You know who they are? Remember the ”to the manor born” brothers who were rowing champions at Harvard, the guys who battled Mark Zuckerberg, another really likeable guy, over the creation and ownership of Facebook, Inc. ? Those guys.
They settled their Facebook claim against Zuckerberg for
about $65 million dollars some time ago.
Now they’re using some of that chump change to fund an initial public offering of the
“Winklevoss Trust” that allows other investors to purchase shares in their
latest “disruptive” online innovation.
The Twins, as they are known to those in the know and their
attorneys, will sell $20M in shares to create a more robust trading market in bitcoins,
which will operate like exchange traded funds. As the Wall Street Journal describes it, the Winklevoss Twins want to
create the next and more sophisticated investment mechanism in what is “ultimately
a peer-to-peer payment system that allows people to pay one another using the
currency from virtual accounts accessed online and on mobile devices.”
Sounds good until you realize that…
Bitcoin was launched in 2009 by a developer whose identify
remains unknown – Edward Snowden? How else can he afford to live in a Moscow
airport?
Plus, this is important:
the money isn’t backed by a
central governing body, such as the Federal Reserve. Because that would take most of the fun – I
mean, risk – out of it. And users remain
mostly anonymous save for their ‘bitcoin” address.
People, am I the only one who thinks nothing good can come
of this?
Bitcoin is secret currency, manipulated for profit by secret
investors. Young tech investors carrying
enormous college debt who are also in search of the next big thing (along with
their soon-to-be- retired helicopter parents, who will finance this out of their
under-resourced retirement savings account) will likely want in because
everybody loves the idea of getting rich quick -- and let’s face it, retirement
is expensive these days.
Even if bitcoin turns out to be very virtually profitable, it
also represents another significant step in the evolution of our most
seductive product as a country: money
and its ultimate control by a relatively small group of people who never seem
to lose their money like the rest of it us when the bubble bursts.
So, high rollers – welcome to digital dialing for dollars, brought
to you by the guys who believe they created Facebook, but maybe didn’t really
if you’ve seen Aaron Sorkin’s The Social
Network (great movie, by the way).
Beware how you play the bitcoin game with them, though, because these
dudes don’t like to lose. And they’ve
got the cold hard real cash money to prove it.
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