Bitcoin wallet remove passphrase
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Bastion grandcoin blockchain
The analysis is really still the same. The debate here should not be whether Bitcoins are useful as a currency or not, but the lesson here is strictly one in economics — people see value in very strange things, and when people do see value, there will be markets created.
In this case, the product is a currency that is only valuable because of its rarity and difficulty of generation, and is not too different than trading artwork or collectibles which have similar appeal.
More people are seeing something valuable in something very odd and this is apparently spreading world-wide to anybody with a computer. There are a few headwinds I see for Bitcoin, and they generally deal with hitting the law of large numbers. There are 12 million Bitcoins outstanding, but the reported liquidity is quite thin. Obviously you would want to fragment the order and leak it out over a period of time over multiple exchanges, but I would suspect that there are some component of technical traders that are simply out there to scalp dollars and not actually give a hoot about the currency.
How many dollars can you actually extract out of the market if you had , Bitcoins and wanted to liquidate in a timely manner? Another issue deals with the ability to control the blockchain the accounting equivalent of the general ledger, with the notable exception that the blockchain contains ALL information of transactions since the history of Bitcoin.
Without getting into a lot of technical details, there are collusion opportunities to corrupt the blockchain if you control a majority of Bitcoin miners. Bitcoin mining has become a very specialized art and to effectively compete in mining, you need to own arrays of specialized devices for the purposes of mining Bitcoins.
Since the difficulty of Bitcoin mining increases as a function of both time and the amount of computational power on the Bitcoin network, there has been a technological arms race, with the following result:. Please observe the y-axis is logarithmic — mining Bitcoins has been over a hundred times more difficult than it was at the start of the year. This is like your typical 10MBps residential high-speed internet connection scaling down to twice the speed of a dial-up modem. The technology to do the proper calculations are application-specific integrated circuits ASICs that have their sole purpose in life to mine Bitcoins, but as these are permeating the Bitcoin marketplace, there are limited opportunities for exponential improvement to Bitcoin hash rates through technological innovation — most performance improvement from this point is going to be linear as more machines get added to the cluster networks that are solely dedicated to Bitcoin mining.
I note with amusement the announcement that somebody is producing a 20nm process ASIC rig that can do some insanely high hash rate, but this will be the end of the line: Even then, the company has already announced the product which apparently will be shipped in Q will be at the threshold of the limits that a typical household power supply can handle.
So when you get into industrial-level operations to run arrays of computer hardware solely for the purpose of mining Bitcoins, some group is going to consolidate a majority of miners and be able to corrupt the network. With billions of dollars of market capitalization, it is getting to the point where that group is probably thinking about implementing some scheme to control the blockchain. When will this blow up? The current phase in Bitcoin is still adding people with money into the system, which is required for the scheme to continue, but those that have caught onto the scheme earlier will presumably be continuing to diversify their Bitcoin holdings into harder currency.
I do not own any Bitcoins, nor will I, but I am watching this with curiosity. It is indeed is fascinating to watch non-financial people get involved in what is inherently a financial specialty product with a touch of well-designed technology sprinkled in.
Whoever conceived of this did their homework and never would have guessed the technology arms race that has developed as a result. PNP , which came across my radar a few months ago when doing some casual screens of the market. Nothing much has changed since then other than that management has blown about half a billion dollars — this is an accomplishment that very few non-fraud artists can claim.
The firm itself is quite easy to analyze. The company functionally operates as a closed-end fund that invests in extremely risky microcap ventures in the mining sector. They were lucky enough to catch the uranium boom half a decade ago, but judging by their subsequent performance it was likely due to luck more than anything else.
Their existing investment portfolio is full of unrealized losses in failed ventures:. With a whopping investments, this company is a functional proxy for the TSX Venture exchange index. Investors would have made a fortune. Strictly in terms of assets and liabilities, the debentures are the only major liabilities on the book and they are currently the only debt on the books aside from some broker margin loans that arise from time to time:. Even the level 1 assets will likely have questionable amounts of liquidity given that the history of the corporation is to purchase minority stakes in various junk firms and should be mentally discounted for this reason.
This tax asset does have hidden value, but you have to get by the fact that management has a heavy severance penalty. Management is entrenched in the company and they make a pretty profit from simply being there. I will let this chart speak for itself:.
Suffice to say, pulling a cool million a year out of this train wreck is rivaling what Robert Mugabe has done to Zaire Zimbabwe over the past few decades. So what is the thesis on this train wreck? The answer is in the debentures. Indeed, the salaries of top management could be used to pay for bankruptcy trustees.
It is clear that there is some large holder out there of the debenture that is dictating terms to the company. Notwithstanding the external pressures being applied by the major debenture holder, management still has firm control of the company and it is clear that nobody rational would ever want to own the common shares of the business.
Management has a clear incentive to seeing that this train wreck continues as long as possible — it is a million dollar per year vehicle to extract capital out of unwitting investors and this incentive should make it possible for them to get rid of the pesky debenture holders by just selling enough assets and getting rid of them. Of course, the scenario of destruction is that management will continue to bleed away their asset base.
At the rate they have been going, they will hit zero at I think the value of the gravy train is more of a powerful force for management than trying to screw over debtholders, however. This is the ultimate nuclear button for management, but it would virtually ensure they would lose control of the firm at this point. This is June 12, The risk is the aforementioned market risk with the index-like exposure the company has to the penny stock market.
Anyhow, I took a position in this early July before some other insightful writer identified this opportunity and it became public on Seeking Alpha. It received a temporary boost-up in value then, but it has recently sunk to values that made me want to write about this in case if somebody wanted to hold their nose and purchase some of this stinker — the debentures, not the equity. I was afforded the luxury of having some dedicated time off and did about six hours of research, most of which was on the US equity side.
Initially, I did some preliminary screening of the Canadian side for potential value stocks, but mostly turned up ones relating to gold mining, which I very rarely dabble in just because I do not have strong thoughts about the metal other than it looks pretty when holding it. I decided to focus on the US equity market instead and broadened my screen to avoid stocks that were explicitly trading at their relative lows.
The net result of this was I did some fairly heavy research on two companies of which were closer to their week highs than their lows which is always a turn-off, but it is nearly impossible to find anything that is trading at their lows these days which were worthy of further research. One of these companies was a retailer, the other was a company selling customized consumer products which appeared to be on the cusp of becoming a universally known name. I will focus on the first one.
COH , please note this was not the retailer, but I am consistently fascinated how they can produce the financial results they do are very difficult to analyze from an equity perspective.
I will keep these companies on my watchlist and just be patient. The cash value in the portfolio continues to be quite high and it is earning a whopping zero percent yield, but the easy way to lose money is to throw it at something for the sake of having it invested. The end of November is as good a time as any to look for candidates that are ripe for tax loss selling, but they are consisting of companies that are related to precious metals, biotechs with particular clinical trial blow-ups and obscure semiconductor companies with genuine issues that caused them to plummet in the first place.
I had these visions of the world entering into a like economic crisis again when the Greek Debt thing hit in August , which was probably one of the worst calls I made over the past decade, and it indeed cost me. Of course, the whole world knows the asset inflation is primarily due to the federal reserve pumping trillions of dollars of liquidity into the system, only to end up as bank reserves for JP Morgan and Bank of America, but who cares at this point?
Politicians know the general public does not know the true implications of free liquidity, and here in Canada, the government knows that if the central bank raises interest rates, they will end up crashing the entire economy because our debt-to-income ratios are sky high.
I remember these days as being wildly irrational. I got my start in the public markets a year or two before this and even when I was beginning my journey to compounding assets on my balance sheet, I realized that things were frothy and I had better stick my capital in anywhere but dot-com technology, and that I did.
IBKR is the best brokerage out there that is available to the retail level. One of the reasons for their superiority is their founder, Thomas Peterffy , continues to push the innovation curve in such a manner that makes the firm cutting-edge. The only reason why I have never put money in them is because the publicly traded entity is essentially a minority slice It is a classic case of the underlying business being fantastic but the stock not necessarily being a good investment.
Although I do not trade options very often indeed, it is very rare that I do so simply because trading options is quite costly in terms of spread , this tool and this explanation is quite intuitive. If you do not understand how options are priced, this is a pretty good tutorial that avoids math.
Clearly understanding the math helps and I would highly recommend people learn some option pricing theory before considering trading them. Options also appeal to gambler-types that love seeing huge rewards in total disproportion to the amount risked. The first deals with liquidity. Since the difficulty of Bitcoin mining increases as a function of both time and the amount of computational power on the Bitcoin network, there has been a technological arms race, with the following result: Their existing investment portfolio is full of unrealized losses in failed ventures: Strictly in terms of assets and liabilities, the debentures are the only major liabilities on the book and they are currently the only debt on the books aside from some broker margin loans that arise from time to time: There are a couple comments I will make on asset quality or lack thereof: I will let this chart speak for itself: In addition, the following terms and conditions were agreed upon: The company is publicly traded and has been on an unsual uptrend over the past few months: