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Rothschild Investment Corporation invests in Bitcoin via Bitcoin Investment Trust

According to the documents sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Rothschild Investment Corporation, one of Chicago’s oldest employee owned investment manager, has invested in the digital currency Bitcoin via Bitcoin Investment Trust (GBTC).

The details of the document show that the firm now owns $210,000 worth of GBTC.

The Bitcoin Investment Trust, Sponsored by Grayscale Investments, is an open-ended grantor trust based in the U.S. Its shares are publicly quoted securities solely invested in and deriving value from the price of bitcoin, reports EconoTimes. The publicly traded shares officially started trading under the ticker GBTC in 2015.

While there seems to be mixed feels about the Rothschild interest into the cryptocurrency, this is signaling that even the more financially elitist actors out there are viewing more upside when it comes to BTC.

Let us hear your thoughts about this in the comment section.

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Former ‘Plunge Protection Team’ Member Warns “Blockchain Is Freaking Governments Out”

Dr. Pippa Malmgren, a US policy analyst and former member of the Working Group on Financial Markets, a government entity better known by its nickname, the “Plunge Protection Team,” had some really interesting things to say about the future of cryptocurrency and the approach governments may take in getting involved in the crypto-sphere. She laid it all out on Erik Townsend’s MacroVoices podcast.

I'll leave you with a few excerpts, courtesy of Zero Hedge, and give you a link to the full the transcript.

• Pippa: Totally. Totally. I think it is a massive market and geopolitical issue. I have written a little article about this, which I put up on LinkedIn, where I said you have got to understand if the size of your debt problem is so big that it can’t be paid off and in fact even inflation, which is the usual way you would seek to default on your debt slowly over time, you can’t get enough inflation generated, then there is one further option. And that is you literally abandon the entire system of money, and accounting. I know that sounds unbelievably radical, but we have seen it happen before. I explained the example of Britain in 1834, when they abandoned the traditional system they had used for 1,000 years at that time, which was called the Tally Stick system. So when we say we tally things up or the word stock market refers to the use of little wooden stocks. They were little pieces of wood on which you record every transaction during your life, every borrowing, every lending deal, every asset acquisition, every tax payment. The way it worked was it was literally a wooden board. You cracked it half really roughly so the two sides definitely did match and couldn’t be faked. Then the borrower and the lender each marked all their transactions. The stock end was always the smaller end, so that’s where we get stock market. There was a market in the stocks, these little wooden sticks. Bottom line was why would you abandon a system that has worked perfectly beautifully for 1,000 years. The answer is you had 200 years of war debts that had accumulated. They were unable to get inflation up enough without causing social unrest, and so the government said hey, let’s take the tally sticks back, and give people this great new innovation called paper money.
  You can imagine everyone said I am going to hand over this record, this ledger of my entire net worth, and you are going to give me a piece of paper. Really? This is a joke. In the end, what the government had to do was confiscate the tally sticks, and they took them to parliament to burn them. They misjudged how much heat the fire would throw off, and that is what caused Parliament to burn to the ground in 1834. It was the destruction of the system of accounting and money. In its place, we adopted what we now use, which is piece of paper we call cash. Today, we are on the brink of similar step change, and the way you will do it is you move to electronic money in conjunction with blockchain. Blockchain is the new ledger, and e-money is the new currency.

• Pippa: The question is whose e-money. So everybody in government circles have been watching the Indian experience because the prime minister stepped up to the platform in early November and basically said we are going to move all of you, a billion people, off paper money and onto electronic money, and we are going to do it in three months. They did it, and they did it successfully. Now governments everywhere are saying we want to do that because, guess what happens when you move to e-money. First of all, you really eliminate the black market because you can’t transact anymore without it being seen. And so, for example, the European Union are talking heavily about moving to electronic money because then all this black market activity that happens in Greece and Italy where there’s no tax, we will be able to get all that tax revenue off it.

• Pippa: The question is can you trust the private hands who are issuing Ethers as much or more as you trust governments. So governments are being to say let’s create our own version, and that’s where you get the PBOC saying we’ve got to control this. Because otherwise, you are going to end up with private sector currencies that possibly are trusted more than government currencies, and that will lead to transactions offline that governments can’t see. There was a report going around the Internet recently about some guy who made $200 million bucks trading on Ethereum in a month, and the question was who will tax that. The answer is nobody. That freaks governments out to say the least, particularly given their debt situation. So I think this is a huge, huge thing, and all investors have to think very carefully about it.

Full transcript.

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Military Just Warned Americans To Exptect WAR With North Korea

Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested Saturday that Americans must be “prepared for the possibility of a military confrontation with North Korea.”

Dunford deemed North Korea's nuclear program an urgent threat while stressing the importance of applying continued economic and diplomatic pressure aimed at persuading Pyongyang to give up its arms.

Despite those thoughts, he dismissed the oft-stated notion that a military option shouldn't be on the table.

While speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, a gathering of national security officials in Colorado, Dunford said:

“Many people have talked about military options with words like ‘unimaginable. I would probably shift that slightly and say it would be horrific, and it would be a loss of life unlike any we have experienced in our lifetimes, and I mean anyone who’s been alive since World War II has never seen the loss of life that could occur if there’s a conflict on the Korean Peninsula. But as I’ve told my counterparts, both friend and foe, it is not unimaginable to have military options to respond to North Korean nuclear capability. What’s unimaginable to me is allowing a capability that would allow a nuclear weapon to land in Denver, Colorado. That’s unimaginable to me. So my job will be to develop military options to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

A Mac Slavo notes, some "experts" seem to believe that North Korea is not a threat to the United States, yet simultaneously, these same experts warn us to expect some military force to be used against the defiant regime at some point in the very near future.

Some experts have also warned that North Korea does have the missile capacity to strike the United States right now, while others are skeptical.

At this stage, Pyongyang does not appear capable of delivering a nuclear weapon on such missiles, but its rapid advancement in the overall weapons systems is deeply worrying to President Donald Trump’s administration. -Politico

So, as you can see, war with North Korea might be hard to get the American people behind because there are so many opinions on the actual capabilities Pyongyang has. And with the U.S.'s track record of lying its way into war, the public will (hopefully) take everything said with a grain of salt.

One thing is clear though, the state of Hawaii certainly is not taking any chances. The island state is currently preparing for a nuclear strike from North Korea.

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This article was put together by the team of writers at PFWnews.com