Tag Archives: Notes

The Economist on “initial coin offerings:” Many ICOs are designed to finance applications that will make use of the blockchain … In some cases, the “coins” can be exchanged for services on the site. In a way, this is like selling air miles in a startup airline; investors can either use the miles for flights or hope they can trade them at a profit. For the business, it is also a way of creating demand for the product they are selling. But in plenty of cases, an ICO is just a way of raising...

On bankunderground, Simon Scorer reminds us that a central bank issued digital currency (CBDC) need not operate on a distributed ledger platform. The two do not have much to do with each other. Scorer suggests a series of technical requirements for a CBDC: And he concludes that a distributed ledger does not meet all requirements. It’s unlikely that all of the above attributes could be perfectly met with today’s technology; you may need to make compromises between features – e.g. the...

That’s what Gerald Auten and David Splinter argue in a paper from last year. … new estimates of top income shares using two consistent measures of income. Our measure of consistent market income includes full corporate profits and adjusts for changes from TRA86, including changes to the tax base and increased filing by dependent filers. In addition, we include employer paid payroll taxes and health insurance and adjust for falling marriage rates. The effect of these adjustments on...

The comparative constitution’s project shows timelines of the world’s constitutions. Japan’s constitution appears as one of the most stable ones, Switzerland’s doesn’t.

The ECB has published a first report on Stella, a joint research project with the Bank of Japan. The two banks are interested in potential roles that distributed ledger technology could play to support the financial market infrastructure. The report assesses whether existing payments systems could be safely and efficiently run on a distributed ledger. It concludes that a distributed-ledger-based system could meet the performance needs of real-time gross settlement systems, up to some...

On his blog, JP Koning offers two explanations for the surprisingly high rupee notes redemption rate—nearly 99%—after last year’s demonetization experiment: Money laundering, and a partial amnesty. Indians who had large quantities of illicit cash were able to contract with those who had room below their ceiling to convert illicit rupees on their behalf … Two weeks after the initial … announcement, the government introduced a formal amnesty for demonetized banknote holders. Any deposit of...

In Historia Mathematica, Daniel Mansfield and N.J. Wildberger argue that Plimpton 322, the Old Babylonian tablets, served as an exact ratio-based trigonometric table. … Instead, P322 is a trigonometric table of a completely unfamiliar kind and was ahead of its time by thousands of years. … we must adopt two ideas that are unique to the mathematical culture of the Old Babylonian (OB) period, between the 19th and 16th centuries B.C.E. First we abandon the notion of angle, and instead...

The Economist discusses the North-South divide in Germany which increasingly replaces the East-West division. The Southern states (Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse, Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Thuringia, Saxony) do better along many dimensions. Germans in the southern states … go to better schools, get jobs more easily, earn more and live longer to enjoy it. Their governments have healthier finances, so they can invest more … crime rates are “strikingly” lower in the south....

More from the recent working paper by Oscar Jorda, Katharina Knoll, Dmitry Kuvshinov, Moritz Schularick, and Alan Taylor (“The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015“). (Previous blog post about the return on residential real estate.) Return data for 16 advanced economies over nearly 150 years … …on the income and capital gains (and thus, total returns) from equities, residential housing, government bonds, and government bills. Real returns average 7% p.a. for equity, 8% for housing,...