Hot Crypto News Roundup: Trendspotting For Fun and Profit
At BlockStamp, we’ve observed quite a few trends developing over the past year or so. Which is approximately one lifetime in crypto years :)
Over the past week, we’ve seen several news stories that fall in line with some of these trends. So we thought it would be interesting (and helpful!) to point them out.
Here’s a quick breakdown of what popped up on our radar.
The New York Times is taking a close look at timestamping.
We’ve written about how timestamping might just be the first blockchain application to gain real mass-market traction, whether or not the mass market knows it.
Recently the New York Times was in the news for exploring — with IBM — ways to use a blockchain as a way to protect intellectual property. Or at least prove that a certain digital asset existed first somewhere because someone timestamped it. Their efforts are taking the form of the News Provenance Project.
Authors, photographers, and publishers obviously care about this. The average reader probably not as much.
But if someone wants to research where a story (technically speaking, a digital news asset) first popped up on the internet, this initiative looks like it could be helpful. Especially as “deepfakes” continue to become more controversial and fake news continues to get faker as time goes on.
Croatia is getting on the right side of the trend towards global crypto adoption.
The Croatian Post is making it easy to convert bitcoins to the Croatian kuna, the country’s fiat currency.
We think it is smart move for two reasons:
- Confirmation bias :) It is a pro-crypto initiative. We are pro-crypto, so we think it is smart!
- We also think the Croatian government is being smart about pursuing their self-interest in a pragmatic way. The Croatian kuna — just like any currency, crypto or fiat — has value because people actually have it and use it for something. So having a public agency make it easier to buy their fiat is a smart move.
We’ve written about crypto will force governments to treat their citizens more like customers than subjects. This is a good example of a government realizing that people have options when it comes to currencies. And we’d say it is fair game to guide people towards making options the government wants — as long as they have the choice to do it or not.
It is probably not a coincidence that Croatia is a relatively small (and beautiful!) with lots of visitors bringing various currencies. There’s no reason exchanging bitcoins for kunas should be more difficult than exchanging euros, for example.
Another Latin American city starts accepting bitcoins for public bus tickets.
The Northeastern Brazilian city of Fortaleza (which also happens to be a beautiful place!) has introduced the possibility of paying for public transport in bitcoins.
That’s the second Latin American city to do that after Buenos Aires, which we cited earlier as an example of how “pain” and a lack of good alternatives are great drivers for crypto adoption.
Brazil has been going through tough economic times recently and a cryptocurrency that is immune to political shenanigans has obviously gained popularity with Brazilians. Why else would the public authorities have made it a payment option for the average folks who want to pay for bus tickets every day?
It’s a similar story in Venezuela, which might be THE world’s worst performing economy today. There, locals are more or less officially using crypto just to survive.
It’s sad that it has come to this — but it’s good that struggling Venezuelans at least have an alternative currency they can rely on just to get by day-to-day.
Amazon has a thriving B2B marketplace.
Not exactly a mainstream story here, but it was news to us that Amazon has a healthy B2B service offering. Nor was it exactly a surprise, though, considering that Amazon is involved in just about everything, including space travel :)
We’ve speculated about how it seems like Amazon might get into crypto sooner rather than later, even though publicly they won’t go on the record about any plans.
We’d say that a cryptocurrency would fit into a B2B marketplace much better than Facebook’s rather undefined marketplace for…. ads? Splitting bills with friends? Birthday money? Which they are of course launching the Libra for.
And speaking of the Libra….
Crypto is getting all kinds of attention from politicians.
Probably the biggest example is President Trump’s tweets about how bad, terribly bad bitcoin is.
Meanwhile, just so things don’t get too consistent, other US federal-level politicians seem to want to promote blockchains.
And China now wants a national cryptocurrency to compete with the Libra.
Would crypto be such a hot political topic without the Libra? We doubt it.
There’s an old saying that all press coverage is good press coverage as long as they get your name right :)
We tend to think that about all this crypto media coverage. Even if it is confusing and somewhat negative at first sight, it is boosting the visibility of cryptocurrencies like never before. You can read more of our thoughts about how that will drive greater acceptance and, ultimately, adoption here.
Surprise! The Federal Reserve Bank doesn’t like currency competition.
James Bullard, CEO of the US Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, referred back to the private banking era of US history and said, basically, what a pain all the exchange rate volatility was.
Fair point, but you’d think one of the biggest big shots (sith lords?) of the world’s most famous free market wouldn’t mind a little competition.
We certainly don’t — and we think it will be one of the defining features of the cryptosphere and all its currencies.
All that diversity means some interesting arbitrage and profit-making opportunities if you are smart about it — and take a diversified approach to thinking about investing in the space.
That’s it for this week. We’ll be keeping an eye out for more interesting news moving forward.
Make sure you’re part of the BlockStamp social community and feel free to ask any questions there!
About BlockStamp:
BlockStamp is a multipurpose Bitcoin blockchain fork developed to promote liberty, transparency, and sovereignty in areas of the digital economy where these fundamental values are most at risk. BlockStamp hosts a radically fair gambling platform, a digital tool for transparently sealing data, a censorship-proof internet Domain Naming System, and the BST crypto coin.
