Bitcoin

All innovations seem unseemly to fogeys. When bitcoin, the first of the cryptocurrencies, was launched in 2009, we dismissed it as a deplorable and transient phenomenon. Its inventor, who called himself Satoshi Nakamoto, would not reveal his real name. Perhaps he did not exist and whoever hid behind the pseudonym was having a joke at our expense. When Satoshi created the first bitcoin on 9 January 2009, he embedded within its code a headline from a recent Times: ‘Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.’ Crypto appeals to people who distrust banks, as well one may. ‘Never trust the bankers,’ Winston Churchill warned in old age. History suggests one

This time it was surely all over. As inflation started to rise towards a 40-year high, as central banks started raising interest rates for the first time in more than a decade, and as the monetary printing presses finally stopped running, the cryptocurrencies crashed.  What a crash it was. Bitcoin, the best-known crypto, fell all the way from $61,000 last November to less than $19,000 in June, a spectacular drop of more than two thirds. Ethereum, Solana and other, frailer ‘coins’ – as well as the even flimsier digital collectors’ items known as NFTs – all tanked. This appeared finally to confirm what the doubters had said all along. Cryptocurrencies

When Britain voted for Brexit, Macron boasted that Paris would eat the City of London’s lunch. It didn’t quite work out that way, with most league tables continuing to put London as the number one or two financial centre, with not a single EU city in the top ten. Emmanuel Macron’s government has now announced that it has invited Binance, a crypto exchange site, to set up a European HQ in Paris. You have to ask: has Macron leapt on a bandwagon which has already started to lose its wheels?  The warning sign for cryptocurrencies is not so much that they have crashed – Bitcoin is down 50 per cent from its peak last

Crypto markets were in a tizzy over the past week following rumours – later quashed – that Amazon was planning to accept bitcoin for payments. Last Thursday, Amazon posted a job opening for a digital currency and blockchain lead, prompting a media frenzy that culminated with a report that the company would accept bitcoin payments by the end of the year. Bitcoin prices had been declining since April, but they surged by almost 15 per cent to hit £29,000, before moderating to around £27,000 yesterday after Amazon denied the report, saying the speculation around specific plans for cryptocurrencies was not true. Another roller coaster ride was to come, after Bloomberg

If you’re looking for proof we live in a computer simulation, consider the farcical story of dogecoin. Named after an internet meme about a talking dog, the joke currency was created as a parody of bitcoin. Dogecoin has no practical uses, yet online investors have ploughed billions into it. ‘We thought it would just make the viral rounds on social media,’ said founder Jackson Palmer. Last week the valuation passed $68 billion — more than Kraft Heinz and Ford. Palmer is now worth several hundred million dollars. Not bad for a Twitter gag. Although it’s seven years old, dogecoin wasn’t a big deal until a few months ago, when supportive

‘This time next year Rodney, we will be millionaires.’ If Only Fools and Horses was still being made I imagine the scriptwriters would have got Del Boy disastrously deep into cryptocurrencies. Dodgy, Get Rich Quick schemes, skirting around the law always were his forte. And that is how I view cryptocurrencies.  The bulls will cry, Louise you are wrong! The price of Bitcoin has doubled since the start of the year and up over 500 per cent in a year. The value of rival cryptocurrency Etherium has risen more than 1,500 per cent in the last twelve months. But cashing in depends on buying and selling at the right time

To most of us, cryptocurrencies remain an esoteric world, beloved by nerds and incomprehensible to the rest of us. Does Visa’s announcement this week that it will now process payments directly in a cryptocurrency called USDCoin change that, and hasten us to a day when we will all have cryptocurrency accounts which we use to do our day-to-day shopping? You don’t need to understand the mathematics of cryptocurrencies and blockchain to work out that the prospect of shopping with crypto is rather concerning for two reasons. Firstly, cryptocurrencies are an unregulated Wild West. While the pound in your pocket is backed by the Bank of England and the pound in

Remember day trading, the fad for retail investors trying to emulate the hotshots of Wall Street from their spare bedrooms, and losing much of their money in the process? It is back with a vengeance, this time driven by a range of ‘disruptor’ apps which seek to lure risk-hungry traders by eliminating the cost of buying and selling assets. This time, the bets are even bigger. Controversially, some apps offer traders the chance to ‘leverage’ their bets: that is to borrow money to increase their gains. Or losses. The story of canny investors looking to outsmart the system — and the charismatic ‘experts’ that lead them — is as old