Showing posts with label bitcoin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bitcoin. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

№ 560.1: EXTRA! Bitcoin (now you see it, now you don't)


MIT Technology Review

Nearly all Bitcoin trades are fake, apparently

Bitwise, a crypto-asset management firm, analyzed 81 exchanges, finding that 71 of them exhibited patterns that reflected artificial trading volume. . . .Although the exchanges in the study reported a combined $6 billion in daily volume during four days this month, Bitwise determined that only $273 million of it was real.

EREHWON, March 27

What, after all, is your Bitcoin:
an algorithmic invention.
Bitcoin can never have any worth
which I suspect is intentional.
All crypto-coins are meant to purloin
things of value conventional.
Things which exist in time and in space,
which are, in fact, three-dimensional.

Bitcoins are bits, just one's and nought's
somewhere in our electronical ether.
Bitcoins can only be sold and bought
if there's power to run your computer.
When electric goes out, they are wiped out.
But to be fair, they never were there.

If you desire not to be rolled,
take care and enfold your billfold.
And, if you can, stuff your mattress with gold.
Gold, history shows, is cold and embitters.
It does not buy contentment, but it, at least, glitters.

[updated 3/28/2019, 2:00 a.m.]

Saturday, December 23, 2017

No. 232.2: EXTRA! Bit By Bitcoin?

Cryptocurrency values plunged Friday in a market-wide selloff that reversed highs the volatile sector had reached just days earlier.
-- USA TodayCryptocurrency values plunge amid market-wide selloff

[with apologies to Roger Christian and Gary L Usher and, I guess since it is Christmas, Tiny Tim]

Tiptoe through the window
with your worthless
cryptocurrency.
Shout out,
“Watch out below!”,
fall free.

In vain to yer,
we explained to yer
tulip mania's
insanity.
So tiptoe through the window,
fall free.

You prob'ly thought
Bitcoins you bought
were a grand
Ayn Rand idee.
So tiptoe through the window,
fall free.

I dunno,
could be so,
it’s a Lib-er-al
conspiracy.
So tiptoe through the window,
fall free.

It's not absurd
that “crypt”' the word
has a bit of
grav-ity.
So tiptoe through the window,
fall free.

Thursday, December 7, 2017

No. 221.1: EXTRA! A Bit Of Advice (or to con a phase)

Ever seeking new ways to purloin
rob, steal, pilfer, confabulate
funders of hedges are trading bitcoin
praying it isn't already too late
to play on human cupidity
by preying on investors' stupidity
and selling what amounts, I suppose,
to high-tech takes on the Emperor's new clothes.

Jealous, I am. I want in on the scam.
I herewith propose an alternative.
Monsieur madam, AIR COIN® is no sham
it might even be too conservative.
Yes, to be fair, it is just hot air
and “mined” every time you exhale.
Coins can be stored in expandable purses
which, when pricked, AIR COIN® disperses.

Bitcoin or AIR COIN®? Let me be terse.
Who can honestly say which one is worse?