News: Google vs web miners, who runs a blockchain, market manipulation, ineffable Bitcoin, Tezos

  • Tim Swanson: In the legal sense, who are the administrators of blockchains? Per FinCEN, “An administrator is a person engaged as a business in issuing (putting into circulation) a virtual currency, and who has the authority to redeem (to withdraw from circulation) such virtual currency.” See also the discussion between Ciaran Murray and me in the comments of the Bitcoin Gold post — it’s a vexed question, particularly one of how likely any given regulator is to pursue this theory; which will in part be a function of just how annoyed they are at the time.
  • “The markets for these other cryptocurrencies are very thin and subject to manipulation. Given that we now know the Bitcoin price has been artificially inflated by unauthorised trades in the past, we must view the present rise with great caution, and not necessarily consider it a ‘healthy bubble’, as recently claimed in The Economist (2017).”
  • Apparently you can’t define Bitcoin, but it still constitutes “an existential threat” to “the fossil class”, the latter being defined with a link to a YouTube video promoting an ICO. What the claim actually means is that there is no possible definition of Bitcoin that supports all the delusions of its most hyperbolic advocates. “Tech people are THE perfect Bitcoin marks as they generally have huge egos and are ignorant of politics and history (i.e. the nature of money and banking)” — Richard Harris. The aggressive ahistoricality of bitcoiners is the source of most of the comedy gold to be mined in the “space.”
  • The book is still just C$3.20 on Kindle Canada! Tell everyone you know in Canada! The paperback is super-nice too!
  • I mentioned in the book: “Mullins was also famous for his anti-Semitism; every time Mullins said ‘banker’ he meant ‘Jew,’ but this mostly isn’t consciously the case amongst Bitcoiners, who only occasionally rant about Zionists.” Here’s some big blockers getting back into that sort of thing (archive).

 

That face when you realise Tim Draper isn’t buying the “tote bags” line

 

Tweets that aren’t aging so well, $1.5m of tote bags later

 


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