Tag: tokens

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The moment of creation of Zcash

“Last November, journalist Morgen Peck showed up at her friend Molly Webster’s apartment in Brooklyn, told her to take her battery out of her phone, and began to tell her about The Ceremony, a moment last fall when a group of, well, let’s just call them wizards, came together in an undisclosed location to launch a new currency.”

Among my favourite Radiolab podcast episodes is this one from two years ago about the planning leading up to, and moment of creation of the Zcash cryptocurrency. A complex topic narrated entertainingly. This is high-quality journalism.

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My 2018 talk on crypto tokens is now online

This was before the 2018 crypto winter, when ICOs were still being launched every week for projects that hadn’t even gotten of the ground (many of the high-profile ones still haven’t, in mid 2019), and ads still ran for tokens that guaranteed returns. I described what made it more likely that a token-based project would be successful.

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Libra makes P2P exchange of securities possible

This article brings up some great points about Facebook’s Libra that I have also been thinking about.

That since the underlying basket includes short term securities, that Libra is also a security, not a currency as FB describes it. It behaves more like a (stable) ETF, and so a transfer is a buy/sell transaction that should attract (minsicule) capital gains.

Using securities as a means of exchange is quite existing. My colleagues and I in the fin-tech space have often discussed idly how it would be useful to simply transfer mutual fund, ETF or stock units from one to another, P2P, instead of via an exchange. Transferring liquid fund units is as close to making fiat payments as possible – bypass the bank account altogether.

Perhaps this is what banks and the US Congress should be worried about. Not that Libra as a currency will supplant the dollar. It won’t be a unit of account since it’s backed by fiat instruments and measures is stability by such. But that it makes P2P buying and selling of securities possible, keeping large amounts of capital outside of the banking system.