Ann: Proposed Sale of Western Tanami Project, page-34

You realise that crypto currencies are a form of non-central bank sanctioned money printing. There is a cost in creating them but when their value starts far exceeding their cost, you might end up with a problem if there is significant proliferation. As long as they stay small and largely irrelevant governments won't care. If they get too big for their boots, to the extent of affecting the money supply, they will simply be made illegal. My guess is that the phenomenon will be self correcting long before they become a threat to central bankers or gold. Funny you mention the dotcom bubble. Seems to have some similarities to the crypto bubble. The market in the dotcom days got really excited with the prospect of being able to make money over the internet but actually forgot that you still needed a valid business idea/model to base your internet business on and some time for that business to mature. The dotcom euphoria placed the cart before the horse. It was always going to take time for people to figure out how to properly monetise the internet. The dotcom bubble was just trying to fast track the process and that's why it ended in tears. The concept of a blockchain form of digital currency exchange is also an innovative idea but its current value far exceeds its present utility. It's actual current utility is dominated by its catalytic role at the centre of a small speculative financial bubble, just like the utility of a tulip (as a pretty decorative flowering bulb) got usurped by its utility as catalyst for another runaway episode of financial speculation. What's the real value of a blockchain currency exchange? Probably only a little more than any other digital currency exchange system by virtue of its additional security utility built into the encryption algorithms that create each coin. Esh