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Tuesday, February 5, 2019

News Notes: New Fed Nominee? Problems at a Crypto Exchange

Below are some links to a couple of news articles that may be of interest appearing recently. One is on some news about a major problem for a cryptocurrency exchange where the owner apparently died taking the passwords for access to all the funds in they system with him. 


The other article says that President Trump may soon fill a vacant slot at the Federal Reserve and suggests Dr. Judy Shelton could be one of the candidates under consideration.

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Coindesk - Government Death Certificate Says Exchange CEO Died in India


"An Indian government-issued death certificate obtained by CoinDesk corroborates QuadrigaCX’s account of the passing of CEO Gerald Cotten in early December.

Cotten’s death is at the center of the turmoil surrounding the Canada-based crypto exchange, which went offline last week owing $190 million to its thousands of customers and is now seeking creditor protection in a Novia Scotia court." . . .


Added note on this story - Jim Rickards raises a question that many seem to be asking about this story:


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"It looks like this could be the moment at which President Trump makes his move in respect of the Federal Reserve. We say that because the chatter we hear is that he’s considering nominating to its board of governors the economist Judy Shelton. The Sun endorses her heartily." . . .


Dr. Shelton notes the article on her Twitter feed and says she is honored to be mentioned:


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A few added comments: Regarding the article on Dr. Judy Shelton, I can add that Dr. Shelton kindly did a short Q&A interview for us here some time back that you can read here. I can also add that I do hear from a number of outstanding experts from time to time that help me out here and some of them know Dr. Shelton. All of them have had nothing but kind things to say about her. She did these two interviews recently on CNBC as well:




Regarding the cryptocurreny news - It's really been a tough year for the cryptocurrency space after flying high for awhile. Where it goes in the future is still an unknown, but I would think stories like this will not help inspire more confidence. It looks like the Kinesis project we have mentioned on here is hoping to follow behind these early crypto projects and market their product as a more "stablecoin" since it is anchored by actual physical gold and silver and does not rely on the "technology" alone to provide a store of value.


Also, after a lot of initial "buzz" about central banks adopting either some kind of cryptocurrency or the blockchain technology, momentum for that seems to have dropped off for now as we have reported here for some time. There are still many doubts about whether this has a future or not and certainly does not appear to anytime soon right now. Articles I see are much like this one:


"China’s economics experts fail to agree on the future of blockchain and digital currency, according to a survey from internet giant Tencent, cited by local news outlet Jiemian Feb. 1."

Over and over I see this same message from central banks. They seem far from moving towards any kind of implementation of either blockchain technology or even towards a central bank digital currency for a host of reasons and issues. 

All this just confirms the information we received here from an expert in this field some time ago that has proven to be very accurate over time and is why we have reported what we have on this topic. No central bank or an institution like the IMF can move forward on something like this unless they are sure they have the functioning technology that is real world tested well ahead of time. There is nothing I have seen or know of that indicates this is the case at this time. The closest thing I know of to a real world tested system using blockchain (potentially usable by central banks) for cross border payments and also currency conversion is the one operated by KlickEx in the South Pacific (KlickEx CEO Robert Bell did this interview with us here awhile back)

I am thankful to the experts who have helped me out here repeatedly and have allowed me to be able to report very accurately on these kinds of issues early on despite an enormous amount of news articles seeming to suggest major change was just around the corner. If we do hear of something that would qualify as major change (or even just realistic potential major change), we will certainly report it here for readers.

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