Sometimes, the world of #crypto is like watching Days of Our Lives. "Like sands through the hourglass," you know somebody is out to screw you, screw your wife, and screw the lid off the salt shaker. Well, I'll bet your Bitcoin against my shitcoin that somebody is anybody with a crypto flypto with a kung-fu grip. Ready for today's episode? Nice big airdrop of nothing if you can guess who has the biggest, uhmmmm, ache (n. āk).

Crypto News

Let's start with the world's most famous twins. No, it's not the Bobbseys. They're old hat, we're talking new hat. In this case, it's the Winklevosses, those old pals of Mark Zuckerberg turned crypto exchange operators (which is sort of like saying the toll booth operator who played tiddlywinks with Henry Ford in college). But I digress (and so did they).

Public domain image.

Anyhoo, back to the Winklevii. They decided it would be a good idea to let people bet on Bitcoin prices in an exchange traded fund (ETF). For the uninitiated, an ETF is like a mutual fund that acts more like a stock and tracks an underlying asset so trust fund babies can gamble their daddy's life savings in exchange for the good feeling of making somebody else's kids' college days a death-defying experience. In other words, it's a grand community service experiment. Well, The Winkledudes applied to get one of them up and running, but the #SEC said that shitfund don't fly. A lot of trust fund babies are crying this week.

Today is Ethereum's birthday. Three years old! Don't you feel like a big boy?

Okay, seriously folks, I tried to think of something appropriate to get a three-year-old blockchain for its birthday, but I came up a blank. Then I realized its got the best gift a blockchain could hope for--a three-year-old founder.

From Wikipedia.
CC BY-SA 4.0

#Bitcoin fell down below $8,000 again. At least she didn't break a hip.

The world's most famous crypto mining operation, #Bitmain, hit $1.1 billion in profits in Q1 2018. Share this article with your uncle the next time he says crypto anything isn't worth a turd in a bucket.

Just make sure you wash the bucket.

#AlphaPoint decided to be helpful this week and assisted with the launch of an XRP-based crypto exchange. If they really wanted to be helpful, they could have just airdropped $20 million XRP into my wallet. I'd have been happy to distribute it for them.

Finally, the Chamber of Digital Commerce is putting out #ICO and #token guidelines. Because nobody's thought of that yet.

Crypto Analysis

Up in #Canada, where standing in line is a national honor, Galaxy Digital plunged into the depths of "oh, shit! we're approved, now what?" so they went ahead and launched just for the hell of it.

#Gallup took a poll of U.S. investors, who thought they were in line to receive the first ever airdrop of physical Ripple, and 75% of them said Bitcoin is 'very risky'. But the really interesting part is that 70% of them have no interest in ever buying it. Which begs the question, why do they call themselves investors?

If you thought the economics of decentralized organizations (#DAO) was a Keynesian walk in the woods, you must have skipped your freshmen year of college economics. It's nothing like that.

Rather, DAOs are more like nothing you've ever seen before, and #Forbes is asking if they're going to put an end to traditional corporate structure. This is like watching a murder mystery where you know who did it, but you wish you didn't.

How much do smart contract hacks cost? Millions. Surprise!

In Great Britain (wait, they don't have Donald Trump; why is it great again?), only 5% made capital gains with cryptocurrencies. Which beats the 2% in the U.S. who even bother investing.

One For the Road

Before I head out, here's a little tidbit from the #Steem blockchain. Hive account@utopian-io and Hive account@fundition have partnered to advance open source projects.

As usual, I've received no compensation, bribes, or Winklevoss head nods to mention the companies and projects in this blog post. I'm simply the humble if not slightly whacked #editor at Blockchain Times. Feel free to drop over and get more crypto news than you can shake a Bitcoin at.