Typography

Antony Lewis recently published a useful article on stablecoins. In it he describes something called "permissioned pseudonymity". In traditional payments systems, people only get to access to payments services after opening an account. This requires that they provide suitable identification. So these systems are not pseudonymous. Usage and personal identity are linked. Stablecoins operators, on the other hand, sever this link. Users can transfer stablecoins to other users without providing personal information. John Doe can pay Jane Doe, no questions asked. Antony calls this permissioned pseudonymity because regulators permit pseudonymous usage of stablecoin networks. 🚨 🚨 30,000,000 #USDC (29,926,581 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet Tx: https://t.co/ujdi6cvpZ8 — Whale Alert (@whale_alert) October 9, 2019 The above payment is an example of permissioned pseudonymity. It is a $30 million transfer between two unknown wallets along the USD Coin stablec...

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...

Source: Gravity Glue (2014) Cryptocurrencies were supposed to destroy the traditional monetary system. Ten years on, where are we? Bitcoin has been wildly successful, but as a financial game --not as a medium of exchange. It's a fun (and potentially profitable) way to gamble on what Keynes once described as what "average opinion expects the average opinion to be." But no one really uses it to pay for stuff. It's nature as a gambling token makes it too awkward to serve as a true substitute for banknotes and credit cards. A number of stablecoins have emerged over the last five or six years. (I first wrote about stablecoins four years ago). Like bitcoin, stablecoins exist on a blockchain. But unlike bitcoin, these tokens have a mechanism for ensuring their stability. Stablecoin owners can convert tokens at par into underlying dollar balances maintained in the issuer's account at a regular bank. So stablecoin entrepreneur have basically built a new blockchain layer...

Narayana Kocherlakota, formerly the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and now a prolific economics blogger, penned a recent article on the abolition of cash. Kocherlakota makes the point that if you don't like government meddling in the proper functioning of free markets, then you shouldn't be a big fan of central bank-issued banknotes. For markets to clear, it may be occasionally necessary for nominal interest rates to fall well below zero. Cash sets a lower limit to interest rates, thus preventing this rebalancing from happening. I pretty much agree with Kocherlakota's framing of the point. In fact, it's an angle I've taken before, both here and in A Libertarian Case for Abolishing Cash . Yes, my libertarian and other free-marketer readers, you didn't misread that. There is a decent case for removing banknotes that is entirely consistent with libertarian principles. If you think usury laws are distortionary because they impose a ceiling on int...

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 whippersnappers who work in the cryptocurrency domain are moving incredibly fast. As I've been saying for a while, assets like bitcoin (or stocks ) are unlikely to become popular as exchange media; they're just too damn volatile relative to incumbent fiat currencies. There's a new game in town though: stablecoin . These tokens are similar to bitcoin, but instead of bobbing wildly they have a fixed exchange rate to some other asset, say the U.S. dollar or gold. Now this is a promising idea. If a crypto-asset can perfectly mimic a U.S. dollar deposit's purchasing power and risk profile, and do so at less cost than a bank, then the monopoly that banks currently maintain in the realm of electronic payments is in trouble. Rather than owning a Bank of America deposit, consumers may prefer to hold an equivalent stablecoin that performs all the same functions while saving on storage and transaction fees. To compete, banks will either have to bribe customers with higher inte...