Brief A necessarily brief one today, I’m afraid. Some more extensive comments on recent movements can be found in our monthly update to fund investors which went out earlier this week. 1.2 From Nikkei Asia. Several things about the headline strike me. Firstly, “child friendly policies”. I would make the case that there is simply

The Spectator From last week’s Spectator magazine: “Bitcoin has already achieved what tulip bulbs and South Sea Company shares failed to do: come back for a second and third bubble. The ability to buy Bitcoin through an exchange-traded fund may yet inflate a fourth” I suppose we should have some respect for Britain’s Spectator magazine.

Politics So it heats up. As we mentioned last week, Trump had intimated his support for cryptocurrency generally. He has now taken this to the next level and his campaign is accepting contributions in digital currency. If the Democrats do not follow suit and decide to take the view that cryptocurrency is by default “Trumpian”,

You are not alone This is the first quarter since the launch of the ETFs where we get to see which hedge funds are holding bitcoin. It was a pretty special quarter quite honestly. For example, BlackRock sailed straight past MicroStrategy in holdings to 274,000 BTC. Across the chart, 8% of the bitcoin supply is

Magic: The Gathering A game of Magic: The Gathering We need to discuss Mt Gox because over the next few months it will become intensely relevant. A brief history. Launched in 2007, based in Tokyo. The name is odd and it stands for ‘Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange’ because its original purpose was for trading

Hong Kong ETFs Interesting spin in the South China Morning Post (owned by Alibaba Group). “….as the US has been delaying a decision on such products”. I think the analysis is rather harsh on the Americans since they were first to the Bitcoin ETF and also now completely dominate bitcoin mining. If a state sanctioned

Explaining the bitcoin halving Today there are 19,679,792 bitcoins on issue. Tomorrow there will be 900 more. The network processes transactions on average every 10 minutes and in doing so, delivers 6.25 bitcoins per block to miners. 6.25 *6 *24 = 900 bitcoins per day. From the 20th April, that reward for miners will drop

Disappointed I somehow always feel disappointed with the performance of bitcoin. There are occasional bouts of excitement when it really charges; but mostly, I feel disappointed. I don’t know if remarking on it is even helpful but it speaks I suppose to my expectations. Thursday was therefore another miserable day languishing just below all-time highs

First tough week Last week was probably the first tough week since the ETFs launched. We experienced net selling. Some critical factors appear to be the end of the approaching quarter, which will cause some balance sheet shuffling but also the settlement of the Genesis bankruptcy. Overall, $0.8 billion in net selling in the week

Not Satoshi By its nature, bitcoin invites attack. Anyone can copy the software. Anyone can call it their own. From the very start, it was open source and intended to be so. That has had many consequences, which include many forks of bitcoin, where copied code purports to be bitcoin or some superior version of