Westchester & Fairfield County Business Journal 12252017

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WESTCHESTER & FAIRFIELD COUNTY

BUSINESS JOURNALS

DECEMBER 25, 2017 | VOL. 53, No. 52

4 | HAIR BUZZ YOUR ONLY SOURCE FOR REGIONAL BUSINESS NEWS

Finance pros weigh in BY PHIL HALL

see page 3

phall@westfairinc.com

O Chef Anthony Bourdain speaks at the December graduation ceremony at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park. Photo by Bob Rozycki.

Hotel hard sell by mayor alleged in Mount Vernon bheltzel@westfairinc.com

A

Mount Vernon property owner has sued Mayor Richard Thomas, the city’s Industrial Development Agency and the agency’s business development director for $15.1 million, claiming that they stymied his attempts to sell his property. Alan Landauer of White

Plains, who owns three acres at 1 Bradford Road, said that Thomas and Roberta James, the IDA official and a real estate broker, insisted that a developer build a hotel or commercial complex, for which the land was not zoned, instead of housing. After the project collapsed because of obstructions by the city, he alleges, James asked him for exclusive rights to represent him in selling the property. In a federal lawsuit filed on Dec. 18 in White Plains, Landauer accus-

westfaironline.com

Bitcoin trading a high-risk bet for investors and commerce

Call to Action

BY BILL HELTZEL

15 | EATERIES EXPLOSION

es Thomas and James of “stripping him of any economically viable use of his property” and of depriving him of the ability to realize a reasonable return on his investment. The mayor’s spokeswoman, Maria Donovan, said Landauer’s proposal for 1 Bradford Road “was a bad deal for Mount Vernon. It did nothing to bring real jobs to Mount Vernon or expand the commercial tax base. The IDA’s obligation is to encourage economic growth that benefits the whole city, not simply sign off on every deal that is presented.” James told the Business Journal she could not respond to the allegations because she had not yet seen the lawsuit. The Bradford Road property is next to the Hutchinson River Parkway at Willson’s Woods » MOUNT VERNON, page 8

n Dec. 10, bitcoin futures trading began on the Cboe Futures Exchange. The initial surge of activity was so overwhelming that the Cboe temporarily went down. The following day, bitcoin futures opened at $15,000 and closed at $18,545, a 23.6 percent spike. For Christopher Salem, a Danbury-based business and personal development consultant, the Cboe launch of bitcoin trading was a missed opportunity. “I’m usually ahead of the curve on a lot of investments before the general population catches up, but not on this one,” he said. “It has been around for eight years and when it began there were very few people, who were mining it for pennies.” For Eric Meermann, vice president of Palisades Hudson Financial Group in Stamford, bitcoin spells nothing but trouble. “I don’t think it has any place in an individual investor’s portfolio,” he said. “This is the biggest bubble I’ve seen in my 17 years as a financial adviser and it is the biggest bubble that we’ve seen since the Dutch tulip bubble of 1637.” Others in the business community are confused by or just not interested in the trading phenomenon. “For the life of me, I cannot wrap my head around bitcoin,” said Brett Nyitray, director of capital markets at iServe Residential Lending in Stamford. “I am clueless on bitcoins,” said Mickey Herbert, president and CEO

of the Bridgeport Regional Business Council. “The issue has yet to be brought to my attention by any of our 750 BRBC members.” The concept of bitcoin as a cryptocurrency was introduced in November 2008 in a paper titled, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” that was distributed to a mailing list of cryptography experts. Neil Howe, head of the demography sector at Hedgeye Risk Management in Stamford, noted that there was something unusual about the person credited with inventing the bitcoin concept. “The guy who founded it is Satoshi Nakamoto,” Howe said. “No one knows who he is. He may not exist at all.” Bitcoin production is done in a process called “mining,” which uses special software to solve computationally challenging puzzles. Bitcoin units are mined in blocks and anyone can participate in building the bitcoin block chain. Howe said that Nakamoto’s plans set a specific parameter for bitcoin production, but that is in danger of disappearing. “In the original algorithm, it would never be over 21 million” bitcoin units, he said. “Now, there are 16 million to 17 million out there, with more being distributed or mined. This is something of a nutty area, where a group of miners can branch off a chain and start a new series of blocks. The currency could split, and that is called a fork. You can have either a hard fork or a soft fork.” “It is complex,” Howe said. » BITCOIN, page 8


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