Topic: Cryptocurrency

Posts

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  Signals and Incentives in Blockchain Applications

  Since Bitcoin’s invention in 2009, permissionless blockchain technology has gone through several waves of interest and development. While applications related to payments have advanced at breakneck speed, progress in financial and nonmonetary applications have largely failed to live up to initial excitement. This chapter considers the incentives facing network participants . . .

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  What's Holding Back Blockchain Finance? On the Possibility of Decentralized Autonomous Finance

  Despite the past decade’s rapid innovation in adapting blockchain technology to new uses, financial intermediation remains elusive except in basic and highly collateralized forms. We introduce the concept of the technical frontier to delimit the kinds of interactions that can feasibly be structured algorithmically among pseudonymous agents, as on a . . .

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  The Blockchain and Economic Organization

  There are two things necessary for regular human exchange: 1) a way to keep track of balances, how much one has contributed versus taken, and 2) a way to prevent people from running consistently negative balances – i.e. to prevent theft and fraud. Over the course of human history and economic development, . . .

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  Cryptocurrency and the Problem of Intermediation

  The volatility of Bitcoin has caused many to dismiss its potential. Bitcoin is, however, very similar to another money commodity with an essentially rigid supply that saw much greater historical success: gold. The paper considers the factors that allowed currencies on the gold standard to adjust their short-run nominal supply . . .

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  Smart Contracts: Killer Enabler for Stable Value

  Piers writes that stable-value cryptocurrencies are necessary for smart contracts to take off. I’d like to stake out the reverse claim: that smart contracts are necessary for stable-value crypticurrencies to take off. Background on the Stablecoin Problem I’ve argued in the past that fractional reserve banking is an essential part of a . . .

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  Helicopters and the Neutrality of Money

  Models of monetary expansion, following Friedman (1969), tend to abstract away from the relative price effects of monetary policy by assuming that the central bank distributes money directly to agents via helicopter. However, in light of the recent entertainment of helicopter drops as a potential monetary policy tool, this paper . . .

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  Confidence in the Pyramid: Speculation, Calculation, and Stabilization in Hayek’s Monetary Dilemma

  Winner of the Mont Pelerin Society’s 2012 Hayek Essay Contest. The essay first discusses the weaknesses of national central banking, and how those flaws are corrected in both free banking and an international central bank. Second, it draws from Hayek’s wider economic and political work to evaluate both alternatives according . . .

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  Hayek vs. Rothbard on Free-Market Money

  Among Austrian economists, there is a fundamental philosophical split between the “evolutionists” following Hayek, and the “moralists” following Rothbard. The former see the world in terms of dynamic, spontaneously ordering evolution of norms, where the latter see the world in terms of fixed and universally applicable ethical norms. This is . . .