Wednesday, May 16, 2018

2017 All Over Again: "The Consensus crypto and blockchain summit in New York"

...“This one will really take you back,” said the Great Winfield....

“My old MG TC. A blond girl, tan from the summer sun, in the Hamptons, beer on the beach, ‘Unchained Melody,’ the little bar in the Village.”

“See? See?” said the Great Winfield. “The flow of the seasons. Life begins again. It’s marvelous. It’s like having a son! My boys! My Kids!”


The Great Winfield had made his point. Memory can get in the way of such a jolly market, that malaise that comes with the instantly gone, flickering feeling of déjà vu. We have all been here before.

“The strength of my kids is that they are too young to remember anything bad, and they are making so much money they feel invincible,” said the Great Winfield.


“Now you know and I know that one day the orchestra will stop playing and the wind will rattle through the broken window panes, and the anticipation of this freezes us. All of these kids but one will be broke, and that one will be the multi-millionaire, the Arthur Rock of the new generation. There is always one, and maybe we will find him.”
—Adam Smith, The Money Game,1968 
From FT Alphaville:

At a crypto conference in New York, it feels like 2017 all over again
If you thought the crypto hype was starting to cool down a little, you'd be right.

But if you'd been at the Consensus crypto and blockchain summit in New York for the past few days, you would not have known it.

This evening, two brand new Aston Martins will be given away on the Cornucopia Majesty as it cruises down the River Hudson. The host of this floating shindig is a company whose “mission is to become the interface to the blockchain world”, which was founded by one of the co-founders of Ethereum, the thinkers' cryptocurrency. One Aston Martin will feature “very subtle bitcoin decoration” (though perhaps not as subtle as Tim Draper's tie) and the other will have Ethereum branding. Partygoers will be given “glow bracelets”, and all stop glowing except for two. The lucky people wearing them will receive a luxury British sports car that starts at just over $160,000.
Decentral, the company giving away the free cars, seems to feel it has more money to throw around than BitMex, a US crypto exchange whose CEO decided to go on television and assign bitcoin a “ price target”, and made that price target $50,000.

BitMex resorted to hiring three Lamborghinis -- or Lambos, to use the correct crypto parlance -- to be parked outside the Hilton Midtown hotel in which the conference is being held for five hours on Monday for its vehicular publicity. The company that rents them out reportedly charges $1,000 per day....MUCH MORE