They don’t exist yet. But they will get started, it is inevitable. They will solve the painful large anomalies that we have in our not-so-modern world of money.
Category: finance
My own little bank
I’ve wondered lately why we keep our money on bank accounts. Why would anyone in their right mind risk their hard earned cash for bankers to invest in loans for their profit, without any return to the deposit holder.
So I set up my own little alternative to a bank. I store any small amounts left over from my monthly salary into one of the two places:
- German government bunds – through an exchange traded fund
- Peer to peer loans to businesses – through FundingCircle and Zopa
Government backed bitcoin
The early bitcoin enthusiasts were trying to solve the problem of money being controlled by governments. Some governments found it laughable, others were just confused. But what if a government really embraced Bitcoin?
People of Iceland recently started an experiment with airdropped auroracoin, designed to counteract the government’s fiscal policy. Icelandic enthusiasts are attempting to bypass macro- and monetary policy. I would argue that there is another more tractable yet enormously valuable problem to solve. Read More
Why governments don’t want to regulate bitcoin
Forgetting for a second that we live in a real world, I would argue that Bitcoin has been the single most important invention on the internet since our ability to follow lives of celebrities in short messages of 140 characters. Unfortunately it feels that in the real world we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Recently I was among a few dozen central bankers across Europe together in an event and I could not help asking in a more informal setting, how do they think about Bitcoin? From what I hear, there are good reasons to disagree with economist Simon Johnson, who argues that goverments want to suppress bitcoin. Read More
Cost of making payments
Banque de France reported that the cost of making payments is 1% of the world’s GDP or $800bn annually. The big number translates into 2 extra holidays for everyone, everywhere, every year.
They complained that 16% of all payments in France are still made using a paper chequebook. Processing a cheque costs ~€1 to the bank, which is then directly or indirectly charged back to the customers. Read More