Monday, 30 June 2014 12:00

Stress Test on Banks’ Earnings Facing the Veritaseum UltraCoin Value Transaction Platform

My last post on the topic of disintermediation during a paradigm shift was Wall Street Should Be First To Invest In Reggie Middleton's UltraCoin, Much Of It Won't Be Here In 10 Years! I clearly illustrated the potential for growth of Bitcoin related companies and cited statistics for the transformation of the financial industry as we know it today.

This post introduces long form research from the analysts at Veritaseum, the same team that brought you the hard hitting BoomBustBlog research. The first page of the report says it all - "Stress Test on Banks’ Earnings Facing the Veritaseum UltraCoin Value Transaction Platform".

research report cover

Excerpts from deeper into the report...

research report 2 research report 3

And of course the inevitable... What happens when a less expensive product is introduced into the market with similar or superior attributes? Margin Compression! We analyzed three big Wall Street banks, starting with the "Riskiest Bank on the Street" (time permitting, reference our hard hitting, prescient research from early 2008).

Veritaseum research report on Morgan Stanley Margin Compression

I invite all to download the free Veritasuem Research Report for July 2014. I also invite all to meet me for the soft beta launch of Veritaseum's UltraCoin Value Trading Platform in my suite at the Drake Hotel in downtown Chicago, the evening of Saturday July 19th (this is also the weekend of The North American Bitcoin Conference in Chicago, where I will be speaking on the topic of money center bank disintermediation.

You will get to touch, play with and trade value via UltraCoin. Below is a screenshot of UltraCoin running on a Mac. I will also be taking applications for large scale beta testers and entities who wish to have customized value trading solutions created for them.

Screen Shot 2014-06-26 at 11.05.24

Published in BoomBustBlog

Wednesday, 04 June 2014 13:04

Bitcoin (and Apple) Mythbusting 101

Yesterday, I did a radio interview with Benzinga. In it I busted myths about Apple, Bitcoin and Coins in general (ABCs). Listen to the interview below and the info sheets afterwards and let me know if you knew this stuff was possible with today's tech - and Apple!

As for Apple...

And more on http://Ultra-Coin.com...

Why am I so bullish on Bitcoin? Note: this is not an offer to buy or solicitation for securities and is presented for illustrative purposes only.

Veritaseum Executive Summary page one

Veritaseum Executive Summary page two

As we roll out Veritaseum's UltraCoin ZeroTrust Smart Contracts, I'll be posting much more on "the new way of doing business".

Media Exposure

Published in BoomBustBlog

Wednesday, 21 May 2014 15:14

Margin Compression Is Coming in the Payment Processing Space As $100 Million Pours Into Startups

After an interesting discussion with those in my laboratory, I've decided to apply the forensic analysis team from BoomBustBlog to the privately funded companies in the Bitcoin space. See my post from yesterday for much of the reason why.

As clearly predicted yesterday, the better funded of the payment processors will initiate a pricing blood bath they'd likely kill for...

From PayPal's subsite on Mass Payments:

Paypal Mass Pay Site Screenshot

As you can see, PayPal has already imbued its service with much of the attributes that are being offered by the Bitcoin payment processors. They also have a material advantage as of right now, a massive installed base.

I also cannot emphasize enough how damaging the all too necessary customer service option is to margins. You see, the problem is most service companies don't put enough into customer service and handholding of the customer. From an optimal perspective, this should actually be part of the marketing and sales process, but it's often either non-existent or implemented as an after thought after enough customers start bitching and complaining, or worse yet (and likely most often the case) leaving!

As a company with mature management, it appears as if PayPal is trying to head this off at the pass as it attempts to change consumer behavior and prod them into adopting its new electronic currency payment system...

Paypal Mass Pay Site Support Screenshot

Now, let's compare PayPal to the newly funded Bitcoin payment processors...

Bitpay

Funding Rounds (3) - $32.50M

$30M / Series A May 8, 2014

Investors:

TTV Capital, Felicis Ventures, Founders Fund, Horizons Ventures, Jerry Yang, Richard Branson, Index Ventures
$2M /Seed May 16, 2013

Investors:

Founders Fund
$510k / Seed Jan 7, 2013

Investors:

Trace Mayer, Ben Davenport, Ashton Kutcher, Matt Mullenweg, Barry Silbert, Shakil Khan, Roger Ver, Jimmy Furland

- See more at: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bitpay#sthash.yvlqpNtr.dpuf Bitpay prices

An interesting departure from the per transaction/fee model, Bitpay implemented a subscription system which benefits those customers who perform a large quantity of relatively small transactions moreso than those who process large orders.

I calculate Bitpay's most recent $30 million series A round to have been at around 9.2x sales, valuing the company at $160 million. This is a guestimate, of course, since I do not have access to internal numbers.

Next we have Coinbase...

Funding Rounds (3) - $31.70M

$25M / Series B

Dec 12, 2013

Investors:

Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, Ribbit Capital
$6.10M / Series A

May 7, 2013

Investors:

Ribbit Capital, Union Square Ventures, Red Swan, SV Angel, Interplay Ventures, FundersClub
$600k / Seed

Sep 12, 2012

Investors:

Alexis Ohanian, Y Combinator, Greg Kidd, FundersClub, Garry Tan

- See more at: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coinbase#sthash.CD8IPTp6.dpuf

There's also Circle, founded by Mr. Allaire of Coldfusion fame (sold to Adobe Systems).

Funding Rounds (2) - $26M

$17M / Series B

Mar 26, 2014

Investors:

Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, Pantera Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Accel Partners, Breyer Capital, Oak Investment Partners
$9M / Series A

Oct 30, 2013

Investors:

General Catalyst Partners, Accel Partners, Jim Breyer

- See more at: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/nfc-direct#sthash.dd0DaxHc.dpuf

Circle has not publicly launched yet but promises to bring a new level of simplicity and user-friendliness to the bitcoin payment ecosystem, concentrating more on a banking paradigm then the technical bent that bitcoin is known to represent. This is all you need ot know about the Circle business model as it relates to this discussion of impending margin compression...

Circle

Free=Margin Compression!

Let's see how this plays out for customers. The most lucrative segments for this industry is the SME (small and medium business enterprises) who process anywhere between 10 and 1,000 transactions per month. Why? Because there are simply more SMEs than they are big companies in the world. Let's see what the two biggest bitcoin processors look like when stacked up against PayPal's Mass Pay product for the SME market...

Of course, the Bitcoin transactions are likely a loss leader for additional, value added services for many companies in the not too distant future. As a matter of fact, I feel that the payment space will quickly become commoditized by Bitcoin technology - forcing these companies and many more (I'm talking about you Mastercard, Visa and Western Union) to innovate and offer significantly and materially better value for the buck.

Imagine what this competitive landscape will look like when Mastercard, Visa, American Express, Discover and Western Union jump into the fray. Of course, before that a much greater portion of the VC and private equity community will wake up and realize the opportunity in Bitcoin to pour more cash into it than sugar into a Bubble gum machine (emphasis on "Bubble"). The key is to get in early, and get in right. But how does one do that and where will this tale of uber margin compression end?

Well, the research report from which this info is being prepared will be offered to accredited and instituional investors starting next week, at least those who have an interest in UltraCoin.

My next article on this topic will explicitly illustrate how UltraCoin can assist ALL players (that's right, including PayPal, Bitpay, Circle, Coinbase, Mastercard, Visa, American Express, Discover and Western Union) as well as their direct customers, in climbing up both the food chain and the value proposition ladder - thus rapidly repairing the margin compression damage they are about to bring upon thier business models.

Published in BoomBustBlog

Tuesday, 20 May 2014 14:48

Payment Processors, Patents and a Dollop of Healthy Paranoia

picsay-1400512647

Reggie Middleton discussion UltraCoin at the 2014 FinTech conference at Dechert LLP.

Coindesk asks "Do Patent Filings from eBay and Western Union Pose a Threat to Bitcoin?" I feel the question is in and of itself missing the point. To explain this fully, I have to share a little bit about myself, particularly my weaknesses. I'm the type of person who is very knowledgeable about his strengths and his weaknesses, but sometimes I don't see my strength for what it is, and that is tantamount to a weakness in a highly competitive environment.

Case in point, in discussing whether or not competing patents have been filed for smart contract transacion processes by those who seek to be in my space with my contract engineer (a very skilled software architect and IP attorney), I displayed what I considered a healthy level of paranoid concern. I found it hard to believe that no one bothered to patent the most innovative, disruptive and groundbreaking aspect of this new crop of digital currencies - the ability to program them. As those who follow me know, I've spent a lot of resources developing, designing, refining and patenting advanced smart contracts (see How Reggie Middleton's Start-up Patented The Future of Global Finance!). I actually found it highly unlikely that no one had come up with this idea before me. Matt (my contracts engineer) said, "You know, it actually takes an uncanny amount of vision to have seen the scope of this stuff and act upon it, not to mention to have done so 6 months ago. Not many people are like you." Right then and there, it hit me. People really do not see things the way I do!

Most know me from my prescient calls in banking, finance, real estate and tech (see Who is Reggie Middleton?). I've demonstrated a knack for seeing future trends and determining when things (such as valuations and opportunities) are out of whack. With that being said, the big media interest in Bitcoin combined with the increasing VC interest in Bitcoin companies (reference BitPay Gets $30 Million in Venture Capital Funding) is a very good thing for the industry, but also illustrates shortsigtedness in both the investment community and many practitioners.

The problem with the processors...

When bitcoin is as easy as PayPal to use then it will be on the path to mass adoption, but to assume that’s the most lucrative path to take in bitcoin company private equity investment begs the wrong question. Here’s the strategic landscape as I see it.

Bitcoin is very inexpensive to use as a transfer agent. A transaction may be safely sent without fees if these conditions are met (this is excerpted directly from the Bitcoin Wiki, verbatum):

It is smaller than 1,000 bytes.
All outputs are 0.01 BTC or larger.
Its priority is large enough

Otherwise, the reference implementation will round up the transaction size to the next thousand bytes and add a fee of 0.1 mBTC (0.0001 BTC) per thousand bytes. Note that a typical transaction is 500 bytes, so the typical transaction fee for low-priority transactions is 0.1 mBTC (0.0001 BTC), regardless of the number of bitcoins sent.

Bitcoin as of 5/18/2014 is $444.74m, thus the fee for this transaction is roughly 4 cents, if not outright free. If a processor is transferring $10,000 on behalf of a customer, whether at one time or 100 times throughout the course of a month, the processor’s fee cost would range from $0 to $4, while the processor would likely charge (as of the date of this writing, $0 to $100). The traditional processors such a Visa or Paypal would charge hundreds (as in up to 50x more!) for the same deal!

That 25x markup on the high end is significant (even for the Bitcoin companies), and ripe for disintermediation itself (that's right, the disintermediaing agents are poised for disintermediaion). Particularly once the UX of Bitcoin evolves, as email and web browsing did, and users realize how easy and cheap it is to jump onto the blockchain and do this stuff themselves.

Even assuming users don’t follow the historical model of those that left proprietary walled gardens (think AOL) and jumped directly into the open World Wide Web themselves, there are no material barriers to entry to enter into the processing business other than potentially a money transmitter license. The only material barrier, hence the business opportunity, is that Bitcoin is cumbersome to use. As the UI/UX polish increases and the amount of competitors in the space increase, the lower the prices charged - hence the margins - will be.

With such low barriers to entry and potentially humongous markups to exploit, what do you think happens next? The wild, untamed hordes of competitors swoop down upon the masses, and we have a concerted race to zero, and likely negative margin as competitors attempt to make processing a loss leader to draw users into the folds of richer, higher margin services!!!

The race to marginal zero, then negative, does not make a strong business plan. So, what do these companies such as BitPay, Coinbase, etc. do once that point is reached (rather quickly)? They look to value added (high margin) services on top of their low margin, utility-like payment infrastructures.

Enter smart contracts and the true use of programmability in the crypto-currencies. The easiest and the likely first implementation of such will be multi-sig operations which allow multiple parties to share funds without having to worry about trusting and single party in a transaction. Our ZeroTrust Letters of Credit (patent pending) is just such a product. It allows for multiple parties to tranfer payment for simple and complex transactions contingent upon the mutual agreed upon successful execution of said transactions. This is done without the parties having to:

Know each other
Trust each other
Have any form of proximity to each other;

and can be done using micropayments all the way up to multi-million dollar macro payments. The barriers to this business are much higher. For one, it takes more than just programming code. You have to be able to congeal the legal logic of the conventional law in equity contract into code. You have to be able to congeal the business logic into code, and you have to be able to implement it into the blockchain or whatever other underlying transmission mechanism you choose to utilize.

Once the race to negative zero is in full swing, a few of the wiser companies will wake-up and say "Hey, there has to be a better way, and we think we found it!". It is at that point Reggie Middleton's UltraCoin products and assets will shine. It is not hard to foresee that the entrenched companies (Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Western Union) may enter a bidding war with the new comers armed with material VC warchests (much more than we're seeing with $30 million investments of today - all over the guys who had the foresight to see the next evolutionary step in plain vanilla payments - smart transactions and self-executing digital contracts and transactions.

We're actively looking for financial and intellectual capital. If you, as an accredited investor, are looking for an opportunity in the higher end of the digital currency space, I think we should talk. In addition, if you are a higher level Java/C++ developer willing to take risk, we need to talk. I'm available at reggie at ultra-coin.com.

Published in BoomBustBlog

Saturday, 10 May 2014 17:02

Did Money Center Bank Ignorance of CryptoCurrencies Allowed A Start-up To Patent The Future of Global Finance?

Bloomberg ran a story earlier this week illustrating the human capital flight out of the Wall Street machine and into tech:

At elite universities, fewer MBA and finance candidates are willing to even consider a life of missed weddings, busted romances and deep-into-the-night deal negotiations. The percentage of Harvard Business School graduates entering investment banking, sales or trading dropped to 5 percent last year from 12 percent in 2006, while those entering technology almost tripled to 18 percent during that period.

At the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the percentage of MBAs entering investment banking dropped to 13.3 percent last year from 26 percent in 2006, while those entering tech more than doubled to 11.1 percent.

Those of you who have been following finance from the Wall Street/Bay Street/Canary Wharf perspective realize that this is a cyclical occurence. Basically, Wall Street falls out of favor with MBA whiz kids every ten years of so. But!!!! This time is different. This time around, Wall Street, et. al. is about to succumb to the destructive forces of technology that transformed, revolutionized, disintermediated, gutted and absolutely reinvigorated the media, news and retail industries.

That's right! The Internet Paradigm Shift has finally hit Global Finance... and it's going to hurt, and hurt a lot!

As many know, the I've poured my time and resources into a start-up by the name of UltraCoin. Many have been clamoring for white papers and details, and I have been purposely secretive about such. The reason? I needed to entrency protection from my competition - the money center banks. How did I do this? Well...

I patented the future of Global Finance!

patent to the Future of finance big

This video illustrates my presentation to both the mainstream and alternative media as I start my capital raising rounds from venture capitalists and strategic investos alike. Check it out!

We're looking for financial and human capital as we prepare to expand globally. Financial capital is self-explanatory. On the human capital side...

We're seeking a full stack contract developer. Must be proficient in: Java or C#; git, bzr, or similar. Must have a solid understanding of: race conditions and how to avoid them; scalable concurrency and data integrity architectural concepts (replication, sharding, etc.); software development processes and best practices. Proficiency in some CRUD technology (*SQL, NoSQL, etc.) as well as and some scripting language (Javascript, PHP, Python, etc.) is highly preferred. Experience with the Bitcoin protocol is a huge plus. Your first interview is to e-mail your resume along with a response to this challenge: https://gist.github.com/mbogosian/28815ae606c663c983c3

Must be willing to sign an NDA. You should be knowledgeable and competent, but we prefer grit to genius. Prima donnas need not apply.

Published in BoomBustBlog

Wednesday, 07 May 2014 13:48

T-Mobile Threatens Deadbeat Carriers With The Death Of The American Wireless Business Model

It started in 2012 wiith the article "Deadbeat Carrier Creative Destruction In The Ongoing Mobile Computing Wars". That's when I warned that margins in the carrier space will collapse - just as they did in the cellular handset space, as new business models and the effect if Android start to ripple and reverbrate. My latest article in the series, "The Smallest & Liveliest Of The DeadBeat Carriers Successfully Launched Wireless WMDs" detailed how T-Mobile will throw the gauntlet down and turn the wireless industry on its head - at great risk not just to margins but entire business models. To wit:

There are 4 major national carriers in the US, basically two big ones two smaller ones. The smallest of the 4, T-Mobile, consistently get beat up - losing out on the right to subsidize the iPhone at a loss (like AT&T used to and Sprint still does) and basically losing subscribers. Then they decided to do something about it. They said, "Hey, let's stop being deadbeats!". By changing their pricing plans and eliminating subsidies and instead selling pure access to their virtual pipes (like a carrier is supposed to) combined with actual "real" financing of the hardware (at competitive rates, nonetheless) they essentially committed DeadBeat Carrier Blashphemy. The only issue was, it worked, to the chagrin of the competition - reference:

- The Death Of The Deadbeat Carriers, Part 2 - Apple Avoideth, Google Destroyeth
- Death Of The Deadbeat Carrier, part 3 - Home Internet Access Unplugged!

Reggie Middleotns Carrier Cost Comparison

Reggie Middleotns Carrier Subsidy Cost Comparison

As a matter of fact, in Deadbeat Carriers Compete, aka #MarginCompression!!! (exactly ONE year ago), I prognosticated that T-Mobile will kick off a pricing war that will bring about the greatest savings to the wireless consumer it has seen since the birth of the industry. I even went so far as to include and online interactive spreadsheet for readers to analyze their own savings - or potential therefore.

Well, fast forward to today and we get to see if Reggie's thesis is still holding water. From the Street.com in How the Consumer Wins In the Wireless Wars:

Carriers are engaging in a price war in order to win market share, with T-Mobile's "uncarrier" plans really shaking things up. T-Mobile has been aggressively trying to grab market shares by eliminating consumer "pain points," specifically the issue of locking customers into two-year contracts. T-Mobile has been rolling out programs to entice customers to switch their carrier, with the latest three offerings announced in April, where the company under the "Simple Starter," "Tablet Freedom" and "Overage Freedom" - eliminated all domestic overage charges for consumers, even those on legacy plans. T-Mobile had announced in March 2013 its "Simple Choice" plan that offered no annual service contract and low out-of-pocket costs on smartphones.

The company must be doing something right, given its impressive first-quarter subscriber growth of 2.4 million total net customer additions for the three months, making it the "fastest growing wireless company in America," it said in its earnings release last week.

Both Verizon and AT&T are combating T-Mobile by touting payment agreements for customersthat require little to no down payment, more data, and fewer service charges when it comes to multiple phones or being able to pay for the device itself in installments as appealing features to switch over. (Check with your carrier to see the latest offers available.)

That said, it's easy for consumers to get confused by the growing array of options, but it's clear that for once, the consumer is winning since costs associated with smartphones are becoming more transparent and understandable. "This trend, combined with a wider selection of fully functional mid-range and low-end devices, should help win over the undecided consumers but also will shift the growth away from the high end," Kantar stated.

Between the first quarter of 2013 and the first quarter of this year, spending on smartphones on contracts dropped to $93 from $119, while pre-pay spending dropped to $148 from $187, Kantar said.

Now, the mainstream media and sell side analytical community is just a year (or two) late in realizing this, but better late then never, eh? Also from the Street.com we have Why T-Mobile Is Beating AT&T and Verizon:

T-Mobile US shares were surging 8.1% to $31.67 following news that larger rival Sprint was prepping plans to propose a buyout of the carrier as its impressive subscriber growth for the first-quarter shows that consumers are digging its offerings.

T-Mobile, known for its "Un-carrier" initiatives, has been aggressively trying to grab market share by eliminating consumer "pain points," specifically the issue of locking customers into two-year contracts like Verizon , Sprint and AT&T . T-Mobile has been rolling out programs to entice customers to switch their carrier, with the latest three offerings announced in April, where the company under the "Simple Starter," "Tablet Freedom" and "Overage Freedom" - eliminated all domestic overage charges for consumers, even those on legacy plans. T-Mobile had announced in March 2013 its "Simple Choice" plan that offered no annual service contract and low out-of-pocket costs on smartphones.

The company must be doing something right, given its impressive first-quarter subscriber growth.

T-Mobile reported first-quarter earnings results earlier this morning in which it boasted 2.4 million total net customer additions for the three months, which included more than 1.8 million branded net customer additions, making it the "fastest growing wireless company in America," it said in its earnings release. T-Mobile ended the quarter with 49.1 million customers, it said. On the other hand, the company experienced "record low" churn of 1.5%, down 20 basis points from the fourth quarter and down 40 basis points from the year-earlier period.

... T-Mobile actually posted a net loss of $151 million, or 19 cents a share, for the three months ending March 31, compared to a profit of $106 million, or 20 cents a share in the year-earlier quarter, according to its quarterly filing. However, revenue at the Bellevue, Wash.-based company rose 47% to $6.87 billion year over year.

... Adjusted EBITDA came in at $1.1 billion, down 12.2% sequentially, which it attributed to increased equipment sales due to the "significant acceleration in customer growth and the success of its Un-carrier 4.0 - Contract Freedom offer." Adjusted EBITDA margin was 20% compared to 24% in the fourth quarter of 2013.<story_page_break>

... T-Mobile expects branded postpaid net additions between 2.8 million and 3.3 million for the full year and adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $5.6 to $5.8 billion, it said.

Althouth T-Mobile may be hard pressed to replicate that pop in revenues and subscribers, I expect the trend to continue until and unless the other carriers match it in both pricing model and marketing efforts. I doubt they will do this until it is too late. They should, but they won't. That is unfortunate for thier investors for, as T-Mobile is the smallest of the top 4 national carriers, this is Verizon/ATT/Sprint's (in that order) fight to lose!

In addition, as revenue and subscriber rate increases subside, EBITDA may level off as the switching incentive costs amortize. This is not even considering what may happen if an entrepenurial and disruptive force (ex. Google Loon offshoots) appears on the scene.

Published in BoomBustBlog

Monday, 14 April 2014 11:50

Facebook Takes Life Seriously and Moves To Create Its Own Virtual Currency, Increases UltraCoin Valuation Significantly

For those who didn't get the memo, I've been toiling away in my lab creating the world's first "investment bank, securities brokerage, asset manager, money transfer agent" in-a-box that allows users to perform all of theses functions themselves on a ZeroTrust (meaning you don't need to trust or even know the other side of the transaction), peer to peer basis.

Well, it appears as quite a few of the big boys and heavy weights have a similar idea and are in the market to make acquisitions. Wouldn't it be ironic if UltraCoin (my iconic venture) was acquired before it gets its seed round???!!!

The Financial Times reports:

[Facebook] The social network is only weeks away from obtaining regulatory approval in Ireland for a service that would allow its users to store money on Facebook and use it to pay and exchange money with others, according to several people involved in the process.

The authorisation from Ireland’s central bank to become an “e-money” institution would allow Facebook to issue units of stored monetary value that represent a claim against the company. This e-money would be valid throughout Europe via a process known as “passporting”.

Facebook has also discussed potential partnerships with at least three London start-ups that offer international money transfer services online and via smartphones: TransferWise, Moni Technologies and Azimo, according to three people involved in the discussions.

In the case of Azimo, Facebook offered to pay the company $10m to recruit one of its co-founders as a director of business development, according to people familiar with the situation.

Yes, this space is heating up. It makes me feel good! You see, the Visas, Mastercards, Western Unions and Paypals of the world make a lot of money selling a relatively cheap services for a relatively large amount. BUT!!!! The Goldmans and JP Morgans of the world make much more money by selling very deep margined products and services for a lot more while paying a lot less to create them. It is here where UltraCoin has staked its ground. As the competition amongst the big boys starts to heat up, they will want to crawl up the food chain and I already have the ladder built!

Ultracoin dektop

“Facebook wants to become a utility in the developing world, and remittances are a gateway drug to financial inclusion,” said a person familiar with the company’s strategy. Facebook recently passed 100m users in India, which is its largest national market outside the United States.

My last post on this topic illustrated how UltraCoin will operate in developing markets by allowing currency, stock and financial asset exposure trades of anywhere from $5 dollars to $5 million, as well as sending money to others for just a little more than nothing, as excerpted from "Hardware IS Dead" Thesis Has Now Torn Through All Handset Providers & Now Everyone Can Act On It:

I've created an infrastructure that significantly expands these investment markets by allowing anyone, anywhere with an Internet connection (of almost any speed) to participate in almost any of the world's public financial markets. Taking the subject matter of this article into consideration, we can short Samsung on its own home exchange of Korea for nearly any amount, from $10 million US down to $8 ...

The Family 2095-2097 - Copy

These same young investors can even hedge thier currency translation risk with a Korean Won US dollar forex pair, for 55 basis points!

manage currency risk in Ultracoin while using it to short Samsung

Armed with the information from simply reading my blog posts, your brothers from Haiti or Botstwana can now take short positions in these (margin)doomed hardware manufacturers - taking the other side of the trade from these big name financial institutions that don't seem to read my writings.

These are young brothers from Haiti who sat through an UltraCoin lesson...

Back to the FT article:

It also comes as other internet groups – in particular, China’s Tencent and Alibaba – race to turn their sites into mobile payment platforms.

Google has reiterated its commitment to expanding its mobile payments and wallet products, which have yet to be widely adopted by consumers. It is registered in the UK to issue electronic money, in a process similar to the authorisation which Facebook is seeking in Ireland.

In 2013, the company [Facebook] facilitated $2.1bn worth of transactions, almost exclusively from games, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Vodafone has acquired an e-money licence for the phone company to operate financial services in Europe.

“It’s great news that non-banks are challenging the traditional banking monopoly,” said Simon Deane-Johns, a UK-based lawyer and European payments expert at law firm Keystone Law.

It will be interesting to see how the potential bidding contest will form as these companies compete to build the next generation financial infrastructure. I believe that I am very well positioned, as excerpted from yesterday's missive:

These are interesting times indeed. For those who are not aware of how far I've come in transforming the way value is traded across geo-political and socio-economic lines, I urge you to view the following video and/or peruse the embedded presentation below it.

Related BoomBustBlog research

Published in BoomBustBlog

Friday, 11 April 2014 10:25

My "Hardware IS Dead" Thesis Has Now Torn Through Every Major Handset Provider

I called the Apple short before it became vogue! I called the Blackberry short beforethey became the industry whipping boy! I warned about Nokia and made clear that Samsung Will Be Ready To Do That Fruit Thing! How'd I know all of this? It's quite simple, I explained it all in 2012 - Smartphone Hardware Manufacturers Are Dead. Well, now the chickens continue to come home to roost, as per CNBC:

In order to deal with such pressures, Samsung appears to be pricing the Galaxy S5 lower than its predecessor S4, according to Kang, who has collected pre-order prices for the device from around the world.

"It reflects the trend of smart phone commoditization – Samsung will have to learn to create profits at a lower price point," Kang said.

Earlier this week, Samsung said it's on track to post its second straight quarter of profit decline, as slowing smartphone sales growth continued to weigh on earnings.

Samsung Electronics 1Q profit view just shy of estimates

The South Korean tech giant estimated that its January-March operating profit fell by 4.3 percent to 8.4 trillion won, slightly below an average forecast of 8.5 trillion won, according to Reuters.

I've created an infrastructure that significantly expands these investment markets by allowing anyone, anywhere with an Internet connection (of almost any speed) to participate in almost any of the world's public financial markets. Taking the subject matter of this article into consideration, we can short Samsung on its own home exchange of Korea for nearly any amount, from $10 million US down to $8 ...

The Family 2095-2097 - Copy

These same young investors can even hedge thier currency translation risk with a Korean Won US dollar forex pair, for 55 basis points!

manage currency risk in Ultracoin while using it to short Samsung

Armed with the information from simply reading my blog posts, your brothers from Haiti or Botstwana can now take short positions in these (margin)doomed hardware manufacturers - taking the other side of the trade from these big name financial institutions that don't seem to read my writings.

These are kids that I taught UltraCoin to during my trip to Haiti a couple of weeks ago. Before you assume, the kids are actually quite bright and adept at math, and yes - kdis can easily trade with UltraCoin. My kids have been doing it for months!
thumb Slide16

My UltraCoin project will nearly double the available potential investors able to profit from these markets. By making the ability to participate in multi-asset class prices moves bi-directionally (that's right, long and short) I will be increase the liquidity of said markets by almost 2 billion people, as per McKinsey:

2.5 billion adults, just over half of the world’s adult population, do not use formal financial services to save or borrow.
2.2 billion of the unserved adults live in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Of the 1.2 billion adults who use formal financial services in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, at least two-thirds, a little more than 800 million, live on less than $5 per day (purchasing power parity adjusted).
Regulatory and policy environments, as well as the actions of individual financial services providers, affect usage levels in a way that is, to a large extent, independent of countries’ socioeconomic and demographic characteristics.

I just had the pleasure of meeting this young lady from Botswana who's trying to spearhead Bitcoin adoption in her country. I've made friends and I'm going to supply her with the means to have the whole country trading a whole variety (UltraCoin can trade more than 10,000 tickers - stocks, bonds, options, futures, indices) of financial assets very soon.

I'll leave it up to you to determine who'll win those trades. These are interesting times indeed. For those who are not aware of how far I've come in transforming the way value is traded across geo-political and socio-economic lines, I urge you to view the following video and/or peruse the embedded presentation below it.

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Published in BoomBustBlog

Monday, 24 March 2014 20:16

The Turkish Government Is About To Find Out Why Bitcoin Is Not A Bubble!!!

The Turkish government has exercised its censorship chops in banning Twitter in an attempt to quell distribution of anti-government recordings, and in the process has materially popularized the service, to wit: Forbes - Streisand Effect Takes Hold As Turkey Bans Twitter

In an attempt to halt widespread allegations of corruption, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has shuttered Twitter – but so ineffectively that the number of tweets sent in the country has remained unaffected.

Last night, Erdogan announced that, following a court order, Twitter was now disabled in the country. “We’ll eradicate Twitter,” he said. “I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.”

The Washington Post reports,Turkey bans Twitter — and Twitter explodes.
Of course, the Islamic leaning Aljazeera.com‎ says "Twitter users ridicule Turkey ban".

Leaked recordings shared on Twitter include one in which Erdogan allegedly instructs his son to dispose of cash [AP]

Turkish and global social media users have mocked moves by Turkey's government to restrict access to Twitter.

The hashtags #TwitterisblockedinTurkey and #Turkey blockedTwitter became the top trending topics globally on Friday, just hours after the Turkish government imposed the ban.

The number of tweets from Turkey reportedly rose by 138 percent as savvy Internet users, including the country's president Abdullah Gul, found it easy to circumvent the shutdown.

"The whole world is laughing at you #ErdoganBlockedTwitter," users tweeted, as dozens of images mocking the ban - including one showing Twitter birds covering Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's head in droppings - were shared on the platform.

Another popular tweet shared a poster of the prime minister on a Barack Obama campaign poster with the message, "Yes, we ban".

Erdogan on Thursday night promised to "root out" and wipe out" the social media platform after users published claims of corruption against him.

Leaked recordings shared and linked on Twitter include one in which Erdogan allegedly instructs his son to dispose of large amounts of cash from a residence amid a police corruption probe.

One method of ridicule was to go around the the blocking if the Twitter domain name by using Google's DNS (Domain Name Server) services which allowed anxious and potential Twitter users to find the Twitter website through Google's machinations. So, what does the Turkish government do? They blocked Twitter at the IP level and then went so far as to bank Google's DNS. This means that Turkey is attempting to block out a portion of the Internet, to wit: Turkey Blocks Google DNS as Erdogan Defends Twitter Action

Now here comes a quick education for the old fogey-type folk that declare Bitcoin is a bubble, ponzi scheme currency with no intrinsic value. If you recall my many videos that declare the value of Bitcoin is in the protocol, and not the unit of account that everyone is calling a currency, then you may realize that the Bitcoin technology can literally take the Turkish government down.

(go to time market 1:10 in the video for the explanation)

Those that know the Bitcoin protocol well know that it is an ideal method of overcoming centralized control in regards to value transfer. Well, it's easily assumable that website data access is value transfer as well. If anybody in Turkey is reading this, then email me and I'll show you how to step around even Erdogan's Google DNS ban using the Bitcoin derivative known as Namecoin - A peer-to-peer, censorship resistant, alternative DNS root and data storage technology. Using that "tulip" technology with "no intrinsic value", Namecoin facilitates cryptographically secure decentralized name and data storage.

According toWikipedia: Namecoin (sign: ℕ; code: NMC) is a cryptocurrency which also acts as an alternative, decentralized DNS, which would avoid domain namecensorship by making a new top level domain outside of ICANN control, and in turn, make internet censorship much more difficult, as well as reduce outages.[3][4][1][2][5][6][7][8]

Now, we all know that Krugman and Roubini and all of the not so technologically inclined macro economists may not believe that Bitcoin, et. al. has any intrinsic value, but if somebody like me led a "Coin" revolt in Turkey, do you think Erdogan would believe the economists or me in regards to the intrinsic value of this technology.

If you think Namecoin can be disruptive to the status quo, you aint't seen nothin' yet. Wait until the launch of UltraCoin, when those little Haitain kids in shacks out trade the Goldman prop desk on that BTC/AU pair trade.

That's right, I'm teaching 3rd world children how to trade using cryptocurrency derivatives and plain old fashioned derivatives. I'm comfortable pitting them against the names that the developed world worships, as long as its using this new tech. Let's see how they fair...

I just love the smell of creative disruption in the air. These pics were taken after some training sessions in Port au Prince, Haiti this weekend.

Published in BoomBustBlog

Sunday, 16 March 2014 15:49

Does Mt. Gox Mark The Beginning of the End for Bitcoin?

On or about February 23rd, 2014, Mt. Gox (on of the larger bitcoin exchanges) collapsed. The MSM (mainstream media) had a field day...

kapre

LA times on btc

yhoo on btc

I warned everybody that the fall of Mt. Gox was simply a poorly managed small business getting its just dues. To correlate the fortunes of Mt. Gox with the fortunes of the Bitcoin ecosystem is akin correlating the fortune of the World Wide Web with that of Pets.com or Alta Vista in the 1990s. Sounds silly doesn't it? Well, fast forward 3 weeks from the Gox'd experience and this is what we find... BTC volatility The week after the media frenzy regarding Mt. Gox started to fade, the price of BTC (bitcoins) started a dramatic phase of price stabilization. This apparent price stabilization was verified by the very dramatic drop in standard deviation.