The magnificent Swiss 10-centime coin

The Swiss 10-centime coin has a lot to teach us about monetary economics.

On its face, the Swiss 10-centime (rappen in German) looks like a pretty unremarkable coin. It's the second-lowest value Swiss coin, the Swiss version of America's lowly nickel, the sort of coin that many people might prefer to throw in a jar and forget about. But I recently learnt via @alea on Twitter that the 10-centime has the distinction of being the oldest original coin in circulation, its size, design and composition remaining unchanged since 1879.

Below are the 1879 and 2023 versions. They're exactly the same.

It's the stability of the coin's composition in particular that strikes me. Since its debut almost 150 years ago, the 10-centime has contained three grams of cupronickel—75% copper and 25% nickel. The only exception was from 1932 to 1939, when it was made of pure nickel. 

The U.S. five-cent coin, or the "nickel," has also had a remarkably long period of stability. Debuting in 1866 as a five gram cupronickel coin comprised of 75% copper and 25% nickel, the nickel has maintained the same metal content throughout its entire existence (except for the wartime five-cent coin), although unlike the 10-centime it has undergone a few decorative changes.

What makes the enduring stability of the Swiss 10-centime and the American nickel so unique is that it runs contra to the dominant coinage timeline, which typically involves a series of changes to a coin's metallic content over time. The main reason that coin compositions have been prone to change is that the global economy has generally been characterized by inflation, or a rising price level. With coins, this has had the unfortunate effect of steadily pushing the market value of their metal content higher, to the point that it eventually exceeds the coin's face value.

When this happens Gresham's law takes hold. It becomes profitable for speculators to melt the coin down in order to sell it as raw metal, the coin disappearing from circulation. Gresham's law, you may recall, is the dictum that when the official value of a monetary instrument is set too low, then it will be hoarded or exported, the "good" money being driven out leaving only what remains – the "bad" money – to circulate in its place. As a result, coin shortages occur and it becomes harder for the consumers and retailers to conduct basic commerce. 

In the early 1960s, for instance, a big rise in the price of silver led to hoarding of U.S. dimes and quarters, which at the time were 90% silver and 10% copper.

Source: New York Times (1964)

To prevent coins from being tossed into the melting pot and causing shortages, governments have typically reminted them out of cheaper material once their metal value approaches their face value. That's indeed what the U.S. monetary authorities did in 1965 with the Coinage Act, when they decided to henceforth mint new dimes and quarters out of cupronickel rather than silver.

Another reason for the regular alterations in coin metal content is to protect the mint's profits, which typically flow through to the government. Buying raw metal is one of a mint's largest costs, so when metal price rise, mint officials search around for cheaper types of metal. Either that or they reduce the size of the coin itself.

After commodity prices boomed in the 1970s, the 10-centime coin's smaller cousin, the Swiss 5-centime – produced from two grams of cupronickel since 1879 – was replaced by an aluminum-bronze version made of 92% copper, 6% aluminum, and 2% nickel. Nickel is a relatively pricey metal, so subbing it out with cheaper materials not only prevented the 5-centime coin from ever reaching its melting point, but also protected the Swissmint's profits.

Canada's 5-cent coin has gone through even more compositional changes than Switzerland's 5-centime. Beginning life in 1858 as a sterling silver coin, the five cent coin was diluted to 80% silver in 1919, got converted to pure nickel in 1922, then cupronickel in 1982, and finally became 94.5% steel in 1999—steel being by far the cheapest of these materials.

Monetary headroom

The 10-centime coin has avoided these transformations. You can see why in the chart below, which illustrates the market value of the nickel and copper making up the 10-centime going back to its original minting in 1879.

When it was created in 1879, the 10-centime had just 1.2 centimes worth of cupronickel in it. That effectively gave the coin a massive amount of metallic "headroom," or space between its metal content and its face value—8.8 centime's worth.

Zoom forward 150 years or so to 2024 and the market value of this three grams of cupronickel has more than doubled from 1.2 centimes to 2.8 centimes. That's a big jump, but still far below – 7.2 centime's worth – the coin's ten-centime face value. Given that plenty of headroom remains, Gresham's law won't be kicking in any time soon. I'd hazard that the cupronickel 10-centime has a few more decades of life, unless the Swiss give up on using cash before then and simply cancel their coinage altogether.

The 10-centime's fat amount of historic headroom isn't the only factor driving its endurance. Another factor has been the relative strength of the franc, Switzerland's monetary unit, composed of 100 centimes. To illustrate this, let's take a look at its competitor, the American five-cent piece.

Not worth a nickel

Below, I've charted out the market value of the five-cent coin's cupronickel content going back to its introduction in 1866.

Back in 1879, when the Swiss 10-centime was introduced, the U.S. nickel had just 0.4¢ worth of copper and nickel in it, giving it a massive 4.6¢ worth of monetary headroom. But over the decades that headroom has been entirely eaten up by inflation. In 2006 the nickel's metallic content exploded above its face value for the first time, and again in 2011. Since 2020 this state of affairs seems to have become permanent, with the value of the metal currently clocking in at 5.5 cents, around fourteen-times higher than 1879.

The high price of the nickel's metal content has been eating into the U.S. Mint's profits. The chart below shows the amount of seigniorage, or profit, that each coin provides to the mint. Seigniorage is the difference between the face value and cost of producing coinage.

Source: US Mint 2023 annual report

As you can see, in 2023 the U.S. Mint lost an incredible $93 million producing nickels! It hasn't made a profit on the five-cent coin in almost twenty years. That the nickel's metal mix hasn't been updated despite almost two decades of consecutive losses indicates bureaucratic failure. Something at the U.S. Mint is broken.

At the same time, we are seeing signs of the nickel falling prey to Gresham's law as hoarders remove them from circulation. A few years ago, investment manager Kyle Bass, who made his fame shorting various mortgage-related instruments during the 2008 credit crisis, bought 20 million nickels in anticipation of eventually melting them down and selling them for more than their face value. In a conversation with me on Twitter, Bass confirms he still keeps the nickels at a storage facility.

I do other business with the storage facility. My agreement is in basis points of value (less than 25bps) and not sq ft.

— 🇺🇸 Kyle Bass 🇹🇼 (@Jkylebass) February 27, 2024

No doubt other speculators have adopted the same strategy. As metal prices inevitably continue to rise, expect serous shortages of nickels going forward, unless the U.S. Mint finally decides to do something about the problem.

Let's bring the 10-centime back into the conversation. By all rights, the 10-centime should have had a much shorter life than the U.S. nickel. In 1879, the nickel was the more valuable of the two coins by a long shot. At the time, the going exchange rate was one U.S. cent to five Swiss centimes, which means a nickel was worth around 25-centimes. Given that it was worth so much more, the nickel had a much wider region of monetary headroom, and so it seemed destined to enjoy a much longer period of time before its metal value caught up to it and Gresham's law kicked in.

But not so. The less valuable centime has proven more enduring.

As I hinted earlier, the reason for this is the Swiss franc's extraordinary strength over the last century. Below I've plotted out the long-term franc-to-dollar exchange rate.

In 1880, one dollar was worth 5.18 francs. Today, a dollar is worth less than a franc. Put differently, the purchasing power of the Swiss franc and its centime subdivisions has improved by a factor of five relative to the dollar's purchasing power. And so the value of the cupronickel embedded in the 10-centime coin hasn't inflated nearly as fast as the value of cupronickel in the U.S. 5-cent piece. That's why Kyle Bass isn't hoarding lowly 10-centime coins.

The U.S. Mint is belatedly scrambling to make changes to the metal content of the nickel. In its 2022 report to Congress, it asked legislators for the authority to mint an updated five-cent coin made of 80% copper and 20% nickel, the idea being to reduce costs by using more of the red metal, which is the cheaper of the two. Either that or use an alloy known as C99750T-M, which is composed of 51% copper, 14% nickel, the remaining being cheaper-cost metals zinc (33%) and manganese (2%).

In the end, the nickel and 10-centime tell two very different stories. One, a coin that’s run out of headroom, becoming a financial liability for a mint that seems mired in bureaucratic inefficiency. The other, a relic of stability, quietly enduring in a world of change.

Renovatio monetae

This silver pfennig from the Archbishopric of Magdeburg (1152-1192) was subject to a policy of renovatio monetae. Twice a year whoever held it had to bring it in to be changed for new coins at a rate of four old coins to three new coins. That suggests an annualized tax rate on coinage of 44%. Image source: British Museum

This is another post in a series that explores how European monarchs harnessed the minting of coins to earn revenues for their coffers. 

A king or queen generally resorted to two different strategies for profiting from the mints. The first was to mint long-lived coinage. The second involved issuing short-lived coinage subject to a policy of renovatio monetae, which is the topic of this post. These aren't mutually exclusive buckets. It's possible for elements of both policies to be blended together.

Almost everything I've written about medieval coinage on this blog has been about the long-lived sort, because that was the dominant pattern in Europe. Under a long-lived coinage system, once a coin had been minted it remained in permanent legal circulation. For example, England's long-lived coinage policy meant that an English penny produced in 1600 would have been just as valid a hundred years later, in 1700, as a penny produced in 1699.

The monarch earned a one-time fee from the original minting of the coin. More specifically, a citizen who brought raw silver to the royal mint left with that same amount of silver now transformed into coin form, less a small part going to the crown. This profit was known as seigniorage. In England, the seigniorage rate on silver typically hovered around 5%, my source for this number being The Debasement Puzzle by economists Rolnick, Velde, and Weber. Once a particular coin was produced, however, the king or queen no longer earned revenue from it.

As society grew and more coins were needed, raw silver was constantly brought to the royal mints by the public in order to be coined, the monarch earning a steady stream of income. This was known as free coinage, since everyone had the right to access the royal mints.

Short-lived coinage subject to a policy of renovatio monetae was an entirely different manner. Under this model, coins didn't circulate permanently. When a king or queen announced what was known as a renovatio monetae, or a renewal of the coinage, all existing coins had to be brought back to the mint to be recoined into new coins. The monarch collected a fee upon each renovatio monetae. 

To help reinforce the monarch's ability to collect a profit, only the most recent coin was allowed to be used within the monarch's domain. Older local coins and coins from other realms were illegal. To distinguish the new version from the outgoing version, the new type was stamped with a different pattern. The penalties for not obeying the rules of renovatio could be harsh. According to Philip Grierson, a numismatist, anyone caught using expired coinage could face imprisonment, a fine, or have their face branded with the old pattern of coin.

Source: Svensson

The period of time between one renovatio monetae and the next varied widely. In England, the monarch initially adopted an interval of nine years, beginning in 973 AD with Edgar. Later on, this was shortened to just three years. In many parts of Germany and Poland, renovatio monetae occurred yearly, as recounted by economist Roger Svensson in his wide-ranging book on the topic. In the Archbishopric of Magdeburg it was carried out twice a year, coinciding with important market days in the spring and autumn. The Teutonic order in Prussia used a much slower ten-year cycle, according to Svensson. 

The date for the switch was often chosen to occur just prior to annual tax payment day or, as in the case of Magdeburg, ahead of a regularly occurring market or festival (see figure above). Requiring that all tax payments or market transactions be conducted with new coins reinforced the necessity of  bringing in old coinage to be melted down into new coinage, thus guaranteeing a boost to the monarch's revenues.

The coinage that prevailed in Poland and Germany from the 12th century almost seems to have been designed with a short lifespan in mind, since it is leaf-thin and fragile. Coins minted in this style are known as bracteates, one of which can be seen below. Svensson speculates that the bracteate format was better suited for the purposes of renovatio monetae than standard coins since the costs of periodically reforming silver into thin and pliable coin would have been lower than heavier coins. 

Leaf-thin bracteates from Frankenhausen. Source: Svensson

 

How much profit did the monarch collect from renovatio monetae? 

For many years the Teutonic order in Prussia used a conversion rate of seven old coins to six new ones, says Svensson. Combined with the fact that renovatio only occurred every ten years, the effective tax rate was relatively light. According to Christine Desan, a law professor, English royal profits amounted to 25% of the metal minted (she cites Spufford), but recall that this tax was levied only every three years so that works out to a yearly tax of around 8%. (Some people may notice the similarity of renovatio monetae to ideas promulgated by Silvio Gesell, who came up with the idea of stamped scrip—money that depreciates.)

In some cases, though, the conversion rate bordered on exploitative. Svensson says that a common exchange rate in Germany was four old bracteates for three new ones. Given two renovatio per year in places like Magdeburg, that works out to a yearly tax rate on coinage of 44%! If a citizen of Magdeburg started the year with 16 bracteates in their stash, and they complied with both renovatio, by year-end target would only have nine bracteates.

This may have created a very weird effect whereby coins became "cheaper and cheaper" over the course of the year in anticipation of the inevitable withdrawal day, according to historian Sture Bolin. Since everyone would have known ahead of time that there was to be a 4:3 conversion on a fixed date, and no one wanted to be stuck holding coins and bearing the conversion tax, sellers would only accept coins at a discount to compensate them for conversion. That discount varied with time. As the final day approached, it would have got progressively wider.

In modern times we don't have to deal with the hassles of renovatio monetae. The coins and banknotes we use are long-lasting: a nickel from 1956 is just as valid as one from 2022. Or consider that while the $1 note is no longer printed in Canada, anyone can still bring them to a bank to be deposited for free. If a policy of renovatio monetae were to be announced by the Bank of Canada in 2025, and Canadians were required to bring our coins and banknotes in each year to be exchanged for new ones, there would probably be a revolt against the inconvenience of it, especially if the fee was high.

This combination of exploitation and inconvenience may explain why the English abandoned renovatio monetae in the middle of the 12th century in favor of permanent coinage. "The renovatio monetae witnessed to the extent of royal control and suggests that coining was routinely coercive," writes Desan. "This new system reduced the burdens placed on people required so frequently to remint their money at a cost."   

However, if renovatio monetae was inconvenient (and frequently exploitative), it also had a key benefit. As silver coins passed from hand to hand, they suffered from natural wear and tear. On top of that, bad actors regularly clipped off their edges, keeping the silver shavings for themselves. By renewing the coinage every year or two, the monarch ensured that the coinage was kept in relatively good condition.

Alas, the same can't be said for long-lived coinage systems, which were particularly prone to the wear and tear problem. After a decade or two of circulating, a typical coin would have lost a significant amount of its original silver content, at which point it would no longer be equal in weight to new coins. This meant that the realm's coins were no longer fungible, or interchangeable, with each other. The familiar problem of Gresham's law would now begin to plague the monetary system, whereby the "bad" coins, which meant the old underweight coins, drove out the "good" coins, the new full-weighted ones. With only shabby coins being used in trade, the money supply was more prone to counterfeiting and clipping, leading to an even shabbier coin supply, and more counterfeiting and clipping. 

Mind you, there were ways to defend against the inevitable downward spiral of long-lived coinage. By adopting a policy of defensive debasements, which I've written about before, the fungibility of coins could be restored.

Nor were long-lived coinage systems spared from being exploitative in nature. The method of abuse was different than that used to exploit short-lived coinage, involving a policy of repetitive debasements in the silver content of coinage.

As an example of this, I wrote a post last year exploring how Henry VIII financed his wars in France using debasement of his long-lived coinage. Do read it, but in short the trick was to increase the number of people visiting the royal mints to convert raw silver into new coins. This would in turn boost the monarch's profits. After all, he or she earned a 5% cut from each new coin produced.  The rush to the mint was linked to the fact that, post-debasement, the public could now get more silver pennies from the mint than before for a given quantity of silver, which in turn allowed them to buy more goods and services than they would have otherwise been able to purchase.

After a series of such debasements, Henry VIII was much richer, but the coinage was debauched. Going into 1542, for instance, the English penny contained 92.5% silver. Nine years later its purity stood at just 25% silver, the majority being base metal such as copper. 

To sum up, short-lived coinage issued under a policy of renovatio monetae was one of several ways to administer the monetary system. It had some advantages over other methods, but was also easily abused. This abuse was linked to the fact that coinage was simultaneously a crucial tool for day-to-day commerce, both as a medium of exchange and a unit of account, and also a way for the monarch to fund itself. Maximizing its latter role by relying on frequent and onerous renovatio may have done severe damage to money's capacity to perform the former role. 

This tension was not necessarily resolved with the move towards long-lived coinage, as Henry VIII demonstrates. And while we may think we have left these these medieval issues behind in the 21st century, I don't think that we can ever fully escape the tensions embodied in money's dual roles as crucial tool of commerce and source of government funding.

Why Henry III's gold penny failed

English gold penny minted by Henry III in 1257

A lucky metal detectorist just discovered a Henry III gold penny, one of the first English gold coins ever minted, on a farm in Devon in the southwest part of the U.K. My favorite thing about detectorist findings is that they give us a good excuse to learn about old coins. 

Minted in 1257, only eight of Henry III's gold pennies (pictured above) have survived. This is odd given that medieval historian David Carpenter's analysis of historical records indicates that 72,000 of these coins may have been produced within a year or two.

Why are there so few of Henry III's gold pennies still in existence? In this short post I'll suggest that the gold penny was a failure. Rather than circulating in trade, as one would expect of a coin, most of them were melted down within a year or two after issuance. And so there are very few gold pennies left for detectorists to find.

Leading up to the 1200s, the demands of English trade for coinage was mostly met by the workhorse English silver penny. Because the yellow metal was expensive, gold coins fell outside of the day-to-day spending range of the average person.

But Europe was getting wealthier and this was creating more demand for higher denomination coins. According to Alexander Del Mar, gold bezants were already circulating in England by the 13th century (page 236, [pdf]). Minted by the Byzantines, bezants had dominated Mediterranean commerce since 300 AD or so (see Munro). To boot, a handful of 11th- and 12th-century Islamic gold dinars and dinar-inspired coins have been found in England, writes historian Caitlin Green in a blog post, further suggesting a nascent demand for high-value coinage (see photo below). Del Mar cites texts from the era mentioning the circulation of Spanish maravedis, a gold dinar copycat.

Arabic gold dinar (AD 1163-84) found in Suffolk [link]

Meanwhile, the Italian city states of Genoa and Florence had begun to mint their own gold coins in 1252, the Florin and the Genovino. In the century before these two cities had pioneered the creation of large silver coins, the grosso or groat (worth 12 silver pennies) which England had yet to copy.

And so Henry III may have been eager to issue his own gold coin, one with his face on it and not someone else's stamp. But his effort failed .

When Henry III issued his gold penny, he rated it to be worth 20 silver pennies. That is, if you were an English merchant in 1256 you were required to accept a new gold penny from a customer at the same rate as 20 silver pennies. As a backstop, Henry III himself promised to redeem the gold pennies at 19 and a half pennies, the other half-penny being a fee. (See Evans, The First Gold Coins of England.)

In bimetallic coin systems, it was crucial for the monarch to choose the proper exchange ratio between silver and gold coins. If the chosen ratio diverged from the market's gold-to-silver rate, then Gresham's law kicked in. Undervalued coins disappear from circulation because they could be better spent elsewhere at their true market metal price.

In his paper Gold and Gold Coins in England in the Mid-thirteenth Century, Carpenter maintains that Henry III picked the right ratio between gold pennies and silver pennies.  A gold penny weighed the same as two silver pennies. At Henry III's chosen exchange rate of twenty silver pennies to one gold penny, this implied a price of ten grams of silver to one gram of gold. Carpenter says that this was in line with the prevailing 10:1 market rate between silver and gold bullion at the time.

But historian John Munro suggests otherwise. What Carpenter omits is that an English silver penny was only 92.5% pure, the remaining 7.5% being comprised of base metals. This means that Henry III's chosen exchange rate of twenty silver pennies to one gold penny actually valued the quantity of gold inside a gold penny at just 9.3 times that of an equivalent amount of silver, not 10 times.

Thus the king's chosen rate undervalued gold. And so Henry III's gold penny would have run smack dab into Gresham's law. It would have been more profitable for an English merchant to melt down 1 kg of gold pennies into bullion and buy 10 kg of silver with the proceeds at the going market rate than to spend that 1 kg of gold pennies as coins (since that would mean getting the equivalent of just 9.3 kg of silver).

Put differently, an English arbitrageur could engage in the following set of trades to make a risk-free return. He or she could spend 9.3 kg of silver coins to get 1 kg of gold pennies at Henry's official rate. Then they could melt that 1 kg of gold coins down and sell the gold bullion for 10 kg of silver at the market rate. Voila, our arbitrageur has magically turned 9.3 kg of silver into 10 kg of silver, earning a free 0.7 kg in silver. They would continue to execute this trade until the entire stock of Henry III gold pennies had disappeared.

There is additional evidence of the undervaluation of the gold penny. In 1265, just eight years after initially issuing them, Henry III increased the gold penny's rated value to 24 pennies from 20 pennies, writes Kemmerer (Gold and the Gold Standard, 1944). This rating would have been more in line with the market rate between gold and silver. But by then it was probably too late. All of Henry III's original issue of gold pennies would have been melted down. Nor was he minting any new ones. Specimens like the coin found this year in the farmer's field in Devon would have been one of a few to escape the melting pot. 

As for England's monarchs, they would only get gold coinage right in 1344 with the successful issuance of the gold noble.

The afghani could split into two (and other possibilities for Afghanistan's currency)

The new Governor of the DAB, Abdul Qahir Idrees, is introduced to staff.  [Source][Source]

Last week I made the case that the Afghanistan's currency, the Afghan afghani, might hyperinflate. In this post I'm going to take a different tack. In a chaotic economy, the afghani—or at least some version of the afghani—may be one of the country's more reliable elements. I'm going to look to several exotic currency scenarios including that of the 1990s Iraqi dinar, which split into an unstable Saddam dinar and a stable Swiss dinar, as a possible template for what might happen in Afghanistan.

My blog post from last week was about the assets owned by Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), Afghanistan's central bank. The Taliban, which just took over control of the country, discovered to its chagrin that most of the DAB's US$9.5 billion in assets are held overseas and controlled by the U.S. and institutions like the IMF. And now those assets have been frozen.

Here is the former central banker, Ajmal Ahmady:

This thread is to clarify the location of DAB (Central Bank of Afghanistan) international reserves

I am writing this because I have been told Taliban are asking DAB staff about location of assets

If this is true - it is clear they urgently need to add an economist on their team

— Ajmal Ahmady (@aahmady) August 18, 2021

With a wedge being driven between the afghani banknotes that are circulating in Afghanistan and the New York-domiciled assets backing those notes, I went on to suggest in my post that the notes—now rudderless—could only fall in value.

What follows is my counter-argument, to myself.

Yes, the Taliban-controlled DAB has been cut off from its New York assets. But Taliban officials are about to learn (if they haven't already) that they have also been severed from the global banknote printing market. This means that the Taliban-controlled DAB can't issue any new banknotes. Cash is the dominant form of money in Afghanistan. With the supply of afghanis now fixed, and the demand for them rising over time along with population growth, Econ 101 tells us that the afghani's purchasing power should strengthen, or at least not fall by very much.

Like many other smaller countries, Afghanistan doesn't print its own notes. The DAB signed a contract in 2020 with the Polish Security Printing Works, Poland's state-owned money printer, to provide it with new cash. The first batch of new Polish-made afghani notes arrived earlier this year, with more due to arrive through 2022. 

The Taliban's takeover makes it unlikely that subsequent batches will be delivered, at least not without U.S. approval. Thus the stock of afghani banknotes is locked with no timetable for unlocking it.

Nor can the Taliban-controlled DAB print up its own series of afghani banknotes. Banknote printing is a complex affair due to anti-counterfeiting features, exotic substrates on which notes are printed, and designer security inks. I doubt the Taliban can acquire high quality presses, materials, or the requisite expertise to operate them.

Might a rogue foreign printer produce notes for the Taliban?

This is where things get interesting. We can look to other countries like Yemen, Libya or Iraq for ideas about what might happen if this happens (more on these countries at bottom).

Say that a shortage of notes pushes the Taliban to try and secure new ones. The Taliban-controlled DAB might contact an ally such as Pakistan to get some new notes printed up in secret. The rogue Pakistani printer will probably do a better printing job than the Taliban would on its own, but it still won't be able to make perfect replicas of the Polish series (or prior series). And the Taliban may not want replicas anyways. It may ask for an entirely new note design to commemorate its coming to power. Once the Taliban has received the Pakistani-printed notes, it will proceed to put these not-quite-replicas into circulation.

Now the ball is in the U.S.'s court.

If the U.S. decides to publicly disapprove of the rogue notes, then people in Afghanistan will refuse to treat old notes and new notes as being fungible, or equal to each other. The old approved notes will be seen as being tied to the billions of assets held in rich New York, the new unapproved being linked to a destitute Taliban. So the unapproved notes will trade at a discount to approved notes. At that point Afghanistan will have two afghanis: a strong Yankee one and a bad Taliban one. (This would be a situation similar to the bad Saddam dinars circulating in 1990s Iraq. More on that later.)

The Taliban may react by trying to restore fungibility. Afghan citizens would be required to treat the two unequal banknotes as equals. That is, local stores and banks would be forced to accept both the new and old notes at par on pain of execution.

But these measures would only partly work. People would adapt by limiting all their official compliant purchases to be made using the weaker unapproved banknotes. They would hoard the good approved ones, perhaps for use on the black market (where they will fetch their true value) or for export to regions of Afghanistan that are not controlled by the Taliban, and where the Taliban's one-for-one afghani rule has no effect. (Much like how stable Swiss dinars circulated in Kurdish-controlled Northern Iraq).

So a strategy of rogue printing could very well mean the emergence of a strong and a weak afghan. (Some of you will recognize this as Gresham's law in operation). That sounds like sci-fi, but as I've been hinting at throughout this post, this sort of strange currency divorce isn't all that new. I wrote about Iraq's experience here. 

The short version is that prior to the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi dinar notes had been printed by a private printer, De La Rue. De La Rue's printing plates were manufactured in Switzerland. Cut off from De La Rue after the war, Iraq's leader Saddam Hussein had a new series printed up locally. These were known as the Saddam dinar and circulated at a discount to the Swiss dinar.

Iraq isn't the only example of currency separation. I've written about Libya's near split in 2016. More recently, I described the Yemeni rial breaking into two.

Yemen remains home to one of the world's oddest monetary situations. The entire Yemeni monetary system has split on the basis of the age of its banknotes, with pre-2016 notes being worth much more than newer notes.

See chart below. Old rial notes are in blue, new in orange.

1/2 pic.twitter.com/om1cYI9CM0

— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) August 3, 2021

The possibility of a dramatic rupture of the afghani might be enough to get the Taliban to swear off the rogue printing option altogether. It may seek to work with the U.S. (i.e. submit to certain U.S. demands) in order to get access to both its Polish-printed notes and New York assets.

As for the U.S., it may agree to work with the Taliban-run DAB for humanitarian reasons, subject to certain conditions (i.e. limits on how banknotes can be issued). This compromise between enemies might lead to a surprising amount of stability for the Afghan afghani.

I've now written two blog posts about the Afghan afghani, both of them describing wildly different scenarios. What's evident is that the situation is a volatile one. It could proceed along any of vast number of arcs.

A nickel is worth more than a nickel

Having just emerged from the fiasco of last year's coin shortage (which I wrote about here and here), the U.S. Mint has a new problem on its hands. The melt value of the nickel, or five cent coin, has suddenly moved higher than the coin's face value.

Thanks to the big rally in copper prices, a nickel coin is once again worth more than 5¢ https://t.co/2ZEkkxqEVR pic.twitter.com/2O2ce0eccN

— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) May 5, 2021

The melt value of a nickel refers to the market value of the 3.25 grams of copper and 1.75 grams of nickel inherent in each five cent coin. In the chart below I've mapped out the melt value of a U.S. nickel going back to 2000, decomposed into its copper and nickel components.

As you can see, the last time that the intrinsic value of a coin exceeded its face value was ten years ago, back in 2011. Thanks to the huge rally in copper prices over the last twelve months, the metallic content of a nickel is currently worth 5.9 cents. In theory, anyone can buy nickels for five cents, melt them down, sell the copper and nickel for 5.9 cents, and earn 0.9 cent profit less costs.

But this trade isn't without its risks. Since 2006, the U.S. Mint has made it illegal to melt down U.S. one-cent and five-cent coins. Rule-breakers can get up to five years in jail. A would-be entrepreneur might try exporting U.S. nickels to Canada to melt them down. But the U.S. Mint anticipated this loophole and also made it illegal to export coins in amounts exceeding $5.

These sorts of punishments might reduce melting. But they are unlikely to stop melting altogether.

The price of copper has risen over the last year, but the price of nickel hasn't matched it. If nickel prices were to rise too and the melt value of a five-cent coin were to hit, say, 8 or 9 cents, then the financial incentive to break anti-melting laws would become quite strong. Cue the problem of coin shortages. If a coin is more valuable for its metal content than as money, it'll quickly disappear from circulation.

Shortages arising from illegal melting would be exacerbated by legal nickel hoarding by speculators. Kyle Bass, for instance, once made a $1 million nickel bet that I wrote about here. Expect many Kyle Basses to emerge out of the woodwork as commodity prices rise.

Careful readers will recognize this as an instance of Gresham's law. When a monetary instrument's value is fixed by the authority, but its intrinsic value is above the amount, then all of this "good" money will be withdrawn from circulation.

What's the solution? 

We've been fighting this problem for hundreds of years and have devised a pretty standard fix. The Mint needs to quickly reduce the metallic value of the nickel. For instance, the U.S. was plagued by shortages of silver quarters in the 1950 and '60s as people hoarded them for their silver content. The solution was to replace silver quarters with cheaper copper ones. (I wrote about these wise debasements here.)

Take another example. In 1982, the high price of copper forced the U.S. Mint to swap its 95% copper penny for a 97.5% zinc penny. Zinc is cheaper than copper. To this day, the melt value of a U.S. penny remains quite a bit below its face value, as the chart below illustrates. (The only exception is a few months in 2007 when high zinc prices pushed a penny up to 1.1¢.) If the U.S. Mint hadn't made the switch from copper to zinc in 1982, then the melt-value of pennies would currently be around 2.5¢, and everyone would be melting them down.

So moving back to 2021, one the U.S. Mint's option to combat hoarding and melting of nickels is a zinc nickel. A steel nickel is another possibility – back in 2000 we Canadians switched our five-cent coins from a nickel/copper mix over to 94.5% steel.

Sure, there would be some hassles. Vending machines often read a coin’s electromagnetic signature to determine its denomination. A move to steel coinage would require the vending machine industry to make significant changes to its coin-reading apparatuses.  

But compared to enduring constant shortages, a switch is a far better idea.

Or here's another option. Why not use the occasion of high commodity prices to get rid of both the one-cent and five-cent coins altogether? These coins are little more than monetary pollution. We don't need them anymore.

One country, two monetary systems

I often write about odd monetary phenomena on this blog. Here's a new contender, Yemen's dual banknote system.

Yemen uses the Yemeni rial as a unit of account. As one of the poorest countries in the world, Yemen still relies mostly on banknotes to make transactions, which are issued by the Central Bank of Yemen, or CBY.

One of the convenient features of banknotes is their fungibility. This means that one banknote is perfectly interchangeable with another. For a few months now, something strange has happened to Yemen's banknotes. Old rials and new rials have ceased to be fungible. Any rial note that was printed prior to 2016 is now worth around 10% more than newer rial notes.

More generally, the entire Yemeni monetary system has split on the basis of banknote age. From a Western perspective, it would be as if every single U.S. banknote issued with a Steve Mnuchin signature on it, the current Treasury Secretary, were worth 10% less than bills signed five years ago by his predecessor Jack Lew.

Conflicts are always complicated. What follows is a short but drastically simplified explanation of how Yemen's banknote problem began.

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In 2014, the northwestern part of Yemen was taken over by rebel Houthis. They also managed to capture the capital, Sana'a. Meanwhile, an internationally-recognized government occupies the south, the port city of Aden being its capital. Very few people live in eastern Yemen.

Source: Aljazeera

The Central Bank of Yemen has always been located in the capital, Sana'a. It tried to be a neutral party between the two warring sides. This sounds like it must have been a very awkward role to play.

For instance, before the war started the central bank was responsible for paying government salaries, including the army. When the war kicked off some soldiers supported the rebels in the north while others joined the internationally-recognized government in the south. According to Mansour Rageh & coauthors, this meant that the central bank was simultaneously paying the salaries of both sides of the conflict. That's touchy.

This balancing act eventually broke down in 2016 when the internationally-recognized government forced the central bank to move to Aden. Rageh et al explain how this happened. In short, the government convinced the international community to block the Sana'a branch's access to foreign reserves. It also prevented the branch from getting new banknotes printed.
 
So by late 2016 we've got two different branches of the central bank, one controlled by the rebels and the other by the internationally-recognized government. The latter controls most monetary functions.

With the stage set, we can now start to get into the meat of why old rial notes are worth more than new ones. After the Aden branch of the CBY had established itself in 2016, one of the first things it did was order a bunch of new banknotes to be printed up by Russian note printer Goznak. These arrived in Aden in early 2017. They looked like this:

Source: Banknote News

You can see that there are some differences between the new 1000 rial note and the old one, pictured below:

Source: Banknote News

The rebels were not happy with the new notes. It's easy to guess why. Fresh money could be used to pay government fighters, not rebel fighters. This "blood money" would then cheekily flow north via trade. Since anyone who holds a banknote is by definition funding the government that issues it with a no-interest loan, the rebel north was financing its own enemies. (The technical term for this sort of financing is seigniorage).

In 2017, the rebels began to limit the ability of northern civilians to use the newly issued banknotes. This mostly affected banks and other large businesses in the northern Yemen, which were now required to avoid dealing in the new notes. Anthony Biswell of the Sana'a Center for Strategic Studies has a much weightier explanation of this transition. Do read his article if you want to learn more about this topic.

Anyways, on December 18, 2019 the rial spat crescendoed into a full out ban. The rebel government announced that everyone in the north had thirty days to turn over new notes at any of 300 agents located across the region. In return they would get an equivalent amount of old banknotes, if available, up to 100,000 rials per person. That's around US$170.

Anything above this 100,000 rial limit would have to be converted into a digital rials. These would be supplied by one of three privately provided electronic wallets. Unfortunately, Yemen has almost no digital payments infrastructure, so these balances wouldn't be of much use.

Thanks to the December 2019 ban, the price of old and new rial banknotes has completely diverged. Below is a chart from the World Bank.

Source: World Bank

We can surmise why a big gap has developed between the two types of notes. The stock of old pre-2016 banknotes is fixed. It can't grow. But the supply of new banknotes is not fixed. The Aden branch of the CBY can get Goznik to print as many notes as it wants. So the rare rials, the old ones, are worth more.

I'd expect Gresham's law to kick in, too. Gresham's law says that if a government stipulates that two payment instruments are to circulate at the same rate, but one is worth fundamentally more than the other, then the "bad" one drives out the "good". More specifically, the undervalued money will be hoarded (or exported), leaving only the overvalued one in circulation.

In Aden's case this is likely to translate into "bad" rials (the post-2016 ones) driving "good" rials (the pre-2016 notes) out of circulation. Since the Aden government treats both old and new banknotes as interchangeable, but old ones are worth more, the old ones will all be exported to the north.

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Where might all this lead? With the Sana'a branch having declared war on new notes, the Aden branch may do the opposite and try to hurt the old ones. This would involve orphaning all of its pre-2016 banknotes. That is to say, the Aden branch will demonetize them; cease accepting old notes as its liability or obligation.

But even if they were to be demonetized, orphaned rials would still circulate.

The topic of "orphaned" currency has popped up before on this blog. The Somalian central bank ceased to exist in 1991. Yet even though the Somali shilling now lacked a central bank sponsor, they continued to be used in Somalia as a medium of exchange, as recounted by Will Luther here.

A new Somali central bank has stated that it will re-adopt these old shillings and replace them with new currency. To date, this hasn't happened.

Along these same lines, even though Saddam Hussein disowned Iraqi dinars that had been printed in Switzerland, these so-called "Swiss Dinars" continued to circulate in northern Iraq. After Saddam was deposed by the Americans in 2003, the new central bank re-adopted all of the orphaned Swiss dinars.

If the Aden government is going to disown old Yemeni rials, I wouldn't expect them to remain orphaned for long. The Sana'a branch of the Central Bank of Yemen would quickly adopt them as their own obligation. At which point Yemen's unofficial two-currency system would become official. The Sana'a branch might even try to get its own version of the rial printed up. If so, it would have to rely on printers other than Goznak.

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Yemenis already face so many difficulties. The sudden emergence of a dual-currency regime only compounds their plight. Prices are a language. We become fluent in this language as we engage in our commercial habits of buying, selling, and appraising. The sudden rial split forces Yemenis to start "speaking" in two different price arrays (three if the U.S. dollar is included). It's terribly inconvenient.

There are also costs to renegotiating rial-denominated debts. If one Yemeni owes the other, are they to pay in old rials or new ones? Debtors will always prefer the debased currency, new rials, but creditors will ask for the stronger one, old rials. Somehow a decision will have to be made.

Finally, a dual currency regime means that Yemenis will be forced to convert from one type of currency to another to make payments. That means incurring fees, hassles, and waiting time.

In the west, we take fungibility for granted. To achieve monetary standardization, a big investment in technology and coordination is required. The fact that a dollar is worth the same in Los Angeles as it is in New York, or Vancouver as it is in Halifax, is worth celebrating.

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P.S. Yemen's old rials are really old. See image below. Dilapidated banknotes are a major problem. They make trade harder and allow for easier counterfeiting.

ولا شي لا تفتجعش، بياس ابو خمسين pic.twitter.com/ljMmZuTxjY

— فرانز عبدالستّار النمساوي (@DerOsterreicher) May 20, 2020

Can lottery tickets become money?

Say that the local lottery system has decided to innovate. Lottery tickets can now be used as money. A ticket with a face value of $x can be used to buy $x worth of stuff at any checkout counter in the country. Or they can be held in digital form and transferred instantaneously across the lottery's new payments system to friends, the utility company, or the government tax department.

With the payments infrastructure in place, will people actually use lottery tickets to pay their bills, transact with friends, or settle their taxes? Can lottery tickets become money-like?

I'm skeptical. Here's my thinking. Say that Jane has just bought $10 worth of digital lottery tickets. At the same time she's chosen to leave $10 in her bank account (she likes the fact that they aren't risky). She spies a coffee stand and suddenly has an urge to buy a $2 coffee. When she arrives at the till, how will she decide to pay? With lottery tickets or deposits?

By paying for the $2 coffee with a bit of both—$1 in lottery tickets and $1 worth of bank deposits—she could end up with $9 of each, re-attaining her pre-coffee 50/50 allocation. But let's assume that every transaction is a bit costly to make, both in terms of time to completion and the small fixed fee associated with each payments network. So paying with both will be too expensive. She'll have to choose one or the other.

A lottery ticket is more than just a bet. Jane is investing in a fantasy in which she is fabulously rich. So from Jane's perspective, swapping her lottery ticket for a mere cup of coffee would be silly. Once she owns it, her ticket is worth more than hundreds of cups of coffee. A form of Gresham's law kicks in. Given that the coffee seller accepts both lottery tickets and deposits at their face value, Jane will only spend her deposits, which she perceives as being overvalued, while hoarding the lottery ticket, which she thinks are being undervalued by the coffee seller. If every lottery player is like Jane, than 'undervalued' lottery tickets will never circulate as money.

Jane could of course consider buying the coffee with lottery tickets only to purchase replacement tickets in time for the draw. But there's always a risk that she'll forget, or not have enough time because something unforeseen suddenly intervenes. By paying with a boring deposit, she doesn't have to fear missing out on a jackpot.

If it seems unlikely that Jane will want to purchase the coffee with a lottery ticket, what about Jim, who owns the coffee stand? Would he prefer to receive lottery tickets or bank deposits?

Again, a mix of the two instruments would be costly for him to accept given a doubling up of payments processing fees. In the unlikely event that Jim is also a lottery player and hasn't yet bought his tickets yet, then he may prefer that Jane buys a coffee with lottery tickets.

Consider that Jim has a constant stream of business expenses ahead of him, but rarely knows precisely when he'll have to make a purchase. Because the lottery tickets will most likely expire worthless in the future, they don't provide him with a suitable means of solving for his future uncertainty. Deposits, on the other hand, will always retain their value. As long as he keeps them on hand, he knows that he can meet his bills. So I think that Jim will probably prefer that Jane pays with deposits. (See more here).

In the unlikely event that Jane insists on paying with lottery tickets, Jim will probably acquiesce—the customer is always right. Since he doesn't want to be exposed to the uncertainty of lottery tickets, he will probably try to exchange them as quickly as possible for deposits, but this will be subject to a conversion fee. Anticipating this expense, Jim could very well decide at the outset to incentivize Jane to pay with deposits. He might place a small surcharge on lottery ticket payments, or offer a small discount if customers pay with deposits. Jim might even pretend that his lottery payments terminal is broken.

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The combination of Jane's reticence to pay with lottery tickets, a form of Gresham's law, and Jim's preference to avoid them will doom lottery tickets as money. Even though the infrastructure is in place for lottery tickets to be transported instantaneously from one person to the other, the incentives just aren't present. Investing in the infrastructure turned out to be a waste of money.

I think this setup also explains why bitcoin has never been adopted as a form of money. Like Jane's lottery ticket, a bitcoin owner's bitcoins aren't just bitcoins, they are a dream, a lambo, a ticket out of drudgery. Spending them at a retailer at mere market value would be a waste given their 'destiny' is to hit the moon. Sure, a bitcoiner can always spend a few precious bitcoins on a coffee, only to replenish his stock later in the day. But this would be dangerous, since bitcoin's price could spike at any moment. Far safer to spend one's deposits and hoard one's bitcoins.

Even when they claim to be accepting bitcoins, retailers like Jim actually rely on intermediaries like BitPay to step in and purchase the bitcoins while relaying dollars to the retailer. For instance, see last month's post on Ohio tax payments.

I also wonder how well my story fits with other examples of volatile media being used as money. For instance, John Cochrane has blogged about a world where one might trade an "S&P500 index share for a candy bar." If lottery ticket buyers and bitcoin owners are consuming a dream, then perhaps an  owner of an equity ETF is doing the same. In which case, no one would bother buying candy bars with stocks, and so building out the payments infrastructure necessary to facilitate this would be pointless.

Two notions of fungibility

A few centuries ago, lack of fungibility used to be a big weakness of monetary systems. But technological and legal developments eventually solved the problem. Nascent systems like bitcoin are finding that they must wrestle all over again with fungibility issues.

Fungibility exists when one member of a population of items is perfectly interchangeable with another. So for instance, because your grain of wheat can be swapped out with my grain without causing any sort of change to our relative status, we would say that wheat grains are fungible. Fungibility is a desirable property of a monetary system. If all monetary items are interchangeable, then trade can proceed relatively smoothly. If monetary items are not fungible, then sellers cannot accept the monetary item without pausing for a few moments to verify and assay it, and this imposes frictions on trade.   

In this post I argue that there are two ways for something to be fungible. They can be fungible for physical reasons or for legal reasons.

By physical fungibility, I mean that members of a group are objectively indistinguishable from each other. In the previous example, our wheat grains are physically fungible because a cursory inspection shows that they look, feel, and smell exactly the same. Now, a deeper analysis might reveal that the two grains are not in fact perfectly fungible. For instance, it may be the case that your grain of wheat is the hard red winter variety and mine is durum, in which case they are not substitutes, durum being better for making pasta. Or perhaps we each have durum grains, but yours enjoyed an excellent growing season—plenty of sun and sufficient rain—whereas mine isn't so healthy. And so your grains can produce more pasta per than mine. And thus they aren't exact substitutes.

We could even go down to the molecular level and determine that the grains are not perfectly equal and thus not quite interchangeable. But for commercial purposes, there is typically some sufficiently-deep level of analysis at which fungibility between types of wheat grains can be established by an experienced grain inspector and accepted by the market. 

Among commodities, gold and silver achieve a notably high level of physical fungibility. As long as a gram of gold is pure, it is perfectly exchangeable with any other gram of pure gold. Gold's fungibility doesn't necessarily carry over to gold coins, however. Earlier processes used to make coins, in particular hand striking, were not very effective at creating perfectly equal specimens. The edges of coins were often irregular, leaving coins vulnerable to clippers who would safely cut off some gold (or silver) without fear of being detected. Thanks to natural wear and tear, coins that had been in circulation for a few years would contain less precious metals than new coins. Both clipping and natural wear & tear meant that the metal content of coins was not uniform.

New technologies helped increase the physical fungibility of coins. For instance, reeded edges—those little lines on the edge of a coin—prevented people from clipping off bits without detection.  It was now obvious to the eye if someone had attacked the coin. Likewise, shifting from hand-hammered coinage to mechanical screw presses allowed for a more circular final product, one less susceptible to clippers (see comparison below). The invention of restraining collars—which prevented metal disks from shifting around while they were being stamped—also helped. With clipping much reduced, coins that had been in circulation for a while were more likely to be equal in weight to new ones.

These two photos compare hammered coins to milled ones (source)

In addition to physical improvements, an attempt was also made to buttress the fungibility of coins with laws. There are two types of laws that achieve this: legal tender and the so-called "currency rule." Legal tender laws required debtors and creditors to accept all coins deemed legal tender by the authorities at their stipulated face value. So even if two different shillings were not physically fungible--say one was clipped and worn and thus contained far less silver than the second newer one--those participating in trade were obligated to treat them as if they were perfectly interchangeable.

Legally-enforced fungibility was no panacea. In the absence of physical fungibility, the imposition of legal tender laws often had  perverse effects. If two coins were not exact physical substitutes because their metal content differed, but law required them to be treated as interchangeable tender, then the owner would always spend away the lighter one while hoarding the heavier one. Legal tender laws, after all, had artificially granted the "bad" coin the same purchasing power as the "good" coin. Thus the good money is chased out by the bad, which is known as Gresham's law.
 
The second set of rules that courts formulated in order to help fungibility, the currency rule, requires us to shift our attention to banknotes. Like coins, banknotes are not particularly fungible in the physical sense, but for a different reason. Banknotes have historically carried a unique identifier, a serial number—coins haven't. An owner of a banknote can carefully jot down the serial number of each note and, if it is stolen, use that number to help track it down.

In 1748, Hew Crawfurd did exactly this. Before sending two Bank of Scotland £20 notes by the mail, Crawfurd not only recorded their numbers but also signed the back of each one with his name, thus further breaking down their physical fungibility. When they went missing, Crawfurd was able to use this lack of fungibility to his advantage by advertising in the newspapers the numbers of the two stolen notes and the fact that they had been signed by him. One of the notes was eventually identified after it had been deposited at a competing bank, presumably long after the robber had spent it. The bank, however, refused to return the stolen property to Crawfurd.

In the resulting court case, the judge ruled in favor of the bank. Crawfurd would not have his stolen property returned to him. The court reasoned that if the note was returned to Crawfurd, then no merchant would ever risk accepting a banknote unless they knew its full history. This would damage the "currency" of money. After all, requiring merchants to pour through newspaper after newspaper to verify that no one was advertising a particular serial number as lost or stolen would be prohibitively expensive. Banknotes would be rendered useless, depriving the Scottish economy of much of its circulating medium. By allowing merchants to ignore the lack of physical fungibility of banknotes, i.e. the unique marks on each banknote, the court recreated fungibility by legal means. To this day, the currency rule that was first established in Scottish courts in the 18th century continues to apply to banknotes in most legal systems. (Kenneth's Reid's full account of this case is available here).

Bitcoin, a purported monetary system, is interesting because it: 1) lacks physically fungible and 2) is unlikely to ever be granted legally fungibility in the form of legal tender status or via an extension of the currency rule.

Bitcoin's lack of physical fungibility is more similar to that of banknotes than coins. It arises from the fact that all bitcoin transactions are publicly recorded. This means that it is possible to trace the history of a given bitcoin. If the token has been stolen, say in a highly-visible exchange hack, then said token may not be as valuable as a bitcoin that has a clean history. In theory, a forward-thinking actor will only accept a tainted coin at a discount because there is always a risk that the original owner will be able to reclaim his or her stolen property.

There seems little likelihood that the courts will solve bitcoin's lack of physical fungibility by fashioning a form of legal fungibility for it. The state will probably never be friendly enough toward bitcoin to grant it legal tender status. Nor do I think it is advisable that courts extend the currency rule to bitcoin by granting merchants the right to ignore the trail left by a given bitcoin, as they do with banknotes. As I pointed out here, to do so would violates the property rights of the original owner of the stolen objects. Only a select few instruments, those that have already proven themselves to be vital to facilitating society's trade, should be protected in this way.

With no legal route to establish fungibility, the only path remaining for bitcoin's architects is to go back to square one and try to improve the physical equivalency between bitcoins. One way they can do so is by anonymizing the blockchain. If transactions can no longer be traced, than clean and dirty bitcoins all look exactly the same. Full anonymity is easy to implement in new cryptocurrencies. Monero and Zcash, for instance, have gone this route.

In the case of a legacy cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, this functionality would have to be added on to its existing codebase. I have heard rumours that bitcoin developers like Adam Back and Greg Maxwell are working on developing code for anonymizing the bitcoin blockchain. But even if the technology is up to snuff, given the difficulties of achieving sufficient consensus for upgrading bitcoin, it remains to be seen if a fungibility-restoring technology could ever get off the ground.

In my view, the idea that bitcoin developers must try to achieve the same level of fungibility as coins and banknotes is misguided. Proponents of this idea are operating on the assumption that bitcoin is, like coins and banknotes, a payments medium or monetary system. But this is wrong. Whatever its original purpose might have been, bitcoin's first and foremost role is as a new type of gambling machine, a global and decentralized financial game. Like lotteries, casinos, and poker tournaments, and other types of zero-sum games, the main service that bitcoin provides its users is the fun of gambling and the allure of becoming very rich. If they want to benefit their users, Bitcoin developers should be working towards furthering its role as a gambling machine rather than mistakenly pursuing the dream of becoming the next monetary system.

People who play financial games such as lotteries benefit from the unique serial number on lottery tickets. If their tickets are stolen from them, this identifier may allow the original owner to get their ticket back. And that way they can still potentially win the big pot.

The same applies to bitcoin. Most people who hold bitcoins are doing so because they expect its price to hit $1 million. At least if their coins can be traced, a bitcoin owner who has been robbed may still have a chance to win that jackpot (and buy that Lamborghini they've been dreaming about). Removing the very feature that makes bitcoin non-fungible—and thus potentially traceable in the case of theft—would only do harm to the average bitcoin user. Anonymizing the bitcoin blockchain would make about as much sense as removing the serial numbers on lottery tickets.

Bitcoin's lack of fungibility isn't a bug, it's a nice feature.

Failed monetary technology

Archaic and ignored monetary technologies can be very interesting, especially when they teach us about newer attempts to update our monetary system. I recently stumbled on a neat monetary innovation from the bimetallic debate of the late 1800s, Nicholas Veeder's Republic of Eutopia coin:

During the bimetallic debates of the late 1800s, one of the more interesting compromises put forward was Nicolas Veeder's cometallic standard. His model 'Republic of Eutopia' coins (1866) had a plug with 12.9 grains of gold and ring with 206¼ grains of silver. A good idea or no? pic.twitter.com/6eZN2YAq6o

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) May 28, 2018

If you've read this blog for a while, you'll know that I like to talk about monetary technology. Unlike financial technology, monetary tech involves a technological or sociological upgrade to the monetary system itself. And since we are all unavoidably users of the monetary system—we all think and calculate in terms of our nations unit of account—each of us is immediately affected by the change.

Veeder's Eutopia coin is an old monetary technology that was never adopted. More recent examples of unadopted (or as-yet not adopted) montech include Fedcoin, NGDP futures targeting, or Miles Kimball's technique for evading the zero-lower bound, which would decouple the value of paper money from electronic money. Examples of recent monetary tech that went on to be adopted include the switch from paper to plastic banknotes, the replacement of older end-of-day clearing systems to real time gross settlement systems, and inflation targeting.

Fintech is more limited in scope than monetary tech. Only that portion of the population that uses these innovations is affected—everyone else's financial habits continues on as before. Recent examples include bitcoin, p2p lending, and roboadvisors. (If bitcoin ever became the standard unit of account, it would have made the trek over to becoming monetary technology, and not just fintech.)

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To make sense of Veeder's Republic of Eutopia coin, we need to understand the problem that his monetary innovation was meant to solve. Most nations were on a gold standard by the 1870s, and with the price of gold rising, the world price level was generally falling. This development provided an unexpected boost to the creditor class, who were owed gold, while hurting the debtor class, who owed gold. A higher price for the yellow metal meant that the loan contract to which a debtor had signed their name now required them to work that much harder to pay it off.

In that context, a broad popular movement for the remonetization of silver emerged. Prior to being on gold standards, nations were generally on a pure silver standard or a bimetallic standard. On a gold standard the debtor class had only one way to settle the debt, by providing the proper amount of gold coins. But if silver coinage was reintroduced at the old rate of sixteen-to-one, debtors could instead sell their labour to buy cheap silver, have it minted into legal tender silver coins, and use those silver coins to pay off the debt. Paying their debts with silver rather than gold meant they'd have a bigger amount of wealth remaining in their pocket.

The movement to restore bimetallism wasn't purely a populist one. The smartest economists of the time--folks like Irving Fisher, Leon Walras, and Alfred Marshall--also preferred bimetallism. A bimetallic standard recruits more monetary material into service than a gold standard. This is advantageous because, as Fisher put it, it "spreads the effect of any single fluctuation over the combined gold and silver markets." In other words, the evolution of the price level under a bimetallic system should be more stable—and thus more fair—than under a monometallic system, since it can absorb larger shocks.

The problem with bimetallism is that it very quickly runs smack into Gresham's law. The traditional way to bring the two metals into service as monetary material was to offer to mint both high denomination gold coins and lower denomination silver coins. So if a merchant needed £20 worth of coins, he could bring either a chunk of raw gold to the mint, or an even bigger chunk of pure silver, and the mint would convert either chunk into £20 for him. The specified amounts of raw silver or raw gold that were required to get a certain number of £-denominated coins constituted the mint's official gold-to-silver exchange rate.

Inevitably the market's gold-to-silver exchange rate would diverge from the mint's official exchange rate, effectively over- or undervaluing one of the two metals. In this situation, no one would bring any of the overvalued metal to the mint to be turned into coins. After all, why bother minting a chunk of gold (assuming the yellow metal was the overvalued one) into £20 worth of coins if that same amount of gold has far more purchasing power overseas? The overvalued metal would thus disappear as it was hoarded and exported, leaving only the undervalued metal in circulation. A monometallic standard had accidentally emerged, and all the benefits of bimetallism were for not.

To prevent Gresham's law from being engaged, the mint had to constantly adjust its official rate so that it stayed in-line with the ever-evolving market rate. Not only would these changes have been politically costly, but they would required an expensive series of recoinages in order to ensure that coins always had the proper amount of silver or gold in them.

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Enter Veeder's Eutopia coin. Nicholas Veeder was no economist, but an executive at C.G. Hussey, a copper rolling mill in Pittsburgh. In 1885, he published a pamphlet with the wordy title Cometallism: A Plan for Combining Gold and Silver in Coinage, for Uniting and Blending their Values in Paper Money and For Establishing a Composite Single Standard Dollar of Account.

Rather than defining a dollar as simultaneously a fixed amount of gold OR a fixed amount of silver, Veeder's pamphlet suggested defining it as a fusion of the two together. Specifically, Veeder's dollar was to contain 12.9 grains of gold AND 206.25 grains of silver. It's worth noting that under a proposed cometallic standard, paper dollars needn't be redeemed with actual Eutopia coins, but could be converted into separate silver and gold bars or coins. The important rule was that each dollar's worth of debt had to be discharged with 12.9 grains of gold and 206.25 grain of silver.

A model of a cometallic gold certificate, from page 60 of Veeder's pamphlet on cometallism

Veeder's cometallic scheme was a neat way to keep all the benefits of bimetallism with none of its drawbacks. Cometallism would draw on the combined supplies of the gold and silver markets, so that the system would be much more elastic than a pure gold standard, and thus fairer to both creditors and debtors. At the same time, Gresham's law would be avoided. Under traditional bimetallic coin systems, the mint established an exchange rate between the two metals. This rate inevitably became the system's undoing when it diverged from the true rate.

But a mint that was operating under a cometallic standard would only accept fixed quantities of silver AND gold before it would mint a $1 coin, and so it would no longer be setting an exchange rate between the two precious metals. The undervaluation of one of the metals, a key ingredient for Gresham's law, could never emerge under cometallism.

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A year after Veeder published his pamphlet, Alfred Marshall—one of the world's leading economists—described a remarkably similar system. Here is part of his response to the Royal Commission on the Depression in Trade and Industry in 1886, which had been convened to address the Long Depression:

"I propose that currency should be exchangeable at the Mint or Issue Department not for gold, but for gold and silver, at the rate of not £1 for 113 grains of gold, but £1 for 56^ grains of gold, together with, say, twenty times as many grains of silver. I would make up the gold and silver bars in gramme weights, so as to be useful for international trade. A gold bar of 100 grammes, together with a silver bar, say, twenty * times as heavy, would be exchangeable at the Issue Department for an amount of the currency which would be calcalated and fixed once for all when the scheme was introduced. (It would be about .€28 or .€30 according to the basis of calculation)."

Marshall's proposal was later dubbed symmetallism. (I wrote about it here.) If you study monetary systems, you'll run into the gold & silver basket idea sooner or later. The concept is invariably refereed to as symmetallism (and not cometallism) and attributed to Marshall (not Veeder). In the 1800s academics were not required to provide references, and from what I understand plagiarism was rampant. Did Marshall develop his idea separately from Veeder, or did he rip it off? Whatever the case, Veeder was an unknown executive at a small manufacturing concern, whereas Marshall a world famous academic. Celebrity carried the day.

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Interestingly, Veeder himself probably borrowed the idea, or at least part of it, from someone else. Almost a decade earlier, William Wheeler Hubbell had tried to get the U.S. congress to adopt the so-called "goloid dollar," a coin containing silver and gold alloyed together.

Another proposed fix was William Hubbell's "goloid" metric dollar (1878). This specimen is 1 part gold, 16.1 parts silver, and 1.9 parts copper. Whereas Vedeer's dollars kept the metals apart, Hubbel's intermingled them. https://t.co/qXpE7EbQrk pic.twitter.com/csNahz1Hhq

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) May 29, 2018

Hubbell owned the patent to the goloid alloy, so he would have made a good profit if the goloid dollar had been adopted by the U.S. Treasury. Unlike Veeder, Hubbell doesn't seem to have been a very good monetary economist, and the case he makes for goloid misses much of nuances of the benefits of bimetallism and the hazards of Gresham's law. He lists a number of advantages for his proposed coin, including: superior durability to gold and silver coins; not susceptible to oxidization (unlike silver); a goloid dollar was smaller than a silver dollar and thus more convenient for consumers to carry around; the mint would be able to make more goloid dollars than silver dollars with its existing capacity; and goloid coins could not be easily melted down for usage in the arts as was the case with gold and silver coins.

Hubbell's idea foundered on the fact that a goloid coin, despite containing gold, has almost the exact same colour as a silver coin. Hubbell's critics believed this set the coin up to be widely counterfeited. A counterfeiter could make a replica with lower gold content, this alteration unlikely to be noticed by the public since the colour of a genuine goloid coin and the fake would be the same.

The difficulties that Hubbell experienced alloying gold and silver were not lost on Veeder. In has pamphlet he mentions that "my first approach, as with many other persons, was to combine the two metals as an alloy for coinage, but, owing to certain difficulties... this idea was soon considered impracticable and abandoned." To avoid Hubbell's color problem, Veeder ended up mechanically wedding the two metals rather than chemically combining them, the Eutopia coin being comprised of a ring of silver and a gold plug embedded inside.

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The topic of goloid and Eutopia dollars seem a bit obscure, but the issues of stability and fairness that concerned monetary technologists in the late 1800s remain relevant today.

Today, most western central banks define the national currency in terms of a basket of consumer goods and services rather than a fixed amount of gold (gold monometallism) or a basket of gold & silver (cometallism, symmetallism). This makes a lot of sense. If we want to create a stable monetary standard, one that provides creditors and debtors with an even playing field, better to use a broad basket of stuff that regular people buy than a narrow basket of metals. That way all parties to a contract know many years ahead of time exactly how much consumer goods they will get (if they are creditors) or give up (if they are debtors). Knowing how much gold and silver baskets they will owe or be owed is less relevant to the average person, since gold and silver are a very small part of most people's day-to-day consumption profiles.

There is an important debate going on today about whether to continue defining national currencies in terms of a consumer goods & services basket, or whether to move to something more fluid like a nominal gross domestic product (NGDP), or output. One problem with using a consumer goods basket is that, in the event of a large economic shock that leads to significant loss of jobs, debtors take on all the macroeconomic risk. After all, they owe just as many CPI baskets as before, but have less capacity to meet that obligation because they might not have a job. This doesn't seem like a fair splitting up of risks and rewards.

The nice thing about defining the national currency in terms of NGDP, or output, is that the risk of a large shock, and the associated loss of jobs, is shared between creditors and debtors. This is because if a recession occurs, debtors will owe a smaller amount of real wealth to creditors than they otherwise would. And during a boom, when the job offers are rolling in, creditors will owe more.

Cometallism was never adopted. Perhaps it was a bit too fancy. NGDP is a bit exotic too, but then again so were many forms of monetary technology, until they were actually adopted and became part of the background. We'll have to see what happens.