Tag: Bitcoin

Why Bitcoin is taken more seriously than Dogecoin

From The Conversation.

As Bitcoin loses value, it may seem like it’s just as useful as the cryptocurrency invented for a joke – Dogecoin.

But there are genuine differences between these cryptocurrencies, and it’s not just because one is “much currency, such volatility”.

There are 1,448 cryptocurrencies around the world, by some counts. For every Bitcoin you have a programmable coin like Ethereum, or a coin that acts like a token for specific services, like Augur.

Some of these coins earn better reputations because of their usefulness, the people who made them, or the tech itself. They are not all taken seriously by investors, researchers and users.

The developers behind these cryptocurrencies are also important as they convince other people to adopt them and write new code for the technology to evolve. This new tech attracts new users into the system.

Different functions

Cryptocurrencies can be divided into several types. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin only provide basic functions such as transferring value from one party to another.

The next category are smart contract cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Cardano, NEO, and Waves. These cryptocurrencies can be programmed, and so can become the basis for applications like games and digital markets.

The third type are cryptocurrencies designed to preserve your privacy like Monero and Zcash. These claim to be “untraceable” although transaction records are still available.

Then there are tokens, which are built with smart contracts to serve many purposes. They are often sold to raise funds to build services, and used as tickets for the services (such as Augur and Power Ledger).

Technological differences

The differing technologies in these cryptocurrencies mean that certain coins have more potential than others.

IOTA is used for “Internet of Things” devices (such as a smart kettle). But it has a special kind of blockchain (the technology that tracks transactions) and so can achieve much higher speeds of transaction and quicker confirmation of trades than Bitcoin.

Others like Nxt, and Ardor have built-in features that let users to do other things than just sending coins, such as creating marketplaces and even messaging.

People use cryptocurrencies like Zcash and Monero to settle transactions with “zero-knowledge”. This means the cryptocurrencies hide the information of the real payers and payees, and even the amount of coins transacted.

Monero has largely replaced the use of Bitcoin in exchanges on the dark web.

And smart contracts built with cryptocurrencies like Ethereum have countless potential usecases, from property transactions to digital asset management and fundraising.

The technology also means that one cryptocurrency might use significantly less electricity than another.

Limitations

The major cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, are slow because of their inability to handle massive amount of data being sent by users. The technology used to secure the data are expensive and inefficient.

Bitcoin can only handle a maximum of seven transactions per second; Ethereum can handle 15 transactions per second. Compare this with the VISA payment system, which can process up to 56,000 transactions per second.

But new entrants, such as Red Belly from the University of Sydney, might be able to solve this problem, handling up to 660,000 transactions per second.

Smart contracts can also run into problems if they contain bugs. When a decentralised organisation built on Ethereum was hacked in 2016, US$50 million in Ether was stolen.

When something achieves the success of Bitcoin we’re bound to see competitors entering the market, hoping to grab a share.

This explains the explosion in cryptocurrencies since the Bitcoin source code was released under an open licence. Anyone can copy, modify, and release a modified version of Bitcoin.

By looking at the current trend, we will see more cryptocoins in the near future.

But as we can see, “cryptocurrency” is a term that encompasses a wide range of different technologies, communities and uses. It’s all of these factors that inform whether users, investors, developers and researchers take a coin seriously.

Author: Dimaz Wijaya  PhD Student, Monash University

Bitcoin Takes A Dive

Further evidence of the volatility of Bitcoin, the virtual distributed ledger currency, which operates without supervision, or central bank support.

Bitcoin touched an all-time high of $19,896 on December 17 having passed the $15,000 mark on December 7. It’s slumped over the past few days, to a low of $12,504 before recovering somewhat. It is still up over 1,100 percent this year. Bitcoin is not alone, the other 20 or so crypto-currencies also retraced.

Many say serious numbers of unsophisticated investors have been piling in (even buying Bitcoins on their credit cards!).  This volatility is likely to continue, and prospective investors need to be aware they may loose their investment, they may not – there can be no certainties.

Opinion is split as to whether this is simply a speculative bubble similar to “Tulip Mania” or whether there is more here about a potential digital replacement for the US$. We suspect the former is closer to the truth.

The classic bubble shape of the South Sea Bubble is often cited and is an interesting case study.

South Sea Bubble

A bubble? We don’t even know how to value Bitcoin

From The Conversation.

Bitcoin is a “speculative mania” according to the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia. But it’s not so easy to say that Bitcoin is a bubble – we don’t know how to value it.

Recent price rises (close to A$18,000 in the past three months) may be too great and can’t continue. But the Bitcoin market is only just maturing as an investment and as a currency, and so it may still have room to grow.

A bubble is when the price of an asset diverges from its “fundamentals” – the aspects of an asset that investors use to value it. These could be the income that can be earned from a stock over time, a company’s cash flow, the state of a country’s economy, or even the rent from property.

But Bitcoin does not pay out profits (like shares) or rent (like property), and is not attached a national economy (like fiat currencies). This is part of the reason why it is hard to tell what the underlying value of Bitcoin is or should be.

In the search for fundamentals some have suggested we should look at the supply of Bitcoins in the market (which is regulated by the technology itself), the number of Bitcoin transactions through the market, or even the energy consumed by Bitcoin miners (the computers that validate transactions and are rewarded with Bitcoins).

Diverging from fundamentals

If we take a close look, we can see how the price of Bitcoin may be diverging from these fundamentals. For instance, it is becoming less profitable to be a miner, especially as the energy required increases. At some stage the cost may exceed the price of Bitcoin, making the network less worthwhile to both mine and invest.

Bitcoin may be the best known cryptocurrency but it is also losing marketshare to other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum and Litecoin. Bitcoin currently accounts for 59.4% of the total global cryptocurrency market, but at the beginning of 2016 it was 91.3%. Many of these other cryptocurrencies have more functionality than Bitcoin (such as Ethereum’s ability to execute smart contracts), or are more efficient and use less energy (such as Litecoin).

Government policy, such as taxation or the establishment of national digital currencies, may also make it riskier or less worthwhile to mine, transact or hold the cryptocurrency. China’s ban on Initial Coin Offerings earlier this year reduced the value of Bitcoin by 20% in 24 hours.

Without these fundamentals the price of Bitcoin largely reflects speculation. And there is some evidence that people are simply buying and holding Bitcoin in the hope it will keep rising in value (also known as Greater Fool investing). Certainly, the cap on the total number (21 million) of Bitcoins that can exist, makes the currency inherently deflationary – the value of the currency relative to goods and services will keep increasing even without speculation and so there is a disincentive to spend it.

Bitcoin still has room to grow

Many big investors – including banks and hedge funds – have not yet entered into the market. The volatility and lack of regulation around Bitcoin are two reasons stopping these investors from jumping in.

There are new financial products being developed, such as futures contracts, that may reduce the risk of holding Bitcoin and allow these institutional investors to get in.

But Bitcoin futures contracts – where people can place bets on the future price of stocks or markets – may also work against the price of Bitcoin. Just like gamblers place bets on horse races rather than buying a horse, investors may simply buy and sell the futures contracts rather than Bitcoin itself (some contracts are even settled in cash, rather than Bitcoin). All of this could lead to less actual Bitcoin changing hands, leading to less demand.

Although the rush to invest is apparently encouraging some people to take out mortgages to buy Bitcoin, traditional banks won’t lend specifically for that purpose as the market is too volatile.

But it’s not just on the finance side that the Bitcoin market is set to expand. More infrastructure to support Bitcoin in the broader economy is rolling out, which should spur demand.

Bitcoin ATMs are being installed in many countries, including Australia. Bitcoin lending is emerging on peer-to-peer platforms, and new and more regulated marketplaces are being created.

Many companies are accepting Bitcoin as payment. That means that even if the speculation dies down, Bitcoin can still be traded for some goods and services.

And finally, although the fundamentals of Bitcoin are still up for debate, when it comes to transaction volume through the network there appears to be a lot of room for growth.

It’s good to remember that people have been calling Bitcoin a bubble for a long time, even when the price was just US$35 in 2013.

In the end, this is uncharted territory. We don’t know how to value Bitcoin, or what will happen. Historical examples may or may not apply.

What we do know is that the technology behind most cryptocurrencies is enabling new models of value transfer through secure global consensus networks, and that is causing excitement and nervousness. Investors should beware.

Authors: Alicia (Lucy) Cameron, Senior Research Consultant, CSIRO;
Kelly Trinh, Data Scientist, CSIRO

The ‘utopian’ currency Bitcoin is a potentially catastrophic energy guzzler

From The Conversation.

The recent upsurge in the price of Bitcoin seems to have finally awakened the world to the massively destructive environmental consequences of this bubble.

These consequences were pointed out as long ago as 2013 by Australian sustainability analyst and entrepreneur Guy Lane, executive director of the Long Future Foundation. In recent months, the Bitcoin bubble has got massively bigger and the associated waste of energy is now much more widely recognised.

In essence, the creation of a new Bitcoin requires the performance of a complex calculation that has no value except to show that it has been done. The crucial feature, as is common in cryptography, is that the calculation in question is very hard to perform but easy to verify once it’s done.

At present, the most widely used estimate of the energy required to “mine” Bitcoins is comparable to the electricity usage of New Zealand, but this is probably an underestimate. If allowed to continue unchecked in our current energy-constrained, climate-threatened world, Bitcoin mining will become an environmental disaster.

The rising energy demands of Bitcoin

In the early days of Bitcoin, the necessary computations could be performed on ordinary personal computers.

But now, “miners” use purpose-built machines optimised for the particular algorithms used by Bitcoin. With these machines, the primary cost of the system is the electricity used to run it. That means, of course, that the only way to be profitable as a Bitcoin miner is to have access to the cheapest possible electricity.

Most of the time that means electricity generated by burning cheap coal in old plants, where the capital costs have long been written off. Bitcoin mining today is concentrated in China, which still relies heavily on coal.

Even in a large grid, with multiple sources of electricity, Bitcoin mining effectively adds to the demand for coal-fired power. Bitcoin computers run continuously, so they constitute a “baseload” demand, which matches the supply characteristics of coal.

More generally, even in a process of transition to renewables, any increase in electricity demand at the margin may be regarded as slowing the pace at which the dirtiest coal-fired plants can be shut down. So Bitcoin mining is effectively slowing our progress towards a clean energy transition – right at the very moment we need to be accelerating.

How much energy is Bitcoin using?

A widely used estimate by Digiconomist suggests that the Bitcoin network currently uses around 30 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year, or 0.1% of total world consumption – more than the individual energy use of more than 150 countries.

By contrast, in his 2013 analysis, Guy Lane estimated that a Bitcoin price of US$10,000 would see that energy use figure climb to 80 TWh. If the current high price is sustained for any length of time, Lane’s estimate will be closer to the mark, and perhaps even conservative.

The cost of electricity is around 5c per kilowatt-hour for industrial-scale users. Miners with higher costs have mostly gone out of business.

As a first approximation, Bitcoin miners will spend resources (nearly all electricity) equal to the price of a new Bitcoin. However, to be conservative, let’s assume that only 75% of the cost of Bitcoin mining arises from electricity.

Assuming an electricity price of 5c per kWh and a Bitcoin price of US$10,000, this means that each Bitcoin consumes about 150 megawatt-hours of electricity. Under current rules, the settings for Bitcoin allow the mining of 1,800 Bitcoins a day, implying daily use of 24,000MWh or an annual rate of nearly 100TWh – about 0.3% of all global electricity use.

Roughly speaking, each MWh of coal-fired electricity generation is associated with a tonne of carbon dioxide emissions, so a terawatt-hour corresponds to a million tonnes of CO₂.

So much energy, so few users

An obvious comparison is with the existing financial system.

Digiconomics estimated that Visa is massively more efficient in processing transactions. A supporter of Bitcoin, Carlos Domingo, hit back with a calculation suggesting that the entire global financial system uses about 100TWh per year, or three times as much as the Diginconomics estimate for Bitcoin.

As a defence, this is far from impressive. First, as we’ve seen, if the current high price is sustained, total annual energy use from Bitcoin mining is also likely to rise to 100TWh.

More importantly, the global financial system serves the entire world. By contrast, the number of active Bitcoin investors has been estimated at 3 million. Almost all of these people are pure speculators, holding Bitcoin as an asset while using the standard financial system for all of their private and business transactions.

Another group is believed to use Bitcoin for illicit purposes such as drug dealing or money laundering, before converting these funds into their own national currency. The number of people who routinely use Bitcoin as a currency for legitimate transactions might be in the low thousands or perhaps even fewer.

Shifting the whole global financial system to Bitcoin would require at least a 200-fold increase, which in turn would entail increasing the the world’s electricity use by around 500%. With the current threat of climate change looming large globally – this constitutes an unthinkably large amount of energy consumption.

Better alternatives to Bitcoin

The disastrous nature of Bitcoin’s energy consumption should not lead us to abandon the associated idea of blockchain technology altogether.

There are alternatives to the “proof of work” method of validating changes to the blockchain, such as “proof of importance”, which is analogous to Google’s page ranking systems. Projects such as Gridcoin are based on calculations that are actually useful to science. But these ideas are in their infancy.

For the moment, the problem is Bitcoin and how to deal with it. There is no obvious way to fix the inherent problems in its design. The sooner this collective delusion comes to an end, the better.

Author: John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

Bitcoin’s rise will have ‘disastrous’ consequences for the planet

From The New Daily.

The Bitcoin frenzy currently gripping the world is taking an unexpected toll on the planet – in the form of a carbon footprint almost as big as New Zealand’s.

And with the cryptocurrency’s astronomical growth showing no sign of slowing, this carbon footprint is likely to grow – prompting some commentators to warn of an “environmental disaster” in the making.

The culprit is Bitcoin ‘mining’, the little-understood process that both secures the existing Bitcoin system, and creates new Bitcoins.

This process, according to Digiconomist, is incredibly energy intensive, and is fed largely by China’s highly polluting, carbon-intensive coal-fired power stations.

These revelations come as the Australian Securities Exchange revealed it would be using the same technology used by Bitcoin – Blockchain – to run its system, the first stock exchange in the world to do so.

Writing in The Conversation on Monday, Professor John Quiggin said the rise of Blockchain itself should not be prevented, as there were other ways to use it that were not as energy intensive.

But he said that Bitcoin itself should be abandoned, describing it as a “collective delusion” with “massively destructive environmental consequences”.

Bitcoin’s rise continues

On Monday, the value of a single Bitcoin reached $A22,343, more than 20 times its value a year ago.

The unprecedented surge – offering massive returns on small investments – has proved irresistible to everyday investors, pushing more and more to buy the currency, and forcing its value into what many warn is bubble territory.

But a more sophisticated, select group – Bitcoin miners – is also  seemingly increasing, likewise attracted by the rocketing value of a digital currency that many called the gold of the 21st century.

How Bitcoin mining works

Bitcoin mining involves using a computer to solve a mathematical problem posed to it by the Bitcoin system.

When the computer solves this problem, it validates previous Bitcoin transactions, increasing the security of the Bitcoin system. In return for performing this service, the miner – as likely as not some teenager working from his or her bedroom in Shanghai – is rewarded in Bitcoins.

The video below attempts to explain the whole thing in simple terms (with questionable success).

As the video explains, Bitcoin mining requires a truly phenomenal amount of electricity – currently 32 terawatts a year, according to Digiconomist.

To put that in context, Australia uses 224 terawatts of electricity a year, while New Zealand uses 40, according to figures published by the US Central Intelligence Agency.

If Bitcoin were a country, it would be the 60th-biggest consumer of electricity in the world, ahead of 160 other countries. In other words, Bitcoin is becoming a significant contributor to climate change.

And the likelihood is it will get worse, for two reasons.

First, there is only a finite number of Bitcoins that can ever be mined. Currently around 17,000 have been mined. The limit is 21,000.

The closer we get to the 21,000 figure, the harder it is to mine Bitcoins. As a result the computer power required to mine Bitcoins increases, with the electricity used going up as a result.

(All this, by the way, puts a huge strain on miners’ computers.)

And second, as the value and profile of Bitcoin increases, the number of aspiring miners will also likely increase, further pushing up electricity usage.

Supporters of Bitcoin would like to see it become a global currency to rival the US dollar. But Professor Quiggins warned against this.

“Shifting the whole global financial system to Bitcoin would require at least a 200-fold increase, which in turn would entail increasing the world’s electricity use by around 500 per cent,” he said.

“With the current threat of climate change looming large globally – this constitutes an unthinkably large amount of energy consumption.”

Bitcoin isn’t a currency – and unless it becomes one it could be worthless

From The Conversation.

Bitcoin is in decline. Not its price, which has increased 900% this year and (at the time of writing) stands at over US$12,000 per unit, but its actual use as a currency. And this makes its rapid appreciation all the more puzzling.

A few years ago, enthusiasts triumphantly shared announcements from businesses that had started accepting Bitcoin. Over the last couple of years, such announcements have become scarce. Instead, businesses that once accepted the currency have begun to drop it.

The BBC contacted ten businesses in London that once advertised accepting Bitcoin. Four no longer accepted it, and two that did said they hardly ever received payments in Bitcoin. The same is even true online. The Wall Street Journal, citing a report by Morgan Stanley, recently reported that Bitcoin is now accepted by just three of the top 500 global online merchants, down from five last year.

If growing adoption as a currency can’t justify Bitcoin’s rapid appreciation, what can? Many enthusiasts have started to promote the idea of Bitcoin as a store of value. In economics, this is usually defined along the lines of “an item that people can use to transfer purchasing power from the present to the future”. In simple terms, it’s somewhere safe to invest your wealth that won’t lose its worth over time.

Apples can be used to barter services from a neighbour while they’re still fresh, but their purchasing power will disappear as they rot. The purchasing power can be retained into the future by exchanging the apples for money, gold, government bonds or some other store of value.

Some items have attributes that make them better stores of value than others, whether we are talking about physical items or digital objects. Gold is a good store of value because it’s durable. Electronic bond certificates are also durable as long as banks’ systems don’t fail, and have the added benefit of being easier to secure than physical valuables. Money, both physical currency and digital bank money, has the advantage of being very liquid, so it’s easy to convert into a purchase when needed.

Bitcoin does share many of these attributes of a good store of value. It also offers potentially high levels of financial privacy, somewhat similarly to the offshore banking system. This is an important attribute of a store of value for some people, although it also creates a lack of accountability and the potential for tax evasion.

But the most important attribute of a store of value is that it’s valuable. Gold is valuable because it has many industrial and decorative uses. Its price can fluctuate because of speculation on financial markets, but it can never fall to zero. There will always be someone willing to accept gold because it’s a useful commodity.

Similarly, US government bonds are ultimately valuable because they entitle the owner to a relatively secure flow of interest payments. Dollars and euros are valuable because they are widely accepted as a means of payment, and will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. In contrast, the future acceptability of the Venezuelan bolivar is in doubt, so people are desperately trying to exchange it to better stores of value.

Is Bitcoin valuable? It has no industrial or decorative uses, and it doesn’t entitle the holder to receive interest. It was intended to be valuable as a currency that is accepted the world over, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. The only major value that Bitcoin has now is its exchange value. Many people are willing to pay a lot of money today to get hold of some Bitcoin.

But what they are getting for their money is simply the hope that another buyer down the line will pay even more money for the coins. Once the music stops, there is no fundamental value to prevent the coins’ price from falling close to zero, save for their tenuous position as the currency of choice in the online drug trade and grey-area gambling.

Beanie Babies lessons

The idea that Bitcoin is valuable because it’s a store of value is upside down. In reality, something becomes a store of value because it’s valuable. In the 1990s, people started to trade Beanie Babies on eBay. Prices of these limited-edition plush toys rose to thousands of dollars, and by 1997 they made up 6.6% of the entire site’s transaction volume.

Some people invested their life savings into Beanie Babies, fully expecting their value to be preserved and more. But eventually people came to their senses and the market bombed. Beanie Babies are useful as toys and collectables, but that doesn’t justify thousand-dollar valuations.

My advice to individuals and institutions tempted by the headlines is to keep their savings away from Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and “initial coin offerings” (ICOs). I know serious blockchain developers won’t mind me saying this, because they see speculative bubbles and bursts as a distraction. For Bitcoin to truly function as a store of value, it first has to gain acceptance as a currency.

Author: Vili Lehdonvirta, Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

RBNZ Looks At Crypto-currencies

The Reserve Bank in New Zealand has released an excellent Analytical Note on Crypto-currencies “Crypto-currencies – An introduction to not-so-funny moneys“. It is one of the best I have read, so far!

The paper introduces the distributed ledger technology of crypto-currencies. They aim to increase public understanding of these technologies, highlight some of the risks involved in using crypto-currencies, and discuss some of the potential implications of these technologies for consumers, financial systems, monetary policy and financial regulation.

Crypto-currencies have no physical existence, but are best thought of as electronic accounting systems that keep track of people’s transactions and hence remaining purchasing power. Cryptocurrencies are typically decentralised, with no central authority responsible for maintaining the ledger and no central authority responsible for maintaining the code used to implement the ledger system, unlike the ledgers maintained by commercial banks for example. As crypto-currencies are denominated in their own unit of account, they are like foreign currencies relative to traditional fiat currencies, such as dollars and pounds.

They conclude that Crypto-currencies offer some distinct features, such as quicker cross-border transactions, possibly lower transaction fees, pseudo-anonymity, and transaction irreversibility. These features help to explain the growing demand for crypto-currencies, even though they fail to satisfy many of the basic functions of money.

Most crypto-currency accounts lie dormant and many of the active accounts are used only for online gambling or speculative purposes. Perceptions of anonymity have also created a demand for such currencies to facilitate illegal transactions, but the anonymity embodied in crypto-currencies has been over-stated. There have been a significant number of crypto-currency prosecutions in relation to money laundering and other crimes, illustrating that there is no guarantee of anonymity.

While crypto-currencies are growing in popularity, they currently facilitate a very small proportion of transactions. Because crypto-currencies intermediate such a small proportion of transactions, central banks do not presently view crypto-currencies as a material threat.Since crypto-currencies are not well-adapted to the provision of borrowing and lending, we also foresee an enduring role for traditional financial intermediaries.

Crypto-currencies and blockchain technology could well become an important part of global payment systems, but wide-scale adoption will depend on competition from alternative transaction technologies, and on regulation to provide users with security. Crypto-currencies will also need to address technical, scalability issues if they wish to intermediate the volume of transactions undertaken globally.

We conclude that all crypto-currencies are experimental in nature and users face material risks by transacting with them or by holding significant crypto-currency balances. Individual cryptoReserve Bank of New Zealand currencies may be more Betamax than VHS, and more MySpace than Facebook. Even if some of the constructs are enduring, such as distributed ledgers and the use of cryptography, specific crypto-currencies may be supplanted by competing transaction technologies. We close with a Latin expression much-beloved by contract lawyers and economists alike – caveat emptor – buyer beware.

The Analytical Note series encompasses a range of types of background papers prepared by Reserve Bank staff. Unless otherwise stated, views expressed are those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Reserve Bank

With a new futures market, Bitcoin is going mainstream

From The Conversation.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange will soon begin trading Bitcoin derivatives (futures contracts), signalling the cryptocurrency is now a mainstream asset class. Bitcoin has had limited use in the mainstream economy in part because the volatility of its price. The value of the currency might go up or down significantly between the time a deal is struck and delivery.

The introduction of Bitcoin futures contracts will allow investors to manage this risk, and make it safer to hold and trade in Bitcoin. This will make the cryptocurrency more accessible to individuals and businesses, and encourage developers to build more products and services on top of the technology.

Futures and other derivatives are contracts between two parties to fix the price of an underlying asset (currencies, shares, commodities etc.) over a period of time or for a future transaction. The buyer of these contracts commits to purchase the underlying asset at a set price and at a certain date, and the seller commits to sell.

There are two main uses for these contracts. First, to reduce price risk by freezing future prices. The second use is speculation. For instance, a speculator would commit to buy a commodity/share/currency at a certain time, hoping that the market price at the time of delivery is higher than the price set in the contract.

Airlines commonly buy long term oil future contracts to hedge against the potential increase in fuel price, or to take advantage of what they believe to be a low price.

Similarly, future contracts will enable traders to lock in the value of Bitcoin for a defined period of time. This effectively removes the risk associated with fluctuation in value. In addition, since these contracts will be traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the exchange effectively guarantees that both buyers and sellers will abide by the agreement.

In 2010, one Bitcoin was worth less than one hundredth of an Australian cent. As of Monday the 6th of November, the price is near A$10,000.

The market capitalisation of Bitcoin is now well over A$160 billion, which is larger than the GDP of most small countries. As the price of Bitcoin has grown, so too have transaction volumes, showing an increasing use of the cryptocurrency.

As a result, Bitcoin is starting to look like a credible investment in any respectable financial portfolio.

Although, this is not the first futures contract for cryptocurrency. Futures contracts already exist for both Ethereum and Monero.

But the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s futures contract is significant as the CME group manages not only the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, but also the Chicago Board of Trade and New York Mercantile Exchange and Commodity Exchange. Combined, these exchanges represent the largest derivative market in the world.

The decision to issue futures contracts on Bitcoin rather than another derivative is also significant. So far Bitcoin derivatives have mainly been swap agreements. A swap is a commonly used financial tool where two parties agree to swap financial instruments, such as interest or currencies. The key point is that the two parties, the buyer and seller, make a deal directly with each other.

As a swap agreement is not done through an exchange, the risk of a party not delivering on the agreement can be quite high. If one party decides to opt out, the agreement has to be terminated. This leaves the other party exposed.

Futures contracts eliminate this “counterparty” risk, as the exchange clears the transaction and guarantees delivery. And unlike swaps, futures contracts are standardised (in term of size, how much is going to be traded, and maturity date etc.). This means futures contracts can be traded at any time until maturity, making them very liquid and accessible.

The lack of a futures market in Bitcoin was a significant barrier to it becoming a mainstream asset class. You can buy and sell forward contracts on the Fijian dollar, for instance, meaning that institutional funds anywhere in the world can hold Fijian dollars in their portfolio and manage the risks of that asset.

But they cannot yet do that with Bitcoin. Until now, there has been no way to offload the risks associated with fluctuating prices. An investor could always hold the cryptocurrency, but they would do so fully exposed to price volatility.

The introduction of Bitcoin futures contracts will allow traders to hedge against this volatility and eliminate the currency risk. This will make Bitcoin more attractive for both individuals and corporations.

As crypto-assets become a mainstream investment class, other products emerge around them (such as exchange traded funds). It will also have a similar effect to that of mainstreaming share ownership – enabling a much larger fraction of the population to diversify their asset portfolios and income streams.

This will unlock some of the value currently being built on cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology – new products and services – that are currently only accessible to a relatively small number of the early enthusiasts and those helping build the technology.

The increased flow of investment funds into Bitcoin will likely push prices up further, but it will also incentivise more work to build products and services on the technology. Bitcoin just went mainstream.

Authors: Jason Potts, Professor of Economics, RMIT University; Marie-Anne Cam, Senior Lecturer in Finance, RMIT University

Why the RBA would want to create a digital Australian dollar

From The Conversation.

The Reserve Bank of Australia could join the likes of Estonia and Lebanon in creating a cryptocurrency based on the Australian dollar, to reap the benefits of technology like the blockchain but with more stability than other well known currencies like Bitcoin.

The RBA has already been approached by interested startups to create this new digital currency, known as the “DAD” or Digital Australian Dollar.

In contrast with other cryptocurrencies a state-backed digital currency has the advantage of being backed by the government as in fiat currency, but at the same time has the technological advantages shared by other cryptocurrencies.

A digital Australian dollar could remove the role of middlemen and create a cheaper electronic currency system, while at the same time enabling the government to fully regulate the system.

It would also allow transactions to settle faster (several minutes to an hour) than the traditional banking system (several hours to several days), especially in a situation where an international payment is involved.

The difference between a digital Australian dollar and Bitcoin

We already use the Australian dollar in a digital form, for example paying via your smartphone. But banks are essential in this system, moving money on our behalf.

When using a cryptocurrency, you interact with a system like the blockchain, an online ledger that records transactions, directly. Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum are examples of cryptocurrency that use the blockchain in this way. These currencies are created by the community that use them and are accepted and trusted within the community.

However, since the community runs the system, the price of the cryptocurrency solely depends on the market mechanism. When the demand increases, the price increases, but when the demand decreases, the price also decreases. While it might create an opportunity for speculators to gain profit from trading, it also creates risk for the cryptocurrency holders.

In comparison to cryptocurrency, the Digital Australian Dollar might be well managed that the price volatility could be reduced significantly. The government holds the capability of increasing or decreasing the money supply in the system. This power can be used to stabilise the market supply of the new digital currency.

The blockchain technology also reduces the fee for every payment made. This is made possible by removing the role of banks or other intermediary parties charging fees for their services. However, a small transaction fee still needs to be introduced to protect the system from being flooded by adversaries with insignificant transactions.

The characteristics of cryptocurrency itself might limit its usage to daily transactions. As the pioneer of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin was created to become a payment system, but the users gain incentive by simply saving their cryptocurrency and not using them to purchase goods or services.

They believe the future price of the cryptocurrency is higher than the current price and thus does not make a good medium of exchange nor a store of value. There is no guarantee that the cryptocurrency will hold any value in the future. Since there is nothing to back up the value, users will lose their wealth when the community no longer acknowledges the value of cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency might also jeopardise the local government’s effort of implementing regulations to minimise illegal activities. Perpetrators create cryptocurrency transactions easily without being detected by the government’s financial monitoring system.

The privacy features of cryptocurrency also make it hard for law enforcement agencies to determine the actors behind illegal activities. Although most governments in the world have enforced the coin exchange services to identify their users, the operation of the cryptocurrency is beyond their reach.

There are other state-backed digital currencies

The idea of creating a national cryptocurrency is not new. Estonia has explored ways to create Estcoin, following an initiative on the blockchain-based residency registration called e-Residency. Lebanon’s central bank has also started to examine the possibility of creating one.

Despite the efforts of those central banks, several questions must first be addressed before launching the real product to the public. The user’s financial data could be exposed since the blockchain will make all transactions created in the system transparent.

Consumer protection is also a concern since all transactions made in the blockchain are permanent without the possibility of being reversed. Without firm solutions to those problems, the Digital Australian Dollar will not satisfy all requirements to be the next groundbreaking innovation for the country’s financial system.

Author: Dimaz Wijaya, PhD Student, Monash University

Is Bitcoin Money?

From Daily Reckoning

At various times in history, feathers have been money. Shells have been money. Dollars and euros are money. Gold and silver are certainly money. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can also be money.

People say some forms of money, such as Bitcoin or U.S. dollars, are not backed by anything.

But that’s not true.

They are backed by one thing: confidence.

If you and I have confidence that something is money and we agree that it’s money, then it’s money. I can call something money, but if nobody else in the world wants it, then it’s not money. The same applies to gold, dollars and cryptocurrencies.

Governments have an edge here, because they make you pay taxes in their money. Put another way, governments essentially create an artificial use case for their own forms of paper money by threatening people with punishment if they do not pay taxes denominated in the government’s own fiat currency.

And the dollar has a monopoly as legal tender for the payment of U.S. taxes. According to John Maynard Keynes and many other economists, it is that ability of state power to coerce tax payments in a specified currency that gives a currency its intrinsic value. This theory of money boils down to saying we value dollars only because we must use them to pay our taxes — otherwise, we go to jail.

So-called cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have two main features in common. The first is that they are not issued or regulated by any central bank or single regulatory authority. They are created in accordance with certain computer algorithms and are issued and transferred through a distributed processing network using open source code.

Any particular computer server hosting a cryptocurrency ledger or register could be destroyed, but the existence of the currency would continue to reside on other servers all over the world and could quickly be replicated. It is impossible to destroy a cryptocurrency by attacking any single node or group of nodes.

The second feature in common is encryption, which gives rise to the “crypto” part of the name. It is possible to observe transactions taking place in the so-called block chain, which is a master register of all currency units and transactions.

But the identity of the transacting parties is hidden behind what is believed to be an unbreakable code. Only the transacting parties have the keys needed to decode the information in the block chain in such a way as to obtain use and possession of the currency.

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This does not mean that cryptocurrencies are fail-safe. But on the whole, the system works reasonably well and is growing rapidly for both legitimate and illegitimate transactions.

It’s worth pointing out that the U.S. dollar is also a digital cryptocurrency for all intents and purposes. It’s just that dollars are issued by a central bank, the Federal Reserve, while Bitcoin is issued privately. While we may keep a few paper dollars in our wallets from time to time, the vast majority of dollar-denominated transactions, whether in currency or securities form, are conducted digitally.

We pay bills online, pay for purchases via credit card and receive direct deposits to our bank accounts all digitally. These transactions are all encrypted using the same coding techniques as Bitcoin.

The difference is that ownership of our digital dollars is known to certain trusted counterparties such as our banks, brokers and credit card companies, whereas ownership of Bitcoin is known only to the user and is hidden behind the block chain code.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies present certain challenges to the existing system. One problem is that the value of a bitcoin is not constant in terms of U.S. dollars. In fact, that value has been quite volatile, fluctuating between $100 and its present high above $3,400 over the past few years. It’s currently around $3,467.

It’s true that dollars fluctuate in value relative to other currencies such as the euro. But those changes are typically measured in fractions of pennies, not jumps of $100 per day.

One potential solution to the Bitcoin volatility problem I find interesting is to link Bitcoin to gold at a fixed rate. This would require consensus in the Bitcoin community and a sponsor willing to make a market in physical gold at the agreed value in Bitcoin. This kind of gold-backed Bitcoin might even give the dollar a run for its money as a reserve currency, especially if it supported by gold powers such as Russia and China.

Both are looking for ways out of the current system of dollar hegemony, which will only take on added urgency now that the U.S. has imposed harsh sanctions against Russia and is signaling a trade war against China.