The classic criticism against the gold standard is that it was too costly. Why are these guys wasting resources to suit up, dig into mountains, desperately seeking a finite resource, and slogging the results all the way to Treasury Department? This is all just silly. We know how to make money: you print it. It’s far cheaper to print than mine. A paper standard will save a tremendous amount of resources that can go to
I constantly get the question: why do we need this blockchain thing anyway? Here is why. Every society with a vibrant commercial life exalts private property as an institution. The entrenchment of this institution occurs in three stages. All three are essential. The first stage is to create private property itself. This is usually done out of the necessity of getting enough to eat. Contrary to every socialist claim, this doesn’t happen through magic or
What is the future of banking, central banking and financial intermediation in a world in which cryptocurrency is dominant? Let’s speculate a bit, with the proviso that no one can fully anticipate how these markets will evolve. We can find hints in the speech by IMF head Christine Lagarde at a Bank of England conference in September 2017. She dropped some words that likely sent some chills down a few spines in the audience. She
It was the second week of February 2013 when I first ventured a public opinion that Bitcoin is the real deal. The dollar exchange rate was at $25, on its way toward another run-up and crash that had been the pattern for two years. I had just returned from a conference where some Bitcoiners surrounded me and force-fed me the information I needed to know. It would take another two months before I wrapped my
[This article was written for publication on April 1, 2013] Understanding Bitcoin requires that we understand the limits of our ability to imagine the future that the market can create for us. Thirty years ago, for example, if someone had said that electronic text—digits flying through the air and landing in personalized inboxes owned by us all that we check at will at any time of the day or night—would eventually displace first-class mail, you
The recent explosion in the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has inspired me to start a new hobby: helping people recover lost Bitcoin wallets. As might be expected of early adopters in an anonymous Internet cryptocurrency, many of my customers are information security professionals. It seems that many of them set up so many security measures that they locked themselves out of their Bitcoin. On the other hand, I’ve also heard from many
Five years of living in China spoiled me in terms of financial transactions. Most people don’t use debit or credit: they either use cash or more commonly, send money electronically via mobile apps. Mobile wallet apps are often used for large payments, and your landlord or utility company is just as likely to accept them as the friend you’re splitting lunch with. You can log in to your bank’s website or ATM and send someone a
The opportunity is to live every dream you have ever had. Now. The problem is that for every dream you realize, you have to relinquish some of your property. And every bit of that property is hard to come by, extraordinarily lucrative, and the single most in-demand thing on the planet earth. So, yes, you could be living it up. Instead, you have become addicted to seeing your net worth rise and rise…oh, and rise
