Typography

Bitcoin has had another white knuckle year, rising from a low of $350 in January to a high of $780 in June. As I've said many times before , if crytpocurrency is going to make a genuine dent in the world monetary order, it'll only happen when its price isn't so volatile. And one of the best ways to smooth things out is by creating a stablecoin, specifically by choosing to peg a cryptocurrency to a popular existing medium of exchange like the U.S. dollar. Stablecoin isn't just theoretical, a number of these tokens exist. They fail too. It's worth investigating the recent collapse of one the fledgling stablecoins, NuBits , to look for clues about the dangers and pitfalls of maintaining a stablecoin peg. Back in September 2014 a developer going by the pseudonym  JordanLee set out on a brave attempt at pegging a cryptocurrency, NuBits, to the U.S. dollar. The $1 peg lasted for around twenty months before falling in late May to 95 cents and outright failing on June 8. ...

The Bank of England recently announced that it will end a 300-year tradition of allowing employees to keep chequing accounts at the Bank. You can see an example of a cheque above, which is marked with the sort code 10-00-00. Traditionally, folks like you and me have only been able to get a piece of the central bank's balance sheet by holding banknotes. Central bank deposit accounts, which are far more convenient, have been limited to banks and other financial institutions. But the BoE provides a rare example of regular people, specifically employees, being permitted to directly own fully transferable central bank deposits, at least until recently. The BoE's termination of this seemingly archaic practice is especially interesting in the context of growing efforts to crack open central bank balance sheets to those who have traditionally been hived off from them. A concrete step in this direction is the Federal Reserve's overnight reverse repurchase facility, which allows mon...