Tag Archives: currency

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away we wrote a series of articles arguing that bitcoin is not money and is not sound. Bitcoin was skyrocketing at the time, as we wrote most of them between July 30 and Oct 1 last year. Back in those halcyon days, volatility was deemed to be a feature. That is, volatility in the upward direction was loved by everyone who said that bitcoin is money, in their desire to make money. In...

VoxEU, August 20, 2018. HTML. To a first approximation, inside and outside money are substitutes—the introduction of CBDC does not change the equilibrium allocation. Bank incentives and central bank incentives might be affected though. CBDC could increase the incentive to extend credit but might undermine the political support for implicit financial assistance to banks.

VoxEU, August 20, 2018. HTML. To a first approximation, inside and outside money are substitutes—the introduction of CBDC does not change the equilibrium allocation. Bank incentives and central bank incentives might be affected though. CBDC could increase the incentive to extend credit but might undermine the political support for implicit financial assistance to banks.

Our earlier articles on bitcoin discuss the crypto asset as a currency and a commodity. Both papers focused on the consequences of bitcoin’s defining feature: the asymptotic supply limit of 21 million coins. This gives it an unusual juxtaposition of demand uncertainty and supply certainty (as well as inelasticity). As a currency, it gives rise to a tension between its use as a store of value and as medium of exchange....

Bitcoin was on my radar far back as 2011, but for years, I didn’t think much of it. It was a curiosity. Nothing more. Sort of like the virtual money you use in World of Warcraft or something. In 2015, looking deeper, I slowly (not the sharpest tool in the shed) arrived at that “aha” inflection point that most advocates of honest money arrive at. I realized that a distributed public ledger has the power to change, well,...

Buy Gold, Silver Time After Speculators Reduce Longs and Banks Reduce Shorts – Gold and silver COT suggests bottoming and price rally coming– Speculators cut way back on long positions and added to short bets– Commercials/banks significantly reduced short positions– Commercial net short position saw biggest one-week decline in COMEX history– ‘Big 4’ commercial traders decreased their short positions by 28,800...

Like any other market, there are many opinions on what a currency ought to be worth relative to others. With certain currencies, that spectrum of opinions is fairly narrow. As an example, for the world’s most traded currency – the U.S. dollar – the majority of opinions currently fall in a range from the dollar being 2% to 11% overvalued, according to organizations such as the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bank of...

Here’s the latest sign that the massively fraudulent ICO market is headed for a collapse. Tezos’s investors are still waiting to learn when they can expect to receive the digital tokens that they paid a premium for during the company’s record-setting crowdsale. But as reports of abuse, internal strife and outright embezzlement have surfaced in the press, three groups of angry investors have filed class action lawsuits...

The value of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, just like any other kind of money, comes fundamentally from what you can do with it. As a follow up to What Backs Bitcoin, I want to dig into that value. The idea, which comes from Austrian economist Carl Menger, is that just as a shovel’s value comes from its ability to dig, a currency’s value comes from its ability to help you do two things: transactions and savings. Think...

Update: Cryptocurrencies are widely bid tonight with Bitcoin over $10,150, Ether holding $475, and LiteCoin topping $100 for the first time… LiteCoin Price in USD, Mar - Nov 2017(see more posts on Litecoin, ) - Click to enlarge Bitcoin has now soared over 20% since Black Friday’s close, topping $10,000 for the first time in history (rising from $9,000 in just 2 days)… now up over 950% year-to-date. image courtesy...