Blockchain Frequently: Weekly Recap 3 – Max L
Monday came with an article about the federal reserve buying $278B worth of bonds from banks. This is the first time a buyback of this magnitude has happened since the 2008 financial crisis.
Speculators are guessing that banks were strapped for cash after paying their quarterly corporate taxes and buying another set of bonds to fund government operations.
The lack of cash led banks to raise their lending rates to crazy heights, so the government stepped in and gave them cash for bonds and everything calmed down.
So there’s all this money flying around, and I’m not buying it. I don’t trust that there’s proper, airtight oversight around all this stuff. What’s to prevent the most powerful institutions in the world from colluding with each other?
I don’t doubt that the federal reserve, the irs and the sec are made up mostly of morally righteous people, but commercial banks definitely are not. They’ve proven time over time that they’re perfectly capable of preying on the weak, and they’re doing it right now.
The world will be a better place when the money supply can be publicly audited and we don’t have to speculate as to why $278B was just pumped into circulation.
Tuesday arrived with news that the messaging app, Kik, is shutting down.
This is a result of the SEC filing a lawsuit against the company for refusing to label their cryptocurrency, Kin, a security.
Kik will be fighting the SEC in court. We’ll see what happens.
This is an interesting event because it highlights the government’s ability to shut down apps but not cryptocurrencies. Yes, you can shut down apps that connect you to a cryptocurrency’s blockchain, if the app is only accessible through a court-summonable third-party, but you can’t shut down the blockchain itself.
The blockchain itself is maintained on computers all over the world, and until every last one of them is court-summoned, each computer-owner has the freedom to run the blockchain.
Wednesday welcomed us with an article about Bakkt. Bakkt has been a crypto buzzword for well over a year now. Most of us assumed that the launch of their institutional custodial services would be a tipping point for billions of institutional dollars to pour into the crypto market, but the opposite has happened. Bitcoin has tanked about 20% immediately after Bakkt’s launch.
I don’t care. If privacy coins can serve as a store of value and we can build a decentralized governance system, I’ll be happy. Bakkt, shmakkt.
Thursday came with an article about Evernym, a startup focused on providing decentralized identity solutions.
I guess they’ve got about 40 pilot projects under their belt already, whatever they are.
This is an important concept though, decentralized identity.
If a government wants to wipe you out via your social security number, passport id, drivers license, you name it: they theoretically have the power to do that.
That’s a real threat in places where military dictatorships aren’t just fears but realities.
Decentralized identities also allow people in, for example, Ethiopia prove that they are a certain person who owns a certain plot of land. If they live in a small village, and some corrupt politician wants to sell their land, they might be able to stop them by proving to some other authority that they are the owner of the land.
If the identity system is controlled by the corrupt politician, then they’ll probably lose their land.
Decentralized identity will eventually make things a lot easier for us here in the US. It’ll be much easier to prove your age, go through airport security or update your drivers license when all the relevant data can be digitally verified on a blockchain.
Ending the week we have an article about a very curious happening in Venezuela. The Venezuelan state-owned oil and natural gas company, Petroleos de Venezuela, requested that the nation’s central bank pay the oil company’s suppliers in bitcoin and ether instead of the highly inflationary national currency, the bolivar.
They’ve also motioned to induct bitcoin and ether into the nation’s international reserves.
It’ll be nice to for them to have consistently appreciative, deflationary assets in there.
Well it’s been an exciting week in blockchain. Thanks for watching blockchain frequently, and until next week.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-26/venezuela-has-bitcoin-stash-and-doesn-t-know-what-to-do-with-it?
Published at Sat, 28 Sep 2019 22:46:31 +0000
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