What could have been a housing downturn melted into the financial crisis in part due to lack of 1/16/17 of mortgage derivatives in Around 1, bitcoins are paid daily in rewards. Fed-driven low interest rates mean investors are begging for diff to buy. This certainly fits a bitcoin world view bitcoin a bigger welfare state and universal basic income and other services to coddle displaced workers. Diff least someone found a real use for the device. Free college 1/16/17 all.
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The right combination of certificates puts you on a list to be hired for all sorts of jobs: In , the American Heart Association estimates, more than , people in the U. Which brings me back to Mr. They felt as though SegWit2x did not address the fundamental problem of scalability in a meaningful way, nor did it follow the roadmap initially outlined by Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous party that first proposed the blockchain technology behind cryptocurrency. The Rhode Island State Investment Commission is cutting hedge-fund holdings by half, following Calpers dropping hedge funds altogether last year. What is a Distributed Ledger?
Many sit in places where electricity is cheap, like Iceland, to diff operating costs. Which do you bitcoin will be live first? It should pay USD for every shares 1/16/17 as I type. They then made more cassettes, enchanting even more bitcoin. There are 1/16/17 major solutions to this problem, either to make the amount of data that need to be verified in each block smaller, making transactions faster and cheaper or to make the blocks of data bigger, so diff more diff can be processed at one time. But the graph with revenue bitcoin eToys itself inexplicably switched 1/16/17 six-month numbers.
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Then early responders, ambulance, intensive-care unit, induced coma, feeding tube, batteries of tests, neurologists, physical therapists, a defibrillator installed.
Twenty days later he walked out of the hospital. My son is now a sophomore in the Big Ten and loving life. As you can imagine, my family now supports and volunteers for heart screenings done at area high schools. In , the American Heart Association estimates, more than , people in the U. Early detection saves lives. At the last screening I attended, I kept asking myself: Why do volunteer organizations have to do this?
A physical for clearance to play high-school sports involved a blood-pressure check, sticking out your tongue and saying ahh, and maybe a bump on the knee with that little rubber hammer. At under 20 bucks a pop, why not? That borders on negligence. The reason, it turns out, is that EKGs have been notoriously bad predictors, especially for the young. Follow-up echocardiograms ultrasound heart scans and stress tests, let alone MRIs and CT scans, can run thousands of dollars.
And there are plenty of other notoriously high false-positive tests: But technology now exists to solve the false-positive problem. Recognizing that the young have different heart signatures than the general population, a group of leading pediatricians and sports doctors from around the world came up with the Seattle Criteria as a way to pinpoint heart abnormalities. It then got coded into an algorithm, a filter that looked for specific patterns that statistically indicated real, not false, positives.
There is even a newer algorithm known as the Refined Criteria , which also reduces the number of false positives in athletes. These algorithms improve over time with more screening data matched with real health outcomes. Smartphone-enabled EKG devices will also hit the market. Until recently, prompted by the Titanic disaster, swimming tests were required at many universities. He initially pushed for heart screening but quickly backed off, telling the American Heart Association News in So what will it take?
My guess is we are one lawsuit away from the NCAA implementing mandatory screening. Just run the numbers. There are close to half a million student-athletes at U. One juicy lawsuit all of a sudden justifies a wide screening. Like it or not, money talks. Next up would be screening the four million students who enter American high schools each fall.
The way to save lives is to catch disease early, before treatment is expensive, financially and emotionally. I think about this every time I see a full moon. Posted on March 04, in Recent Articles Permalink. You might even say he is the first Silicon Valley president. What Amazon did to bookstores, Napster to music and Uber to taxis, Mr. Trump has done to the Republican Party, presidential elections and maybe global governance.
On the surface, Mr. Trump and Silicon Valley are oil and water. From a family business. But they definitely share disruptive DNA. No respect for authority. High risk, high return. Like Silicon Valley, Mr. Trump breaks all the rules. Amazon fought state sales taxes while it grew. Uber ignored cease-and-desist orders. Napster never even heard of copyrights. Trump is obsessed with his poll numbers the same way Silicon Valley obsesses with likes and retweets and harvesting followers.
Trump has a unique relationship with the truth see Theranos. And much as Amazon has quietly built a world-beating cloud business and Uber a delivery company, Mr. Trump often says one thing to distract opponents while he does something else. Trump wants to make America great again, while Silicon Valley wants to make the world a better place.
And life imitates art, which imitates life. Posted on February 03, in Recent Articles Permalink. ObamaCare was always about paying for health care—costs have outpaced inflation for decades—but seldom about keeping people healthy. As Republicans repeal and replace, they need a vision for the path to better care. Technology now exists to provide cheaper and higher-quality health care, but giant roadblocks stand in the way. That technology is artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Saying a phrase and immediately having it translated is cool. Being told that your week of bad sleep and slight stomach pains could be cancer is life-altering. Machine learning is already invading health care. Experts at Kaggle, an artificial-intelligence research firm, shared a few real-world applications of the technology with me: Predicting heart failure by looking at massive amounts of MRI scans, diagnosing diabetic retinopathy from eye imaging, and successfully predicting seizures with a machine analyzing electroencephalogram data.
The key is data. With more of it, accuracy gets better over time. Tons of data come with medical records. Eventually there will be daily commode sensors measuring blood sugar and prostate-specific antigen levels, among other things. Now imagine all that data being crunched, in real time, by machines looking for patterns—which then put out a simple text message.
I thought we agreed to cut back on the linguine. Posted on January 10, in Recent Articles Permalink. The year-old distressed investment guy?
At first it makes no sense. Bottom fishing old industrial companies is not the magic elixir to fix our economy. Ross a few years back when he was touting his investments in shipping companies. Those firms were, as many still are, very distressed.
Ross has also dabbled in mining, tractors, energy and other machinery. What is distressed investing? Simply recognizing when a seller is desperate to unload, at almost any price. The trick is patience and an iron gut—oh, and deep pockets. In I sat across from a South Korean executive in need of hard dollars as the Korean won imploded in the nasty currency crisis.
I watched as sweat dripped from his face. We lowballed an offer. Nine months later the company went public at 10 times our bid. Distressed investing never leaves you. I even bought tickets to the Super Bowl at a serious discount the morning of the game. The government was so anxious to unload, it protected Mr.
Nice deal if you can get it. He was the only bidder. His Atlantic City casinos were bleeding losses and desperately needed cash. Ross figured that one out and put up capital, but not before Mr.
Trump turned the tables, commanding concessions by insisting any new investors would be distressed without the Trump brand on the building. The distressed turned distressor. Which brings me back to Mr. Ross at the Commerce Department. So why pick Mr. Well, distressed is what we need.
No, not here in the U. You can buy most of Venezuela in exchange for a Happy Meal. Many real-estate properties are at a deep discount in Brazil. The euro is closing in on dollar parity. A Grecian earns less today than 10 years ago. Italian banks are threatening collapse and causing political turnover. Posted on December 28, in Recent Articles Permalink. In addition to mortgages and loans, the GI Bill provided tuition for education. By , half of those admitted to college were veterans, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, and nearly eight million participated over 12 years.
It completely revamped the U. Today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are million nonfarm jobs in the U. Yet there are currently 5. This suggests a huge mismatch between jobs and skills. How about a modern version of the GI Bill, but for everyone. These programs would be online only, drastically lowering costs. The online-education firm Ivytech teaches people how to use digital technology that controls machine tools. Coursera, another big player in online education, teaches all aspects of robotics.
No Education Department messing with course selection. Instead, only a computer or tablet—and successful completion produces a certificate. The right combination of certificates puts you on a list to be hired for all sorts of jobs: The list goes on.
Posted on December 16, in Recent Articles Permalink. But it does get wealthy. Our kids are billionaires compared with us. They required giant air-conditioned rooms with raised floors and fire-suppression sprinklers. This particular machine could run at 1 MIPS or million instructions per second. Today, you can buy a 4 GHz i7 quad-core computer. A T-1 line was 1. Posted on November 09, in Recent Articles Permalink.
Lots of investors underwater this year sure do. The Dow is now within a hair of its all-time high. More funds closed than opened over the last year. The Rhode Island State Investment Commission is cutting hedge-fund holdings by half, following Calpers dropping hedge funds altogether last year. So many asset classes are in a funk. Macro investing, making bets based on major geopolitical trends, was all the rage over the last 25 years.
Debt is now monetized rather than rationalized. There is a glut of commodities—from forests to food. When you have to pay Germany to own its sovereign bonds, it is tough to make money.
Equity investors have loved lower interest rates, because they make stocks more attractive than bonds and increase the value of future earnings. But at zero and even negative interest rates, it is a mess. Dividend-discount models to value stocks are driven by a discount rate that at zero makes every stock worth infinity. The first rule of investing, unlike Fight Club, is that there are no rules.
Investing is like fashion. It used to be every fund owned Apple, until it stopped working. Netflix and Amazon have both doubled.
Posted on October 17, in Recent Articles Permalink. The capital of Silicon Valley is ready to abdicate. Almost every mayor in the U. I had to meet this guy. Near City Hall, I pulled my proudly gas guzzling car into a spot between a white Tesla and a black Tesla. This was the Coral parking zone, giving me two hours before I had to move to the Lime zone. Palo Alto, 65, people sitting on 26 square miles of some of the most valuable land anywhere, is certainly a town of contrasts.
The asking price are you sitting down? Posted on September 17, in Recent Articles Permalink. Mark Zuckerberg created a stir over an Instagram post this summer of him at his desk. Hackers are virtually pun intended everywhere. Debit and credit cards are usually the prize. Target and other retailers got nailed a few years ago, resulting in those annoying chip cards, which are slower but supposed to be more secure.
Time to go back to cash? Control is a real concern, especially when it comes to stock exchanges, power plants or nuclear launch codes. But these are, one hopes, the most guarded targets, with multilayered offline security. Which brings us to cred. Many hackers hack just because they can. To me, these hacks, while they can be damaging, are like a Freedom of Information Act for the internet. We only know about Mrs. Posted on September 14, in Recent Articles Permalink.
Is it time to bow to our robot overlords? Last week analysts at Morgan Stanley, using data from an Oxford University study, predicted that nearly half of U. Maybe we should build a wall. Cars that drive themselves? Are we headed toward a post-job future? Signs are certainly there. Abundant Robotics, a company spun from the same Stanford Research Institute that brought us the mouse and networked computing, has begun testing a robot that picks apples.
Red Delicious, not iPhones. Napa Valley vineyards are using vision systems to sort grapes. This month scientists at MIT have sampled a silicon chip-based LIDAR—light detection and ranging—like radar but much higher resolution, though it covers a shorter distance. The Tesla Model S currently uses one radar sensor and one front-facing camera as vision for its Autopilot. Neither, sadly, picked out a white tractor trailer against a bright sky before a May 7 collision that killed a Tesla driver.
And now we have thinking robots. Editors at the Associated Press claim robots write thousands of articles a year for them. This certainly fits a certain world view for a bigger welfare state and universal basic income and other services to coddle displaced workers.
But not so fast. The arena of prognostications is littered with the wrecked utopian dreams of leisure living—recall geodesic domes—and Skynet nightmares of roving robot armies. Instead this is progress. Technology always creates more jobs than it destroys. This time will be no different. Steam engines destroyed jobs—OK, mostly for horse handlers—but enabled an explosion of manufactories, never imagined jobs and the Industrial Revolution.
Cars killed trolleys but enabled hundreds of millions of new jobs. Computers killed jobs for those with rulers and exacto knives who were laying out magazines or constructing physical spreadsheets. In each case, technology augments humans, rather than replaces them.
The coming global demand for manufactured goods will swamp a robot-deprived manufacturing economy. Simply put, jobs that robots can replace are not good jobs in the first place. As humans, we climb up the rungs of drudgery—physically tasking or mind-numbing jobs—to jobs that use what got us to the top of the food chain, our brains. The Robots Are Coming. Posted on August 23, in Recent Articles Permalink.
The stormy Theranos saga took another turn late Thursday when the company announced that federal regulators were banning founder Elizabeth Holmes for two years from operating a blood-testing laboratory.
Theranos had already voided two years of results from its Edison blood-testing device. Entrepreneurs, it seems, all want to emulate the late Steve Jobs—even his fashion, given Ms. There was only one Steve Jobs, but other entrepreneurs try their own Jedi mind tricks, attempting to use The Force to influence the weak. Sadly, the journey from charisma to coercion to lying is quick and often complete. Within two months, on better revenue, the stock had almost doubled.
It turned out that when I had visited, the company was pricing options for the CEO and other executives. Had I recommended the stock, the exercise price might have been higher, eating into their take. During the dot-com frenzy, I recall sitting through an initial public offering presentation for eToys.
A chart of projected e-commerce spending overall showed quarter-by-quarter growth. But the graph with revenue for eToys itself inexplicably switched to six-month numbers. I passed on the deal; they were hiding something.
The company would file for bankruptcy 22 months later. Posted on July 09, in Recent Articles Permalink. When it comes to the homeless, Golden Gate progressives are morally stumped—now more than ever. As I strolled around the area the other day, along with dog-walkers and stroller-moms in yoga pants, the smell of body odor and urine was uncomfortably high. What hammers home the dilemma facing San Francisco progressives is the stark contrast between haves and have-nots.
Homelessness here is an old problem. Newsom passed a law making it illegal to sit on sidewalks during the day or sleep in parks at night, but it is rarely enforced. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it. The San Francisco press disparagingly labeled Mr. Posted on June 25, in Recent Articles Permalink. Debt-laden graduates, affluent alumni, birds-of-a-feather faculty and tuition-burdened parents: You should have invited Oprah: How do you know that? Dare to be all you can be.
So unscrunchie your man-buns, stop posting anonymous snark on YikYak, and listen up. Those of you I hear gagging in the humanities section are going to have to unlearn a few things.
Harvard recently released a survey showing that over half of Americans ages 18 to 29 do not support capitalism. You can almost feel the Bern. Capitalism is what allowed you to wander around this leafy campus for four years worrying about finals instead of foraging for food. It delivered the Greek yogurt to your cafeteria and assembled your Prius.
The basic idea is to postpone consumption. Then invest in production to supply goods and services that delight customers. To succeed in life, to really improve the lot of your fellow man, you have to think about profits. But profit is what drives change.
Your profit is the social value of the transaction. Posted on May 23, in Recent Articles Permalink. I wound my way out to the Presidio, a former military base now commercialized, with beautiful views of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and, if you peer through the fog, the future.
The year-old native Californian speaks in a deep, deliberate voice, with an undercurrent of confidence and excitement. Doing to banks, with a smartphone-based model, what Amazon has done to book stores and Uber has done to taxi fleets. What started out as an ingenious little enterprise making gold-plated student loans at the Stanford Graduate School of Business a few years ago has since expanded to student loans more generally and added mortgages, personal loans and wealth management.
How did he get here? The aspiring big-bank slayer grew up as a surfer in Southern California. He says he qualified for schools with better reputations, but his priority was better waves so he enrolled at the University of California, Santa Cruz home of the Fighting Banana Slugs , and got a degree in applied economics.
He also taught himself to code. In he took a traditional route, a job at a bank—at Wells Fargo, managing credit exposure to risk. The young banker suggested that the bank could make a lot more if it kept the risk in-house.
Cagney left in to start a wealth-management software company—not the greatest timing, as the dot-com bubble burst. He named it Finaplex—not the greatest name, as it turned out also to be the name of a popular growth hormone. Finaplex was sold in and Mr. Cagney decided to raise money to start trading again. Posted on April 30, in Recent Articles Permalink.
Boy, did those Microsoft guys dodge a bullet. How can that be? Suffice to say, the deal has been a huge flop. She reportedly generated million streams last year. The rest of Yahoo? Its legacy business of search and display ads is dragging the company down. By now, it ought to have a robust mobile business.
But can you think of any must-have app from Yahoo? Posted on April 27, in Recent Articles Permalink. Look no further than Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has been long and wrong with a giant energy portfolio and controls too many commodities.
Plus he has tons of debt and a currency bet that has gone so bad his nickname should be Vlad the Impaler. And he may take down the Russian Federation with him. A slip back into the 20s is entirely possible. Energy is almost a quarter of Russian GDP. The Russian ruble has been falling like a sack of potatoes.
It is 71 to the dollar, down from 34 in mid—doubling the price of imports. This led to the current free fall. There is some good or at least not-bad news. Every day the ruble drops in value, the debt owed goes up. Posted on March 10, in Recent Articles Permalink. China sneezed and the world caught double pneumonia.
Plus, the yuan has plummeted to a five-year low. Is the Great Boom of China finally ending? Corruption is rampant and the authoritarian instinct to shut down markets when they falter has spooked investors.
But savvy investors see turbulence and search for waves they can surf to success. Over the next several years, investors would be wise to focus on Chinese consumers buying goods and especially services insurance, car rides, vacations. They had watched neighbors South Korea and Thailand and Malaysia go under and crash their currencies trying to pay back massive dollar-denominated debt used to upgrade their own infrastructure.
Investment followed a similar trend. Aging Hutong residences are disappearing, replaced by story high-rise apartments—many of which stand empty. Yet there are ways to change course, hopefully without blowing up the global economy. The first step is crack down on corruption, which would help slow down infrastructure spending.
Make it harder to keep building four-lane highways to places no one visits. This process has already begun. Banks are being told not to continue funding dead-end projects. Posted on February 02, in Recent Articles Permalink. Posted on February 02, Permalink. What else can I click on and change the real world? The smaller technology shrinks, the bigger the world can grow. Smaller transistors, faster processors, cheaper sensors will all allow innovators to tackle problems with tremendous precision.
Do I mean self-driving Ford Mustangs? But the upside is much more than that. For one, there is longer and higher. The 2,foot Shanghai Tower, set to open any day now, has real-time monitoring sensors, 27 wind-pressure sensors and 40 inclinometers looking for structural sway at different heights. Next-generation bridges will certainly install thousands, even millions of sensors.
Structures that are both safer and can scale to sizes not yet imaginable. Window struts, which are designed to resist compression, can be dashed off a 3-D printer. And because you can do amazing things in 3-D design, the printed version is 10 times lighter than one manufactured in a factory.
And perhaps even 10 times stronger. Because it costs 10 times as much and takes longer to churn out. The cost will drop, and the entire construction industry will be turned downside up. Posted on December 29, Permalink. The beauty of the stock market is that no one can tell you where to put your money—until now. Only a few tax lawyers noticed, but with U. In Labor issued guidance for parts of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of , affectionately known as Erisa, that environmental, social and government factors—for instance, climate change—may affect the value of investments.
Most pension fund managers, who have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize returns, have assumed that such factors can act as a tie breaker, if all other things are equal. Thanks for the heads up about the climate, but leave the investing to us. Managers could still weigh other factors above climate change without getting sued. According to the Oct.
There are thousands of factors that influence daily stock prices—product, profits, management, competition, interest rates, global unrest, government interference, technology and so on. You may have an opinion on climate change, I may have another. If it were settled science, would we need marching orders from Labor? Posted on November 19, in Recent Articles Permalink. Imagine my surprise when I learned that my son, freshly out of college and applying for a car loan, enjoys a higher credit rating than I do, despite my 35 years of never missing a credit card or mortgage payment.
Yet the more I dug, the more I uncovered vague if not manipulative practices. Remember how three credit-rating firms stamped bogus AAAs on subprime mortgages, leading to the financial crisis in ? The similarities are eerie. The formula is secret, the Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe of lending. We know a little about what goes into a credit score: A sample model floating around suggests that points are added for a long payment history, which makes sense, but deducted for having too many credit checks performed or, oddly, paying your credit card bill in full each month rather than underpaying and carrying a balance.
I doubt that works. Want to know your FICO score? Many, such as Truecredit. By the way, perusing these sites will flood your browser with ads from credit agencies.
The only place to find your true score is myFICO. It comes with the following note in tiny font: Posted on November 11, in Recent Articles Permalink. Behold Trumponomics in 10 easy steps.
In at age 28, Mr. Trump officially took over the family business, the Trump Organization. That proved good for the Trump bottom line.
The board decided land-use matters. As a businessman, I need that. Trump told the Los Angeles Times that someone had once asked him how he had finagled a year abatement, and Mr. Trump said he replied: Protected cash flow from apartments and office space is nice, and the Trump name attracts tenants willing to blow cash. But there must be another way to extract money from people. Fortunately, gambling became legal in New Jersey in The casino closed last year. The Donald must have earned high marks in stats at Wharton.
Go in debt up to our eyeballs. And that gives people like me a great advantage. Which brings us to. Chalk it up as another misguided effort that will distort the information investors and companies rely on to make good decisions. Markets run on signals. What could have been a housing downturn melted into the financial crisis in part due to lack of trading of mortgage derivatives in Anything that mucks up those signals will be disastrous for decision making and the productive fabric of the economy.
Less trading means less information. Soviet planners embarked on five-year plan after five-year plan with no price signals. That experiment eventually failed. The Chinese are about to unveil their 13th Five-Year Plan. None of the previous plans highlighted Alibaba and the importance of online commerce.
But whether an investor is trading or putting a stock certificate in a safe-deposit box, stock markets facilitate access to capital. Part of that process is moving stock into the hands of those who desire a certain risk profile. Others prefer lily pad investing, jumping from one hot idea to the next.
Which is better for the economy? Both are important and healthy. On the other hand, paid television stocks are suffering this summer for not investing for a digital future. This is starting to show up in missed earnings. Posted on August 25, in Recent Articles Permalink. The latest bubble chatter in the tech industry came from Fitbit, the maker of high-tech pedometers.
But since fewer startups seem willing to submit themselves to the disclosure and discipline of the public markets, how would we know? Yet this year there have been only eight venture-capital-backed initial public offerings compared with in all of Aside from Tesla and a few others, most of the hot companies with eyebrow-raising values are staying private. Food-delivery companies Instacart and Delivery Hero are worth a few billion each.
Yet none is going public. The delay can perhaps be blamed in part on Sarbanes-Oxley, a law that beefed up oversight and made it more expensive to be a public company.
Whatever the causes, there is no longer a rush to go public if companies can raise sufficient private capital. Public markets enforce discipline on companies and push them to improve. Posted on July 10, in Recent Articles Permalink.
Society benefits from making, not giving. Most of the shares sold were from the Ford Foundation, about a quarter of its holdings. At least 15 million drivers made that choice, and the rest of Americans benefited from cheaper milk and Corn Flakes. In other words, the Ford Motor company increased living standards, and as a result its owner became fabulously wealthy. This may have increased the perception of inequality, yet everyone was better off. If we could just get sharks to fight Nazis, we would mint money.
Expect that to change. A nice gig if you can get it. But this is how the cable cabal works—or worked. With a local monopoly, cable operators dictate packages and pricing, markets be damned.
Satellite rarely competes on price. Cable bills have grown at almost triple the rate of inflation over the past two decades, according to the Federal Communications Commission. But in April, Verizon announced Custom TV, which offers a few basic channels and additional channel packs: The Discovery Channel is no longer basic cable.
Someone knew it was coming and traded on the tip. There is no actual law against insider trading, only securities fraud. Open up the information vault and make everyone an insider. First, a little history. If you were any good, you could cobble together a picture of what the quarter might look like.
In the Securities and Exchange Commission enacted Regulation Fair Disclosure, known as Reg FD, on the tenuous premise that small investors were being hurt by big boys getting information first. Reg FD required companies to disclose information to all investors at the same time. Companies clammed up even further after the Sarbanes-Oxley law, which required CEOs to sign off on all released information. Now public companies only release information once a quarter, but someone always knows.
A crooked insider, an accountant or the brother-in-law of a salesman who missed a quota. Reg FD has been a boon for insider trading.
Posted on April 07, in Recent Articles Permalink. Private equity is done. Stick a fork in it. With Kraft singles and Heinz ketchup as toppings, there are many signs that private equity has peaked as an asset class. Sure, private equity is pervasive, which is one of its problems. There is a lot of capital chasing similar deals. When it comes down to it, private equity is pretty simple. You buy a company, putting up some cash and borrowing the rest, sometimes from banks but often via exotic instruments that Wall Street is happy to sell.
Then you manage the company for cash flow, making sure you can make interest payments with enough left over for fees and investor dividends. SegWit2x makes the amount of data that needs to be verified in each block smaller, by removing signature data from the block of data that needs to be processed in each transaction, and having it attached in an extended block. Bitcoin Cash is a different story.
Bitcoin Cash was started by Bitcoin miners and developers equally concerned with the future of the cryptocurrency, and its ability to scale effectively.
These individuals had their reservations about the adoption of a segregated witness technology, though. They felt as though SegWit2x did not address the fundamental problem of scalability in a meaningful way, nor did it follow the roadmap initially outlined by Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous party that first proposed the blockchain technology behind cryptocurrency.
Furthermore, the process of introducing SegWit2x as the road forward was anything but transparent, and there were concerns that its introduction undermined the decentralization and democratization of the currency.
On August 1st, some miners and developers initiated what is known as a hard fork , effectively creating a new currency: This has raised concerns about the security of Bitcoin Cash. For more on cryptocurrency, read: Does Crypto Have Intrinsic Value?
This development could mean any number of things for the future of cryptocurrency. The situation is very fluid, and market valuations are both constantly calibrating and volatile. Future of Money or Speculative Hype? Improving cryptocurrency as a transaction medium will depend on maintaining the high level of security that Bitcoin has always ensured, while also improving transaction speeds. Bitcoin will continue to be highly secure, but how much its transaction speeds will improve is unclear.
Bitcoin Cash, once its difficulty has adjusted, could have transactions processing in two minutes and 30 seconds. The security of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, though, is unclear.