Typography

Vitalik Buterin had a thought-provoking tweet a few days back about interest rates. Lending DAI to Compound offers 11.5% annual interest. US 10 year treasuries offer 1.5%. Why the discrepancy? — Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) August 23, 2019 Today's post explores what goes into determining interest rates, not blockchain stuff. So for those who don't follow the blockchain world, let me get you up to speed by decoding some of the technical-ese in Buterin's tweet. DAI is a version of the U.S. dollar. There are many versions of the dollar. The Fed issues both a paper and an electronic version, Wells Fargo issues its own account-based version, and PayPal does too. But whereas Wells Fargo and PayPal dollars are digital entries in company databases, and Fed paper dollars are circulating bearer notes, DAI is encoded on the Ethereum blockchain. Buterin points out that DAI owners can lend out their U.S. dollar lookalikes on Compound , a lending protocol based on Ethere...

I recently spent some time on Twitter discussing the monetary wonders of Starbucks. In this post I'll bring a bunch of tweets together into a single blog post. I don't go to Starbucks very often, so I only recently learnt that the company has succeeded in getting many of its customers to stop using cash and debit/credit cards to buy coffee. Instead, they are using  Starbucks's own payments option: Wow Starbucks, what a great gig. Starbucks has ~$1.6 billion in 'stored value card liabilities' i.e. the Starbucks Card. So ~6% of the firm's liabilities are comprised of coffee addicts paying 0% for the privilege of lending to their supplier. Source: https://t.co/nGH2arujYz pic.twitter.com/cGcSW3L4MM — JP Koning (@jp_koning) August 11, 2019 Starbucks has around $1.6 billion in stored value card liabilities outstanding. This represents the sum of all physical gift cards held in customer's wallets as well as the digital value of electronic balances held in the Star...

Some payments systems are so awkward they scare away the average user. The only people with the patience to stick around must have a motivation for doing so. These include ideologues with an ax to grind, hobbyists who happily embrace complicated features, and criminals/weirdos who are shut out of everything else. Here are a few examples of awkward payments systems: -Local Exchange Trading Systems, or LETS -Bitcoin/Dogecoin - Labor notes - Stamp scrip When usage of a payments system is confined to a narrow group of like-minded individuals, this may stigmatize these systems, scaring away mainstream users. Stigmatization only compounds the initial awkwardness. After all, if fewer venues accept the stigmatized payments option then it becomes harder for the small band of users to make purchases. A vicious circle has been created. Initial awkwardness leads to stigma which leads to more awkwardness etc. While this vicious circle is the death knell for a payments system, it is less of a pro...