Sleigh Bells just wrapped up a mini-tour of Florida with Diplo (could be the description of a porno?) with an appearance on SNL to promote Reign of Terror. Our little babies are all growds up! Read More
This Ryan Gosling
The official Bitcoin mark
Today, the second-largest bitcoin exchange, TradeHill, announced it was halting trading on bitcoins, buying them back from all of its clients, and “focusing on Bitcoin.com“. Bitcoin, the crypto-currency which operates like the digital version of cash, had been trading around $5.80 since I began watching about a month ago. After the announcement, it fell 20% in value, finally settling around $4.50.
The CEO of TradeHill cited a major withdrawal of funds by one of its payment processors, as well as continuing regulatory concerns, such as compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act.
One of TradeHill’s major payment partners, Paxum, was mentioned in the TradeHill press release. Paxum, like PayPal, seeks to provide an online payment solution linking your credit cards and bank accounts. Until five days ago, it supported bitcoins—its banking partners forced them to stop. Left with no foreseeable way to fund accounts, TradeHill chose to suspend bitcoin trading.
TradeHill has just a slice of 20% of the bitcoin trading market shared by Mt. Gox’s competitors. The other 80% belongs to Mt. Gox, the largest bitcoin exchange. With significantly higher liability, Mt. Gox may be in for a visit from the feds, further elucidating the legal implications of a robust rogue currency competing with the dollar or euro.
All this attention means bitcoin is on the radar of banks who don’t want to take on the risk. The promise of bitcoin is to become another mainstream medium of currency, outside of banks, much like mp3s became another mainstream medium of entertainment. The entertainment industry is still reeling from the changes to its business models.
It hasn’t exactly needed a bailout, either. There is one major difference, though—the exchange of payment for goods and services is slightly more complicated than how we consume recorded music. Bitcoin presents a challenge to banks and governments. Should it be treated as currency, accepted everywhere you want to be? Or maybe regulated like securities? In all likelihood, it will be outlawed and fade from mainstream attention, relegated to black markets, where it presents another challenge to law enforcement officials.
Seriously though, when the world economy collapses, you’ll be glad you saved all those bitcoins.
Roland Martin and Nancy Komen
Regarding the suspension of Roland Martin’s role as part-time contributor for CNN due to some tweets, Raynard Jackson of the Washington Post Roots blog sums it up nicely:
In the immortal words of semanticist S.I. Hayakawa, “meanings are in people, not in words.” In short, words have no intrinsic meaning other than meanings that are internalized by each individual. For example, if I walked up to a female and told her that her dress was “stupid,” she would be either flattered or insulted. If she understood the language of hip-hop, she would be flattered; if she didn’t, then she would be insulted. “Meanings are in people, not in words.”
Jackson goes on to explore the racial aspect—why wasn’t Martin asked to resign from TVOne? Why haven’t black leaders come to his side?—but the fact that there was such an outrageous reaction to such seemingly innocuous Internet postings suggests that there was more behind the scenes.
About a week before then, the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure, the best-known breast cancer awareness and advocacy group, came under fire from progressive activist group GLAAD for deciding to discontinue funding for Planned Parenthood at some of its associates’ facilities. GLAAD posted a statement to its website a day later condemning the move, which was picked up by major media outlets. Instantly, women’s health advocates took up in arms, moneyed folks announced they would stop donating to Komen, and armchair activists took to their laptops: Planned Parenthood received over $1 million in the days following the decision, and Komen reversed its decision to remove its funding for it. Suddenly, the news cycle is over! Komen’s brand is left marred, its reputation as a leader in private giving and as a huge proponent of women’s services gets a slap in the face for a (relatively) small parcel of money that was made up easily in the days after. In the end, Komen ended up raising more money for Planned Parenthood than they would have if they’d simply given the same amount like last year. (Not like Planned Parenthood needs it—for the record, Planned Parenthood’s budget is about twice as big as Komen’s. The funding itself constituted $680,000, which is less than one percent of either organization’s budget.)
GLAAD stands for Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and is very activist in nature. It has a fairly savvy marketing team, as does Komen. (Pink ribbons, anyone?) Both groups are outspoken in their efforts to advance women’s health. I suspect these past few weeks have been a high-profile effort to kick off a fundraising season during which the spectre of a GOP dark horse in the White House with a divided legislature looms the following year.
It’s fascinating how easy it is to whip a crowd up into a frenzy over seemingly nothing only to have it evaporate as the next media cycle begins, leaving a trail of cash in its wake. Then again, part of politics (and public relations in general) is harvesting potential media blitzes and keeping them in some sort of arsenal until they’re needed. These are the sorts of outrages that fuel media cycles and propel (or torpedo) public entities.
Sign outside one of the tents at Occupy DC McPherson Square Washington, DC
The idea of a progressive populist uprising against the misdeeds of the financial industry which plunged the nation into severe economic crisis seemed appealing. Unfortunately it came in the form of a movement which, at its core, entailed spotting on public lands, consuming nearby services, disrupting local economies. Confrontation became its signature tactic, and after a while, the cries for justice became tired. It was more provoke and react than anything else. While their citizen-powered media team was excellent, they needed a political strategist to move their cause to the next level. A big part of their message was demonizing police, who were simply called in to do their jobs.
After the inevitable “evictions” of the past few months—costing millions in taxpayer dollars for cleanup—I’ve had enough of it. I sympathize with the outrage, but this is not the way to bring an important message to bear. There are legitimate wrongs committed by the financial industry which ought to be righted. The recent federal-state deal to inject $25 billion into a fund to prevent foreclosures is a nice start. I hope to see more efforts like this from the banking industry. But for now, Occupy needs to decamp and channel their efforts into something productive.
The official Bitcoin mark
So for the past two weeks I’ve been fascinated by bitcoin. Bitcoin is a “virtual currency” created by a wunderkind cryptographer called Satoshi Nakamoto (not his real name). It operates much like cash: There is a limited supply of bitcoins in circulation and transactions are untraceable.
There are two fundamental ways in which it differs from cash (other than being confined to the ether): There is no central bank which can act to counter the effe
cts of inflation by issuing more. The algorithm that makes it possible issues a limited supply every week, culminating at 21 million bitcoins in about ten years. It’s all done peer-to-peer—that is, a transaction takes place between two computers, and the history of that transaction is updated to other computers in the bitcoin network immediately.
One bitcoin at the time of this post is worth US$5.67. The high was around US$33. It went through a boom and bust where the media first picked up on it, followed by a high-profile heist where just shy of half a million dollars’ worth of bitcoin was stolen by a hacker. Since then, the value has hovered around $5.
You can get bitcoins one of two ways: purchasing them from an exchange or “mining” them—using your spare computing power to decrypt “blocks” of the currency, buried deep within the network. Some people have invested thousands in huge clusters of computers with multiple high-end graphics cards doing the mining. For some, it’s been worth it.
I’ve invested about $300 for 25. Get yours while you still can!
It is the year 2012. We have touchscreen devices that play your favorite music and real-time video news from around the world. Welcome to the future, in case you are a time traveler.
Man, does it feel good to be back on WordPress. tumblr was getting out of control. Nice to have a big boy blog. Such amazing changes since last I was last here, pre 3.0.
I love this theme. Much thanks to WPShower.