As far back as 1990, financial experts were predicting that in the not too distant future, investment and money management would be aided by sophisticated computer technologies. Flash forward a couple of decades, and that future is here. Robotics experts predict that...
Bitcoin Ponzi Scheme: New Coin, Old Scam?
The Bitcoin is looking more and more like traditional money every day. In just a few short years, the upstart digital currency has gone from a mere novelty to a multimillion dollar trading commodity subject to many of the ills that plague “real” money backed by...
The Bitcoin Bounces Back
After a rough couple of years, the Bitcoin is surging back with a vengeance. Just a year after its fall from grace in the Silk Road drug site scandal, the digital currency’s market value has even beaten gold in the world’s markets. Whether hailed as a welcome...
The Dollar: The World’s Go-To Currency
When your country’s facing economic turmoil, who you gonna call? For worried consumers around the globe, the obvious answer is the trusty US dollar. Just ask the Russians. As Russia slides deeper into economic crisis, dollars are in high demand, followed by the euro....
Drug Lord or Hero: The Silk Road’s Founder Confounds Expectations
The Silk Road is dead. That eclectic online marketplace for trafficking in illegal substances of every kind was raided and shut down in 2013 by the FBI and other federal agencies, who confiscated its multimillion dollar store of Bit coin. But its mysterious founder,...
A Cash Free Society? Sweden Leads the Way
Hard metal in the hand or virtual numbers on a card, money is what people agree that it is. And now, as Sweden moves quietly toward a cash-free society, the very nature of money – and what it means – could be forever changed. Sweden has long been in the vanguard of...
The Fed’s Stimulus Strategy: Silencing Skeptics?
In the end, did hard easing work? That contradictory term for Qualitative Easing version 3, the Federal Reserve’s controversial and much disputed stimulus plan, has been in the news and on the minds of economists and financial advisers since it was conceived in 2012...
Data Theft Crosses All Borders
The Digital Age has all but erased many of the world’s conventional borders. While that’s undeniably useful for commerce and communication, it’s also made cybercrime a household word, as thousands of American Express cardholders in California found out this spring....
The MintChip: Mainstream Banking Tries to Get Digital
It sounds like a new kind of snack: the MintChip. But this product of the Royal Canadian Mint represents a new stage in the evolution of digital currency: digital money created and controlled by a state bank. And its demise in April 2014 serves as a cautionary tale...
What’s In Your (Dark) Wallet?
The Bitcoin is making more and more strides toward worldwide acceptance—and that’s fueling increased efforts to regulate use of the new digital currency. But Bitcoin supporters who embrace the freedom and anonymity of the Bitcoin and other monies like it are fighting...