FirstFT: Today s top stories newsoninvest.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newsoninvest.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Governments are increasingly getting worried about "stablecoins", cryptocurrencies which have a more "stable value". John Stepek explains what stablecoins are and why they are causing alarm.
In their desperation to find a reason for why bitcoin is terrible-bad-destructive-awful and morally reprehensible, the crypto-obsessed authors of the Financial Times blog Alphaville – Jemima Kelly, Jamie Powell, Izabella Kaminska – are quickly running out of good choices.
Their latest one is the “environmental FUD” – a classic in our world of environmentally obsessed elites, where anything remotely associated with The Climate ensures moral supremacy. If all else fails, guilt-by-association will not. So, complain away about the environmental impact from the energy used by the Bitcoin network’s nodes and miners.
What’s so strange about this objection is that first, that impact is globally small, and second – who cares? Somebody, somewhere, is using energy in ways that you disapprove of (shocking, I know), to which the only reasonable response must be “Yes, and?”
I fought in Afghanistan. I still wonder, was it worth it?
on withdrawing from Afghan
Timothy Kudo, a former Marine captain who served in the Afghanistan war, recalls a letter he wrote on the eve of his deployment in case he was killed. “The first paragraph reads, ‘It was worth it’, then it continues about honor, duty and patriotism before closing with a final farewell and a request for burial at Arlington,” he writes in The New York Times. “‘It was worth it’. The words reverberate. The weight feels a little heavier, and I whisper them like a mantra and continue marching. But now the war is ending, and those words are enigmatic.” As the US pulls its troops out of Afghanistan, Kudo fears that “the most meaningful part of my life – and only its prologue – is being erased by time, by the enemy and even by my country”. He wonders: “Was it worth it? Everything has been because I’d been able to answer yes to that question. But what if the answer is no?”