In praise of apartheid – the Republic
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Whether you live in Italy or Africa, Brazil or Vietnam, apartheid is the standard you must uphold. Be inflexible and without half measures: apartheid must be guaranteed, whatever the cost. And in the evening, at dinner, brag about it with your friends: apartheid is the best, claim it too.
Economy
Pos, cap on cash? Meanwhile in Lugano you can live using bitcoins
by Giuditta Mosca
When it comes to crypto, nothing is better than apartheid: every owner of Bitcoin or other digital asset should want it, pursue it, champion it. In fact, only the strict segregation of digital assets on the platforms where they can be purchased and kept guarantees you that you actually own them, and therefore the possibility of having them at any time. In the early days of this industry, around 2010/2011, there were no exchanges, let alone custody platforms. Anyone who wanted Bitcoins had to mine them. And those who didn’t know how to do it but still wanted them could buy them .. on Ebay! More than one miner, in fact, put them up for sale.
The interview
Ferrero (Young): “Bitcoin is the answer of a generation that has less faith in institutions”
by Archangel Rociola
The price? For example, ten thousand Bitcoins for 10, 20, 50 dollars. As I write this it would be $230 million, give or take. The problem, as we have seen many times, would have been not to lose them. At the time, there was no solution other than the so-called self-custody: keys, computers or the first paper wallets: you generated a private key and wrote it somewhere, in the hope of not losing it. At the time, the custody platforms had not yet been born, but neither were the exchanges, which made their appearance about ten years ago. The first in the world was probably the Italian, but with an English name, The Rock Trading. Unfortunately recent news shows him as at the end of the race following a series of internal situations still to be clarified. Hopefully everything turns out for the best soon.
The case
What is DarkFi, the new crypto-threat that already scares governments
by Andrea Daniele Signorelli
There are those who argue that digital currencies are not safe because they can be lost easily, while this is not the case with fiat currencies because, once deposited in the bank, they remain safely stored there. Unfortunately, not always: increasingly creative hackers, flaws in security systems and, of course, the unpreparedness of bank customers mean that various mishaps also occur in this sense. Now, cryptocurrencies have been around for a dozen years. Money – something that, like many other things like cryptocurrencies themselves, didn’t exist for all intents and purposes – thousands of years ago: inventing things that don’t exist, and then behaving as if they really exist, is perhaps the single thing that most distinguishes us from other animals. The first banks appeared much later, in the Middle Ages: thousands of years old with money but no safe place to put it. Finally, with their appearance, there was a place and they, over the centuries, have had the opportunity to develop increasingly secure systems for storing our banknotes.
To say how much things have evolved, yes, but with their times, still in 1857 in the United States, local banks issued their version of the dollar, corresponding to the gold that a specific customer deposited. Those dollars were a kind of receipt for that gold, and could only be spent in the neighborhood: who in Chattanooga or Miami would accept dollars issued by a bank in Santa Barbara or San Diego? How could they be sure that they weren’t fakes and that the corresponding gold had actually been deposited?
In order to arrive at a unified dollar, usable throughout the federal territory, it was necessary to create, in 1864, the National Currency Act, which represented a decisive step forward also in terms of the security of citizens’ savings. The Americans could keep their dollars safe in the bank but no bank was able to preserve their value over time: you, then as now, deposited a thousand dollars, after fifty years they were still there but they were almost worth nothing: being the naturally inflationary fiat currencies, if hackers don’t steal them, inflation will take care of it, elegantly. Over the centuries, therefore, things have progressed, banks and technologies have evolved greatly, which, unfortunately, over the decades has not prevented many banking institutions from blowing up overwhelmed by scandals and mismanagement, leaving it paves the way for customers as proof that, historically, not even depositing our money in the bank has given us 100% confidence in being able to get it back.
More or less what happened in 2022 to many centralized crypto companies, ten years or so after the birth of the digital asset industry (not centuries), which apparently could continue to happen even in the current year. Those companies, without exception, had always been careful not to apply apartheid to customer assets. As I’ve written several times before, their banking-inspired model inflated their earnings during the upmarket and drove them out of business when the winds changed. Even today, practically all centralized exchanges in the world can use the cryptocurrencies left in the custody of customers as they please. I find it incredible that they would accept such a thing after all that has happened. Evidently many people struggle to draw lessons even from the big negative events.
Several crypto asset custody firms, on the contrary, have understood that apartheid is their salvation and that of their customers. There are those who have chosen it since day zero (disclaimer: Anubi Digital) and those who have arrived more recently. The important thing is that our digital assets remain unequivocally separate from those of other customers of the platform on which they have been deposited, and from those of the platform itself. Only by doing so can we avoid risks due to opaque third-party models of our assets, which no one should be able to get their hands on, except us.
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