Tag Archives: Bitcoin

This piece grew from a number of conversations with people of Austrian economic persuasion, mostly Bitcoiners and goldbugs (which these days seem mysteriously to have converged). I thought of calling this "Monetarism for goldbugs", but decided to preserve the mathematical slant of the previous pieces in this series. But it's monetary arithmetic, of course. And as Austrians tend to obsess about "sound money", it is specifically sound monetary arithmetic. (Note: Someone has pointed out on...

MMT.Makes MogulTheBitcoin Fallacy-Back to the Gold Standard Jonah Ho

For over a century now, the world has lacked a genuinely international means of payment. This is partly due to decisions made at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, when the US dollar was adopted as the principal international settlement currency, rather than John Maynard Keynes's suggestion of an independent global currency that he called "bancor". Although the Bretton Woods gold-backed structure ended in 1971, the US dollar became ever more dominant. In 2008, the dollar's global reach...

If Bitcoins are indeed worthless, then financial markets should price them at zero. But the introduction of futures trading actually boosted the price in the short run. Even after recent declines, there’s no sign that prices will reach zero any time soon. On the other hand, if Bitcoins are valuable simply because people value them, then asset prices are entirely arbitrary. The same argument can be applied to any financial asset. John Quiggin's BlogBitcoin kills the efficient market...

Three startups are getting ready to launch one of the most ambitious and important cryptocurrency experiments since the creation of bitcoin itself. Called Lightning, the project aims to build a fast, scalable, and cryptographically secure payment network layered on top of the existing bitcoin network. Essentially, Lightning aims to solve the big problem that has loomed over bitcoin in recent years: Satoshi Nakamoto's design for bitcoin is comically unscalable. It requires every full node...

After bitcoin goes to (essentially) zero (since it is global, even a few oddballs can prop up its value for years at some low level, like hobbyists do for all kinds of things), which it will, some will say that it was regulation that killed it, not, as I explain, because crypto is worthless because it is not part of a balance sheet and as such has no inherent value to extinguish debt. To be clear: That bitcoin can’t withstand being treated as any other ordinary good yet does not deserve...

Trump has been bragging about the stock market's gains, but what we don't hear about is the fact that the US dollar has eroded badly. Since his election the dollar has fallen to a 3-year low.Trump is destroying the US dollar.I called this at the time of the election and I said it was based, at the time, on two things. 1) Trump's  proposed expansion of fiscal stimulus. (More spending and tax cuts.) And, 2) the ongoing rate hike campaign of the Fed, which is inflationary and therefore NOT...

By Marshall Auerback (This post was first published on Alternet) Is the bitcoin craze another in a series of history’s most infamous bubbles, or is it a genuine harbinger of a new global financial architecture? In spite of recent market turbulence, its champions see bitcoin (and its cryptocurrency peers) as an ideal market-generated solution as questions arise about the future viability of...

Is Bitcoin a Reaction to US Dollar Hegemony? Like Mike has been saying for some time. The DuranDe-dollarization and the rise of Bitcoin. Is there a connection between the two? Alex ChristoforouSee alsoThe iron fist of the US. As the launch of new ‘petro’ cryptocurrency draws near, a US government agency declared that this newcomer to the digital financial market may represent a violation of sanctions imposed against Venezuela, its issuer. Sputnik InternationalUS Treasury Warns About...

The geeks to whom my post on probability was addressed responded exactly as I expected. "You don't understand the tech", they said. And they went on about network routing protocols and Dijkstra's algorithm. Someone even sent me a spec for an onion routing protocol for the Lightning network. I read it and sighed. They had completely missed the point. To be sure, I had made an incorrect assumption about Lightning. I assumed that Lightning devs respected property rights. It turns out that...