03.26.14

More Economic Injustices and New Bitcoin FUD

Posted in Finance at 4:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

UK

• Six More Years of Tory Rule

  The raison d’etre of the Tories is to ensure the state runs smoothly in the interest of the 1% of the population who own 70% of the wealth. Blair made sure New Labour had the same objective, the only purpose of the party structures now being as career ladders for the likes of Blair to join the 1%.

• DWP plans to ditch ridiculed jobs website

  Universal Jobmatch set to be jettisoned after it was found to be carrying a series of fake, repeat or fraudulent jobs ads

• Councils using controversial lie detector tests to catch benefit fraudsters

  ‘Voice risk analysis’ being used by 24 English authorities at a cost of millions – despite scientists’ claims that it ‘does nothing’

• Figures show huge rise in zero-hours contracts

  The scale of the use of zero-hours contracts has been revealed after a revision of official figures showed that nearly 583,000 employees – more than double the government’s estimate – were forced to sign up to the controversial conditions last year.

  A “rising tide of insecurity” in the job market since the last election was allowing employers to turn a “once marginal and niche element of the labour market” into the norm, Labour claimed on Sunday evening.

• Age UK sounds alarm over cuts to care for older people

• Report reveals little evidence foreign migrants put British workers out of jobs

  Conservatives insist official study, previously blocked by Downing St, supports their policy of reducing net immigration

• London’s Laundry Business

  The city has changed. The buses are still dirty, the people are still passive-aggressive, but something about London has changed. You can see signs of it everywhere. The townhouses in the capital’s poshest districts are empty; they have been sold to Russian oligarchs and Qatari princes.

  [..]

  But Britain has already undermined any unified action by putting bankers’ profits first.

Europe

• Profiting from crisis – How corporations and lawyers are scavenging profits from Europe’s crisis countries

  Since the economic crisis hit Europe, international investors have begun suing EU countries struggling under austerity and recession for a loss of expected profits, using international trade and investment agreements. This is revealed by a new report released today by the Transnational Institute and Corporate Europe Observatory. The investors – and the lawyers involved – are scavenging for profits amidst crisis-hit nations, providing a salutary warning of the potential high costsof the proposed trade deal between the US and the EU, which start its fourth round of negotiations today in Brussels.

US

• WOW! Look at 10 Years of Fast Food Price Inflation!

• Wealth Over Work

• Who Needs a Boss?

  Arizmendi and its five sister bakeries in the Bay Area are worker-owned cooperatives, an age-old business model that has lately attracted renewed interest as a possible antidote to some of our most persistent economic ills. Most co-ops in the U.S. are smaller than Arizmendi, with around a dozen employees, but the largest, Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx, has about 2,000. That’s hardly the organizational structure’s upper limit. In fact, Arizmendi was named for a Spanish priest and labor organizer in Basque country, José María Arizmendiarrieta. He founded what eventually became the Mondragon Corporation, now one of the region’s biggest employers, with more than 60,000 members and 14 billion euro in revenue. And it’s still a co-op.

• What I learned from a shoeless Mark Cuban at SXSW

  To join EO, your company must be raking in at least $1 million in revenue, so I suddenly found myself surrounded by well-dressed, well-connected go-getters in fancy shoes, mingling and networking while waiting to pick the brain of one of America’s most charismatic billionaires. I rolled up in a hotel shuttle van, wearing dirty, fake-leather boots and a giant backpack of phone chargers and miscellaneous swag—the only person wearing a SXSW badge, my event nametag handwritten with Sharpie instead of laser-printed, my thrifted jacket soggy with the rain that had pelted downtown’s festival grounds all morning.

• Regulator’s 10% spending rule set to ‘take the crowd out of crowdfunding’

  Financial Conduct Authority wants to prevent ordinary investors using more than 10% of their savings buying shares in peer-to-peer funded companies

• Box IPO papers reveal it’s losing money in a big way

  Box has capitalized on the growing popularity among businesses of storing data in the cloud, where it can be accessed from a variety of devices including smartphones and tablets, giving employees more flexibility.

Bitcoin

• [Old] HOW TO MAKE A MINT: THE CRYPTOGRAPHY OF ANONYMOUS ELECTRONIC CASH

• [FUD (due to weak passwords/bad admins)] Linux worm diversifies to mine cryptocurrencies

  The software on devices such as routers and IP cameras is often not patched as rigorously as other software, such as operating systems, which may give the Darlloz hackers an advantage.

• Danish Central Bank Compares Bitcoins to ‘Glass Beads’

• Bitcoin exchanges need to get their act together

• Bitcoin Scoops Linux Media Award at CeBIT 2014

  Bitcoin has won a Linux award at CeBIT 2014 – Europe’s premier tech trade show.

• MtGox class-action suits in US and Canada allege fraud, drag in Japan’s Mizuho Bank

• Security At MtGox Much Worse Than Originally Imagined

  Revelations of the mismanagement at the now-bankrupt Japanese bitcoin exchange keep surfacing. When laying the puzzle as pieces keep coming, it becomes obvious that security at the billion-dollar vault was practically nonexistent. This adds to previous insights of economic and/or fraudulent mismanagement.

• Nothing New Under the Sun, Bitcoin Edition

  I was invited to speak at Texas Bitcoin Conference in Austin this past week. Due to my house arrest, I’ve been largely staying low key but felt I needed to make a statement, a strong one. I asked Rick if I could use his speech from the Stockholm 2006 pro-freedom demonstration and adapt it to Bitcoin, which he agreed to. The speech ended to a standing ovation, and although I was over Skype I could not help but burst into tears. Free knowledge, free the market, free the world!

• My great bitcoin adventure: 6 months, 5 exchanges

  How safe is bitcoin? After several months of testing bitcoin services, I can conclude that the digital currency is both important and strong as a concept and as a system, though it can fall prey to weaknesses in the proprietary software of exploitative ad-hoc businesses around it. Here’s a snapshot of the experiences that led me to this opinion.

• Dorian Nakamoto denies any knowledge of Bitcoin or cryptography

• Accused Bitcoin creator Dorian Nakamoto denies creating the currency once more

• On the Hunt for Bitcoin Founder Satoshi Nakamoto

• Alleged Bitcoin inventor says Newsweek story is dead wrong

  Nakamoto and an Associated Press reporter went to a sushi restaurant, then headed to the news organization’s office in downtown Los Angeles. After “an exclusive two-hour interview,” the AP has published a story featuring Nakamoto’s flat-out denial that he had anything to do with the digital currency.

• The Winklevii Are Spending Their Bitcoin Fortune on Space Travel

  Just as the price of Bitcoin crashes to earth from its effervescent highs, two of the world’s most famous cybercurrency investors, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, are hoping to escape the planet’s pearly grip.

• Newly Revealed, Could Satoshi Nakamoto, Worth $400M In Bitcoin, Be In Danger?

• iophk: “Somehow they wedged a reference to His Billness in there at the end.”

• CEO in apparent suicide was bitcoin fan, had other issues, too

• iophk: “Title says it all about the attitude.”

• Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto apparently is unmasked

• “Really immature journalism at best. A mistake that might cost someone their life at worst.”

• iophk: “The original Newsweek article however is not public.”

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