The cryptocurrency is "a commodity like gold," he reports the American authority. But it is also a coin, say the judges. That's how it is transforming the virtual currency and how risky the saver.
Born in 2009, Bitcoin has officially become a "commodity" like gold or oil or grain. The decision was made a few days ago, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in the United States, after investigating two online platforms - Coinflip and Derivative - selling options to buy or sell at the end of some bitcoins. But they did so without the slightest respect for rules of "trading" imposed by the CFTC for all other commodities.
The reprimand the two operators because in the future futures contracts, swaps, and the whole family of "derivatives" involving bitcoins to happen with the procedures required by regulators, opens the door to a series of consequences.
The first is that the "cryptocurrency" invented in 2009 by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto (his identity has not been established), and allows payments to private individuals without the intermediation of banks, is in some way promoted in the financial world so far he has kept at a distance and view with suspicion. So much to want to imitate some technological aspects, as we will see later.
The second is that after having seduced millions of people around the world, which in part also used to purchase illegal goods, now digital currency is likely to infect savers, attracted by the fact that it is cleared by an authority.
The third is that the combined provisions of finance and authority come out like rabbits from the hat of a magician products to bet on the bitcoins market, to make real money on virtual money, a perverse and dangerous building.
The proof is that it is already to be launched an ETF that bets on the performance of Bitcoin (called ARK). Finance is thirsty for new emotions, and Bitcoin is exactly what he does for her, even if it requires strong nerves: the volatility of the virtual currency has been crazy since birth. Before rose by six thousand percent, coming to quote $ 1,250, then collapsed, and today is around $ 230 value "face." With a volume of about 10 billion total value.
The failure in Japan of a leading exchange platform, Mr. Gox, should have taught us that the system is very vulnerable. The Japanese case is obvious: the manager of the Exchange has denounced the disappearance of $ 480 million in bitcoins belonging to its customers. Perhaps stolen by hackers, since they resided not in a physically safe, but in the form of bits in a computer. And he never found.
Also for customers of a hedge fund Texan in bitcoin awakening, it was bitter when the SEC found that applied a Ponzi scheme (a scam based on species of Saint Anthony of new clients chain that guarantee the gains of the previous ring chain). The fund defended himself by saying that because the Bitcoin is not money, not touching the SEC deal: the judge ruled that conversely also that virtual currency is.
And what about the case of "Silk Road", a site that was offering drugs and various narcotics, payable in bitcoins? The owner, once caught, he has also defended saying that the charges (money laundering, the sale of banned substances and other illegal activities) were unfounded because he ran a business based on something that you could not even define "money." It ended up in jail for life.
It was precisely the Bitcoin that the Greeks have decided to turn while their economy is screwed towards the precipice: the exchange sites between common currency (in this case the euro) and the virtual currency were bombarded by questions of their information from that country, reflecting a fascination beyond reason.
The question of "what is" exactly the Bitcoin is not nominalistic, although very reminiscent of the arguments of Don Ferrante on the plague in the Betrothed: being neither substance nor accident, did not exist for him, and yet he was infected and died. It is not nominalism because the various authorities try this road to bring to light and tame the phenomenon, which has had a boom in a few years, has created a network of trading companies around the world and had legions of fans. Just to say: if money must be tied to income, and therefore should be taxed.
Something good, however, the Bitcoin system has taught him. It's called "blockchain", and it is precisely the system that keeps track of transactions, distributed through the joint effort of many different computers of the user community. Every time a transaction occurs, its details are translated into a code and transmitted to the rest the population: those who can decrypt the message, share it with others to test it, and if it is ok, the effort allows you to earn a certain number of bitcoins in return. But above all, that message becomes part of a chain of information where several computers act as sentinels to report any discrepancies, for example, the use of the same bitcoins twice.
So the blockchain technology makes the system a difficult test for hackers (unless Mr. Gox).
This has pulled in the consideration of a portion of the Most powerful financial institutions in the world, from Goldman Sachs to Barclays at UBS, who have just announced that it has entrusted to a company in New York, the technological R3, the task of developing the chain of a block. To make a product for themselves and the market.
Will this road that cryptocurrency will eventually earn immortality?