#This Week in #Bitcoin: A New Dawn

Battle of the Acronyms
Words are constantly evolving. “Literally” used to mean literally, only now it’s more commonly used to exaggerate stories for dramatic effect. Then we have FOMO and FUD, two acronyms frequently used in the cryptocurrency space, both of which have also evolved from their original definitions. This week in bitcoin, we’ve got an equal stack of both: bullish stories that constitute FOMO and bearish ones that go down as FUD.

FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) is now applied to any story that bagholders believe detrimental to their chosen cryptocurrency. The story about child porn on the bitcoin blockchain definitely falls into that category – the reality is nothing of the sort. FOMO (fear of missing out) has similarly been misapplied so that it’s now used to denote anything positive. We’ll get to the upbeat stuff shortly, but first let’s finish this week’s allocation of fear.

Spies Gonna Spy
Ross Ulbricht is a hero in the eyes of many bitcoiners.
There was fear alright in the revelation that the NSA was aggressively targeting bitcoin users as far back as 2013, as the latest Snowden leaks show. It’s not a big surprise, but there’s still something daunting about seeing it in black and white. The leaked slides also provided further evidence that Silk Road’s Ross Ulbricht may have been snared by the NSA trawling the web for bitcoin-related activity. If so, this evidence wasn’t disclosed in court, and thus Ross’s defense team were unable to contest it. It’s long been suspected that “parallel reconstruction” – the practice of faking an evidence trail after the suspect’s been nabbed – is rampant at the highest level, and the NSA docs do nothing to allay that fear.