Crypto Currents 04-27-2018

“Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history,” writes Bill Harris, former CEO of Intuit and founding CEO of PayPal and Personal Capital, in ReCode. Tired of telling investors to be careful, he decided to lay out his unvarnished argument: “The losers are ill-informed buyers caught up in the spiral of greed. The result is a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary families to internet promoters. And “massive” is a massive understatement — 1,500 different cryptocurrencies now register over $300 billion of “value.” It helps to understand that a bitcoin has no value at all.

Meanwhile, Business Insider invites you to “meet the traders, investors, and technologists pioneering crypto on Wall Street.” As regulators take a dim view of crypto exchanges and social media outlets say they will refuse cryptoasset ads, “trading, technology, and asset management executives are leaning in on digital assets and working on projects that could bring them front and center in mainstream financial services.”

Wall Street investors and technologists are looking to clean up the bitcoin exchange mess. Gemini Trust Co., led by Camron and Tyler Winklevoss, is relying on Nasdaq to provide trading oversight for bitcoin and ether.

And Central Banks, which definitely do not consider crypto money are exploring the use of blockchain technology in bank-to-bank settlement operations, as I report for PayThink in “Government digital currencies aren’t efficient enough for prime time.”