大家好~今天速度的 TOPIC 是 BITCOIN（比特币）。继年初的 BITCOIN CRAZE 之后，这两天它又成为了一个热门话题——7月2日，双胞胎兄弟 Cameron & Tyler Winklevoss 计划在 SEC（美国证券交易委员会）上市 BITCOIN 的 ETF（Exchange-Trade Fund）。
— Winklevoss 兄弟是谁呢？他们在电影 The Social Network 中被人们注意到；他们曾由于 Facebook 的创意归属问题上诉 Zuckerberg，引发一阵热议；他们还是赛艇划手，曾参加2008年北京奥运会。
— ETF 是什么呢？请参见二楼介绍~
— LZ！你啰嗦半天也没说 BITCOIN 到底是神马啊！哈哈哈，大家快做作业呀！
【PART I: SPEED】
Article 1: Why I Invested in Bitcoin
By Chamath Palihapitiya May 31, 2013
【TIME 1】
The weeks of speculation about whether JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon would be forced to give up one of his titles has ended. I didn't take a side in the battle, if only because I couldn't get beyond the threshold questions: “Why does anyone even care, and why do we believe we are still beholden to people like this?”
Since the 2008 financial crisis, we have seen a massive decline in trust in the financial services industry: Lehman Brother, Bear Stearns, American International Group, the "London Whale," Cyprus and a host of lesser scandals have prompted consumers to say one thing loud and clear: “I don’t trust you.” Or "You're only in it for yourself.” Or “Who made you king?” Or some very reasonable variant thereof. It seems the financial services industry’s best response is, “Trust me, I went to Harvard Business School.”
The point is that this fundamental trust no longer exists; in its place, rises Bitcoin.
Bitcoin was launched in 2008 during the depths of the financial crisis. It is a growing phenomenon that you can find out more about here (wikipedia.org), here (bitcoinfoundation.org) and here (coindest.com). In short, it’s a crypto-currency that is completely electronic, peer-to-peer, unregulated (or unregulate-able) and uncontrolled (or uncontrollable) by any government or agency. Each Bitcoin is simply a long string of numbers and letters that can identify itself within the Bitcoin economy to be unique and legitimate. Bitcoins can’t be copied or tampered with; they don’t exist in the real world -- only on your phone, computer or tablet -- but they have the same value as physical currency.
There are 11 million of these coins in existence today, and there will only be 21 million ever created. Similar to gold, Bitcoins are made by mining. But while gold is mined from the ground by bulldozers, Bitcoins are mined by computers solving complex mathematical equations. Each time you get a correct answer, you unlock a coin which can then enter the Bitcoin economy. These quirky characteristics may all seem like reasons to question, dislike or fear this new currency. Instead these are a few of the reasons why everyone should hope it becomes a lasting part of the fabric of financial services.
Why?
【TIME 1 ENDS – 374 WORDS】
【TIME 2】
When the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency first implemented a working version of the Internet in the 1960s it seemed like a fringe experiment not dissimilar to Bitcoin today. It wasn’t until a protocol called TCP/IP emerged in the 1970s and was commercialized that the Internet was positioned to take off. In short, this protocol allowed every website and service built on it to have its own “address” and a way to communicate information. This averted chaos, allowing users to find what they were looking for, allowing websites to work together and enabling networks to do the hard lifting of directing traffic in an orderly and predictable way. Without TCP/IP, the Internet as we know it would not exist.
Bitcoin today is in roughly the same development phase that TCP/IP was back then. Instead of IP addresses and websites, Bitcoin has unique strings that represent money and a mechanism to send these strings securely and safely wherever you want. It is a protocol that is allowing money to flow around the world much like TCP/IP allows information to flow -- in an orderly, predictable way.
This is not a theory; it happens every day. The Bitcoin economy, while still in its infancy, is about $2 billion (meaning, the value of all Bitcoins) and rising. New services appear daily -- exchanges, digital wallets, payment processors, along with companies that accept Bitcoin alongside dollars, euros and yen for traditional services. In addition, a small and growing group of technologists are getting behind the currency, allocating time and capital to building a robust ecosystem.
Bitcoin is being used all over the world in a wide range of ways already: to avoid the high fees of using a Visa card in San Paulo; to settle the purchase of a million dollar home in Buenos Aires; to pay a mechanic for services in Lagos; to provide Egyptians access to a liquid currency. The list goes on.
【TIME 2 ENDS – 321 WORDS】
【TIME 3】
Bitcoin provides a safe way for anyone, anywhere to send, receive or store his or her money. By contrast, consumers are realizing that the traditional banking system shouldn’t be trusted. Why store my money with strangers who may make crazy bets on derivatives (JPMorgan)? Why keep my money in a bank that could threaten to seize it (Cyprus)? Why keep my hard-earned savings in a currency that could be devalued because of an incompetent government (Argentina)?
All of this said, the emergence of a robust Bitcoin economy won’t all be positive. Bad actors will use Bitcoin for drug dealing, porn and financing terrorism. However, this already happens every day with gold, dollars and other currencies; it's not a reason to shut Bitcoin down. Which -- did I mention this? -- is not actually possible anyway.
There is no central server, no central authority and no owner. Bitcoin can be slowed but not shuttered. And even if the U.S. Government decides it is anti-Bitcoin, many other countries will either tacitly or explicitly support it. China. Russia. Switzerland. Iceland. Singapore. Suffice it to say that the geopolitical ramifications of a robust Bitcoin economy are mind-boggling, beginning with a completely peer-to-peer banking system that works by and between people and ending with a world that no longer relies on the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency of all assets.
【TIME 3 ENDS – 226 WORDS】
【TIME 4】
The opportunity here is to think constructively about a world in which money flows are more transparent (Bitcoin), easy (Bitcoin), cheap (Bitcoin) and secure (Bitcoin). Does the Bitcoin economy need regulation? Possibly. Much like virtual guardrails enabled the Internet to thrive, the Bitcoin ecosystem may need something similar to begin rebalancing the financial services landscape.
The current price of Bitcoin is about $130. Some people think that Bitcoin will never become a useful currency but rather a better version of gold or a replacement to gold entirely (Gold 2.0). If this is all Bitcoin becomes, a good question is: “What would that make each Bitcoin worth?” Well, the value of all of the gold in the world is roughly $8 trillion. Assuming that Bitcoin can replace gold as a more useful store of value, then the upper bound of each Bitcoin would be almost $400,000 ($8 trillion/21 million bitcoins).
If Bitcoin grows into something bigger -- a useful reserve currency, then watch out: Its value will far exceed $400,000. I personally think that Bitcoin is already superior to gold. Its role as currency is yet to be determined, but over the next decade, being Gold 2.0 will suffice considering that it would represent a more than 3,000 times return.
I’ve told my friends that it is entirely rational to allocate one percent of your assets to Bitcoin -- as I have. Call it schmuck insurance. As the 2008 crisis proved, schmucks can cause a world of damage.
There is a famous scene in the Matrix where Morpheus asks Neo if he wants to take the blue pill and go back to life as he knows it or take the red pill and see life as it is. Neo takes the red pill and begins a period of exploration about humanity, hierarchy, rules, etc. Bitcoin is a red pill. There will be some bad and awkward moments, but lots of good, useful and powerful things will also ensue. It will reallocate financial strength and power to the people versus keeping it within a few centralized authorities.
I am hopeful that Bitcoin prevails. The world needs more red pills.
【TIME 4 ENDS – 357 WORDS】
Source: Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-30/bitcoin-the-perfect-schmuck-insurance.html
Article 2: Winklevoss Twins Make Best Case Against Bitcoin Fund
By Evan Soltas Jul 2, 2013
Cameron Winklevoss, right, and his twin brother Tyler leave a federal appeals court in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2011. Facebook Inc.'s settlement of claims that its founder Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for what became the world's largest social-networking website should be undone, former college classmates of Zuckerberg told an appeals court. Photographer: Noah Berger/Bloomberg
【WARM UP】
The Winklevoss twins are looking to create an exchange-traded fund for the online currency Bitcoin. Their company, Math-Based Asset Services LLC, filed forms with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday.
The goal is to let traders and investors in on the roller-coaster ride that is Bitcoin -- without having to go through online currency exchanges, which are unregulated and tricky to access.
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, known for their claim to have co-founded Facebook Inc., own 1 percent of all outstanding Bitcoins, worth about $10 million. Their plan to make Bitcoin more mainstream has generated some skepticism about potential risk.
【101 WORDS】
【TIME 5】
But the Winklevoss ETF's own filing makes the best arguments against treating Bitcoin as an investment asset.
1. "It may be illegal now, or in the future, to acquire, own, hold, sell or use Bitcoins in one or more countries, and ownership of, holding or trading in Shares may also be considered illegal and subject to sanction."
The risk that your investment could be outlawed isn't one you hear that often. An investment in Bitcoin ETF shares is ultimately a bet on which way U.S. and other regulatory authorities go on Bitcoin. With Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange, in trouble with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, that's looking riskier by the day.
2. "As the Sponsor and its management have no history of operating an investment vehicle like the Trust, their experience may be inadequate or unsuitable to manage the Trust."
The Winklevoss twins were rowers, then technology investors. They aren't experienced managers of a financial product, let alone Bitcoin experts. Then again, nobody really is.
3. "The Trust’s internal systems rely on a Security System that is highly technical, and if such system contains undetected errors, the value of the Shares could be adversely affected."
A major draw to Bitcoin is the anonymity and security of direct personal transactions through encryption and digital transactions. That works against the currency when you trust someone else to invest for you.
The investment assets are hard to secure and to trace. A "Bitcoin trust" is somewhat of a contradiction in terms. If you're buying Bitcoin, you already have some trust issues.
4. "The Blended Bitcoin Price is based on the daily average of the high and low trading prices on various Bitcoin Exchanges in the Bitcoin Exchange Market chosen by the Sponsor."
Pay attention to the pricing method. The "blend" is determined by the average of highs and lows of an extraordinarily volatile, illiquid and opaque investment security. That's risky. It might not be all that difficult to manipulate the ETF's share value by briefly pushing up or down the price of Bitcoin to extreme levels.
Prospective investors should be more than a bit skeptical about putting coin in the Winklevoss ETF.
【TIME 5 ENDS – 361 WORDS】
Source: Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-02/winklevoss-twins-make-best-case-against-bitcoin-fund.html
在彭博社上看到一个采访，可以解决关于这个事情的好多小疑问，但是没有找到下载，也没有找到靠谱的录音/录屏软件，在此就不能直接放上来了。大家可以找到其他办法观看视频：Winklevoss Bitcoin Fund: Dumb Money or Good Idea?
地址：http://www.bloomberg.com/video/winklevoss-twins-prepare-first-ever-bitcoin-fund-AgTGdeAKRJeMAeCO9r9JCw.html
【PART II: OBSTACLE】 Article 3: Insider Trading: Bad, But Not the Real Scourge of Wall Street
By Charles Gasparino July 02, 2013
Americans hate cheaters, and they don’t like those who have an unfair advantage, which is why when you ask most people about insider trading, they’ll usually say that the perpetrators belong in jail.
To that end, the biggest coup of the ongoing insider-trading crackdown, at least so far, has been the conviction of Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam, who was found guilty of insider trading and securities fraud and sentenced to 11 years in the same federal prison that houses Bernie Madoff and mob kingpin Carmine “the Snake” Persico. During the course of his career Rajaratnam made a lot of money trading, accumulating a net worth of nearly $2 billion. Wiretaps, government witnesses, and telephone recordings from informants with inside tips paint a wide pattern of abuse, leading to a well-deserved conviction.
Yet even government prosecutors would concede that most of the money he made for himself and for his clients did not come from breaking the law. Largely overlooked by the media was the cost of Rajaratnam’s illegal dealings. Before his arrest in 2009 (and Galleon’s subsequent demise) the fund had accumulated around $7 billion in assets.
To build a fund of that size, Rajaratnam and his team conducted many tens of billions of dollars’ worth of trades to produce overwhelmingly positive annual returns averaging around 25% since 1992 and amounting to billions of dollars in winnings for his clients. Yet the feds say he stole only some $70 million by trading on insider information. That figure, even if it is accurate (his lawyers claim the amount is closer to $7 million), would mean that the vast majority of his trades, billions upon billions in winnings, were perfectly legal.
It would also mean that the government spent tens of millions of dollars to prosecute a crime that pales in comparison to many other shady practices that have cost the financial markets and American taxpayers untold billions and possibly trillions of dollars in losses. The shadiest of those practices, of course, led to the 2008 financial crisis, one of the world’s great economic tragedies.
The financial crisis and its continued lack of identifiable culprits is key to understanding why insider trading is all the rage these days with the federal law enforcement bureaucracy, and why men who run hedge funds, like Raj Rajaratnam and Steve Cohen, have become more recognizable household names than those of our banking titans. Of course, bubbles like the one that caused the risk-taking that led to the 2008 collapse are often more about irrational exuberance than the more rational act of fraud. In other words, they are difficult cases to make, and upon taking office in 2009, and with the after-effect of the financial crisis causing massive unemployment, regulatory officials in the Obama administration barely explained those nuances to a skeptical and hurting American public.
What it needed was a white-collar scandal that it could tout as having successfully prosecuted to satisfy the public’s demand for Wall Street scalps, even though insider trading had nothing to do with the practices that led to the banking debacle.
At least that’s what many of the career prosecutors have told me in their more candid moments. Did they make up the crimes of Raj Rajaratnam, David Slaine, and their circle of friends? Of course not; these cases were based on good detective work, informants, and wiretaps that produced overwhelming evidence that the culprits didn’t merely step over the line of what is acceptable behavior—they often drew new boundaries.
But consider the following: The investigations were launched during the waning years of the Bush administration and had been developed by career law enforcement officials from the SEC, the FBI, and the Justice Department. They were developed at a time when Bernie Madoff still roamed free, with some in law enforcement ignoring warnings about his activities, and when risk-taking by the banks grew to enormous heights.
Unlike the minutiae involved in mortgage fraud or Wall Street risk-taking, insider trading cases are, as one prosecutor called them, “sexy,” in that they include wiretapped evidence of tipsters getting not just cash but lobsters and real sex in exchange for their services, as my new book, Circle of Friends, points out. The hedge fund moguls on the other end of the telephone were caught on tape eagerly paying for the information, while bragging about their exploits.
All of this was tailor-made for the Obama administration’s white-collar crime point man, Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney from Manhattan. Bharara is a smart, capable, and ambitious prosecutor. His critics inside the Justice Department and in the legal community have also described him as a Rudy Giuliani on steroids when it comes to using the media to burnish his image and turn the crime of trading on “material nonpublic information” into the Wall Street crime of the century.
【OBSTACLE ENDS – 802 WORDS】
Source: TIME
http://business.time.com/2013/07/02/insider-trading-bad-but-not-the-real-scourge-of-wall-street/#ixzz2XyYfMIqI
|
[复制链接]
京公网安备11010202008513号 京ICP证101109号 京ICP备12012021号
发表于 2013-7-4 23:38:10
收藏
收藏
