We should ask ourselves where does all these money go in the first place, The government should be able to account to the people because this seems like a fraudulent case to me.

Nvidia has announced that they expect sales of GPUs related to cryptocurrency mining to drop by about 67% in the current quarter. That's a pretty monstrous drop, and if mining investment is a leading indicator of overall market demand for crypto, it would follow that this decreased demand in mining equipment foretells decreased demand for crypto generally.

China Quietly Orders Closing of Bitcoin Mining Operations

Move tightens a clampdown that already has shut exchanges for trading of cryptocurrencies in China

Chinese authorities ordered the closing of operations that create a large share of the world’s supply of bitcoin, tightening a clampdown that has already shuttered exchanges for the trading of cryptocurrencies in China.

A multiagency government task force overseeing risks in Internet finance issued a notice last week ordering local authorities to “guide” the shutdown of operations that produce, or “mine,” cryptocurrencies, according to the notice and people familiar with the information.

While the notice called for an “orderly exit” without setting a deadline, far-flung areas of China where cryptocurrency mining operations have flourished are complying. A local regulatory official in the far western region Xinjiang said Wednesday that his agency received the notice and is doing “what the country wants.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-quietly-orders-closing-of-bitcoin-mining-operations-1515594021

CARACAS, Venezuela — Investors looking to buy Venezuela’s new cryptocurrency may want to head to a little-known Moscow bank whose biggest shareholders are President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government and two state-controlled Russian companies under U.S. sanctions.

Evrofinance Mosnarbank has emerged as the only international financial institution so far willing to defy a U.S. campaign to derail the world’s first state-backed digital currency, called the petro, even before it begins to function.

Early would-be investors who registered with Venezuela’s government and downloaded the petro’s wallet software — available in Spanish, English and Russian — were then invited to buy the cryptocurrency by wiring a minimum of 1,000 euros to a Venezuelan government account at Evrofinance.

The bank’s place in the rollout of the petro is further evidence of Russia’s role in the creation of a cryptocurrency that much of the digital world has shunned but that Maduro hopes will allow Venezuela to circumvent U.S. financial sanctions imposed last year.

At the petro’s launch on Feb. 21, Maduro heaped praise on two Russians in the audience who worked with wealthy, Kremlin-connected businessmen, thanking their previously unknown startups — Zeus Exchange and Aerotrading — for their role developing what he joked would be a kind of “kryptonite” against U.S. economic dominance.

A day later, he dispatched his economy minister to Moscow to brief his Russian finance counterpart.

And in March, the Russian Association of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain awarded the Venezuelan government an award for its role “challenging the de-facto powers of the international financial system.”

Russia’s interest in the petro stems from its own increasingly pariah status in the west, said Claiborne W. Porter, the former head of the U.S. Justice Department’s bank integrity unit. As relations with the U.S. and European Union become more tense, both countries are looking for ways to demonstrate political strength while moving money outside the American financial system.

“Like kids on the playground, Venezuela and Russia think they are fighting a common bully in U.S. sanctions, so they’re going to try and form a united front,” said Porter, who is now the Washington-based head of investigations at consulting firm Navigant.

Russia has provided Venezuela with billions in debt relief over the years and is a major investor in the country’s oil industry. That financial lifeline has become more important since the Trump administration last year banned Americans from lending money to the nearly bankrupt government and now threatens to slap sanctions on the OPEC nation’s oil industry if Maduro goes ahead with presidential elections this month that are widely seen as a sham. In March, Trump signed an executive order banning Americans from any dealings with the petro.

Evrofinance and its executives didn’t return repeated email requests for comment. But after The Associated Press’ inquiries, all references to the bank were removed from the petro’s wallet, leaving prospective buyers with no guidance on how to actually buy it, though it’s still listed for sale in rubles and euros as well as three other widely circulated cryptocurrencies.

Venezuela’s government purchased a 49 percent stake in Evrofinance in 2011, making the bank, which traces its history back a century as a western financial outpost for the Soviet Union, a vehicle for binational trade and investment projects, with almost $800 million in assets.

The rest of the shares are held by two major banks, state-controlled VTB and Gazprombank, which were sanctioned by the U.S. and European nations in 2014 over President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea.

It’s unclear how many petros the government has sold. Maduro boasted this month that the government had raised $3.3 billion in the pre-sale phase. But so far only a small fraction of the petros appears to have been distributed to buyers, according to the blockchain where the digital currency’s movements can be publicly tracked.

Experts say that the petro is of little interest to foreigners other than drug traffickers and others active in Venezuela’s burgeoning criminal underworld. Even offshore trading platforms like Bitfinex are refusing to deal in the petro for fear of violating sanctions. Rating website ICOindex.com, which tracks initial coin offerings of cryptocurrencies, called it a “scam.”

“An overwhelming majority of ICOs don’t deliver on what they promise because their promoters are outright scammers or fall short on technical expertise,” said Alejandro Machado, a Venezuelan-born computer scientist who consults for crypto startups. “In the case of the Venezuelan government, both reasons apply.”

One of the two Russians who signed agreements with Maduro to position the petro globally, Denis Druzhkov, had been fined $31,000 and barred for three years by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for fraudulent trading in futures’ contracts. Zeus Exchange, which Druzhkov created alongside a Kremlin-connected industrialist, said in a statement that it has never had any business ties with the Venezuelan government and that Druzhkov resigned after abusing his authority.

The other, Fedor Bogorodskiy, used to help run the credit card division at a bank controlled by a Russian oligarch. He has lived in Uruguay since 2009, combining telecommunications business with part-time promotion of Russian culture. He told The AP that his company, Aerotrading, whose website consists of a single home page with no company information, immediately ceased all work on the petro after Trump announced his ban.

Despite the pressure, Maduro is showing no signs of slowing down. He’s given government institutions — from ministries to airports — 120 days to start accepting the petro as legal tender in all transactions. He’s also paved the way for the creation of 16 local exchanges where Venezuelans will be able to purchase petros with their fast-depreciating bolivars. Also in the works is a second state-backed cryptocurrency tied to the country’s gold reserves.

But gaining international acceptance remains an uphill battle.

Yuri Pripachkin, president of the Russian blockchain group that honored Venezuela, said that while the Kremlin is keeping a close eye on the petro it hasn’t been involved in its development. Still, he said as long as sanctions are used as a foreign policy tool to punish governments that challenge U.S. policies, the incentives to seek out alternative means of financing will remain. He also dismissed the idea that the petro could be used to fund criminal activity.

“That’s a fairy tale,” said Pripachkin. “The most popular currency for terrorists and criminals the world over is the U.S. dollar, not crypto, and nobody is suggesting we ban dollars. This is just an attempt to stop crypto from expanding.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-bank-helps-venezuela-defy-us-cryptocurrency-sanctions/2018/05/14/5b9c2988-5788-11e8-9889-07bcc1327f4b_story.html

“An overwhelming majority of ICOs don’t deliver on what they promise because their promoters are outright scammers or fall short on technical expertise,” said Alejandro Machado, a Venezuelan-born computer scientist who consults for crypto startups. “In the case of the Venezuelan government, both reasons apply.”

He also dismissed the idea that the petro could be used to fund criminal activity.

“That’s a fairy tale,” said Pripachkin. “The most popular currency for terrorists and criminals the world over is the U.S. dollar, not crypto, and nobody is suggesting we ban dollars. This is just an attempt to stop crypto from expanding.”

28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

It seems too easy to be true that you could make millions by raiding the clearance aisle at your local Walmart or Target and then selling your haul on Amazon. But that's exactly what 28-year-old Ryan Grant is doing.

Only four years after quitting his accounting job in Minneapolis, Minn., to flip purchases full-time, his business is making seven-figure profits.

"Pretty early on I realized I wasn't in the career path that I wanted to be on," he tells CNBC Make It. "That experience really had me looking for other options and I was starting to explore ways that I could basically leave that job and have my own schedule and be on my own time."

To do that, Grant turned to the side hustle he had used to make ends meet in college.

As a student at Winona State University, he organized textbook buyback events on campus twice a year. He listed the books on Amazon and shipped them out to customers around the country for a profit of up to $10,000 a year.

The process worked simply enough: Using the Amazon Seller app he could see exactly how much he could expect to profit on each book and in what time frame. But the hours spent processing and packaging each order himself proved to be a bit much.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/28-year-old-makes-millions-buying-from-walmart-selling-on-amazon/ar-AAupB8i

BERLIN (Reuters) - German Radoslav Albrecht has founded an online bank that allows clients to transfer loans anywhere in the world using Bitcoin.

Bitbond uses cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to bypass the Swift international transfer system to lend money across the globe rapidly and at low cost.

“Traditional money transfers are relatively costly due to currency exchange fees, and can take up to a few days,” Albrecht told Reuters TV in his office in Berlin’s fashionable neighborhood Prenzlauer Berg. “With Bitbond, payments work independently of where customers are. Via internet it is very, very quick and the fees are low.”

Clients hold the loans in digital tokens like Bitcoin only for seconds or minutes until they are exchanged back into the currency of the country where they wish to receive the funds, avoiding the crypto currencies fluctuating exchange rates.

Bitcoin has been used as collateral for loans, but never as a way of transferring credit in currency internationally.

Albrecht’s service has been growing in popularity among clients since he launched the company in 2013. His office employs 24 people from 12 countries who manage loans for 100 clients amounting to around $1 million each month.

Most clients are small business owners or freelance workers, Albrecht says. Loans are relatively small and don’t exceed 50,000 dollars. In 2016, Bitbond was officially licensed as a bank and has gained many investors since.

Adoption of Bitcoin has been rapid in Germany. It trails only the U.S., according to Bitnodes, which tracks the location of all the Bitcoin nodes that transmit data about new transactions.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-bitcoin/german-online-bank-uses-bitcoins-to-transfer-loans-idUSKBN1ID07Y

OP, I am just trying to figure out how this has anything to do with Bitcoin?

Universal Basic Income doesn't work, it makes people less motivated to work as they're receiving money for just breathing. People need to work, it's the thing that stimulates. Plus the fact that UBI isn't even working in nations it's being tried in now, why ruin the USA with it?

Just days before its international debut at an airshow in the United Kingdom, the entire fleet of the Pentagon’s next generation fighter plane — known as the F-35 II Lightning, or the Joint Strike Fighter — has been grounded, highlighting just what a boondoggle the project has been. With the vast amounts spent so far on the aircraft, the United States could have worked wonders, including providing every homeless person in the U.S. a $600,000 home.

It’s hard to argue against the need to modernize aircraft used to defend the country and counter enemies overseas, especially if you’re a politician. But the Joint Strike Fighter program has been a mess almost since its inception, with massive cost overruns leading to its current acquisition price-tag of $398.6 billion — an increase of $7.4 billion since last year. That breaks down to costing about $49 billion per year since work began in 2006 and the project is seven years behind schedule. Over its life-cycle, estimated at about 55 years, operating and maintaining the F-35 fleet will cost the U.S. a little over $1 trillion. By contrast, the entirety of the Manhattan Project — which created the nuclear bomb from scratch — cost about $55 billion in today’s dollars.

The rich have a disproportionate say in formulating economic policies. I doubt if anything like this will ever see the light of the day. Plus, the risk have become very efficient at tax planning. you just have to find the right offshore trust to keep your money safe

Americans Paid $400 Billion in Taxes & Internet Surcharges for Fiber Optic Upgrades that Never Came

South Korea is the poster child for high-speed internet: its fixed-connection and mobile download speeds are consistently among the fastest in the world, and its capital city, Seoul, is completely saturated with Wi-Fi.  How did they do it?

Being densely populated helped: it’s easier and cheaper to wire-up crowded cities than empty countrysides.  But the key element was the government’s pro-broadband policies.  Not only did they open up the market for competition among internet service providers, but they also invested in hard infrastructure.

Back in 2011 the New York Times reported that the South Korean planned investments of $24.6 billion in digital infrastructure.  It paid off: South Korea’s internet remains among the world’s fastest, according to testing done by Speedtest—and this is in spite of massive recent gains and investments made by other countries.

Meanwhile, America’s internet connections are slow.  This summer Forbes Magazine reported:


Since then America’s fallen down to 11th place in terms of fixed connection download speed, and 47th in terms of mobile download speed.  Basically, America’s internet is slow, and it’s getting relatively slower.  This will have big economic consequences down the road as the world grows increasingly digital.

But that’s not the real story here.  More important is America’s failure to keep pace with countries like South Korea despite absolutely astronomical investments in broadband technology.

According to a fairly recent book (2015) called The Book of Broken Promises, the American people have been charged some $400 billion by telecom companies (at the insistence of government) for fiber optic upgrades that have not materialized.  The author writes:


Of course, this didn’t happen.  America has relatively slow internet, and just a 9.4 percent penetration rate for fiber optic cables, according to Business Insider—this is less than half the OECD average.

The Trump administration would be wise to make improving America’s digital infrastructure a priority.  The South Korean model, market liberalizations combined with hard investments, could be a viable model.

https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/2017/11/27/americans-fiber-optic-internet/

Cryptocurrency is unsupported: is it true or is it a myth?

Putin pushes the agenda to move away from the dollar, time is closing in on the economy completely breaking down and it seems Russia and China are ready to breakaway and be independent.

And you two guys are hilarious. A major bank decides to deal in cryptocurrency and you're against it?!?! hahah. Totally agree with you that HSBC is a shit bank that's financed a lot of evil things in the world, but Chase bank is banning their customers from making transactions to Coinbase...which of these two stories do you prefer?

Imagine that some respectable country would go far beyond legalizing cryptocurrency and start one of its own. It would surely be no scam and it would probably have a strong support, but would there be any drawbacks to the currency and the state itself? Would it get more attention than some of the biggest coins now?

The dogma of ‘increasing wants’ as an indispensible basis for further industrial progress. Instead of the duty to work, we now have the duty to consume. To ensure rapid absorbtion of its immense productivity, megatechnics resorts to a score of different devices: consumer credit, installment buying, multiple packaging, non-functional designs, meretricious novelties, shoddy materials, defective workmanship, built-in fragility.

The aim of industry is not primarily to satisfy essential human needs with a minimal productive effort, but to multiply the number of needs, factitious and fictitious, and accommodate them to the maximum mechanical capacity to produce profits. These are the sacred principle of the power complex. Not the least effort of this system is that of replacing selectivity and quantitative restriction by indiscriminate and incontinent consumption.

Thus the shorter working day promised by this system is already turning into a cheat. In order to achieve the higher level of consumption required, the members of the family must take on extra jobs. […] The effect, ironically, is to turn the newly won six- or seven-hour day to twelve or fourteen hours; so in effect, the worker is back where he started, with more material goods than ever before, but with less time to enjoy them or the promised leisure.

If all these goods are in themselves sound and individually desirable, on what grounds can we condemn the system that totalizes them? So say the official spokesmen. All these goods remain valuable if more important human concerns are not overlooked or eradicated. Unqualified successes in over-quantification.

When a scientist in good repute, like Dr. Lee du Bridge, can defend the wholesale immediate use of pesticides, bactericides, and possibly equally dangerous pharmaceuticals, by saying that it would take ten years to test them sufficiently to certify their value and innocuousness and that ‘industry cannot wait’ – it is obvious that his rational commitments to science are secondary to financial pressures, and that the safeguarding of human life is for industry not a matter of major concern.

The ironic effect of quantification is that many of the most desirable gifts of modern technics disappear when distributed en masse, or when – as with the television – they are used too constantly and too automatically. No umbilical cord attached man to nature: neiter ‘security’ nor ‘adjustment’ were the guidelines to human development.

Patrick Geddes: Conditions of degeneration in the organic world are approximately known. These conditions are often of two distinct kinds, deprivation of food, light, etc. so leading to imperfect nutrition and enervation; the other, a life of repose, with abundant supply of food and decreased exposure to the dangers of the environment. It is noteworthy that while the former only depresses, or at most distinguishes the specific type, the latter, through the disuse of the nervous and other structures etc. which such a simplification of life involves, brings about that far more insidious and through degeneration seen in the life history of myriads of parasites.

THE PENTAGON OF POWER, Lewis Mumford, 1970

As early as 1066, when William the Conqueror seized England, there were 8,000 watermills, serving less than one million people. At the very modest estimate of 2.5 horsepower per mill, this was twice the energy that was available through the assemblage of the 100,000 men who built the Great Pyramid, and probably more than twenty times in relation to the population of their respective countries.

Even in backward mining communities, as late as the sixteenth century more than half the recorded days were holidays; while for Europe as a whole, the total number of holidays, including Sunday, came to 189, a number even greater than those enjoyed by Imperial Rome. The idea that there should be no limits upon any human function is absurd: all life exists within very narrow limits of temperature, air, water or food; and the notion that money alone, or power to command the services of other men, should be free of such definite limits is an aberration of mind.

Where capitalism prospered, it established three main canons for successful economic enterprise: the calculation of quantity, the observation and the regimentation of time (‘Time is Money’), and the concentration on abstract pecuniary awards. Its ultimate values – Power, Profit, Prestige – derive from these sources and all of them can be traced back, under the flimsiest of disguises, to the Pyramid Age.

Leonardo: “men shall walk without moving [motorcar], they shall speak with those absent [telephone], they shall hear those who do not speak [phonograph]”. Is the intelligence alone, however purified and decontaminated, an adequate agent for doing justice to the needs and purposes of life?

Leonardo, for example, invented the submarine [but] he deliberately suppressed the invention “on the account of the evil nature in men, who would practice assassination at the bottom of the sea”. Inventions in Medieval Age: velocipede and military tank (Fontana), diving suit and infernal machine (Konrad Keyeser von Eichstadt), toxic gas

John Stuart Mill – ‘Principles of Economies’: it is doubtful if all the machinery then available had yet lightened the day’s labor of a single being. Within a century or two, the ideological fabric that supported the ancient megamachine had been reconstructed on a new and improved model. Power, speed, motion, standardization, mass production, quantification, regimentation, precision, uniformity, astronomical regularity, control, above all control – these became the passwords of modern society in the new Western style

TECHNICS AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, Lewis Mumford, 1967

HSBC Helped Terrorists, Iran, Mexican Drug Cartels Launder Money, Senate Report Says

A Senate report released ahead of the embargo time revealed that HSBC’s lax anti-money laundering policies allowed Mexican drug money, Iranian terrorist money, and even suspicious Russian money to enter the U.S. and gain access to U.S. dollar liquidity over the last couple of years.

The report, released late on Monday despite a 10 PM embargo time, was prepared by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and counted with the support of Senators Carl Levin and Tom Coburn.

In a year-long investigation, the Subcommittee found that HSBC violated several rules, exposing the U.S. financial system to “a wide array of money laundering, drug trafficking, and terrorist financing.”  According to the report, HSBC’s Mexican affiliate channeled $7 billion into the U.S. between 2007 and 2008 which possibly included “proceeds from illegal drug sales in the United States.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/07/16/hsbc-helped-terrorists-iran-mexican-drug-cartels-launder-money-senate-report-says/

Cryptos Crash After Nvidia Forecasts Big Drop In Mining Demand

Around 1pmET, the entire space tumbled almost instantly as large blocks went through in Bitcoin, with chatter suggesting the MtGox custodian was unloading once again. Prices quickly stabilized once that selling pressure abated.

However, shortly after the US market closed at 4pmET, Nvidia announced its results, posting quarterly sales that topped expectations.

However, NVDA shares fell as the company revealed for the first time that a bigger-than-anticipated portion of the demand for its powerful graphics processors came from the volatile cryptocurrency market.



And then the company said that while it generated $289 million in sales to cryptocurrency miners in the first quarter, Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said that the company expects cryptocurrency-related revenue to fall 65% to about $100 million in the next quarter.

And that sparked a second leg of selling pressure across the crypto-space...



Sending Bitcoin back below $9000...



https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05-10/cryptos-crash-after-nvidia-forecasts-big-drop-mining-demand

What do you think could be achieved by Blockchain and decentralisation in the future? For me the question is very much linked with decentralisatio of resources.

Some futurists believe we'll live in a post capitalist society; at present we have in many ways the worst aspects of capitalism- and the central banks, governments are dinosaurs who are failing to adapt, partly because of vested interests, partly because the systems in place are from the analogue era and so cumbersome they have no dynamism, or ability to change at all, and when something new happens they feel threatened.

I believe because of the rate of exchange of information in the digital age, the rate of change is exponential and at some point a lot of the old order will be rebuilt, to be more open to change but also a lot of decentralised communities may be able to in part break away from the remnant shackles of empire, banksters etc.

The issue of peer review and transparancy- unaccountable centralised apps, social media, platforms, exchanges etc may start seeing a user base drop once a competent decentralised competitor emerges, but of course we are some way away from seeing twitter, Google, youtube etc being challenged realistically.