American Consequences - January 2019

is working on a similar platform. So is Citigroup. Other companies are buying their way in. Goldman Sachs partnered with BitGo (a blockchain security company)... Japanese investment bank Nomura partnered with Ledger, who makes hardware to protect cryptos. What we’re witnessing is a technological cold war involving traditional financial institutions. These companies know the crypto industry’s going to be massive. And they’re quietly positioning themselves to take advantage of it. They’re preparing for the next wave of new buyers. And the next wave will be bigger than anything we’ve ever seen. I’ve seen the preludes already. Looking back at 2013, we saw the first major wave of new crypto investors. Back then, the market jumped from thousands of participants to millions. Wave two came in 2017. The market size catapulted from the millions to the tens of millions. And starting in 2019, the market’s going to go through a third wave. This time, it’ll go from tens of millions to hundreds of millions. And we’re going to see one of the biggest supply crunches of our lifetimes.

FIXING BITCOIN’S SECOND FATAL FLAW By design, the total world supply of bitcoin will only ever reach 21 million. Over time, we’ve been climbing toward that number as more bitcoin are awarded to the mining computers that power the bitcoin network. Right now, there are technically 17.4 million bitcoins in existence. But guess what? There aren’t! That’s bitcoin’s second fatal flaw. If you lose access to your bitcoin, everyone else does, too. They’re gone forever. Nearly 3 million bitcoins have already been lost. They were put into virtual “safes” by an owner who then lost the key. They’ll never, ever come out. People lost their passwords, or they lost their “wallets” completely. There’s no recovering from this. Another 2 million bitcoins have been stolen. Their status is unknown, but they’ll probably never return to the market. And another 1 million belong to bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. That’s a pseudonym. Nobody knows if Nakamoto is a person or a group. But these coins are likely gone forever.

What we’re witnessing is a technological cold war involving traditional financial institutions.

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