**TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based company founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming. It is used to create short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. The app was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in markets outside of China. ByteDance had previously launched Douyin (Chinese: 抖音) for the Chinese market in September 2016. TikTok and Douyin are similar to each other, but they run on separate servers to comply with Chinese censorship restrictions. The application allows users to create short music and lip-sync videos of 3 to 15 seconds and short looping videos of 3 to 60 seconds. The app is popular in Asia, the United States, and other parts of the world.TikTok is not available in China; its servers are based in countries where the app is available. TikTok was the most downloaded app in the US in October 2018, the first Chinese app to achieve this. As of 2018, it is available in over 150 markets and in 75 languages. In February 2019, TikTok, together with Douyin, hit one billion downloads globally, excluding Android installs in China. In 2019, TikTok was declared the 7th most downloaded mobile app of the decade, from 2010 to 2019.** Source: Bloomberg and wikipedia

**Peter Schiff is wrong about bitcoin for the same reason he was right about the housing market crash. That’s what makes his views on bitcoin fascinating.** The Federal Reserve’s expansionary monetary policy steadily drives down the value of the dollar. This is by design, because it gets people to spend and invest their money instead of hanging onto it. Mainstream economists from John Maynard Keynes to Milton Friedman are proponents of this design, believing it spurs economic growth. The drawback, as Schiff and the Austrian economists he studied have pointed out, is the boom and bust economic cycle. As money expands, the rush to spend it creates misallocation of capital to high risk, unproductive investments and speculative bubbles. When the market readjusts prices to reflect the true value of the economy, there’s a crash. Bitcoin didn’t exist when the housing market crashed and the Great Recession dragged the entire world economy into the doldrums. But if it had, one could imagine how much capital would have fled to it as a global macro hedge. Bitcoin has already proven itself as a safe haven asset like gold. Like gold, the bitcoin price is uncorrelated to equities. Peter Schiff’s question was obviously a tongue-in-cheek wisecrack. But the real question is what will happen first: $3,000 spot price of gold, or bitcoin reaches its previous all time high of $20,000? Let’s hope it’s the latter. Because if gold roughly doubles in price over the next couple years, it means we’re having another Great Recession. Source: CNBC