Monthly Archives: April 2017

Bryan Fischer’s Incoherent Theory Of The First Amendment Grows … – Right Wing Watch

Posted: April 12, 2017 at 8:21 am

As we have noted several times before, American Family Radios Bryan Fischer holds an utterly incoherent view of the First Amendment that allows him to continually insist that it only applies to Congress except for all the times when he insists that it applies to all sorts of other government entities.

Amazingly, Fischers theory regarding the scope and meaning of the First Amendment grew even more incoherent when he said on his radio program yesterday that a failure by the Supreme Court to strike down a provision in a state constitution prohibiting the use of public funds to aid religious institutions would be a violation of the First Amendment.

Fischer was discussing the upcoming Trinity Lutheran Church v. Pauley case, which The Atlantic summarized thusly:

At first glance, Trinity Lutheran is about resurfacing childrens playgrounds. Missouris Scrap Tire Program offers state funds to nonprofit groups that replace playground surfaces with recycled rubber. The church applied to the program in 2012 to replace the gravel surface of its playground, but the state rejected its application, citing a clause in Missouris state constitution that bars the use of state funds directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect, or denomination of religion.

Trinity Lutheran Church argued that that provision violates the U.S. Constitutions First Amendment by discriminating against religious organizations. Missouri countered that because it does not favor or disfavor any church over another, it meets the Establishment Clauses standards.

In the past, Fischer has repeatedly stated that the First Amendment applies to Congress and Congress alone Since Congress is the only entity restrained by the First Amendment, Congress is the only entity that can violate it. He has also argued that states are allowed the freedom under the Founders Constitution to regulate religious expression anyway they choose.

Despite the fact that just last year, Fischer insisted that the First Amendment only applies to Congress and that states are free to regulate religious expression in any way they would like without any interference from the federal government, he is now bizarrely demanding that the federal government, via the Supreme Court, strike down this clause in the Missouri constitution on the grounds that it violates the First Amendment.

The First Amendment is addressed to Congress, Fischer said, and Congress has all legislative power, so this is essentially an amendment that applies to all of the federal government. The whole federal government is covered by the First Amendment. What is Congress not allowed to do, according to the First Amendment? It is flatly prohibited from doing what? From prohibiting the free exercise of religion. So what is the Supreme Court forbidden to do in the case of Trinity Lutheran Church vs Pauley? It is absolutely, totally, as an instrument of the federal government, it is forbidden by the Constitution to limit, to prohibit, to restrict the free exercise of religion in any way. What are they doing if they say to the school, Youre not eligible for any public help because you engage in religious expression? You cannot find a more direct and more egregious violation of the First Amendment than for the Supreme Court, an agency of the federal government, to prohibit their expression of religious liberty.

Not only is Fischer insisting that the First Amendment applies to entities beyond Congress, despite repeatedly asserting exactly the opposite in the past, he is now also declaring that the federal government must nullify a provision in a state constitution pertaining to religious expression despite having previously proclaimed that states are free to regulate religious expression in any way they would like without any interference from the federal government.

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ROGER WICKER: Celebrate First Amendment religious freedoms … – Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal

Posted: at 8:21 am

ROGER WICKER

The First Amendment to our Constitution is a powerful expression of our right to the free exercise of religion. Americans can practice their faith without fear of persecution a freedom that is not found in all parts of the world.

For Christians in the United States, the prevalence of religious persecution worldwide is especially heartbreaking as we approach Easter Sunday. We are reminded of the suicide bomber who targeted Christians on Easter Sunday last year in Pakistan, killing more than 70 and injuring hundreds. Sadly, this violence is not isolated. Pakistan ranks fourth on this years World Watch List created by the nonprofit group Open Doors USA. The list names 50 countries that have extreme, very high and high persecution of Christians. North Korea ranked first.

I currently serve as chairman of the U.S. Helsinki Commission, an agency comprised of members of Congress and federal officials to promote security and human rights in 57 countries in North America, Europe and Eurasia. The persecution of Christians and religious minorities remains a significant concern for the commission. In Syria, the Islamic State has waged a genocide against Christians, forcing thousands from their homes and destroying religious sites. In Russia, the governments recent attempt to ban Jehovahs Witnesses from practicing their faith is yet another affront to religious freedom in a country known for trampling human rights. Russias actions refute the international agreement that the U.S. Helsinki Commission seeks to uphold.

I have consistently supported legislative measures to protect Americans constitutional freedoms, including the exercise of religion. Political agendas should not encroach these rights. During the Obama administration, for example, I championed legislation that would allow military chaplains to refrain from performing marriage ceremonies if it would violate their conscience to do so. The religious expression of our military men and women is deserving of respect.

The same respect should be afforded to all Americans by our government agencies. I am encouraged by recent reports that President Trump is considering an executive order that would require federal agencies to protect the freedom of religion in their actions and policies. Earlier this month, I sent a letter with 17 other senators to President Trump expressing our support for this executive action and the need for federal agencies to follow the rule of law.

The letter reminds the President of attempts by the Obama administration to infringe on the rights of faith-based charities like the Little Sisters of the Poor. Obamacare forced the group either to pay a fine or offer services that they opposed for deeply held religious reasons. A Supreme Court ruling reaffirmed the religious liberty of the Little Sisters, just as it did for the owners of Hobby Lobby, who also raised religious objections to the health-care law.

Our founding documents built a foundation for religious liberty that is admired around the world. It is up to us to ensure that this foundation does not crumble.

Roger Wicker is a U.S. Senator from Mississippi. Contact him at 330 W. Jefferson St., Tupelo, MS 38803 or call (662) 844-5010.

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Time to Go Nuclear Against Anti-Internet Privacy Laws – thebolditalic

Posted: at 8:19 am

GIF courtesy of 20th CenturyFox

Last week, most congressional Republicans voted to let Internet service providers (ISPs), the companies that pipe the Internet to consumers, harvest intimate online user data for profit. Since the big ISPs, such as Comcast, have near-monopoly power in most of this country, the only way for a consumer to opt out of this kind of data harvesting would be to not have a home Internet connection.

For the privacy-minded citizen, tech sites like Gizmodo recommend covering ones tracks by using virtual private networks (VPNs) or a Tor browser, which anonymizes traffic. But there are downsides to those options, especially if youre the kind of person who wants no-hassle access to the web.

And since most of us arent up to anything particularly nefarious, its not about anonymity so much as valuing the sanctity of the private details of our lives. This includes such chestnuts as personal health info and the sweet nothings shared by lovers. Cant all of us who arent Republican congresspeople and telecom-company execs agree that some things are sacred and shouldnt be profited off of?

Rather than hide, perhaps it would be most effective to render our information worthless to these greedy corporations. Please allow me to share an idea as to how we might take back our privacy from the powers that be.

The reason missile defense systems dont work in real life is that theres no good way to tell the difference between an actual nuclear missile and a fake one. If any industrious evildoer wants to get their missile past an antimissile defense system (like the one the US is installing in South Korea), all they have to do is overwhelm the detectors with dummy missiles.

Similarly, its time to go nuclear on the ISPs and the whole advertising-funded model of the web. They want to track our data and advertise to us? I say fineyou want my data? Ill give you data. SO MUCH DATA. Lets blow the system up.

Much like evading a missile defense system, the way to throw smoke into the eyes of enemy ISPs is to send forth a deluge of bogus information, flowing abundantly through the gnashing jaws of their ravenous data munchers.

The whole web advertising system is predicated on the idea that some fancy algorithms can get a decent idea of who are you from analyzing what content moves to and from your Internet-connected device.* On your computer, all the juicy profile data youre producing as you browse on your home WiFi connection will now be fair game to Comcast, AT&T, etc. And dont believe what they are saying now about respecting privacythese are terrible companies that will take you for everything youre worth.

A simple way to combat this would be for everyone to mix a lot of fake data in with their real data. But rather than spending lots of time fake browsing, ideally someone could create a program or a device to automatically fake-browse for you. Maybe this already exists, but Im searching through the Internets, and surprisingly, I cant find anything that precisely fits the bill. Yes, theres Internet Noise, a nifty program that adds random Internet nonsense to your browsingbut data munchers wont have much of a problem sifting out your real data from such a crude, randomized approach.

But what if someone came up with an approach that worked? Would you spend $5 on a device that you could plug into your computer in order to make your info worthless to marketers? Perhaps a USB dongle that has a program on it that acts as a virtual computer mouse. No physical hardware need be involved. Just a virtual device that, to the computer, is indistinguishable from a real peripheral device, since all the computer sees is commands anyway. The USB virtual mouse would be loaded with preprogrammed click schemes. You plug the device in, and the program opens a browser and starts clicking through pages. It enters in bogus information to text boxes it encounters along the way. When it gets to CAPTCHAs, it takes a different route, or perhaps it holds the page and waits for you to fill it in. Low tech is good tech.

Instead of feeding in a bunch of random searches like Internet Noise, I imagine computer labs full of teens furiously surfing the web, recording a diverse array of click schemes. Or perhaps a crowdsourced situation. Libraries of these human-generated web journeys would be uploaded onto the device. The important thing is keeping an analog-based solution to make it impossible to tell whether the clicks are coming from the real owner of a specific laptop or a deluge of fake data.

This phantom mouse could run around the web while youre away from your computer. Or maybe run in the background so that during all hours your computer is generating reams of fake browsing data.

If even a small portion of Internet users started doing this, enough doubt would infect the system, and the targeted Internet advertising business as we know it would crumble. Then we could all join Medium, pay our five bucks a month and live happily, advertisinglessly ever after.

Well, not really. Thered still be browsing data from your phone. I dont think running a program like this on an iPhone would be feasible. Maybe an Android device would be easier since they dont police their apps to the same degree as Apple. Also, this would throw the ball back into the court of Google and Facebook, who would still have plenty of data from your profile/account to target you well. But suddenly, Facebook and Google are looking a lot less insidious than they did a few weeks ago. And given how thoroughly dystopian last week was, thats saying something!

Heres a crazy idea: What if consumers could take control of their own data and then allow certain companies they like to opt-in for a price to their real information? But not ISP-creeper profile informationrather, relevant information the consumer feels open to sharing. For instance, I could give my favorite musical-instrument company the option of paying me or giving me discounts to tell them what Im interested in. This could be information I actively give them of my own free will that is relevant to my instrument buying. Heck, maybe I could get a free subscription to the New York Times or whatever news websites/blogs I dig in exchange for opting in to some targeted advertising. Wouldnt that feel much more aboveboard than this surreptitious profile building? And then they could send me deals. And then maybe Id buy stuff!

We cant just hand over our privacy to the biggest bribers of Congress. Until these products and services are implanted under our skin (oh, wait, its already happening!), we still have some say in this.

Maybe it seems benign at the moment, given all the other dire political stuff that is happeningthe lifting of environmental regulations, airstrikes killing civilians in Mosul, our government being infiltrated by Russiabut really, what the heck can you do about any of that? I have no idea! Whereas we still have a modicum of agency over our basic privacies.

Capitulating on this issue means pissing away fundamental, freedom-loving American value. Five years ago, such legalized intrusions would have seemed unfathomable. If Congress can sell us out so quickly and thoroughly, whats next?

My proposal may not be the most elegant solution, but I havent heard anyone else come up with anything better. Somehow, weve got to do something to stop corporations from violating the sanctity of your silly sexts and the stupid pictures you send to your mom.

*But the good news is that for the most part, your phone data isnt going through an ISP, and your phone company still isnt allowed to capture and sell your phone data. Phone connections are still defined as a public utility, whereas this new move by Congress stops laws going into effect that were going to make Internet connections subject to that same public-utility designation. So another pricey solution could be doing all your computing through data plans provided by your phone company.

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Mixing Penny Stock With New Cryptocurrency Does Really Not Improve Either – Forbes

Posted: at 8:19 am


Forbes
Mixing Penny Stock With New Cryptocurrency Does Really Not Improve Either
Forbes
Almost all the coverage you will find about Sunshine Capital Inc is press releases by Sunshine Capital Inc. Sunshine trades over the counter and is currently priced at $6.00 per share making it, in the view of my stick in the mud investor adviser, a ...

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Is bitcoin here to stay? Why cryptocurrency isn’t just a fad – Cambridge News

Posted: at 8:19 am

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin should no longer be considered a passing fad, according to Cambridge experts who have carried out the first in-depth study of the sector.

The first global benchmarking study of cryptocurrency, encrypted digital currency used to make online payments, has been carried by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) at the Judge Business School, and shows that millions of individuals are actively using cryptocurrency.

Indeed, the study found there are between 5.8 million and 11.5 million wallets where bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies are stored active in the world today. If the average person has two wallets, this means there are between 2.9 million and 5.8 million individual active users of cryptocurrency today.

It also notes that more than 1,800 people are now working full time in the cryptocurrency industry, as more companies are engaged across various cryptocurrency sectors.

Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have been seen by some as merely a passing fad or insignificant, but that view is increasingly at odds with the data we are observing, said Dr Garrick Hileman, research fellow at the CCAF, who co-authored the study with Michel Rauchs, research assistant at the organisation.

Currently, the combined market value of all cryptocurrencies is $27bn, which represents a level of value creation on the order of Silicon Valley success stories like Airbnb. The advent of cryptocurrency has also sparked many new business platforms with sizable valuations of their own, along with new forms of peer-to-peer economic activity.

Though bitcoin was the first decentralised cryptocurrency to emerge, in 2009, there are now hundreds of cryptocurrencies that are being traded. While bitcoin remains the best known and dominant cryptocurrency both in terms of market capitalisation and usage, it has conceded market cap share to other cryptocurrencies declining from 86% to 72% in the past two years. This is further evidenced by the fact that 39% of wallets already offer multi-cryptocurrency support, and nearly one third of those currently without multi-cryptocurrency support have this feature on their roadmap.

Robert Wardrop, co-founder and a director of the CCAF, said: This benchmarking study sheds light on the burgeoning cryptocurrency industry and comprehensively examines the global development of exchanges, wallets, payments and mining sectors. It demonstrates that cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin are undergoing some profound changes in how digital assets are transacted, stored, channelled and generated. The findings of this study will serve to advance useful academic and policy research in to cryptocurrencies and its many implications.

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EY Supporting Global Cryptocurrency BOScoin – Yahoo Finance

Posted: at 8:19 am

NEW YORK, April 10, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- BlockchainOS has engaged EYC3, EY's Asia-Pacific data and analytics capability, to support development of the BOScoin cryptocurrency.

EY's footprint across 150 countries, their global experience in blockchain and cryptocurrency coupled with their leading data and analytics capabilities are critical to the strategy behind the platform.

"EY is very excited to support the BOScoin Platform and sees a very strong potential in blockchain technology for both consumers and businesses," Gwang Rim Yi, Partner for EYC3 Seoul office.

EY will utilise their expertise in the governance realm, drawing from their wide range of experience it has from working with global enterprises and applying it to the BOScoin platform's self-evolving governance system.

"Having the support from such a renowned firm provides us with the global reach and will help provide direction to the design of the platform," CK Park, Chairman of BOScoin.

Most recently BlockchainOS presented the BOScoin platform concept at meetups in Berlin and London, answering questions from the wider community on various interest areas including technical, architecture and design; to applications, operations and governance.

BOScoin is a self-evolving cryptocurrency platform for Trust Contracts. Trust Contracts are self-executing programs on the blockchain similar to smart contracts. BOScoin Trust Contracts provide the foundations for a secure, self-evolving system where non-technical users can also create immutable and shareable contracts on the blockchain.

With US$3 million raised from pre-ICO funding, the official ICO scheduled to commence in a month's time invites the public to participate in the international cryptocurrency platform.

Website - https://boscoin.io Email - contact@boscoin.io

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Financial Spring Cleaning: For Bitcoin, Save All Records – Forbes

Posted: at 8:18 am


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Financial Spring Cleaning: For Bitcoin, Save All Records
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That's a warning sign to taxpayers that they need to stop underreporting their bitcoin income, because it will become a point of enforcement by the IRS in the future, says Tyson Cross, tax attorney and founder of Cross Law Group and ...

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Bitcoin touches 3-week high as Russia mulls recognizing it as a currency – MarketWatch

Posted: at 8:18 am

The price of a single bitcoin on Tuesday climbed to its highest level in three weeks following reports that Russian authorities might recognize the worlds most popular digital currency as a legitimate financial instrument some time next year.

If true, this would represent a regulatory about-face for the Russian government, which had previously threatened to jail anyone caught using the worlds most popular digital currency. The story was first reported by Bloomberg News.

The price BTCUSD, -0.58% of a single coin traded as high as $1,232 on Tuesday.

After falling sharply during the second half of March, the bitcoin price recovered over the past week as a controversy over a proposed software update that wouldve expanded bitcoins ability to process transactions threatened to split bitcoin into two separate tokens has appeared to subside. Also, a Japanese law that will allow large financial institutions to participate in the bitcoin market finally took effect at the beginning of the month.

Chris Burniske, blockchain analyst and products lead at ARK Invest, said that, although the market appears to be pricing in a resolution to the debate about how to increase the processing speed of the bitcoin network, the issue is hardly settled.

There are still some hurdles the community has to overcome, Burniske said.

Adding to the encouraging regulatory news, China-based OkCoin announced on Tuesday that it had officially updated its anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer policies, leading to speculation that OkCoin, one of Chinas big three exchanges, could reinstate customer withdrawals as soon as April 23, according to Charles Hayter, chief executive officer of CryptoCompare, a provider of bitcoin data and analytics.

The ecosystem is maturing and a dose of regulation in the right form can only help to support the space, Hayter said.

In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission rejected two proposed bitcoin exchange-traded funds on the grounds that it would be difficult for exchanges to provide the necessary market oversight to prevent market manipulation and other unsavory practices.

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Bitcoin BTC) miners have earned more than $2 billion from rewards … – Quartz

Posted: at 8:18 am


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Bitcoin BTC) miners have earned more than $2 billion from rewards ...
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Bitcoin mining has become a multi-billion dollar industry. Bitcoin miners have collectively earned over $2 billion in revenue since the cryptocurrency was ...

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Meet the millennials making big money riding China’s bitcoin wave – The Guardian

Posted: at 8:18 am

On a sunny afternoon in west Beijing, on the auspicious eighth floor of a nondescript concrete high-rise, Huai Yang sits with the curtains drawn in his apartment, making his own luck.

For the past six months, 27-year-old Yang has worked mainly from home, mainly from his sofa, tracking and trading bitcoin, and watching the money roll in. The flat itself is modestly sized; Yang moved in in his pre-bitcoin days when he worked variously for a crowdfunder start-up, a branding consultancy and dabbled in hedge-fund management, all of which he describes as creative financial work. Now, though, his main focus is bitcoin, which is much younger, more fun, and much more money. Yang claims to make up to 1m yuan (116,000) a month, under the radar of the taxman, purely from trading the online cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin has no physical form but the rewards are very tangible; Yangs home is packed full of expensive gadgetry, most prominently a mega-sized flat screen smart board, over a metre wide, which Yang uses to chart bitcoins rise and fall in HD.

Normally, the graphs on Yangs screen show bitcoins and his own fortunes going up and up. At the time of writing, one bitcoin is worth 6,600 yuan (768) recent months have seen the value hover well above 8,000 yuan. The global worth of bitcoin is over $14bn USD (11.3bn), of which over 90% is in yuan, and Yang and his peers are cashing in. I want a more splendid life, he says.

Theres certainly big money to be made in bitcoin, but it comes at a high risk. Bitcoin was designed to be a peer-to-peer currency, free from interference from government and central banks. Since the currency was launched in 2009, however, the Chinese market, where government interventions are common, has come to dwarf all others.

One such intervention took place in February this year, when the government warned that there would be serious violations for trading platforms that failed to abide by strict money-laundering regulations. In line with this, OKCoin and Huobi.com, the two biggest exchanges in China, announced that they would be suspending bitcoin withdrawals for one month.

Incidents like these, which Yang sees as not convenient, but not [a] problem, give Chenxing (who asked that I only use his first name) pause for thought. Chenxing, a boyish, skittish 35, has been trading bitcoin for the past four months, after giving up his too comfortable job as a geo-information engineer for the government. The governments pressure on bitcoin platforms is not so easy to understand, he tells me. Im not sure its really about money laundering they try to control [bitcoin], but they cannot.

For Chenxing, its the system itself that is vulnerable: Technology changes every day, he explains. Maybe tomorrow a hacker can find a way to crack bitcoin the security is from mathematics. If you can crack the mathematics, bitcoin is nothing. Thats why, even though Chenxing describes himself as a believer in bitcoin, he doesnt plan to stay involved for the long term.

Its really not a stable thing, he says, both in terms of fluctuating prices and the uncertain technological future of the cryptocurrency. That said, hes still making more money than in his previous government job. In a good month, Chenxing will pocket the cash value of around five bitcoin, which is close to 40,000 yuan, and which Chenxing prefers to have in cold, hard cash.

Chenxing is something of an anomaly in Chinese bitcoin circles, where the general mood is one of evangelical faith in the currencys potential, especially in an economy where the government often devalues the national currency.

Brendan Gibson, 32, is a United States national who has been in China for six years, trading bitcoin for three. Weve barely sat down to talk when Gibson takes my phone and downloads the BTC Wallet app onto it, before transferring me the seeds of my cryptocurrency fortune: 0.0027 bitcoin, worth 2.50, which is the amount that everyone in the world would have if the 21m bitcoin in existence were equally divided up between all 7.8 billion of us. He believes that everybodys aunt or grandma should be using bitcoin.

For Gibson, bitcoin is a way of life. He hopes to be completely bank free in the near future. Hailing from the shady mortgage industry of corporate America, Gibson shares Chenxings distrustful attitude, but is more concerned about private banks than bitcoins technological vulnerability. Im just kind of fed up with the system, he tells me over coffee in a slick caf and co-working space from where Gibson does most of his work remotely.

I dont think economies should be built on inflated numbers, and I think its kind of ridiculous that everybody relies on this inflated number in their bank account when its definitely not there bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are making it so that we are our own banks, and thats one less things we have to worry about. Gibson owns two companies in China, and as far as possible uses bitcoin for all his daily expenses, converting the personal profits he makes into bitcoin to avoid using banks.

One of the commonly cited weaknesses in the bitcoin system is that if you lose your private key to access your bitcoin wallet, the bitcoin within are lost forever. In 2015, it was estimated that up to 30% of all mined bitcoins had been lost, with a value of 625m. Unsurprisingly, plenty of people see this as an opportunity to make some money.

Sun Zeyu, 27, works at a tech start-up based near Beijings university district that specialises in bitcoin. His latest project is Coldlar, an offline, physical wallet that stores users bitcoin and can be accessed by scanning a QR code. Bitcoin security is a tough question, Sun tells me, which is why he and his colleagues designed a product that allows people to circumvent bitcoin platforms and have even greater control over their bitcoin. Now that the value [of bitcoin] is going up, he explains, people really realise the importance of security.

Before, when we just traded one or two coins, people didnt mind, [but] now the value of bitcoin is much bigger. Sun got involved with bitcoin while at university after attending a seminar run by Huobi, one of the biggest trading platforms in China. Like his flashier friend Yang, Sun wanted money, and lots of it. He wont tell me exactly how much he earns, but assures me that its hundreds or thousands times more than the 10,000 yuan per month he was earning when he first dabbled in bitcoin three years ago.

His money comes from both his trading activity and his company salary. With the growth of bitcoin and related products like his Coldlar wallet, Sun believes that in 10 years time, the value of the cryptocurrency will be one bitcoin, one house in Beijing. Minor shocks to the system, like the recent suspension of bitcoin withdrawals in China, are just like breathing, he insists, and the inhalations of profit dwarf any other bumps in the road.

Despite the solitary nature of their work, Yang, Sun, Gibson and Chenxing are all sociable creatures. Gibson is connected to hundreds of bitcoin aficionados in China, and has introduced close to 1,000 new people to the technology (although how many are like me, with 2.50 lying dormant in an unused wallet, is unknown), such is his enthusiasm for the cryptocurrency. Chenxing cites the social side of the bitcoin scene in Beijing as one of the main attractions of staying in the industry and the city.

I can meet some fun people who really love bitcoin I think most of the people who like bitcoin are people who like freedom he says. Yang, however, takes a slightly harder-edged approach. He has little patience for sceptics: Yes, bitcoin is a risk. Why should I have to discuss these things with [people concerned about the security]? I earn my money, thats enough. I dont waste my time explaining bitcoin [if] youre not my client. In some ways, Yang concedes, the less people understand bitcoin, the better it is for him. At the moment, the industry is like an ATM for him and his peers, and hes perfectly happy for things to stay that way.

In the fast-changing world of the crypto-currency, nothing seems to stay the same for long. Whether its unpredictable government interventions, or debates within the community about how the industry can and should be scaled, general growth in value thus fair doesnt necessarily suggest anything about the future of bitcoin, despite the faith of its adherents. Gibson makes the point that bitcoin has only been around for nine years; it took PayPal at least 10 to properly catch on.

In Japan it has recently been recognised as legal tender. Its unlikely that the same could ever happen in China, no matter how much its popularity continues to balloon. Chenxing, who has years of insider experience, is sure that [the government] will never accept a thing thats not built by themselves. Many bitcoin traders in China are in it for the long haul, confident that they can ride out any governmental interferences, as long as they have access to the internet. Chenxing, however, is more paranoid. His final thoughts on bitcoin are: I never feel secure.

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Meet the millennials making big money riding China's bitcoin wave - The Guardian

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