on the other hand, is incredibly interesting, lucrative, changing and wildly dynamic. Yes, many people lose their shirts. This is not a disgrace but a bragging right. If you have bought high and watched the thing fall to zero, it only demonstrates your derring do. If you have made money, you are a bit cheeky about it because, after all, these markets are edgy.

    There is some glory in checking your smartphone in the middle of the night to find that your assets are up 10% since you went to bed. When you wake up and you are down 20% total, it’s sad but still exciting. That’s why people play these markets. And some people are truly winning.

    What does it mean to be a millionaire but all your assets are in brand new digital things with names like BCH, NEO, GBYTE, FCT, or DSH? And do you really want this information known? Probably not.

    It’s a Mania

    Another scene: I’m at the UPS store and paying with a Bitpay debit card. The guy behind the counter nonchalantly says that his choice coin is Monero. I banter with him a bit. We do what everyone in these discussions does: we test the limits of each other’s knowledge. Who among us is the more tech savvy and experienced. Discerning that gives insight into the real question: what is your crypto net worth?

    How likely is it that some dude I bump into at a mail service would know anything about this new thing going on? Could be a coincidence. Or he could be the voice of a generation. According to the New York Times, the second conclusion is the more likely truth.

    After years as a niche market for technologically sophisticated anarchists and libertarians excited about a decentralized financial network not under government control, digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream…. Cryptocurrency has understandable appeal to millennials who came of age during the 2008 financial crisis and are now watching the rise of antiglobalist populism threaten the stability of the international economy.

    Typically with such reporting, there are great insights in this story, despite the misquoted price. The 2008 financial crisis traumatized a generation. They no longer trust banks. Conventional financial markets are driven by electronic trading, and there is no way to beat the market in the short run. Plus, there is the draw of the new and techy. Young people have no assets but they do have tech skill. Crypto markets are easy to get into and you are rewarded for knowing your way around. Older people tend to lack such skill, and they are afflicted by incredulity: surely this market is nothing more than a techno tulip mania.

    I can recall being in front of an audience of 3,000 people some three years ago, interviewing a major and famous global investor. In passing – slightly expecting to be ridiculed – I asked about Bitcoin. He blew up in fury, as if I had committed a faux pas. This is a fake, he said, just like all social media platforms and time-wasting video games. If young people think this is productive, they are sadly mistaken. This country needs to get back to making things rather than taking food selfies.

    I was crypto shamed.

    And that was that.

    Meanwhile, the dollar exchange ratio of Bitcoin moved from $30 to $3,000. Our savvy and “mature” and responsible investor was completely wrong. And he had misinformed thousands of people who had paid for his advice. And he was wrong because of the old Latin phrase: “Damnant quod non intellegunt.” They condemn what they do not understand.

    The young have no such hangups. They don’t need a theory to justify their interests. They discern that the market is pointing a certain direction even if they do not know why. You could chalk it up to naivete of youth. Or you could look at the old investor and observe that his failure to believe is due to the foolhardy incredulity of age.

    What It Is

    Let me attempt, yet again, to explain why these markets are not tulipmania. Tulips had always existed. Cryptoassets, on the other hand, are a new innovation. What is it? Some people understood early on. For people not stuck in the old ways, not biased by prevailing practices, this was promising and exciting.

    For the rest of us, it took time. It’s true that it is a way of hacking the internet to make a market-driven money. It’s true that the blockchain technology that backs cryptoassets makes for a great payment system, far faster, cheaper, and better than existing practices. Millennials know that the old way failed and, because of experience, they trust that there is a technological solution, even if old-world institutions are slow to adopt it.

    There’s more going on than just that. This technology is the newest and best iteration of a universal human demand to document ownership rights. After many years of struggling to understand this, this is my best-possible explanation. Humanity documented “mine and thine” since the ancient world: stones, clay, parchment, vellum, databases. There must be a record to compel social assent to anything.

    And it is not only about rights. It is about rules. But the failing of every previous piece of technology has been that it has been centralized: only one authoritative copy. Blockchain distributes that knowledge and authority to an infinite number of nodes.

    Is that an innovation? Yes. It’s everything. With millions of applications, only one of which could imply the possibility of abolishing government money and central banking in favor of a market-controlled money. And that’s just the most obvious. Blockchain actually offers up the hope that humanity can learn to master its own affairs on a purely voluntary basis: no need for coercive relationships, geographical jurisdictions, or preemptive revenue collection by force. It’s the realization of the old liberal dream.

    But not yet. It will take decades to get there. In the meantime, young people are having a blast. Good for them. They understand more about the world than those who are charged with copy editing the New York Times.


    Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • What Cryptocurrency Can Teach Us about Political Governance

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    What Cryptocurrency Can Teach Us about Political Governance

    It’s a marvel to me to witness what is happening on planet Earth as it regards cryptocurrencies. Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever or whatever he/she/zhe is, began a revolution as big as the wheel and the printing press and the Internet that came before it, or so it seems to me.

    Over $93 billion, and counting, have poured into the cryptocurrency market since Bitcoin was released in 2009. Millions of individuals have come together without central direction to build this worldwide phenomenon.

    Changes are happening every day that have global ramifications, all of which are happening without permission by governments, and often in spite of governments’ supposed authority to control other people. That is truly awesome.

    Decentralized Governance 

    There is governance, to be sure, as it regards cryptocurrencies, but such governance is without centralized structure. Cryptocurrency manipulation must follow specific rules, and changing those rules requires popular acceptance by users and stakeholders of each given cryptocurrency. Nobody can implement their preferred change arbitrarily. The only thing arbitrary about cryptocurrencies is one’s desire to get involved in the hundreds of different systems, and once involved, they must follow the rules.

    I think there’s a model here for political governance, or in others words governance around the idea that people have rights, and those rights should be protected, with physical violence if necessary. While people mostly agree that behaviors such as murder, rape, robbery, assault, and battery are undesirable and we all should be protected from them, there’s a lot of disagreement on the smaller stuff, like who’s entitled to what, provided by others that haven’t themselves committed any of the foregoing behaviors (ie. crimes). That’s not to say that people don’t disagree on the big stuff, but the disagreement is more a matter of definition than of undesirability.

    Who should decide which entitlements should be enforced? The current model says that for a given arbitrarily-derived geographical area, one entity should decide, even when a party to the dispute and that entity may be influenced in any number of ways. In other words, one size fits all, like it, leave it, or hope you get enough popular support to change it.

    Spontaneous Order

    Alternatively, using the cryptocurrency model, there would be no single entity per arbitrarily-derived geographical area to force one set of rules onto everyone else. Instead, individuals would pick and chose which rules they wish to engage with. When someone violates their rules, they have the option of dealing with it personally or calling on their rights protection agency to do so.

    Everyone involved now has a strong financial incentive to remedy the dispute as peacefully as possible. How so? Because everyone involved is bearing the costs of resolution personally. There’s no forcing those costs on to innocent third parties. Any attempt to do so will be met with the same type of response the original dispute was met with.

    Of course, I can’t predict how all of this will develop, spontaneously, just as I couldn’t predict the effects of the wheel, the printing press, the Internet, and of the emergence and spread of cryptocurrencies. But I can say that I’d prefer governance based on this model over governance based on the old model. Seems far more effective, efficient, justified, and just plain ‘ole right, to me.

    In any event, to what extent the cryptocurrency phenomenon pushes against old models in the financial industry, and beyond, should be a welcome change for anyone tired of getting “landline government in a cell phone world,” quoting Michael Malice. I don’t think it can be stopped. I think that now that it’s begun, it’s here to stay.

    Reprinted from Everything-Voluntary.


    Skyler J. Collins

    Founder and editor of Everything-Voluntary.com, Skyler is a husband and unschooling father of three beautiful children.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Why the SEC Is Terrified of Cryptocurrency

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    Why the SEC Is Terrified of Cryptocurrency

    The federal government is no match for innovation. This is something lawmakers have always known, and it is the reason state and federal regulations exist. But innovation, by its very nature, will always find a way around those regulations, resulting in the implementation of more regulations for creative minds to learn to evade – which they will. This results in the over-regulation we see in America today.

    Nothing scares the government more than something it can’t control, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) revealed this week that it is terrified of cryptocurrencies – as well it should be.

    Targeting ICOs

    See, all those lawmakers and bureaucrats sitting around regulating everything depend on taxpayer money to pay their salaries so they can keep writing regulations. Since cryptocurrencies allow people to keep all of their money, this is a big problem for the lawmakers. Soon, people may even start to realize they can buy, sell, and trade freely without any government intervention. The horror.

    So the SEC recently got together to write up even more regulations to try to scare people away from using cryptocurrencies and the blockchain by targeting Initial Coin Offerings, or ICOs.

    Initial Coin Offerings have become very popular recently as a way for crypto start-ups to raise funds for their ventures using digital tokens (cryptocurrency) like Bitcoin or Ethers. They operate on a blockchain, which is a decentralized digital ledger of publicly and chronologically-recorded cryptocurrency transactions. Investopedia gives a wonderfully detailed breakdown of how ICOs work. You can read it here or watch an explanation by technologist and author of The Internet of Money and Mastering Bitcoin Andreas Antonopoulos here.

    Basically, with the birth of the ICO came the emergence of a whole new market – one with a great deal of money floating around that the federal government couldn’t take by force. Naturally, this had to be investigated, and on July 25, the SEC released a Report of Investigation under Section 21(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

    The investigation zeroed in on the DAO, a distributed autonomous organization that set the record for the largest crowdfunding campaign in history, raising over $150 million in ether in 2016. According to the report published by the SEC:

    The Commission applied existing U.S. federal securities laws to this new paradigm, determining that DAO Tokens were securities. The Commission stressed that those who offer and sell securities in the U.S. are required to comply with federal securities laws, regardless of whether those securities are purchased with virtual currencies or distributed with blockchain technology.”

    Good Luck!

    Or, as crowdfunding lawyer Amy Y. Wan explains the press release amounts to the SEC saying: “For those of you out there doing ICOs, we’re here to warn you that U.S. securities laws might apply. When we say might, we mean just that – sometimes securities law will apply, sometimes it won’t. It depends on the specific facts of the ICO.”

    Okay, so the government wants to regulate virtual tokens, aka cryptocurrency. Good luck. As blockchain engineer Elaine Ou pointed out on Twitter, ICO’s are “Untraceable, international, [have] no central authority, [and] funds can’t be frozen. The SEC ICO warning is the best ad for ICO’s.”

    So while the government can – and will – continue to make the lives of innocent people miserable using weapons like civil asset forfeiture, crypto regulations, web-provider takedowns, and the war on drugs, these are all last ditch efforts by a desperate ruling class on its death bed.

    The creativity and resilience human beings possess do not exist within the jurisdiction of the government – no matter how hard it tries to convince us otherwise.

    Reprinted from The Anti-Media.


    Josie Wales

    Josie Wales, journalist for the Anti-Media, is a writer, public speaker, YouTube personality, and activist from Philadelphia. She is also a tech writer for d10e, and formerly worked as an editor and contributing writer at The Free Thought Project. Josie covers disruptive technology, artificial intelligence, innovation, tech solutions, and digital privacy issues for Anti-Media.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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