A new cryptocurrency was created in February, the Auroracoin. It is comparable to Bitcoin (actually it’s based on Litecoin, but that would be too technical for this blog post) and on March 25 every citizen of Iceland will get 31.8 Auroracoins. For free. Just by using their ID number.

That in itself is an interesting experiment, because what will happen when everybody gets a small amount of a crypto currency? Will people start using it and create a second economy or will it not take off? When I first heard about it last month I did not really believe it would work but I still followed the coin a bit.

When Auroracoin was launched the value was very small, so 31 coins did not have a lot of value. But then something unexpected happened: people outside Iceland started to buy the currency before it was even distributed to the citizens of Iceland and the price shot up. Last Friday it was worth about $7 I think, so the total value of the 31 coins would be about $220. At that amount of money it would be likely that most people would claim their coins and maybe start using them.

But what happened over the weekend is unbelievable. The coin’s price exploded, and from $7 on Friday it is now worth over $66 per coin! (Update: while writing this post the price went up to $80 per coin!!!) That means that each person in Iceland will suddenly get over $2000 at the current market value. What might happen now, is that most people will sell the coins the moment they receive them and so the price will plummet. And of course traditional media will pick up the story saying that a Bitcoin experiment showed that people do not want to use Bitcoin.

Or something else might happen: maybe, just maybe, the hackers who created Auroracoin are just some very smart guys who created a hype to get rich quickly. The total value of the coins that they created last month is now worth over $700 million. Today over $17 million was traded, so they have a huge incentive to just forget about the whole experiment and slowly start selling their coins. They could earn a few million dollars per day over the next 22 days (until the coin should be launched on March 25). Not bad for a few weeks of work.

I am not saying that this will happen, but after the Mt. Gox disaster last week nothing surprises me anymore. It turns out that the name of the person that created the coin does not exist in reality. That does not mean that this is a scam, because Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s creator is also a pseudonym. Coincidentally Sathoshi holds about 1 million Bitcoins which as today’s market prices is alos worth about $700 million!

Let’s just say there is a big incentive for the creators not to distribute the coins and make themselves rich beyond belief. If they decided to do so, probably nobody would even be able to sue them. The perfect financial crime!

We will find out on March 25 whether the so-called Iceland airdrop will really take place. I personally think it will happen (I still believe that most people are intrinsically good), but I would not be surprised if the whole idea turns out to be a big scam.

Today Youku Tudou released its Q4 2013 results and the online video site is now officially profitable! It’s almost 10 years ago since I entered this sector, at that time I had not expected that it would take so long to reach this milestone. Although I have not been involved in the company for quite some time it’s still a nice feeling to see that the company is doing so well.

I dialed in on the earnings call a few hours ago and was impressed with how the company is doing and with their expectations and plans for 2014. The share price immediately reacted, during regular hours it went up by 3% and after the results were published by another 8.5%. Let’s see what will happen when Wall Street opens on Friday!

I am quite happy with this and from the pictures on Weibo I can see that the people at Youku Tudou are also celebrating this result in their office.

What’s the best way to quickly see what people on the Internet talk about right now? You can go to Twitter and scroll through your timeline to get an idea of what’s important, but your results depend very much on who you follow. It also takes time before you can distinguish between what’s important and what not. Twitter’s trending topics may be a better way to find out what’s going on, but there is a lot of noise there and some topics are covered multiple times.

Today a new app was launched in the app store, Current.ly, that solves this problem. I have been beta testing it for a couple of months already and I must admit that I love it. The app gives you a quick overview of what’s trending on Twitter right now, and you can even choose the country that you want to see the trending topics for.

The user interface is very well designed, so you can swipe from topic to topic and get all the information you want in just a few minutes. If you want to dig deeper into the topic you can do that with one click, if not you just go to the next topic. A great app for anybody suffering from information overload.

Current.ly was created by the team behind PeerReach, a company that I invested in about 2 years ago. Zlatan Menkovic and Nico Schoonderwoerd did a great job with this app, and I am proud of what the team managed to achieve with their limited resources. Congrats on reaching this milestone guys!

Give Current.ly a try, it may replace the way you consume some of your news. I am of course a bit biased (but I would never promote something I don’t like or don’t believe in!), but of the many news apps that I downloaded, this is one of the very few that I now use on a daily basis. You can either go the Current.ly website or you can download it from the Apple app store here.

It’s Monday lunchtime and it has been snowing non-stop in Vancouver since Saturday morning. Even at our house (which is close to the sea) there is a lot of snow and it looks great. Downside is that it’s hard to drive in this kind of weather, we don’t have a heated driveway so last night I could not even drive our family car up to the garage anymore.

Alfred, a long time friend from Holland, is visiting for a couple of days, so we decided to grab the opportunity and do some snow sports over the weekend. On Saturday we drove up to Hollyburn Mountain where we went snowshoeing. It was snowing hard it was not too cold, so perfect weather to enjoy the trails through the woods.

So far I had only done green and blue snowshoe trails, but this time we also tried some black ones. Because of the fresh snow they were not hard at all, just a bit steep at some places. The scenery was amazing with huge amounts of snow on the trees, and when you stopped it was completely silent. We were surprised that we hardly met anyone else on the trails, despite it being a Saturday afternoon. After the snowshoeing we had a glass of wine in my rooftop terrace hot tub, while it was snowing hard. We ended the evening at The Boathouse in Horseshoe Bay for excellent sea food dinner with local a Pinot Blanc.

On Sunday Scott had his weekly ski lesson on Cypress Mountain, so Alfred and I decided to go skiing as well. The snow was fantastic with a huge amount of fresh powder. Finally some of the black diamond slopes were open, so we tried some of them. Pretty cool to be skiing through the trees with your skis invisible under a thick layer of snow.

When Scott finished his lesson he also wanted to ski through the trees, so we took him on an easy trail. He loved it, despite his basic skills (he only had 7 lessons of 2 hours each so far) he was not afraid at all and had a great time. After that he was so tired, however, that he fell asleep in the car on the way back!

The snow was supposed to stop overnight, but this morning it was still snowing hard. According to the weather report it should have stopped snowing by late morning, so I decided to stay home until lunch time in order to avoid the snow and the traffic jams. But instead of less snow it started to snow even harder…

We kept the kids home from school today: the school sent us a text message at 6:30 AM that classes would start an hour later, and then our kids’ teachers advised us by email that the roads up the mountain were in very bad condition so that we should consider to keep the kids at home. That was turned out to be a good idea, because the heavy snow caused a power failure and parents had to pick up their kids before lunchtime already!

Driving was quite a challenge, especially because I did not put winter tires on my car and because the roads in our area were not cleaned or sprayed with salt. I like snow a lot, but I don’t mind if it would stop snowing soon. It looks great but when you live in a city with lots of hills it can disrupt life quite a bit. One thing is for sure, next year I am going to get winter tires for my car!

This afternoon I will pick up a friend from the airport, so at breakfast I checked Google to see what time the plane will arrive. Scott, who was eating his oatmeal next to me, wanted to see where the plane was at that moment, so I showed him the location of the plane on the KLM website. However, then I noticed that there was a difference in arrival time of more than 40 minutes between KLM and Google.

I assumed it was just a glitch that would be gone after refreshing the page or by just waiting 10 minutes, but that was not the case. It’s now about 5 hours later and both sites still show a different arrival time. Who should I believe? If Google is right I need to leave 40 minutes earlier than planned, but if KLM is right and I leave early I have to wait 40 minutes at the airport.

I normally use Google for arrival information and so far they have always been right, but because this is a KLM flight I would assume KLM’s information is more accurate. I wonder where they get their data from, I guess there should only be one feed for this information (the plane’s on-board computer)?

Update:  KLM’s information was right and Google was wrong, the flight landed at 2:22 PM. Good to know for the future. I still don’t understand why they give different arrival times though. Even after the plane had landed Google still showed 1:41 PM, and for tomorrow’s flight it now shows 1:49 PM, even though the flight has not even departed yet.

Mt. Gox seems to be in a dead spiral. The management is not only incapable of running the company but also of communicating effectively with its consumers. Today’s announcement that they have nothing to announce forced the Bitcoin price on the exchange down even further. People seem to be losing all trust in Mt. Gox, despite the fact that this is not the first time the exchange screwed up big time and each time they managed to come back.

Personally I think Mt. Gox still has a 60% chance to survive so if I would still have fiat money in the exchange I would say ‘buy, buy, buy’! I know some people who are trying to buy at these prices, but this is no investment advice to my readers. There is a big risk that you will lose all your money or that at least it will be tied up for a long time to come, so stay away if you have no extreme risk tolerance and don’t understand Bitcoin well.

But why is the management handling this so badly? Are they just plain stupid? Maybe, or maybe not. They might actually be geniuses, because they created a risk free money machine for themselves. Does nobody see this? The management can now buy BTC at $112 and sell it at the same moment for 5 times that amount on other exchanges. And they can do this continuously, this is an amazing opportunity for them and I would be surprised if they don’t take advantage of it.

It’s speculation, but today’s announcement only creates a larger opportunity for them. It made the price drop even further and they have more time to continue their trades. Wouldn’t it be possible that Mt. Gox lost a lot of money with the transaction malleability and is now using this to earn this money back?

The volume on the exchange seems to be about 70,000 BTC (source: bitcoincharts.com), which means that theoretically they can earn about $30 million per day risk free (assuming rates won’t change too much). Keeping their customers in the dark for a few more days could be extremely lucrative for them and might actually save the company if they would put the money back in.

Like I said, this is pure speculation, but these guys are entrepreneurs and if an entrepreneur sees an opportunity…

I’m a global citizen, so over the years I have cheered for many countries during international sports events. I am generally not a huge fan of watching sports (I prefer to do sports myself), but it’s always fun to watch a Dutch soccer game with friends (and a lot of beer) during the World Cup.

But I’ve also watched China play with Chinese flags painted on my face, for example when I was in Seoul for the soccer World Cup in 2002. So far I have not cheered for Canada yet, but that may come soon when watching the Olympic (ice) hockey semi-finals on Friday!

The day before the Sochi Olympics opening ceremony, Scott and Elaine were allowed to were civvies (as opposed to their daily uniform) to school, in the colors of their home country. When I read that they had to choose their country I was looking forward to which country they would choose.

The kids are both Dutch, in the sense that they have a Dutch passport, speak Dutch, watch some Dutch TV programs and go to Holland about once a year. But they never lived there, so I was not sure if they would choose Holland.

The more obvious choice would be China, where they were both born and raised until they moved to Vancouver about a year ago. They are both fluent in Chinese, they still love Chinese food (we mainly ate Chinese food in Shanghai) and they have a lot of Chinese friends in Vancouver as well.

So when they had to make the choice they both said… Canada! Frankly, at first I was a bit surprised. But when I thought about it a bit more it’s actually quite logical. They have only been here a year, but for them it probably seems like their whole life. They don’t really remember their life in China anymore and all their friends are now here. They probably don’t realize that they have a Dutch passport and they also never see me wearing orange for sports events. They now sing the Canadian national anthem in school every week and learn everything about Canada, so it’s logical they feel Canadian.

Thinking about it, I am happy that they made this choice, because it shows they are developing roots here. Over the years I have seen too many expat kids who lived all over the world and don’t know where they belong anymore. At least Scott and Elaine will likely feel completely Canadian when they get older. And I will cheer for Canada with them this weekend if “we” make it to the hockey finals!

The negative news about Bitcoin does not seem to stop. Central Banks keep on warning for the crypto currency, but that does not really have an influence on the market anymore. The Charlie Shrem arrest had a chilling effect on the community, but was not directly related to Bitcoin. The problems at Mt. Gox because of the transaction malleability caused another round of negative articles in mainstream media that do not understand the real issue (“Bitcoin has a fatal flaw”).

Next came the ban of Bitcoin in Russia, which was unexpected for many Bitcoin fanatics. After that news came that many more exchanges would be affected by the transaction malleability bug and a lot of them closed temporarily. Shortly after that there was a DDoS attack on the Bitcoin network that slowed things down considerably. And when the whole BTC community thought everything was finally settling down a bit, news broke that Silk Road 2.0 was hacked and 4400 coins were stolen out (or maybe the operators stole the coins?).

If Bitcoin had been a business it would have been bankrupt by now. But interestingly Bitcoin went down about 25% over the past week, but not more than that. A year ago this news would have led to a major crash, like the one in April where Bitcoin lost 70% of its value in one single day. To me this is a very good sign, Bitcoin has become a lot more mature and not everybody starts panic selling anymore even when there is such a long string of negative news.

What doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger, and that’s the case with Bitcoin as well. It will take more time to gain acceptance among the general population, but it’s certainly not the end of Bitcoin. The currency has once again proven that it can solve its own problems and most exchanges have adjusted their code for the transaction malleability bug.

Although I don’t like to speculate about the Bitcoin price too much, I think the value will go up again fast once more positive news comes out. It may take a few weeks or months, but I personally believe that unless something huge happens this might be the last time you can buy BTC below $600.