Digital currency bitcoin has emerged as a rival to gold and could trade as high as $146,000 if it becomes established as a safe-haven asset, investment bank JPMorgan (JPM) said on Tuesday.

The total market capitalization of Bitcoin (BTC) has exceeded that of Mastercard’s today, placing the cryptocurrency on the 16th spot among the world’s largest companies, according to tracking platform AssetDash.

Bitcoin’s market cap amounts to nearly $338 billion while the coin’s price hovers around $18,270. According to AssetDash’s data, Bitcoin’s capitalization increased by 3%—enough to push payment giant Mastercard back to 17th place as its market cap lost 0.6%.

How far can interest rates fall?

Currently, many sovereign rates sit in negative territory, and there is an unprecedented $10 trillion in negative-yielding debt. This new interest rate climate has many observers wondering where the bottom truly lies.

Today’s graphic from Paul Schmelzing, visiting scholar at the Bank of England(BOE), shows how global real interest rates have experienced an average annual decline of -0.0196% (-1.96 basis points) throughout the past eight centuries.

The Evidence on Falling Rates

Collecting data from across 78% of total advanced economy GDP over the time frame, Schmelzing shows that real rates* have witnessed a negative historical slope spanning back to the 1300s.

Displayed across the graph is a series of personal nominal loans made to sovereign establishments, along with their nominal loan rates. Some from the 14th century, for example, had nominal rates of 35%. By contrast, key nominal loan rates had fallen to 6% by the mid 1800s.

Starting in 1311, data from the report shows how average real rates moved from 5.1% in the 1300s down to an average of 2% in the 1900s.

The average real rate between 2000-2018 stands at 1.3%.

Current Theories

Why have interest rates been trending downward for so long?

Here are the three prevailing theories as to why they’re dropping:

1. Productivity Growth

Since 1970, productivity growth has slowed. A nation’s productive capacity is determined by a number of factors, including labor force participation and economic output.

If total economic output shrinks, real rates will decline too, theory suggests. Lower productivity growth leads to lower wage growth expectations.

In addition, lower productivity growth means less business investment, therefore a lower demand for capital. This in turn causes the lower interest rates.

2. Demographics

Demographics impact interest rates on a number of levels. The aging population—paired with declining fertility levels—result in higher savings rates, longer life expectancies, and lower labor force participation rates.

In the U.S., baby boomers are retiring at a pace of 10,000 people per day, and other advanced economies are also seeing comparable growth in retirees. Theory suggests that this creates downward pressure on real interest rates, as the number of people in the workforce declines.

3. Economic Growth

Dampened economic growth can also have a negative impact on future earnings, pushing down the real interest rate in the process. Since 1961, GDP growth among OECD countries has dropped from 4.3% to 3% in 2018.

Larry Summers referred to this sloping trend since the 1970s as “secular stagnation” during an International Monetary Fund conference in 2013.

Secular stagnation occurs when the economy is faced with persistently lagging economic health. One possible way to address a declining interest rate conundrum, Summers has suggested, is through expansionary government spending.

Silvio Gesell hated money. A German entrepreneur who moved to Argentina for business in the late 19th century, he witnessed a massive financial crash in 1890 that convinced him that money was behind the world's economic problems: poverty, inequality, unemployment, stagnation.

The problem, Gesell believed, was that money served two roles that often came into conflict: It was a way for people to store wealth, and it was the thing everybody needed to conduct business. The fact that money could store wealth meant its holders had a reason to cling to it, especially in crises like the one he saw in Argentina, when opportunities to safely put that money elsewhere looked grim. It was a typical story. When people got scared, they hoarded cash and brought business to a standstill. It led, Gesell said, to a situation of "poverty amid plenty."

Gesell wanted to create a new kind of money — a money that would "rot like potatoes" and "rust like iron" so no one would want to hoard it, a money that was "an instrument of exchange and nothing else." And the crazy part is that he did create it. Through a series of pamphlets, articles and books, Gesell inspired a worldwide movement that introduced a completely new form of money. It's one of the most fascinating, and largely forgotten, stories in economic history.

But after 70 years of obscurity, Gesell is making a comeback. All of a sudden, this obscure radical from another age has his name and ideas popping up in unlikely places — like speeches of leaders at the U.S. Federal Reserve, research papers of the International Monetary Fund and the pages of the Financial Times. As the industrialized world grapples with stagnation and as markets signal another recession, policymakers are struggling to figure out what to do. Could Gesell provide an answer?

La loi Pacte a été définitivement adoptée ce jeudi par les députés. Une double disposition permet aux assureurs de mettre, via des fonds professionnels spécialisés, des crypto-actifs dans l'un des produits d'épargne préférés des Français. Les FPCI sont également concernés par la mesure.

Du bitcoin dans les contrats d'assurance-vie ? C'est pour bientôt. Selon nos informations, grâce à la loi Pacte  votée ce jeudi à l'Assemblée nationale, les assureurs peuvent désormais proposer des contrats d'assurance-vie exposés aux cryptomonnaies. Une première pour un produit aussi populaire en France.

« Ce n'était pas l'objectif premier de Pacte, mais les assureurs pourront effectivement offrir des produits basés sur des crypto-actifs. Ils le pourront via des fonds spécialisés », confirme le député LREM et rapporteur du budget, Joel Giraud. Le nouveau cadre sera opérationnel après la publication des décrets d'application.

Deux dispositions de la loi Pacte

Le dispositif a été rendu possible par l'adoption de deux textes de la loi Pacte, en discussion depuis 18 mois. L'article 21 de Pacte a modifié le Code des assurances pour permettre de placer des fonds professionnels spécialisés (FPS) en unités de compte d'assurance-vie.

Si l'article insère des conditions quant à la situation financière ou l'expérience de l'épargnant, qui seront justement précisées par décret, il n'y a plus de limite quant aux actifs dans lesquels les FPS éligibles à l'assurance-vie peuvent investir. « Les FPS ont été encore assouplis », explique Emilien Bernard-Alzias, avocat chez Simmons & Simmons LLP.

Dans le même temps, l'article 26 bis de Pacte a modifié les dispositions du Code monétaire et financier relatives aux actifs éligibles à l'investissement par des FPS. Désormais, tout « bien » faisant l'objet d'une « inscription dans un dispositif d'enregistrement électronique partagé », autrement dit une blockchain, pourront composer l'actif d'un FPS.

« Avec ces deux dispositions, il est écrit noir sur blanc que les FPS peuvent investir dans des crypto-actifs comme le bitcoin », souligne Emilien Bernard-Alzias. Les Fonds de placement en capital investissement (FPCI) sont également concernés par la mesure.

La Chine envisage d'interdire le minage de cryptomonnaies, une activité extrêmement consommatrice d'énergie. Depuis 2017, Pékin a considérablement renforcé l'encadrement du Bitcoin, contraignant des nombreuses sociétés à délocaliser à l'étranger.

This piece originally appreared in McSweeney’s new issue, The End of Trust, a collection featuring over 30 writers investigating surveillance, technology, and privacy, with special advisors the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Over the last five years, Edward Snowden and I have carried on an almost daily conversation, most of it unrelated to his legal troubles. Sometimes we meet in person in Moscow over vodka (me) and milkshakes (him). But our friendship has mostly taken place on secure messaging platforms, a channel that was comfortable and intuitive for him but took some getting used to for me. I learned to type with two thumbs as we discussed politics, law, and literature; family, friends, and foster dogs. Our sensibilities are similar but our worldviews quite different: I sometimes accuse him of technological solutionism; he accuses me of timid incrementalism.

Through it all, I’ve found him to be the clearest, most patient, and least condescending explainer of technology I’ve ever met. I’ve often thought that I wished more people — or perhaps different people — could eavesdrop on our conversations. What follows is a very lightly edited transcript of one of our chats. In it, Ed attempts to explain “blockchain” to me, despite my best efforts to cling to my own ignorance.

SAN FRANCISCO — A concentrated campaign of price manipulation may have accounted for at least half of the increase in the price of Bitcoin and other big cryptocurrencies last year, according to a paper released on Wednesday by an academic with a history of spotting fraud in financial markets.

The paper by John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas, and Amin Shams, a graduate student, is likely to stoke a debate about how much of Bitcoin’s skyrocketing gain last year was caused by the covert actions of a few big players, rather than real demand from investors.

Many industry players expressed concern at the time that the prices were being pushed up at least partly by activity at Bitfinex, one of the largest and least regulated exchanges in the industry. The exchange, which is registered in the Caribbean with offices in Asia, was subpoenaed by American regulators shortly after articles about the concerns appeared in The New York Times and other publications.

Mr. Griffin looked at the flow of digital tokens going in and out of Bitfinex and identified several distinct patterns that suggest that someone or some people at the exchange successfully worked to push up prices when they sagged at other exchanges. To do that, the person or people used a secondary virtual currency, known as Tether, which was created and sold by the owners of Bitfinex, to buy up those other cryptocurrencies.
“There were obviously tremendous price increases last year, and this paper indicates that manipulation played a large part in those price increases,” Mr. Griffin said.

Bitfinex executives have denied in the past that the exchange was involved in any manipulation. The company said on Wednesday that it had never engaged in “any sort” of market or price manipulation. “Tether issuances cannot be used to prop up the price of Bitcoin or any other coin/token on Bitfinex,” Jan Ludovicus van der Velde, Bitfinex’s chief executive, said in a statement.

• The tech giant's cloud computing arm is partnering with a start-up called Kaleido to make it easier for customers to put their services on blockchain.
• "Introducing Kaleido to AWS customers is going to help customers move faster and not worry about managing blockchain themselves," Amazon Web Services says.
• Founder of Ethereum blockchain Joseph Lubin calls it is a "heavy duty" move by the tech giant to get into blockchain.

Right now, based on preliminary assessments, it can be said that more than $7.4 billion has already been collected, which is more than during all of 2017, and this despite a threefold fall in the entire cryptocurrency market over the first quarter. The total funds collected in 2017 equaled around $6.9 billion.

The growth in collected funds in 2018 took place despite the introduction of a number of changes and restrictions in this area related to regulation processes and the types of tokens being issued (for example, regulation of the issue of tokens by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and restrictions on security tokens).

Despite the ban on initial coin offerings in certain countries (China, South Korea), and the need to perform KYC (Know Your Customer) verification procedures, some ICO projects have established mandatory preregistration, limitations on the minimum and maximum amount of tokens purchased, a digital queue for the right to purchase tokens, etc.

A document submitted to the SEC earlier this week states that the money was raised “for the development of the TON Blockchain, the development and maintenance of Telegram Messenger and the other purposes.” The security is described as “purchase agreements for cryptocurrency” and the filing is signed by Telegram CEO Pavel Durov.

This initial sum is most likely the pre-sale stage of the ICO which, as TechCrunch reported on extensively and in detail last month, was targeted at venture capital firms and top figures in the investment community who were given deep discounts to buy Telegram’s Gram token. The pre-sale was originally targeted at raising $600 million, but demand pushed the figure up to $850 million, according to a Bloomberg report.

Telegram initially planned to raise a further $600 million to develop its TON project via a public sale that starts in March, according to documents seen by TechCrunch, but it remains to be seen whether that figure will be adjusted. Bloomberg previously suggested the public sale component would expand to $1.15 billion, bringing the total raised to nearly $2 billion if successful.

Telegram CEO Durov did not reply to an emailed request for comment at the time of writing.

Either way, the sale promises to be the largest ICO seen to date. The pre-sale figure alone tops all other ICOs held by some margin.

Insurance company MassMutual just invested $100 mn in bitcoin to get:
- exposure to a new asset class
- investment portfolio diversification
- a (limited) hedge against sovereign debt hiccups
- the benefit of a digital gold store of value
- some hope to get decent investment yield in the current zero-interest trap
- a protection against decreasing fiat currencies (under current quantitative easings)
- a better understanding of this new asset that institutional investors want to invest in
This is coming after listed companies like Microstrategy or Square already made the move to protect their company reserves.
Other financial companies will soon follow suit. those lagging behind will have to invest after the next price peak.

Il est indéniable, que l’agrégat monétaire M1 augmente d’une façon vertigineuse depuis début 2014, si on le compare au PIB. Cela sans que l’on ait besoin de larguer des billets par hélicoptère, comme le suggérait l’économiste Milton Friedman, le Chicago boy !

Cette création fiduciaire pure ne correspond pas bien sûr à une création de valeur.

 De l’intérêt de l’accroissement du montant des espèces pour les banques centrales !

Lorsqu’une banque centrale émet de la monnaie, elle porte au PASSIF  de son bilan la quote-part (% négocié entre les pays en fonction de leur population,  lors de la création de l’euro , la France avait alors très bien négocié)   de la valeur des billets en euros émis par l’Eurosystème, cela se nomme « hypocritement »  le « revenu monétaire »

 Il en résulte que les ressources nettes de la Banque sont en hausse d’une fin d’année à l’autre, elles s’établissaient à 317 milliard d’euros en 2014, contre 308 milliards en 2013 . Cette hausse résulte essentiellement de la croissance de la circulation fiduciaire.

 En 2014 la croissance de la valeur des billets en euros s’est accélérée + 6,3 % d’une fin d’année sur l’autre,  en 2015 c’était de l’ordre de 6.5% pour redescendre en 2016 et 2017 à 4%, des pourcentages bien supérieurs à la croissance. 

Enfin, après avoir mis au passif l’émission de monnaie, les banques centrales portent (à ma connaissance à hauteur de 70%) cette progression fiduciaire, à l’ACTIF  de leur bilan c’est là qu’est l’intérêt des banque centrales, car ces 70% sont ensuite  matérialisés par l’achat de bons du trésor Américains, Suisse, Japonais etc , appelé hypocritement  « réserves de change » qui sont eux normalement générateurs d’intérêts.

Mise à jour Informations 2018

Depuis la mise en place du QE Quantitative Easing, les banques centrales de la zone euro, peuvent acquérir des obligations dont des emprunts d’état. La banque de France a profité de cette possibilité et est devenue un grand détenteur de la dette Française. Le Produit net des activités a ainsi progressé de près de 6% pour atteindre plus de Huit milliards d’Euros. Tout ses éléments  de technique financière ont généré  en 2017, un bénéfice avant impôts de Six Milliards d’euros, soit en hausse de 8%.  La banque de France devrait versée à l’Etat un dividende de près de cinq  milliards d’Euros.

Conclusion,

D’après certaines études, Il semblerait qu’un tiers de cette croissance de masse fiduciaire soit détenue hors de la zone Euro. Il n’empêche qu’aujourd’hui dans la zone euro à l’heure des cartes de crédit dont l’utilisation a progressé de 67% au cours des 10 dernières années, 79% des transactions en points de ventes se font encore en espèces.

Pour résumer cet artifice technique des banques centrales, plus il y a d’espèces en circulation, la plus grosse partie, indispensables  à la consommation mais dont une faible partie est  thésaurisée dans des coffres ou à l’étranger, une autre partie étant utilisée pour l’acquisition et l’exportation de biens acquis grâce aux trafics, plus la banque centrale se voit obligée d’émettre de nouveaux billets, plus elle fait grossir son passif, cela lui permet de faire grossir  parallèlement son actif , et donc augmenter les ressources nettes de la banque !

The Australian man who claimed to have invented cryptocurrency bitcoin has been ordered to hand over half of his alleged bitcoin holdings, reported to be worth up to $5bn.

The IT security consultant Craig Wright, 49, was sued by the estate of David Kleiman, a programmer who died in 2013, for a share of Wright’s bitcoin haul over the pair’s involvement in the inception of the cryptocurrency from 2009 to 2013.

Kleiman’s estate alleges Wright and Kleiman were partners, and therefore his family is entitled to a share of the bitcoin that was mined by the pair in that time. Wright denies there was a partnership.

A US district court in Florida on Tuesday ruled that half of the bitcoin mined and half of the intellectual property held by Wright from that time belongs to Kleiman.

One issue is it is not known exactly how much bitcoin Wright holds. It has been claimed that the Kleiman estate could get anywhere between 410,000 and 500,000 bitcoin, putting the value at between A$6.1bn and A$7.4bn as of Wednesday.

Wright claimed to the court that he couldn’t access the bitcoin because he doesn’t have a list of the public addresses of that bitcoin. He claimed in 2011, after seeing the cryptocurrency had begun to be associated with drug dealers and human traffickers, he put the bitcoin he mined in 2009 and 2010 into an encrypted file and into a blind trust. The encrypted key was divided into multiple key slices, and the key slices were given to Kleiman who distributed them to people through the trust.

Wright said this meant he could not decrypt the file until he gets access to the key from a bonded courier who will arrive in January 2020 – a claim Wright has made before in claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin.

In the judgment, Judge Bruce Reinhart said Wright had not proved he could not comply and obtain the bitcoin. He said Wright made inconsistent statements and the whole story was “inconceivable” that he’d had a Dr Frankenstein-like revelation when his creation “turned to evil”.

“During his testimony, Dr. Wright’s demeanor did not impress me as someone who was telling the truth. When it was favorable to him, Dr. Wright appeared to have an excellent memory and a scrupulous attention to detail. Otherwise, Dr. Wright was belligerent and evasive,” Reinhart said.

In 2015, Wright was investigated by the Australian Taxation Office over his involvement with bitcoin with his Sydney home raided by the Australian federal police, leading to speculation he might be Nakamoto.

In 2016, Wright claimed he was Nakamoto, but experts questioned the evidencehe provided. He promised to provide further proof, but backed down days later, saying he was “sorry” and did “not have the courage”.

Reinhart said at the start of his ruling the court “is not required to decide, and does not decide” whether Wright is Nakamoto, and the court was not required to decide and did not decide how much bitcoin Wright controls today.

China’s plan to close local cryptocurrency mining facilities would potentially end the country’s dominance in the energy-hungry, yet lucrative industry

Facebook has made its first acquisition in the blockchain space.

The social network has quietly hired the team behind Chainspace, a small blockchain startup founded by researchers from University College London, Cheddar has learned. Chainspace was building a decentralized “smart contracts” system that could facilitate payments and other services through blockchain technology.

The acquisition of Chainspace’s team, a move known in Silicon Valley as an acqui-hire, is the clearest sign yet of Facebook’s ambition to be a big player in the nascent blockchain industry. Veteran Facebook executive and former PayPal ($PYPL) President David Marcus was tapped to lead Facebook’s blockchain group earlier last year.

According to Chainspace’s August 2017 white paper, which outlines the academic and technological details behind the project, the team wanted to build a “distributed ledger platform for high-integrity and transparent processing of transactions within a decentralized system.”

That essentially means that one of Chainspace's goals was to improve the speed of transactions through blockchain technology, which currently functions much slower than traditional financial institutions like Visa. The researchers behind Chainspace were also looking at how blockchain and decentralization could be applied to areas outside of payments, like polling.

Four of the five researchers behind Chainspace’s academic white paper are joining Facebook’s blockchain group, according to people familiar with the matter. Two of the white paper authors, Alberto Sonnino and George Danezis, already list their employment as blockchain researchers in Facebook’s ($FB) London office on LinkedIn.

The Chainspace website was recently updated to say that the team behind the startup is “moving on to something new," and people familiar with the startup told Cheddar it will shut down now that Facebook has hired most of its employees.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Cheddar that the company had hired employees from Chainspace but declined to comment on specific hires. Facebook isn’t acquiring any of Chainspace’s technology, according to the spokesperson, who referred to an earlier statement about the company’s blockchain efforts:

“Like many other companies, Facebook is exploring ways to leverage the power of blockchain technology. This new small team is exploring many different applications. We don’t have anything further to share.”

Cheddar first reported last year that Facebook was exploring the creation of its own cryptocurrency, which Bloomberg recently reported will take the form of a stablecoin, or cryptocurrency backed by a fiat currency, in WhatsApp.

Facebook has been aggressively recruiting academics, product managers, engineers, and legal experts with experience in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, as Cheddar previously reported. More than 40 people work in Facebook’s blockchain division currently, and Facebook has shown interest in hiring other teams behind nascent cryptocurrency and blockchain-related projects like Chainspace.

It’s unclear how much Facebook would be willing to pay for an acquisition in the blockchain space. Chainspace was in the process of raising an initial round of funding of less than $4 million, according to people familiar with the matter. Early backers of Chainspace include Lemniscap and MW Partners.

Facebook could still acquire more blockchain companies. The social network has also held talks with Algorand, a blockchain-based payments platform, which has raised about $66 million to date. But those talks fell through, people familiar with the matter said. Algorand didn’t respond to requests for comment.

HTC is developing a new android phone that will be powered by blockchain technology. The phone, named Exodus, will feature a universal wallet and a built-in secure hardware enclave to support cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications.

Andreessen Horowitz, one of the leading venture capital firms when it come to investing in digital currencies, is preparing to launch a separate fund to buy and sell crypto assets, Recode has learned.

The move could be a significant broadening of the high-profile firm’s mission, and would serve as another big industry moment as investors seek to capitalize on the flurry of activity in cryptocurrencies, which some see as the next wave of innovation. Andreessen Horowitz has invested in blockchain companies like Coinbase, in crypto-specific funds like Polychain Capital and in initial coin offerings, but as a fund, it has not yet publicly traded the actual assets like bitcoin.

Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.

Two job listings posted on Andreessen’s website say that the firm is hiring for a “separately managed fund focusing on crypto assets.” Andreessen has so far only invested out of two types of funds: One for early- and late-stage startups, the latest closed in 2016 totaling $1.5 billion; and one for bio investing, which last year equipped the firm with $450 million to invest in a specific class of companies.

The job postings did not specify how much this fund would gather under management, or when it would begin investing. Andreessen Horowitz also doesn’t define “assets” in the job postings, so it’s possible that the firm could choose to run its token- and blockchain-related startup investing out of this pool of capital, as well. Plus, the industry could look very different in just a few years.

But the listings for a legal counsel and for a finance and operations manager do spell out some details:

• The lawyer would be responsible for making sure Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto investments are SEC-compliant. The firm acknowledges that this person would need to “operate in an area where the regulatory, legal and business climate remains largely unsettled.”
• The finance manager would help Andreessen Horowitz collect money from its limited partners — a “capital call,” in the parlance of the industry. One key challenge for this role, according to the posting, would be to help the firm assign a valuation to its crypto assets, which isn’t easy given how volatile some cryptocurrencies have proven to be.

Venture capital firms have been generally skittish about investing in cryptocurrencies directly, with some saying that their limited partners could very well do so without their help (and avoid the fees that they’d have to pay to the venture capital firms to do it for them). Other conservative limited partners are worried about the regulatory risks of the entire sector.

But few funds have a track record in this space like Andreessen Horowitz, which is one of the most active venture capital firms in cryptocurrency investing, under a team led by general partners Chris Dixon and Alex Rampell, who are looked to in Silicon Valley as guiding lights for understanding the asset class. Andreessen Horowitz investments in addition to Coinbase range from well-known companies like Ripple to newer deals like CryptoKitties.

That being said, some investors believe there’s a lot more money to be made and faster in the currencies themselves than in the companies that are merely organized around them.

It wasn't long ago that your average enterprise wouldn't even mention bitcoin, ethereum, or any number of cryptocurrencies in public.

Instead of using the cryptographically secure tokens to streamline workflows - or even talking about doing so - some of the most recognizable enterprises in blockchain have largely confined themselves to uses of blockchain as a new decentralized database, absent any digital assets.

Slowly however, over the past several years that has started to change. Executives at large corporations have shown themselves to be increasingly willing to take public stances both for (and against) what is now a $300 billion token market.

But if 2017 was the year that companies began talking about crypto, it wasn't until recently that enterprises have been willing to publicly use cryptocurrencies in both early-stage prototypes and live applications.

Now, it would seem the floodgates are prepared to open, with the $140 billion IBM revealing to CoinDesk that it has been meeting with executives from commodities trading platforms, large corporations, and perhaps most importantly, central banks, to explore how cryptocurrencies can help save them money and generate revenue.

"We're seeing tons of demand for digital asset issuance across the board," said IBM's new head of blockchain development Jesse Lund, who was hired from Wells Fargo earlier this year to help develop the computer giant's cryptocurrency strategy.

At the moment, that work is largely being pursued using the public Stellar platform, and its native cryptocurrency, the lumen (XLM), a partnership made public last October.

But in interview, Lund said IBM is interested in expanding the business applications of cryptocurrencies in a number of ways.