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It’s the festive season, and if there is a bitcoin fan among your friends and family, then they may have given you some of the virtual currency in your Christmas stocking. If so, what should you do with it? There are several options for you as a new bitcoin owner. We’ll tell you about them here, but before you start, please don’t do what Bloomberg TV anchor Adam Johnson did. Fellow anchor Matt Miller gave bitcoins to Johnson as a Christmas gift on air. They came in the form of a paper wallet (see below), which Johnson showed to the...

Bitcoin is rapidly becoming part of the everyday lexicon. Following David Woo's investigation, National Australia Bank's Emma Lawson looks at its creation, use, and quality as "currency," and find that Bitcoin meets most, but not all the conditions required to be a currency. Lawson concludes Bitcoin may not be the most efficient monetary system, given the costs to create, and that the supply set-up can be seen as both an advantage (hyperinflation is not possible) but also a disadvantage (there are conditions which may create deflation). But, if enough people believe in it, and use it, it may be here...

On the flat lava plain of Reykjanesbaer, Iceland, near the Arctic Circle, you can find the mines of Bitcoin. To get there, you pass through a fortified gate and enter a featureless yellow building. After checking in with a guard behind bulletproof glass, you face four more security checkpoints, including a so-called man trap that allows passage only after the door behind you has shut. This brings you to the center of the operation, a fluorescent-lit room with more than 100 whirring silver computers, each in a locked cabinet and each cooled by blasts of Arctic air shot up from...

Overstock.com – the American internet retailer with over a billion dollars per year in sales – will accept Bitcoin starting in 2014. As Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne told the Financial Times: I think a healthy monetary system at the end of the day isn’t an upside down pyramid based on the whim of a government official, but is based on something that they can’t control. If there’s going to be some part of the population which adopts it… I think that we’ll get that business. And the people who switch to it will respect that we started adopting it. Europe...

A paper currency system contains the seeds of its own destruction. The temptation for the monopolist money producer to increase the money supply is almost irresistible. In such a system with a constantly increasing money supply and, as a consequence, constantly increasing prices, it does not make much sense to save in cash to purchase assets later. A better strategy, given this scenario, is to go into debt to purchase assets and pay back the debts later with a devalued currency. Moreover, it makes sense to purchase assets that can later be pledged as collateral to obtain further bank loans....

Haters gonna hate, but the “Bitcoin bubble” meme has become the financial equivalent of a viral online cat video – wildly popular but pretty vacuous. In an effort to separate fact from fiction, ConvergEx's Nick Colas reviews 11 bitcoin myths (and dispels them). Still, there’s no doubt that the public is entranced: there are now 3x more Google searches for “bitcoin” than “Western Union”, and 33x more than for “Gold coins”. We started writing about bitcoin back in February because it was – and still is – a fascinating invention (for better or worse). How it plays out, we will...

It was inevitable that a few short days after Wall Street lovingly embraced Bitcoin as their own, with analysts from Bank of America, Citigroup and others, not to mention the clueless momentum-chasing, peanut gallery vocally flip-flopping on the "currency" after hating it at $200 only to love it at $1200 that Bitcoin... would promptly crash. And crash it did: overnight, following previously reported news that China's Baidu would follow the PBOC in halting acceptance of Bitcoin payment, Bitcoin tumbled from a recent high of $1155 to an almost electronically destined "half-off" touching $576 hours ago, exactly 50% lower, on very...

Make no mistake, the Bitcoin opportunity is creating a fast evolving trillion dollar new market in cryptocurrency eCommerce and more importantly mCommerce or mobile-Commerce. The future of cryptocurrencies is being secured right now with the launch of many new apps to enable digital cash, electronic payments and secure eWallets using cryptocurrencies via smart phones and other digital devices such as secure pens, sophisticated crypto-watches and customised memory sticks. Cryptocurrency adoption is growing very fast, in a similar exponential curve to the adoption of the world wide web in the years following 1995 or even the spread of electric power exactly...

The bitcoin bubble appears to have burst as a stepped series of price crashes are underway with the price currently standing at 1074 down form 1240 barely a day earlier. A clue to its future direction can be discerned from the unfolding technical price patterns, that just as I wrote wrote in the run up to the peak of the Bitcoin bubble with the price converging on USD 1250 that the market was primed to crash and all it was waiting for was any even marginally negative news to act as trigger for increasing waves of market panics as GREED...

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew unsure about the sequence or pacing of reforms.

The Wall Street Journal's Justin Baer reports that a "complex bet in the foreign-exchange market backfired" for Goldman. Specifically, the forex desk bet incorrectly on the value of the dollar versus the Japanese yen, according to the report. Oops! Every quarter, we look at all the major bank's trading revenue from fixed income, currencies, and commodities dubbed "FICC." But major banks don't break out each component of FICC, so when Goldman Sachs reported $1.25 billion FICC net revenue during the third quarter, down 44% from 2012 and 49% from Q2 2013, we only had this explanation from the earnings report...

Five years ago it was worth $0. Then, a month and a half ago it went to $150 a piece. On Monday it shot to over $600. On Tuesday, the value rose to over $900, meaning a 6, 445%-increase in value since the start of the year. It plummeted to $531 at midday today and then recovered reaching $793 while being traded on the Asian markets. Bitcoin: it’s the bonanza of the century. Volatility and hikes are based on nothing except speculation and the desire to make a mint, thinking that you can predict what the markets are going to...

It took literally minutes following our report from yesterday that in addition to the ECB and Fed, it was the Senate's turn to finally shine the spotlight on the most notorious electronic currency with a hearing titled "Beyond Silk Road: Potential Risks, Threats, and Promises of Virtual Currencies" next Monday, for Bitcoin to tumble 25% from its all time high just shy of $400, to $290 within 12 hours, in large part answering our rhetorical question if "the one thing that can finally end the dream of BitCoin holders arrive soon: when the government, and existing monetary authorities, start taking...

Bitcoin, an online-only currency scarcely four years old, is breaking out to new highs this week and now sports a total value of $2.8 billion. Just a few months ago, it looked like this economic experiment as the world’s first decentralized technology-based form of money would crash and burn. Since then, ConvergEx's Nick Colas points out that the U.S. government has shut down a large drug website which accepted bitcoins and promised further scrutiny of its uses; and omputer science experts have warned that bitcoin is neither especially private – one of its notional values – or especially well constructed....

I've always avoided reporting on the Federal Reserve. I know it's more important than much of the stuff I cover, but it's so boring. How can I succeed on TV reporting on the Fed? Fed chairs even work at being dull. Alan Greenspan said he tried to be obscure because he didn't want to spook markets. He called his obfuscation "Fedspeak." It's a far cry from the clarity of his language -- and principles -- when he was young and a disciple of libertarian Ayn Rand. Outgoing Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his likely successor, Janet Yellen, are almost as...

All great empires – from the Greek, to the Roman, the Spanish and the British - have at their heart a dominant means of exchange which is very much part of their political and social hegemony. Once upon a time, it was Roman coinage which was the world's pre-eminent currency. In more recent times it was the British pound. Today, it's the US dollar to which international investors flock as a safe haven for their money. Highly liquid and apparently reliable – until recently at least – nothing else comes even remotely close to the greenback's dominant position in the...

Canadian billionaire businessman Ned Goodman predicts the end of the U.S. Dollar as the world's reserve currency. He predicts the transition out of the U.S. Dollar will become, "...quite ugly." He delivered the lecture at Cambridge House's Toronto Resource Investment Conference 2013 on Thursday, September 12, 2013.

WASHINGTON – A federal judge has tossed a lawsuit filed earlier this year that sought to remove the motto ‘In God We Trust’ from American currency.As previously reported, well-known atheist Michael Newdow, who has filed numerous suits challenging the mixture of God and government, submitted a complaint in the Southern District of New York this past March, asserting that the motto violates the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution as it serves to proselytize unbelievers.“[T]he American dollar travels all over the world, into every country of the world, and frequently gets behind the Iron Curtain, and if it...

The Fourth Reich When the Second World War ended in 1945, imagine the conversation amongst the leading lights of West Germany's leaders. After several attempts, military domination of Europe was shown to be impossible, doomed by Germany's central position to always fight wars on two fronts against collectively superior forces. What should be the methods to achieve the Germans' long standing objectives of prosperity for their own people. If military domination and plunder were no longer possible, then perhaps peaceful economic domination could be achieved. But how?

I know this sounds hysterical to post about a seemingly tin foil conspiracy development but I am prepared to risk some credibility and get it out there so that we can say we weren't completely surprised. First, 120 embassies have been shut down. The rationale is presumably because AQ is planning an attack. Fine, go with that but that's not the real reason I am hearing from credible sources. I'll say in my own defense that I was told by another source last October, a substantial source who nevertheless did not have 100% of my trust, that Israel would attack...