Bitcoin is a permissionless ledger. In plain English, that means you don’t need to ask anyone’s damn permission to use it. There are no terms and conditions to read, no checkbox to tick, and no forms to sign before you can send or receive bitcoin. But if some people had their way, pseudonymous cryptocurrencies, as well as anonymous coins like monero, would only be used with the government’s permission. These people are wrong. So wrong it hurts.
Also read: Illegal Activity No Longer Dominant Use of Bitcoin: DEA Agent
Bad Advice is Easy to Come By
Ever since bitcoin became officially cool, sometime last year, all its previous haters and ignorers have come out of the woodwork, offering to share their insights. Every day, the editorial inbox at news.Bitcoin.com fills with pitches from bankers, regulators, and financiers eager to dispense soundbites on this new asset class called cryptocurrency – the very same one that we could swear we’ve been covering for years.
There’s no shame in being late to crypto; cool points are not awarded for the number of years you’ve been using bitcoin. But it does stick in the craw when johnny-come-latelies try to position themselves as cryptocurrency experts and insist on telling the rest of us what to do with them. One such newcomer is Weiss, an agency founded in 1971 that has since gone on to rate more than 55,000 institutions and investments. It’s new to cryptocurrency though – 2018 new – and it shows. We originally reported on its nonsensical crypto ratings back in January, when it awarded BTC a “C+” – i.e mediocre. It then supplemented this with a review of 93 cryptocurrencies in May, in which BTC scored a “B-”.
The agency’s latest pronouncement
