If you want to join in the bitcoin frenzy without simply buying the digital currency at today's inflated prices, then bitcoin mining is another way to get involved. However, mining bitcoins does come with expenses -- and risks -- of its own. And the more popular bitcoins become, the harder it is to mine them profitably.

Unlike paper currency, which is printed by governments and issued by banks, bitcoins do not come in any physical form. That creates a major risk, as hackers could theoretically create bitcoins from nothing. Bitcoin mining is how the bitcoin network keeps its transactions secure.

Bitcoin transactions are secured by blockchains, which make up a public ledger of transactions. Because of how blockchain transactions are structured, they're extremely difficult to alter or compromise, even by the best hackers. But in order to secure these transactions, someone needs to dedicate computing power to verifying the activity and packaging the details in a block that goes into the bitcoin ledger. And that's precisely what bitcoin miners do. As a reward for doing the work to track and secure transactions, miners earn bitcoins for each block they successfully process.

The bitcoin founders have set a limit of 21 million bitcoins available for mining. Once that total is reached, miners will still be able to benefit from transaction fees, but they won't be granted bitcoins as a reward for their work. As of mid-January 2018, approximately 16.8 million of those 21 million bitcoins have already been mined. Assuming the bitcoin mining industry doesn't change dramatically, it looks like we won't hit the 21 million-bitcoin limit until the year 2140.

During the early days of bitcoin mining, miners would often download a software package designed to allow their computers to process bitcoin transactions in the background. Unfortunately, that's no longer practical, because solving bitcoin transactions has become too difficult for your average computer to manage.

The bitcoin network is designed to produce a certain number of new bitcoins every 10 minutes. If only a few people are bitcoin mining at any given time, then the network will be generous and share bitcoins readily in order to reach the predetermined number. But now that bitcoin mining has become so widespread, the network has become much stingier about handing out bitcoins to miners. In order to control how frequently bitcoins are generated, the network requires miners to solve more and more difficult problems to confirm transactions -- which means that miners must have more and more powerful equipment just to keep up. These days, in order to have a chance at being profitable, miners need to adopt one of two approaches: 1) buy specialized hardware (aka a bitcoin mining rig) or 2) join a cloud mining pool.

To get started with your own mining rig, you buy hardware designed for mining bitcoin (or some other virtual currency), set it up, and let it run 24/7 solving bitcoin transactions. Ideally, this will result in a steady flow of payments without your needing to get involved.

While it's fairly easy to set up and use a bitcoin mining rig, actually making money on the process is something of a challenge. Because more and more people are signing up to mine bitcoins, the mining process continues to get more difficult and will likely keep doing so for some time. That means the hardware you bought last year to mine bitcoins probably won't be up to the job a year from now. And because bitcoin mining rigs aren't cheap -- expect to pay at least $1,000 for the hardware, or several times that for a top-quality rig -- having to replace it every year or two takes a huge bite out of any profits you make from mining. Plus, most mining rigs consume enormous amounts of electricity, so you also have to subtract that expense from the bitcoins you earn to determine your profits.

If buying and maintaining your own mining hardware doesn't appeal to you, then cloud mining may be the way to go. Cloud mining companies invest in huge mining rigs, often filling entire data centers with the hardware, and then sell subscriptions to individuals interested in dipping a toe into bitcoin mining. Your subscription to a cloud mining company earns you a small percentage of the bitcoins that those mining rigs yield.

The biggest challenge facing cloud mining subscribers is avoiding fraud. The field is rife with pseudo-companies that sell thousands of multiyear subscriptions, pay out for a few months, and then disappear into the sunset. If you decide to try cloud mining, do your homework in advance and confirm that the company you're dealing with is a real cloud miner and not a scheme. Preferably, you'd pick a cloud mining company that's been around for several years and has a decent reputation. Avoid companies with anonymous domain registration (you can look up their registration info at Network Solutions), as well as any mining company that "guarantees" profits or offers huge incentives for referring new customers; anything above a 10% referral commission is deeply suspicious, because legitimate mining pools simply don't generate a high enough profit margin to pay big commissions.

If you find a legitimate cloud mining company, you'll still lose out on a portion of the bitcoins the company generates, as said company will take its cut from whatever profits it generates. Many cloud mining companies also charge a fee or deduct a percentage of your take to pay for maintenance, electricity, and other costs of doing business. And as bitcoin mining becomes more and more competitive, the returns you make from that multiyear subscription may sink to an unprofitable level.

Bitcoin may or may not be at the top of a bubble, but bitcoin mining has definitely become much less profitable as more and more people get involved. You can help predict your profitability by using a bitcoin mining calculator to crunch the numbers, but even the best calculator can't tell you what the situation will be like in a few months or years. In short, getting involved in bitcoin mining today is a risky business. You might be able to make a fortune, but you're more likely to lose big.

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In a newly published paper on the use of bitcoin for illegal activity, researchers from the University of Sydney, the University of Technology Sydney and the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga indicate that a quarter of all bitcoin users are associated with illegal activity.

The use of bitcoin for illicit purposes has long been the most controversial aspect of the cryptoasset, although it has taken a back seat to speculation around the bitcoin price over the past few years.

In addition to estimating the scale of illegal activity involving bitcoin, the research paper also claims this sort of activity accounts for a significant portion of bitcoin’s intrinsic, underlying value.

In the paper, which was co-authored by Sean Foley, Jonathon R. Karlsen and Tālis J. Putniņš, publicly available information is used as the basis to identify an initial sample of users involved in illegal activity on the Bitcoin blockchain. Seizures of bitcoin by law enforcement, hot wallets of darknet markets, and Bitcoin addresses on darknet forums are used here, in addition to the trade networks of users who were identified in this data set.

Additionally, the researchers use a formula of their own creation to detect users likely to be involved in illegal activity by analyzing the entire public blockchain up until the end of April 2017. The formula for detecting criminals on the blockchain involves a wide variety of metrics such as transaction count, transaction size, frequency of transactions, number of counterparties, the number of darknet markets active at the time, the extent the user goes to conceal their activity and the degree of interest in bitcoin in terms of Google searches at the time.

“Bitcoin users that are involved in illegal activity differ from other users in several characteristics,” the paper says. “Differences in transactional characteristics are generally consistent with the notion that while illegal users predominantly (or solely) use bitcoin as a payment system to facilitate trade in illegal goods/services, some legal users treat bitcoin as an investment or speculative asset. Specifically, illegal users tend to transact more, but in smaller transactions. They are also more likely to repeatedly transact with a given counterparty. Despite transacting more, illegal users tend to hold less bitcoin, consistent with them facing risks of having bitcoin holdings seized by authorities.”

The paper also notes that bitcoin transactions between illegal users are three to four times denser, meaning those users are much more connected to each other through their transactions. This is consistent, the paper says, with illegal users taking advantage of bitcoin’s use as a medium of exchange, while legal users tend to view the cryptoasset as a store of value.

As with any research into the activities of criminals on the internet, it’s important to take the findings of this study with a grain of salt. Remember, this is a study on the activities of those who do not wish their activities to be discovered in the first place.

For example, another study Bitcoin Magazine reported on last week indicated a much lower level of illegal activity — albeit limited to the concept of bitcoin laundering — on the Bitcoin network than what was found in the study being reported on today.

Having said that, here are the levels of illegal activity on the Bitcoin network, according to the study:

The study compares Bitcoin’s black market to the markets for illegal drugs in the United States and Europe. In the United States, this market is worth $100 billion per year. In Europe, the market is 24 billion euros on an annual basis.

“While comparisons between such estimates and ours are imprecise for a number of reasons (and the illegal activity captured by our estimates is broader than just illegal drugs), they do provide a sense that the scale of the illegal activity involving bitcoin is not only meaningful as a proportion of bitcoin activity, but also in absolute dollar terms,” the paper says.

While the amount of illegal activity taking place on the Bitcoin network appears to be relatively large, the paper indicates that the prevalence of this sort of activity has been declining since 2015 as more mainstream users have entered the market due to the interest in bitcoin as a store of value or speculative asset.

The paper notes that the illegal activity involving bitcoin is inversely correlated to the number of searches for “bitcoin” on Google.

“Furthermore, while the proportion of illegal bitcoin activity has declined, the absolute amount of such activity has continued to increase, indicating that the declining proportion is due to rapid growth in legal bitcoin use,” says the paper.

The paper also indicates that privacy-focused altcoins, such as Monero and Zcash, may be cutting into bitcoin’s role as the currency of the online black market.

The paper notes that it’s currently unclear if bitcoin is leading to an increase in black market activity or if this is simply offline activity moving onto the internet.

“By providing an anonymous, digital method of payment, bitcoin did for darknet marketplaces what PayPal did for [eBay] — provide a reliable, scalable, and convenient payment mechanism,” the paper adds.

According to the paper, this use case is the underlying value of the bitcoin asset.

“Our paper contributes to understanding the intrinsic value of bitcoin, highlighting that a significant component of its value as a payment system derives from its use in facilitating illegal trade.”

In addition to implications the online black market could have on the valuation of the bitcoin asset (a claim that is highly speculative as the bitcoin price has continued to see tremendous gains in the face of declining use for illicit payments), the paper adds that this realization also has ethical implications: those who choose to speculate on the bitcoin price may question whether they wish to provide liquidity for a payment system that enables illegal online transactions.

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

..., the use of cryptocurrencies is a violation of foreign-exchange rules. Singapore: Official warning Characterized – sometimes with pride – as a nanny state, Singapore has lived up to that label when it comes to ...

The financial-services industry has been undergoing a revolution. But the driving force is not overhyped blockchain applications such as Bitcoin. It is a revolution built on artificial intelligence, big data, and the Internet of Things.

Already, thousands of real businesses are using these technologies to disrupt every aspect of financial intermediation. Dozens of online-payment services – PayPal, Alipay, WeChat Pay, Venmo, and so forth – have hundreds of millions of daily users.

And financial institutions are making precise lending decisions in seconds rather than weeks, thanks to a wealth of online data on individuals and firms. With time, such data-driven improvements in credit allocation could even eliminate cyclical credit-driven booms and busts.

Similarly, insurance underwriting, claims assessment and management, and fraud monitoring have all become faster and more precise. And actively managed portfolios are increasingly being replaced by passive robo-advisers, which can perform just as well or better than conflicted, high-fee financial advisers.

Now, compare this real and ongoing fintech revolution with the record of blockchain, which has existed for almost a decade, and still has only one application: cryptocurrencies.

Blockchain’s boosters would argue that its early days resemble the early days of the Internet, before it had commercial applications. But that comparison is simply false. Whereas the Internet quickly gave rise to email, the World Wide Web, and millions of viable commercial ventures used by billions of people, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin do not even fulfill their own stated purpose.

As a currency, Bitcoin should be a serviceable unit of account, means of payments, and a stable store of value. It is none of those things.

No one prices anything in Bitcoin. Few retailers accept it. And it is a poor store of value, because its price can fluctuate by 20-30 per cent in a single day.

Worse, cryptocurrencies in general are based on a false premise. According to its promoters, Bitcoin has a steady-state supply of 21 million units, so it cannot be debased like fiat currencies.

But that claim is clearly fraudulent, considering that it has already forked off into three branches: Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Gold. Besides, hundreds of other cryptocurrencies are invented every day, alongside scams known as “initial coin offerings,” which are mostly designed to skirt securities laws.

So “stable” cryptos are creating money supply and debasing it at a much faster pace than any major central bank ever has.

As is typical of a financial bubble, investors are buying cryptocurrencies not to use in transactions, but because they expect them to increase in value. Indeed, if someone actually wanted to use Bitcoin, they would have a hard time doing so.

It is so energy-intensive (and thus environmentally toxic) to produce, and carries such high transaction costs, that even Bitcoin conferences do not accept it as a valid form of payment.

Until now, Bitcoin’s only real use has been to facilitate illegal activities such as drug transactions, tax evasion, avoidance of capital controls, or money laundering.

Not surprisingly, G20 member states are now working together to regulate cryptocurrencies and eliminate the anonymity they supposedly afford, by requiring that all income- or capital-gains-generating transactions be reported.

After a crackdown by Asian regulators this month, cryptocurrency values fell by 50 per cent from their December peak. They would have collapsed much more had a vast scheme to prop up their price via outright manipulation not been rapidly implemented. But, like in the case of the sub-prime bubble, most United States regulators are still asleep at the wheel.

Since the invention of money thousands of years ago, there has never been a monetary system with hundreds of different currencies operating alongside one another.

The entire point of money is that it allows parties to transact without having to barter. But for money to have value, and to generate economies of scale, only so many currencies can operate at the same time.

In the US, the reason we do not use euros or yen in addition to dollars is obvious: doing so would be pointless, and it would make the economy far less efficient. The idea that hundreds of cryptocurrencies could viably operate together not only contradicts the very concept of money; it is utterly idiotic.

But so, too, is the idea that even a single cryptocurrency could substitute for fiat money. Cryptocurrencies have no intrinsic value, whereas fiat currencies certainly do, because they can be used to pay taxes.

Fiat currencies are also protected from value debasement by central banks committed to price stability; and if a fiat currency loses credibility, as in some weak monetary systems with high inflation, it will be swapped out for more stable foreign fiat currencies or real assets.

As it happens, Bitcoin’s supposed advantage is also its Achilles’s heel, because even if it actually did have a steady-state supply of 21 million units, that would disqualify it as a viable currency.

Unless the supply of a currency tracks potential nominal GDP, prices will undergo deflation.

That means if a steady-state supply of Bitcoin really did gradually replace a fiat currency, the price index of all goods and services would continuously fall. By extension, any nominal debt contract denominated in Bitcoin would rise in real value over time, leading to the kind of debt deflation that economist Irving Fisher believed precipitated the Great Depression.

At the same time, nominal wages in Bitcoin would increase forever in real terms, regardless of productivity growth, adding further to the likelihood of an economic disaster.

Clearly, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies represent the mother of all bubbles, which explains why every human being I met between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2017 asked me if they should buy them.

Scammers, swindlers, charlatans, and carnival barkers (all conflicted insiders) have tapped into clueless retail investors’ FOMO (“fear of missing out”), and taken them for a ride.

As for the underlying blockchain technology, there are still massive obstacles standing in its way, even if it has more potential than cryptocurrencies. Chief among them is that it lacks the kind of basic common and universal protocols that made the Internet universally accessible (TCP-IP, HTML, and so forth). More fundamentally, its promise of decentralised transactions with no intermediary authority amounts to an untested, Utopian pipedream. No wonder blockchain is ranked close to the peak of the hype cycle of technologies with inflated expectations.

So, forget about blockchain, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, and start investing in fintech firms with actual business models, which are slogging away to revolutionise the financial-services industry. You won’t get rich overnight; but you’ll have made the smarter investment. PROJECT SYNDICATE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Nouriel Roubini is Professor of Economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University, and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates.

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