A NEW INTERNET SECURITIES EXCHANGE?

Ms. S.H. shared this one, and it's so significant that it simply has to be passed along: Moves are afoot to create a kind of "bitcoin" alternative to the conventional stock market, one which has the potential, perhaps, to replace the various bourses around the world, including Wall Street:

Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock, has taken the first steps toward putting Wall Street out of business.

There's been much hype about bitcoin, and about how it bypasses bankers, but I remain skeptical for a variety of reasons. But those reasons aside, the idea behind bitcoin is being expanded now to securities markets:

"Basically, this new blockchain based securities exchange, which Byrne calls “Medici,” is a decentralized, open source, peer-to-peer, system that posts all transactions in chronological order on a public ledger. Under this system, users will be empowered to send money over the Internet simply and efficiently with little to no transaction fees depending on how the money is spent or traded.

Last Friday, thanks to Byrne and Overstock, the world’s first-ever cryptobond has officially been offered. According to the story, which first appeared in Politico, this is a huge deal. Here’s why:

“This system would do something no other stock exchange has ever done. It would skip the centralized clearinghouse entirely, and keep track of trading, clearance, and ownership on everyone’s computers at once. It would transform processes that now depend on centralized institutions for trust, and let people instead transact directly with one another.”

This is the SEC’s first move in regulating Bitcoin 2.0. For many people, Bitcoin seems like a crazy futuristic type of currency that will never take off. But those people tend not to be informed about the technology behind it. The same thing happened when email was created. People didn’t understand the point of it or what it meant and many of them poo-pooed it. It’s now hard to even imagine a world where email didn’t exist.(Emphases are in the original)

There are a number of potentialities that all this poses, but the one that alarms me the most concerns all such "internet" and "electronic" based systems: records, regardless of the security or encryption, are ultimately liable to be hacked. We are assured that the new systems are secure. We were also assured that God Himself could not sink the Titanic. The point here is that electronic information-based systems are the new version of cannon versus armor: security systems and encryption evolve, countermeasures are developed to penetrate them, and a cycle begins.

At stake is the information itself, and its vulnerability to sudden deletion or alteration. This is what has concerned me about ebooks of any sort, especially those systems named after the suggestive idea that they are designed to burn books, to burn, or alter, the information they contain. For this reason, I have always urged people that if books are worth the purchase, then the physical copy is worth owning and holding.

The same, it seems to me, holds even more true with media of exchange, and the necessity to maintain analogue systems of actual physical media of exchange - currency, coinage, securities - and their actual physical movement and transfer. Indeed, this is a redundancy in case any purely digital system should break down. Don't get me wrong, I use electronic currency just as much as anyone else. But I also continue to use cash and paper checks to create a physical backup trail should electronic systems fail. Thus, I remain skeptical of the touted advantages and supposed privacy of such crypto-currencies and now, crypto-securities. If it was easy before to bundle securities of dubious value into the "bundles" that caused the previous meltdown, think how much more easy it will be to do so under such circumstances.

There's a final high octane speculation to consider here: assume that all public financial exchange does move entirely digital: what will become of any hidden system of finance or black budget? THese can be handled digitally, of course, by all the standard tactics. But I suggest that hidden systems will continue to involve good old fashioned analogue physical currency and securities instruments, and their physical exchange. The alternative, of course, is a "dark internet" of finance. And with high frequency trading algorithms, and potential penetration of such systems, it becomes easy to imagine that in the milliseconds of trade executions, small amounts can be siphoned off, used for other things, profits taken, and then the original amounts restored as a trade is concluded. Think of it as a hidden system....

...on steroids.

See you on the flip side...

Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and "strange stuff". His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into "alternative history and science".

9 Comments

  1. basta on June 16, 2015 at 5:05 am

    As I understnd the proposal, completed trades cannot be hacked because all the data is open-sourced and diffuse, i.e, it resides on all servers connected to the network and so is completely transparent. This is a very powerful argument in its favor.

    However, how that works out in practice is another thing, and I don’t doubt that backdoors would be seeded and that hacks can and would be made to the architecture.

    As for skimming, well that’s already done today; in fact HFT is the very definition of institutionalized skimming on a massive scale. If the SEC truly wanted to close down the gambling den and return Wall Street to a functional bourse, all they must do is institute a small tax on each traded share, making the whole scam vastly more expensive. But we all know that taxes are for the peons, not the parasite class.

    And every financial transaction today is also being short-term skimmed: cash a check and it takes 3-4 days to clear while the sending and receiving banks play the markets in the meantime; buy a book from Amazon, for example, and they do the same before disbursing the meny to the small sellers. PayPal too, wire transfers are notorious for this.



  2. Robert Barricklow on June 15, 2015 at 9:39 am

    The bitcoin phenomenom is based upon it’s accessible, incorruptible block chain protocol’s platform upon which many digital vehicles/businesses can be launched. There appears to be a culture that understands this bitcoin protocol as incapable of being breached/hacked. Of course, these “can’t fly” scenarios are based upon “known” technologies. Still, it’s the wave of the future: decentralization. Out with the old and in with the new. There’s certainly been a push back; and now “they” are attempting to capture this technology – corral it, tame it, and monopolize it. So it is another evolutionary race of battling technologies, only this one is of a centralized order versus a decentralized one.



    • Robert Barricklow on June 15, 2015 at 10:09 am

      Which, in essence, mirrors the universe itself:
      a battle of entropy/energy; a ying/yang;
      an ongoing evolutionary battle, since before/time began.



      • Robert Barricklow on June 15, 2015 at 10:15 am

        nothing/something



  3. marcos toledo on June 15, 2015 at 9:12 am

    This legalizing the game of Monopoly a swindlers ,black operations, underworld paradise. Would you be able to trust your bank statements can you now. When we the useless eaters are declared bankrupt how long calls for the disposal of us parasites will be far behind. As for e-book horror stories I have heard of people being prevented from access to using them because of copyright issues or having books they purchase erase from their readers due to the same problem. And we have all dropped are electronic calculators in water you a imagine a e-book containing you library suffering the same fate good by library.



  4. loisg on June 15, 2015 at 8:36 am

    So, would the bit coin central operations be its own clearinghouse? In the final analysis, how would that be any different than the bank clearinghouses, as the same level of trust would have to be maintained, and we know how these things go. Yes, count me skeptical also.



  5. DanaThomas on June 15, 2015 at 7:36 am

    With the securitization process launched into cyberspace and perhaps outer space, what little “original Capitalism” remained in the system (i.e. investing money in “legitimate” business ventures) is now long gone.



  6. Aridzonan_13 on June 15, 2015 at 5:59 am

    IF we operated under the “Rule of Law” where all laws were enforced evenly: AND IF we did not have embedded spy ware, keystroke monitoring devices & secondary OS’s in most computing devices: THEN the idea of BitCoin might be acceptable ELSE This is not the case: BitCoin is the ultimate Cyber Rip Off. Becuz, there is no privacy in Cyber Space..



    • Aridzonan_13 on June 15, 2015 at 11:12 am

      The SHA-II/III? encryption algos are two of the underpinnings of BitCoin. It was written by NSA w/ admitted back doors. How can anyone expect a level playing field when you are dealing with Alphabet Agencies? My best guess is there are redundant surveillance systems built into all computing devices. And I would not be surprised if our cell phones are recording every keystroke from our computers as well as our texts.



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