Magic: The Gathering A game of Magic: The Gathering We need to discuss Mt Gox because over the next few months it will become intensely relevant. A brief history. Launched in 2007, based in Tokyo. The name is odd and it stands for ‘Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange’ because its original purpose was for trading

Hong Kong ETFs Interesting spin in the South China Morning Post (owned by Alibaba Group). “….as the US has been delaying a decision on such products”. I think the analysis is rather harsh on the Americans since they were first to the Bitcoin ETF and also now completely dominate bitcoin mining. If a state sanctioned

Explaining the bitcoin halving Today there are 19,679,792 bitcoins on issue. Tomorrow there will be 900 more. The network processes transactions on average every 10 minutes and in doing so, delivers 6.25 bitcoins per block to miners. 6.25 *6 *24 = 900 bitcoins per day. From the 20th April, that reward for miners will drop

Disappointed I somehow always feel disappointed with the performance of bitcoin. There are occasional bouts of excitement when it really charges; but mostly, I feel disappointed. I don’t know if remarking on it is even helpful but it speaks I suppose to my expectations. Thursday was therefore another miserable day languishing just below all-time highs

First tough week Last week was probably the first tough week since the ETFs launched. We experienced net selling. Some critical factors appear to be the end of the approaching quarter, which will cause some balance sheet shuffling but also the settlement of the Genesis bankruptcy. Overall, $0.8 billion in net selling in the week

Not Satoshi By its nature, bitcoin invites attack. Anyone can copy the software. Anyone can call it their own. From the very start, it was open source and intended to be so. That has had many consequences, which include many forks of bitcoin, where copied code purports to be bitcoin or some superior version of

What if? One of the better books about cryptocurrency is Cryptoeconomics by an ex US Navy pilot called Eric Voskuil. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reading it unless you are really an enthusiast but it sets a very interesting tone because he has worked deeply with the US government. For example, we generally read that the

Getting high A short note on all-time highs. Bitcoin, give or take, has an all-time high price of US$69,000, which has been topped a few times intra-day this week. It first arose in November 2021. Since then we have had inflationary impulses of 4.7% in 2021, 8% in 2022 and 4.1% in 2023. As a

Dad Politics is about winning For a long time, since the beginning in fact, digital assets have had no friends in politics. Simply, it was not a vote winner. Indeed there was no need to take a position on things like bitcoin because nobody had really ever heard of it and it was ‘nonsense’ and

Groq* Off topic to start, but this really caught my attention and won’t be in the AFR for at least six months.  I insist you try groq.com. Before you do though, I will explain. Programs like GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini use enormous amounts of computing power. That is why you access them via the web