Standard Coin. FIX, Blue circle

I have an account at SOAPCOIN and have made a lot on several ICOs.

ICOs, what is that?

Initial Coin Offering, when new coins are released you can get in at the ground floor. Many of them don't go anywhere, but the ones that do pay off a hundred times over, maybe more.

I thought they shut all this stuff down, it was all fake, people spending money for nothing but numbers.

In general, the cryptocurrencies weren't fake. They were overspeculated and some of the buyers didn't exist, they were bots, using other coin to buy coin. Since one measure of money is velocity it appeared as if the value was higher than it actually was.

So its like the tulips thing, endless speculation.

Well, most people get the "tulips thing" wrong. Tulip bulbs had an actual value, inflated or not, you could hold the bulb in your hand.  What did them in was speculation. Holland goofed. A legal loophole  allowing contracts for fractional interests in tulip bulbs. These were needed because the price of popular new bulbs was higher than even rich individuals could afford. The result, if you had two coppers of discretionary income, you could buy 1/1000 of a high end bulb, this is called monetiztion and it is almost unstoppable. The keypoint is the contract value becomes decoupled from the value of the underlying asset. Fake wealth, leading to fake news about fake wealth.

By the time 1637 rolled around, contract values were up to 20 times the actual bulb value, the government tried to regain control, failed and the crash happened. Currency, especially cryptocurrency, is hard is hard I will give you that. They can't announce in public or anything, but since some of the money is used for drugs, prostitution terrorism, it will never go away. And, there are some law abiding upstanding people that just do not trust the government.

Look, if you want to gamble, it is not my place to tell you how to spend your money, but since you are an expert at this sort of thing, we have been working on an idea.

Yo, bro, I don't know nothing about Coin, I just watch the dark web and buy sometimes, understand Blockchain, a real distributed ledger techie, inspect the engine, maybe sign it, even get some free coin for my trouble.

Yup, you are doing great for a math head that stores his Armani suit in a Pringles can. What about a coin with real asset backing? If it had a bullet proof ledger, could it work?

I don't think so, you can't sell it on the open market, all that fraud, the big markets like China keep a lid on it.

XXX smiled. Let me show you something we bought one of those companies that sell gold and silver to collectors, bullion, Krugerrands, double eagles, specials from mints, that sort of thing.

Man, I really don't get it, there isn't much margin and you have to sit on high priced inventory and it the market really swings you get caught with your shorts down. What is your angle?

We want to float a coin, three actually, all backed by real metal, gold, silver, copper,
like the old days. We have already started. You can have the purchasing power of a kilo of gold without carrying it around.

Three choices? Adrian has got to be involved in something that big, how did you get him to pony up to three choices, they are all massively price correlated, anyone would do. I would pick silver and move on.

Price correlated over a decade, but the real world demand curve for any one of the metals might outpace the others. Like you, my money would be on silver.

YYY scratched her chin. It could work.  Everything is already in place. People buy gold as a hedge, sometimes they have it stored. This gives us a slight edge, but very slight, considering the value of gold and its cousins our competition can afford Blockchain ledgers.

There could be a few differences. We already have substantially more assets under management than any other dealer. Buffet once asserted all the gold in the world would create a 21 m. cube. If he was even close it means gold is finite and bounded.

Bounded? What is it worth? All the gold in the world, what is it worth?

No clue. When Buffet wrote his investing letter he said it wouldn't produce anything, no interest or dividends and he didn't feel it would particularly grow in value. Anyway at the time he figured it was worth USD 10 Trillion.

But nobody knows what a dollar is worth today, they are still doing the assets vs. debts thing it will be months, years before the smoke clears.

So, we never try to tie to any currency, don't tie gold to silver, anything to anything. All we promise is that if you buy a gram of gold, you have a chit backed by a gram of gold. People decide what it is worth. We have no idea what is going to come of it with features of fiat, asset based and digital currency What we do know is that every hour that goes by we are the stewards of more of that cube, silver and copper as well.

We almost went down the wrong path. Initially our founders thought the key was through distributed ledgers, where the whole world be digitized into a family of equities markets with access to almost anything that was bought, sold or traded. Even then, the distribution of wealth was becoming international, have money and assets and there is a frequent flyer citizenship arrangement in and most geographic locations. The improvement was tokenization, virtual pointers to bought, sold, traded, real world assets. That is a big idea.

What's wrong with that?

Trust. Remember learning about the big sticking point for PKI, who would get to sign the certificates? What a great business model, you give me money, you get 48 bits. While the IETF was figuring this out, Verizon mathematicians were yelling at Entrust engineering proposals saying, "Why should we trust you?".  The whole cert signing thing got really bad, half those clown had no idea what they were doing and they were the brokers of trust.  In the US, there were four different credit bureaus, executors of the credit trustworthy, till as Geoff put it, "heartbreaking to see this tiny fax machine company botching their breach". They didn't die exactly, but they certainly got reset. Did we learn? Oh no, we had the explosion of cryptocurrencies. People were actually trading gold for a spot on a ledger. If you do what we tell you and spend lots of money you can earn points towards a check mark. So we knew if we came saying we are the one blockchain to bind them all, it could not work.

= = =

Years later, StandardCoin became, well, the standard.  Not that it was perfect, but would you want to holding a fistful of pesos, Belize dollars, or if you had an alternative, a euro or Canadian dollar. At first the haves were mostly looking to diversify or hedge. Currency hedging is a have strategy designed to mitigate the impact of currency or foreign exchange risk on international investments returns. And it mostly worked, forward and spot contracts,  options on foreign currency, even crazy things, whether hemlines would go up or down, the so-called leg line, (LLX), how many hurricanes would ride in on the African Easterly Jet stream, the HLX.

It happened slowly, eventually there was a generation that believed BitCoin and Ethereum had been around since Noah loaded the Ark and so they didn't question the also ran coins.  As these XXX wraiths grew to skyscraping values Ponzi style many of the less grounded haves jumped in on the fear of losing out many of them would end up joining the denarius wage working ranks when the smoke finally cleared.

After we all started picking up the pieces after the flip flop the world began to understand the obvious, currency value = trust. And just when the it seemed the total madness was coming to an end, Wonk floated an exchange fund, FIX, the Fear and Insecurity eXchange, two concepts he knew very well. And once you had an account you could invest an as, (1/10th of a denarius).

Wonk, exactly how does FIX work?

It is sort of a feel better investment.

What does that mean?

Well does the world concern you, all the complexity, the madness, the wars and rumors of wars, the beginning of the birth pains of the end times?

Well, I guess so.

Then give me money.

QQQ gives Wonk a small amount of money and gets a receipt for one asset's worth of FIX.

There, do you feel better?

Not really.

Then you probably better give me more money.

As vapid and crassly commercial a;s FIX was, it had some value and struck a chord. And unlike a cipher currency there was some intrinsic value.


= = =

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A piece of the action

When silence doesn't mean consent

Sorry for a millionaire from 1.7 deleted, maybe can reuse