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People often discuss Bitcoin in terms of its price volatility: Is it up or down? Is it a good investment or a speculative bubble?

But at BI Intelligence, we believe all the talk of price volatility obscures Bitcoin's real value: as a payments network. Bitcoin offers merchants and individuals an extremely low-cost, virtually frictionless payments system. Value can easily be transferred around the world without transmitting sensitive information that could be used for fraud, and without forcing merchants — or people sending international remittances — to pay exorbitant transaction fees.

In  a recent report, BI Intelligence explains how Bitcoin works, from the moment when local currency is exchanged for bitcoins, to the moment when it reaches the electronic wallet of a receiving party. We look at the key advantages of Bitcoin compared to the legacy players in the payments industry and examine the challenges that Bitcoin faces as a payment network. 

Access the Full Report By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>

Here are some of the key elements from the report: 

• Unlike government-backed currencies, Bitcoin's elegant design places a strict limit on how many units can be created — 21 million. But each coin can be divided into 100 million pieces, which will allow it to scale as a payments technology.
• Bitcoin's daily average transaction volume stands at just $89 million compared to $16.5 billion for Visa and $9.8 billion for MasterCard. 
• In a nutshell, Bitcoin allows for the simple and secure transfer of value online, without intermediaries. There are many players in the Bitcoin ecosystem that help to make this happen, including Bitcoin exchanges, Bitcoin wallets, and miners.
• Third-party bitcoin payments processors already are stepping in to address flaws such as price volatility and the length of time that it takes the Bitcoin network to clear transactions, allowing merchants to instantly process bitcoin transactions and avoid exchange risk.
• Bitcoin faces other significant threats, though, including fraud and regulation. And right now, too much power is concentrated among a small group of miners, which opens Bitcoin up to further vulnerabilities.
• Despite the barriers, we believe the efficiency and low cost of Bitcoin in comparison to legacy payments tools — including credit cards, money transfer services, and letters of credit — will ultimately prove too tempting for merchants, individuals, and business-to-business applications to resist.

In full, the report:

• Examines the problems Bitcoin was created to solve and the elegant solutions it provides which have clear advantages over the current payments system. 
• Gives an insider's view of Bitcoin with exclusive interviews from Bitcoin Investment Trust Founder Barry Silbert and BitPay's Vice President of Marketing Stephanie Wargo.
• Explores the open questions surrounding Bitcoin pertaining to security, volatility, and regulation and provides potential answers to these questions. 
• Analyzes the players in the legacy payments system which Bitcoin has the potential to eliminate if it catches on as a transaction network. 

For full access to all BI Intelligence's charts and data on the Payments Industry, sign up for a free trial.

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The Atlantic's New York Ideas conference played host to a debate on the future of bitcoin on 6th May.

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Today's young people can retire comfortably with $1 million in the bank. All it takes is starting early, spending 15 minutes a year rebalancing their portfolio, and avoiding financial professionals who are mostly concerned with making themselves money.

At least that's the message of William Bernstein, cofounder of investment management firm Efficient Frontier Advisors, who recently published the short ebook "If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly."

It clearly resonates. The book, available for free on his website and for 99 cents on Amazon, is being snapped up by readers, and a New York Times story about Bernstein has spent the last several days at the top of the publication's most emailed list.

The popular interest seems to be a combination of older people sharing the text with their young family members and unspoken anxiety about saving for retirement, Bernstein tells Business Insider. "Of course, what I'd really like to believe," he says, "is that I've successfully stoked latent public outrage over a retirement system that somehow expects the folks who teach our kids and flip our burgers to somehow, against all odds, manage their retirement portfolios."

So how can you get rich slowly? Here's some of Bernstein's advice, excerpted from the ebook with his permission:

*** 

Would you believe me if I told you that there's an investment strategy that a seven-year-old could understand and that will take you 15 minutes of work per year, outperform 90% of finance professionals in the long run, and make you a millionaire over time? 

Well, it is true, and here it is: Start by saving 15% of your salary at age 25 into a 401(k) plan, an IRA, or a taxable account (or all three). Put equal amounts of that 15% into just three different mutual funds: 

• A U.S. total stock market index fund
• An international total stock market index fund
• A U.S. total bond market index fund 

Over time, the three funds will grow at different rates, so once per year you'll adjust their amounts so that they're again equal. (That's the 15 minutes per year, assuming you've enrolled in an automatic savings plan.) 

That's it; if you can follow this simple recipe throughout your working career, you will almost certainly beat out most professional investors. More importantly, you'll likely accumulate enough savings to retire comfortably. 

But You're Still Screwed 

Most young people believe that Social Security won't be there for them when they retire, and that this is a major reason why their retirements will not be as comfortable as their parents. Rest assured that you will get Social Security; its imbalances are relatively minor and fixable, and even if nothing is done, which is highly unlikely in view of the program's popularity, you'll still get around three-quarters of your promised benefit. 

The real reason why you're going to have a crummy retirement is that the conventional "defined benefit" pension plan of your parents' generation, which provided a steady and reliable stream of income for as long as they lived, has gone the way of disco. There's only one person who can repair the gap left by the disappearance of these plans, and you know who that is. Unless you act with purpose and vigor, your retirement options may well range between moving in with your kids and sleeping under a bridge in the rain. 

Further, the most important word is the IF in the above "if you can follow this simple recipe," because, you see, it's a very, very big if. 

At first blush, consistently saving 15% of your income into three index funds seems easy, but saying that you can become comfortably well-to-do and retire successfully by doing so is the same as saying that you'll get trim and fit by eating less and exercising more.

People get fat because they like pizza more than fresh fruit and vegetables and would rather watch Monday night football than go to the gym or jog a few miles. Dieting and investing are both simple, but neither is easy. (And I should know, since I've been much more successful at the latter than at the former.) 

In your parents' day, the traditional pension plan took care of all the hard work and discipline of saving and investing, but in its absence, this responsibility falls on your shoulders. In effect, the traditional pension plan was an investing fat farm that involuntarily limited calorie intake and made participants run five miles per day. Too bad that, except for the luckiest workers, such as corporate executives and military personnel, these plans are disappearing. 

Bad things almost inevitably happen to people who try to save and invest for retirement on their own, and if you're going to succeed, you're going to need to avoid them. To be precise, five bad things — hurdles, if you will — must be overcome if you are to succeed and retire successfully:  

Hurdle number one

People spend too much money. They decide that they need the newest iPhone, the most fashionable clothes, the fanciest car, or a Cancun vacation. Say you're earning $50,000 per year, 15% of which is $7,500, or $625 per month.

In this day and age, that's a painfully thin margin of saving, and it can be wiped out simply by stringing together several seemingly innocent expenditures, each of which might nick your savings by $100 or so per month: a latte per day, a too-rich cable package, an apartment that's a little too tony, a dress or pair of brand-name sneakers you really don't need, a few unnecessary restaurant meals and, yes, an excessive smart phone plan you could, if you had to, not only live without, but also function better without.

Life without these may seem spartan, but it doesn't compare to being old and poor, which is where you're headed if you can't save. You might even save the whole $625 in one fell swoop just by living with a roommate for a while longer, instead of renting your very own place. Again, as bad as having a roomie may be, it's not nearly as awful as living on cat food at age 70.

Let's assume you can save enough. You're not home free, not by a long shot. You've got four more barriers to get by.

Hurdle number two

You'll need an adequate understanding of what finance is all about. Trying to save and invest without a working knowledge of the theory and practice of finance is like learning to fly without grasping the basics of aerodynamics, engine systems, meteorology, and aeronautical risk management. It's possible, but I don't recommend it.

I'm not suggesting that you need to get an MBA or even read a big, dull finance textbook. The essence of scientific finance, in fact, is remarkably simple and can be acquired, if you know where to look, pretty easily. (And rest assured, I'll tell you exactly where to find it.) 

Hurdle number three

Learning the basics of financial and market history. This is not quite the same as the above hurdle; if learning about the theory and practice of finance is akin to studying aeronautics, then studying investing history is akin to reading aircraft accident reports — something every conscientious pilot does.

The new investor is usually disoriented and confused by market turbulence and the economic crises that often cause it; this is because he or she does not realize that there's nothing really new under the investment sun.

A quote often misattributed to Mark Twain has it that "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." This fits finance to a tee. If you don't recognize the landscape, you will get lost. Contrariwise, there's nothing more reassuring than being able to say to yourself, "I've seen this movie before (or at least I've read the script), and I know how it ends." 

Hurdle number four

Overcoming your biggest enemy — the face in the mirror — is a daunting task. Know thyself. Human beings are simply not designed to manage long-term risks. Over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, and over hundreds of millions of years of animal development, we've evolved to think about risk as a short-term phenomenon: the hiss of the snake, the flash of black and yellow stripes in the peripheral vision.

We were certainly not designed to think about financial risk over its proper time horizon, which is several decades. Know that from time to time you will lose large amounts of money in the stock market, but these are usually short-term events — the financial equivalent of the snake and the tiger. The real risk you face is that you'll be flattened by modern life's financial elephant: the failure to maintain strict long-term discipline in saving and investing. 

Hurdle number five

As an investor, you must recognize the monsters that populate the financial industry. They're very talented chameleons; they don't look like monsters; rather, they appear in the guise of a cousin or an old college friend. They are also self-deluded monsters; most "finance professionals" don't even realize that they're moral cripples, since in order to function they've had to tell themselves a story about how they're really helping their customers. But even if they're able to fool others and often themselves as well, make sure they don't fool you. 

Only if you can clear all five of these hurdles can you successfully execute the deceptively simple "three fund strategy" I've outlined above.

This excerpt is from "If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly" by William Bernstein.

SEE ALSO: What I Wish I Had Known About Money When I Was 21

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The post China And Bitcoin: Two Chinese Banks Announce That They Will Cancel Accounts Associated With Bitcoin Or Litecoin appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

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The post China And Bitcoin: Two Chinese Banks Announce That They Will Cancel Accounts Associated With Bitcoin Or Litecoin appeared first on CryptoCoinsNews.

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The post CryptoCurrency Castle Consummated appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.