Coppola Comment

Another day, another application for a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) rejected. Yesterday, the SEC rejected an application from Fidelity's Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust, the fifth such rejection in three months. Back in November, the SEC rejected an  application from Van Eck Bitcoin Trust, and in December it rejected applications from Kryptoin Bitcoin ETF Trust and Valkyrie Bitcoin Fund.And on 20th January, it rejected First Trust Skybridge Bitcoin ETF Trust's application.   Valkyrie had already had an application for a Bitcoin futures ETF approved by default. So the rejection of its spot ETF came as something of a surprise. Indeed, some analysts seem to have expected the SEC's default approval of Bitcoin futures ETFs for Valkyrie and ProShares in October to open the floodgates for approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs.  But these are not the first spot Bitcoin ETFs the SEC has disapproved. The SEC has previously rejected applications from Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust, Soli...

Do you have a poorly-performing company that you don't know what to do with? Bitcoin fixes this!  At least, that's what Michael Saylor seems to think. Since August 2020, Microstrategy, the company of which he is simultaneously CEO, chairman and principal investor, has invested heavily in Bitcoin. And Saylor has joined the select group of billionaires fronting the campaign to promote Bitcoin's widespread adoption (and talk up its price).  Microstrategy has been bumping along the bottom for quite some time. MarketWatch helpfully reports the income statements for the last five years . They make grim reading. Here are the bottom-line net income and key financial metrics from 2015 to 2019 inclusive: Yes, there's been some improvement in net income, but just look at that EBITDA.... The financials reveal a company that is making little money, generating little free cash and repeatedly reporting operating losses. Sales are disappointing and operating costs are high. At the time...

Tether is the issuer of the cryptocurrrency world's premier stablecoin, USDT. Stablecoins aim to guarantee the value of cryptocurrencies in dollar terms, hedging volatility risk and making it easier to realise notional gains from cryptocurrency's wild price rises. But Tether's relationship with the main cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin, is controversial. There is a raging battle between those who think that USDT issuance pumps up the price of Bitcoin, and those who argue that USDT issuance has nothing to do with Bitcoin's price. But in my view, the truth is more complex. Tether's asymmetric mechanics both support and disprove the arguments of both sides.  USDT, Tether's "token", is a representation of the US dollar that can be readily traded on cryptocurrency markets. People exchange dollars for USDT, then use the USDT to buy and sell cryptocurrencies. They do so secure in the belief that each USDT token is always worth 1 US dollar. And so far, U...

This piece grew from a number of conversations with people of Austrian economic persuasion, mostly Bitcoiners and goldbugs (which these days seem mysteriously to have converged). I thought of calling this "Monetarism for goldbugs", but decided to preserve the mathematical slant of the previous pieces in this series. But it's monetary arithmetic, of course. And as Austrians tend to obsess about "sound money", it is specifically sound monetary arithmetic . (Note: Someone has pointed out on Twitter that the arithmetic in this piece is considerably more advanced than the equations themselves suggest. If you are bit rusty on the mathematics of change, I suggest reading the first piece in this series, Calculus for Journalists ).  Inflation is complicated As "sound money" seems to mean "no inflation", let's start by defining what we mean by inflation. In mainstream economics, "inflation" usually means a general increase in...

For over a century now, the world has lacked a genuinely international means of payment. This is partly due to decisions made at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, when the US dollar was adopted as the principal international settlement currency, rather than John Maynard Keynes's suggestion of an independent global currency that he called "bancor". Although the Bretton Woods gold-backed structure ended in 1971, the US dollar became ever more dominant. In 2008, the dollar's global reach enabled an American financial crisis to spread to the entire world, causing a deep recession and long-lasting malaise. Ever since, there has been a deep longing for a more stable international financial system, one which didn't depend on debt, wasn't dominated by the US and was immune to political whims. Some have called for a new Bretton Woods , or even for the return of the classical gold standard . Bitcoin emerged from the financial crisis as a fledgling internatio...