JPMorgan & BofA Admit “Disruptive Threat” Of Cryptocurrency To Their Business

This report was originally published by Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge

Having explained why central banks are so nervous about cryptocurrencies, it seems the rest of the banking sector is finally admitting the real driver behind their disdain for digital currencies – they are competition and an existential threat.

As CoinTelegraph’s Molly Jane Zuckerman reports, J.P. Morgan Chase has added a segment on cryptocurrencies to the “Risk Factor” section of their 2017 annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), filed yesterday, Feb. 27.

The annual report mentions cryptocurrencies under the “Competition” subsection when describing how new competitors have emerged that threaten J.P. Morgan’s operations:

“Both financial institutions and their non-banking competitors face the risk that payment processing and other services could be disrupted by technologies, such as cryptocurrencies, that require no intermediation.”

The report notes that these new technologies, evidently including Blockchain, although they don’t mention it by name, “could require JPMorgan Chase to spend more to modify or adapt its products to attract and retain clients and customers or to match products and services offered by its competitors, including technology companies.”

This competition could potentially “put downward pressure on prices and fees for JPMorgan Chase’s products and services or may cause JPMorgan Chase to lose market share.”

J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon had made waves back in September 2017, when he called Bitcoin (BTC) a “fraud” and threatened to fire any employee that traded BTC on company accounts. Since then, Dimon has backtracked slightly, telling a Cointelegraph reporter at the Davos World Economic Forum that he is not a “skeptic” on cryptocurrencies.

In the beginning of February, an alleged internal report from J.P. Morgan Chase referred to cryptocurrencies as “innovative” and “unlikely to disappear”, also noting cryptocurrency’s potential to be successfully applied to payment system areas that are traditionally problematic or slow, such as cross-border payments.

JPMorgan is not alone, as TruthInMedia.com’s Brendan Weber reports, in Bank of America’s new annual report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the corporation largely reflected internally about a number of economic, geopolitical, and operational risks faced.

One of those stated risks is surrounding the increased adaptation of cryptocurrencies, which could have negative effects on the corporation’s earning potential.

In addition, technological advances and the growth of e-commerce have made it easier for non-depository institutions to offer products and services that traditionally were banking products, and for financial institutions to compete with technology companies in providing electronic and internet-based financial solutions including electronic securities trading, marketplace lending and payment processing. Further, clients may choose to conduct business with other market participants who engage in business or offer products in areas we deem speculative or risky, such as cryptocurrencies. Increased competition may negatively affect our earnings by creating pressure to lower prices or credit standards on our products and services requiring additional investment to improve the quality and delivery of our technology and/or reducing our market share, or affecting the willingness of our clients to do business with us.

Increased adaptation of cryptocurrencies also had Bank of America admitting that it may need to make “substantial expenditures” to compete with these rising technologies:

In addition, the widespread adoption of new technologies, including internet services, cryptocurrencies and payment systems, could require substantial expenditures to modify or adapt our existing products and services as we grow and develop our internet banking and mobile banking channel strategies in addition to remote connectivity solutions.

Bank of America might have already taken action to help counter these technologies by banning cryptocurrency transactions on their credit cards.

Additionally, the document stated concerns besides those directly affecting earning potential; they noted that emerging cryptocurrencies could impact Bank of America’s compliance with anti-money laundering regulations:

In addition to non-U.S. legislation, our international operations are also subject to U.S. legal requirements. For example, our international operations are subject to U.S. laws on foreign corrupt practices, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, know-your-customer requirements and anti-money laundering regulations. Emerging technologies, such as cryptocurrencies, could limit our ability to track the movement of funds. Our ability to comply with these laws is dependent on our ability to improve detection and reporting capabilities and reduce variation in control processes and oversight accountability.

Even though cryptocurrencies were a small mention within the entire report, its brief discussion indicated that the company is both aware of and reacting to the further potential impacts of cryptocurrency.

Here’s Why Banks Hate Cryptocurrencies

This report was originally published by Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge

Banks like to pretend that they’re so much more established and secure than the world of cryptocurrencies, but as anybody who pays close attention to the headlines would know…that’s just not the case…

Setting aside all of their rhetoric about embracing the blockchain, banks have mostly avoided or opposed cryptos (Goldman Sachs, sensing the opportunity for profit, is one notable exception), often citing their volatility and the ease with which they can be used to launder money as qualities that disqualify them from being taken seriously (though, as we recently witnessed with the US dollar, perhaps banks need to rework this volatility argument a bit).  Even yesterday’s announcement of the first criminal charges against a cryptocurrency trader pales in comparison to the many, many crimes that banks (or even one bank) have settled allegations of. The real answer to why the banks’ dislike cryptocurrencies is probably because they feel threatened. The recent selloff notwithstanding, the rise of cryptocurrencies has continued unabated, despite the efforts of some of the most powerful governments on Earth, while the concept is still very young, it does have potential to shake up the aging fiat system. In order to understand the race between the banks and cryptocurrencies, we developed a visual to see just how “David” is comparing to “Goliath.”

Using data from Yahoo Finance and CoinMarketCap.com, HowMuch.com‘s data team developed a visual that compares the market caps between some of the world’s largest banks and the largest cryptocurrencies. On the left blue column, there are four banks listed from largest to smallest market caps: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of China, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. Conversely, the right red column features the total cryptocurrency market, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, NEO, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Cardano, and Stellar. The larger the circle, the bigger the market cap.

Total Crypto Market Exceeds Size Of JPMorgan; Banks Fight Back In Attempt To Slow Growth

After an extraordinarily volatile (even for bitcoin) start to the year, cryptocurrencies are rallying once again, with bitcoin breaking above $10,000. As of Feb. 16, 2018, the crypto market had a market cap of $470 billion – larger than the size of the United States’ largest bank, JPMorgan Chase.

Bitcoin’s market cap alone is comparable to Bank of China’s. The second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, Ethereum, is comparable in size to Morgan Stanley. It is stats like these that have the global banking sector worried that cryptocurrencies are on track to make a serious impact on their operations.

One of the most recent efforts to help slow the pace of crypto growth were announcements from several banks saying that customers could no longer purchase digital currency with their credit cards. Berkshire Hathaway’s Charlie Munger has called Bitcoin “totally asinine” and Warren Buffet has said he would “buy a five-year put on every cryptocurrency.”

Overall, cryptocurrencies are seeing their size and value top even some of the largest financial institutions in the world. This has caused banks to fight back and attempt to slow their growth. However, even banks clearly don’t know what they really want. After JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon famously declared Bitcoin a “fraud”, it is interesting to now see a report published by the investment bank that calls Bitcoin-based ETFs the “holy grail for owners and investors.”

And should the bitcoin ETF become a reality, do you really think banks will turn down those lucrative fees?

What do you think?

Study Finds That 22 Percent Of Bitcoin Investors Are Using Debt To Fund Their Investments

This report was originally published by Michael Snyder at The Economic Collapse

Investing in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ripple, Ethereum and Litecoin is extremely risky, and experts all over the country are warning that people should only invest what they are willing to lose. Unfortunately, many are getting swept up in the current euphoria surrounding cryptocurrencies and are not listening to that very sound advice. A disturbing new survey that was just released found that 22 percent of all Bitcoin investors are either directly or indirectly investing in Bitcoin with borrowed money…

According to LendEDU, a personal loan research firm, more than 18 percent of Bitcoin investors have used borrowed money to trade the cryptocurrency. In a global survey of 672 active Bitcoin investors, researchers asked traders the method they used to fund their cryptocurrency trading accounts. The majority of investors used banking systems such as credit cards and ACH transfers to fund their accounts.

But 22 percent of traders revealed that they have not paid off their credit and debit cards after purchasing Bitcoin, effectively investing in the cryptocurrency with borrowed money.

Credit card debt is one of the most toxic forms of debt that you could ever carry, and investing in anything when you still have credit card balances is extremely unwise.

Yes, cryptocurrencies went on an epic run in 2017, but there is absolutely no guarantee that they will continue to rise in 2018.

In fact, there is a very real possibility that we could see a cryptocurrency crash, and there are many investors that are actually eagerly anticipating one…

Well, as many traders expected, it appears that institutions are using the futures product to slowly but surely build a short position in bitcoin. According to the CFTC Commitment of Traders report (available CBOE futures), non-commercial traders held a net short position of around $30mn as of Tuesday Dec 26, or around half of the total open interest.

Separately, the Traders in Financial Futures breakdown provided by the CFTC show that the leveraged funds category that consists largely of hedge funds and various money managers had a short of around $14mn, or around a quarter of the total open interest.

In other words, spec investors have used the futures contracts to establish Bitcoin shorts.

On the other hand, there is also the possibility that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin could continue to defy gravity and soar even higher over the next 12 months.

In fact, a rumor that Amazon.com will soon start accepting Bitcoin has lots of people buzzing…

As a backdrop to all of this, there is a strong rumor that Amazon is about to accept Bitcoin as a method of payment. Patrick Byrne, the CEO of Overstock, has stated that Amazon will soon have no choice but to start accepting it. He is quoted as saying, “… they have to follow suit. I’ll be stunned if they don’t because they can’t just cede that part of the market to us if we are the only main large retail site taking Bitcoin.” Scott Mullins, an Amazon executive has confirmed that Amazon is, “working with financial institutions and crypto-experts to spur innovation, and facilitate frictionless experimentation.”

If the Amazon rumor turns out to be true – Bitcoin will probably go into orbit! Be prepared…

If someone knew exactly what would happen throughout 2018, that individual could make an absolutely obscene amount of money.

Unfortunately I don’t know where cryptocurrencies are heading, but it does appear that things are about to get a whole lot more interesting. According to Reuters, it looks like you will soon be able to invest in Bitcoin using leveraged ETFs…

The new idea is to build “leveraged” and “inverse” funds that would rise – or fall – twice as fast as the price of bitcoin on a given day.

Direxion Asset Management LLC plans to list such products on Intercontinental Exchange Inc’s NYSE Arca exchange if U.S. securities regulators give the nod, according to a filing by the exchange this week.

In the filing, the exchange said the listing “will enhance competition among market participants, to the benefit of investors and the marketplace.”

So if Bitcoin rises or falls a thousand dollars in a single day, those financial instruments will be designed to move by about twice as much.

That should be fun.

Meanwhile, some are asking what will happen to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ripple, Ethereum and Litecoin if the long-awaited collapse of global financial markets finally happens this year.

Well, some believe that it would be doom for cryptocurrencies, but others believe that cryptocurrencies would be like gold and would actually do extremely well during the next great financial crisis…

The question is what will happen to Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies once the financial collapse takes place. The signs are that when economic circumstances start to deteriorate the price of Bitcoin rises. A prime example of this is during the Cyprus and Greece bailout which saw the price of BTC rise considerably during this period. With banks stopping access to cash in ATM machines, Bitcoin was the perfect solution to be able to store it safely out of the banks and Governments’ hands.

What also happens during a depression is interest rates skyrocket and start to see hyperinflation. This will mean it is extremely hard to get finance from banks and the cost can make it unsustainable. The ICO market is a perfect solution to this problem and as the banking sector suffers, ICOs will boom. More companies will look to these as a cheap way to raise money and will create their own cryptocurrency.

It will be fascinating to see how all of this plays out.

There are some financial experts that believe that Bitcoin is going to zero, and there are others that are absolutely convinced that it is going to a million dollars.

As with so many things in life, timing is everything. If you are investing in Bitcoin, let us just hope that you got in at the right time and that you will also get out at the right time.

Michael Snyder is a pro-Trump candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Michael T. Snyder is a graduate of the University of Florida law school and he worked as an attorney in the heart of Washington D.C. for a number of years.Today, Michael is best known for his work as the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and The American Dream. 

If you want to know what is coming and what you can do to prepare, read his latest book Get Prepared Now!: Why A Great Crisis Is Coming.

The #BitcoinBreakdown: Before You Buy, More Caveats

First Appearing on HedgeAccordingly.com

Fifth in a series.  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

By @sellputs

Let us regard the wonders of technology & innovation: Suddenly, we now have multiple easy ways to lose money betting on bitcoin. Giddyup!

With incredible speed, from your laptop or even your smartphone and without even thinking about it, you can open up a new account, inject real U.S. dollars into it, use that to buy a teensy piece of your favorite cryptocurrency, and begin surfing the bitcoin wave. Or begin getting crushed by that wave, depending on your timing, smarts and luck.

This occurs to me on a recent Thursday night, as I visit an old friend in Brooklyn and bring along Big Guy, a college pal who stands 6-feet-4 (“and a half,” he feels it necessary to point out).  The Big Guy and I had been hanging out at the famed Waverly Inn in the West Village in Manhattan, where I had the vodka martini, marked down on special: just $28, down from $30 list.

This next point has nothing to do with bitcoin, okay? I gotta say: Anybody who regularly spends 30 bucks on a martini is a P.T. Barnum-scale sucker.  What a waste of money.  Waste it, instead, on something really irresponsible. . . . like bitcoin.

Anyway, we’re standing around a table in my friend’s apartment in Brooklyn, and Big Guy is taking swigs from a bottle of Blue Point Winter Ale and staring into the screen of his smartphone, as if mesmerized by some new videogame. Instead, he is tracking his own cryptocurrency trades.

“Uh oh, Ethereum is flash-crashing,” he says. He had gotten got into Ethereum (ETH), a newer “altcoin” alternative to bitcoin, a few days earlier at $620, watching it rise to $740 in a day or two and holding on, only to see it crash instantly down to $650 just this moment.  Should he sell?

Guy resists the urge and doubles up on his bet, adding to his ETH holdings (as well as Litecoin, LTC) “to lower my cost basis and scalp the bounce-back from the flash crash,” as he describes it later.  By 3 a.m. that same night, Ethereum had re-inflated to rise back up even higher, to $850. Whew.

Big Guy had put $10,000 into a new account he opened at Coinbase, a digital exchange akin to the New York Stock Exchange (except it is unregulated and carries no particular guarantees, far as I can see).  He had bet his stake all on bitcoin, pulling out after a 53% gain in a week, after commissions.

Guy opened up a second account, this one on GDAX, a 24/7, online platform in the rather unregulated, Wild West of crypto (it is owned by Coinbase). GDAX offers FDIC guarantees up to $250,000 (what happens to your money as a result of your trades is on you). On GDAX, he bet his bitcoin profits on the two lesser lights, ETH and LTC.  He says he can take profits out of Litecoin in only minutes, while transferring money out of bitcoin would take several hours. (LTC is lighter-traded than the binge-fueled bitcoin.)

GDAX charges him 25 basis points (0.25% of the total value of the trade) for “taking markets,” that is, buying coin shares on offer, and no fee at all for “making markets,” or selling on the platform.  Coinbase’s buying fee, at 1.5%, is fives times as much that of GDAX. A few days after he sat out the mini-flash-crash, Guy transfers some LTC from his GDAX account to another coin platform, Binance, where he wants to sell LTC and spread the proceeds among various coins trading below $5 apiece.

And a day or two after that, Big Guy is beaten down: He was up 75% and lost most of it all when he panicked and fled ETH and LTC at the bottom of a later plunge. Too fidgety. Easy come, easy go. He’s back in Ripple, though, and it has been “outperforming.”

Yes, the Big Guy admits, he does worry that in a flash crash or especially high trading volume, he may not be able to minimize his losses and take out cash.  In cryptocurrency trading, the bigger question than whether to sell may be: Can you sell? 

Coinbase limits how much money you can pull out of your account after you sell your crypto and convert the proceeds back to U.S dollars or whichever “real” currency you desire. So, in the event of a crash or some sudden, sharp de-valuation in bitcoins, your ability to act fast and sell your coins might be hampered, and selling your coins could be all but impossible.

Think of it as a football packed with cheering buyers, most of them unaware that there’s only one exit—and it is the size of a doggy door.  Buyer beware.  Puppies, too.

Next up: The high fees for buying bitcoin.

This Cryptocurrency Mining Rig Can Also Heat Your Home

The intensifying energy consumption of the bitcoin network is becoming a concern for environmentalists who have begun to question whether digital currencies should be considered a socially responsible investment. As we pointed out last month, Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index stood at 29.05TWh.

That’s the equivalent of 0.13% of total global electricity consumption. While that may not sound like a lot, it means Bitcoin mining is now using more electricity than 159 individual countries, including Ireland and Nigeria.

As the share of the world’s electricity consumed by miners of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies rises, miners will likely face pressure – both economic and social – to find efficiencies wherever they can.

In anticipation of this trend, a crypto startup called Comino is marketing a mining rig that also functions as a heater.

Back in October, the Next Web published a report about the company and their new product, the Comino N1. In launching the product – priced at an affordable $5,000 per rig – the company is hoping t make it easier for novices and those who have only a glancing familiarity with crypto technology to start mining coin.

A reporter from The Next Web tested out the miner – and found that it both the heating and mining functions worked well. He even used it to heat his room during the winter.

After running the crypto-heater for a little over a month now, we are finally ready to share our experience with the device...

 

Once we installed the mining rig in our office, which practically included connecting the crypto-heater to the internet via the web-based dashboard system developed by Comino, it automatically created a wallet and began mining Ethereum. As easy as this.

 

Of course, if you already have a wallet, you still have the option to connect it to the dashboard. You can also connect any other mining rig to the Comino dashboard, in case you want to follow all of your mining efforts in one place.

 

Among other things, the online dashboard shows a number of statistics the Comino developers had programmed to monitor, including the current and average hashrate at which the miner is solving cryptographic puzzles, the current and average temperature at which it operates, as well as the unpaid balance of Ethereum you’ve accumulated. It also shows stats for the temperature of each separate GPU.

...

Throughout this one-month trial, the only issue I experienced with the miner was that – for some reason – its ambient temperature sensor inaccurately picked up the temperature of the GPUs inside (which had just taken a break from mining); this prevented the device from booting up again, until it cooled down a little.

...

And in case you were wondering about how reliable the Comino was as a heater : it certainly kept the temperature high enough to save some energy on heating bills, but not enough to make you turn on the air conditioner. Which is exactly what you want from a a machine that was built to bank on crypto.

The Comino N1 maintains an average hashrate of about 200 MH/s, and an average temperature of approximately 60 Celcius – about 140 degrees Farenheight.

Since installing the miner on Nov. 16, TNW reported that it has so far transferred a total of 1.2 ether to the company’s designated wallet. Since Ethereum is currently trading around $700 a coin, the miner would pay for itself in eight months, assuming the value of Ethereum doesn’t crash, or that an influx of new mining capacity decreases the miner’s efficiency.

Will Ethereum Be The Next Facebook?

Authored by Kenneth Tan via Hackernoon.com,

2017 has been an amazing year for Ethereum.

Prices has hit an all time high of $800, and it is now the processing nearly double the number of transactions of bitcoin at a million a day.

As we enter 2018, I think Ethereum will be the next Facebook due to the massive amount of use cases that i am finding in major industries that benefit greatly from decentralization & transparency.

Ethereum is basically the app store for blockchain.

It allows creators to build and run apps without having to worry about the underlying “operating” system just like Apple.

Here are some of the areas to look out for:

Fundraising and ICOs

ICOs are the largest real world use case for ethereum. Traditionally, to fund your idea, you would have to borrow money from a bank, give up a lot of equity to a VC, or get an expensive loan from people lending sites. Basically, ICOs is a kickstarter on steroids.

As the founder of fundyourselfnow.com, I have worked with entrepreneurs all over the world on their product to get it ready for their ICOs. Many come from developing nations such as Indonesia (EagleCoin) and India (WandX) where it would have been extremely hard to raise significant funding for their idea due to lack of local investors.

ICOs are democratizing funding and spawning the next wave of innovation from young hungry entrepreneurs all over the world who will eventually contribute back to their local communities for a better future.

Payments & Lending

Currently, the crypto-currencies are quite hard to spend. Crypto credit card companies such as TenX, Monaco, Tokencard are stepping in to fill in the gap. All of them are built on the ethereum network. I personally hold a TenX Card and have used it to spend on daily goods and services using bitcoin.

Monaco in particular, has gotten official approval from VISA to issue cards to Singapore residents. Expect to see a huge increase in actual cryptocurrency spending & adoption 2018 as many of these crypto-card companies get official approval from VISA or MasterCard.

There has also been a rise of ethereum based lending solutions, such as SALT lending and ETHLend. The interest rates are expected to be fairer than getting from a bank, and people globally can gain access to financing even without a bank account.

I expect that 2018 will be the year where we will help lot of the unbanked get included in this new digital world.

Gambling

The gambling industry is ripe for disruption. 2017 started off with a very simple dice game, etheroll. You send ether to a smart contract and winnings are sent to you in a matter of minutes. Etheroll has over 260,000 ethers wagered so far (Around 2000m USD), which is incredible considering how simple and basic the game is.

Keep an eye out on Edgeless and Funfair in 2018 as one of them could potentially grow to become the largest online global casino. They have significant advantages over traditional real world casinos:

1. There is no capital controls


2. Anonymous, money doesn’t flow through the banking system


3. Trustless smart contract to process payouts and ensure fairness of game.

Gaming

The virtual nature of gaming lends itself incredibly well for the blockchain. Many successful gaming companies have started to include tokens in their games/product to fund their gaming ecosystem.

Here are some of the interesting ways tokens are used (not exhaustive):

Decentraland?—?Buy Land in their virtual world. Virtual worlds has been around since 2003 with Second Life and Ethereum might be the fuel that makes it finally takes off

Engin Coin?—?Used to create virtual goods that people that can on their marketplace. Instead of using “gold” in most games, expect games in 2018 to require you to use their own Ethereum game token to make & trade items.

CryptoKitties?—?Tokens represents a digital cat in the blockchain. Over 17m worth of cats were transacted since they launched early Dec , with the most expensive cat sold for more than 100k USD.

What more interesting is that with the use of Ethereum tokens for games, this could potentially mean that you could eventually trade items across games. For example, you can trade an Enjin Coin Item for land in decentraland through decentralized exchanges using the ENJ/MANA trade pair. Virtual worlds economies which are currently “silo-ed” could potentially change with the ability to “trade” across worlds.

Final Words

I see the money flowing into Ethereum and the overall cryptocurrency market as a positive. The technology underpinning Ethereum has a lot of real world usage that has yet to be unlocked and money is being funneled into innovative ethereum projects via ICOs at an incredible rate.

Mark Zuckerburg started facebook at the young age of 20 about 13 years ago, and it has completed changed the way we interact with our friends and family.

Vitalik, founder of Ethereum, started Ethereum also at the young age of 20 too about 3 years ago. I strongly believe that within the next 10 years, Ethereum will radically change the we interact with our world.

Trump"s Tax Bill May Be Reason for Crypto Rout

Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

Let"s be clear. The American market for Bitcoin is an aspirational one; but the true volume is done in Asia. Instead of going through the trouble of setting up shell corporations to launder their money, the Chinese have been using crypto currencies, which was beautifully marketed as some sort of rebellious form of capitalism -- creating millions of bedroom billionaires.

All of that might be ending soon, thanks in part of President Trump.

He"s gonna sick the IRS hard on your asses -- tossing evil tax evaders into ass-raping prisons.

Bloomberg:

New limits in the bill would bar cryptocurrency owners from deferring capital gains taxes when trading one type of virtual currency for another -- effectively closing a gray area in the tax code, experts say.

 

Those gains can be considerable. Bitcoin, which had an initial price of less than 1 cent when it first traded in 2010, was around $1,000 as 2017 began and surpassed $19,000 this week, at least briefly, before paring some of the gains. Many enthusiasts jump between bitcoin and a long list of similarly volatile competitors, such as ether.

 
For investors who hold the virtual currencies, “the bill is bad news,” said Kelsey Lemaster, a tax attorney with Goodwin Procter LLP. “Every time you trade one digital currency for another, one token for another, it’s going to be a taxable event.”

 

The change might not deter traders, who have been leaping into cryptocurrencies without researching what they are -- let alone their tax implications, said Brian Kristiansen, a partner in the digital currency services practice at Friedman LLP.

 

Under current law, Bitcoiners have been protected under the "like-kind exchanges", swapping one investment for another, notably Ethereum. That shit ain"t gonna fly in 2018. You"re gonna get taxed out.

The change goes into effect January 1st.

Bitcoin is off by 7,000 points from recent record highs, trading at $12,500.

Bitcoin (BTCUSD) Breaking Daily Chart Upchannel Support

Bitcoin (BTCUSD) Weekly/Daily

Bitcoin (BTCUSD) is down more than 15% (at the time of writing) from yesterday, and more than 30% off the peak last weekend just shy of the psychologically key 20k whole figure level (on Bitstamp). Significantly, BTCUSD has just broken upchannel support (on the weekly and daily chart), with this week"s weekly candle reversing all of last week"s gains and then some. The daily MACD is negatively crossing, which combined with the strongly downsloping daily RSI and Stochastics suggest more downward pressure today. Although bears are increasingly in control having broken the 6 week upchannel support line, with the weekly MACD blue line still sloping slightly up, BTCUSD could very well shrug off the upchannel support break this weekend, clawing back into the upchannel briefly and forming a lower high next week. If the weekly MACD blue line flattens and turns down this weekend, longer term bears will have plenty to feast on in early January. 

 

 

 

 

Click here for today"s technical analysis on Ethereum (ETHUSD), Litecoin (LTCUSD)

Stunning Visualization Of The Explosion Of ICO Activity In The Last Four Years

Via Elementus.io,

This graphic shows every token sale that successfully raised at least $100k, from the beginning of 2014 through the end of last month, November 2017. The bar chart at the bottom displays the total dollar amount raised in each month (details below).

How big is the ICO (aka token sale) market really?

It seems like this should be an easy question to answer. After all, blockchains are open data layers that contain a complete record of every transaction ever made. However, we"ve found the answer to this question to be surprisingly elusive.

We surveyed the web for data on token sales and turned up over 100 ICO listing sites. Estimates on the total dollar amount that has been raised via ICOs to date range from about $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion.

Why such a big discrepancy?

As far as we can tell, all of these estimates rely strictly on reported figures -- either by the ICO issuer itself or by another third party. There is nothing wrong with this approach. Many data providers in the financial world collect their information this way. However, why rely strictly on reported figures when the actual transactions are available directly from the blockchain?

We decided to estimate the size of the ICO market ourselves by going directly to the source.

The figures in this post are based on our own deep dive into the Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains. We searched for every token, crowdsale, and multisig wallet we could find. We then identified the corresponding owners and added up the total amount of contributed funds -- taken either from the blockchain itself or as reported by the fundraiser.

In total, we estimate about $6.4 billion has been raised via ICOs to date - materially larger than what is being reported elsewhere.

Perhaps more surprising than the fundraising total is the trend over time. The ICO market is not dying down, as many have reported. It"s still growing.

The rise and rise of ICOs

This chart is a labeled version of the one at the top of the post. It shows the ICO fundraising amounts by month.

Contrary to the commonly heard narrative that the ICO party is coming to an end, ICO fundraising in November was only slightly off its high point the month before.

The current run rate of over $1.3bn per month surpasses traditional early stage fundraising by a multiple. Angel and seed-stage VC investments were running at less than $300 million per month as of July (Goldman Sachs via CNBC).

The trend is even more stark when you look at the total count of ICOs that closed each month (minimum raise of $100k).

By this measure, the token sale market is not only still going strong. It"s accelerating!

November set a new record for number of closed token sales with 148, an increase of 36 compared to the month before.

We view this metric, the number of token sales, as a better gauge of market activity than the fundraising total. The total dollar amount raised is not only susceptible to fluctuations in crypto exchange rates, it may also be driven by just a handful of outliers, rather than the true underlying trend. For example, just two ICOs (Tezos and EOS, which raised $236m and $200m respectively) account for nearly half of July’s total fundraising.

The number of ICOs completed each month shows a much clearer trend, and one that shows no sign of slowing down.

To play around with the graphic yourself, click here to view the interactive bubble chart.

TL;DR

• ICOs have closed over $6.3bn of fundraising to date.


• Contrary to widespread perception, the ICO market is still growing.


• Total fundraising in November was down slightly from its high point in October ($1.38bn vs $1.39bn).


• November set the record for number of ICOs that closed with 148.

Is This The Biggest Blockchain, Big-Data, A.I., FinTech YOLO Trade Of All Time?

Meet LongFin Corp  - an independent finance and technology company. The Company offers commodity trading, alternate risk transfer, and carry trade financing services. LongFin also provides hedging and risk management solutions to importers, exporters, and small medium business enterprises. LongFin serves customers worldwide.

As iBankCoin notes, it has all of the trimmings of wanton degeneracy on an industrial scale.

• Recent IPO: check


• Small float: check


• Shady as heck: check


• AI company: check

and the cherry on the top...

• a day after coming public, they announce the purchase of a blockchain company: check

Longfin Corp.  a leading global FinTech company, announces the acquisition of Ziddu.com, a Blockchain-empowered solutions provider that offers Microfinance Lending against Collateralized Warehouse Receipts in the form of Ziddu Coins.

Ziddu Coin is a smart contract that enables SME’s, processors, manufacturers, importers and exporters using cryptocurrencies across continents. Ziddu Coins are loosely pegged to Ethereum and Bitcoin. The importers/exporters convert offered Ziddu coins into Ethereum or Bitcoin and use the proceeds for their working capital needs. At the end of the contract, importers/exporters will realize their proceeds and pay back their funds through cryptocurrencies only. Depending upon the risk profile of the counterparty, the interest will vary from 12% to 48%.

 

“The advent of Blockchain technology has caught the imagination of the global financial services industry; blockchain is emerging as a technological revolution that is set to disrupt the financial services infrastructure. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum will act as a global financing currency to avail credit against hard currencies of many emerging markets.” Says Venkat Meenavalli, Chairman of Longfin Corp.

And with all those buzzwords, why wouldn"t it be up 200%!!

 

"Calculating the incalculable..." -  An ironic tagline indeed!

Bitcoin (BTCUSD) Testing Daily Chart Upchannel Resistance

Bitcoin (BTCUSD) Weekly/Daily

Bitcoin (BTCUSD) was rejected yesterday at upchannel resistance (on the weekly and daily chart), and may see a few days of profittaking as hinted by the daily MACD histogram sliding down.  A stronger selloff could quickly coincide with the daily MACD negatively crossing.  Nevertheless, longer term bulls will take comfort in the weekly MACD still sloping strongly up.  I suspect that after the next few days of consolidation, BTCUSD bulls may try once again to reach the psychologically key 20,000 whole figure level (which BTCUSD nearly did with a rise to over 19500 last Thursday on GDAX) ahead of the highly anticipated CME Bitcoin futures launch Monday (Sunday night Chicago).  For those who haven"t seen the BTCUSD price performance relative to other bubbles throughout history, or for those who are buying out of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), take a moment to review the following chart.  

 

 

 

 

Ethereum (ETHUSD) Weekly/Daily

Ethereum (ETHUSD) is seeing strong profittaking today, forming what appears to be upchannel resistance (on the daily chart).  The rally yesterday to just above 700 fulfills the 300 in gains that could have been projected based on the approximate height of the ascending triangle (as calculated from the mid May low of 100 to the triangle resistance at 400), and the point of triangle breakout at 400.   After another day or so of further consolidation, ETHUSD may want to retest the same upchannel resistance at 700 especially as BTCUSD stands a decent chance of reaching for the psychologically key 20,000 whole figure level (which BTCUSD nearly did with a rise to over 19500 last Thursday on GDAX) ahead of the highly anticipated CME Bitcoin futures launch Monday (Sunday night Chicago).  The weekly and daily MACD are still sloping strongly up, suggesting bulls will continue buying on pullbacks. 

 

 

 

Click here for today"s technical analysis on USDCAD 

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UBS Is Using Ethereum Technology To Soften The Impact Of MiFid II

After devising blockchain-based systems to help facilitate equity and bond trading (remember Goldman’s cryptocoin?) as well as derivatives clearing, some of the leading banks in the blockchain space are banding together to build a system that they hope will help banks streamline another essential function: Compliance.

According to CoinDesk, UBS is leading an Ethereum-based project designed to make it easier for banks to reconcile a wide range of data about their counterparties. Barclays, Credit Suisse, KBC, SIX and Thomson Reuters have also signed on to the project. The project is meant to soften the impact of MiFid II, a set of new European banking regulations that will go live shortly after New Year’s.

Traditionally, regulated firms use what are called "legal entity identifiers" that are stored in a global data system to execute transactions on behalf of clients, even if those clients themselves don"t have one of the codes. But as part of a sweeping regulatory change called the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) II, scheduled to go live in the EU on Jan. 3, 2018, all eligible legal entities will be required to have and use these codes.

 

Instead of mandating that each of these institutions perform these checks independently, though, the banks built Madrec to mutualize much of the effort in a potentially industry-wide reconciliation process hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud.

In an interview with CoinDesk, Peter Stephens, the head of UBS’s blockchain research and development efforts, explained how the system was designed, and to what end. Surprisingly, out of the many blockchain or distributed ledger projects that UBS is involved with (R3, Hyperledger etc.), Stephens said he expects the compliance project to be the first to go live.

Built over a six-month period, the platform evolved into a smart contract-powered network designed to integrate with identifiers endorsed by The Legal Entity Identifier Regulatory Oversight Committee (LEI ROC) and others. The reconciliation of the LEI reference data includes industry classification and information from the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA).

 

Instead of each company checking the information independently, and reconciling the results periodically, the blockchain smart contracts will ensure accuracy in almost real-time.

 

To do this, the anonymized reference data is hashed to the Ethereum blockchain, while the source data itself remains within the institution. The smart contracts then reconcile the data, letting users quickly identify anomalies and reconcile them.

 

Since every eligible entity will be held to those same standards, Stephens argues that helping one another ensure the accuracy of their work will only positively impact their respective bottom lines, leaving room for competition elsewhere.

UBS is hardly the only major European bank that’s investing heavily in blockchain technology. In a presentation obtained by CoinDesk, Christian Nolting, also the bank’s global head of wealth, and Marcus Muller, global head of the CIO office, explained digital currencies and blockchain to their fellow bankers.

In the presentation, the bankers asserted that the  “opportunities associated with blockchain technologies are huge,” and could be fully put into practice within the next few years.

And in what"s possibly one of most grandiose predictions about blockchain"s impact on the global economy, the bankers predicted that roughly 10% of the global gross domestic product (GDP) would be tracked or otherwise "regulated" by a blockchain by 2027.

Read the presentation in its entirety below:

 

Cio Insights Reflections - Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains - Emea - Client Ready by zerohedge on Scribd

 

Oil Producers Turning To Crypto To Solve Sanctions Problems

Authored by Tom Luongo,

Last week, Venezuela announced it would develop a national cryptocurrency backed by its oil reserves, the Petro.  Now there is a report that Russia is considering the same thing.  Iran will likely follow suit.

As of right now this is just a rumor, but it makes some sense.  So, let’s treat this rumor as fact for the sake of argument and see where it leads us.

The U.S. continues to sanction and threaten all of these countries for daring to challenge the global status quo.  There is no denying this.  And so much of what we see in the geopolitical headlines are knock-on effects of this challenge.

The Geopolitical “Why”

From the Middle East to North Korea, the Dutch changing their laws to block Nordstream 2 to the Saudis breaking off relations with Qatar, everything you read about in the news is a move on the geopolitical “Go” board.

Because at the heart of this is the petrodollar. Contrary to what many believe, the petrodollar is not the source of the U.S. dollar’s power around the world, but rather the U.S.’s main fulcrum by which to keep competition out of the markets.

It is a secondary effect of the dollar’s dominance in global finance today.  But it is not the main driver.  Financial market are simply too big relative to the size any one commodity market for it to be the fulcrum on which everything hinges.

It was that way in the past. But it is not now.  That said, however, getting out from underneath the petrodollar gives a country independence to begin building financial architecture that can be levered up over time to threaten the institutional control it helped create.

U.S. foreign policy defends the petrodollar along with other systems in place – the IMF, the World Bank, SWIFT, LIBOR and the central banks themselves – to maintain its control.

The main oil producers, however, can escape this control simply by selling their oil in currencies other than the U.S. dollar.  That’s not enough to dethrone the dollar, but, like I just said, it is where the process has to start.

Therefore, any and all means must be employed to defend the dollar empire by keeping everyone inside that system. 

So, it looks like the petrodollar is all-important, but only in the long-run.  In the short run, monetary policy, diplomacy and political stability are far more powerful actors on the system.

Russia’s Crypto-Upside

However, the oil-backed cryptocurrency by Venezuela is very important.  And it’s why attaching a rumor to Russia makes sense.  Who do you think put this idea in President Maduro’s head, anyway?  Martians?  No, it was Putin.

Because it deepens Russia’s tools to combat U.S. hybrid war tactics, which include financial sanctions.  They’ve already announced their plans for a crypto-ruble, as well as supporting cryptocurrency research, massive Bitcoin mining operations, and the possibility of a BRICS-Coin as well.

And, most importantly, legal frameworks under which all of this will operate.  In short, these things create certainty in the minds of companies doing business in Russia that the government will act in predictable ways.

Those ways may still not be profitable enough to lay off other risks and attract capital, but predictability first and fine-tuning second.

Adding in a cryptocurrency backed by their oil reserves which can trade on the open market then only makes sense.  It allows smaller oil and gas companies to avoid the worst of U.S. banking sanctions.  It will help create secondary markets for corporate debt and equity issuance, fast-international clearing without need of centralized systems like SWIFT, etc.

This can facilitate a shift in the oil supply chain economy away from banks sanctioned by the U.S. and spur development in that space across not only Russia, but the entire region served by the Eurasian Economic Union.

Especially if this potential “Neft-coin”(Neft is Russian for ‘oil’) is convertible into crypto-Rubles and, by extension, Rubles themselves.  There will be no barrier for Russian businesses to use the “Neft-coin” to get around sanctions since it the crypto-Ruble was predictable tax consequences.

Moreover, since the crypto-Ruble will only be taxed at 13%, the capital gains tax rate in Russia, this, in effect, could be a back-door way for companies to lower their corporate tax rate to 13% from the current 20% Russian corporate tax rate.   I am just spitballing here.  But, if I were Vladimir Putin I would consider this, highly to compete with the U.S. pushing their corporate tax rate down from 35%.

The Other Side of the Coin

Those are the benefits, but what are the potential drawbacks?

The problem with backing any currency with physical reserves is the fluctuations in value of those reserves.  It’s not like oil is a low-beta commodity or anything.  But, like everything else in the commodity space, price movements are supposed to be smoothed out by the futures markets helping to coordinate price with time.

But the bigger problem is the estimation of those reserves the coin’s value is based on.  First, how do you accurately quantify them?  Can holders of Petro or Neft-coin trust the Russian or Venezuelan governments to provide accurate assessments of their reserves?

Second, there is the ability of the country to pull it out of the ground and sell it into the market at anything close to a fair price.  This isn’t a concern for Russia, the world’s 2^nd largest supplier of oil and very stable government but Venezuela is the opposite.  And, its “Petro” would probably trade at quite a discount early on to the dollar price of oil.

It will open up all kinds of arbitrage opportunities.

Moreover, the blockchain that backs this “Neft-coin” is subject to hacking by hostile actors… I wonder who those will be?

A cryptocurrency is only as secure as its blockchain is.  And, the size of the mempool backing that blockchain is the elephant in the room and it has to be big, deep and incorruptible.

Don’t think for a second that various U.S. ‘intelligence’ agencies are not developing ways to attack anything crypto-based that either of these countries put in place.  And, as well, don’t think that the Russians, masters themselves of cryptography, aren’t thinking of ways to combat this at a fundamental level.

Bitcoin Solves Other Problems

Now, there are schemes emerging in the blockchain space that can mitigate this possibility very simply.  And it all depends on the architecture of this “Neft-coin” or Venezuela’s “Petro.”  Tying either of these coins to a massive proof-of-work based blockchain like Ethereum or Bitcoin would be the right way to do this.

Like I said at the outset, this is purely speculation on my part, but it’s important to ask these questions now to see what shakes out.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see this “Neft-coin” if it’s happening, is employing some form of double-proofing that ties back into the plans for Russian Miner Coin, and the employment of not only the best new Bitcoin mining ASICs but the incredibly cheap Russian electrical grid.

I wrote about this when it was first announced back in August, seeing it as a way to get around sanctions and create a potential crypto-reserve system for the Russian economy.

Not only does Bitcoin get potentially elevated to the level of reserve asset to reside right next to Russia’s enormous pile of gold that represents nearly 20% of M2 in Rubles at insanely depressed prices, but it also furthers the argument for Russia to be a destination for capital as the sovereign debt crisis unfolds.

 

Capital is flowing into cryptos at an astounding pace.  Governments are completely behind the curve in their adoption of this technology.  Russia under Putin is moving quickly to remedy this and now fully groks how it can help him acheive his goals for Russia’s financial independence from the U.S.

 

Lastly, if this proves successful, Russia’s new Bitfury chips that will power this system could see wide demand in the global mining market.

And now you know why Russia is interested in taking over 10% of the Bitcoin mining hashing power.  In cryptocurrency mining, he who controls the hashing power controls the network, in essence.  Russia wants in on this for the strategic purpose of leveraging it for a number of reasons.

Both a crypto-Ruble and this potential “Neft-coin” can be tied to the Bitcoin blockchain by proxy and insulate it from any number of attack types.  For an example of how they could structure this read about Komodo’s delayed-Proof-of-Work system.

The drive to attract global capital away from the existing and (in my opinion) failing monetary and political system is what is driving the creation of these new types of digital assets.  Contrary to the opinion of many America Firsters, the U.S. is not capable of militarily taking on the world.  It does most of its fighting through the financial markets and political backrooms.

Moves like this and assets like Bitcoin itself happen because of that very natural human desire to be free from external control which enriches the few at the expense of the many.  Even if Russia isn’t working on a “Neft-coin” because of its relationship with China and its developing a crypto-Ruble, it’s obvious that there is a coordinated effort via the blockchain to secure Russia’s future free from U.S. control.

Top Crypto-Mining Executive Explains Why "We"re Hoarding The Coins"

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

If the price action in crypto currencies over the last several months has proven anything, it’s that the blockchain has gone fully mainstream with global investors, major financial institutions and governments showing significant interest in the space. While a number of blockchain projects are moving onto the stage, the primary focus for investors has been Bitcoin, which has seen an increase of over 1,600% in 2017. And according to Frank Holmes, there is much more to come.

In an interview with SGT Report, Holmes, the Chairman of Hive Blockchain Technologies, the world’s only publicly traded blockchain mining company explains that, while roughly 78% of the available 21 million Bitcoins, or about 16.4 million, have been mined up to this point, there are probably only about 10 million coins in actual circulation around the world because somewhere on the order of 25% have been lost forever due to misplaced wallet access keys and other issues. Moreover, of those 10 million or so available coins, it has been widely reported that about 1000 “whales,” or high net worth investors, own some 40% of the coins, creating a scarcity in the market that has left millions of global investors chasing a limited supply of BTC.

Holmes suggests that this limited availability works to the advantage of cryptocurrency miners who use expensive computer hardware mining rigs to process transactions on the blockchain, because with so much investment capital moving into the space they can hoard the coins they mine and sell into the market during price spikes while loading up on more coins when markets dip. Hive currently mines Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Bitcoin and will soon move into Litecoin and other popular cryptocurrencies using the same strategy:

We’re hoarding the coins… we mine virgin coins and in fact we are getting offered premiums for our coins because they’ve never been tainted.

 

We never buy the coins… anytime it has a huge surge we will sell one, two or three percent… and as soon as it corrects we just mine more and replenish ourselves…

 

We want to wait until we get at least 20,000 coins and then we can turn around and use our quant models, so we’re doing things very unique…

Most crypto currencies have a maximum supply of coins that can ever be mined. As Bitcoin demonstrates, a percentage of those already-mined coins will be lost. Another percentage will be locked up by high net worth and long-term investors. These mechanics create a situation where, perhaps only a little over half of the actual listed circulation of coins is actually circulating.

With this being the case it’s not difficult to see why, as tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps even trillions as has been suggested by investment gurus, continue to pile into these assets, prices for top tier crypto currencies could continue to rise exponentially in coming months and years.

SEC Wins Injunction Against ICO Organized By Financial Fraudster

The Securities and Exchange Commission is stepping up its long-overdue crackdown on shady initial coin offerings that are churning out suckers at a record clip with one simple promise: Invest in our coin and you, too, can receive an astronomical IRR just like your savvy cousin who bought a handful of bitcoins back in 2011 and decided to hold on for dear life.

In an enforcement action that, as far as we can tell, is the first of its kind anywhere, the SEC just won an emergency asset freeze to stop an initial coin offering that the agency said has defrauded investors by promising a 13-fold profit in less than a month.

While such an outrageous guarantee should immediately set alarm bells ringing in the minds of any experienced investor, bitcoin’s 1,000%-plus return so far this year has inspired many lazy would-be crypto millionaires to throw caution to the wind and approach every new ICO with a level of credulity that’s totally unjustified. But anybody who actually reads the “white papers” that many of these companies release will realize that they typically comprise hypertechnical gibberish designed to convince investors that there is no problem in the world today that can’t be solved with a blockchain and thousands of monetized tokens.

According to Bloomberg, the asset freeze was granted after the SEC sued Dominic Lacroix and his company PlexCorps in federal court in Brooklyn. The firm and Lacroix, described by the SEC as a recidivist securities-law violator (a status that’s not uncommon among so-called “entrepreneurs” in the massively fraudulent world of ICOs), have raised $15 million since August marketing and selling a product called PlexCoin.

The case is the first brought by a new SEC unit created in September to focus specifically on ICOs.

“This first Cyber Unit case hits all of the characteristics of a full-fledged cyber scam and is exactly the kind of misconduct the unit will be pursuing,” said Robert Cohen, head of the SEC’s Cyber Unit.

 

“We acted quickly to protect retail investors from this initial coin offering’s false promises."

According to the SEC, Lacroix and PlexCorps violated securities laws by failing to register the offering and not disclosing Lacroix’s involvement with probes by Canadian authorities, the SEC said. The agency also sued and froze the assets of Sabrina Paradis-Royer, described as Lacroix’s romantic partner. The suit seeks fines and disgorgement from Lacroix and Paradis-Royer, as well as a ban on their participation in offerings of digital securities.

The SEC fired its warning shot in July when its ruling on an investigation into the collapse of the DAO - a sort of proto-ICO that went bust after hackers stole $50 million worth of ethereum tokens (of course, the total value of the tokens stolen has massively inflated in the interveneing period) - officially declared ICOs to be securities that must be registered with the SEC. In August, the regulator warned investors to exercise extreme caution before investing in ICOs, warning that many are classic pump-and-dump schemes obscured by a new techno-veneer.

Even the most successful ICOs are on the verge of collapse. The 800 or so ICOs that have launched this year have raised nearly $4 billion. Yet the market has been astonishingly devoid of success stories.

Yesterday, we reported how frustrated investors in Tezos, which raised more than $230 million in an ICO over the summer, have filed a spate of class action lawsuits against the company alleging that its founders intentionally defrauded investors. The company, which had little more than a white paper to its name when it completed its offering, has yet to produce the digital tokens it promised investors.

Meanwhile, the ethereum and bitcoin that it accepted as payment during its crowdsale have appreciated massively in the intervening months.

But for those investors who still insist on invest in the ICO market - where founders fool investors with nonsensical business plans that they pass off as “too complicated” for the average layperson to grasp - one 16-year-old math whiz has created a product that will reportedly allow investors to invest in a “tranche” covering the entire ICO market.

As the press release explains, the answer is simple:

In a nutshell: We’re going to take a position in each ICO, then wrap those up into their own ICO and then you can buy tranches of that ICO depending on your “risk tolerance” i.e. how strong a person you are.

 

Basically, it’s all a question of how RICH YOU WANT TO BECOME. The bottom tranche is so safe that you can basically put your entire life savings in and earn a fat return.

The notion that diversification can help investors avoid losses in a massively fraudulent market is, of course, a canard. At the end of the day, it"ll be the investors - not the offering"s organizer - left holding the bag once the entire market goes to zero.
 

Bitcoin Just Crashed Over $1000

Bitcoin has just collapsed over $1000, back below $11,000...On heavy volume...

Ethereum is also down hard...

No immediate catalyst for the move, but we do note that it started as Venezuela"s Maduro unveiled "The Petro" - their official cryptocurrency.

Or is this why?

The dreaded Barron"s Cover Curse?