Think your stock portfolio has had a bad 2018 so far? Your losses are minuscule compared to owners of digital currency, most famously known as Bitcoin.
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The past several weeks saw Bitcoin prices tumble almost 75% (from almost $20,000 to nearly $6,000) before starting a slow but steady recovery in the past few days. The cryptocurrency enthusiasts I know need PTSD treatment. Why did this happen?
Just a few months ago, Bitcoin and the other alternative digital currencies, saw their total market cap soaring toward $1 trillion. This was up from $18 billion just a year before. The Bitcoin world saw no end to the surge. Even the sky was no longer the limit.
Instead, prices sank fast, and continue to stay flat. What flipped the switch on the Bitcoin money-making machine? There are a host of theories, but one that dominates lays the blame on government. Not any particular government. All governments.
Most politicians and bureaucrats didn't see the Bitcoin train coming. From time immemorial, the state has controlled currency and its movement across international borders. In recent times, governments everywhere have implemented strict financial security controls to prevent terrorists and criminals from using the banking system to advance their nefarious aims.
Bitcoin changed all that. The highlight of this new digital currency system was its anonymity. Governments and financial institutions would no longer be able to control the movement of funds, nor know who was moving those funds. As Bitcoin prices surged, the state struck back.
Across the globe — from India to China to South Korea to the UK to Australia to the U.S. and many, many other nations — governments moved to ban digital currencies, or at least force them to comply with anti-money laundering and know-your-customer statutes that have been refined since well before 9/11.
The unrelenting governmental assaults likely caused frightened coin holders to head for the hills, and sell their digital currency. The market cap plummeted almost 70%. All because the structure of Bitcoin and other digital currencies is now seen as a security threat on every continent.
The security flaw in Bitcoin also leaves digital currencies susceptible to theft. Hackers who break into digital currency exchanges or the 'wallets' of coin holders can quickly transport crypto to another anonymous wallet, and never be seen again.
Is this the end of Bitcoin? Will the security flaws and the ability for terrorists, child sex traffickers and drug cartels to use it with equanimity doom what could be the most important tech innovation since the creation of the internet? Not if Marcus Andrade has his way.
We hear a lot about Bitcoin profit, but very little about the real Bitcoin prophet, who resides in the State of Texas. Andrade was an early software entrepreneur in the first phase of the Bitcoin movement.
But, several years ago, before anyone was focused on the potential security flaws that could be the undoing of the digital coin movement, Andrade and his team of technicians were busy developing a different kind of digital currency: one that was compliant with anti-money laundering and know-your-customer laws that lay at the heart of the financial security matrix protecting the world financial systems.
His innovation is Bitcoin 2.0. With sophisticated biometric digital identity systems built into its core, Andrade's AML Bitcoin (www.amlbitcoin.com) has arrived in time to commence the next phase of Bitcoin — where digital currency is not the enemy of government, but rather a useful tool employed in government payment systems.
But it is not government alone that has been awaiting the arrival of this new form of digital currency. Industry has been itching to enter the digital currency arena, but was held back by the lack of compliance with financial security laws. No longer.
Andrade's teams have been meeting quietly with governments on every continent to share AML Bitcoin's solutions to their concerns with digital currency. The enthusiasm is great.
Among those entirely unenthusiastic about AML Bitcoin are the very terrorists and rogue regimes that have been busy stealing bitcoin for the past several years — chief among them North Korea. In fact, in an act some feel is immensely brave — or incredibly crazy — AML Bitcoin has gone right at Kim Jong-Un with a hilarious Super Bowl ad lampooning his frustration at the inability to steal this one form of digital currency.
As the world cautiously watches how the digital currency market will shake out, there is at least one option to transition to the future, AML Bitcoin.