Is money a ponzi?

 Matt Levine entertains the possibility that all money is a ponzi:

"But of course crypto people will happily tell you that fiat currency is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all, and they are not really wrong are they?"

Here is my discussion with some crypto folks on Twitter making that claim.

I disagree. Here is a short (930 words, 3 minutes) blog post explaining why money is not a ponzi.

Aneroid is a small town in Saskatchewan. It has 100 inhabitants. Selma, one of the town's 100 inhabitants, starts a ponzi.

By ponzi, I am referring to a general class of economic phenomena that can only exist if additional people continue to join up. Under these schemes, old investors are paid with new investors' funds. Once the incoming flow of new entrants dries up, the ability to pay out funds to existing participants comes to an end. The scheme ends. This family of economic phenomena includes not only ponzi schemes but also pyramids, chain letters, MLMs, HYIPs, speculative bubbles, and Nakamoto schemes.

Out of the above options, Selma opts to go with a chain letter. She drafts one up on paper and sells a copy to her friends Tom, Sally, and Alice for $10. (I'm replicating the basic design of the notorious 1970s Circle of Gold chain letter). The letter requires the recipient to send $10 to the person at the top of the list, copy the letter (removing the name from the top of the list and writing one's own name at the bottom), and sell it on to three friends for $10.

Selma's chain letter proves to be popular. 99 inhabitants of Aneroid eventually buy a letter, send $10 to the person at the top of the list, and resell it.

But when Jack, the 100th inhabitant, buys a letter and sends $10 to the person at the top, he finds that he can't resell it. Everyone in Aneroid has grown tired of the game. The chain letter stops propagating, the flow of money ceases, and the whole enterprise dies. Jack $10 copy is worthless.

Does money have the same ending as Selma's chain letter?

Enter the Bank of Aneroid. 

The Bank of Aneroid is the town's sole issuer of banknotes. The Bank lends a $10 banknote to Selma secured by a $15 lien on her property. Selma spends the $10 note at Frank's hardware store who spends it at the grocery store etc etc, until it ends up in the hands of Jack. But to his dismay Jack finds that, for whatever reason, no one will accept the $10 note.

Alas, poor Jack. His $10 banknote now seems as worthless as his $10 chain letter.

Lucky for him, it isn't. Unlike a chain letter, Jack can return the $10 note to the original issuer, the Bank of Aneroid, for redemption.

Recall that the Bank of Aneroid owns Selma's $10 property-secured IOU. When Jack walks into the Bank and asks to have the note redeemed, the Bank of Aneroid makes good on its promise by selling Selma's debt in the debt market for $10 worth of gold or central bank money. It then pays this amount to Jack. The Bank of Aneroid then destroys its $10 note.

(Alternatively, the Bank of Aneroid can tell Selma to repay her $10 loan, the proceeds being used to pay Jack. Or the Bank can take the more extreme measure of seizing Selma's property and selling it in order to make good on its promise to redeem Jack's $10 banknote.)

As you can see, what I'm describing is not a ponzi scheme. That is, the Bank of Aneroid's $10 banknote isn't valuable because a new buyer keeps arriving to take it off of the previous owner's hands. It is valuable because the original issuer, the Bank of Aneroid, will always repurchase its note using its resources, i.e. its portfolio of loans.

Careful readers will protest at this point. "C'mon JP, you're talking about redeemable bank money. Of course that's not a ponzi. It's the non-redeemable stuff, fiat money, that's a ponzi!"

But I'd argue that the same principles apply to fiat money. I'm going to define fiat money as a banknote that can't be redeemed on demand by its holder into an underlying instrument, perhaps gold or government money. 

In our example, let's modify the Bank of Aneroid so that it issues fiat banknotes, not redeemable ones. Apart from that, everything remains the same. Now when Jack takes his unwanted $10 banknote back to the Bank of Aneroid for redemption, the bank refuses to convert it into an underlying medium.

Jack's $10 won't be worthless like the $10 chain letter, though.

"Sorry Jack, we can't redeem it," says the bank manager. "Our banknotes are non-convertible fiat notes. But Selma's $10 loan is due next week. To pay us back she's going to need your $10 note. Why don't you talk with her?"

And so Jack walks over to Selma's house and offers to sell her the $10 note. And Selma will buy it since she'll need it to repay her $10 debt to the Bank.

So in the end, Jack's $10 banknote is valuable—not because a ponzi process props it up—but because the bank that originally issued it reaccepts it. The support that a bank offers to its banknotes is more obvious when a banknote is immediately redeemable by its issuing bank at par. But even an non-redeemable fiat banknote has an underlying linkage back to the issuer that helps support its value.

By contrast, a chain letter (or any other ponzi-like instrument) lacks this connection and only has value as long as a new player emerges.  

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PS. This note is for Ethereum fans.

Another way to think about the question of fiat money is to bring in some stablecoin analogies. The Bank of Aneroid's non-redeemable fiat notes are equivalent to Rai or MakerDAO's Dai (before Maker introduced the PSM). 

Rai and pre-PSM Dai are fiat monies. Neither are directly redeemable into underlying USDC, Tether, or bank dollars. But this doesn't prevent Rai and Dai from staying close to their targets (in Rai's case $3-ish and in Dai's case $1.) In the absence of direct redeemability, the main force pushing these tokens towards target is the requirement that vault owners (i.e. debtors) repurchase Rai and Dai to repay their Rai- and Dai-denominated debts to the system. This is the same force that stabilized the Bank of Aneroid's $10 fiat note in my story. Recall that Frank's $10 note was valuable because Selma needed it to close her debt to the Bank of Aneroid.

Adding an on-demand redemption feature to the Bank of Aneroid's notes only makes this stabilization more direct and immediate, much like Maker's addition of a direct redemption mechanism, the PSM, resulted in a more direct fusion of Dai to its $1 target. (The PSM means that Dai has become non-fiat money.)

Another force keeping Rai and pre-PSM Dai anchored to their respective targets are the threat of Rai's "global settlement" or Maker's "emergency shutdown." Basically, in extreme scenarios both systems can be completely unwound. When this happens all the collateral held in the system gets distributed back to its respective stakeholders, including the owners of Rai and Dai. The knowledge that this could happen helps nudge the price of Rai and Dai closer to their targets.

The Bank of Aneroid's notes are also subject to their own version of emergency shutdown. At any point in time the owners of the Bank of Aneroid can wind up the bank. By collecting on all of their debts, selling those debts to others, or seizing collateral, the Bank can buy back all of the notes they have issued at par. The possibility that this could happen helps pull the Bank of Aneroid's fiat notes towards a stable terminal value.

Sure, there are stablecoins that depend on an underlying ponzi process to stay pegged to $1. But Rai and Dai do not fall into that category of stablecoins. Rai and Dai use non-ponzi mechanisms to create a stable version of the dollar. The Bank of Aneroid's fiat notes are not ponzi-ish for the same reasons that Rai and Dai are not ponzi-ish. And the same goes for Federal Reserve dollars, Bank of Canada dollars, and Bank of England pounds, which operate on the same principles as the Bank of Aneroid's fiat notes.

The dollar isn't a meme

"Currencies are not memes that only have value because governments say they do," writes Brendan Greeley for the Financial Times. 

I agree with him.

The dollar-as-meme claim is often made by cryptocurrency enthusiasts. That this idea would emanate from the cryptocurrency community makes sense, since cryptocurrency prices are a purely meme-driven phenomenon. There is no cryptocurrency for which this is more apparent than Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency started as a joke and sustained by shiba inu gifs, but it applies equally to Doge's older cousin, Bitcoin. The harder you meme the higher a cryptocurrency's price, as the image at top suggests.

And so for cryptocurrency analysts, getting a good understanding of a given coin's value is a matter of picking through its underlying memes and meme artists. 

But if cryptocurrency analysis is ultimately just meme analysis, what sort of analysis applies to dollars?

Dollars issued by banks are secured by the banks' portfolio of loans, Greeley reminds us. And so they are subject to credit analysis, not meme analysis. An analyst appraises the quality of the bank's investments in order to determine the soundness of the dollar IOUs the bank has issued.

As for central banks like the Fed, they are just special types of banks, says Greeley, and so the dollars they issue are also subject to credit analysis.  

The idea that the money issued by central banks—so-called fiat money—is subject to the same credit analysis as any other type of debt security is a point I've also made on this blog. There are certainly some odd features about Fed dollars or Bank of Japan yen, but ultimately they are just another form of credit.

What sort of credit is fiat money? There are many different kinds of credit instruments, from bonds to deposits to banknotes, each with its own unique features. To see where central bank money fits, I've made a chart that illustrates how credit instruments differ across three different criteria (click to expand).

The first criteria along which to compare credit instruments is whether the instrument is redeemable on demand by the holder or not. That is, if I own a given credit instrument, or IOU, can I bring it back to the issuer, or debtor, at a time of my choosing and redeem it for something?

The second category concerns the instrument's maturity. Does it stay outstanding forever i.e. in perpetuity? Or is it term debt? When a credit instruments has a term, that means that it expires after a predefined period of time, the debtor cancelling it and paying back the the original amount lent.

The final category is whether the instrument pays interest or not.

By toggling these various features, we arrive at the eight different types of credit instruments, examples of which I've listed on the right side of the graphic.

As you can see, the Fed's dollars, the ECB's euros, and the Bank of Japan's yen are type 5 and type 6 credit instruments. Central banks issue two types of money: physical banknotes and electronic balances (sometimes known as reserves). Electronic central bank reserves pay interest. Banknotes do not.

Apart from that, banknotes and electronic balances are very similar instruments. Neither of these two credit instruments is redeemable on demand. That is, you can't bring a banknote back to the issuer at 5:30 PM Friday and redeem it for something. (This same lack of on-demand redeemability characterizes bonds and certificates of deposits.) And they are both perpetual, much like a perpetual preferred share or non-expiring coupons/gift certificates.

Removing a credit instrument's redemption-on-demand feature doesn't stop it from being a credit instrument. It just changes it into a different type of credit instrument. Yes, probably an inferior one, but a credit instrument nonetheless.

For instance, if a retractable bond (type 3) suddenly loses its retractability feature (and is no longer redeemable on demand by its owner) it doesn't stop being a credit instrument. It simply switches to being a regular bond (type 7). Likewise, if a perpetual puttable preferred share (type 1) loses its puttability, it doesn't stop being an IOU. It becomes a new type of credit instrument, a regular perpetual preferred share (type 5).

This same principal applies to those credit instruments we call money. Decades ago the Fed's dollars were redeemable on demand into gold, and thus they were a type 1 or 2 credit instrument. When the Fed removed redemption back in 1934, dollars didn't become mere memes. Rather, they were converted into a different type of credit instrument, a type 5 or 6 credit instrument.

Once a credit analyst has figured out what kind of credit instrument they are dealing with, their work is only half done. Next they have to go back and look at the underlying issuer. How solid is it? Does it have sufficient assets to guarantee the credit instruments it has issued? Do it generate enough income to keep paying interest? Is the issuer linked to affiliates, parents, or other third-parties who might strengthen or diminish the issuer's credit?

As you can see, none of this is meme analysis. It is credit analysis.

To recap, dollars issued by the Federal Reserve are perpetual credit instruments that lack an on-demand redemption feature. To determine how solid the Fed's perpetual non-redeemable credit instrument are, you'd want to do an analysis of the Fed's finances. That should also include investigating the soundness of the Fed's parent, the U.S. government. Does the parent's finances further enhance the Fed's credit, or detract from it?

So dollars don't only have value because the government says they do. Just like Tesla's financial health determines the value of Tesla bonds, the financial health of the issuing central bank (and its parent) is  key to determining the value of central bank money.

If you want to do meme analysis, stick to Dogecoin and Bitcoin.

Is fiat money to blame for the Iraq war, police brutality, and the war on drugs?

I often encounter memes claiming that fiat money is to blame for all sorts of government evils. Here is one example from Kraken bitcoin strategist spokesperson & bitcoin meme factory Pierre Rochard:

The military-industrial complex that deliberately creates wars is financed by inflationary State fiat currencies.

— Pierre Rochard (@pierre_rochard) January 8, 2020

The rough idea behind this family of memes is that the Federal Reserve, the world's largest producer of "fiat" money (i.e. irredeemable banknotes), is responsible for financing all sorts of examples of government over-reach, say foreign invasions, police brutality, and the twin wars on terrorism and drugs. It does so by producing seigniorage, or profit, which it passes on to the state. Replace fiat-issuing central banks like the Fed with bitcoin or a gold standard, and seigniorage would cease to exist. With the government's purse strings having been cut, a relatively peaceful society would be the result.

This meme's premise is wrong. In practice, central bank seigniorage in both the U.S. and other developed nations is a very small part of overall  government revenues. And so even if fiat money were to be displaced, say by bitcoin or a gold standard, it wouldn't change the state's ability to fund the war on drugs and adventures in the Middle East.

Let's look at the U.S. Below are two charts showing how much income the Federal Reserve has contributed to the Federal government's overall receipts going back to 1950. (Beware. One chart relies on a regular axis, another a logarithmic axis. But they use the same data). The Fed's contribution has been steadily growing over time. In 2019, it sent about $53 billion to the Federal government.

You may be wondering how the Fed generated $53 billion in profit, or seigniorage, in 2019. Most of this income comes from issuing banknotes, or cash. For each $1 in banknotes that it issues to the public, the Fed holds an associated $1 of bonds in its vault. These bond have typically yielded 3-4% in interest. But the Fed only pays 0% interest to the owners of its banknotes. Which means that it gets to keep the entire 3-4% flow of bond interest for itself. It forwards this income to the Federal government at the end of the year.*

Seigniorage tends to grow over time. (But not always. Below I'll show how Sweden's seigniorage has been shrinking). The larger the quantity of banknotes that the public wants to own, the more interest-yielding bonds the Fed gets to hold, which means more seigniorage. In general, banknote demand increases with economic and population growth.

Interest rates are another big driver of seigniorage. If bond interest rates rise from 4% to 8%, the Fed earns more on the bonds it owns in its vault. Banknotes continue to yield 0% throughout, so the Fed keeps the entire windfall for itself (and ultimately for the Federal government).

By the way, a big driver of nominal interest rates is inflation. If inflation is expected to double, then bond owners will require twice the interest to compensate them for inflation risk. So inflation boosts seigniorage (because it boosts the interest rate that the Fed earns on the bonds in its vaults), and deflation hurts seigniorage (because it reduces interest rates). In the chart above, the one with the logarithmic axis, you can see how the Fed's seigniorage increased during the inflationary 1970s. It flatlined from the mid-1980s to the early early 2000s, which coincides with inflation subsiding.

US seigniorage is relatively small. In addition to enjoying revenues from the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Federal government also gets money from individual and corporate income taxes, social insurance and retirement receipts, excise taxes, duties, and more. Below I've charted the relative sizes of these contributions.

As you can see, the Fed's contribution (the grey line) is a rounding error.

Below is a chart showing what percentage of total government revenue is derived from the Fed.

In 2019 the Fed contributed just 1.5% of total U.S. Federal government receipts. This contribution has hovered between 1% to 3% over the last four decades. So the meme that fiat money abetted the Iraq War, the expansion of the police state, or the U.S.'s military industrial complex is mostly hyperbole.

What about other developed nations?

The Bank of Canada provided $1.2 billion in earnings to the Canadian Federal government in 2018. But the Federal government took in $313 billion in revenues that year, which means that the Bank contributed a tiny 0.4% fraction of total revenues. The reason for the big gap between the Bank of Canada's tiny 0.4% contribution and the Fed's 1.5% contribution is the global popularity of the US$100 bill. Canadian cash doesn't enjoy a big foreign market.

I mentioned Sweden earlier. Below is a chart of seigniorage earned by the Swedish central bank, the Riksbank.

Sweden's central bank, @riksbanken, used to earn a handsome profit by issuing banknotes, ie seigniorage.

With cash usage wilting & interest rates hitting zero, seigniorage has collapsed. If these trends continue, issuing cash could become a financial burden for the Riksbank. pic.twitter.com/LCYOJ3q8dZ

— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) August 28, 2019

Sweden is one of the only countries in the world where banknote ownership has been falling. This de-cashification is compounded by interest rates that have fallen close to 0%. Which means that the Riksbank's bond portfolio isn't earning as much as it used to. This combination has just decimated the Riksbank's seigniorage. In 2018 its seigniorage amounted to a paltry SEK 267 million (US$29 million). This is just 0.00003% of all Swedish central government receipts.

So in sum, central banks in places like the US, Canada, and Sweden are not a big source of government funding. If you want to stop governments from engaging in bad policies like the war on terror, the war on drugs, and foreign meddling, you've got to work within the system. Vote, send letters, go to protests. Sorry, but buying bitcoin or gold in the hope that it somehow defunds these activities by displacing the Fed is not a legitimate form of protest. It's a cop-out.

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P.S. By the way, I am not saying that control of the nation's money supply hasn't been used to finance wars in the past. Obviously it has. Greenbacks helped pay for the Union's war against the Confederates. Henry VIII paid for his wars by dramatically reducing the supply of silver in the English coinage.

*The Fed enjoyed a big spike in seigniorage after the 2008 credit crisis. This is because it issued a bunch of deposits to bank (known as reserves) via quantitative easing. The Fed only had to pay 0.25% interest on these reserves, but the bonds that backed them were earning 2-3%. This QE-related income has declined as the Fed has unwound QE (since reversed) and long-term interest rates have declined.

The life and death of an internet monetary meme

Over the last few years I've increasingly crossed paths with the following claim on the internet: "The average life expectancy for a fiat currency is 27 years." Is this claim true? What definitions are being used? I mean, are we talking about inconvertible paper money here, or currency that was convertible into gold, too?

I finally got curious enough that I decided to chase down the source of this meme. After all, without knowing what data it is based on, it's hard to evaluate the claim's truthfulness. Below I give a description of my trek through internet history.

The average-life-of-fiat meme has become particularly popular among cryptocurrency types. For instance, here is Jimmy Song, a popular bitcoin educator/developer, confidently invoking the slogan back in 2017:

"When a society lacks prudence, what happens is that the society collapses or goes into chaos. It’s not a coincidence that the average lifespan of a fiat currency is only 27 years."

A long list of cryptocurrency luminaries have dutifully mentioned the meme including Dan Held (2018), Taylor Pearson (2019), Barry Silbert (2019), Tuur Demeester (2015), Francis Pouliot (2018), and Adam Back (2019). Grayscale Investments, a firm that provides cryptocurrency-based investment products, even includes it in their marketing material:

Hey @GrayscaleInvest. You say on your website that fiat currencies have "an average life expectancy of just 27 years." Do you have the data to back up your claim? https://t.co/sscStL8efj @barrysilbert pic.twitter.com/bIj7D3ZWaS

— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) September 17, 2019

As is often the case these days, crypto bugs have cribbed their ideas from their older cousins, the gold bugs. Nathan Lewis, author of Gold: The Once and Future Money, mentioned the idea in written testimony to Congress in 2012. Ralph Benko, a gold standard advocate, invoked the meme in a 2011 article. And Max Keiser, a long-time gold bug turned cryptocurrency advocate, began mentioning it as early as 2013. Where did Keiser, Benko, and Lewis get the meme from?

One of the meme's earliest and most cited appearances comes from Washington's Blog, a platform for a group of anonymous financial writers. We know little about this group except for the fact that George, "website owner and lead writer – is a busy professional, a former adjunct professor, an American and a family man." 

In August 2011, Washington's Blog published an article with the brutally long title The Average Life Expectancy of a Fiat Currency is 27 Years... Every 30 to 40 Years the Reigning Monetary System Fails And Has To Be Retooled. The author failed to explain how the 27 years claim was derived. Instead, he/she relied on another article by a writer named Chris Mack for backup. In a disclaimer the author noted that "I don't know Chris Mack," and thus couldn't vouch for the figures. "However," he/she went on to say, "the general concept is correct."

That's an odd way to do analysis, no? I've got this number for you, 27. I don't know how the number was generated, or who came up with it. But it's good enough. So go ahead and use it.

After a bit of hunting, I found Chris Mack's article here (the link at Washington's blog is dead). It is dated January 2011, pushing back the meme's genesis by another few months. At the time, Mack was President of Trade Placer, a "real-time marketplace where you can buy or sell items such as gold, silver, platinum, wine and other collectibles." Now he is the CEO at Levidge, a platform for trading cryptocurrencies. Note again the well-trodden corridor between gold buggery and crypto buggery.

Anyways, in 2011 Mack wrote:

"According to a study of 775 fiat currencies by DollarDaze.org, there is no historical precedence for a fiat currency that has succeeded in holding its value. 20 percent failed through hyperinflation, 21 percent were destroyed by war, 12 percent destroyed by independence, 24 percent were monetarily reformed, and 23 percent are still in circulation approaching one of the other outcomes.

The average life expectancy for a fiat currency is 27 years, with the shortest life span being one month. "

Mack mentions a study by DollarDaze, but doesn't provide a link to the article. Aha, the missing data! I hopped over to DollarDaze's website, a blog dedicated to talking about the failings of the U.S. dollar. But there are no blog posts older than 2018. No study, folks.

This puts all the meme users – Jimmy Song, Grayscale, Max Keiser, and the rest – in an absurd situation. There are some words on some websites about a study, but ask our meme users where the study is and none of them can actually find it. Did it ever exist? Why are they so confidently transmitting data when there is no data? DollarDaze has got to be right, no? How could you doubt it, JP?

Since no one was able to help me, I turned to the Wayback Machine to see if I could pull up older versions of the DollarDaze website. It took a while, but I finally found pay dirt. Back in 2009 the editor of DollarDaze, Mike Hewitt, wrote an article entitled The Fate of Paper Money. I tried to track Hewitt down, but he seems to have disappeared from the internet.

No matter. Finally, some data to evaluate! In his article, Hewitt claims to have counted 176 currencies in circulation and 599 currencies that are not in circulation. Of the 599 in his discontinued list, Hewitt comments that the "median age for these currencies is only fifteen years!" He provides links to both lists (1 and 2).

I downloaded Hewitt's list of 599 defunct currencies and put it into an Excel spreadsheet. The median age is indeed 15 years, as Hewitt claims, and the average is 27 years, as Mack claims in his subsequent 2011 article. So voila, we finally have the basis for the modern internet meme that the average age of a fiat currency is just 27 years. It's based on Hewitt's list of 599 dead currencies, with Mack taking the average duration. (They conveniently don't include the list of 176 existing currencies in their calculation, which would have increased the number). 

Now for my criticisms.

The 27-years meme has been used for many years now as a prop for making gold and cryptocurrencies look good. "Ha ha, suckers! Only 27 years until your paper is worthless!" But many of the 599 defunct currencies in Hewitt's list weren't failures. Rather, they were replaced for political, economic, and cultural reasons.

And things haven't improved much from there other than getting better at not imploding in 5months flat, tho there are appalling stats about the lifetime of fiat currencies since inception (27 years average). the oldest is the GBP at 317 years and even it lost > 99.5% of value.

— Adam Back (@adam3us) July 31, 2019

For instance, the list contains all of the pre-euro currencies (Dutch gulder, French franc, Italian lira, etc). These currencies had good reasons for disappearing: they were swapped for a new monetary unit. Existing currency holders weren't robbed. They were fairly compensated for this switch.

Another example of monetary reorganization occurred in East Africa. From 1919 to the 1960s, Britain's former east African colonies relied on the East African shilling, produced by the East African Currency Board. When these countries gained their independence, the currency board was dismantled. In its place Kenya began issuing its own shillings at par with the old ones, as did  Tanzania and Uganda.

In each case, existing owners of East African shillings could convert their holdings into new currency. No wealth was being destroyed during any of these switches. But people who throw around the phrase the average life expectancy for a fiat currency is 27 years as a criticism of the very institution of currency are using the data in a way that implicitly assumes that the East African experience – and others like it – were negative. They weren't.

So the idea that Hewitt's list somehow measures the length of time between a fiat currency's birth and its impending worthlessness is just wrong. I'd go even go so far as to say that the plasticity of the listed currencies is one of their strengths. As national borders change and political circumstances shift, the writing on the bills should be updated too. 

Hewitt's list contains many data errors. He makes the odd claim that the Japanese gold oban and silver momme were created in 1904 and met their end in a hyperinflation in 1905. But these were both historic Japanese coins that had existed for centuries. Hewitt also lists the U.S. greenback ("US Paper Dollar) as lasting from 1862 to 1878. But this isn't correct. Greenbacks were repegged to gold in 1878, but they continued to be issued for many decades after.

Or take Hewitt's categorization of British Military Authority (BMA) lira as dying in hyperinflation. This is an odd claim to make. BMA Lira were issued in Libya by occupying British forces both during and after World War II to provide the nation with a circulating medium. These notes were basically a military version of the British pound, with 480 lira equal to a pound sterling. In 1951 BMA Lira notes were converted into Libyan pounds, issued by Libya's new currency board, at a rate of 480-to-1. No hyperinflation here.

Finally, take Hewitt's claim that the Hawaiian dollar was "destroyed" by WWII. Not so. I've written about the Hawaiian overprints before. To protect against a potential Japanese invasion of Hawaii (and a confiscation of dollars by Japanese soldiers) all dollars on Hawaii were overprinted. Once the threat of Japanese invasion had disappeared they were swapped for regular U.S. dollars and withdrawn . But not a single Hawaiian lost anything during the entire process.

I don't want to nitpick too much, but given that it only took me a few minutes to find these four mistakes, one can only conclude that the rest of Hewitt's list is riddled with errors.

Finally, there are some semantic issues. Fiat currency is generally considered to be inconvertible money. It can't be redeemed for gold or silver. The world really only shifted onto a fiat standard between 1968-71 as the dollar ceased to be redeemed in gold. But Hewitt's list is replete with many metallic currencies (i.e. the riksdaler riksmynt). Are people using his data to make a claim about currencies in general, or just fiat ones? The meme isn't clear on this.

So having examined the life of an internet monetary meme, I'd like to kill it. It's time for us to retire the idea that says that "the average life expectancy for a fiat currency is 27 years." God knows there's plenty of problems with currencies. But good criticism requires diligence and accurate data. The meme in question is an example of sloppy work and bad data.

I know that the crypts and the bugs and the fiats are engaged in constant meme warfare, the bugs and the fiats for many decades now, the crypts only joining the battle a few years ago. Messages must be crafted for best efficiency, whether this be to pump bitcoin to the moon, or to push gold into the stratosphere, or to lock the fiat system in place. But most of the serious people involved in these debates, no matter which side, still keep at least one foot in the truth. Let's flush the 27-years meme down the toilet, folks.  

More fiatsplainin': let's play fiat-or-not

The (Great) Tower of Babel, 1563, Bruegel the Elder. "Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth"

People bandy the term fiat currency around a lot, but what exactly does it mean? None of us wants to live in a Babel where people use fiat to indicate twenty different thing. So let's try to zero in on what most people mean by playing a game called fiat-or-not. I will describe a monetary system as it evolves away from a pure commodity arrangement and you will tell me when it has slipped into being a fiat system. (The technique I am using in this post cribs from a classic Nick Rowe post).

So let's start the game.

1) An economy in which gold coins circulate as the medium of exchange.

Fiat or not? I think we can all agree that there is nothing fiat at all here. (For simplicity's sake let's assume for the duration of this post that taxes can be paid with anything, and that there is no legal tender.)

2) A government-owned central bank begins to issue banknotes that are redeemable into a fixed amount of gold. Owners of banknotes need only line up at the central bank's redemption window to convert their $1 notes into 1 gram of the yellow metal. The central bank ensures that its vaults contain 100% gold backing for its notes.

Fiat or not? Some people associate fiat with the invention of paper money or IOUs, but in general I don't think very many of us would say that these banknotes qualify as fiat.

3) The central bank sells off a chunk of its gold and invests in safe bearer bonds. Its banknotes are no longer 100% backed by gold coins, but are backed 70% bonds/30% gold. The central bank continues to redeem notes on demand with gold at a rate of $1 to 1 gram.

Say the public suddenly wants to hold more coins. A lineup develops at the central bank's redemption window and eventually the central bank uses up its coin reserves as it meets redemption requests. To continue meeting additional requests, it need only sell some of the low-risk bonds from its vault and use the proceeds to buy additional gold coins.   

Fiat or not? Since low-risk bonds have now become part of the backing for the banknote issue, a few readers may choose step 3 banknotes as the entry point for fiat money. But this would be unconventional, since most note-issuing central banks in the 1800s were running this sort of 70%/30% system, and we usually call the monetary system that prevailed in the 1800s a gold standard, not a fiat standard.

4) The central bank announces that it  will undergo extensive renovations. As a result, its redemption window will have to be shut for two months. People can no longer redeem their $1 for 1 gram of gold on demand, but will have to wait until the renovations are over.

Fiat or not? Two months is a long time. But it could be that the central bank already closes its doors on the weekends anyways, banknotes being inconvertible for 48-hours. I doubt many of us would describe the weekend as a fiat currency episode. Should we think of the renovation closure as an extended weekend, or is it long enough that it generates fiat money?

5) Unfortunately the central bank chose an incompetent construction company. Renovations will take another two years!

To make up for the inconvenience of the redemption window being closed for such a long time, the central bank promises to send agents to the local gold market who will ensure that the market rate stays fixed at $1/gram. These agents will buy & sell whatever amount of gold is necessary to maintain the peg (by selling and buying banknotes).

Fiat or not? Thanks to the strategy of buying and selling in the local gold market, the $1/gram price holds just as well as it did in steps 2 and 3. So the public notices no difference in the purchasing power of the money in their wallets. On the other hand, two years without a redemption window at the central bank may be long enough for many readers to tick the fiat money box.    

6) The central bank is still undergoing renovations, but instead of dispatching agents to the market to buy and sell gold to enforce the peg, they go with bonds in hand.

If the market price for gold threatens to rise from $1/gram to $1.01/gram, because there is too much money chasing too few goods, the agents sell bonds and withdraw banknotes, thus reducing pressure on the exchange rate and bringing it back to $1/gram. And when the exchange rate threatens to fall below $1/gram to $0.99/gram, because there is too little money chasing goods, agents buy bonds with banknotes.

Fiat or not? Not only are notes not redeemable in gold, but now the central bank no longer operates directly in the gold market. With this step we are getting a bit closer to modern central bank money. The Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada, and other major central banks all regulate the purchasing power of money by purchases and sales of bonds. The $1/gram peg still holds thanks to bond purchases and sales, so step 6 money does almost everything that step 2 and 3 money does.

7) With the renovation dragging on, the central bank decides that it doesn't need a redemption window after all. So what was initially a temporary suspension of convertibility becomes permanent. But the central bank continues to send agents to the market to buy or sell whatever quantity of bonds are necessary to maintain the $1/gram peg.

Fiat or not? You tell me. Perhaps permanent inconvertibility is the very definition of fiat. However, if steps 2-6 didn't qualify as fiat money, because gold stayed at $1/gram, why would step 7 be any different?

8) The central bank decides that, rather than fixing the market price of gold at $1/gram, it will set the market price of a typical consumer basket of goods and services (i.e. meat, car repairs, school, etc). 

This is a bit trickier to think about than the other steps. So for example, say that the central bank is currently setting the price of gold at $1/gram. And people can buy a consumer basket for $1000. But the price of that basket starts to rise to $1010, $1020, and then $1030. To stop this inflation, the central bank will announce its intention to reduce the price of gold to $0.99/gram. It does this by selling bonds and withdrawing money from the system, so that there is less money chasing goods. It keeps repeating gold price decreases/money withdrawals until it has successfully reigned in the inflation and brought the consumer price basket back to $1000. The net effect is that consumers are always guaranteed that the money in their pocket has constant purchasing power.

Fiat or not? This is pretty much the monetary system we have now in the U.S. and Canada where central banks target inflation. Well, there are a few small differences. Instead of temporarily setting the price of gold in order to regulate the value of a consumer price basket, the Fed and Bank of Canada temporarily set the price of a very short-term debt instrument to hit their target for the basket. And rather than shooting for constant consumer goods and services prices, these central banks prefer one that shrinks by 2% a year.

Given that step 8 describes something close to modern money, and it is common practice to refer to modern money as fiat, then it would only make sense that many readers raise their hands at this point. Complicating matters is that step 8 money isn't really that different from steps 2 to 7. After all, the central bank is establishing a fixed price for banknotes, the only difference being that the fix has been adjusted from gold to a basket of consumer goods and services. 

9) The central bank donates all of its assets to charity, closes its doors and shuts down for good. But it leaves all its banknotes outstanding. Money floats around the economy without a tether to reality. Or as Stephen Williamson says, money is a bubble.

Fiat or not? By this stage, everyone will probably have ticked the fiat money box. 

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Here is a collection of unconnected thoughts on the fiat-or-not game.

A) My guess it that readers will have chosen different stages as their preferred debut for fiat money. This is a bit tragic, since with no commonly-accepted definition for the term, most debates about fiat money have been and will continue to be meaningless.

B) We apply our definitions like cookie cutters to the real world. So if you chose step 7 (when banknotes became permanently irredeemable) as your flipping point, then 1971 would be a very important date in your scheme of the world since this is when the U.S. permanently removed gold convertibility.

But if you chose step 9 as your transition point to fiat, then the global monetary system is not currently on a fiat standard, since central banks have neither closed their doors nor donated their assets to charity. So 1971 really isn't an interesting date. I'm aware of only one country on a step 9 fiat standard: Somalia. Its central bank burned down yet Somali shilling banknotes continued to circulate. And ironically enough, if we choose to adopt a step 9 definition of fiat money, then bitcoin—which was designed to destroy central bank "fiat" money—is itself fiat, because it is unbacked, whereas most central bank money is not fiat.

What I've described is the Borges problem. Categories pre-digest the world for us. We get very different results depending on what definition we use and how we apply it to the world.

C) I think many readers associate fiat with hyperinflatable. For instance, here is Dror Golberg:

Was Canada ground zero for fiat money? This paper claims that fiat money was independently invented by French Canadians in 1685, copied by Massachusetts in 1690, adopted in Europe, and diffused to the rest of the world: https://t.co/bSXyYLYzwp pic.twitter.com/kWVWbi43hH

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) March 14, 2018

Readers who conflate fiat and hyperinflatable will probably have played the fiat-or-not game by gauging each step to see if it introduced (or removed) a set of features perceived to be conducive (inhibitory) to high inflation. They probably toggled the fiat button somewhere in the murk of temporary inconvertibility (step 4) and permanent inconvertibility (step 7). The thinking here is that convertibility into specie imposes a more imposing restriction on a central bank than a mere promise to hold gold's value at $1/gram by using open market operations (step 6). With the removal of convertibility, hyperinflatability is activated and thus money has become fiat.

There are certainly some good historical reasons for assuming that inconvertibility leads to hyperinflatability. Some of the most famous hyperinflations occurred after redemption was removed, including John Law's paper money scheme, the American Greenback episode, and the Wiemar inflation. But there is no inherent reason that these systems must lead to hyperinflation, or that step 1 (coin-based systems) and step 2 (fully convertible) systems aren't themselves hyperinflatable. In the case of coin-based systems, all that it takes is a rapid series of reductions in the silver content of coins to set off inflation, Henry VIII's consistent debasement of the English coinage being one example. And there is no reason that a fully convertible step 2 banknote system can't undergo a series of large devaluations leading to hyperinflation. 

D) Fiatness, fiatish? If we can't agree on what constitutes fiat-or-not, maybe we can agree that there might be a fiat scale, from pure fiat to not fiat at all, with most monetary systems existing somewhere in between. I am already on record advocating moneyness over money, so this fits with the general them of the blog. On the other hand, fiatness seems a bit of a cop-out.

E) We don't need gobbledygook like fiat. The term carries too much baggage. Let's select a more precise set of words, then apply them to the real world in order to understand what our monetary systems were like, how they are now, and where we are going. Until we settle on these words, let's avoid all conversations with the term fiat in them.

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P.S. I have a recent post about the desirability of coin debasements at the Sound Money Project and another post on money as a measuring stick at Bullionstar. 

Fiatsplainin'

I am a big fan of coinsplainers like Andreas Antonopoulos. Listening to Andreas explain how bitcoin works is a great learning opportunity for folks like myself who know far less about the topic. I am less impressed when bitcoiners engage in fiatsplainin', since they generally have an iffy understanding of the actual financial system and central banking in particular.

So for the benefit of not only bitcoiners, but anyone interested in the topic of money, I'm going to fiatsplain' a bit. (I really like this term, I got it from an Elaine Ou blog post)

Paul Krugman recently had this to say about the difference between bitcoin and fiat money:

"So are Bitcoins a superior alternative to $100 bills, allowing you to make secret transactions without lugging around suitcases full of cash? Not really, because they lack one crucial feature: a tether to reality.

Although the modern dollar is a “fiat” currency, not backed by any other asset, like gold, its value is ultimately backed by the fact that the U.S. government will accept it, in fact demands it, in payment for taxes. Its purchasing power is also stabilized by the Federal Reserve, which will reduce the outstanding supply of dollars if inflation runs too high, increase that supply to prevent deflation.

Bitcoin, by contrast, has no intrinsic value at all. Combine that lack of a tether to reality with the very limited extent to which Bitcoin is used for anything, and you have an asset whose price is almost purely speculative, and hence incredibly volatile."

Now if you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll know that I agree with Krugman's point that bitcoin lacks a tether to reality while a banknote doesn't. He mentions two forces that anchor a $100 banknote, or provide it with intrinsic value: tax acceptability and a central bank's guarantee to regulate its quantity. Let's explore each of these anchors separately, starting with tax acceptability.

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The idea that taxes can determine the value of a fiat currency is easier to grasp by looking at currencies issued during the American colonial era. Coins tended to be scarce in the 1700s and there were few private banks, so the legislatures of the colonies issued paper money to meet the public's demand for a circulating medium. They had a neat trick for ensuring that this paper money wasn't deemed worthless by citizens. A fixed quantity of paper money was issued concurrently with tax legislation that scheduled a series of future levies large enough to withdraw each of the notes that the legislature had issued. This combination of a fixed quantity of notes and future taxes of the same size was sufficient to give paper money value, since the public would need every bit of paper to satisfy their tax obligations.

Examples of colonial currency (it's worth enlarging this image to see the detail) From: Early Paper Money of America

Crucially, once a colonial government had received a note in payment of taxes, it removed said note from circulation and destroyed it. If the government re-spent notes that had already been used to discharge taxes, this would be problematic. The tax obligation would be more-than-used-up, leaving no reason for the public to demand outstanding banknotes. Krugman's "tether to reality" would have been removed.

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The modern day version of Krugman's tax acceptability argument is a bit more complicated. For starters, no one actually pays their taxes with banknotes. Rather, the tax acceptability argument applies to a second instrument issued by central banks otherwise known as reserves (in the U.S.) or settlement balances (in Canada). All commercial banks keep accounts at the central bank, these accounts allowing them to make instant electronic payments to other banks during the course of the business day, or to the government, which typically will also have an account at the central bank.

When Joe or Jane Public are ready to settle their taxes, they initiate a set of financial transactions that ultimately results in their bank depositing funds on their behalf into the government's account at the central bank. To satisfy the public's demand to make tax payment, commercial banks will want to have some central bank settlement balances on hand. So the existence of taxes "drives" banks to hold a certain quantity of central bank settlement balances, thus generating a positive price for these instruments. And since a banknote is in turn tethered to a central bank deposit via the central bank's promise to convert between the two at par, by transitivity the banknote is also tethered.

Unlike the colonial era, however, the tax authority—the government—can't destroy money. The government can either accumulate central bank deposits, or spend them, but it can't cancel them. What generally happens with the government's account at the central bank is that as soon as it is topped up with some tax receipts, they get quickly spent on government programs, salaries, and other expenses. So these funds simply boomerang right back into the accounts that commercial banks keep at the central bank, undoing the tethering that is achieved by tax acceptability.

Put differently, for every bank that demands settlement balances to pay taxes, and thus help gives those balances value, there is a government official who spends them away, and negates this value. So government taxes by themselves don't anchor modern central bank money.

To really anchor the value of central bank money, the government needs to withhold from spending the money it has received from taxes. The more it resists spending incoming tax flows, the more balances accumulate in its account at the central bank. If the government keeps doing this, at some point almost every single deposit that the central bank has ever issued will have been sucked up into the government's account. With almost no deposits remaining for paying taxes—and thus no way for the public to avoid arrest for failure to meet their tax obligations—the value that banks collectively place on deposits will reach incredible heights.

And that explains how tax acceptability (combined with a strategy of not spending taxes received) can provide modern fiat money with backing sufficient to generate a positive price.

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Let's turn now to Krugman's second reason for central bank money having intrinsic value, the central bank itself. As I said earlier, a government can freeze deposits by accumulating them, but it can't destroy them. The only entity that can destroy money is the central bank. It achieves this is by conducting open market sales of bonds and other assets. When it sells a bond to a bank, the central bank gets one of its own deposits in return, which it proceeds to destroy.

Imagine that banks collectively decide they have too many central bank deposits and start to sell them (a scenario I discussed here). This sudden urge to rid themselves of money will cause inflation. In a worst case scenario, they will get so desperate that the purchasing power of money falls to zero. The central bank can counter this by selling assets and destroying deposits. In the extreme, it can sell each and every one of the assets it owns, shrinking the deposit base to zero. Its actions will drive the value of deposits into the stratosphere, since banks need a token amount to make interbank payments.

And that, in short, explains how central banks can provide dollars with backing sufficient to generate a positive price.

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Which of Krugman's two forces—tax acceptability or a central bank's guarantee to regulate the quantity of money—is more important for imbuing little electronic bits with value?

We know that a government can anchor a fiat money purely through tax acceptability. Colonial money proves it. (Here is another example from the Greenback era) But can a fiat currency be anchored solely through the actions of the central bank, without the help of tax acceptability? Let's set the scene. Imagine that the government has unplugged itself from the central bank by closing its account and instead opening accounts at each of the nation's commercial banks. Since all incoming tax receipts and outgoing government payments are now made using private bank deposits, the government no longer generates a demand for central bank settlement balances.

This "unplugging" needn't drive the value of central bank money to zero. The central bank has assets in its vault, after all, so any decline in the value of central bank money can be easily offset by an appropriate set of central bank open market sales and concomitant reductions in the quantity of deposits. So the answer to my question in the previous paragraph is that money doesn't require tax acceptability to have intrinsic value. Tax acceptability is sufficient, but not necessary.

That being said, on a day-to-day basis the value of modern central bank money is regulated by a messy combination of both factors. Money is constantly flowing in and out of the government's account at the central bank, and this can have an effect on the purchasing power of money. Likewise, central bank open market operations are frequently conducted on a daily basis in order to ensure the system has neither a deficiency nor an excess of balances. It's complicated.

And that ends this episode of fiatsplainin.' Fiat money is indeed backed and has intrinsic value, as Krugman says, and it does so for several reasons.

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PS. If you are interested in colonial currency, you should read some of Farley Grubb's papers.

Addendum:

On Twitter, someone had this to say about my post:

Ummm one may pay taxes in Arizona in Bitcoin.

Argument fails on factual grounds.

Bitcoin is tethered to reality. @paulkrugman https://t.co/Z8ojvzw8FX

— ฿ryce Weiner (@BryceWeiner) March 22, 2018

฿ryce gives me the perfect opportunity to keep fiatsplainin'. Contrary to ฿ryce's claim, the fact that Arizona plans to accept tax payments in the form of bitcoin does not provide bitcoin with a tether to reality. For every bitcoin that Arizona accepts, it will just as quickly spend it away. The first is undone by the other. You'll notice that this is the same reason I gave for modern central bank money not necessarily being anchored by tax acceptability; whereas taxes vacuum up central bank money, government officials typically reverse this vacuum by quickly spending it, so the net effect is a wash.

To tether central bank money to reality, governments need to not only make it tax acceptable but also  be ready to let those balances pool up in its account, thus setting a limit on the overall supply of balances. Likewise with bitcoin. If the Arizona government were to accumulate incoming bitcoins as part of an overall policy of never spending them, then it would be removing bitcoins from circulation, in essence "destroying" them. And this would provide bitcoin with a true anchor. Of course the Arizona government isn't going to do this. It will want to rid themselves of bitcoins the moment it gets them.

The bootstrapping of Thorne, Magic Money, and Cyberbucks: three pre-Bitcoin monetary experiments

Bitcoin boasts many technical achievements, but none is more interesting to me than they way it was successfully bootstrapped. How did a small group of cypherpunks—activists interested in widespread use of cryptography and digital currency—manage to get an intrinsically valueless token to have a consistently positive price? Hal Finney, a cryptographer and early adopter of bitcoin, put it this way in 2009:

"One immediate problem with any new currency is how to value it. Even ignoring the practical problem that virtually no one will accept it at first, there is still a difficulty in coming up with a reasonable argument in favor of a particular non-zero value for the coins."

The bootstrapping of bitcoin seems to have been achieved with some care. William Luther has gone through old bitcoin message boards to show how early adopters, including Finney and bitcon-creator Satoshi Nakamoto, coordinated to 'enter the network' at the same time, thus generating a positive value for worthless bitcoin tokens. A token that is already valuable, perhaps because it is useful for some non-monetary use like jewellery, or because it is directly convertible into an already-existing money, is much easier to launch than one that isn't already valuable. Bitcoin didn't have the benefit of non-monetary usefulness.

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By way of Timothy May's Cyphernomicon, I recently discovered that bitcoin wasn't the first attempt by cryptographers to launch an intrinsically worthless digital token into positive-value space. Similar bootstrapping attempts occurred back in a previous era of digital currency experimentation, the mid-1990s.

In 1993 the extropians—a group that believes in the technological possibility of immortality (among other things)—set up an experimental market called the Hawthorne Exchange where individuals could trade units of reputation. There seems to be some crossover between extropians and cypherpunks with the reputations of folks like Timothy May and Nick Szabo, both key contributors to the Cypherpunks electronic mailing list, being listed on the Hawthorne Exchange. Trades were made using the exchange's own native currency called thorne, which had a fixed supply. Not only did the extropians succeed in generating a positive price for twenty or thirty reputation tokens, but by extension the native currency—thornes—was also bootstrapped.

As part of the experiment, people began to sell stuff for thornes, including copies of digital cash papers and old books. They made bets in thornes and even established a U.S. dollar price for the nascent digital currency (it was somewhere between 100 and 1000 thornes per dollar).

The problem with the whole endeavour is that—as Hal Finney would point out not long after it had begun—the tokens were essentially worthless. By convention each unit was supposed to represent a person's reputation, but there was no independent force that could possibly make a token correspond to a reputation:

"It is important to understand that Thornes are not like dollars. Unless HeX shares can be given a grounding other than the whim of their owners, the market will surely collapse, because there is nothing to support it."  

Finney would be proven right, since the Hawthorne exchange was shut down sometime in 1994.

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In their next effort the cypherpunks would bootstrap a set of play currencies that had been created using a toolkit called Magic Money, a digital cash system programmed by the pseudonymous Pr0duct Cypher and made available in February 1994. Here is Pr0duct Cypher in the introduction to the software:

"Now, if you're still awake, comes the fun part: how do you introduce real value into your digicash system? How, for that matter, do you even get people to play with it?

What makes gold valuable? It has some useful properties: it is a good conductor, is resistant to corrosion and chemicals, etc. But those have only recently become important. Why has gold been valuable for thousands of years? It's pretty, it's shiny, and most importantly, it is scarce.

Digicash is pretty and shiny. People have been talking about it for years, but few have actually used it. You can make your cash more interesting by giving your server a provocative name. Running it through a remailer could give it an 'underground' feel, which would attract people.

Your digicash should be scarce. Don't give it away in large quantities. Get some people to play with your server, passing coins back and forth. Have a contest - the first person who (breaks this code, answers this question, etc.) wins some digital money. Once people start getting interested, your digital money will be in demand. Make sure demand always exceeds supply."

From the cypherpunks mailing list we learn that over the course of the next few months four or five unique tokens were created using Magic Money, including Tacky Tokens, GhostMarks, DigiFrancs, and NexusBucks. As in the earlier case of thornes, an attempt was made to sell goods and services in these new currencies. One poster on the Cypherpunk message board offered to pay coders to write software with NexusBucks, and another tried to sell GIF art of tacky tokens.

After a flurry of activity, however, interest died off. "It appears that the Magic Money/Tacky Token experiment is not succeeding in producing an informal digital currency," wrote Hal Finney in May 1994. "People have offered services in exchange for this money but have had no takers." In a post entitled Why Digital Cash is Not Being Used, Tim May blamed the failure of Magic Money on the lack of items to buy with tokens and confusion about how to get them and send them. It's worth a read.

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No sooner had the Magic Money experiment died when a new new opportunity for bootstrapping digital tokens emerged. David Chaum, an early advocate of privacy, had established a company called Digicash in 1989 to commercialize the use of blind signature technology in electronic currency. In a trial that was first announced in July 1994, Digicash offered the first 10,000 applicants one hundred free cyberbucks, or e$, up to a maximum issue of one million cyberbucks.

Despite the fact that these tokens were intrinsically worthless—they had neither commodity value nor could they be redeemed into U.S. dollars—people soon began to transact with them. On its website, DigiCash listed around 100 shops that accepted cyberbucks, including those that sold postcards and various types of information services. Zooko Wilcox-Hearn, who recently founded the anonymous cryptocurrency Zcash, offered to sell his PGP software for cyberbucks. A coding contest by the omnipresent Hal Finney offered cyberbucks as a prize and Adam Back, a cryptographer who is currently involved in administrating bitcoin, sold "export-prohibited" cryptographic t-shirts for a price of e$250. In the same way that a pizza was the first good to be bought with bitcoin, Back's t-shirts may have been the first to be bought with cyberbucks:

i guess those t-shirts were the first pizza. digicash coins however are defunct- their SPOF failure is why B-money/bitgold/Bitcoin were p2p. pic.twitter.com/uJ2GIR3HU1

— Adam Back (@adam3us) October 24, 2017

To Digicash's surprise, several primitive financial markets emerged to trade cyberbucks for genuine currency. On the Ecash Exchange Market, which was hosted on the website of company called Firecloud Solutions, a price of around five cents per e$1 was established (see image below), effectively valuing the entire market capitalization of cyberbucks at $50,000.

Source: A Common Currency System for Spontaneous Transactions on Public Networks

For those with long memories, the above Ecash market looks very similar to New Liberty Standard's bitcoin-to-paypal market, the first bitcoin exchange that was established in 2009.

The cyberbuck trial did not last. While there was plenty of discussion about the topic in 1995, there are only a few mentions of cyberbucks on the Cypherpunk mailing list in 1996, but almost nothing in 1997. When I asked Zooko if he still had cyberbucks, he told me he had long since lost his. Who knows? They might still be worth a lot as collector's items.

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Like cyberbucks and the other mid-90s experiments, bitcoin began as a mere play thing among a small coalition of technologists interested in privacy. Why did bitcoin get successfully boostrapped while the others failed? How did one form of monopoly money spread over the entire globe while the others were never used by anyone other than a small band of cypherpunks?

One answer is luck. Perhaps nothing more than a fortuitous flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set the whole thing off. Another is experience. After three failed efforts to bootstrap electronic tokens, perhaps the cypherpunk community had developed a better understanding of what not to do to get the ball rolling. Hal Finney for one participated in all four digital currency experiments.

The technology was different as well. Because it utilized David Chaum's patented blind signature protocol, Magic Money was technically illegal, and thus unlikely to spread to more timid adopters. As for cyberbucks, once the trial was over the server running the software would have to be shut off, at which point there would be no way to verify cyberbuck transactions. Knowledge of this imminent shutdown would have handicapped the ability of cyberbucks to propagate beyond the core group of hobbyists. Bitcoin, on the other hand, used a decentralized (and unpatented) method of verifying transactions, so the threat of winding up the system was less salient.

I'm not sure these technical factors were as important as the different macroeconomic environments in which the various digital currencies were issued. Cyberbucks, Magic Money, and thorne all appeared when the global economy was humming along and interest rates were high. Owning these zero-yielding tokens meant that users had to make a large sacrifice. In 2009, interest rates around the world had fallen to near zero, so holding a digital currency like bitcoin did not involve forgoing much in the way of interest income.

If usage of an intrinsically worthless token is to spread beyond an inner clique of hobbyists, a whole army of dreamers and speculators has to be encouraged to jump onto the bandwagon. What better pool to recruit from than the ranks of unemployed and underemployed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis? This pool of downtrodden simply didn't exist in the humming 1990s. Folks back then had no need for a bubble asset to get them ahead—they enjoyed full-time jobs and plenty of opportunity.

Perhaps we were all a bit innocent in the 1990s and didn't understand how much our privacy could be invaded by governments and corporations. Magic Money and cyberbucks, which promised  protection from these threats, arrived too early. When bitcoin was finally introduced, it may be that we had all become a bit wiser and thus more willing to endure the hassles of switching some of our wealth into cludgy digital currency.

Lastly, people weren't upset with the finance establishment back when thornes, Magic Money, and cyberbucks were being introduced to the world. While recessions had hit in the early 1980s and 90s, they weren't accompanied with large-scale financial meltdowns. But in 2009, the credit crisis and bailouts were just in the rear-view mirror. Many were furious with banksters, and justifiably so. Turning to bitcoin was a protest vote.

Bringing back the Somali shilling

Somalia has long played host to one of the world's strangest monetary phenomenon, a paper currency without a central bank. I explored the idea of Somalia's "orphaned currency" more fully four years ago, but if you're in a rush what follows is the tl;dr version. Despite the fact that both the Central Bank of Somalia and the national government ceased to exist when a civil war broke out in 1991, Somali shilling banknotes continued to be used as money by Somalis. Over the years, Somalis also accepted a steady stream of counterfeits that circulated in concert with the old official currency, a state of affairs that William Luther explores in some detail here.

The story is worth revisiting because apparently Somalia's newly restored central bank is on the verge of re-entering the game of printing banknotes after a quarter century absence. With the help of the IMF, the Central Bank of Somalia (CBS) plans to issue new 1000 shilling banknotes, the introduction of higher denomination notes coming later down the road.

Old legitimate 1000 shilling notes and newer counterfeit 1000 notes are worth about 4 U.S. cents each. Both types of shillings are fungible—or, put differently, they are accepted interchangeably in trade, despite the fact that it is easy to tell fakes apart from genuine notes. This is an odd thing for non-Somalis to get our heads around since for most of us, an obvious counterfeit is pretty much worthless. The exchange rate between dollars and Somali shillings is a floating one that is determined by the cost of printing new fake 1000 notes. For instance, if a would-be counterfeiter can find a currency printer, say in Switzerland, that will produce a decent knock off and ship it to Somalia for 2.5 U.S. cents each (which includes the cost of paper and ink), then notes will flood into Somalia until their purchasing power falls from 4 to 2.5 U.S. cents... at which point counterfeiting is no longer profitable and the price level stabilizes.

Below is the long-term price of Somali shillings, which I've snipped from Luther's paper. You can see how the purchasing power of a 1000 shilling note has fallen to what Luther calculates to be the cost of producing a new banknote, around 4 cents. His chart goes up to 2013, but if you look at the IMF's most recent report on Somalia (see Figure 3) you'll see that the exchange rate hasn't moved much.

From Luther

So with a new official banknotes on the way, what will happen to the old legacy notes and counterfeits? According to the IMF mission chief Mohammed Elhage, the IMF is in the midst of trying to determine at what price it will convert old notes for new official ones. So rather than repudiating counterfeits, the normal route taken by central bankers, the CBS will buy them up and cancel them. It will have to offer a decent price too, say like 5 or 6 U.S. cents for each 1000 note. If it makes a stink bid, say 3 U.S. cents, Somalis may simply ignore the appeal to bring in their old currency and keep using the old stuff. Because the buyback decision validates the work of counterfeiters, it just seems wrong. However, keep in mind that for the last twenty-five years it has been counterfeiters who have been willing to take on the risk of providing Somalis with a very real service, the provision of a working paper medium of exchange.

There is another good reason for buying up old legacy notes and counterfeits and cancelling them. If the CBS lets the old notes stay in circulation, then Somalia's ragtag multi-currency system will only get more confusing, with old legacy and counterfeit notes circulating concurrently with new shillings and U.S. dollars. With the new issue of shillings having a different purchasing power than the old ones, yet another floating exchange rate will be added to the mix. Who needs that sort of confusion? Better for the CBS to absorb the cost of buying up fakes in order to promote a more homogeneous currency.

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As I pointed out in my old post, there's an old and nagging question in monetary economics that has never been satisfactorily answered: why is fiat money valuable? Somalia serves as a great laboratory to investigate this question because its situation is so unique. One famous answer to the riddle of fiat money is that governments use force to ensure that fiat money is valued. But this can't be the case in Somalia: it hasn't had a government since 1991, yet shillings continue to be accepted.

A second answer is that once money is valued—say because it a central bank has been pegged to an existing store of value like gold—then once the central bank disappears and the anchor is lost, those orphaned notes will continue to have value by dint of pure inertia and custom. This theory certainly seems to fit Somalia's experience.

The last theory is that when a central bank is destroyed, the money it issues will quickly become worthless... unless citizens expect a future central bank to emerge and reclaim the orphaned currency as its own. If so, it makes sense to keep using the currency since it isn't actually orphaned—it's on the way to being adopted. If the expectation is that this future central bank will also adopt counterfeit notes, it makes sense for people to accept all knock-offs as well. So we can tell a story that shillings, both real and fake, never fell to zero because enough Somalis had a hunch that a future body would reclaim them, a hunch that is on the verge of being realized as a newly-christened CBS seems set to buy old and fake shillings back. Were Somalis really this good at predicting the future? I don't know, but like the second theory, the last one seems to explain the data.
 

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Personally, I think introducing a new paper currency is a bad idea. For some time now Somalia has been partially dollarized economy. U.S. dollar banknotes are the most popular paper currency, with old shillings being used in small payments and in the countryside. Mobile payments are extremely popular, but they are usually denominated in U.S. dollars, not shillings, and tend to be prevalent in cities where network coverage is best.

There are several problems with dual-currency systems like Somalia's. First, they impose a small but steady stream of currency conversion costs on the population, both the actual cost of shifting one's wealth from one to the other as well as the mental gymnastics involved in converting prices in one's head. Secondly, there are fairness issues. Civil servants are usually paid in the domestic currency and those in rural parts deal in the stuff. Urban private sector workers tend to earn dollars. In developing nations, dollars are usually more stable than domestic currency. As a result prices of houses, cars, and rent are often set in dollars. The class of folks who are paid in dollars make out better than the class that is earning shillings. Dollar earners never have to leave the much stabler dollar loop while those earning domestic currency suffer from constant slippage due to conversion costs and chronic inflation.

Now the IMF might argue that new shillings will completely expel dollars, thus forcing everyone into the same shilling loop and removing any monetary inequalities. But that's hog wash. The literature on dollarization teaches us that once the dollar begins to be used by a country—usually because the domestic currency has suffered from high inflation—it is very hard to remove it. Long after the local currency has been successfully stabilized, dollarization continues, an effect referred to by economists as hysteresis. Bring back the shilling and the dollar will stick around.

While bringing back new shillings doesn't make much sense, some sort of currency reform is probably worthwhile. While cities seem to be already well-served by dollars and mobile money, the rural population still relies on old and deteriorating shilling notes. Instead of foisting new shillings on these people, why not replace them with locally-minted small denomination dollar coins? I call this the Panama solution. For those who don't know, Panama is a dollarized nation. Due to the high costs of shipping in coins form the U.S., Panama mints its own dollar-denominated small change, paper money printed by the Federal Reserve taking care of the rest of the nation's physical money requirements. 

By adopting the Panama model all Somalis would get to deal in U.S. dollars, thus removing any monetary class divisions. Gone too would be the headache of constantly converting between shillings and dollars, since with U.S. coinage there would only be dollars. And poor Somalians living in rural areas without phone coverage would finally get clean and homogenous small denomination cash.

Admittedly, there's far less for a central banker to do if he/she issues a narrow range of small denomination U.S. denominated coins, say 1¢, 5¢, and 25¢, rather than a full range of banknotes. It's certainly not sexy. But it would be cost effective. Coins, after all, last much longer than notes. This durability means that coins are a cheaper circulating medium for a central bank to maintain than paper. There is also the national ego that must be satisfied. What nation doesn't have its own currency? The worst reason to adopt a new shilling is because some concept of nationhood requires it—Panama has been using the dollar for decades, and this hasn't prevented it from becoming one of Central America's most successful nations.