Under the Microscope: The Real Costs of a Dollar

Hass McCook is a chartered engineer and freshly minted Oxford MBA. He has been researching bitcoin over the past several months and recently joined the Lifeboat Foundation's New Money Systems advisory board. This, the final instalment in his five-part series, evaluates the relative sustainability of the bitcoin network against the costs of gold production, the printing and minting of physical currency and the legacy banking system. Under the Microscope has aimed to cast a critical eye over the social, environmental and economic impacts of the way we currently transact and transfer wealth,....

Hass McCook is a chartered engineer and freshly minted Oxford MBA. He has been researching bitcoin over the past several months and recently joined the Lifeboat Foundation's New Money Systems advisory board. This article is the second in a series on bitcoin's sustainability. Having previously examined the cost of bitcoin mining, here McCook seeks to quantify the economic and environmental factors involved in mining gold. Gold has been used for millennia as a means to project and protect wealth. As the data below indicates, 52% of all gold ever mined is used for jewellery and palatial....

Let's begin with a short thought experiment. Put yourself into a world in which banks charge $20 to $50 to manage an international wire transfer, but hardly make a profit on it. Conceptualize a world in which banks delay domestic ACH transfers up to three days, in a large part to reduce fraud risk. Imagine a world in which taking on just one new customer necessitates the hiring of another employee. If you're a commercial bank, these problems are likely all too real and familiar to you. Your costs are continuously rising, but your clearing and compliance infrastructure hasn't changed. Well....

As a follow up to my piece "Why Bitcoin Value vs The U. S. Dollar Does Matter (And Never Will)", it is necessary to understand the fate of the U. S. Dollar is set in stone. The U. S. Dollar must collapse. Fait accompli. The average American is ignorant to this fact because: 1) An ignorant American consumer is the government's best customer. If Americans knew what was going on in the global economic markets, and what Washington ISN'T DOING to correct it, they'd storm the White House this evening! 2) The U. S. has not had an economic collapse in the last 80 years; so 95% of Americans don't....

Landshare is bringing real estate to the blockchain by allowing users to own real estate through tokenized assets. The tokens derive their value directly from the value of the asset and ownership of the tokens represents a real-world ownership stake in the assets. The revolutionary project presents investors a way to invest in the real estate market without having to worry about property costs, maintenance costs, or rent collection on the properties which they own. Basically, Landshare tokenizes the properties while managing the real-world properties for the benefit of its holders. How....