Bitcoin

How the Rat sniffed out £15,000 down the back of my virtual sofa

It must be about 25 years since the Rat first made an appearance in The Spectator. He started out as my girlfriend’s six-year-old boy, then became my stepson and featured here quite often over the years because, being a scaly-tailed creature of evil, he was always good for some copy. This new year, with his agreement, I upgraded him to full son status. Let me explain why in a way that I hope you’ll find charming, rather than one that makes you want to throw up. The first reason is purely mercenary. During Christmas, while over with his wife Chloe from Hong Kong, the Rat managed to find about £10,000

Why cryptocurrencies are the answer

The craze for cryptocurrency can be explained by a host of factors: the allure of getting rich quick; the attraction of off-the-grid accountancy for malefactors like tax evaders and drug dealers (though Bitcoin is traceable); the glamour of the new. Despite blockchain currencies’ wild volatility thus far, I’d still posit that the more underlying attraction is to a reliable store of value. Bitcoin investors may not recognise their motivation as such, but the impulse behind computer-generated currency is revolutionary: to take the production and control of money away from government. Now that we live in a world of 100 per cent fiat currencies — backed by nothing — governments can

Martin Vander Weyer

Is it possible to defend the Persimmon boss’s nine-digit bonus? Well, let me try

New Year’s Eve was certainly a day for celebration in the household of 53-year-old Jeff Fairburn, chief executive of the housebuilder Persimmon. He was due to receive the first £50 million tranche of shares under a bonus scheme that has won him total entitlements of £110 million. He must have done a terrific job, you’ll be thinking, if shareholders value him so highly. But in fact his winnings (plus £400 million shared by 150 other Persimmon executives) are the freak outcome of a 2012 scheme that was tied to the company’s share price and dividend record but failed to include a cap on how high rewards might go. Then in April

The LSE’s skulking assassins are a terrible advert for the City’s global aspirations

The revenge tragedy at the London Stock Exchange whose plot I outlined last month has reached its third act, but the carnage may not be over. Chief executive Xavier Rolet has left the building, rather than staying one more year as the LSE first announced, and declared that he won’t come back under any circumstances. Despite whispers that ‘aspects of his operating style’ sparked this row in the first place, Rolet is due a £13 million golden farewell — which the Daily Mail called ‘obscene’ but his fans see as fair reward for all the value he has delivered. Chief among those fans is LSE shareholder and hedge-fund princeling Sir

Why oh why didn’t I buy more Bitcoin?

Every time I write about Bitcoin you can probably take it as a major sell signal. The last time I did so was in January 2014, at which point Bitcoin was trading around the $935 mark. Had you been inspired by my golden words and invested immediately in BTC (as we aficionados call it), here’s what would have happened: within a few months their value would have more than halved. ‘Bloody hell!’ you might have said. ‘This is an idiot’s game. Clearly there is no future in this stupid crypto-currency malarkey.’ But investment’s all about timing, isn’t it? Had you hung on a bit, watched it drift to its 2015

Up the Zambezi: why Rio Tinto’s colossal coal cock-up is going to court

Another week, another blue-chip in the dock. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has brought fraud charges against London-based mining giant Rio Tinto and two former executives in relation to an ill-starred coal venture in Mozambique. Whatever its legalities, this was a colossal corporate cock-up. In 2010, Rio paid $3.7 billion for Riversdale, an Australian company that controlled large coal deposits in the Tete region of Mozambique. The plan was to send coal by barge 400 miles down the Zambezi river to the coast, for shipping to Chinese power stations. But the coal reserves proved disappointing, while the Mozambique government refused to permit the barge operation and a rail link

Bitcoin is booming – is drug-taking the reason why?

The FTSE 100 ended the year strong, at 7142, and reopened even stronger. For 2016 overall the index gained 14 per cent, with multinational mining giants as top performers, while the pound lost 16.5 per cent against the dollar — those facts being closely related, since they mean London blue-chips are still cheaper in dollars than they were 12 months ago. Current optimism rests on the idea of a Trump spending spree on US infrastructure, but such is the perversity of markets that if common City wisdom decides that Brexit will actually boost the UK economy, stocks may fall as the pound resurges and foreign investors take profits. Meanwhile bitcoin,

2017 will be one long vampire scream from the liberal elite

I’ve been looking at my predictions for 2016 made this time last year. It’s extraordinary — don’t check, just trust me — all 12 of them came true. If you had placed a £1 accumulator bet on my forecasts that Britain would vote Brexit, Trump would be elected US President, and that Scarlett Moffatt off Gogglebox would win I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here, you wouldn’t need to read The Spectator any more — just the Forbes Rich List, where you’d come just between Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim. 1. 2017 will be one long vampire scream from the liberal elite. That moment when Christopher Lee finally gets

I may have to revise my view that crypto-currencies are Satan’s work

I confess to being an out-and-out Luddite when it comes to bitcoin and other so-called crypto-currencies. To the extent that I think about them at all, I think that they are an ephemeral by-product of those creepy ‘virtual worlds’ in which obsessed gamers eventually go mad; that only such lost souls could seriously believe unregulated online money might eventually supplant the state-backed real thing; and that fashionable belief in them can only lead to fraud and loss. In short, I concluded some time ago, they are probably the work of Satan. ‘Every normal person above the age of six and not over-affected by chemical stimulants should [grasp] that societal concepts

Let’s pay for the BBC content we use

What follows is a proposal for reducing the BBC licence fee and improving the corporation’s output while saving the British newspaper industry. All that’s involved is a basic understanding of pricing psychology combined with a digital currency for micropayments. Under my proposals, half the licence fee would fund the BBC’s Reithian purpose; the other £60 could be paid direct to the BBC as now or, if you chose, paid to you as a digital currency (6,000 Beebcoins). People could buy additional Beebcoins, which could be spent on BBC or competitor content — including content from newspapers. Notionally the BBC would lose out; in practice they would gain revenue, as they

Remember when Britain could build stuff?

Heathrow. The whole British story is there. Reading up around that debacle last week, I came across the eye-watering — and I think true — claim that, over the course of the second world war, Britain built 444 airfields. Four hundred and forty four. Although not all in the United Kingdom, probably. Some will have been in far-off lands, where Johnny Foreigner could be bought off in exchange for a pretty goat, or just shouted at, at gunpoint, until he went away. Hundreds, though, will have been here, on British soil — where it has now taken us over half an actual century to not quite build a new runway

Welcome to crypto-currency land

These online crypto-currencies have made the financial world more fun. It’s all so gloriously bonkers. First there was Bitcoin, the ‘peer-to-peer’ online payment system founded in 2009. Almost nobody understood how it worked or what a Bitcoin actually was — something to do with chains of code, computer ‘mining’, and a ledger system — but that didn’t stop anti-government types everywhere embracing the idea. A decentralised currency that politicians and bankers cannot manipulate and spoil — what’s not to like? Following Bitcoin, all sorts of junior crypto-currencies have popped up, mushroom-like, across the web. There’s litecoin, namecoin, novacoin, worldcoin, quarkcoin, feathercoin, alphacoin to name only several out of thousands. Are they

Do wars always start in years ending ‘14’?

Years of war Imaginative souls have tried to compared the situation in Ukraine with that which preceded the first world war 100 years ago. Are years ending in 14 especially violent? — 1414 saw the Polish-Teutonic war, one of a dozen skirmishes between Poland and Teutonic knights between the 14th and 16th centuries. The war was noted for the efforts to starve opposing armies by razing crops. — 1714 saw the outbreak of the seventh Ottoman-Venetian War, which like the first world war lasted four years. It ended with Venice losing control of the Peloponnese. — 1814 saw the Swedish-Norwegian War, which resulted in Norway entering a union with Sweden.

James Delingpole: Those bitcoin weirdos might just be right

Here’s a thought to kindle a lovely warm glow of smugness and schadenfreude as we enter a new year: you didn’t lose your fortune in the great bitcoin bubble of 2013. The reason I know you didn’t is because few Speccie-reading types of my acquaintance even understand what a bitcoin is, let alone how you might go about buying one, or why it might be important for the future of everything. So let me try to explain from the perspective of a fellow Luddite and techno-phobe. You think about bitcoin, if at all, as one of those newfangled things that young people and child pornographers and hackers and other unsavoury

Matthew Parris: Logically, bitcoin fans should love the euro. Why don’t they?

Bitcoins have been in the news, after a story about an unfortunate fellow who jettisoned his computer’s hard drive that contained (apparently) the code he needed to access his stash of this electronic currency — its value more than £4 million. I don’t even pretend to have an opinion on bitcoins. I only just, and most imperfectly, understand what this electronically traded currency is and why it appeals to people. But it has got me thinking. A bitcoin is a single currency, a global currency, a currency beyond the reach or control of national governments around the world. In theory (unless governments try to ban the bitcoin) it would be