Here’s my piece for Foreign Policy explaining the events of the past week — It’s Time for Regulators to Put Crypto Down: A lack of rules has created fraudulent, bubble-driven markets. [Foreign Policy, paywalled]
James Palmer wrote the headline, and I wholeheartedly approved. We considered both-sidesing it to “rein in,” but we decided you miss all the shots you don’t take. It got through.
The headline summarises my point: crypto is trash, the regulators spent the past year asleep, and they have some questions to answer.
I also begged that we please not use a stock photo of a gold coin with a cryptocurrency logo. At least a bitcoin ATM is a bit less bad.
I’m also giving up capitalising the names of cryptos. Apparently it’s AP style not to. bitcoin. bitcoin. bitcoin!
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I’m not sure this is a good idea. Regulations could keep the nonsense alive by giving it fake legitimacy. The casinos have been thinking about this for a while, and they have employed many “former” regulators including Jay Clayton of SEC. At this point the nonsense is collapsing of its own weight, and its total illegitimacy is speeding the implosion.
Celsius should have been quashed early by existing law. That would have been a very good idea.
Wouldn’t denominations of terra and luna be “terrae” and “lunae”? I mean, if we’re going to be all pedantic about it… Like, grammatically, it’s “two dollars”, “three euros”, and “four pounds” plural, so it would be “five terrae” or “six lunae”, no?
Yes, I know it’s “seven quid”, singular, but I doubt “quid” is AP style for GBP. And “bitcoin” doesn’t seem to be used that much denominations, but it should also be “eight bitcoins”, plural. (The whole “BTC” versus “XBT” thing is its own rabbit hole.) The English “ether”, on the other hand, is usually an uncountable noun (unless it’s, say, multiple types of ether), so it would be “nine ether”, though if we’re going with the Latin (as with lunae and terrae), it would probably be “ten aetheres” or, apparently, in Late Latin, “eleven aethera”.
Really, though, the important thing is using the noun forms of cryptocurrency that most annoy their supporters. In which case saying “twelve dogi” (Italian) would probably be out due to being a bit twee, but “thirteen Doxi” (Venetian, and, yes, capitalized, apparently) would probably be more okay.
b1tS::co1n
“|3i+<0!n" surely? If I'd had a suitably easy way of getting the "PC characterset" highhalf characters, if might even have been even less normal letters in there.
Given how generally ignorant Americans are, I doubt that the AP Stylebook would approve of the use of the word “quid.” I can’t confirm that, however, because the AP Stylebook is paywalled.
My brother and I had a discussion last week about the pronunciation of “dogecoin.” He agrees that the “real pronunciation” of this quite fake coin is “dohj coin” but he pronounces it “dog-e coin” to annoy me. 🙂 (Why yes, my brother and I have a constant tease going, how’d you guess?) While I think putting money into gold is stupid, at least he put money into gold, not into Bitcoin. I guess he listened to my rants about how Bitcoin is illiquid and subject to wild swings in value.
According to Wiktionary, the spelling “doge” for “dog” originated in a Homestar Runner video first published in 2005. (It’s surprising how much internet culture still derives from Homestar Runner!) Anyway, Homestar pronounces “doge” as “dog”, while Strong Bad pronounces “doge” as “Doge”, so your pronunciation would depend on whether you’re trying to finish your third-quarter projection analysis spreadsheets or you’re trying to invite your coworker (who is working on said spreadsheets) to ladies’ night at the beach-themed restaurant (with fake palm trees!). In neither case, though, is “doge” pronounced “doggie”, so if you use that pronunciation you are an historical revisionist!
This is the source of “doge”, so should be canon for it’s pronounciation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLSgRzCAtXA