Allow me to point out that Anderson Silva's fight versus Derek Brunson was a very close one, and the win was inclined towards Derek. But the judges scored it for Anderson to everyone's and also to his surprise.

I reckon Derek had him, but Dana White might have had comeback plans for Anderson during that time hehehe.

What does either of them have to gain by saying Bitcoin and other cryptos are a sham?

Exactly one month ago, when the Treasury reported its latest monthly budget deficit, we noted that Federal spending surged in March, rising 7% from $392.8BN from a year prior to $420BN, the second highest monthly government outlay on record, and with tax receipts disappointing, it meant that the March budget deficit of $208.7 billion was 18% higher than $176.2BN deficit recorded last March, and was the biggest March budget deficit in US history.

Fast forward to today when anyone who took this one month and extrapolated it as an indication of US economic health got the shock of a lifetime, when the US posted its largest monthly budget surplus on record in April, and the highest Federal Government Receipts ever - at just over half a trillion dollars - which the Congressional Budget Office said reflected stronger economic activity over the past year.

In many ways, April was a mirror image of March: unlike March, Federal receipts in April soared to $510 billion, 12% or $54.8BN more than April 2017, and the highest Federal receipts not just for an April but any month in history (although of that surge, approximately $20BN was due to one additional day of collections in April 2018).



For those wondering if the culprit was tax repatriation, the answer is no: net corporate income taxes totaled $42.2BN in April and $120.8BN so far in fiscal 2018, 7 months into the year. The latter is down $39.2BN (24.5%) from the corporate taxes collected at this time last year; overall gross receipts were down 14% to $159.1BN while refunds up 53% to $38.3BN. as corporations become an increasingly less relevant source of government funding.

Meanwhile, on the spending side, outlays increased by a more modest 8.4% to $296 billion, the latest monthly budget statement  reported.



Combined, this meant that the monthly surplus was $214.3 billion, the highest since records started in 1968. While the number was modestly below the CBO's May 7 estimate of $218 billion, the number was well above the Wall Street consensus of $194BN, and well higher than the $182BN surplus in April of 2017.



While the federal government traditionally posts its biggest budget surplus in April when taxpayers file and pay their tax returns, this years was a blockbuster in every possible way: in a May 7 preview of the report, the CBO said that a stronger economic expansion and income growth added to federal revenue in April (there was no mention of taxes collected on cryptocurrency gains).

Overall, the budget deficit for the first seven months of the fiscal year widened to $385 billion, from $344 billion a year earlier, according to Treasury, although it was sharply lower than the $600 billion cumulative YTD deficit reported last month.

That said, don't expect the good times to continue indefinitely: Trump's tax cuts and spending increases are expected to push the budget deficit to $804 billion in the current fiscal year, from $665 billion in fiscal 2017, and surpass the $1 trillion-mark by 2020, according to the CBO. Others, such as Goldman, are confident that the US debt funding needs will surpass $1 trillion as soon as this year. The Trump administration has countered that tax cuts will pay for themselves through faster economic growth, and if April is any indication, it may be right.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05-10/us-posts-biggest-budget-surplus-history

So out of the 4 matches he fought ever since USADA started testing UFC athletes, 1 win, 2 lost and 1 NC (Originally a unanimous decision win for Silva; overturned after he tested positive for drostanolone and androsterone. Diaz also tested positive for marijuana metabolites.)

Moreover, decentralized file storage services have the potential to offer a cheaper and more secure option than centralized services, potentially posing a threat to legacy infrastructure platforms like Amazon’s S3 or Dropbox.

By 2016, American Samoa was desperate. Its economy and population had been shrinking for years and hopes of a turnaround fell as the verdant volcanic islands in the South Pacific withered into banking desert.

The Bank of Hawaii announced in 2012 it intended to leave the U.S. territory entirely. It agreed to hang on until a successor could be found but scaled back services.

By 2016, officials and consultants say, no new loans had been issued for four or five years. Consumers who couldn’t afford to travel to Hawaii or the mainland resorted to backyard lenders and paid usurious rates.

In their desperation, the islanders found inspiration in early frontiersman and prairie progressives who had likewise found themselves on the margins of the American economy.

The islanders are now putting the finishing touches on the first new U.S. public bank in almost a century. The development is being closely watched by other isolated regions hoping to kick-start economic renewal — and by the legal marijuana industry whose operators have struggled to enter the federal banking system.

Public banks were once relatively common in the U.S. but today exist only in North Dakota. Typically, state and local governments own the banks and deposit their revenue there. The banks then offer loans, partnerships and services to boost the local economy and hopefully turn a profit.

No loans but plenty of sharks

The seven islands of American Samoa lie about six hours southwest of Honolulu by air. The territory is slightly larger than the District of Columbia and home to 60,000 American nationals. Its largest export is processed tuna under the Chicken of the Sea and StarKist brands.

If American Samoa were a state, it would have had the slowest GDP growth of any since the recession. If it were one of the 3,000-plus counties in the U.S., its average annual earnings would place it near the absolute bottom of the list, according to Commerce Department figures.

It would be an oversimplification to trace all the islands’ woes to a lack of credit and banking services, but it’s a convenient place to start.

Bankers desert the island

The Bank of Hawaii said “geographic isolation” drove it to wind up its operations after nearly 50 years in American Samoa. Australia’s ANZ bank still has a small presence but offers limited services.

To understand why banks are scaling back and why it causes American Samoa such pain, imagine a basic small-town bank. It takes in paychecks and other deposits from locals and uses them as reserves when lending to their neighbors, who then invest in property and businesses.

That model breaks down when banks span states or countries. The big banks with tiny branches in American Samoa are happy to take deposits from locals, but when it comes to lending that money back out, it makes cold, actuarial sense to focus on bigger, safer clients elsewhere.

Federal regulators have been struggling with this problem for decades. But variations have been present since soon after the country's birth — and states have been taking matters into their own hands for almost as long.

The first wave of U.S. public banks arrived in the 1830s, when Andrew Jackson vetoed a bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States, thrusting residents of frontier states like Indiana, Illinois and Alabama into the ranks of the unbanked. In desperation, about half of the states in existence founded public banks, some jointly owned by the private sector.

Almost all had folded by 1918, when high plains farmers still chafing at the economic stranglehold of Big Railroad and the high interest rates charged by Minneapolis and Chicago lenders voted the Nonpartisan League into full control of North Dakota's government.

Led by former socialist A.C. Townley, League politicians passed myriad populist measures, but their most prominent legacy is the public Bank of North Dakota. It opened in 1919 and lent money to farmers at lower rates and deposited cash in small banks statewide.

Today, fueled in part by the oil boom in the Bakken shale formation, the bank says it has earned 14 years of record profits. It partners with banks, invests in businesses and offers student loans.

The Bank of North Dakota has both helped propel the state's shale boom, which in turn has goosed its profits. (AP Photo/Dale Wetzel)
When your Hail Mary is a bank shot

Drew Roberts, general partner at the Utah financial services consulting firm Burton, Roberts and Meredith, first heard of American Samoa’s quest for a banking solution in 2013.

Roberts worked with government and business leaders on the islands to charter a new bank and — when that fell through — helped devise a scheme that hadn’t worked in a century.

After researching BND, leaders were convinced a public bank could work in American Samoa. Roberts started looking for retired folks who had started and run banks successfully, and who had experience (and connections) with federal regulators.

When former Celtic Bank president and chief executive Phil Ware heard their pitch to help start a government-owned bank on a tropical archipelago, he thought the consultants were crazy.

“[But] I made a few calls and found out the great need that there is down there,” said Ware, who first encountered Samoan language and culture on his mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in New Zealand. “We need to help them get banking. How do you operate an economy without a bank?”

When Roberts first arrived in the territory and drove past an ANZ branch, he saw cars parked at the drive-through and a line of customers stretching far out the door.

“The first thing we thought was that it was a run on the bank,” Roberts said.  Only it wasn’t an old-school bank run. It was just payday, when everybody scrambled to turn their paychecks into cash before the bank ran out of bills.

American Samoans, Roberts and Ware found, had no access to credit cards, loans or the other financial tools that other Americans take for granted. Islanders living on the mainland faced wire-transfer fees over $150 to send money home.

When Ware agreed to become the first chief executive of the Territorial Bank of American Samoa, he thought it would be a “piece of cake.”

“I had no idea,” he says now.

The Territorial Bank of American Samoa (TBAS) served its first customers in October 2016 out of a leased office handed over by the Bank of Hawaii.

It was soon lending money and opening accounts. But it couldn’t offer basic services such as direct deposits or bank transfers until the Federal Reserve signed off on its routing number.

That usually takes a couple of weeks. This time, it took a couple of years. Few federal regulators had approved a new bank in a U.S. territory before, let alone one owned by a territorial government. They fretted about TBAS oversight and its political independence.

The team behind the public bank pressed their case all the way up to the vice president's office, but it took a meeting with the freshly appointed Federal Reserve vice chair for supervision, Randal Quarles, who came from the Utah-based Cynosure Group, to break the logjam.

“He understood completely,” Roberts said. “All of a sudden, we get a call [from regulators] saying ‘we got the green light, let’s get this thing done.’”

TBAS now has a routing number and can offer cash transfers to the mainland, issue checks and provide card-swiping machines to merchants.

As with BND, the money customers entrust to TBAS is not guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Instead, it’s backed by the full faith and credit of the territory of American Samoa.

The bank’s architects eventually plan to gain FDIC insurance and privatize the bank, although no timetable has been set.

Exporting more than just tuna

After TBAS, it appears unlikely the United States will have to wait another century to get its next public bank. The post-recession anti-bank backlash continues, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) and others have pushed for public banks to help revive marginal rural and urban areas.

Community banks are vanishing. Adjusted for inflation, the value of small-business loans in rural U.S. communities is half of what it was in 2004, according to a December 2017 analysis by the Wall Street Journal’s Coulter Jones and Ruth Simon.

As banks consolidate, lending shifts to safe, wealthy urban markets and capital flows away from small towns. It accelerates their economic decline, making them even less attractive to big banks, and the cycle intensifies.

North Dakota has avoided the worst of this cycle. The rural state has more banks per capita than any other and, according to FDIC data analyzed by the nonprofit Institute for Local Self Reliance, lends to small businesses at more than four times the national rate.

The public bank's partnerships help cushion private-sector banks against downturns and other economic shocks. Those partnerships also avoid questions of inefficiency and corruption that have dogged public banks such as the state-run Banco do Brasil, said Middle Tennessee State University lecturer Walker Todd, a former lawyer for the New York and Cleveland Feds.

“If you’re going to have a public bank, it better look like the Bank of North Dakota,” Todd said. “Once you start making retail loans you’re going to start looking like [Banco do Brasil].”

FDI-see-you-later

The vast majority of public-bank campaigns have yet to yield results, but public banking remains one of the few practical options for chartering a bank outside the watchful eye of the FDIC.

And it might not lead to undue risk. Ronnie Phillips, economics professor emeritus at Colorado State University, said that, with proper safeguards a public bank could effectively be guaranteed by steady deposits from its government.

“It’s very doable, especially these days, to have a publicly chartered bank,” Phillips said. “You don’t have to really worry about the safety and security of it because it’s a state bank.”

And you also don’t have to worry about FDIC oversight. Which might be useful if your state has legalized marijuana and the attorney general is Jeff Sessions. It doesn't bypass the Fed’s role, but it’s a step toward local independence.

Because it’s a Schedule One drug, federal regulators view cannabis-related deposits and transfers as drug money. That has forced most of the legal marijuana industry to do their business in cash, which — much as it has in American Samoa — limits growth, increases operating costs and enables tax evasion.

The industry is trapped on the margins. Large banks don’t think it’s worth the risk and federal regulators view it with mistrust. So, like frontier states in 1833, North Dakota in 1919 and American Samoa today, officials in California, Massachusetts, Washington state and elsewhere are looking into creating their own public banks.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/05/09/when-banks-abandoned-american-samoa-the-islands-found-a-century-old-solution-that-could-be-the-future-of-finance/

The Territorial Bank of American Samoa (TBAS) served its first customers in October 2016 out of a leased office handed over by the Bank of Hawaii.

It was soon lending money and opening accounts. But it couldn’t offer basic services such as direct deposits or bank transfers until the Federal Reserve signed off on its routing number.

That usually takes a couple of weeks. This time, it took a couple of years. Few federal regulators had approved a new bank in a U.S. territory before, let alone one owned by a territorial government. They fretted about TBAS oversight and its political independence[/u].

Behind the guards, the blast doors and down corridors of reinforced concrete, sit the encrypted computer servers -- connected to nothing -- that hold keys to a vast digital fortune.

Argentine entrepreneur Wences Casares has spent the past several years persuading Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires that Bitcoin is the global currency of the future, that they need to buy some, and that he’s the man to safeguard it. His startup, Xapo, has built a network of underground vaults on five continents, including one in a decommissioned Swiss military bunker.

In the rarefied world of wealth management, Xapo is known for a client list studded with family offices, and for occasionally letting a journalist peek into a stronghold to write about its security. But one secret has proven elusive: how much digital cash does it really hold?

Two Xapo clients said it houses roughly $10 billion of Bitcoin. Another person close to the venture called the figure an accurate approximation. Bitcoin’s price, after all, is hardly steady.

‘Patient Zero’

Even in the colorful world of crypto the cache is remarkable -- amounting to about 7 percent of the global Bitcoin supply. It would mean Xapo, just 4 years old, has more “deposits” than 98 percent of the roughly 5,670 banks in the U.S. But as a custodian it’s regulated differently. The Swiss subsidiary is overseen by the self-regulating Financial Services Standards Association, which audits members to ensure they comply with anti-money-laundering rules. Xapo serves U.S. customers through a Delaware corporation that’s registered with the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and is licensed in several states.

The outsize holdings underscore the faith that Casares -- a serial entrepreneur nicknamed “Patient Zero” for stirring Silicon Valley’s interest in Bitcoin -- has garnered among his acolytes and at major crypto investment firms, such as Grayscale and CoinShares.


Xapo has a network of underground vaults on five continents.Photographer: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

“Everyone who isn’t keeping keys themselves is keeping them with Xapo,” said Ryan Radloff of CoinShares, which has more than $500 million of Bitcoin stored at Xapo. “You couldn’t pay me to keep it with a bank.”

Xapo’s billionaire backers include LinkedIn Corp. co-founder Reid Hoffman and former Wall Street trader Mike Novogratz, who’s in the process of setting up his own cryptocurrency merchant bank. Their bet is that Bitcoin is here to stay, and so is its biggest scourge, theft.

The first rule of owning Bitcoin is to securely keep your private key -- the code that lets you spend your coins. If thieves get it, they can loot your holdings in an instant, with no hope of recovery. Putting keys on a device connected to the Internet is both convenient and perilous: Hackers have proven adept at obtaining them from afar.

The most popular alternative is called cold storage, keeping the key in an offline device such as a thumb drive. But risks remain: Hackers have also proven adept at setting traps on computers to access cold-storage devices the moment they’re online. More traditional criminals have committed home invasions and kidnappings. Some Bitcoin tycoons have resorted to hiding their identities, fortifying their homes and studying self-defense.

Trading Desk

Xapo’s solution is to bury a cold-storage device in a mountainside and layer on electronic safeguards.

“They’re the first folks who recognized custodial and security functions would be key,” said Hoffman, whose venture capital firm Greylock Partners led a $20 million investment in Xapo in 2014, a couple of years after Casares persuaded him to buy his first Bitcoin. “He made the pitch in the morning and in the afternoon I called him with an offer.”

At Xapo, retrieving Bitcoin from the vault takes about two days. The company verifies a client’s identity and authenticates the request before manually signing the transactions with private keys from multiple vault locations. Approval from three separate vaults is required for any transactions to be authorized. The company also offers customers a trading desk to buy and sell Bitcoin and created the first Bitcoin debit card to spend it.

Casares, 44, declined to comment for this story. After a flurry of publicity at Xapo’s launch, he has drawn big audiences at crypto conferences but largely shunned media interviews.

Yet his persuasiveness is legendary. His evangelizing of Bitcoin is so pervasive in Silicon Valley that when Hoffman asked his family office to buy some, his banker asked when he’d spoken to Casares. Xapo’s advisers now include former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, ex-Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Officer John Reed and Visa International founder Dee Hock.

Such salesmanship has been critical to Xapo’s success. First Block Capital, Canada’s first fully registered crypto firm, picked Xapo as its custodian after months of due diligence, including touring the Swiss vault.

“Every part of their DNA is geared to security,” said Sean Clark, First Block’s founder, who noted the vault’s fingerprint scanners were equipped with a pulse reader to prevent amputated hands from being used. “Whenever we make big transfers they FaceTime us, we have duress words, if it’s big enough they’ll fly out to see us.”

Xapo is doubling down on its pursuit of institutional clients, with President Ted Rogers enlisting Peter Najarian, a veteran of emerging-market trading at UBS Group AG and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, to oversee outreach to investors including pension funds, private banks, assets managers, family offices and hedge funds.

‘Tidal Wave’

The perceived lack of an institutional-grade custodial solution for Bitcoin has been one of the sticking points for many money managers looking to try the asset class. Xapo says its already offering precisely that solution. If it persuades them of its merits, the implications for Bitcoin would be profound.

“A fraction of that kind of institutional money flowing into the space would be a tidal wave,” Najarian said.

Casares has made acceptance of Bitcoin his life’s mission. Born to sheep ranchers in Argentina’s remote Patagonia region, he experienced the impact of inflation throughout his youth.

That drove him to build a series of fintech startups that made him millions before he encountered Bitcoin. He sold 75 percent of Patagon, a Latin American financial-services website, for $529 million in 2000 and digital wallet startup Lemon for $43 million 13 years later to focus on crypto. By then, he was already a big holder of Bitcoin.

“I am personally allocating a percentage of my net worth to this that is borderline irresponsible because I believe in it so much,” Casares told Lemon board member Eric O’Brien, according to “Digital Gold,” a book by Nathaniel Popper. Two years ago, he joined the board of PayPal Holdings Inc.

‘High Hurdle’

Bitcoin’s meteoric rise in recent years has spurred the proliferation of rival currencies, such as Ethereum and Ripple that also have multibillion-dollar valuations. Yet Xapo only safeguards Bitcoin because of Casares’s belief that it alone will succeed. Such dogmatism has seen Xapo turn away customers looking to store rival currencies.

Other purists say ventures such as Xapo have no place in the Bitcoin ecosystem, slowing down what’s supposed to be a seamless transfer.

Xapo’s top brass wrestle with that paradox, too.

“It’s a subject we discuss a lot, and we believe Bitcoin won’t reach the mainstream if people have to hold their own private keys,” Rogers said. “It’s a pretty high hurdle technically to be your own bank with lots of security.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-09/bunkers-for-the-wealthy-are-said-to-hoard-10-billion-of-bitcoin

The concepts from stock market are applicable for trading Bitcoin ? Or I have to study crypto market specifically? 

SAN FRANCISCO — Some of the biggest names on Wall Street are warming up to Bitcoin, a virtual currency that for nearly a decade has been consigned to the unregulated fringes of the financial world.

The parent company of the New York Stock Exchange has been working on an online trading platform that would allow large investors to buy and hold Bitcoin, according to emails and documents viewed by The New York Times and four people briefed on the effort who asked to remain anonymous because the plans were still confidential.

The news of the virtual exchange, which has not been reported before, came after Goldman Sachs went public with its intention to open a Bitcoin trading unit — most likely the first of its kind at a Wall Street bank.

The moves by Goldman and Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, mark a dramatic shift toward the mainstream for a digital token that has been known primarily for its underworld associations and status as a high-risk, speculative investment.

The new interest among Wall Street power brokers also represents a surprising new chapter in the renegade history of Bitcoin.

The virtual currency was created after the 2008 global financial crisis by a still-anonymous programmer who used the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The idea was to replace the existing banking structure with an online alternative that couldn’t be controlled by a handful of powerful organizations.

But instead of being replaced, the old banks are beginning to assert their own role in the unorthodox financial world of virtual currency, sometimes called cryptocurrencies.

While Bitcoin was originally intended to be used by consumers for all sorts of transactions — without any financial institutions getting involved — it has mostly become a virtual investment, stored in digital wallets and traded on mostly unregulated exchanges around the world. People buy Bitcoin in the hope that its value will go up, similar to the way they purchase gold or silver.

Details of the platform that Intercontinental Exchange is working on have not been finalized and the project could still fall apart, given the hesitancy among big Wall Street institutions to be closely associated with the Wild West of virtual currencies. A spokesman said that the company had no comment.

Many corporations and governments have expressed interest in the technology that Bitcoin introduced, particularly a form of database known as the blockchain.

Some large financial exchanges, including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, have already created financial products linked to the price of Bitcoin, known as futures. But the new operation at ICE would provide more direct access to Bitcoin by putting the actual tokens in the customer’s account at the end of the trade.

ICE has had conversations with other financial institutions about setting up a new operation through which banks can buy a contract, known as a swap, that will end with the customer owning Bitcoin the next day — with the backing and security of the exchange, according to the people familiar with the project.

The swap contract is more complicated than an immediate trade of dollars for Bitcoin, even if the end result is still ownership of a certain amount of Bitcoin. But a swap contract allows the trading to come under the regulation of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and to operate clearly under existing laws — something today’s Bitcoin exchanges have struggled to do.

The chief executive of Nasdaq, Adena Friedman, recently said her company could also create a virtual-currency exchange if regulatory issues are ironed out. While several hedge funds have been buying and selling Bitcoin, most large institutional investors, such as mutual funds and pensions, have avoided it largely as a result of similar regulatory concerns.

Bitcoin still faces plenty of skepticism in the mainstream financial world. Over the weekend, Warren E. Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, who has long been critical of virtual currencies, said Bitcoin was “probably rat poison squared” in an interview with CNBC. The Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates added his own skepticism, saying he’d “short” Bitcoin if he could.

And the new efforts to trade Bitcoin don’t help answer basic questions about what makes the virtual currency useful in the real world. Most attempts to use Bitcoin for everyday commerce haven’t gained traction, and investors have treated it as a speculative commodity like gold or silver.

Some Bitcoin enthusiasts have said that its increasing integration into the existing financial system has pulled it away from its founding ideals. Paul Chou, a former trader at Goldman Sachs who set up LedgerX, a regulated Bitcoin exchange that would compete with Intercontinental Exchange, said his company has made a point of focusing on large Bitcoin holders, rather than financial institutions.

“The reason we got into crypto was not to partner with a bank, but to replace them,” Mr. Chou said, using the shorthand for cryptocurrencies. “We deal with crypto holders directly in a way that really takes advantage of Bitcoin’s strengths, while avoiding brokers, banks and other institutions that take multiple cuts of the transaction.”

Goldman will initially only be trading futures contracts linked to Bitcoin’s price. But Goldman executives said they were looking at moving in the direction of buying and selling actual Bitcoins.

Intercontinental Exchange’s effort, if it pans out, could make Bitcoin available to a much wider and more influential customer base, including other financial firms.

Several big corporate names, including the giant technology investor SoftBank, which has stakes in Sprint and Uber, have been in discussions about being involved with the exchange in some way, the people familiar with the project said. But a spokesman for SoftBank said this week that it was no longer involved.

LedgerX, the exchange founded by Mr. Chou, is the only exchange that now offers the kind of swaps that ICE has discussed. LedgerX has experienced increasing trading volume in recent months, but ICE would start with an edge because essentially every large financial institution is already hooked into it.

The interest in Bitcoin trading illustrates how the reputation of the virtual currency has, after a rocky start, improved.

Regulators are currently looking at whether many virtual currencies, including the second most widely used digital token, Ether, have been issued and traded in violation of securities regulations. Institutional investors believe that because of the way Bitcoin was created and structured — without any one company or organization behind it — it would be on safer ground with regulators.

ICE was considering launching a swap contract linked to Ether, but backed away from that because of regulatory uncertainty, the people briefed on the effort said.

Mr. Chou, at LedgerX, said he made a similar decision and has delayed creating any products linked to Ether.

With Bitcoin, on the other hand, Mr. Chou said that road seems to be clear for big institutions to get involved.

“The industry is seeing unprecedented institutional interest for the first time in Bitcoin’s history,” he said. “I’ve been amazed that the strongest believers in cryptocurrency often start out the most skeptical. It’s a healthy skepticism. But at some point the perception shifts, and for many institutions — I think we’re finally there.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/07/technology/bitcoin-new-york-stock-exchange.html

What the food industry really needs is a trusted, traceable and easily accessible history of each product’s journey – from farm, to fork. And this is exactly what Blockchain can do. Every step in the food production and transportation cycle is verified (through the consensus of those involved) and recorded onto the Blockchain – guaranteeing security and immutability.

What good points are you referring to? Are you referring to the ones I quoted here:
They might not experience poverty, but society itself will suffer from abundance of negligent people if ever Chris Hughes' desire comes into fruition. Wouldn't it also be unfair for rich people who worked hard for that money?

I agree that resources should come from people who got the most benefit out of the economy's structure but I think they shouldn't provide it for free. With their money, they can open more business to help give jobs to others who needs it.

Rulers of that era and now are different. Economic growth and prosperity by that time came from spoils of war, not mainly from taxes.
Cash would not simply eradicate poverty and stabilize the middle class, it would just make them more negligent and slothful.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes wants to tax anyone who makes over $250,000 to the tune of nearly $3 trillion over ten years, then use the proceeds to provide universal basic income (UBI) to every working American who makes under $50,000 a year, including those providing services such as child care and elder care.




Hughes, who has a related book coming out, has made tackling income inequality his top priority by partnering with the Economic Security Project - a major recipient of his philanthropic efforts. The group is focused finding solutions to provide "unconditional cash and basic income" in the United States due to the effects of "automation, globalization, and financialization" forcing the discussion.

The plan would essentially be an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for low-to-moderate income individuals and families.


While Hughes notes that the annual $290 billion annual price tag is half the U.S. defense budget, he contends that income inequality is destabilizing the nation - and that there is a "very practical concern that, given that consumer spending is the biggest driver of economic growth in the United States and that median household incomes haven't meaningfully budged in 40 years," a Universal Basic Income is vital to maintaining economic national security.   

"Cash is just the simplest and most efficient thing to eradicate poverty and stabilize the middle class," Hughs told Bloomberg at the Economic Security Project's New York offices at Union Square.


https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05-04/facebook-co-founder-wants-slap-3-trillion-tax-rich-pay-universal-basic-income

For Venezuela's economy, the ascent into socialist paradise did not turn out quite as planned: in fact, under the Maduro regime, the country with the world's biggest petroleum reserves somehow reversed course, and crashed through every single circle of economic hell, and now that its hyperinflation has hit levels that would make even Mugabe and Rudy von Havenstein blush, all that's left is barter.

And, as Fabiola Zerpa explains as part of Bloomberg's fascinating "Life in Caracas" series, i.e., watching economic and social collapse in real-time, in Venezuela, a haircut now costs 5 bananas and 2 eggs.

Read on for what really happens when money dies, coming to a banana monetary regime near you in the near future.

In Venezuela, a Haircut Costs 5 Bananas and 2 Eggs

The other day, I made a baguette-for-parking swap. It worked out brilliantly

I had time but, as usual, no bolivars. The attendant at the cash-only lot had some bills but no chance to leave his post during the fleeting moments the bakery nearby put his favorite bread on sale. The deal: He let me leave my car, and I came back with an extra loaf, acquired with my debit card. He reimbursed me—giving me a bonus of spare change for my pocket.

That’s how we make do in our collapsing economy. If somebody has lots of one thing and too little of another, an arrangement can be made. I’ve exchanged corn meal for rice with friends from high school, eggs for cooking oil with my sister-in-law. Street vendors barter, too, taking, say, a kilo of sugar as payment for one of flour. There are Facebook pages and chat-room groups devoted to the swap-ability of everything from toothpaste to baby formula.

A barber in the countryside cuts hair for yuccas, bananas or eggs. Moto-taxi drivers will get you where you need to go for carton of cigarettes. The owners of one of my favorite Mexican restaurants offer a plate of burritos, enchiladas, tamal and tacos in return for a few packages of paper napkins. At a fast-food joint near my office, the guy working the register let me walk away with a carry-out order of chicken, rice and vegetables without paying the other day, relying on my promise to come back with the 800,000 bolivars.

Acting on that kind of trust was unheard of just a few years ago. Charity is also something new. I didn’t grow up with the traditions of canned-food drives and volunteerism that are common in the U.S. Now parents from my kids’ school collect clothes for the poor, and neighbors gather toys for a children’s hospital. My friend Lidia, a property-rights lawyer, delivers homemade soup to the homeless.

I like to think of all of this as a noble expression of solidarity, as evidence of the decency of my fellow caraquenos at a time of mind-numbing shortages of basic goods and exploding inflation. I know that in most cases the motivation is necessity, even desperation. But that’s all right. Handing that freshly baked baguette to the parking lot attendant made both of us smile, even if for just a second.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05-05/when-money-dies-venezuela-haircut-costs-5-bananas-and-2-eggs

Perhaps one day with the current bitcoin advances, bitcoin digital currencies will be an international currency for all countries, and make it easier for every human to make transactions between countries when going to another country.
if it happens in the future it will certainly affect the paper money that exists around the world, whereas we know when the banknotes have a lot of history and symbolize the diversity of a country with other countries.
if that happens, surely the government will not remain silent on the matter, there will be an agreement between state governments to immediately close the bitcoin network to the world.
what will you do if you have a lot of bitcoin.

What are your observations and thoughts regarding the development and possible predictions of the correlation between stock markets and Bitcoin?

So when a state days they consider cryptos as property, it means they are getting taxed, while this is not the case with means of payment.What do you think of this?

How much, in your opinion, has international relations influenced the world economy and what do you think about it?