Thursday, September 14, 2017

Diamonds for ever

This is a cool video of a tax-free shop advertising at Amsterdam Schiphol airport in 2014. We were visiting Portugal and Spain.

It was an arresting video.

https://youtu.be/bU8TQxlHr2w

Sunday, September 10, 2017

I could not sign up for Coinbase in Hawaii!

CoinBase is a San Francisco based company that does digital currency business. I just wanted to set up an account (free) but since I live in Hawaii, I was rejected right away. I could not buy Bitcoin again (the last time it was lower than $350)

Hawaii is one of the states that the Hawaii's Division of Financial Institutions, "determined that licensees who hold virtual currency on behalf of customers must maintain redundant fiat currency reserves in an amount equal to the aggregate face value of all digital currency funds held on behalf of customers".

This translates to CoinBase to hold cash reserves (or equivalent assets) in order to do digital current business in Hawaii. The fiat money is same as the redundant collateral.

Coinbase of course does not want to commit to this and therefore they cannot do business with a Hawaii resident. They are therefore OUT.