This silver pfennig from the Archbishopric of Magdeburg (1152-1192) was subject to a policy of renovatio monetae. Twice a year whoever held it had to bring it in to be changed for new coins at a rate of four old coins to three new coins. That suggests an annualized tax rate on co … | Continue reading
Payments companies are regularly punished for engaging in money laundering. MoneyGram, for instance, has has to pay multiple fines. Western Union was famously busted in 2017. Meanwhile, Cash App is being probed as we speak for inadequate anti-money laundering controls. In the fut … | Continue reading
I'm not a fan of mandatory investor education classes. The issue was brought up recently by former chair of FDIC, Sheila Bair, who sees early financial education as ways to stop future FTX-style disasters. The model of finance I've been using for many years is the fairly dismal d … | Continue reading
Last month American provocateur Tucker Carlson visited a Russian grocery store. Because it was filled to the brim with food, Carlson claims that western sanctions placed on Russia aren't having an effect. "We've been told sanctions on Russia have had a devastating effect on its e … | Continue reading
There's a new financial loophole in town: stablecoins. Stablecoins are dollar, yen, or pound-based payments platforms that are built using crypto database technology. Financial institutions are always looking for loopholes to game the system. Typically this has meant avoiding cap … | Continue reading
I very much enjoy economist Robin Brooks's tweets, especially his charts showing how sanctions imposed on Russia have affected regional trade patterns. While direct trade between Europe and Russia has collapsed thanks to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions, the … | Continue reading
Call me a pedant, but I'm not a fan of the word "crypto". It may have been a serviceable category back in 2011 when there was only one type of crypto thingy – bitcoin. But it's ceased to be a meaningful term and, if anything, it causes a regression in understanding. Source: Fidel … | Continue reading
What do I like about Byzantine coinage? Most people probably admire the Byzantine solidus, a gold coin that maintained its weight and purity for over 600 years, which is quite remarkable for a coin. The solidus was exported all over the world, including to Europe, which lacked go … | Continue reading
Turkish banks halted transactions with Russian banks last month and are only slowly reintroducing payments for a narrow range of products that are on a so-called "green list," reports Ragip Soylu. This broad debanking of Russia by Turkey is part of the fallout from President Bide … | Continue reading
A Federal judge ruled last week that the emergency banking measures taken to end the Ottawa convoy protest in 2022 contravened the protestor's rights. In this post I want to provide my reading of this particular ruling and what is at stake for Canadians and their bank accounts. T … | Continue reading
Some folks are suggesting that a bitcoin ETF is absurd because it doesn't fit with Bitcoin's original ethos. On the contrary, I think it's a nice snug fit. It would be a misunderstanding of bitcoin's history to assume that it was the idealism of cypherpunk-ism that gave birth to … | Continue reading
Russia is sometimes described as the world's most sanctioned nation. And while that's true, the long list of sanctions that the G7 coalition has placed on Russia in response to its attack on Ukraine are surprisingly light compared to the fewer but far more-draconian sanctions pla … | Continue reading
I'll start with the conclusion. I don't think flatcoins are a good idea. The idea for flatcoins has been around for a while, but it got a wider airing when it popped up in a Coinbase marketing piece from earlier this year. Now, arch-crypto hater Nouriel Roubini has undergone a Da … | Continue reading
Coinbase, the U.S.'s largest crypto exchange, is openly processing Ethereum transactions involving Tornado Cash, a piece of blockchain infrastructure that was sanctioned by the U.S. government last year for providing mixing services to North Korea. Over the last two weeks Coinbas … | Continue reading
Tether, a stablecoin, has been in the news for offering sanctioned actors such as Hamas a means to participate in the global payments ecosystem. In this post I want to explore in more depth how Tether is being used to dodge sanctions. I'm going to avoid drawing on the Hamas examp … | Continue reading
Many of you may not realize this, but in most parts of the developed world, banks automatically record and report our transactions to law enforcement. The logic behind this is that by giving up our personal data, we get more security, albeit at the cost of 1) losing our privacy, … | Continue reading
Central bank settlement systems are the the tectonic plates of the payment system: they are vitally important to our lives, but we never see them in action. All of a nations' electronic payments are ultimately completed, or settled, on these systems. If they stop working, our fin … | Continue reading
Chris Blec asks the following question: Source: Twitter Chris's premise is that it is "not illegal" for him to get together with a bunch of strangers to mix cash. But that's not quite right. It can be legal. It can also be illegal. To determine which it is, we need to understand … | Continue reading
It's been a full year since FTX International and FTX-US collapsed, and the shocking thing is – there is still no regulated crypto venue in the U.S.! You'd think some lessons would have been learnt. To best protect the public from the Sam Bankman-Frieds of the world, what the U.S … | Continue reading
Two seemingly separate stories, a crypto and a banking story, have a common thread in anti-money laundering thresholds. In the first story, the New York Times shows how regular folks are increasingly losing their bank accounts because their bank perceives them to be engaging in r … | Continue reading
What role do changes in the supply of banknotes play in contributing to a central bank's ability to carry out monetary policy? Put differently, to what degree does "printing," or creating new physical currency and issuing it into the economy, contribute to generating a central ba … | Continue reading
Source: America Loves CryptoYou may have recently come across the America Loves Crypto marketing campaign, sponsored by Coinbase, the U.S.'s largest crypto exchange. In an attempt to promote the voting power of crypto owners, the website makes the claim that 52 million American a … | Continue reading
Source: America Loves Crypto You may have recently come across the America Loves Crypto marketing campaign, sponsored by Coinbase, the U.S.'s largest crypto exchange. In an attempt to promote the voting power of crypto owners, the website makes the claim that 52 million American … | Continue reading
Last week I explored how Henry VIII resorted to coin debasement as a way to raise revenues in order to fight his wars. This provided Henry with the financial firepower to annex the city of Boulogne from the French in 1544, albeit at the price of England experiencing one of its gr … | Continue reading
I've been writing on this blog for a while now – over ten years. Many of those posts are now forgotten (by myself included), but some were pretty popular at the time, and a few still get a steady stream of readers. Someone recently asked me for a list of my top ranked posts accor … | Continue reading
Henry VIII, after Hans Holbein the Younger It's fun to imagine traveling back in time and engaging with the then-prevailing technologies. Would you be able to ride a boneshaker or use a counting board? It's probably harder than you think: kids today can't even use a 1980s rotary … | Continue reading
There's a good article by Leo Schwartz on stablecoin issuer Circle, which provides some clarity into last March's big depegging of the USDC stablecoin, and Circle's subsequent bailout by the government.I wrote about the whole thing here, but the short version is that a handful of … | Continue reading
Along with the trillion dollar platinum coin and premium/perpetual bonds, the gold trick lies in the genre of strange-accounting-tricks-to-evade-the-US-debt-ceiling.With the debt ceiling getting closer every day, gold bugs like James Rickards are calling for the U.S. to trigger t … | Continue reading
From the Israel Museum in Jerusalem’s 2013 exhibition White Gold [Originally published at Bullionstar.] For several years Brits have been ... | Continue reading
As the world's largest stablecoin, Tether has attracted its share of critics. There are several strains of Tether criticism. Under one strai... | Continue reading
English gold penny minted by Henry III in 1257 A lucky metal detectorist just discovered a Henry III gold penny , one of the first English ... | Continue reading
Over the last five years Yemen has stumbled into a unique monetary situation. I initially wrote about Yemen's odd currency status two years ... | Continue reading
Balaji Srinivasan, an angel investor, wants to kick start an updated version of MIT's Billion Prices Project . He will invest $100,000 in t... | Continue reading
The new Governor of the DAB, Abdul Qahir Idrees, is introduced to staff. [ Source ][ Source ] Last week I made the case that the Afghanist... | Continue reading
Bitcoin mining farm ( via CoinDesk ) There are two extreme theories about cryptocurrency energy consumption, both of them bitterly opposed t... | Continue reading
Having just emerged from the fiasco of last year's coin shortage (which I wrote about here and here ), the U.S. Mint has a new problem on i... | Continue reading
Usually when I think about gambling and speculative excess, I've always associated it with giddy prosperity. When an economy is doing well, ... | Continue reading
How are we consumers to know whether the dollars that financial institutions provide us aren't fraudulent dollars? On what basis can we assu... | Continue reading
How are we consumers to know whether the dollars that financial institutions provide us aren't fraudulent dollars? On what basis can we assu... | Continue reading
Over the last decade, few nations have experienced as much monetary and payments chaos as Venezuela has. Fans of bitcoin, Dash, and other cr... | Continue reading
Source Here's a surprising statistic: 5.4% of American households didn't have a bank account in 2019. That's 7.1 million households. Oddly, ... | Continue reading
Scale & weights | Aylmer, Quebec | Canadian Museum of History This post is for my dad, who says he doesn't understand my writing but remai... | Continue reading
When The Sopranos was running I never watched it, but during the pandemic I finally had some extra time to give it a try. It was excellent.... | Continue reading
The European Central Bank (ECB) recently published a report that explores the idea of introducing a digital euro for use by the general p... | Continue reading
Not all bitcoins are the same. If someone steals 100 bitcoins from a cryptocurrency exchange and tries to sell them, they'll have to pric... | Continue reading
Before I start my list, a bit of introduction. Tether is a stablecoin . It happens to be the most popular stablecoin in the world. A ... | Continue reading
The Kalgoorlie Super Pit Mine in Australia Does the world need gold mining? Let's think about what a world without farming look like... | Continue reading
The Kalgoorlie Super Pit Mine in Australia Does the world need gold mining? Let's think about what a world without farming look like... | Continue reading