I do know my piece of bad news was the yawn yawn lazy criticism of cryptocurrencies as Ponzi schemes. This time by Mastercard CEO Ajay Banja. At a New India Lecture he said that 95% of all illegal online transactions were on the dark net and using cryptocurrencies – and he said they included child trafficking, drugs and credit card fraud. What makes me cross is that people in positions of power can slag off cryptocurrencies using lots of emotive tags without any real justification. I mean folks, has anyone looked at the bad things cash is used for – let’s ban cash and penalise say OAPs for using cash to pay for their drugs, er groceries.
Then he went a step further and mentioned the 12 Russians indicted for impacting the US presidential election. He said they were using bitcoin to pay for IT services etc. What he failed to recognise was that if bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were anonymous and untraceable, how where they found out. If they had used cash this would not have been known.
Sigh.
Overall it was a good week for the industry in our estimation – Oh have I done a spoiler? The price is stabilizing over all and lots of good implementation stories are coming through.
Hitachi is unveiling a pilot in Tokyo to use blockchain to settle payments in their retail stores. Uber co founder Oscar Salazar is behind a new commission free trading platform called Voyager. It sounds cool in that you can use that one platform to search for the best prices across at least 12 other exchanges without having to have accounts on all of them.
And then there were the secret meetings with Nasdaq – which included the Winklevoss brothers. Despite the SEC refusing their ERT or ETF (my dyslexia in full form now lol) this is still forward motion.
So as I already disclosed – a pretty good week we reckon
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