Currency
In a surprise move, one of the world’s best-known anti-virus software makers is adding cryptocurrency mining to its products.
Norton 360 customers will have access to an Ethereum mining feature in the “coming weeks”, the company said.
Cryptocurrency “mining” works by using a computer’s hardware to do complex calculations in exchange for a reward.
It is not clear what the business model for Norton Crypto is, or if Norton will take a cut of earnings.
The company pitched the idea as a safe and easy way to get into mining, an “important part of our customers’ lives”.
In a press release, Norton LifeLock – once called Symantec – said: “For years, many coin miners have had to take risks in their quest for cryptocurrency, disabling their security in order to run coin mining.”
That is true, in so far as anti-virus software packages such as Norton itself often falsely identify widely used mining programs as dangerous, and the antivirus software often needs to be deactivated to continue the mining process.
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Norton also warns of “allowing unvetted code on their machines” and the danger of storing earnings on a hard drive which could fail.
But most keen miners use a small selection of well-regarded mining apps – some of which are little more than simple command-line scripts – and a digital wallet that is stored on the web or on a smartphone.
The Chinese RMB rose nearly 4% against the US Dollar in the last two months – closing this week at a 3-year high. Some analysts believe the rally in the RMB was “engineered” by the Chinese government ahead of trade talks with the USA; however, the USD has been weak against nearly all actively traded currencies, with the US Dollar Index (USDX) falling ~4% since the end of March. (In this chart, falling prices = fewer RMB needed to buy one USD.)
- The Federal Reserve will release a research paper this summer that explores a move to a central bank digital currency.
- The moves of multiple countries, most prominently China, in the central bank digital currency space has intensified talk about how aggressively the Fed should move.
The Federal Reserve is moving forward in its efforts to develop its own digital currency, announcing Thursday it will release a research paper this summer that explores the move further.
Though the central bank did not set any specific plans on the currency, Chairman Jerome Powell cited the progress of payments technology and said the Fed has been “carefully monitoring and adapting” to those innovations.
“The effective functioning of our economy requires that people have faith and confidence not only in the dollar, but also in the payment networks, banks, and other payment service providers that allow money to flow on a daily basis,” Powell said in a video message accompanying the announcement.
“Our focus is on ensuring a safe and efficient payment system that provides broad benefits to American households and businesses while also embracing innovation,” he said.
Is Bitcoin for real? In other words: do you think cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are as transformative an innovation as the Internet browser? That digital currencies can replace the dollar like Google replaced the encyclopedia?
Or do you think that Bitcoin is more like . . . Beanie babies? A bubble driven by overhyped mania that will burst as all bubbles do?
These are the questions I have been asking myself, perhaps like you, for the past few years with increasing urgency. Half the wealthy people I know argue that it’s a fad — one that is going to cost a lot of normal people a lot of pain. The other half insist it is the future of finance. And they are investing accordingly.
I am a person that until very recently did not have a credit card, so I will not pretend to be an expert on real currency, let alone cryptocurrency. I continue to swing back and forth between “This thing is like Pokemon!” to “Ok, I think I see how this thing can replace the money in my pocket.”
The reason I am extremely interested in this topic is that there are some profound political questions at its heart: Are centralized systems better than decentralized one? What areas of our public and private lives should the government have control over? What guardrails does freedom require?
In an effort to moot the very best arguments on both sides of this debate, I reached out to two brilliant investors: Balaji S. Srinivasan and Michael W. Green.
We’re starting with the bullish case for Bitcoin. And there is no one better to make that case than Balaji. (You’ll hear from Michael in a few hours.)
Balaji is the former chief technology officer of Coinbase, the cryptocurrency trading platform that went public to huge fanfare last month, and a former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Balaji is the ultimate polymath,” Marc Andreessen told me. “He can actually do everything he describes — and he has, at his own biotech company and at Coinbase. He develops fully articulated theories of the future, supported by substantive grounding in science, engineering, philosophy and history the way normal people write shopping lists and thank you notes.”
You can read Balaji’s various theories at his new site, 1729.com. But I first encountered Balaji on Twitter, where I quickly discovered that he was as passionate about transhumanism (he’s a fan) as he was about The New York Times (not so much). Back in January 2020 he was warning about a mysterious virus from China months before the mainstream media started putting the public on notice. As one Silicon Valley founder put it: “‘Balaji was right’ might be the most terrifying phrase in the English language.”
The question is whether or not he is right about cryptocurrency.
Without further ado, here’s Balaji:
A cryptocurrency billionaire seems to have made one of the largest contributions to save lives in India from the coronavirus pandemic: Over $1 billion.
But as there so often is in the world of cryptocurrency, there is a massive catch. And it’s a catch that over the next few years will likely come up again and again and again as crypto billionaires ascend to become major players in the world of philanthropy.
Here’s what happened: Vitalik Buterin, the 27-year-old programmer who founded the cryptocurrency Ethereum, disclosed on Wednesday that he had contributed about $1.5 billion worth of coins to nonprofit organizations, some of which came in his own (and relatively stable) Ether.
But $1 billion of that came in a donation of a more … unusual type. He donated it in the form of a meme digital currency called Shiba Inu coin — yes, after the dog breed — that Buterin was gifted for free. (Like the popular Dogecoin, which also features the dog as its mascot, the Shiba Inu coin has much hype but questionable underlying value.) But then, as is prone to happen in the topsy-turvy world of meme assets, Shiba coin proceeded to tank in value immediately after Buterin’s donation was disclosed — perhaps because buyers and sellers expected the billionaire to soon liquidate his holdings.
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I know Mike is a very solid investor and respect his opinions very much. So if he says pay attention to this or that - I will.
~ Dale G.
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I've started managing my own investments so view Michael's site as a one-stop shop from which to get information and perspectives.
~ Dave E.
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Michael offers easy reading, honest, common sense information that anyone can use in a practical manner.
~ der_al.
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A sane voice in a scrambled investment world.
~ Ed R.
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