Source: https://www.ccn.com/20-trillion-us-debt-will-inevitably-lead-to-big-crypto-boom-prominent-investors/


$20 Trillion US Debt Will Inevitably Lead to Big Crypto Boom: Prominent Investors.

ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorhees has said that the growing debt of the US, which hovers at around $21.7 trillion as of November, will inevitably cause a big spike in crypto.

“When the next global financial crisis occurs, and the world realizes organizations with $20 trillion in debt can’t possibly ever pay it back and thus must print it instead, and thus fiat is doomed. Watch what happens to crypto.” Voorhees suggested that to repay the national debt, the government and the federal reserve will be forced to print more fiat money, leading to inflation and a decline in the purchasing power of the US dollar.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with more than $6.317 trillion in assets under management, is the latest major financial institution to express concerns regarding the rapidly increasing national debt of the US. The conglomerate’s CEO, Larry Fink, stated that the US government is heading towards a supply problem due to the country’s increasing budget deficit. Beginning next year, Fink noted that the US could be forced to borrow $1 trillion a year. The rising inflation rate of the US dollar, as shown by the growing interest rates of the Federal Reserve, has become too high to sustain the economy. “That could be the real issue related to everything: where we have interest rates becoming too high to sustain the economy with its growth rates,” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said.

Nouriel Roubini, a professor at NYU Stern School and a cryptocurrency skeptic, echoed the sentiment of Fink, emphasizing that the interest rate has increased to a point in which the US economy cannot match it with its growth rate. “Second, because the stimulus was poorly timed, the US economy is now overheating, and inflation is rising above target. The US Federal Reserve will thus continue to raise the federal funds rate from its current 2% to at least 3.5% by 2020, and that will likely push up short- and long-term interest rates as well as the US dollar,” Roubini said, predicting a major financial crisis by 2020.

If a financial crisis is to occur by the end of 2020 as predicted by many economists in the US primarily due to the overly high-interest rate set forth by the Federal Reserve, then the US dollar could drop substantially in value and open up investors to stores of value such as gold and cryptocurrencies whose value is not dependent of the global economy.

Vinny Lingham, the founder of Civic and a partner at Multicoin Capital, said that more wealth would be created in crypto in the next 10 years than the past ten years, despite several large corrections the market faced and will continue to experience in the years to come.

“More wealth will be created in crypto over the next 10 years, than over the prior 10 years. But remember, like any success story, it’s not going to be a straight line up. Keep believing and just be patient.”

"In practice, blockchain is nothing more than a glorified spreadsheet."

With the value of bitcoin having fallen by about 70% since its peak late last year, the mother of all bubbles has now gone bust. More generally, cryptocurrencies have entered a not-so-cryptic apocalypse. The value of leading coins such as Ether, EOS, Litecoin and XRP have all fallen by over 80%, thousands of other digital currencies have plummeted by 90%-99%, and the rest have been exposed as outright frauds. No one should be surprised by this: four out of five initial coin offerings (ICOs) were scams to begin with.

Faced with the public spectacle of a market bloodbath, boosters have fled to the last refuge of the crypto scoundrel: a defence of “blockchain,” the distributed-ledger software underpinning all cryptocurrencies. Blockchain has been heralded as a potential panacea for everything from poverty and famine to cancer. In fact, it is the most overhyped – and least useful – technology in human history.

In practice, blockchain is nothing more than a glorified spreadsheet. But it has also become the byword for a libertarian ideology that treats all governments, central banks, traditional financial institutions, and real-world currencies as evil concentrations of power that must be destroyed. Blockchain fundamentalists’ ideal world is one in which all economic activity and human interactions are subject to anarchist or libertarian decentralisation. They would like the entirety of social and political life to end up on public ledgers that are supposedly “permissionless” (accessible to everyone) and “trustless” (not reliant on a credible intermediary such as a bank).

Yet far from ushering in a utopia, blockchain has given rise to a familiar form of economic hell. A few self-serving white men (there are hardly any women or minorities in the blockchain universe) pretending to be messiahs for the world’s impoverished, marginalised and unbanked masses claim to have created billions of dollars of wealth out of nothing. But one need only consider the massive centralisation of power among cryptocurrency “miners,” exchanges, developers and wealth holders to see that blockchain is not about decentralisation and democracy; it is about greed.

For example, a small group of companies – mostly located in such bastions of democracy as Russia, Georgia and China – control between two-thirds and three-quarters of all crypto-mining activity and all routinely jack up transaction costs to increase their fat profit margins. Apparently, blockchain fanatics would have us put our faith in an anonymous cartel subject to no rule of law, rather than trust central banks and regulated financial intermediaries.

A similar pattern has emerged in cryptocurrency trading. Fully 99% of all transactions occur on centralised exchanges that are hacked on a regular basis. And, unlike with real money, once your crypto wealth is hacked, it is gone forever.

Moreover, the centralisation of crypto development – for example, fundamentalists have named Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin a “benevolent dictator for life” – already has given lie to the claim that “code is law,” as if the software underpinning blockchain applications is immutable. The truth is that the developers have absolute power to act as judge and jury. When something goes wrong in one of their buggy “smart” pseudo-contracts and massive hacking occurs, they simply change the code and “fork” a failing coin into another one by arbitrary fiat, revealing the entire “trustless” enterprise to have been untrustworthy from the start.

Lastly, wealth in the crypto universe is even more concentrated than it is in North Korea. Whereas a Gini coefficient of 1.0 means that a single person controls 100% of a country’s income/wealth, North Korea scores 0.86, the rather unequal United States scores 0.41 and bitcoin scores an astonishing 0.88.

As should be clear, the claim of “decentralisation” is a myth propagated by the pseudo-billionaires who control this pseudo-industry. Now that the retail investors who were suckered into the crypto market have all lost their shirts, the snake-oil salesmen who remain are sitting on piles of fake wealth that will immediately disappear if they try to liquidate their “assets”.

As for blockchain itself, there is no institution under the sun – bank, corporation, non-governmental organisation or government agency – that would put its balance sheet or register of transactions, trades and interactions with clients and suppliers on public decentralised peer-to-peer permissionless ledgers. There is no good reason why such proprietary and highly valuable information should be recorded publicly.

Moreover, in cases where distributed-ledger technologies – so-called enterprise DLT – are actually being used, they have nothing to do with blockchain. They are private, centralised and recorded on just a few controlled ledgers. They require permission for access, which is granted to qualified individuals. And, perhaps most important, they are based on trusted authorities that have established their credibility over time. All of which is to say, these are “blockchains” in name only.

It is telling that all “decentralised” blockchains end up being centralised, permissioned databases when they are actually put into use. As such, blockchain has not even improved upon the standard electronic spreadsheet, which was invented in 1979.

No serious institution would ever allow its transactions to be verified by an anonymous cartel operating from the shadows of the world’s authoritarian kleptocracies. So it is no surprise that whenever “blockchain” has been piloted in a traditional setting, it has either been thrown in the trash bin or turned into a private permissioned database that is nothing more than an Excel spreadsheet or a database with a misleading name.

source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/15/blockchain-democracy-decentralisation-bitcoin-price-cryptocurrencies?utm

Will cryptocurrencies ever become much more than speculative assets? If they do, the key will be a new kind of digital coin that is engineered to maintain a steady price. At least, that’s what a growing number of developers in the crypto world seem to believe.

We’re in the midst of a “Cambrian explosion” of such projects, says Garrick Hileman, head of research at Blockchain, a cryptocurrency services firm. According to a survey Hileman published this week, the number of what are called stablecoins has grown from a just a handful to nearly 60 in the past 18 months, and more than a dozen more are expected to launch in the near future. Hileman says the stablecoin rush speaks to a growing understanding that the volatility of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum “is going to pose a problem” for some of the most sought-after blockchain applications, like payments, lending, and insurance. And he says it reflects the hypothesis that nonvolatile digital coins can form an “infrastructure layer” that could vastly expand cryptocurrencies’ global user base.

This piece first appeared in our twice-weekly newsletter, Chain Letter, which covers the world of blockchain and crypto-assets. Sign up here—it’s free!

Cryptocurrency often gets cast as a new form of money that will benefit people who don’t have access to a bank account or a stable national currency. Another popular prediction among enthusiasts is that smart contracts, blockchain-stored computer programs that automatically move cryptocurrency between users according to agreed-upon conditions, will revolutionize the way we do business online.

But payment applications have so far failed to gain much traction, and a fair amount of last year’s exuberance about the future of smart-contract-powered decentralized applications—dapps, if you prefer—has been replaced by uncertainty over whether Ethereum and similar platforms can live up to the hype. Ethereum and other currencies have swung wildly in price, and that could well be one factor crypto-payment-based applications haven’t seen wider adoption.

If the goal is to expand the user base, though, it’s important to be clear about what we mean by “stablecoin.” The term can be used to refer to a few very different concepts. Tether, a popular stablecoin that is supposedly backed by US dollars in a bank account, has been around for years. A useful tool for traders wanting to safely park their gains in other cryptocurrency investments without having to convert back into fiat money, Tether has inspired a number of copycats.

According to Hileman’s report, nearly 60% of the $350 million that venture capitalists have invested in stablecoin projects has gone toward approaches that don’t rely on banks and thus promise to be more decentralized and accessible. Some use cryptocurrency instead of fiat money as collateral, relying on smart contracts to manage the collateral’s volatility. But most of this funding has backed yet-to-launch coins commonly described as “algorithmic central banks.” Such a coin wouldn’t use collateral at all, and would instead use software to increase and decrease its supply in order to maintain its price.

Critics doubt that these more complicated stablecoins can hold their pegs in the long run. The systems also raise complicated new legal questions, especially given that many rely on an element of market manipulation to maintain price stability, says Hileman. “It is very early days, not just on the technology side but on the regulatory side,” he says. “Trying to make too many predictions about where this will wind up is hazardous at this stage.”

source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612207/stablecoins-will-help-cryptocurrencies-achieve-world-dominationif-they-actually-work/

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitmain-ipo/cryptocurrency-giant-bitmain-chooses-hong-kong-for-ipo-idUSKCN1M627L

Bitmain Technologies, the world’s largest designer of products used for mining cryptocurrencies, confirmed it was bringing its IPO to Hong Kong in what will be an important test of institutional investors’ interest in the crypto sector...

Yup, according to a survey Hileman published this week, the number of what are called stablecoins has grown from a just a handful to nearly 60 in the past 18 months, and more than a dozen more are expected to launch in the near future...

Source: https://blog.blockchain.com/2018/09/26/the-state-of-stablecoins/

Sorry about the source, my fault...Here it is:
https://www.technologyreview.com/lists/technologies/2018/

Just stumbled upon this article from Mike Orcutt. Man, this can leads to major discussions (eager to see it, though).

Perfect Online Privacy

True internet privacy could finally become possible thanks to a new tool that can—for instance—let you prove you’re over 18 without revealing your date of birth, or prove you have enough money in the bank for a financial transaction without revealing your balance or other details. That limits the risk of a privacy breach or identity theft.

The tool is an emerging cryptographic protocol called a zero-­knowledge proof. Though researchers have worked on it for decades, interest has exploded in the past year, thanks in part to the growing obsession with cryptocurrencies, most of which aren’t private.

Much of the credit for a practical zero-knowledge proof goes to Zcash, a digital currency that launched in late 2016. Zcash’s developers used a method called a zk-SNARK (for “zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge”) to give users the power to transact anonymously.

That’s not normally possible in Bitcoin and most other public blockchain systems, in which transactions are visible to everyone. Though these transactions are theoretically anonymous, they can be combined with other data to track and even identify users. Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, the world’s second-most-popular blockchain network, has described zk-SNARKs as an “absolutely game-changing technology.”

For banks, this could be a way to use blockchains in payment systems without sacrificing their clients’ privacy. Last year, JPMorgan Chase added zk-SNARKs to its own blockchain-based payment system.

For all their promise, though, zk-SNARKs are computation-heavy and slow. They also require a so-called “trusted setup,” creating a cryptographic key that could compromise the whole system if it fell into the wrong hands. But researchers are looking at alternatives that deploy zero-knowledge proofs more efficiently and don’t require such a key.

Uma ferramenta que vem sendo muito utilizada por ICOs é a https://www.twitteraudit.com/

Parece ser um avanço que deve ser acompanhado pelo Facebook. Mas calma, não vale pra tudo, por enquanto é mais focado em Exchange (ICOs tão fora ainda)...

Fonte:
https://cnb.cx/2xSgHUW

Outra dica boa (mas em inglês) é assinar a newsletter "Chain Letter" da faculdade MIT nos EUA. Bem bacana!

https://www.technologyreview.com/newsletters/chain-letter/

Bom, a previsão do Tim Draper é de um market cap de U$80tri em 15 anos...

Incrível iniciativa, demais mesmo!!

tem muita previsão rolando, a última que vi foi do Tim Draper, que fala em cap de 80 trilhões em 15 anos...

https://cointelegraph.com/news/tim-draper-predicts-total-crypto-market-cap-of-80-trillion-in-next-15-years