Typography

Last week, we finally got some information about what Libra's currency basket would look like. A Libra currency basket will reportedly include... -no Chinese yuan -50% dollar -18% euro -14% yen -11% pound -7% Singapore dollar https://t.co/YNbRY9Q02x Libra could have automated the decision by adopting an established unit of account, say the IMF's SDR... — John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) September 20, 2019 If you haven't heard, Libra is a proposed global blockchain-based payments network. It is being spearheaded by Facebook along with a coalition of other companies including Uber, MasterCard, PayPal, and Visa. The hook is that rather than going the conventional route and expressing monetary values using existing units-of-account like the dollar, yen, pound, or euro, the Libra network will rely on its own bespoke Libra unit-of-account as its "base language." Libra originally revealed in its whitepaper that the Libra unit would be defined as a basket, or cocktail, of ...

Facebook recently announced a new cryptocurrency, Libra. I had earlier speculated about what a Facebook cryptocurrency might look like here for Breakermag. I think this is great news. MasterCard, Visa, and the various national banking systems (many of which are oligopolies) need more competition. With a big player like Facebook entering the market, prices should fall and service improve, making consumers better off. The most interesting thing to me about Facebook's move into payments is that rather than indexing Libras to an existing unit of account, the system will be based on an entirely new unit of account. When you owe your friend 5 Libras, or ≋5, that will be different from owing her $5 or ¥5 or £5.  Here is what the white paper has to say: "As the value of Libra is effectively linked to a basket of fiat currencies, from the point of view of any specific currency, there will be fluctuations in the value of Libra." So Libra will not just be a new way to pay, but al...

The U.S. $10,000 was available till Nixon nixed it in 1969 For the last few years the conversation about cash has been dominated by Ken Rogoff's proposal to remove high-denomination banknotes. In an effort to broaden the discussion, last year I wrote an essay for Cato Unbound about introducing a new U.S. supernote. The value of the current highest denomination note--the $100 bill--has deteriorated over the decades thanks to inflation. Is it time to restore the purchasing power of U.S. cash by bringing out a $1,000 note? In the same essay I also floated the idea of taxing the supernote. Why a tax? A new $1,000 bill could be used for both good and nefarious purposes. Given that nefarious supernote usage (tax evasion and crime) could impose costs on society, a tax would make up for this by transferring wealth from note users to the rest of us. (I also blogged about the idea of taxing cash here and here ).  Josh Hendrickson, Will Luther, and Jamie McAndrews all had responses. Do rea...

When it comes to financial privacy, good old fashioned banknotes and privacy cryptocurrencies like Zcash & Monero get all the attention. But as I recently wrote for the Sound Money Project, let's not forget about prepaid debit cards. Having written a bunch of posts over the last two years about financial privacy, I recently decided that it was time to step up my own personal financial privacy game. A few months ago I walked into my local pharmacy and bought my first non-reloadable prepaid debit card (i.e. gift card), a Vanilla card. You've probably seen the rack of prepaid cards near the front of pharmacies and department stores. Some of them are closed-loo p cards. They can only be used to buy things at the issuer, say Tim Horton's or Starbucks. But some of them, like my new Vanilla Prepaid card, are open-loop cards. That means they can be used wherever Visa or MasterCard are accepted. In Canada, Vanilla cards are sold in denominations from $25 to $250. The Vanilla c...

Say that the local lottery system has decided to innovate. Lottery tickets can now be used as money. A ticket with a face value of $x can be used to buy $x worth of stuff at any checkout counter in the country. Or they can be held in digital form and transferred instantaneously across the lottery's new payments system to friends, the utility company, or the government tax department. With the payments infrastructure in place, will people actually use lottery tickets to pay their bills, transact with friends, or settle their taxes? Can lottery tickets become money-like? I'm skeptical. Here's my thinking. Say that Jane has just bought $10 worth of digital lottery tickets. At the same time she's chosen to leave $10 in her bank account (she likes the fact that they aren't risky). She spies a coffee stand and suddenly has an urge to buy a $2 coffee. When she arrives at the till, how will she decide to pay? With lottery tickets or deposits? By paying for the $2 coffee wit...

Anthony Pompliano, or Pomp, is at it again. Some of you may recall his odd claims about bitcoin adoption in Argentina, which I took apart here . Well, the following tweet wandered onto my twitter stream a couple of days ago. For more, here is the Wall Street Journal. So let's get this straight. The Ohio state government is not accepting bitcoin as payment for taxes. Rather, it is sponsoring a gateway that allows business owners to offload their bitcoins on the market in the moments prior to tax settlement. Now that actual dollars having been obtained, the tax obligation can now be settled. Take a look at the FAQ at ohiocrypto.com . "At no point will the Treasurer’s office hold cryptocurrency. Payments made on OhioCrypto.com, through our third party cryptocurrency payment processor partner BitPay, are immediately converted to USD before being deposited into a state account." Here's an example of how this might work. Let's say an Ohio business owner has to pay $10,...

A few months ago Vijay Boyapati asked me to " steel-man " the bubble theory of money. The bubble theory of money, which can originally be found in a few old Moldbug posts , has been used by Vijay and others to explain the emergence of bitcoin and make predictions about its future. So here is my attempt. I am using not only an article by Vijay as my source text, but also one by Koen Swinkels, a regular commenter on this blog. Both are interesting and smart posts, it's worth checking them out if you have the time. Steel-manning the bubble theory of money and bitcoin 1. Unlike a stock or a bond, which is backed by productive assets, bitcoin cannot be valued using standard discounted cash flow analysis. And since it has no intrinsic uses, it can't be valued for its contribution to various manufacturing processes, nor for its consumption value. Rather, bitcoin is a bubble. Its price is driven by a speculative process whereby people buy bitcoins because they think that...

 A strange new bank called TNB, or The Narrow Bank , recently applied to get a clearing account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, only to be refused. Funny enough, TNB is run by the New York Fed's former director of research James McAndrews, who left in 2016 in order to get the bank up and running. McAndrews and TNB are now suing the New York Fed. There's a backstory to all of this kerfuffle. While still employed by the New York Fed, McAndrews coauthored a paper in 2015 entitled Segregated Balance Accounts . The paper proposed a solution to the following problem. Interest rates in wholesale lending markets were refusing to align with each other. Wholesale markets are the sorts of markets which neither you nor I have access to but are reserved for large institutions. For some reason, banks that kept interest-bearing overnight accounts at the Fed were not passing the rate they earned on these accounts to other overnight lending markets in which they were active, say the r...