Tag Archives: Dogecoin

Business, Technology

GameStop Now Accepting Dozens of Cryptocurrencies

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GameStop Corp. is now accepting dozens of cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin and Dogecoin, per a report from Investor Place yesterday.

These cryptocurrencies can be used at any one of GameStop’s locations or online. GameStop is using the Flexa network, which supports a wide variety of cryptocurrencies.

This comes shortly after AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. began accepting crypto payments, including Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Meme stocks trying to draw in the adjacent crypto community is a wise move. All marketing costs money, but accepting crypto provides a bunch of press attention for the minimal cost of joining the Flexa network.

Flexa appears quite robust, with tens of thousands of retail locations on its platform. It reminds me of a Square for crypto; easy payment acceptance for merchants.

If GameStop ever delivers streaming games on its own platform, crypto payments could be particularly useful. Unlike with credit cards, customers from all over the world could purchase access with no foreign exchange fees.

Will accepting crypto payments make or break GameStop or AMC’s business? Of course not.

But for businesses that rely on foot traffic, anything that builds buzz at low cost is a huge win!

What do you think of GameStop and AMC accepting crypto payments? And who do you think will be next?

Let me know in the comments below.

This is the last blog for this week. I’ll see you again on Monday.

Merry Christmas!

More on markets:

Hedge Fund Paid Researcher to Write Misleading Reports on Seeking Alpha

Parody Site Sues Citadel to Stop Shutdown

How Did High Dividend Stocks Perform In the Last Crash?

Photo: Photo: “Retail GameStop” by ccPixs.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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Business, Technology

The Hamster Crypto Trader That’s Outperforming Me

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I’ve got a fun one for you today: a German hamster is trading cryptocurrencies. And he’s blowing away the S&P 500:

The livestreamed hamster, named Mr. Goxx, has been independently trading a portfolio of various cryptocurrencies since June 12, and so far its* performance has been impressive. As of Friday, the portfolio was up nearly 24%, according to the @mrgoxx twitter feed that documents daily performance, along with every trade made by the hamster. Mr. Goxx’s performance outpaces bitcoin and the S&P 500 over the same time period.

Here’s a short video of this financial titan at Goxx Capital headquarters:

First, Goxx runs on the “intention wheel” to pick which one of about 30 cryptocurrencies to trade. Once the crypto is chosen, the hamster runs through one of two “decision tunnels” that trigger either a buy or sell trade of the chosen cryptocurrency.

As someone who invests for a living, I’m okay with being outperformed by a rodent. He earned it, and he’s also much cuter.

Whimsical as this example is, we attribute skill to fund managers who have a good run, only to forget them when they underperform. Bill Miller of Legg Mason was lionized for beating the S&P 500 15 years in a row. Shortly thereafter, his fund lost two thirds of its value in the financial crisis and he was out of a job.

I, for one, will be a supporter of Mr. Goxx even if his hot streak runs out.

Follow Mr. Goxx on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, or Twitch!

Note: I object to the term “it” for this adorable little man!

More on markets:

How Solana Could Wipe Out Visa and MasterCard

China’s Crypto Ban and the Road to Total Control

Where Can We Hide in a Financial Crisis?

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If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

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This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

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Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order.

Business, Politics, Technology

This Congressman Is Buying Dogecoin

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Dogecoin has become so popular, even Congressmen are getting into the game:

U.S. Rep. Mark Green purchased Dogecoin on April 1 and April 14 according to Congresstrading.com. The purchases were in the amount of $1,001 to $15,000 on each occasion.

A $1,000 purchase each time would now be worth $17,078 based on today’s price of $0.4009. A $15,000 purchase each time would now be worth $127,985.

More here.

As cryptocurrencies including dogecoin become increasingly mainstream, with more investors holding them and more companies accepting them as payment, it will become harder and harder for the government to ban or even regulate them. Congressmen won’t want to hurt their own portfolios, nor those of their wealthy contributors.

For more on dogecoin, check out these posts:

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Business, Technology

You Can Now Buy a Rolls Royce with Dogecoin

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Post Oak Motor Cars is now accepting dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that recently gained new heights of popularity following support from Tesla founder Elon Musk, as a form of payment. New Bugatti, Bentley, Karma, and Rolls-Royce vehicles are sold at the boutique sales location next to Houston’s only five-star hotel, The Post Oak Hotel at Uptown Houston.

This is the second form of cryptocurrency the Houston dealership has accepted. In 2018, Post Oak Motor Cars announced that it would allow customers to pay using bitcoin after integrating cryptocurrency processor Bitpay into its payment system.

More here.

Given the enormous price spike in the currency recently, I imagine quite a few holders are in the market for Rolls Royces.

This is the same pattern I saw with bitcoin: increasing acceptance in the real world as the price increases. I don’t own cryptocurrencies due to their volatility and lack of an income stream. That said, in the crypto market, dogecoin has long seemed like one of the better bets. Its market cap is a fraction of bitcoin’s, despite using the same underlying technology.

Its biggest disadvantage was a lack of acceptance as a form of payment, but that too is changing. Perhaps this coin has a lot further to run.

For more on dogecoin, check out these posts:

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Photo: “Mansory Conquistador Rolls Royce Phantom – Team 93 – Team Rolls Royce Austria” by daveoflogic is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Business, Podcasts, Technology

“Everybody Thought I Was Crazy”: How Brian Armstrong Built Coinbase

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“Everybody thought I was crazy.”

That’s Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase. When he started the company in 2012, it was a small and quirky startup. Bitcoin had only been in use for three years and remained relatively obscure.

But now, it’s safe to say not many people think Armstrong is crazy. His company just went public yesterday and its valuation currently sits at $66 billion. Coinbase holds $200 billion in cryptocurrencies, around 11% of all crypto in existence. So how did Armstrong go from lunatic to visionary?

Armstrong had to build interest in his new product. He settled on a cost effective and attention getting marketing tool: send people free money. But not just any money; bitcoin, of course! He sent tiny amounts of the cryptocurrency to countless people. One of them was angel investor Garry Tan, who became one of Coinbase’s first backers. His $300,000 bet turned into $2.4 billion yesterday.

In an interview with Jason Calacanis on This Week in Startups, Armstrong emphasized the importance of entrepreneurs being scrappy and doing whatever it takes to get the job done. His original approach to investors, repeated countless times, paid off in a major way and Coinbase was accepted to Y Combinator, the most prestigious startup accelerator in Silicon Valley. Armstrong’s resourcefulness and persistence definitely inspire me.

To build a major business, Armstrong had to make sure not to run afoul of regulators. Unlike, for example, a social media app, finance is heavily regulated. Armstrong ditched the anonymity most people expect from cryptocurrencies, abiding by “know your customer laws.” In turn, he offered users a much more secure way to store their cryptocurrencies:

The selling proposition here is security—security conspicuously lacking at some of the exchanges with which Coinbase has competed. The Mt. Gox exchange in Japan went bust in 2014 after hackers spirited away coins worth $480 million. Customers of QuadrigaCX, which was one of Canada’s largest exchanges, have been unable to retrieve $150 million in crypto since the founder supposedly died suddenly in December 2018, holding the only set of keys to unlock their money. They now want the body exhumed.

Armstrong wasn’t afraid to reimagine the crypto business in a way that could grow big, and he doggedly pursued anyone who he thought could help him do it. I find his extraordinary career quite instructive.

For more on Coinbase and crytocurrencies, check out these posts:

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Business

The Stimulus is Headed into Bitcoin

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Even as Bitcoin sits near record highs, a new survey by Mizuho Securities finds that many Americans plan to put their stimulus check into the hot cryptocurrency:

…the Mizuho survey found around 20% of check recipients expected to allocate as much as 20% of their checks to bitcoin and/or stocks, while 13% expected to allocate 20% to 80%, and 2% expected to put 80% or more into the markets.

Bitcoin even outranked stocks, another popular choice:

“Bitcoin is the preferred investment choice among check recipients. It comprises nearly 60% of the incremental spend, which may imply $25 billion of incremental spend on bitcoin from stimulus checks,” wrote Mizuho analysts Dan Dolev and Ryan Coyne, in a Monday note (see chart above). “This represents 2-3% of Bitcoin’s current $1.1 trillion market cap.”

The graph below shows the extent to which bitcoin is favored over stocks as a home for stimulus funds:

This survey was small, so we shouldn’t put too much stock into it, but this could be a major shot in the arm for the cryptocurrency. I also expect a pop in other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Dogecoin, along with meme stocks like GameStop and AMC. But I’d advise my fellow Americans to buy stock/bond index funds instead.

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Photo: “Bitcoin, bitcoin coin, physical bitcoin, bitcoin photo” by antanacoins is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Business

Who Is the Secret Dogecoin Billionaire?

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Someone owns $2.1 billion worth of dogecoin. And no one knows who it is:

Records show that a person, or entity, owns about 28% of all of the cryptocurrency in circulation—a stake worth about $2.1 billion at current prices. The holder’s identity isn’t known, which is common in the opaque world of digital currencies.

The account could belong to an exchange on which dogecoin is traded, or to the individuals and groups who run the software that keep the digital currency’s network going, researchers say.

There is some speculation that the secret dogecoin billionaire could be the not-so-secret Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, but the evidence is thin:

The address also offers an intriguing “Easter egg” for people trying to decipher the identity of the owner: the account has on multiple occasions received 28.061971 dogecoins. Mr. Musk’s birthday is on June 28, 1971.

Despite his interest in dogecoin, the major holder’s address is unlikely to belong to Mr. Musk, said Elias Ahonen, author of “Blockland.” Anyone can send dogecoin to a publicly listed address, which could explain the amounts linked to Mr. Musk’s birthday.

Having 28% of the currency in the hands of a single, unknown person makes dogecoin very susceptible to wild swings in price. If that holder sells suddenly, it could crash the currency. One has to balance that against a major positive for dogecoin: it uses the same technology as bitcoin but is a tiny fraction of the price.

Any guesses on who it is? Leave them in the comments!

For more on dogecoin and cryptocurrencies, check out these posts:

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Photo: “Doge Meme: Japanische Hunderasse Shiba und Vorbild für den DogeCoin” by marcoverch is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Business

This New Indicator May Tell You Where Bitcoin Is Headed

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For many years, investors in stocks have been able to see how volatile the market is expected to be by relying on a gauge called the CBOE Volatility Index, or VIX. This measure, often called the “fear gauge,” reads how much volatility investors are expecting based on option prices.

Nothing like this has ever existed for cryptocurrencies. Until now:

A bitcoin “fear gauge,” similar to the Cboe Volatility Index (VIX) investors use to gauge volatility in the stock market, saw its first trades on Wednesday.

The T3i BitVol Index measures the expected 30-day implied volatility in bitcoin derived from tradable bitcoin option prices.

The index goes two years back so far. Current expected volatility appears higher than normal.

A high VIX tends to correlate with a drop in stocks. A low VIX tends to predict calm, gradually rising markets. This pattern may hold with Bitcoin as well, giving crypto holders a chance to see a bit into the future.

For more on the latest in cryptocurrencies, check out these posts:

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Business

Bitcoin Anonymity Could Become A Thing of the Past If This Regulation Passes

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In the waning days of the Trump administration, the government proposed regulations that would ban anonymity for holders of cryptocurrencies:

Users whose wallets now are only identified with codes would have their true identities recorded with the financial institutions they zealously avoided.

This proposed regulation has now been passed on to the Biden administration. There’s no timeline for a decision, but removing anonymity from crypto transactions could hammer the price:

If adopted, the regulations could cause a sharp fall in the prices of virtual currencies like Bitcoin, said Matthew Maley, chief market strategist for Miller Tabak & Co., adding that he thinks Bitcoin’s price will continue to rise in the long term.

There are some major companies like Fidelity and Coinbase pushing to retain anonymity, and I think their political influence may stop such regulations. But on the other hand, the possibility for anonymity to facilitate drug deals and terrorism could push the government in the opposite direction.

For more on the latest in cryptocurrencies, check out these posts:

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Business

This One Fact Could Drive Dogecoin Up 100X

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I started this post planning to write about how silly Dogecoin is. For the uninitiated, Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency based on a meme of a Shiba Inu. Its price has risen by more than a factor of 20 in the last year. Some recent gains have come from Elon Musk and other celebrities promoting the coin on social media.

But then I read that Dogecoin has basically the same underlying technology as Bitcoin:

It was a find-and-replace job.

Ctrl+F ‘Bitcoin,’ replace with ‘Dogecoin.’

The total value of all Bitcoin is $900 billion. The total value of all Dogecoin is $6.4 billion. If the code behind them is essentially the same, why is there such a huge disparity in value? I would expect these coins to converge in time, whether that means Bitcoin going down, Dogecoin going up, etc.

So, will I be loading up on Dogecoin? No. Like other cryptos, I don’t see any fundamental value there. Unlike a stock or bond, there’s no income stream. Unlike major currencies, they’re incredibly volatile and accepted practically nowhere. Nor do they have much of a track record. For Dogecoin’s $6 billion, you could buy Huntsman Corporation, a chemical company with profits of over $200 million/year, outright. I like that a lot better than a speculative crypto with no income stream.

That said, if you’re a believer in Bitcoin, I think you have to be a believer in Dogecoin also. I’ll be interested to see where it goes!

For more on Dogecoin, meme stocks, and the Wallstreetbets phenomenon, check out these posts:

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Photo: “Полный обзор криптовалюты Dogecoin” by dmitriyshustovb3 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0