Typography

This 2 euro coin is issued by Monaco, which is not a member of the Eurozone Grexit isn't what people take it to be. The standard narrative is that Greece is approaching a fork in the road. It must either stay in the euro or adopt a new currency. I don't think this is an entirely accurate description of the actual fork that Greeks face. Over the next few months, Greece will either: A) stay a member in good-standing of the institution called the "Eurozone" and continue to legitimately use that institution's currency, the euro, or B) leave the Eurozone while continuing to use the euro 'illegitimately.'* This means either the status quo of de jure (official) euroization or de facto (unofficial) euroization. In both cases, the euro stays. The probability of a new drachma emerging is awfully low. The widespread idea that a sick country can rapidly debut a new currency and, more importantly, have that currency be universally adopted as a unit of account is mag...

Over the last few decades, dollars have become incredibly heterogeneous. People can pay for stuff with traditional paper bank notes, debit cards, or a plethora of different credit cards. Each of these dollar brands comes with its own set of services and related costs. On the no frills side is cash. Paying with paper still incurs the lowest transaction costs, although at the same time it offers its owner no associated perks. On the fancy side is an American Express card, which costs around 3.5% per transaction but is twinned with a raft of benefits including reward points, the right to dispute a transaction, and insurance coverage. Mastercard and Visa come somewhere between. As you can see, spending one sort of dollar is very different from spending another sort. The free banking era and the "multitude of dollars" problem There's a precedent for this sort of dollar heterogeneity. During the U.S.'s so-called "free banking era" that lasted from the 1830s until ...

On Twitter , Noah Smith asks: @ClicheGuevara But why don't we use stock shares as our medium of exchange? — Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) June 13, 2015 He answers his own question on his blog . I pretty much agree. It's interesting to imagine science fiction worlds where people do use volatile instruments like stock as their medium of exchange. Why would people in these worlds be willing to adopt volatile media while people in our world don't? Liquidity, the world's best insurance policy against uncertainty First, we need to understand why our world has a preference for stable media of exchange. As Noah points out, people don't know exactly when they are going to need to spend money, or how much. Any individual faces the dizzying fact that any of an infinite number of events could hit them at any point in time. People have many ways to cope with this chaos, one of which is to build up an inventory of assets that can be deployed to help deal with surprises as they occur...

Bitcoin was supposed to result in the bitcoinization of the world; instead, I'd argue that the world of bitcoin is being dollarized. A successful medium of exchange will be used by four types of actors: retailers , consumers , financial intermediaries , and speculators . In bitcoin's case, the inherent volatility of the cryptocurrency militates against its adoption by anyone other than speculators, leaving dollars as the default option. Let's start with the first bit of the equation; retailers, or merchants. Entrepreneurs who have been trying to bring bitcoin to the mainstream have discovered that while merchants like the idea of allowing consumers to pay with bitcoin, the merchants themselves refuse to deal in the stuff. Instead, upon receipt of bitcoin, a merchant's bitcoin payments processors—usually an intermediary like Bitpay or Coinbase—will instantly convert bitcoin into U.S. dollars on behalf of the merchant. Retailers choose to dollarize rather than bitcoinize ...

It's pretty simple, really. For any medium of exchange to displace another as a means for buying stuff, users need come out ahead. And this isn't happening with bitcoin. We can break any exchange medium's user base into consumers  and sellers . Now we know that sellers love bitcoin—they've been adopting it at a blistering pace, from Amazon to Microsoft to CVS. No wonder when we consider the cost savings they enjoy. A merchant is required to pay around 1.5-2.0% for each credit card transaction. Bitcoin payment processors like Coinbase, Bitnet, and Bitpay charge just 0.5% while simultaneously absorbing all of merchant's forex risk. A retailer with $1 million in sales that converts all of its shoppers from Visa/Mastercard payments to bitcoin has just earned themselves $10,000. It's a no-brainer. While sellers are jubilant, consumers aren't. Tim Swanson shows that bitcoin payments haven't budged in over a year with bitcoin processor Bitpay's transaction...