Vitalik Buterin is one of the youngest billionaires right?

the fair value I calculate, without making any use of market data at all, coincides with the actual price with a small error. And that is because the fair value of currencies is not an intrinsic fair value, but a compounded one. And its composition, in the case of a monetized currency, is a collection of present variables has more weight than the collection of future speculative variables.

if they had responded to the scandal in time, it would have died down and everyone would have realised that it was #Fakenews and the dude wasn't in fact died or in a car crash. But as time went by, it reached more and more people and they all freaked out and reacted the way they did. As a result, it went sliding down by 20%. Which in my opinion, is A LOT!

Brooklyn’s Latest Craze: Making Your Own Electric Grid

Using the same technology that makes Bitcoin possible, neighbors are buying and selling renewable energy to each other

When Michael Guerra, a blunt-talking Brooklyn real estate broker, installed 24 solar panels on his Park Slope rooftop in 2012 during a home renovation, all he knew was that he liked the idea of being able to supply his own green electricity—and to run his air conditioning in the summer without paying exorbitant charges. So he got as many panels as his utility and the state would allow.

“I’m the guy who wanted solar panels on his roof since Jimmy Carter was president,” says the 54-year-old.

Then one day in 2016, he got a knock on his door. Sasha Santiago had been on a nearby rooftop and spied Guerra’s solar panels; he used Google Earth to home in on the right building.

“A strange man rang my bell and—I’m not kidding—said, ‘Hi, I’m Sasha. Can I talk to you about a microgrid?’” Guerra says. “I said, ‘What’s that?’”

Santiago explained that the company he worked for, Brooklyn-based LO3 Energy, was running a pilot program that would permit renewable energy users like Guerra to sell power directly to their neighbors. In effect, the neighbors would become their own small power grid in the middle of the most populous city in the country.

“Oh, this is shared economy. This is Airbnb, this is Uber, this is 21st century,” Guerra remembers thinking. He agreed to be part of the project on President Street. Residents with solar panels on one side of the street sold environmental credits to residents on the other side of the street who had no solar of their own.

New York state allows electricity consumers to use their own solar panels to supply their electricity, but any power produced that the customer doesn’t use feeds back into the larger grid, with consumers being paid for those kilowatt hours. The microgrid system that LO3 had devised would essentially cut out the middleman, using a phone app and smart meters to enable neighbors to strike deals for how much electricity they want to buy from one another and at what price. The technology that makes this possible, Santiago explained to Guerra, is blockchain, the same secure information exchange that makes bitcoin trading possible.

“The idea with blockchain is that everything is done peer to peer,” says Duke University economist Campbell R. Harvey. “With a microgrid, people that have solar panels can actually trade amongst themselves. They don’t have to have a centralized person in the middle that is taking a piece of the action.” In a time when the national electricity grid could be vulnerable to terrorism and climatic events, a new technology “could potentially resolve some of these problems,” he says.

Brooklyn, he says, is “a glimpse of the future.”

***

Blockchain has been looked at for everything from medical records and voting to international money transfers and even online poker. Its value is the way it maintains the integrity of a transaction by breaking it into small blocks of data that are not controlled by one person and therefore can’t be tampered with.

LO3, which began as an energy think tank in 2012, saw that blockchain would be perfect for creating energy markets, says Scott Kessler, LO3’s director of business development. The sale and purchase of electricity depends on the fast and secure processing of enormous amounts of continually changing data—the availability of a particular type of energy, its value at that instant and any ceiling the consumer might have placed on a contract price.

Blockchain enables the meters to communicate reliably with one another, but it’s the phone app that really puts the control in the hands of the microgrid consumers. The app “acts as your bidder” in the energy marketplace, Kessler says, enabling consumers to determine “what is their willingness to pay for energy.”

Buyers interested in simply getting the best price could opt out of any sort of green energy, relying on whatever energy source is available from ConEd, Kessler notes. Or, “they could play with the percentage and see how cheap can I go to get local green energy.”

“The idea is that it isn’t just rich people with solar panels selling energy to each other, but really, it’s the entire community … So if you’re low-income and you need the cheapest power you can get, we’ll still provide that to you. We don’t want to be dictating.”

Picking Brooklyn as the location of the experiment made sense for several reasons, says Kessler.

The community is “environmentally conscious”—not only are there a number of solar panels already set up on rooftops, but many Brooklynites already buy green power and receive a renewable energy credit from ConEd, the New York electric utility.

Brooklyn has a vested interest in “energy resiliency.” When Hurricane Sandy hit Brooklyn, the Gowanus Canal flooded for blocks and power was knocked out to many of the high-rise public housing buildings. “You had folks in wheelchairs with no access to elevators for a week or two, without power, so it was a really bad situation,” Kessler says. With enough battery storage, a microgrid could potentially survive a power outage that affected much larger portions of the city.

The borough’s economic and architectural diversity, from industrial warehouses to historic brownstones, made it a good test subject, Kessler says. That mixture could offer LO3 great feedback about the kinds of energy that might be needed in the future.
***

The pilot program was successful enough that the microgrid will go live later this year. The next phase of the project will involve 300 households or small businesses that have signed letters of interest, along with 50 generation sites—all solar except for one small wind turbine. In total, those producers generate about 1.5 megawatts of electricity, still just a small portion of the needs of Brooklyn’s nearly 3 million residents. But the point is not to replace the whole grid, but to show that small grids can serve local communities.

It’s hard to get any more local than Roger and Barbara Ditman. Roger, 75, and Barbara, 73, bought their four-story brownstone on 10th Street in 1973 for $63,000. (Today it’s worth $3.5 million.) About five years ago, the retired couple paid $40,000 to install 16 solar panels on their roof—panels that now supply about 95 percent of the home’s electricity. With the solar production and various state credits for the solar panels, the investment is almost paid off, Roger Ditman says.

Signing up for the Brooklyn Microgrid means that their excess electricity could be bought in the community. “To me, it’s the next step,” says Roger Ditman. “It’s taking advantage of something that is totally free. It helps the atmosphere, it helps the country, and it helps the community. What we’re not using gets made available to our neighbors and to the larger community, as opposed to using energy that comes from Arizona.”

Michael Guerra compares the microgrid to the changes in telephone service. “There used to be a central switching station. Now if you look at voice-over IP, you’ve got routers that are distributed around that are talking to one another,” he says. “Microgrid controllers can do the same kind of thing with electricity. They can isolate problem spots,” and create a kind of “island” that would be producing electricity when the rest of the city might be dark.

“After I learned about it,” Guerra says, “I thought, ‘This is definitely happening. This can’t not happen.’”

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/15/how-a-street-in-brooklyn-is-changing-the-energy-grid-215268

Excessive spending (i.e. running budget deficits) has never been a problem in the way you think. It may lead to severe inflation via exuberant and uncontrolled money printing but it can't lead to a crash in the sense you mean it.

Big Business Giants From Microsoft to J.P. Morgan Are Getting Behind Ethereum

Thirty big banks, tech giants, and other organizations—including J.P. Morgan Chase, Microsoft, and Intel—are uniting to build business-ready versions of the software behind Ethereum, a decentralized computing network based on digital currency.

The group, called the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, is set to debut at a summit in Brooklyn, New York on Tuesday, during which members J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM, +0.44%) and Banco Santander (SAN, +1.08%) are scheduled to demonstrate a pilot of the financial technology as it exists today. The pair plan to show off a "spot trade" on the foreign exchange market for global currencies using an adaptation of Ethereum as the settlement layer.

Ethereum uses a blockchain, often referred to as a distributed ledger, to record and execute transactions without the need of a middleman. Instead of a centrally managed database, copies of the cryptographic balance book are spread across the network and automatically updated as any payment takes place.

The Ethereum alliance arrives as a challenger to several other extant blockchain ventures. The R3 consortium, for example, counts scores of partnering banks among its members, despite recent high-profile departures by Goldman Sachs, Santander, and Morgan Stanley. It has created "Corda," its own take on a blockchain.

IBM (IBM, +0.73%), meanwhile, has spearheaded another initiative known as the Hyperledger Project, part of the non-profit Linux Foundation. That group maintains the "fabric" blockchain codebase, which as been used in supply chain trials with Wal-Mart (WMT, +0.88%).

Much of the interest to date from traditional financial firms involves "private" blockchains, meaning permission from an authority is required before a party can join the network. The original versions of Bitcoin and Ethereum have public networks that anyone can join. (At press time, the market caps of their cryptocurrencies were approximately $19 billion and $1.4 billion, respectively.)

Alex Batlin, blockchain lead at Bank of New York Mellon, said that while the Ethereum alliance will focus on the development of private blockchains, the hope is that these will one day link up with the public Ethereum blockchain, which is open to all.

"That interconnection of public and private chains actually creates a very strong network," Batlin said on a call with Fortune. "Each chain strengthens the other at an exponential level."

In the view of its proponents, Ethereum's public and private networks will become analogous to intranets versus internets; they will share standard protocols, but have different configurations for privacy and security, depending on each organization's needs.

Members of the Ethereum alliance include Accenture, BBVA, BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas, BP, Cisco, Credit Suisse, ING, Thomson Reuters, and UBS. Also joining is IC3, or the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts, an academic group consisting of researchers from universities such as Cornell University, UC Berkeley, and Israel's Technion.

Several representatives from alliance firms cited the energy surrounding Devcon2, Ethereum's fall developer conference in Shanghai, as the focal point that led to their collaboration on this effort. Despite multiple hacks on Ethereum-based applications and a controversial splitting of the Ethereum network, enthusiasm in the network has apparently not diminished.

J.P. Morgan is responsible for developing the basis of the blockchain tech for the alliance. Called "Quorum," the bank's code has been designed to add privacy protections into the mix, among other tweaks.

The partners will help each other develop the foundations for different use cases, such as post-trade settlement, payments between banks, and supply chain tracking, while competing on applications and services built atop the networks. The top priorities for the alliance now include ensuring scalability and security.The other founding members of the alliance are BlockApps, Nuco, AMIS, Andui, CME Group, ConsenSys, Fubon Financial, brainbot technologies, Chronicled, Cryptape, The Institutes, Monax, String Labs, Telindus, Tendermint, VidRoll, and Wipro.

http://fortune.com/2017/02/28/ethereum-jpmorgan-microsoft-alliance/

Economists have been threatening recession crash for YEARS!

I'm not saying it won't happen, only that it's not news.

Anyway, It's obvious that at some point the SEC is going to respond to the explosion of ICO activity.  I want to argue that we CAN actually influence that decision -- but by careful action before, not by organization after it happens.  

Five years ago, Hochstein praised the Bitcoin network’s ability to settle transactions with low fees and at fast speeds without the necessity and involvement of intermediaries or mediators.

Did you check how much gold went down?

It is somewhere in the range of 1-1.5%. Basically, the change is just bordering on average daily volatility of this metal (and it's already rebounded to 1,243 dollars per ounce). Regarding cryptocurrency going south, the explanations is simple, and I've been telling it for a week already. The market had been mostly undecided for the last few days, and now as the Judgment day draws nearer, people become nervous and anxious, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that they are looking to cash out. I suspect we should see extreme volatility in July

Great recession fears as bankers warn next global crash could arrive 'with a vengeance'

Next major recession could be brewing in countries like China, a new report warns

A new financial crisis is brewing in the emerging economies and it could hit “with a vengeance”, an influential group of central bankers has warned.

Emerging markets such as China are showing the same signs that their economies are overheating as the US and the UK demonstrated before the financial crisis of 2007-08, according to the annual report of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

Claudio Borio, the head of the BIS monetary and economic department, said a new recession could come “with a vengeance” and “the end may come to resemble more closely a financial boom gone wrong”.

The BIS, which is sometimes known as the central bank for central banks and counts Bank of England Governor Mark Carney among its members, warned of trouble ahead for the world economy.

It predicted that central banks would be forced to raise interest rates after years of record lows in order to combat inflation which will “smother” growth.

The group also warned about the threat poised by rising debt in countries like China and the rise in protectionism such as in the US under Donald Trump, City AM reported.

Chinese corporate debt has almost doubled since 2007, now reaching 166 per cent of GDP, while household debt rose to 44 per cent of GDP last year.

In May, Moody's cut China's credit rating for the first time since 1989 from A1 to Aa3 which could potentially raise the cost of borrowing for the Chinese government.

The BIS’s credit-to-GDP gap indicator also showed debt, which is seen as an “early warning indicator” for a country’s banking system, is rising far faster than growth in other Asian economies such as Thailand and Hong Kong.
 
The world economy is still recovering from the financial crisis and the euro crisis which followed it in 2010.

The UK is said to be experiencing a “lost decade” as productivity and wages have flatlined.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/global-financial-crash-central-bankers-warn-back-with-a-vengeance-china-debt-gdp-ratio-a7807811.html

Billionaire says he has 10% of his money in Bitcoin and Ether

"Ten percent of my net worth is in this space," Novogratz said at a forum held at the Harvard Business School Club of New York Wednesday. He declined to say exactly how wealthy he is, but he's a former hedge fund manager at Fortress Investment Group and a Goldman Sachs partner who made the Forbes billionaire list in 2008.

It's the "best investment of my life," Novogratz said.

Bitcoin was worth under $500 a year ago. Today the digital currency trades at over $1,200. Back in 2013, Novogratz predicted Bitcoin's value would soar. He remembers people laughing at him at the time.

Since then, Bitcoin's price has been on a wild run. It surged to nearly $1,000 in late 2013 and then fell to under $250 in 2015. It started to fly again last year, around the time of the Brexit vote. It surpassed $1,000 in January of this year again and has kept climbing.
Now Novogratz is saying Bitcoin will go to $2,000.

But he also warned the Harvard Business School Club crowd that there will "likely be a bubble" in digital currencies. The best way to handle it, he argues, is the old Wall Street trick of diversification. Put a little money in a lot of different plays in digital currency.

For example, Novogratz was also an early investor in Ether. It's another digital currency that has quickly emerged as the No. 2 rival to Bitcoin. Novogratz says he bought Ether when it was trading for about $1. Today it's worth over $48.

Novogratz met Vitalik Buterin, the young Russian brainchild behind Ether at a dinner party at a prominent CEO's home. He recalls that Buterin, then 21, showed up late, which struck him as shocking -- and a bit ballsy. He figured it was worth paying attention to Buterin.
Ether is a currency with a "smart contract" function that gives users additional security and abilities to transfer information in addition to monetary value.

We're witnessing the "3rd inning" of this digital asset revolution, Novogratz predicts. He's not exactly sure how it will play out, but he plans to continue investing in digital currencies and Blockchain, the revolutionary technology behind the scenes that makes Bitcoin work.
Blockchain is literally a digital ledger to record and track transactions. What makes it so technologically advanced is that multiple companies or parties can access the Blockchain and see the history of what happened to an asset.

Novogratz has emerged as one of the biggest Wall Street cheerleaders of Blockchain, but his bets haven't always gone so well. He exited Fortress in 2015 after the company shut down his Marco Fund for poor performance. It lost around 20% in its final year after his investments in emerging markets, especially Brazil, tanked.

"We have had an extremely challenging two years, and I do not believe the current environment is conducive to achieving our best results," Novogratz said at the time.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/20/investing/mike-novogratz-bets-big-on-bitcoin-ether-blockchain/index.html