Two recent announcements by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have proponents of increased financial regulation up in arms. The first is the Bureau’s expansion of its no-action letter policy to include a regulatory sandbox. A sandbox is a program which allows firms to offer new products under…
In January I had the pleasure of participating on a panel on “The New Financial System: Decentralized?” at the Blockchain Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. (Video of the panel is here.) The panel was preceded by a talk by Prof. Nouriel Roubini of the NYU Stern School…
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Kik, a messaging app that raised close to $100 million dollars in a 2017 initial coin offering (ICO) of its “Kin” token, is challenging a proposed Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement action against the company. As has been discussed by…
Some prominent economists have begun to analyze formally the market for a privately issued outside money that they associate with Bitcoin. Rodney Garratt and Neil Wallace (2018) (ungated version here) model the relative values of (exchange rates between) “Bitcoin 1” and other hypothetical cryptoassets (“Bitcoin 2,” etc.)….
The end of this month (31 October 2018) will mark the 10th anniversary of the online posting of the now-famous white paper by “Satoshi Nakamoto” outlining the concept of “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” This is an opportune occasion to compare what Bitcoin has achieved with…