Must-reads September 12, 2018: Despite the hype, crypto’s plunge is awful

‘This is something we have to do to push the ecosystem forward’: Tyler Winklevoss explains why Gemini is launching a crypto coin pegged to the US dollar (Business Insider)
The Winklevoss brothers say their stable coin, which is also regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services and with assets held at State Street, will help draw in institutional money and confidence into crypto. That’s cool because…

Crypto’s 80% Plunge Is Now Worse Than the Dot-Com Crash (Bloomberg)
Here’s a sad stat: The “money of the future” is having an awful present. Crypto market caps are now 80 percent off their peak, a drop worse than Nasdaq’s plunge during dot-bomb. “One silver lining of the crypto slump is that ramifications for the global economy are likely to be minimal. While the market has lost more than $640 billion of value since peaking in January, that’s a far cry from the trillions erased from Nasdaq Composite stocks during the dot-com bust,” writes Patterson, adding salt to the wound. Just to put it all in perspective, CoinMarketCap has the total global value of crypto at $188.4 billion at the time of this writing. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo each have market caps larger than the whole sector that is supposed to take them down.

Bitcoin crash: This man lost his savings when cryptocurrencies plunged (CNN)
Crypto has suffered massive losses like this before, note the HODL bros, so everything will bounce back they say. That may be the case but this is the first big crash that brought in swaths of unsophisticated investors. “Retail investors, students, housewives, even grandma was driven in by the hype,” said Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance’s Michel Rauchs to CNN. “They were told by the media that this was an opportunity of a lifetime. They bought at the top and are now sitting on heavy losses.” Getting those people to ever adopt crypto again will be all the harder now.

A cryptocurrency created as a joke about a dog meme is surging while other coins are tanking (Business Insider)
It’s not all bad news. Dogecoin is having a good month.

Town of Midland set to pay ransom to unlock systems encrypted in cyberattack (Global News)
Midland, Ontario, a town of 16,000 souls on Lake Huron, gave the world hockey legend Mike Robitaille. In exchange, the world gave Midland a cyber attack. The town’s government was the unfortunate victim of malware. Stymied, they decided to start paying the hackers in crypto. Guess the doctrine of not negotiating with terrorists is now out the window. See? Money of the future!