Cryptocurrency News March 20 – initial news offering

Yeah I’m the tax man (frowning)

One Reddit user has found themselves in hot water after not paying hot startup the Inland Revenue Service. Naturally CNBC had a normal take that didn’t involve an IRS bill, versus reading the post itself:

I just discovered that I owe the IRS $50k that I don’t have, because I traded in cryptos. Am I fucked? from personalfinance

There are so many of these posts where people are using Reddit as one big accountancy firm, despite very few of them actually being a CPA or a tax attorney. So the advice is anywhere between “you’ll be fine” and “you’re going to jail, good luck in there.”

The not so fantastic Mr. Ripple

Business Insider’s amazingly-named Oscar Williams-Grut wrote a good piece on XRP and its relationship to Ripple, the company that owns XRP, which is also called Ripple. What’s important here is to realize that Ripple is not XRP (Ripple) and that XRP is a product made by Ripple (not XRP).

“XRP is payment protocol and cryptocurrency that is “fine-tuned for transactions,” according to Marcus Treacher, Ripple’s Global Head of Strategic Accounts. Note, that Marcus Treacher is not the Global Head of Strategic Accounts at XRP (Ripple) but at Ripple (not XRP). They also call it Ripple Labs, which developed Ripple (XRP, not the company Ripple):

While the people behind both XRP and Ripple are the same, the company insists that the open source nature of the network and the fact that XRP can be publicly bought and sold means that Ripple is not “behind” XRP — merely tangentially linked to it.

Totally makes sense – kind of like how Toyota builds Toyota Camrys, but when you buy one and drive it off it now becomes just a Camry, right?

Crash corner

Now that we’ve gone a full 3 months from when Bitcoin was worth $19,000, habitual FUD-churner CNBC has decided to change its cycle to “Bitcoin is going to fail.” Morgan Stanley’s Sheena Shah has said that Bitcoin’s rally apparently was 15 times faster than when the NASDAQ went crazy in 2000. Which is funny. Why? Because they brought up Tether, in a shocking move that also betrays a complete, willful lack of understanding of reality. Considering these guys seem really good at paying dearly for messing around with subprime assets, they really should be able to see the writing on the wall – or, indeed, pay well to find wherever the mysterious bank that matches dollars to mysterious crypto-dollars. Or maybe they don’t want to! Either way, not sure what point I’m getting at here but I’m tired of these articles, mostly because they’re really boring and you could easily make a chart of CNBC stories about Bitcoin going up or down. Nevertheless I write this newsletter every day.

Garage Inc.

A picture of our garage – A „thank you“ for everything that Bitcoin teached me and gave me! from Bitcoin

John McAfee update: suspended

I wear belts with s suspenders. I carry too much armam3nts on my belt to be able to function without suspenders

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) March 19, 2018