— Covering digital currencies, precious metals and online payments
The Financial Times has just released an article claiming that several people familiar with the CFTC’ silver investigation are saying that the regulator has not found enough evidence to pursue a legal case and will soon drop the investigation.
Read More about Rumour has it the CFTC may drop its silver market investigation
I once again subjected myself to a House Subcommittee hearing; this time I was pleasantly surprized.
Yesterday the House Subcommittee on Financial Services, held a hearing titled “Sound Money: Parallel Currencies and the Roadmap to Monetary Freedom”. There were an excellent group of witnesses, some intelligent questions from the committee members and testimony from Mr Rob Grey of The American Open Currency Standard that you don’t want to miss.
Bitcoin is now on Brazilian regulators radar. Recently the Comissão de Valores Mobiliários, the Brazilian version of the US’s the Securities and Exchange Commission, ordered a Brazilian man to suspend the operations of his investment fund. Leandro César, an IT Consultant from Belo Horizonte, had setup a small (~US$4,500) investment fund denominated entirely in bitcoin. http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/28048708075/brazil-bitcoin-securities
Ron Paul’s Audit the Fed bill passes the house http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-25/fed-audit-bill-opposed-by-bernanke-approved-by-u-s-house.html
Bitcoin continues its international expansion. In May, Bitcoin caught on in China with a 700% volume increase and BitInstant customers in the US, Russia and Brazil were given 700,000 more locations to purchase bitcoins. Now Bitcoin Nordic, a new Denmark based exchange, is looking to expand into the North Africa and the Middle East market by accepting CashU, a popular payment option in the region. http://bitcoinmagazine.net/bitcoin-nordic-brings-bitcoins-to-middle-east-and-north-africa/
I have recently heard, from a seemingly very knowledgeable source, that Bitcoin’s Android client is getting offline abilities. This means a transaction can be completed with only the merchant connected to the internet.
Well…possibly, “hopefully”, “in the not-too-distant future”, maybe even “in September or October”. This according to a Bloomberg.com article quoting a member of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission here.
Read More about Silver Manipulation Probe to End This Year??
I recently sat down to review the ‘prepaid access’ issue and look for any new developments. Here are a few notes on what I found…
Perhaps thanks to the LIBOR scandal, gold market manipulation is beginning to look less like a crazy conspiracy theory and more like reality.
Read More about Gold Manipulation gains a bit of main stream attention
The Vietnamese government recently enacted Decree No 24, which essentially shuts down small gold shops and creates a state monopoly where only state-appointed organizations are allowed to trade gold.
Read More about Small gold shops in Vietnam adapt to gold trading ban
The Canadian Mint is working on an interesting project called MintChip, described on their web site as “the evolution of currency”.
Read More about The Canadian Mint does something cool…Kind of
It seems that PayPal has changed its terms and now wants to monitor merchants online content to prevent sharing of “illegal content”.
