"To
turn $100 into $110 is work. To turn $100 million into $110 million
is inevitable."
Edgar
Bronfman, Chairman, Seagrams.
This
weekend more on Bitcoin, the get rich fast scheme for every-man and
his dog. Forget getting rich by taking in each other’s laundry,
doing each other’s nails and hair, or peddling pizza, bitcoin is a
one way street to unlimited riches. Why walk when you can ride. And
you can ride in style in bitcoin, everyone says so.
But
first this stunning news from Brussels, everyone won in the Brexit
Battle of Britain!!! London won. Dublin won. Berlin won. Brussels
won. Fudge and uncertainty won. For the foreseeable future, John Bull
will keep paying Danegeld to Brussels. That doesn’t seem like
London winning to me.
December
8, 2017 / 5:03 AM / Updated 4 hours ago
Britain, EU clinch Brexit 'breakthrough' with move to trade talks
BRUSSELS
(Reuters) - Britain and the European Union struck a divorce deal on
Friday that paves the way for arduous talks on future trade ties,
easing immediate pressure on Prime Minister Theresa May and boosting
hopes of an orderly Brexit.
May
rushed to Brussels before dawn to seal a European Commission
agreement that “sufficient progress” had been made to begin talks
about trade and a two-year Brexit transition period that will start
when Britain leaves the EU on March 29, 2019.
Negotiators in London, Brussels and Dublin worked through the night before breaking an impasse over the status of the Irish border, the last major obstacle to the opening of trade talks which EU leaders are due to bless at a summit on Dec. 15.
But though the Irish prime minister called a British pledge to avoid a destabilising “hard border” for Northern Ireland a “bullet-proof” commitment, one senior EU official conceded that wording to appease May’s Belfast allies was a “fudge” which had simply put off until later the need to “square the circle”.
While Northern Ireland would remain aligned with the rules of the EU’s single market and customs union under which member state Ireland operates, May’s government is officially committed to leaving both the single market and customs union.
Actual negotiations on a trade pact that may take several years to agree may not start for some months. But EU officials said they should be ready to start rapid talks in January to give May the transition period she wants to reassure business that not much will change for a couple of years after Brexit.
More
Below
the reality version of how Mrs May got mugged in Brussels.
Two Tens for a Five.
Only One Side Compromised for This Brexit Breakthrough
The U.K. bowed to EU demands on all the
main issues and will have to keep doing so during trade talks.
by Leonid
Bershidsky
8 December 2017, 14:18 GMT
Now
back to bitcoin and how we’re all going to get rich and retire from
work forever. With a theoretical bitcoin limit of 21 million, and
unlimited global fiat money, endlessly created out of nothing at the push of a
central banksters’ button, and 7 billion potential
buyers, bitcoin is a one way street to insane wealth. When we get to
that last bitcoin, it’s going to trade at infinity, honest it will.
"The
London Banker Henry Fauntleroy forged to keep his bank solvent. He
was executed for it in 1824."
Charles
P. Kindleberger, author Manias, Panics and Crashes.
The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market
8
December 2017, 10:00 GMT
On
Nov. 12, someone moved almost 25,000 bitcoins, worth about $159
million at the time, to an online exchange. The news soon rippled
through online forums, with bitcoin
traders arguing about whether it meant the owner was about to sell
the digital currency.
Holders
of large amounts of bitcoin
are often known as whales. And they’re becoming a worry for
investors. They can send prices plummeting by selling even a portion
of their holdings. And those sales are more probable now that the
cryptocurrency is up nearly twelvefold from the beginning of the
year.About 40 percent of bitcoin is held by perhaps 1,000 users; at current prices, each may want to sell about half of his or her holdings, says Aaron Brown, former managing director and head of financial markets research at AQR Capital Management. (Brown is a contributor to the Bloomberg Prophets online column.) What’s more, the whales can coordinate their moves or preview them to a select few. Many of the large owners have known one another for years and stuck by bitcoin through the early days when it was derided, and they can potentially band together to tank or prop up the market.
“I think there are a few hundred guys,” says Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital. “They all probably can call each other, and they probably have.” One reason to think so: At least some kinds of information sharing are legal, says Gary Ross, a securities lawyer at Ross & Shulga.
Because bitcoin is a digital currency and not a security, he says, there’s no prohibition against a trade in which a group agrees to buy enough to push the price up and then cashes out in minutes.
Regulators have been slow to catch up with cryptocurrency trading, so many of the rules are still murky. If traders not only pushed the price up but also went online to spread rumors, that might count as fraud. Bittrex, a digital currency exchange, recently wrote to its users warning that their accounts could be suspended if they banded together into “pump groups” aimed at manipulating prices. The law might also be different for other digital coins. Depending on the details of how they are structured and how investors expect to make money from them, some may count as currencies, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Asked about whether large holders could move in concert, Roger Ver, a well-known early bitcoin investor, said in an email: “I suspect that is likely true, and people should be able to do whatever they want with their own money. I’ve personally never had time for things like that though.”
“As in any asset class, large individual holders and large institutional holders can and do collude to manipulate price,” Ari Paul, co-founder of BlockTower Capital and a former portfolio manager of the University of Chicago endowment, wrote in an electronic message. “In cryptocurrency, such manipulation is extreme because of the youth of these markets and the speculative nature of the assets.”
----(Although bitcoin transactions are designed to be anonymous, each one is associated with a coded address that can be seen by anyone.) When he sees activity, Samani immediately calls the likely sellers and can often get information on motivations behind their sales and their trading plans, he says. Some funds end up buying one another’s holdings directly, without going into the open market, to avoid affecting the currency’s price. “Investors are generally more forthcoming with other investors,” Samani says. “We all kind of know who one another are, and we all help each other out and share notes. We all just want to make money.” Ross says gathering intelligence is legal.
Ordinary investors, of course, don’t have the cachet required to get a multimillionaire to take their call. While they can track addresses with large holdings online and start heated discussions of market moves on Reddit forums, they’re ultimately in the dark on the whales’ plans and motives. “There’s no transparency to speak of in this market,” says Martin Mushkin, a lawyer who focuses on bitcoin. “In the securities business, everything that’s material has to be disclosed. In the virtual currency world, it’s very difficult to figure out what’s going on.”
Ordinary investors are at an even greater disadvantage in smaller digital currencies and tokens. Among the coins people invest in, bitcoin has the least concentrated ownership, says Spencer Bogart, managing director and head of research at Blockchain Capital.
more
December
7, 2017 / 2:24 PM / Updated an hour ago
Bitcoin drops after dramatic gains ahead of futures launch
LONDON/NEW
YORK (Reuters) - Bitcoin lost almost a fifth of its value in 10 hours
on Friday, having surged more than 40 percent in the preceding 48
hours, sparking fears the market may be heading for a price collapse.
In
a hectic day on Thursday, bitcoin leapt from below $16,000 to $19,500
in less than an hour on the U.S.-based GDAX, one of the biggest
exchanges globally, while it was still changing hands at about
$15,900 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp. Some market watchers
attributed the lurch higher to the coming launch of bitcoin futures
on major exchanges. Having then climbed to $16,666 on Bitstamp at around 0200 GMT on Friday, it tumbled to $13,482 by around 1200 GMT - a slide of more than 19 percent. It was last down 8.2 percent at $15,232.32 on BitStamp.
On Sunday, the Chicago-based Cboe Global Markets exchange is due to launch a futures contract on the digital currency, to be followed by CME Group the next week.
Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at OANDA in London, said investors may have taken profits on bitcoin gains ahead of the Cboe launch, which could open the door to short speculators who believe the price has risen far too quickly.
Bitcoin gamble: Canadian couple pours life savings into bitcoin mine
'If this is going to work, it's going to work really well'
By Jacqueline Hansen, CBC News Posted: Dec 07, 2017 5:00 AM ET Last Updated: Dec 08, 2017 9:10 AM ET
Mining
for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin isn't the first "crazy" idea
Dan Ingram has come up with, according to his wife Amanda Ryland.
"Most of his endeavours have been profitable," Ryland said. "They may sound crazy, but I trust him."
Entrepreneurs at heart, the Langley, B.C., couple sees real potential in the somewhat complicated world of cryptocurrencies. But rather than buy the digital currencies, they have invested more than $100,000 in the machines, electricity and space to create new ones — a process known as bitcoin "mining."
"If I was looking for get-rich-quick, I would've just bought bitcoin, and just sat there and crossed my fingers — and that would be really taking a chance," Ingram, 38, said. "I was looking for something that was a little bit more stable."
Ryland, 39, jokes that she and her husband have to explain to friends that bitcoin mining doesn't require a headlamp or a pickaxe.
Bitcoin
mining is done digitally, using machines with high-level computing
power to try to solve complex equations. Successful miners are
rewarded for their efforts with bitcoin.
Ingram and Ryland have 11 mining machines running at their home, and many more that recently shipped from China that they plan to set up in a specially designed warehouse space.
Each shoebox-size machine requires a lot of electricity to run, generating heat that is moderated by an attached fan, which creates a loud humming noise.
There
are massive mining enterprises elsewhere in the world, such as those
operated by Bitmain in China.
The warehouse building will help Ingram and Ryland to access more power at better rates, but in order to compete with those giant commercial operations, the couple teams up with other miners in an online pool and get a small slice of any cryptocurrencies earned each day.
"I'm not planning on taking money out on a daily basis to live off of — I have a job for that," Ingram said. "This is for the long term. It's basically taking all of my savings so far and putting it towards it. It is a little risky, but I'm young."
more
Bitcoin's Futures Are All Mapped Out
Dec
7, 2017 8:45 AM EST
Coming
to an officially-regulated market near you this month: Bitcoin
Futures.Trading the cryptocurrency will start on Dec. 10 on the Cboe Global Markets Inc. exchange, and by Dec. 18 on the world's biggest futures exchange, CME Group Inc. This means neither restricted access nor the risk of dubious counter-parties will stop hedgers, financial institutions or the downright adventurous from getting in on the most-talked about new instrument.
Yet the two bodies are struggling to persuade members to provide the clearing services crucial to gaining critical mass -- unsurprisingly given the tulip-style mania around Bitcoin and the ever more insane price swings. The chief lobby group for futures brokers, the Futures Industry Association, is pushing back at the speed and ease that the regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has waived this through.
It all seems pretty futile. In all likelihood, traders will find a way to access clearing services even if they have to avoid the main providers. While no big bank has enthusiastically endorsed Bitcoin futures, none has ruled out involvement. If they don't do the clearing, smaller non-bank brokers will. Many proprietary risk-trading firms can self-clear anyway.
Wild
Ride
New
highs for Bitcoin is pushing volatility higher again
But
"Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)", to use social media
parlance, is driving crypto-land. The CME and Cboe
have their trading customers to satisfy and they're screaming for
this. Build it and they will come. Smaller clearers will rush to fill
any gap.
And, in fairness, there's a game attempt to stop this being completely off-the-scale Wild West stuff. It's a cash-settled futures contract in U.S. dollars, with no actual delivery of Bitcoin required. The exchange will impose a minimum initial margin -- the deposit required to trade a specified amount of futures contracts -- of 35 percent. That's seven times more than for trading oil or mini-S&P equity futures. There will be a twice-daily requirement to make sure the 35 percent buffer is intact, given Bitcoin's constant swings. Clearing members can impose a higher limit if they want.
Two-minute trading breaks will kick in if the daily price moves 7 percent away from the previous day's settlement price, then again at 13 percent and a hard limit at 20 percent when all trading will cease unless trading can restart within that band. There are no stated plans to offer options on the futures, until the contract is fully established. That would be too much rocket fuel.
More
"Very
few people can afford to be poor."
George
Bernard Shaw, author.
Once
again another year draws to a close. If you are one of the regular
reader of this six days a week update that helps support my efforts
with the occasional donation via the Paypal button, once again I
sincerely thank you. If you are a regular reader who finds the LIR
informative, interesting, occasionally amusing or entertaining,
please consider making a small donation via the Paypal button on the
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thank you for reading and sending in helpful suggestions.
21st
century adage: Is that true or did you hear it on the BBC?
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