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Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology The Cryptocurrency Frontier in Commodity Monetary Standard
Understanding of the technology however lags well behind the hype, amongst practitioners, policy makers and industry commentators alike. ‘Blockchain’ technology seems to promise major change for capital markets and other financial services – some say it may ultimately prove to be as important an innovation as the internet itself – but few can say exactly how or why.
Michael Mainelli, Alistair Milne (2016)
The Impact and Potential of Blockchain on the Securities Transaction Lifecycle http://ssrn.com/abstract=2777404
2. Distributed systems (networking and data transmission)
3. Game theory
4. Economic and monetary theory
Mainly not a technology,
a cultural paradigm shift instead
Ferdinando Ametrano 2017 4/55
• Decentralized digital currency • Not backed by any government or organization • Instantaneous peer-to-peer transactions • No need for trusted third party • Cryptographic security • Synergic economic incentives • Efficient low-cost banking for everybody everywhere
• To securely transfer value using digital means has been possible for decades
• In digital cash schemes, a single digital token, being just a file that can be duplicated, can be spent twice
• A centralized trusted party has always been required to prevent double spending
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Mining
• All bitcoin network nodes validate and propagate transactions
• Transactions are cleared in blocks, thus a blockchain: the nodes providing computational power for clearing are called miners
• Miners compete to validate a new block of transactions: the winner providing proof-of-work is rewarded with the issue of new bitcoins in a special coinbase transaction included in the block
• Miners solve the double spending problem: – conflicting transactions spending the same coins would invalidate the block
– an invalid block would be rejected from the network
– the bitcoin reward would be removed from transaction history
– miner would have wasted his work Ferdinando Ametrano 2017 11/55
Distributed Consensus
• How do miners reach consensus on the transaction history?
• Consensus in an asynchronous network with faulty (or malicious) nodes is proved to be impossible
• A problem known as Byzantine General Problem
Ferdinando Ametrano 2017 12/55
Nakamoto Consensus
• Nakamoto achieves Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus using (game theory) economic incentive for the mining nodes to be honest. Bitcoin – solves double spending without a central trusted party
– can resist attacks of malicious agents, as long as they do not control network majority
• Miners are compensated for their proof-of-work using seigniorage revenues, i.e. with issuance of new bitcoins
• Seigniorage revenues subsidize the network, making transaction almost free
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Network Costs Covered By Seigniorage Revenues • 144 blocks per day, 365 days per year
• 12.5 BTC per block, $6,000 per BTC Currently about $4 billions per year (as of November 2017)
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Virtuous Cycle
Hashing Power
Bitcoin Security
Bitcoin Price
Mining Reward
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Validation Process: Block Generation
The proof-of-work difficulty is adapted to the overall available computing power to ensure an average of one block every ten minutes
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Bitcoin Monetary Rule
• 2009: 50BTC per block, every 10 minutes
–halving every 4Y
• This is the only way new bitcoins are released
• It is called mining because of its similarity with the progressive scarcity of gold extraction
• Gradually switch over to a fee-based system: as block space is limited, market is already requiring a growing satoshi/byte fee to be included into a block
• Switch to a different paradigm? We have about 120 years to come up with a solution
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What Makes Bitcoin Special?
• Digital and scriptural: it only exists as validated transaction • Asset, not liability • Bearer instrument • It can be transferred but not duplicated
(i.e. it can be spent, but not double-spent) • Scarce in digital realm, as nothing else before • Mimicking gold monetary policy • More a crypto-commodity then a cryptocurrency
Bitcoin is digital gold this is the brilliant groundbreaking achievement by Satoshi Nakamoto
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Trade Economy From Gold Standard to Fiat Money
• Gold: the commodity money standard – scarce
– pleasant color, i.e. resistant to corrosion and oxidation
– high malleability
– relative easiness of its purity assessment
• Gold purity certification
• Representative money
• Fractional receipt money
• Fiat money and legal tender
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Money As A Social Relation Instrument
1. Human beings are born into a gift economy
2. Enlarged relationship circle requires exchange economy
3. Barter economy: coincidence of wants
4. Trade economy: money as medium of exchange
5. Global information economy: supranational digital money
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Friedrich August von Hayek Denationalisation of Money
• history of coinage is an almost uninterrupted story of debasements; history is largely a history of inflation engineered by governments for their gain
• why government monopoly of the provision of money is regarded as indispensable? It deprived public of the opportunity to discover and use a better reliable money
Blessed will be the day when it will no longer be from the benevolence of the government that we expect good money but from the regard of the
banks for their own interest
A Free-Market Monetary System, Gold and Monetary Conference, New Orleans, Nov. 1977, https://mises.org/daily/3204
Hayek, F. A., Denationalisation of Money, The Institute of Economic Affairs, http://www.mises.org/books/denationalisation.pdf
• If 𝑃𝐶 ↓ 0.95 and 𝑅𝑒𝑠𝐴𝑠𝑠 < 𝐶 ∙ 0.95: coin is dead, Reserve Bank defaulted, 𝑃𝑆 = 0
• If 𝑃𝐶 ↓ 0.95 and 𝑅𝑒𝑠𝐴𝑠𝑠 > 𝐶 ∙ 0.95: coin is dead, Reserve Bank has not defaulted, 𝑃𝑆 > 0 (no interest for stable coins, shares are the equivalent of bitcoins)
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𝑃𝐶↑ 1.05: Profits for Shareholders
• fresh new coins are minted and sold in exchange for reserve assets pushing 𝑃𝐶 down to parity
• Reserve assets increase by 1.05
• Coin liabilities increase by 0.95
• Net effect: 𝑃𝑆 ↑
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Leverage Bitcoin As Reserve Asset
• Bitcoin is the first and most successful instance of an intrinsically scarce digital asset: it’s digital gold
• When used as reserve asset, its qualities are magnified!
• Its limits are lessened. No more need to: – scale to huge (cash + bank accounts + credit cards) number of transactions
– support economically inefficient micropayments
– lower confirmation time
• The Reserve Bank IPO raises bitcoins, issues seigniorage shares and stable coins
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The Ultimate Fate of Bitcoin: To Serve as a Reserve Currency
Hal Finney (1956–2014) was a noted cryptographic activist. He was the second PGP Corporation developer hired after Phil Zimmermann. He created the first reusable proof-of-work. He was an early bitcoin user and received the first bitcoin transaction from bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
• Instead of the hardware and electric power expenses of proof-of-work, bitcoins are irrevocably paid to the Reserve Asset Bank by validating nodes (proof-of-payment)
• Chances of being appointed for the next block generation are proportional to the overall submitted payments, i.e. to the accumulated proof-of-payment
• When a node is picked up for block generation its proof-of-payment resets to zero
• Even if a node is not picked up, its payments are never reimbursed
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Transaction Validation Proof-of-Payment
• Block generation is rewarded with the issuance of a new share
• Since 𝑃𝑆 = 𝑅𝑒𝑠𝐴𝑠𝑠 − 𝐶 ∙ 0.95 𝑆 , that should be the price a rational agent is willing to commit as payment
• Share price estimation in bitcoin is obtained as by-product
• Existing shareholders are not really diluted: for the issuance of each new share, 𝑅𝑒𝑠𝐴𝑠𝑠 increases accordingly