Baltic
Dry Index. 1670
+04
Brent Crude 61.36
It
is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to
put out on the troubled seas of thought.
John
Kenneth Galbraith
Today,
as Bitcoin goes from bubble to mania, some thoughts.
Each
day now, greed is overcoming fear, and driving money into the mania,
as speculators, and money managers fear to lose out. A classic greed
bubble. I worry about what happens if/when this fraud breaks.
How bad will the bust be and how far will the contamination spread?
Real assets will get sold to raise the missing cash. The
longer the bubble runs and the higher, the greater the devastation
when it ends.
Worse,
no one can control that ending. China or the EU could suddenly
outlaw it. A Madoff like ending is all too likely. But if the
financial havoc requires another bailout, I fear for the political
stability in America, the UK and EU. China and Russia have been
stockpiling gold, and can probably muddle through with some domestic
currency changes. But both are still more command economies than the
western democracies.
I
suspect that bitcoin and the others are already sucking cash out of
other markets. If that becomes a manic mania in 2018, the wealth loss
into the underground economy risks a major crisis in the real
economy. But will/can the authorities act without a crisis? And
what happens when interest rates normalise?
In
short, I think we are living in an early mania. Nothing good comes of
it unlike graphene, solar power, AI, and robotics.
Asia Stocks Trading Mixed, Aussie Dollar Weakens: Markets Wrap
By Adam Haigh
6 December
2017, 22:03 GMT Updated on 7 December 2017, 04:05 GMT
Asian
equities were mixed, with stocks rising in Japan and Australia,
falling in China and South Korea and fluctuating in Hong Kong. The
Australian dollar declined after another disappointing set of
economic data.
In Japan, the Nikkei 225 Stock
Average recovered some of its worst slide in nine months after U.S.
stocks steadied. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index was up after falling for
eight consecutive days to Wednesday.
The
Australian dollar dropped to the lowest in about three weeks after
October trade data missed estimates. Weaker-than-expected
third-quarter GDP earlier this week reinforced views that the central
bank won’t adjust monetary policy any time soon, sending the Aussie
lower.
“Japanese stocks will probably
regain their calm as the currency market hasn’t fallen into a
typical risk-off vicious circle after the selloff in Asian stocks
yesterday,” said Juichi Wako, a senior strategist at Nomura
Securities Co. in Tokyo. “Shares are looking cheaper.”
Global markets have succumbed to a
bout of profit taking this week with eight days of losses for Asian
equities culminating Wednesday in the biggest slide since last
December for the region’s stocks index. Technology stocks, this
year’s biggest winners, have posted the largest declines along with
emerging-market shares, also standout winners in 2017.
more
Bitcoin Soars Through $14,000, Up More Than 40% This Month
By Adam Haigh
7 December
2017, 03:16 GMT Updated on 7 December 2017, 04:38 GMT
Bitcoin
climbed as much as 7.9 percent on Thursday as it surged above
$14,000, extending this month’s advance to more than 40 percent.
The price of the cryptocurrency touched $14,399.99, a record,
according to Bloomberg pricing.
ASX
Ltd., the main exchange operator for equities and derivatives in
Australia,
on Thursday said it will start using blockchain to process equity
transactions. Blockchain is the ledger software that makes bitcoin
and other cryptocurrencies possible, and Digital Asset Holdings LLC,
the startup run by former JPMorgan Chase & Co. banker Blythe
Masters, will supply the technology.
Bitcoin also got a boost from a
successful test of the Lightning Network, which promises to
provide a new way to pay with bitcoin. The technology would move
some transactions away from the blockchain by allowing buyers and
sellers to transact privately and later broadcast their activity to
the public network. Supporters say it will ease the on-going
congestion plaguing bitcoin.
On Wednesday, the three companies
behind the technology -- Lightning Labs, Blockstream Corp. and ACINQ
-- successfully made multiple payments. This is the first time their
system has been used on bitcoin’s actual blockchain, according to
Elizabeth Stark, head of Lightning Labs. She said this paves the way
toward testing with outside businesses.
“We had done some tests before on
the main net, but this was the first payment on the bitcoin
blockchain across implementations,” Stark said in an email. “The
stakes are quite a bit higher when it comes to releasing for the main
bitcoin network.”
The
price of bitcoin cash fell after the news, slumping 7.4 percent to
$1,321, according to prices on Bitfinex. The rival offers a separate
solution to bitcoin’s congestion issue.
Bitcoin’s latest price move will
add to a chorus coming from naysayers who assert the speculative
frenzy is an asset bubble waiting to pop. The largest cryptocurrency
by market value has soared from less than $1,000 at the start of the
year, up more than 1,300 percent.
More
A Bitcoin Frenzy Like No Other Is Gripping South Korea
By Kyungji Cho , Yuji Nakamura , and Narae Kim
6 December
2017, 16:19 GMT Updated on 7 December 2017, 02:36 GMT
Like
thousands of South Koreans, Moonsung Bae is infatuated by bitcoin.
The 35-year-old financial analyst got
his first taste a year ago, before the cryptocurrency exploded
into one of the wildest investment stories of our time, and by the
end of last month his personal holdings had swelled to half his
liquid assets.
“I had this fear when I first
bought,” Bae said. “But then I realized, oh, it actually works.”
It’s certainly worked, at least so
far, for those who got in early and rode the speculative wave that
pushed the cryptocurrency above $14,000 on Thursday. But where
bitcoin and its ilk go from here is the subject of fierce debate,
nowhere more so than in Korea, which has emerged as a sort of ground
zero for the global crypto-mania.
So many Koreans have embraced bitcoin
that the prime minister recently warned that cryptocurrencies might
corrupt the nation’s youth. The craze has spread so far that, in
Korea, bitcoin is trading at a premium of about 23 percent over
prevailing international rates.
While neighboring Japan hosts more
transactions by some measures, Korea punches far above its
weight: In the 24-hour period through Wednesday evening in Seoul,
about 21 percent of the world’s bitcoin trades on fee-charging
venues involved the Korean won, according to Coinmarketcap.com. The
country accounts for about 1.9 percent of the global economy.
More
The Great Credit Party Is Almost Over, Societe Generale Says
By Chris Anstey and Narae Kim
7 December
2017, 04:28 GMT
The
great credit party that’s taken yield premiums in major markets
down around lowest in a decade is probably months away from an end,
as central banks normalize monetary policy and the economic outlook
softens, Societe Generale SA predicts.
"We expect next year to be a
transition year, when the ultra-low yield environment finally starts
to lose its grip," Societe Generale credit strategists Juan
Esteban Valencia and Guy Stear wrote in a note. "The U.S. and
the eurozone are heading for an economic slowdown in 2019, and given
the rising levels of corporate leverage, this should have an impact
on credit."
U.S.
investment-grade bond premiums will widen by mid-2018, with European
counterparts following suit, as credit markets price in the economic
slowdown, they wrote. "The sword falls in 2H," they
predicted in a report that recognized last year’s annual outlook
proved too bearish. Societe Generale had anticipated political risk
to hurt credit in 2017, but changed tack by March as that didn’t
pan out.
Now, with global premiums having
fallen further, "credit looks very pricey indeed," they
wrote. "Emerging market and high-yield markets are the most
alarming."
more
If
all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular
error.
John
Kenneth Galbraith
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The
bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Bitcoin
again. Who benefits? Is mining bitcoins even cost effective. Below
more on the Bitcoin global mania. Any bets on whether this Bitcoin
scam ends well?
"Annual
income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen
[shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty
pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result
misery."
Mr
Micawber. Charles Dickens.
One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week
Bitcoin’s surge in price has sent its electricity consumption soaring.
Christopher
Malmo
Nov 1 2017, 7:20pm
Bitcoin's incredible price
run to break over $7,000 this year has sent its overall
electricity consumption soaring, as people worldwide bring more
energy-hungry computers online to mine the digital currency.
An index from cryptocurrency analyst
Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist,
estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be
profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours
of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly
difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins.
That's about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people,
uses in a year.
This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice
used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently
about 300,000
transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes
901
KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to
run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week. On
a larger scale, De Vries' index shows that bitcoin miners worldwide
could be using enough electricity to at any given time to power about
2.26 million American homes.
Expressing Bitcoin's energy use on a
per-transaction basis is a useful abstraction. Bitcoin uses x
energy in total, and this energy verifies/secures roughly 300k
transactions per day. So this measure shows the value we get for all
that electricity, since the verified transaction (and our confidence
in it) is ultimately the end product.
Since 2015,
Bitcoin's electricity consumption has been very high compared to
conventional digital payment methods. This is because the dollar
price of Bitcoin is directly proportional to the amount of
electricity that can profitably be used to mine it. As the price
rises, miners
add more computing power to chase new Bitcoins and transaction
fees.
It's impossible to know exactly
how much electricity the Bitcoin network uses. But we can run a
quick calculation of the minimum energy Bitcoin could be
using, assuming that all miners are running the most efficient
hardware with no efficiency losses due to waste heat. To do this,
we'll use a simple methodology laid out in previous
coverage on Motherboard. This would give us a constant total
mining draw of just
over one gigawatt.
That means that, at a minimum, worldwide Bitcoin mining could power
the daily needs of 821,940 average American homes.
Put another way, global Bitcoin
mining represents a minimum of 77KWh
of energy consumed per Bitcoin transaction. Even as an
unrealistic lower boundary, this figure is high: As senior economist
Teunis Brosens from Dutch bank ING wrote,
it's enough to power his own home in the Netherlands for nearly two
weeks.
Digiconomist's less optimistic
estimate for per-transaction energy costs now sits at around 215 KWh
of electricity. That's more than enough to fill two Tesla batteries,
run an efficient fridge/freezer
for a full year, or boil 1872 litres of water in a kettle.
It's important to remember that de
Vries' model isn't exact. It makes assumptions about the economic
incentives available to miners at a given price level, and presents a
forward-looking prediction for where mining electricity consumption
could go. Despite this, it's quite clear that even at the
minimum level of 77 KWh per transaction, we have a problem. At 215
KWh, we have an even bigger problem.
That problem is carbon emissions. De
Vries has come up with some estimates by diving
into data made available on a coal-powered Bitcoin mine in
Mongolia. He concluded that this single mine is responsible for 8,000
to 13,000 kg CO2 emissions per Bitcoin it mines, and 24,000 - 40,000
kg of CO2 per hour.
More
Bitcoin Futures Plan Criticized by Brokers for Overlooking Risks
By Sam Mamudi
7 December
2017, 05:15 GMT
Some of
the world’s biggest derivatives brokerages criticized plans
to offer bitcoin futures and options on U.S. exchanges, telling
regulators that the contracts have been rushed to market without
proper consideration of the risks.
The Futures
Industry Association, whose members include Goldman Sachs Group
Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc., detailed its
concerns in a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on
Wednesday. The association said there should have been more
discussion about margin levels, trading limits, stress tests and
clearing before the contracts were given a green light.
CME
Group Inc. and Cboe
Global Markets Inc. were the first bourses to approve bitcoin
derivatives, paving the way for mainstream investors to participate
in a volatile and largely unregulated market that some have called a
bubble. Cboe will start trading futures on Dec. 10, while CME’s
contracts are set to debut on Dec. 18. The exchanges were allowed to
offer the products after pledging to regulators that they comply with
the law, and the contracts will be subject to CFTC oversight.
“A more thorough and considered
process would have allowed for a robust public discussion among
clearing member firms, exchanges and clearinghouses,” the FIA said
in its letter, signed by the organization’s Chief Executive Officer
Walt Lukken. “The recent volatility in these markets has
underscored the importance of setting these levels and processes
appropriately and conservatively.”
more
Technology Update.
With
events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene,
I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported. Is
converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC energy mankind’s
future from the 21st
century onwards? DC? A quantum computer next?
Hybrid electrolyte enhances supercapacitance in vertical graphene nanosheets
Combining the characteristics of aqueous and organic electrolytes into a hybrid version increases VGN performance in supercapacitors, while KOH activation improves nanostructure and charge storage capacity.
- Date: December 5, 2017
- Source: American Institute of Physics
- Summary: Supercapacitors can store more energy than and are preferable to batteries because they are able to charge faster, mainly due to the vertical graphene nanosheets that are larger and positioned closer together. Using VGNs as the material for supercapacitor electrodes offers advantages that can be enhanced depending on how the material is grown, treated and prepared to work with electrolytes.
Supercapacitors
can store more energy than and are preferable to batteries because
they are able to charge faster, mainly due to the vertical graphene
nanosheets (VGNs) that are larger and positioned closer together.
VGNs are 3-D networks of carbon nanomaterial that grow in rows of
vertical sheets, providing a large surface area for greater charge
storage capacity. Also called carbon nanowalls or graphene
nanoflakes, VGNs offer promise in high-power energy storage systems,
fuel cells, bio sensors and magnetic devices, amongst others.
Using
VGNs as the material for supercapacitor electrodes offers advantages
due to their intriguing properties such as an interconnected porous
nanoarchitecture, excellent conductivity, high electrochemical
stability, and its array of nanoelectrodes. Advantages of VGNs can be
enhanced depending on how the material is grown, treated and prepared
to work with electrolytes.
"Performance of a supercapacitor
not only depends on the geometry of electrode material, but also
depends on the type of electrolyte and its interaction with the
electrode," said Subrata Ghosh of the Indira Gandhi Centre for
Atomic Research at Homi Bhabha National Institute. "To improve
the energy density of a device, [electric] potential window
enhancement will be one key factor."
In a paper published this week in the
Journal of Applied Physics, from AIP Publishing, Ghosh and a
team of researchers discovered ways to improve the material's
supercapacitance properties.
According to modeling, VGNs should be
able to provide high charge storage capabilities, and the scientific
community is trying to unlock the keys to reaching the levels of
efficiency that are theoretically available. Needed improvements to
be viable include, for instance, greater capacitance per unit of
material, greater retention, less internal resistance, and greater
electrochemical voltage ranges (operating potential windows).
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished November
DJIA:
24,272
+243
Up.
NASDAQ:
6,874
+289
Up.
SP500:
2,648
+189
Up.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteThe Australian dollar dropped to the lowest in about three weeks after October trade data missed estimates. It's important to remember that de Vries' model isn't exact. It makes assumptions about the economic incentives available to miners at a given price level.I agree with your post. Thanks for sharing your post.
...
http://onedaytop.com/queen-elizabeth-prince-philip-celebrate-platinum-wedding-anniversary/