UK 17:14 Friday, 23 October 2026
Breaking news and expert analysis on fast-moving AIM and LSE listed shares
Disclosure: Financial Investigative Media Limited, which is not owned by Tom Winnifrith but by a trust for his dependants, owns shares in companies mentioned in this article. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from ShareProphets). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
I do not understand Bitcoin, blockchain technology and the like. I leave that to smarter folks like Dominic Frisby who will be presenting on it at Gold & Bears and my good friend Jim Mellon who will – I’m sure – mention it in his G&B talk. This could all be the next phooey hype but it could be big so I’m getting a small exposure via Coinsilium – a two year old blockchain investor listing on ISDX later this month. I’m backing Jim’s judgement on this one.
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Comments
Gary Newman
Very interesting one and will keep an eye on this as have been having a bit of a read on bitcoin recently – it seems that banks are starting to realise that it is an acceptable currency to use, and quite a few new listings going on around the word for companies involved in it and blockchain.
I see the inventor of Bitcoin (can’t remember his name, Japanese i think) is up for a Nobel prize for 2016!
wildrides
Bit coin , blockchain paah !…………….. just buy gold and bury it in your garden ! When the crims finally bring the internet down ( which they will ) or make it unusable , then these systems will be obsolete over night ( its called “the money crash” if your into future forecasting) The whole system relies on telecoms ……… which are the first thing to go out the window come the revolution baby ………….. how you gonna cash your shitcon in then ? Talk to Van Goddess and she will tell you “buy gold bars” . Your avin a bubble gov , or at least trying to make one !
Simple Moving Avarice
Bitcoin is fatally flawed. Any business which holds significant amount of cash as bitcoin eventually goes bust because one of its employees steals the lot. Bitcoin transactions are irreversible and anonymous(-ish). So the money disappears and the transaction cannot be reversed. It has already happened multiple times. (The alternative is you mislay some of your private keys and lose some or all of it. Bitcoin generates private keys all the time and you had better not lose any of them.)
The blockchain itself is a copy of every bitcoin transaction ever made and it is held on every bitcoin node. So you make a microtransaction to access a single webpage and that transaction is recorded forever on every single bitcoin node. It is so inefficient it will eventually collapse. No way could it handle more traffic than the current small devoted following. Even they got upset when a gambling site (SatoshiDice) started generating vast number of transactions because it was so popular.
Anyone building applications on top of the bitcoin blockchain such as mentioned in your linked article is relying on bitcoin continuing. You could presumably just use the ideas/technology without bitcoin itself but you’d need to persuade people to run nodes and in any case we are just talking about unrelated software developments in that case.
However it could easily bubble up in the short term. The bitcoin price itself has had multiple outrageous bubbles in its short life. In fact AIM is a veritable sea of tranquillity compared with bitcoin trading. Just know when to take your investment back out. As ever it is non-markovian: the best time to sell is just before the crash.
blackstone
Jim has cherry picked the best bits of Consilium for his investment vehicle Kuala Innovations (KUL) soon to be called Fast Forward
Daz
Blackstone agree, its Fast Forward Innovations from next week. Watch Kuala emerge into the ethos of Jims book, my share for 2016. Like Tom I know fkall about block chain but trust in Jim!