BITCOIN

Very Undervalued

Next few months is time to buy bitcoins with both hands, with gusto, aplomb, and conviction. Last time sub-4 figures pic.twitter.com/cavnTxWHFT – Pierre Rochard

Market Cap

Possible to think Bitcoin achieves $1 Trillion in Market Cap within 2 -3 years? 17% of Gold Value. $65K per Bitcoin = $1 Trillion in 2017.

1/30th of off shore accounts = $1 Trillion Bitcoin.

– BitcoinBreak

100% Reserve Proof Solutions

3 Major Chinese Bitcoin exchanges BTCChina, Huobi and OKCoin are ready to release 100% Reserve Proof Solutions.

A few minutes after BTCChina’s announcement, OKCoin also announced officially that they would launch 100% reserve proof solution which was the same with solution of Bitfinex and Kraken that based on Merkle Tree and notaries for beta test by the end of this week – Bitell

List of Major Bitcoin Heists, Thefts, Hacks, Scams, and Losses

“List of Major Bitcoin Heists”, last updated August 12 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=576337 – Jeff Garzik

No Dollars After 2016

Amagi Metals, an online dealer in precious metals and coins, announced that they will stop taking US dollars for payment at the end of 2016. Instead, Amagi plans to be trading exclusively in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

“We want to be a leader in the sound money movement,” Macaskill says. “With the adoption of cryptocurrencies increasing every day, their viability is virtually assured. History shows that paper currency, backed by nothing of value, will ultimately fail. It’s only a matter of time until no one will be accepting the dollar. By trading exclusively in cryptocurrencies, we’ll still be in business when that time comes.”

Amagi Metals has been accepting cryptocurrencies since November of 2012 with a major focus on Bitcoin. Bitcoin now accounts for over 40% of the company’s customer payments – Amagi Metals

MINING

Miners Selling 70-90% of Their Bitcoin

As mining costs rise, miners come under pressure to sell their freshly unearthed bitcoin to recoup the costs of their investment in equipment. Citi notes that about 3,500 BTC are mined daily (about $2 million worth per day)

Mark Lamb, chief executive at Coinfloor, a London-based bitcoin exchange, said that sell-side pressures have intensified in recent months, with miners and merchants as the most likely traders. “Last year miners were selling a much lower percentage of new bitcoin mined. Nowadays it’s estimated that they’re selling 70–90% of their bitcoin” – Joon Ian Wong

Bitcoin Pool Discus Fish Swims Past Ghash.io to be #1

Ghash had been sitting a little under 30% total hash rate, while Discus fish was 18%

Ghash is now at 20% and Discus Fish is at 22.5%

It has been quite a dramatic drop in terms of market share for Ghash in the last few days. It will be interesting to see where it is a week from now.

– btcrack

The Bitcoin Network

At 5 petahashes (in November 2013) the bitcoin network was already the world’s most powerful computer network (256 times faster than the top 500 supercomputers combined)

It hit 100 petahashes of processing power on 5th June 2014.

As of 28th August 2014, the bitcoin network has reached 220 petahashes

The network is over 400 times more powerful than 1 year ago

Bitcoin has existed for for 5 years and 9 months. The network has grown more in the last 3 months than it did in its first 5 years and 6 months of existence – Lee Banfield

EQUITIES

Crypto Platform

One of Mega‘s shareholders (18%) had his Mega shares seized. See Mega’s press release at the bottom of this story. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11313978 – Kim Dotcom, Founder of Mega

Time to issue Mega shares as an asset on some crypto platform? http://Overstock.Com is looking into it – Pierebel

Very Overvalued

I cannot see how a soft landing would be possible here.

Net corporate debt is at all-time highs (so don’t let anyone tell you that corporate balance sheets are strong), interest rates are essentially pinned at zero, and the Fed’s balance sheet has exploded. Based on the Q-ratio—the most robust and predictive valuation measure there is—the stock market is more overvalued today than it was at every major top over the past century, save 2000.

How could this get corrected in an orderly way? – Mark Spitznagel, Universa Investments LP

S&P 500

You don’t need a degree in finance or have to be an economist or a clairvoyant to predict where this is going… pic.twitter.com/tUdIb4PQNl – Deon Opperman

Roundabout Investing

My book is about the thinking behind my way of investing, what I call “roundabout” investing (after the Austrian economics concept of roundaboutness)—so I’ve basically been contemplating it my entire adult life. But it took me about a year or so to actually write down.

Roundabout investing is all about delaying gratification and taking small setbacks now for enormous positional advantage later.

I regularly fall behind other asset classes during monetary expansions in order to maintain a position that eventually soundly passes them all by when the stock market crashes. The key is that the strategy (which I run in my hedge funds) pairs with a stock portfolio to robustly protect it against large losses—a “tail hedge.”

The whole necessity of this protection specifically follows the bubble-blowing distortions of the Fed’s monetary policy. Austrian economics has always been central to my awareness of this. I happened upon the Austrians in college from Henry Hazlitt’s magisterial Economics in One Lesson which then turned me on to Bastiat and Mises—and my career would have been entirely different without them

About Austrian economics, yes, it’s one thing to get it, quite another thing to practice it. Patience is everything. Everything. Unfortunately, human beings are wired to do the opposite of what we really need to do. – Mark Spitznagel, Universa Investments LP

PROJECTS

Hyperlocal Mesh Networks

A neighborhood in Brooklyn has built a hyperlocal mesh network to service the entire neighborhood, from housing projects to townhouses.

For those that don’t know the difference between a mesh network and a traditional network, the big thing to focus on is that the nodes (think of them like public wireless access points) talk to each other and form a network that operates even if its is not connected to the public Internet. Most mesh networks are connected to the public Internet, but if that connection goes down, the local mesh continues to work.

At USV, we think this is an important part of how we (meaning the entire world) get a mobile Internet that is not controlled by the large mobile telcos. We have made one investment in this area (which I don’t think we have announced yet) and we are looking to find other smart ways to invest in this trend.

But the biggest investments that will be made in mesh networking will be made by local groups like Red Hook Initiative. It is not terribly expensive to construct one of these mesh networks and every neighborhood ought to be thinking of doing something like this. If everyone did this, the mobile Internet would look a lot different than it does today – Fred Wilson, Co-founder of Union Square Venutures

Mesh networking could be a great application for Bitcoin. Each node could set its own access rate – Chris Dixon, Andreessen Horowitz

There are so many great applications of Bitcoin. i wish developers would stop all this alt currency stuff and start building useful stuff on the bitcoin blockchain – Fred Wilson

The vast capital malinvestment in altcoins has diverted resources from the development of some very low-hanging fruit in Bitcoin. For instance, five years later and we are only now seeing the proliferation of multisignature transactions. I’m glad to hear there are investors such as yourself that are devoted to building serious infrastructure for the network, rather than just scamming others in the network for their bitcoins through crowdsales and “IPOs” of economically nonviable software – Michael Goldstein

PRIVACY

Your Anonymous Posts to Secret Aren’t Anonymous After All

The Secret app is supposed to keep you anonymous. But until last week, it was possible to trace posts directly to you – Jose Pagliary

I’m concerned w/ all these apps that promise anonymity but don’t deliver. People could die. Or have lives ruined – Christopher Soghoian

Anonymity Violates the Brazilian Constitution

A Brazilian civil court in Vitória granted a preliminary injunction to a public prosecutor, prohibiting Apple and Google from distributing the anonymous sharing app Secret and Microsoft from distributing Secret’s Windows Phone client, Cryptic. The injunction also said that the three app store proprietors had to remotely delete the app off Brazilian users’ devices.

Chapter five, article 1 of the Brazilian constitution specifies that “the expression of thought is free, anonymity being forbidden,” and that was the legal justification upon which the Brazilian judge rested his decision, calling Secret’s promises of anonymity unconstitutional. Apple, Google, and Microsoft have 10 days to comply, or they’ll be fined 20,000 reals a day (or $8,870).

According to UOL (Google Translate), opposing lawyers argued that Secret does not violate the constitution because it is technically possible to trace who is posting anonymous messages through e-mail and phone number records. Secret told the paper that if a court mandates that it reveal information that it has on a user, it would have to comply – Megan Geuss

THE SINGULARITY

Life Expectancy

Today, the average 70 year old is about as healthy as an average 50 year old was in 1950 – Aubrey de Grey

Personalized In-home Health Monitoring

Mitera is building a device for early disease detection through saliva analysis using nanotechnology – http://www.miteraphc.com

Cost of Genetic Sequencing Has Dropped 100,000x in the Last 14 Years

Change is coming at breakneck speed. How fast? In the 1980s and 1990s the PC revolution was driven by an insight that legendary Intel cofounder and chairman Gordon Moore had as a researcher in 1965: The number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years.

But over the past 13 years the cost of sequencing DNA has dropped 1,000 times more than Moore’s Law, from $100 million per human genome to only $1,000.

“The road maps that we have are pretty breathtaking as far as where the technology can move in the next three to five years.”

– Matthew Herper

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For more information, contact Lee at:

weeklyglobalresearch@gmail.com

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@leebanfield1