The mass adoption of digital payments in the world’s most populous nation has made the use of physical cash virtually obsolete — a trend that has alarmed China’s central bank, which has been conducting small-scale rollout trials for its digitized legal tender since late 2019. At previous Olympics, cash and Visa cards were the only two permitted forms of payment, though the former diminished in usage at the sporting venues after the 2004 Olympics in Athens, according to people familiar with the matter, with nearly all payments having moved to Visa.
Category: FinTech
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The Fed, which has Sprinkled Easy-Money Fairy Dust all over the Economy
I came across that delightful metaphor in an article on how the US economy is in a bubble:
Housing prices are also way overinflated, and another contributor to that household wealth, a big chunk of middle class wealth, he says. Behind it all, is the Fed, which has sprinkled easy-money fairy dust all over the economy. And that central bank is going to bust the household wealth bubble right open, he warns, with rising interest rates and tightening monetary policy.
Analyst who predicted the 2008 crash warns of bubble brewing in U.S. household wealth
So the top blue line is going to “revert to the mean” meaning back to the gold GDP line, which equals a market crash back to reality.
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The Train Has Not Left the Bitcoin Station
This is a short excerpt from Venture Capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya on CNBC, Dec 12, 2017.
I wrote an article about bitcoin in 2013. There is so much asymmetric upside here. This is a thing that goes to roughly the value of gold. There’s very little downside.
Take 1% of your money and put it into schmuck insurance. This is now a confidence game, this is a hedge against autocratic regimes and banking structures that are corrosive to how the world needs to work properly. You cannot have central banks infinitely printing currency, you cannot have guys with misdirected and misguided fiscal policy…
So we’ve seen the first few chapters of this and now we have to see the great unwind. [Referring to QT: quantitative tightening]
All I’m saying is its a hedge against the infrastructure that made those decisions without our input is a smart thing.
I think 1 bitcoin will be worth $100,000 in 3 to 4 years, and in the next 20 years, a million dollars a coin.
Former Facebook Exec Chamath Palihapitiya On Social Media, Bitcoin, And Elon Musk (Full) | on CNBC.
Here’s the link: 10:20 in, Let’s Talk Bitcoin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zyRpq2ODrE&t=620s -
FUD Vs Foresight
Today on March 16, 2018 bitcoin is sitting at $8,550 USD. Here we have a couple of my favorite investors throwing shade at bitcoin. What’s interesting is that the crypto industry is actually going thru the necessary growing pains of regulation and use scaling. Because both bitcoin and ethereum are testing their scaling solutions (to compete with banks & visa/mastercard, etc), both are poised for more use adoption this year.So here’s the FUD:
In February, Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. (BRK.A, BRK.B) vice chairman Charlie Munger had harsh words for bitcoin at the Berkshire annual shareholder meeting.
“It’s just disgusting. Bitcoin is noxious poison,” Munger said. Billionaire Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett once famously called bitcoin “a mirage.”
And the Foresight:
Still, bitcoin has plenty of supporters on Wall Street. Fundstrat Global Advisors co-founder Thomas Lee[WD] says Fundstrat’s bitcoin misery index suggests the sell-off is an excellent buying opportunity for long-term investors.
“The BMI is telling us to keep the negative headlines in perspective,” Lee said, according to CNBC. “When the BMI is at a ‘misery’ level, future returns are very good.”
Fundstrat has a year-end price target for bitcoin of $25,000.
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CoinPuffs Vs Coinmarketcap
Coinmarketcap’s homepage. One day I noticed that the bitcoin price dropped alot, and the coinmarketcap as a whole also dropped $50 billion. What?! It turns out someone running coinmarketcap.com decided to drop South Korea off the market index because it’s prices were higher than other countries without telling anyone in advance. What?! Their prices are higher because South Korea makes it hard to move money in and out of country on purpose–that shouldn’t bar the country from being part of of the general index. Anyway, in the process of discovering this info, I found out that CoinPuffs works like CoinMarketCap, but not as capriciously. It seems more like a community site, and it has over 2000 coins listed. Article on coindesk.