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So you're thinking about investing in bitcoin? Don't
To understand this fear, it is important to know a little bit about governments and conventional currencies. Fiat is a term used to describe the conventional currencies that are issued by governments. Fiat currencies have value because governments say that they do. To an increasing number of people, that promise means nothing.
After all, fiat currencies are not backed by any tangible assets. Fiat currencies are backed by the full faith and credit of the government that issued them and nothing more. If you want gold, silver, beans, or smokes you need to exchange your fiat currency with a person or entity that possesses the item that you want. Governments control fiat currencies.
Why Some Investors Get Bitcoin So Wrong - CoinDesk
They use central banks to issue or destroy money out of thin air, using what is known as monetary policy to exert economic influence. They also dictate how fiat currencies can be transferred, enabling them to track currency movement, dictate who profits from that movement, collect taxes on it, and trace criminal activity. All of this control is lost when non-government bodies create their own currencies.
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While each of these topics is broad and deep enough to fill volumes, a brief overview is enough to provide insight into the general concept. Since governments intentionally increase or restrict the amount of money circulating in an economy in an effort to stimulate investment and spending, generate jobs, or avoid out-of-control inflation and recession, control over currency is an enormous concern. The currency is created in cyberspace when so-called "miners" use the power of their computers to solve complex algorithms that serve as verification for Bitcoin transactions.
Their reward is payment with cyber currency, which is stored digitally and passed between buyers and sellers without the need for an intermediary. If bitcoin or another cryptocurrency become widely adopted, the entire banking system could become irrelevant. While this may sound like a wonderful concept in light of the recent behavior of the banking industry, there are two sides to every story. Without banks, who will you call when your mortgage payment gets hacked? How will you earn interest on your savings? Who will provide assistance when a transfer of assets fails or a technical glitch occurs?
While the financial crisis gave bankers an even worse reputation than they already had, there is something to be said for institutions that oversee timely, effective, and trustworthy asset transfers and their associated record keeping. Those fees generate a lot of revenue and a lot of jobs across the global banking industry. Money transfer business would also disappear in a virtual world.
Nobody needs a Western Union or its competitors if everybody is using bitcoin. So much has been written about virtual currency and crime, that it is enough to recap the issue by stating that untraceable financial transactions facilitate crime. Drug trafficking, prostitution, terrorism, money laundering, tax evasion, and other illegal and subversive activity all benefit from the ability to move money in untraceable ways.
The now-defunct Silk Road online drug market is a case in point. Its founder credits Bitcoin for its success. Aside from the headline-grabbing fact that virtual currencies can and are used to engage in a wide range of illicit activity it should be noted that cash is used for many of these same transactions , there is a legitimate theoretical argument in favor of their use. It is based on the reality that central bank tinkering with the money supply has induced recessions, exacerbated unemployment, and given rise to a global banking system based on profiteering and corruption.
Don't trust bitcoin just because it's going mainstream
We need look only as far as the mortgage-market shenanigans underpinning the financial crisis of for insight into why disaffected consumers everywhere would support the efforts of anonymous programmers in subverting a system that has done them no favors. These ideas are not new. The Austrian School, a school of economic thought founded in , holds among its core tenets the idea that economic manipulation by central banks is not beneficial. Before you convert your national currency to bitcoin, you want to consider a few additional facts.
Gox , the largest exchange service converting dollars to bitcoins, failed in spectacular fashion when hackers allegedly stole bitcoins valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. It is created by anonymous programmers through a methodology that it too complex for most people to understand much less participate in. On the other hand, the European Central Bank reported in that Bitcoin is just one of over digital currencies now in circulation around the world. So what does the future hold for Bitcoin and other virtual currencies? It is safe to say that they are here to stay.
You can use the virtual currency to make purchases in a wide variety of video games and at some retailers like overstock. Bitcoin Forum. Feedback requested :. Austrian Institute of Economics and Social Philosophy. European Central Bank. Accessed May 22, Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for Investopedia. Bloomberg Markets pieced together the story of these lucrative but secretive operations through interviews with more than two dozen current and former traders and executives, some of which were conducted for The World for Sale, our new book on the history of commodity trading.
The oil majors trade in physical energy markets, buying tankers of crude, gasoline, and diesel. And they do the same in natural gas and power markets via pipelines and electricity grids. But they do more than that: They also speculate in financial markets, buying and selling futures, options, and other financial derivatives in energy markets and beyond—from corn to metals—and closing deals with hedge funds, private equity firms, and investment banks.
As little known as their trading is to the outside world, BP, Shell, and Total see it as the heart of their business. In years of low prices, like or , trading profits can far exceed those of the production business. One reason profits are so high is because the three companies can reduce their trading tax bill by routing their business through low-tax jurisdictions—a strategy not available to their oil pumping and refining businesses, which are rooted in physical infrastructure in particular countries. Shell, for example, concentrates all its trading of West African and Latin American crude via a subsidiary in the Bahamas.
Even better for the trio, trading profits tend to soar when markets are oversupplied, as was the case in and again in , helping to cushion the blow of low prices on the traditional business of pumping and refining oil. Trading also gives them an edge over their U. For most shareholders, however, the trading business is a black box. Together the three companies trade almost 30 million barrels a day of oil and other petroleum products, equal to the daily production of the entire OPEC cartel. Shell alone trades about 12 million barrels a day. The paper volumes are much larger. Total, for example, trades 6.
With trading comes risk. There are very few risk-free trades. BP, Shell, and Total declined to comment for this article. Then, in the first half of the 20th century, oil trading simply ceased to exist as the biggest producers squeezed others out of the picture.
A few large companies came to dominate the industry, underpinned by their agreements to divvy up the oil resources of the Middle East. BP was emblematic of the era. Already early traders such as Marc Rich, who founded the company that is today Glencore, were finding ways to trade oil outside the control of the Seven Sisters on the nascent spot market. The big oil companies regarded trading as beneath them and looked down on the upstarts, but they would soon be forced to think differently. The Iranian revolution of at a stroke dispossessed BP of much of its oil production.
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The company was forced to turn to the spot market that it had long disdained to buy the oil its refineries needed. Soon BP was doing much more than just buying oil for its own refineries. Andy Hall, then a young graduate working in its scheduling department in New York, would go on to be one of the most successful oil traders in history after leaving BP. He recalls that he started buying any oil that looked cheap, whether BP needed it or not, figuring to resell it at a profit.
The oil price slump of the late s set the stage for what the three large trading businesses would become as a wave of consolidation swept through the oil industry. The same happened when Chevron took over Texaco. The Americans were pretty much out of the trading business. Meanwhile, BP bought Amoco, which had a large trading unit, expanding its reach. Shell, too, reorganized and centralized its trading unit. By the time the wave of consolidation was over in , the European trio emerged as the kings of oil trading. Their timing was exquisite: Commodity trading was about to enjoy an enormous boom as skyrocketing Chinese demand spurred a decade-long supercycle in prices.
Rows of desks sprouting vast arrays of flashing multicolored screens stretch out almost as far as the eye can see. In Chicago its traders occupy the historic floor of the former Chicago Mercantile Exchange building.
All in all, BP, Shell, and Total employ about 8, people in their trading divisions, a small fraction of their overall workforce of , The traders have more in common with the investment bankers across the road than they do with their colleagues sweating on oil rigs in Nigeria or mapping fields off the coast of Brazil. You see that moving up, hopefully, on a daily basis, and it just makes you want to do more.
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Dont believe in bitcoin
Dont believe in bitcoin
Dont believe in bitcoin
Dont believe in bitcoin
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