Tag Archives: payments

This is a slightly amended version of a keynote speech I gave on 14th April 2023 at the University of Ghent, for the Workshop on Fintech 2023.  The crisis that has engulfed crypto in the last year is a crisis of fractional reserve banking. Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank NY were fractional reserve banks. So too were Celsius Network, Voyager, BlockFi, Babel Finance and FTX. And still standing are the crypto fractional reserve banks Coinbase, Gemini, Binance, Nexo, MakerDAO, Tether,...

This is the story of a bank that put all its eggs into an emerging digital basket, believing that providing non-interest-bearing deposit and payment services to crypto exchanges and platforms would be a nice little earner, while completely failing to understand the extraordinary risks involved with such a venture. On 1st March, Silvergate Capital Corporation announced that filing of its audited full-year accounts would be significantly delayed, and warned that its financial position had...

It's now widely accepted, though still not universally, that banks create money when they lend. But it seems to be much less widely known that they also create money when they spend. I don't just mean when they buy securities, which is rightly regarded as simply another form of lending. I mean when they buy what is now colloquially known as "stuff". Computers, for example. Or coffee machines. Imagine that a major bank - JP Morgan, for example - wants to buy a new coffee machine for one of...

The video blogger Crypto Eri (@sentosumosaba) thinks she has evidence that the American Bankers' Association (ABA) wants the Federal Reserve to adopt Ripple/XRP as its cross-border settlement system. She has found a letter from the ABA which makes three requests to facilitate faster interbank settlement:A liquidity management tool Interoperability Access for chartered financial institutions Hey hey everybody, this looks just like Ripple's bag, doesn't it? "You are going to see how...

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...