Articles tagged with "cryptocurrency"

The temple's awful (I'm being polite here) history isn't enough; they've recently created their own cryptocurrency called Highden Coin. On the Highden Coin website, very few details are shared, and what is said is very wishy-washy. They say their coins will be released gradually over twenty-five years, through 49 cycles/initiations - and twice each year they will gather at Highden for six weeks. These gatherings are to do "transformative work" at the temple, and build up the community. 17 of these initiations have already occurred, so a third of the supply was released when the coin was created. You can currently (as of the 24th of March) buy a coin for 0.01607 USD, or 100 coins for ~2.75 NZD - up ~60% from 0.01 USD per coin when it was released in March this year.

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud

The title of this one's a mouthful, and it's an interesting one to pick apart - it includes some of my favourite technologies, one that I think is going to be an important part of our future and the other which I think is a storm in a teacup, and unlikely to disrupt anything of note.

This week we're covering a few different topics. I look at some potential good news in relation to SIDS and look back at claims made about it in the past. We've got some bizarre claims of paranormal ability related to wind control (don't think I've ever come across that one before), and I look at the recent crash in cryptocurrency markets.

I've written in the past about NFTs - Non-Fungible Tokens, as they're called, and Mark has written about cryptocurrencies and the scams that surround them.

I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, the original and most "successful" of them, has not followed its creator's vision of being a decentralised currency that allows people to make payments to each other without having to go through traditional banking systems. Rather, instead of Bitcoin being used as a digital currency for purchasing online, people are using it as an investment, speculating on its price and hoping for “massive gains”. This is evidenced by both its high price per coin and its volatility. Hardly any Bitcoin transactions are actually involved in buying or selling goods, and the high price of Bitcoin these days means that the Proof of Work idea for securing the Blockchain (the shared list of transactions that records all transfers of Bitcoin) ends up using over 1,000kwh of electricity for each transaction. The promised decentralisation of Bitcoin is also mostly a myth these days. What Bitcoin has become is a way for greedy people to make money from other greedy people. Its creator, the enigmatic “Satoshi”, is probably despairing of what happened to his creation - if he's still alive.

Rex Warwood sadly died late last week. He was a long time reporter, and later editor, for the Franklin County News, and was apparently well liked. However in recent years he appears to have succumbed to conspiratorial thinking, and he became a vocal critic of vaccination against COVID, saying things online such as: