If I had to choose one of the tricks for getting around the debt ceiling, I'd go with premium bonds/perpetual bonds over the platinum coin:
jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/02/why-i-
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monetary economics|history of money|central banking|financial privacy|payments|gold|financial inclusion|cryptocurrency|monetary law|financial crime
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Over the last few months crypto miners have faced a string of measures from the federal government and five provinces that make it harder to operate in Canada.
financialpost.com/the-logic/cana via
A summary of the measures taken:
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All of this was a lie but, hey, he’s one of the good ones
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imagining a dystopian sci-fi movie where a portion of society is so discouraged w the lack of opportunities for upward mobility that they spend their savings gambling in a casino type market but no matter what their participation in the market enriches the already mega rich owner
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Some people say 'bitcoin uses an enormous amount of energy'. This is misleading -- or at least, incomplete. Better: bitcoiners pay for an enormous amount of energy to get used.
But how?
In answer to that question, see this fun post from .
jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/02/hey-bi
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I've been pushing back against the never-ending IMPENDING CANADIAN HOUSING MARKET COLLAPSE narrative for as long as I can remember.
The collapse never happens, but NONE of these hard-headed peddlers of doom has ever changed their story: doom is always just around the corner.
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Variable mortgage interest rates and mortgages in arrears; arrears data through to November 2022.
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Byzantine gold coinage was ~97% pure for six centuries, and then in the 11th century it was rapidly debased to 10% purity, only to be restored in 1092.
armstrongeconomics.com/81148-2/
You can see how the main gold coin, the histamenon, changed colour as its gold content fell.
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A quick blog post on how bitcoin holders bear bitcoin's energy costs. Bitcoin is bloody expensive, after all. Owning it can't be free.
jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/02/hey-bi
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Charlie Munger is wrong to say that crypto is a gambling contract with a "nearly 100% edge" for the house. Bitcoin, litecoin, and dogecoin are all gambling contracts, but they're fairer than any lottery or slot machine.
wsj.com/articles/why-a
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The crypto industry often accuses the SEC of engaging in 'regulation by enforcement.' Here's an interesting article arguing why this view is wrong: "Litigation is precisely how securities regulation works."
linkedin.com/pulse/why-sec-
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One solution to a stablecoin that isn’t stable is apparently renaming it so all the people who invested money in your stablecoin can no longer get mad because it doesn’t have the word stable anymore
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I agree with that crypto staking rewards are like new shares created in a stock split, and so they shouldn't be taxed as income.
taxnotes.com/featured-analy
Mind you, this argument only applies to proof-of-stake coins. Bitcoin mining rewards should be taxed.
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Let's face it, a lot of crypto trading is more like gambling than investing. So why not regulate the industry that way?
jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/01/a-big-
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A separation of trading and custody is the practice in Canada, where exchanges Bitbuy and Coinsquare can't hold customers' crypto. Rather, regulators require them to use a qualified trust company for custody.
Bitbuy uses BitGo Trust. Coinsquare uses Coinbase Custody.
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Hard to disagree with that crypto exchanges like Coinbase should be required to separate crypto custody from crypto exchange. Mixing the two is a powder keg:
coindesk.com/consensus-maga
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I just found an old but topical (perhaps dated?) blog post on the Fed accepting the platinum coin that I don't remember writing: jpkoning.blogspot.com/2013/01/would- Can't believe that ten years has already passed!
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🔥Fintech Biz Weekly just dropped
New research: How credit card rewards programs redistribute $15 *BILLION* in wealth from poor to rich, from less to more educated, from high- to low-minority areas
Read: fintechbusinessweekly.substack.com/p/credit-card-
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If someone asks you what a use case of crypto is and you respond with something like:
Decentralization, immutability, transparency, censorship-resistance, etc
You haven’t actually described any use cases, just some technical properties of the system
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Long "Gambling Night in Canada" pregame segment ends with Ron MacLean saying: "Ben Franklin likes the Lightning." NHL all-in on gambling.
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So if Circle wants to offer USDC in Japan, it sounds like it will have to transfer dollar assets currently held at its US bank to a Japanese bank. Only then would Japanese exchanges have permission to offer USDC to customers.
Probably not worth the effort.
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Japan will let local exchanges offer foreign stablecoins like USDC and Tether, but only if all stablecoins stored on Japanese exchanges are backed by assets held in trust at a Japanese bank.
coindesk.com/consensus-maga via
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One more interesting tidbit about numismatics:
"...the work is hampered by the lowly status of numismatics in contemporary academia. Among the so-called auxiliary sciences of history, only heraldry and genealogy are taken less seriously..."
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Numismatists once thought that the periodic proliferation of unofficial Roman coinage was a sign of crisis. Now they see it as the Roman economy demanding more coins than the state could supply.
This is from 's new & readable article on numismatics:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/
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The Fed is not a fan of banks issuing stablecoins, whether they be state banks or federal banks. And it is particularly wary of banks issuing pseudonymous-style stablecoins (i.e. like what Circle, Paxos, and Tether do).
federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pre
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Well I guess it is true. The Fed has denied 's application for Fed membership because "[t]he firm proposed to engage in novel and untested crypto activities that include issuing a crypto asset on open, public and/or decentralized networks."
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The next big crypto crisis will probably emanate from real-world assets, or RWAs. I think RWAs are key to crypto actually engaging with the world and providing meaningful financial products, but they are trickier than anything crypto has tried so far.
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A recent article shows how medieval Scandinavia also copied the Byzantines, including the clumsy attempt by Olaf Skötkonung (994-1021 AD), pictured below, which was based on a Byzantine silver miliaresion from around 977 AD, at bottom.
coinweek.com/world-coins/th
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European monarchs of the middle ages liked to copy coinage from the Byzantine Empire because of its grandeur and imperial legacy. At left is Edward the Confessor (~1050 AD) appropriating a coin designed long before by Justin II (~570 AD).
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Interestingly, the trope that US banks feast on lower-income people through credit card issuance isn't entirely correct. The credit card users who pay the most to banks? High-income people with low credit score.
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Fascinating to see how US banks profit off of credit cards users. For customers with low credit scores, the majority of bank revenues are in the form of interest. For sophisticated customers (i.e. high credit score), revenue is mostly from interchange.
federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/f
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Not all of crypto is gambling, but a big chunk of it is. We should regulate that chunk accordingly:
coindesk.com/consensus-maga my latest for
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Good to see the BLS take this on directly.
What always amazed me was that people who claim to work in finance say that shrinkage was not accounted for. You could verify the information in this tweet with a 10 second search on the BLS web page. How’s due diligence doing?
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Replying to @TheRiverWorksCo
Yes, the Consumer Price Index accounts for package size. For example, if a box of cereal is the same price from one month to the next, but the box was 16 oz. in the first month and 15 oz. in the second month, the CPI counts that as a price increase because price per ounce rose.
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A new study finds that reward credit cards redistribute $15 billion from naive to sophisticated individuals in the U.S. every year. The rewards received by naive consumers are outweighed by larger interest charges.
ft.com/content/0b3349 ht
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So when you see strange things happening with Binance stablecoin reserves, keep in mind that it may be the result of Binance actively managing its portfolio in order to extract as much as it can from stablecoin issuers.
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Binance holds around $30 billion in stablecoins, or 25% of the market. With that much control it can probably arm twist issuers like Paxos, Tether and Circle to fork over a chunk of the interest they earn. If a stablecoin doesn't pay up, Binance threatens to replace it.
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Pattern 1574 dated sixpence of Elizabeth I, made using machinery designed by Eloy Mestrelle. Mestrelle introduced machine-struck coins to England. One of the coins we'll be looking at in the workshop on minting technology. #Numismatics #History #Royal #Tudors
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One thing I've been noticing in my correspondence is how many people think inflation is still running wild; the big deceleration in the 2nd half of 2022 hasn't broken through to public consciousness 1/
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While customers of FTX US remain stuck in bankruptcy, here's how FTX Japan users can get 100% of their money back:
help-jp.ftx.com/hc/ja/articles
Blame a lack of regulation of exchanges in the US, and the coin lobbyists who pushed for that state of affairs.
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Many of us pay more into insurance companies than we get out. This is just as scandalous as some people paying more to the state than they get out. Which is to say, not at all so.
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