Is bitcoin really an “uncorrelated safe haven”? - FT ...

What is Vaudeville?
It is a multi-act event theatrical performance brought to the world by FT Alphaville, the blogging team of the Financial Times, on Friday 26th July at Wiltons Music Hall in London, England, (Not necessarily United) Kingdom.
Some say it's a genius move to entrap an audience and tell them stories. Others are calling it experimental theatrical journalism. Others still are calling it a self-indulgent expression of editor Izabella Kaminska's inner subconscious no better than an end of year school play. It could be genius. It could be the Fyre Festival of data/economic/crypto/conspiracy events. But it's the ambiguity that makes Vaudeville (notably, by putting the schrodinger into CryptoKitty).
What we know is that it's never happened before, will never happen again, will not be filmed and will feature not insignificant volumes of comedy gold...
Featuring: Frances Coppola on "winner takes all" economics. A scaling solution song (a contender entry for "Blockchain the Musical") by a prominent bitcoin podcaster. A sermon on fraud by Craig Wright. Dgerard in the audience. A scary story about a payments company. Artist Simon Denny's duplicate cryptokitties (crypto copycats). A story about Alpha 60. Amazon influencers. The former CEO of a company that changed everything (or nothing at all).
PLUS
An array of Adam Curtis clips presented by the man himself.
More details here:
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2019/07/19/1563531655000/One-week-to-Vaudeville-/
The last remaining tickets can be bought here: https://www.wiltons.org.uk/whatson/577-ft-alphaville-presents-vaudeville
(This is not a desperate attempt to sell out and justify the future of independent not-sponsored-by-advertisers-or-crypto-donations-journalism. Or maybe it is. But we wouldn't ever admit it. It's definitely suitable for buttcoiners and that's why we thought we'd mention it here.)
Buttcoins not accepted

Followers of FT Alphaville’s Bitcoinmania series will be familiar with our generally sceptical position on all things bitcoin.
Indeed, over the course of more than 64 posts, we’ve presented a mostly negative case for bitcoin “the currency”, and remain confident that the open-source “people-cleared” cryptocurrency (which replaces one accountable and identifiable third party with 10,000 anonymous parties of dubious intent) is ill-suited for the job of currency in any stable economic system.
That said, we have reflected tiny bursts of enthusiasm for what blockchain technology, the distributed public ledger underpinning bitcoin, could do for the murky and shadowy world of OTC bilateral clearing.
Such enthusiasm should not, however, be confused with the current industry vogue of rubbishing bitcoin whilst simultaneously claiming that the blockchain technology is genius.
We are more sanguine on the latter front.
For one, we’re not convinced blockchain can ever be successfully delinked from a coupon or token pay-off component without compromising the security of the system. Second, we’re not convinced the economics of blockchain work out for anything but a few high-intensity use cases. Third, blockchain is always going to be more expensive than a central clearer, because a multiple of agents have to do the processing job rather than just one, which makes it a premium clearing service — especially if delinked from an equity coupon — not a cheap one.
In short, the cost structures have not yet been proven. It’s all very enticing using blockchain to clear your financial positions as long as the service remains cheap as chips — (largely because it’s being subsidised by investment flows or an altruistic network of computer processors). Not so much, however, if the costs start rising because the network wants compensation for its efforts.
Until they do, however, what’s not to like if you’re Blythe Masters? You’ve just found a genius way of passing on your clearing costs to a network of unsuspecting volunteers and speculators. Even better than that, they don’t seem to notice the huge favour they’re doing for big financial businesses, because they’ve become so distracted by the idea of not depending on banks, they’ve overlooked that in the process they’ve become poorly paid bank employees instead.
If blockchain is to make an impact in any sphere, it must be in a non exploitative and cost transparent way. Call it a raison d’etre participation structure, where nodes are incentivised to fund or work for the system because they themselves benefit from the services being cleared.
A good analogy is a baby sitting collective, where the participants have an incentive to provide quality work to the system, because they want to redeem similar work from others in the system. They are in the scheme to benefit from the services, not just to make money. What they put into the system is what they get out. And they have no incentive to put in any more or less than than they plan to redeem in kind.
Were the baby sitting collective, however, to be opened to non-beneficiaries, those who baby-sit solely for the purpose of accumulating credits would have an incentive to resell them to the highest bidder in an open market. This would expose the collective to centralisation and corporatisation. Before the participants knew it the collective itself would be dead and a centralised babysitting corporate would be dominating the system.
The same dynamics, we believe, apply to blockchain. For it to work, a raison d’etre closed structure where participants get repaid in kind not in profit is needed.
We’re about to moderate a panel on Thursday at Consult Hyperion’s Tomorrow’s Transactions forum, where we plan to dive deep into some of these issues. We’re open to persuasion.
We’ll be back with some insights from the likes of Richard Brown at IBM, Douwe Lycklama from Innopay, Preston Byrne, Eris Industries and Vitalik Buterin from Ethereum.
Consider this a curtain raiser.

http://www.ft.com/intl/fastft/420521/post-420521
Christine Lagarde has advised bankers worrying about being disrupted by bitcoin and blockchain to "pause for a second," citing the potential for abuse of the technologies, writes Kadhim Shubber.
Referencing FT Alphaville reporter Izabella Kaminska's article on the use of bitcoin in a Chinese social network that bears the hallmarks of a pyramid scheme, she told attendees of a banking conference in New York:
If those new technologies and as long as those new technologies are going to abuse, take advantage of, the yield for anonymity, I think the banking industry has quite a few good days ahead of it
Here's the full quote:
Many of you have heard about not only bitcoins but blockchains and that unbelievable technology that underlies the Bitcoins of this world at the moment, and how incredibly convenient it will be to actually generate trust and identify players and whatever pseudo they decide to use.
And many of you in the industry are actually worried that those technologies are going to massively disrupt the current industry.
Pause for a second.
If those new technologies and as long as those new technologies are going to abuse, take advantage of, the yield for anonymity, I think the banking industry has quite a few good days ahead of it as long as it takes ownership of those issues of capital and culture in order to actually restore the trust without which you see no trade no transaction no business can take place.