After twelve years of writing about bitcoin, here's how my thinking has changed

What follows is an essay on how my thinking on bitcoin has changed since I began to write on the topic starting with my first post in October 2012. Since then I've written 109 posts on the Moneyness Blog that reference bitcoin, along with a few dozen articles at venues like CoinDesk, Breakermag, and elsewhere.

An early bitcoin optimist

I was excited by Bitcoin in the early days of my blog. The idea of a decentralized electronic payment system fascinated me. Here's an excerpt from my second post on the topic, Bitcoin (for monetary economists) - why bitcoin is great and why it's doomed, dated November 2012:

"Bitcoin is a revolutionary record-keeping system. It is incredibly fast, efficient, cheap, and safe. I can send my Bitcoin from Canada to someone in Africa, have the transaction verified and cleared in 10 minutes, and only pay a fee of a few cents. Doing the same through the SWIFT system would take days and require a $35 fee. If I were a banker, I'd be afraid." [link]

I was relatively open to Bitcoin for two reasons. First, I like to think in terms of moneyness, which means that everything is to some degree money-like, and so I welcome strange and alternative monies. "If you think of money as an adjective, then moneyness becomes the lens by which you view the problem. From this perspective, one might say that Bitcoin always was a money," I wrote in my very first post on bitcoin. Second, prior to 2012 I had read a fair amount of free banking literature—the study of private money—so I was already primed to be receptive to a stateless payments system, which is what Bitcoin's founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, originally meant his (or her) creation to be. 

A lot of bitcoin-curious, bitcoin-critics and bitcoin-converts were attracted to the comments section of my blog, and we had some great conversations over the years. My bitcoin posts invariably attracted more traffic than my non-bitcoin ones, all of us scrambling to understand what seemed to be a newly emerging monetary organism.

My early thoughts on the topic were informed by having bought a few bitcoins in 2012 for the sake of experimentation, some of my earlier blog posts describing how I had played around with them. In 2013 I wrote about the first crop of bitcoin-denominated securities market (which I dabbled in)—predecessors to the ICO market of 2017. I also used my bitcoins to buy altcoins, including Litecoin, and in late 2013 wrote about my disastrous experience with Litecoin-denominated stock market speculation. In Long Chains of Monetary Barter I described using bitcoin as an exotic bridging currency for selling XRP, a new cryptocurrency that had just been airdropped into the world. I didn't notice it at the time, but in hindsight most of these were instances of bitcoin facilitating illegal activity, i.e. unregistered securities sales, which was an early use case for bitcoin.

Although Bitcoin excited me, I was also critical from the outset, and in later years my critical side would only grow, earning me a reputation among crypto fans as being a salty no-coiner. In a 2013 blog post I grumbled that playing around with my stash of bitcoins hadn't been "as exciting as I had anticipated." Unlike regular money, there just wasn't much to do with the stuff, my coins sitting there in my wallet "gathering electronic dust."

 "...the best speculative vehicles to hit the market since 1999 Internet stocks."

What my experimentation with bitcoin had taught me was that the main reason to hold "isn't because they make great exchange media—it's because they're the best speculative vehicles to hit the market since 1999 Internet stocks." But that wasn't what I was there for. What had tantalized me was Satoshi's vision of electronic cash, a revolutionary digital payments system. Not boring old speculation.

In addition to my practical complaints about bitcoin, I also had theoretical gripes with it. The "lethal" problem as I saw it back in my second post in 2012 is that "bitcoin has no intrinsic value." Over the next decade this lack of intrinsic value, or fundamental value, would underly most of my criticisms of the orange coin. Back in 2012, though, the main implication of bitcoin's lack of intrinsic value was the ease by which it might fall back to $0. As I put it in a 2013 article:

"Bitcoin is 100% moneyness. Whenever a liquidity crisis hits, the only way for the bitcoin market to accommodate everyone's demand to sell is for the price of bitcoin to hit zero—all out implosion" [link]

But if the price of bitcoin were to fall to zero then it would cease to operate as a monetary system, which would be a huge disappointment to those of us who were fascinated with Satoshi's electronic cash experiment. Adding to the danger was the influx of bitcoin lookalikes, or altcoins, like litecoin, namecoin, and sexcoin. In theory, the prices of bitcoin and its competitors could "quickly collapse in price" as arbitrageurs create new coins ad infinitum, I worried in 2012, eating away at bitcoin's premium. The alternative view, which I explored in a 2013 post entitled Milton Friedman and the mania in copy-paste cryptocoins,  was that "the earliest mover has superior features compared to late moving clones," including name brand and liquidity, and so its dominance was locked-in via network effects. Over time the latter view proved to be the correct one.

The "zero problem"

Despite my worries, I was optimistic about bitcoin, even helpful. One way to stop bitcoin from falling to zero might be a "plunge protection team," I offered in 2013, a group of avid bitcoin collectors that could anchor bitcoin's price and provide a degree of automatic stabilization. In a 2015 post entitled The zero problem, I suggested that bitcoin believers like Marc Andreessen should consider donating $21 million to a bitcoin stabilization fund, thus securing a price floor of $1 in perpetuity. 

No fan of credit cards, in a 2016 post Bitcoin, drowning in a sea of credit card rewards, I suggested that bitcoin activists encourage retailers that accept bitcoin payments to offer price discounts. This carrot would put bitcoin on an even playing field with credit card networks, which use incentives like reward points and cashback to block out competing payment systems.

My growing disillusionment

By 2014 or 2015, I no longer saw much hope for bitcoin as a mainstream payments system or generally-accepted medium-of-exchange. "For any medium of exchange to displace another as a means for buying stuff, users need come out ahead. And this isn't happening with bitcoin," I wrote in a 2015 post entitled Why bitcoin has failed to achieve liftoff as a medium of exchange, pointing to the many costs of making bitcoin payments, including commissions, setup costs, and the inconveniences of volatility.

In another 2015 post I focused specifically on the volatility problem, which stems from bitcoin's lack of intrinsic value. If an item has an unstable price, that militates against it becoming a widely used money. After all, the whole reason that people stockpile buffers of liquid instruments, or money, is that these buffers serve as a form of insurance against uncertainty. If an item's price isn't stable—which bitcoin isn't—it can't perform that role. 

Mind you, I did allow in another 2015 post, The dollarization of bitcoin, that bitcoin might continue as "an arcane niche payments system for a community of like minded consumers and retailers." I even tracked some of these arcane payments use cases, such a 2020 blog post on retailers of salvia divinorium (a legal drug in many U.S. states) falling back on bitcoin for payments after the credit card networks kicked them off, followed by a 2021 post on kratom sellers (a mostly-legal substance) doing the same. But let's face it, a niche payments system just wasn't as impressive as Satoshi's much broader vision of electronic cash that had beguiled me in 2012, when I had warned that "if I was a banker, I'd be afraid." 

The dollarization of bitcoin

By 2015 a lot of my pro-bitcoin blog commenters began to see me as a traitor. But I was just changing my thinking with the arrival of new data.

Searching for Bitcoin-inspired alternatives: Fedcoin and stablecoins

Bitcoin's deficiencies got me thinking very early on about how to create bitcoin-inspired alternatives. By late 2012 I was already thinking about stablecoins:

"What the bitcoin record-keeping mechanism needs is an already-valuable underlying asset to which it can be tethered. Rather than tracking, verifying, and recording the movement of intrinsically worthless 1s and 0s, it will track the movement of something valuable." [link]

Later, in 2013, I speculated about the emergence of "stable-value crypto-currency, not the sort that dangles and has a null value." These alternatives would "copy the best aspects" of bitcoin, like its speed and safety, but would be linked to "some intrinsically valuable item." A few months later I predicted that "Cryptocoin 2.0, or stable-value cryptocoins, is probably not too far away." This would eventually happen, but not for another few years.

My dissatisfaction with bitcoin led me to the idea of decentralized exchanges, or DEXs, in 2013, whereby equity markets would "adopt a bitcoin-style distributed ledger." That same year I imagined central banks adapting "bitcoin technology" to run its wholesale payments system in my post Why the Fed is more likely to adopt bitcoin technology than kill it off. In 2014 I developed this thought into the idea of Fedcoin, an early central bank digital currency, or CBDC, for retail users.

If not money, then what is bitcoin?

By 2017 or so, even the most ardent bitcoin advocates were being forced to acknowledge that Satoshi's electronic cash system was not panning out: the orange coin was nowhere near to becoming a popular medium-of-exchange. This was especially apparent thanks to a growing body of payments surveys (which I began to report on in 2020) showing that bitcoin users almost never used their bitcoins to make payments or transfers, preferring instead to hoard them. So the true believers pivoted and began to describe bitcoin as a store-of-value, or digital gold. It was a new narrative that glossed over Satoshi's dream of electronic cash while trying to salvage some monetary-ish parts of the story.

I thought this whole salvage operation was disingenuous. In 2017 I wrote about my dissatisfaction with the new store-of-value narrative, and followed that up with a criticism of the digital gold concept in Bitcoin Isn’t Digital Gold; It’s Digital Uselesstainium. (The idea that store-of-value is a unique property of money is silly, I wrote in 2020, and we should just chuck the concept altogether.)

But if bitcoin was never going to become a generally-accepted form of money, and it wasn't a store-of-value or digital gold, then what exactly was it? 

I didn't nail this down till a 2018 post entitled A Case for Bitcoin. We all thought at the outset that bitcoin was a monetary thingamajig. But we were wrong. Of the types of assets already in existence, bitcoin was not akin to gold, cash, or bank deposits. Rather, it was most similar to an age-old category of financial games and zero-sum bets that includes poker, lotteries, and roulette. The particular sub-branch of the financial game family that bitcoin belonged to was early-bird games, which contains pyramids, ponzis, and chain letters. Here is a taxonomy:

A taxonomy showing bitcoin as a member of the early-bird game family

Early-bird games like pyramids, ponzis, and chain letters are a type of zero-sum game in which early players win at the expense of latecomers, the bet being sustained over time by a constant stream of new entrants and ending when no additional players join. Pyramids and ponzis are almost always administered by thieves who abscond with the pot. Bitcoin, by contrast, was not a scheme nor a scam. And it was not run by a scammer. It was leaderless and spontaneous, an "honest" early-bird game that hewed to pre-set rules. Here is how I described it in a later post, Bitcoin as a Novel Financial Game:

"Bitcoin introduces some neat features to the financial-game space. Firstly, everyone in the world can play it (i.e., it is censorship-resistant). Secondly, the task of managing the game has been decentralized. Lastly, Bitcoin’s rules are automated by code and fully auditable." [link] 

This ponziness of bitcoin was actually a source of its strength, I suggested in 2023, because "it's tough to shut down a million imaginations." By contrast, if bitcoin had an underlying real anchor, like gold, then that would give authorities a toe hold for decommissioning it.

Bitcoin-as-game gave me more insight into why most bitcoin owners weren't using bitcoin as a medium-of-exchange. Its value as a zero-sum bet was overriding any functionality it had for making payments. In a 2018 post entitled Can Lottery Tickets Become Money?, I worked this out more clearly:

"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." [link]

If bitcoins weren't like bank deposits or cash, how should we treat them from a personal finance perspective? Feel free to play bitcoin, I wrote in late 2018, but do so in moderation, just like you would if you went to Vegas. "Remember, it's just a game."

Bitcoin is innocuous, don't ban it

By 2020 or 2021, the commentary surrounding bitcoin seemed to be getting more polarized. As always there was a set of hardcore bitcoin zealots who thought bitcoin's destiny was to change the world, of which I had been a member for a brief time in 2012. But arrayed against them was a new group of strident opponents who though bitcoin was incredibly dangerous and were pushing to ban it.

A vandalized 'Bitcoin accepted' sign in my neighborhood

I was at odds with both sides. Each saw Bitcoin as transformative, one side for the good, the other for the bad. But I conceived of it as an innocuous gambling device, one that only seemed novel because it had been transplanted into a new kind of database technology, blockchains. We shouldn't ban bitcoin for the same reason that we've generally become more comfortable over the decades removing prohibitions on online gambling and sports betting. Better to bring these activities into the open and regulate them than leave them to exist in the shadows.

Thus began a series of relax-don't-ban-bitcoin posts. In 2022, I wrote that central bankers shouldn't be afraid that bitcoin might render them powerless. For the same reason that casinos and lotteries will ever be a credible threat to dollar's issued by the Fed or the Bank of Canada, neither will bitcoin.

Illicit usage of bitcoin was becoming an increasingly controversial subject. Just like casinos are used by money launderers, bitcoin had long become a popular tool for criminals, the most notorious of which were ransomware operators. My view was that we could use existing tools to deal with these bad actors. Instead of banning bitcoin to end the ransomware plague, for instance, I suggested in a 2021 article that we might embargo the payment of ransoms instead, thus choking off fuel to the ransomware fire. Alternatively, I argued in a later post that the U.S. could fight ransomware using an existing tool: Section 311 of the Patriot Act. Which is what eventually happened with Bitzlato and PM2BTC, two Russian exchanges popular with ransomware operators that were put on the Section 311 list.    

Nor should national security experts be afraid of enemy actors using bitcoin to evade sanctions, I wrote in 2019, since existing tools, in particular secondary sanctions, are capable of dealing with the threat. The failure of bitcoin to serve as an effective tool for funding the illegal Ottawa protests, which I documented in a March 2022 article, only underlined its low threat potential:

"Governments, whether they be democracies or dictatorships, are often fearful of crypto's censorship-resistance, leading to calls for bans. The lesson from the Ottawa trucker convoy and Russian ransomware gangs is that as long as the on-ramping and off-ramping process are regulated, these fears are overblown." [link]

Other calls to ban bitcoin were inspired by its voracious energy usage. In a 2021 blog post entitled The overconsumption theory of bitcoin, I attributed bitcoin's terrible energy footprint to market failure: end users of bitcoin don't directly pay for the huge amounts of electricity required to power their bets, so they overuse it. No need to ban bitcoin, though. The way to fix this particular market failure is to introduce a Pigouvian tax on buying and/or holding bitcoins, which I described more clearly in a 2021 blog post entitled A tax on proof of work and a 2022 article called Make bitcoin cheap again for cypherpunks! 

Lastly, whereas bitcoin's harshest critics have been advocating a "let it burn" policy approach to bitcoin and crypto more generally, which involved leaving gateways unregulated and thus toxic, I began to recommend regulating crypto exchanges under the same standards as equities exchanges in a 2021 article entitled Gary Gensler, You Should be Watching How Canada is Regulating Coinbase. Yes, regulation legitimizes a culture of gambling. But even Las Vegas has stringent regulations. A set of basic protections would reduce the odds of the betting public being hurt by fraudulent exchanges. FTX was a good test case. After the exchange collapsed, almost all FTX customers were stuck in limbo for years, but FTX Japan customers walked out unscathed thanks to Japan's regulatory framework, which I wrote about in a 2022 post Six reasons why FTX Japan survived while the rest of FTX burned.  

So when does bitcoin get dangerous?

What I've learnt after many years of writing about bitcoin is that it's a relatively innocuous phenomena, even pedestrian. When it does lead to bad outcomes, I've outlined how those can be handled with our existing tools. But here's what does have me worried. 

If you want to buy some bitcoins, go right ahead. We can even help by regulating the trading venues to make it safe. But don't force others to play.

Whoops, You Just Got Bitcoin’d! by Daniel Krawisz

Alas, that seems to be where we are headed. There is a growing effort to arm-twist the rest of society into joining in by having governments acquire bitcoins, in the U.S.'s case a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The U.S. government has never entered the World Series of Poker. Nor has it gone to Vegas to bet billions to tax payer funds on roulette or built a strategic Powerball ticket reserve, but it appears to be genuinely entertaining the idea of rolling the dice on Bitcoin.  

Bitcoin is an incredibly infectious early-bird game, one that after sixteen years continues to find a constant stream of new recruits. How contagious? I originally estimated in a 2022 post, Three potential paths for the price of bitcoin, that adoption wouldn't rise above 10%-15% of the global population, but I may have been underestimating its transmissibility. My worry is that calls for government support will only accelerate as more voters, government officials, and bureaucrats catch the orange coin mind virus and act on it. It begins with a small strategic reserve of a few billion dollars. It ends with the Department of Bitcoin Price Appreciation being allocated 50% of yearly tax revenues to make the number go up, to the detriment of infrastructure like roads, hospitals, and law enforcement. At that point we've entered a dystopia in which society rapidly deteriorates because we've all become obsessed on a bet.

Although I never wanted to ban Bitcoin, I can't help but wonder whether a prohibition wouldn't have been the better policy back in 2013 or 2014 given the new bitcoin-by-force path that advocates are pushing it towards. But it's probably too late for that; the coin is already out of the bag. All I can hope is that my long history of writing on the topic might persuade a few readers that forcing others to play the game you love is not fair game.

It's time to trash the "store of value" function of money

When we first learn about money and banking in high school or university, we are all taught that money has three functions: medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. Maybe it’s time for educators to throw out this triumvirate. It’s not very accurate. 

We need a simple and teachable device to take the triumvirate’s place. I propose the money Venn diagram.

Before I explain the money Venn diagram, let’s revisit the textbook triumvirate.

When something is a medium of exchange, what is meant is that it is generally acceptable in trade. You can use it to buy stuff at the grocery store, or purchase stocks on the stock market, or get things online. 

The quality of being a medium of exchange is really more of a gradient than a matter of either/or. Banknotes, for instance, are good at brick and mortar shops, but useless online. Your debit card works great at shops, but forget trying to buy shares with it. But both are sufficiently widely accepted to qualify as a medium of exchange.

Because cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Litecoin aren’t widely accepted, they don’t make it across the line to qualify as a medium of exchange. Neither do Walmart or Target gift cards. Cigarettes don’t qualify either, but that wasn’t the case in 1950 when Milton Friedman used them to buy gas:

Milton Friedman describes the time he used cigarettes as money. (I get this from his book "Money Mischief".) pic.twitter.com/1NSjY9vZNX

— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) November 6, 2020

The unit of account function of money refers to the fact that our economic conversations and calculations are couched in terms of a given monetary unit, whether that be the $, ¥, or £. In Canada and the US, prices are expressed in grocery aisles with dollars, our salaries use dollar units, and our debts are denominated in dollars. We don’t express prices in terms of government bonds, or Microsoft shares, or cigarettes or bitcoins. These things don’t function as a unit of account.

Thirdly, when money acts as a store of value we mean that it preserves value over time and space. Whereas the first two functions are quite useful, the store of value isn’t. Every asset functions as a store of value: houses, diamonds, banknotes, deposits, bitcoins, LSD tabs, lentils, cars, spices. And so it is meaningless to cast store of value as a unique function of money. Monetary economists such as Nick Rowe and George Selgin have proposed, and I concur, that we just chuck store of value from the definition of money.

But we are still left with two useful definitions for money, unit of account and medium of exchange. Which gets us to the money circle.

Note that the two circles in the diagram, medium of exchange and unit of account, don’t perfectly overlap. About 99% of the time the things we use as media of exchange are also the things we use as a unit of account. So the contents of our wallets or our bank accounts, dollar banknotes and dollar deposits are functionally equivalent to the $ units displayed in signs in grocery aisles.

But for the remaining 1% of the time, the unit of account and medium of exchange are separated. The idea of a separation is tough to get one’s head around. Luckily we’ve got a nice example. In Chile the prices of many things, particularly real estate, are expressed in terms of the Unidad de Fomento. But no Unidad de Fomento notes or coins circulate in Chile. It is a purely abstract unit of account.

Apartments for sale in Chile, priced in Unidad de Fomento

If a Chilean wants to buy an apartment that is priced at 840 Unidad de Fomento, she must use a separate medium of exchange, the Chilean peso, to make the payment. The peso is issued by Chile’s central bank, the Banco Central de Chile, in both paper and account form.

How many pesos must she pay? Every day the Banco Central de Chile publishes the exchange rate between the Unidad de Fomento and the peso. Right now one Unidad de Fomento is equal to 28,969 pesos. If an apartment were priced at 840 Unidad de Fomento, a Chilean would have to hand over 24 million Chilean pesos today.

Why has Chile separated its unit of account from its medium of exchange? I have discussed the issue at length. But the short answer is that it was a trick the government used to help cope with high inflation in the 1960s. Chilean inflation has been well under control for decades now. The practice of using the Unidad de Fomento as a unit-of-account has continued nonetheless.

You can see why it’s rare for these two functions to be separated. It’s awkward to do conversions every time one wants to pay for something. For the sake of ease, we tend to evolve towards systems where the medium of exchange and unit of account are united. But these exceptions are still important enough that we need a Venn diagram.

To sum up, money isn’t best thought of as a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. Let’s just think of it as just a medium of exchange and a unit of account. For the most part these circles overlap, and the two functions are united. But this isn’t always the case. 

[My article was originally published at AIER's Sound Money Project in 2020 under the title A Simpler and More Accurate Way to Teach Money to Students]

Do bitcoin ETFs conflict with bitcoin's original ethos?

Some folks are suggesting that a bitcoin ETF is absurd because it doesn't fit with Bitcoin's original ethos. On the contrary, I think it's a nice snug fit.

It would be a misunderstanding of bitcoin's history to assume that it was the idealism of cypherpunk-ism that gave birth to the Bitcoin movement. Bitcoin would never have got off the ground without a massive amount of old fashioned greed. In bitcoin-speak, this greed usually goes by the term number-go-up, and it was crucial from the start. The new bitcoin ETFs are certainly not cypherpunk, but they are very much in the founding spirit of number-go-up.

One of the main goals of the 1990s cypherpunks, if you recall, was to create anonymous digital cash. And while bitcoin certainly has some roots in cypherpunk ideals, the ethos of number-go-up clashes with the dream of digital cash: after all, an asset with a volatile price makes for an awful medium of exchange. Before long, number-go-up had drowned out the cypherpunks.

I recall walking into Montreal's Bitcoin Embassy in 2014, which was located on the busy intersection of St-Laurent and Prince-Arthur. I had already been researching and writing about bitcoin for a few years, but decided to play it dumb to see how the folks at the Embassy would approach the task of teaching a newbie about bitcoin. Instead of preaching to me about how to make a bitcoin payment from my own self-custody wallet, the ambassador walked me over to a large screen showing bitcoin's price. "Look, it's rising," he said in awe.

That, in short, sums up bitcoinism. Like 1980s televangelism with its gold-plated cowboy boots, mansions, private jets, and a dose of God on the side, bitcoin is all about the price chart with a small helping of cypherpunk ideology.

Number-go-up has always required getting ever more people into the game. Bitcoin, after all, is itself sterile. Unlike a publicly-traded business, it doesn't generate a stream of improving profits, so the only way for its price to keep rising is to recruit more players, much like a pyramid or a chain letter. From the early days, getting access to traditional financial and banking infrastructure has been crucial to making this recruitment process go as smoothly as possible.

Docking bitcoin to the existing financial edifice began in 2010 with the first bitcoin exchanges, which hooked into the crucial global bank wire systems like SWIFT, as well as local wire systems like the Federal Reserve's Fedwire system and Europe's SEPA system. These integrations were key to pumping the initial rounds of money into the game, and pushing the number above $1, and then $10, $100, and $1000.

Later on, bridges to the Visa/MasterCard debit card and credit card networks brought an even tighter fusion between bitcoin and the regular world, more inflows, and more number-go-up. The addition of bitcoin purchases to mobile payment apps like PayPal and Cash App came after. Viewed in this context, ETFs are nothing new, really; they only represent the next coupling between the two worlds.

As for regular old finance, it isn't complaining. The task of players like Visa is to generate profits – they want nothing more than to add new products like bitcoin to the list of products they already connect. The curious result is that no chain-letter style product has ever gone as mainstream as bitcoin has.

Now that bitcoin ETFs exist, number-go-up demands even more linkages to traditional finance and banking. What's next? One possibility: expect the bitcoin community to lobby for federally-chartered banks to be allowed to offer bitcoin products alongside savings deposits and retirement accounts. Banks offering bitcoin to their retail client base may seem inconsistent with bitcoin's more cypherpunk-y dreams of replacing the banking system, but on the contrary: its hard to imagine a more fantastic recruitment tool for number-go-up.

Are flatcoins a good idea?

I'll start with the conclusion. I don't think flatcoins are a good idea.

The idea for flatcoins has been around for a while, but it got a wider airing when it popped up in a Coinbase marketing piece from earlier this year. Now, arch-crypto hater Nouriel Roubini has undergone a Damascene conversion and is about to introduce a crypto flatcoin, suggesting that these novel instruments are "the way forward."  

What is a flatcoin?

If you own one dollar's worth of stablecoins or one dollar's worth of Wells Fargo deposits, both stay locked at $1 dollar indefinitely. A flatcoin, by contrast, slowly rises in value over time to compensate the holder for inflation. So if you own a single flatcoin worth $1 today, it will be worth $1.0001 tomorrow, and $1.0002 the next day, and so on. Twelve months later its value will have arrived at $1.05. This 5% appreciation protects you from 5% inflation, leaving your purchasing power unchanged.

Roubini and Coinbase are marketing flatcoins as a blockchain-specific thing, but there's no reason the concept couldn't by packaged up as a traditional financial product, one without a blockchain. Imagine a Wells Fargo account that holds 100 in Wells flatbalances which rise by 3-4% a year. Or imagine a flatnote, the issuer indexing the purchasing power of its paper banknotes to inflation by promising to buy them back at progressively higher prices.

Roubini stakes out a role for flatcoins as a potential "global means of payment." As far as monetary/payments technology goes, I disagree. I think flatcoins are an evolutionary dead-end.

One of the key features of money that makes it so popular is that it is directly fused to the dominant commercial language that we all use in our day-to-day economic lives.

What do I mean when I say commercial language? We converse and haggle with each other in terms of the dollar, we think and plan in terms of dollars, we dream in dollars, and we remember in dollars. Every facet of our day-to-day commercial lives revolves around this very basic measuring unit. (In Europe, the euro serves as the basis of Europe's commercial language, and in Japan it's the yen.)

The dollars that we own in our pockets (and in our bank accounts, as well as the stablecoins in our Metamask wallets) have been conveniently designed to be fully compatible with the dollar measuring unit that we refer to in language. That is, our media of exchange are pegged, or wed, to $1. For instance, if I've got to make a $1500 rent payment next week, I know that the 1500 units sitting in my bank checking account are a precise fit for meeting that obligation. I don't know the same about my other assets, say my S&P 500 ETF, my gold, my government bonds, or my dogecoins.

This standardization is a convenient feature. It takes a lot of hassle out of day-to-day commercial life. It means that when we buy things or make plans to buy things, it's not necessary to engage in constant translations between the dollar media in our pocket and the dollars in our speech and thoughts and plans. As Larry White once put it, harmonizing the unit we use in our speech with the units we transact with "economizes on the information necessary for the buyer's and the seller's economic calculation."

Since everyone tends to converge on these very useful standardized units for making payments (i.e. deposits, stablecoins, and banknotes), the markets for them have become highly developed and liquid. This only makes them more useful for payments, in effect locking in their dominance.

A flatcoin, by contrast, has been rendered incompatible with the dollars that we use in our speech. One unit might be worth 1.1145 times the dollars we use in our speech today, and 1.1147 tomorrow, and 1.1205 next month. This erases one of the most user-friendly features of money, its concordance with the commercial vernacular, alienating anyone who might use it for their day-to-day spending. Flatcoins will thus be less liquid than standardized 1:1 dollars, and this lack of liquidity will render them even less useful for making payments.

There's the secondary problem with flatcoins that stems from taxes. Since a flatcoin rises in value over time, all purchases made with flatcoins will generate a small taxable capital gain. This introduces an administrative burden which makes it even less likely that people will use flatcoins as an everyday medium of exchange.

This incongruity between linguistic dollars and flatcoins doesn't mean that people won't hold them. They might be useful as a type of long-term savings vehicle, much like how one might buy and hold a fixed income ETF. But unlike Nouriel Roubini, I don't think they are "the way forward" when it comes to acting as a medium of exchange. No one is going to be buying a coffee with a flatcoin.

The strange new world of multifunctional assets

I would never own it, but the cryptocurrency BNB is probably one of the strangest most interesting assets I've ever analyzed. No other asset (perhaps ever?) provides its owner with so much functionality. 

Is the sort of multi-functionality offered by assets like BNB a feature that all assets will have in the future? Is this the dawn of a multi-functional asset world? I'll explore this question at the end of this post.

BNB was issued by Binance, the beleaguered global crypto exchange, through an initial coin offering in 2017. It has around four, maybe five (?) different functions.

1. a medium of exchange

 BNB can be digitally transferred in a P2P fashion to other people. You can use it to buy stuff, send funds to friends or family, or move funds between crypto exchanges. It's like cash, except electronic (and volatile).

2. an investment security

BNB provides yield to its owner, sort of like a stock or bond. Most securities issuers pay securities owners an explicit return in the form of a stream of dividend payments or interest payments, generated out of the issuer's revenues. Rather than paying a return directly, Binance repurchases and cancels BNB using a portion of revenues.* It dubs this process burning, but it's functionally the same thing as paying a dividend.

3. loyalty points

Like the points issued by Starbucks, BNB can be used at the Binance.com exchange to get deals on trading fees and access to other Binance perks and services.

4. a ticket, or commodity

In addition to running a big crypto exchange, Binance controls a "decentralized" blockchain. The only way to use that blockchain is to have some BNB on hand to pay fees. No BNB, no play. So we can think of BNB as a ticket to get network access or, alternatively, a very select sort of commodity. That is, in the same way that the demand for pork bellies is driven by people's desire to consume bacon, the demand for BNB is driven by people's desire to consume the services available on Binance's blockchain.

So BNB is Swiss army-knife asset, with four functions packed into one instrument. There's probably more that I've missed.

The dawn of a multi-functional asset world?

Might this sort of multi-functionality, heretofore confined to the crypto ecosystem, become popular in the regular world? 

Let's imagine what Apple multi-functionality might look like. Apple shares wouldn't just be securities providing a yield. They could also be sent to friends and family as payment, or used to buy apples at the grocery store. They could also be used as loyalty points, say to get perks at the Apple store (i.e. priority in line to see a technician), and as a necessary commodity for accessing certain types of Apple product functionality.

Or, imagine if your Air Canada ticket also provided a flow of dividend payments, like Air Canada shares do. And say that ticket could also be used as a digital medium-of-exchange for buying stuff and/or remitting funds back home to family.

One thing that has historically prevented this sort of multi-functionality is that securities, media of exchange, coupons, loyalty points, and tickets have always existed on separate databases, each with its own set of rules,  none capable of communicating with the other. When you start out from scratch, however, with a single database, as was the case with blockchains, and thus a unified set of rules, then that opens the door to multi-functional assets.

But even if the technological problem is solved (as well as a legion of legal and regulatory issues), there's another key reason that multi-functionality may never become widely adopted. It may not offer end-users an ideal customer experience. The problem is that functions start to interfere with each other, the final result being that the total usefulness of the multi-functional asset is less than the total usefulness of the set of separate assets, each offering its functionality independently.

For instance, if loyalty points are imbued with features that turn them into securities, then they will become much more volatile. For folks who simply want to be able to reliably and consistently consume a given product, these fluctuations will be a turn-off.

Alternatively, if a bundle of features (like p2p transferability and loyalty benefits) are added to an existing security, this will probably increase its price, upsetting many asset managers who don't want those perks, but want to enjoy a stream of dividends at the cheapest price possible.

So even though new technologies may allow for multi-functional assets, a multi-functional world may never actually emerge because people naturally prefer that functions be split apart.

---

* More specifically, the revenue stream that funds repurchases, or "burns," of BNB comes from user fees levied on users of BSC Chain, Binance's "decentralized" blockchain. There's a formula that calculates how much fees get burned. Prior to this, revenues from Binance.com were used to fund repurchases and cancelleations of BNB.

A bronze currency in ancient Europe?

Metal scraps from a soldier’s pouch found at the Late Bronze Age battlefield of Tollensee Valley (source)

1) Last month I wrote about hacksilver currency in the ancient Middle East. This month I thought I'd share some fascinating archaeological research exploring what Europeans may have used as money during the Bronze Age.

2) By Bronze Age Europe, what is generally meant is the period beginning with the first appearance of bronze, a product of copper and tin, in southern Europe around 3000 BC and spreading north into the rest of Europe. It lasted till the introduction of iron between 1000 BC - 600 BC, depending on the region.

3) Did Bronze Age Europeans develop the idea of using metal as a common medium of exchange? There's a big hurdle to answering this question. Europe lacks textual evidence.

4) This isn't a problem in the Middle East. Thanks to the survival of "texts" such as cuneiform tablets, it is commonly accepted among archaeologists that hacksilver, or bits of cut up silver, circulated as a medium of exchange in the Near Middle East (i.e. Turkey, Israel, Iraq, Egypt, Iran). Europe, by contrast, hadn't yet developed written language -- that wouldn't come till around 500 BC. And so archaeologists don't have textual evidence that they can use to get hints about what Europeans used (or not) as money during the Bronze Age.

5) One curiosity from Bronze Age Europe is why cut up pieces of bronze are habitually found at dig sites all over Europe. Here is a picture of a bronze hoard found in France that I screenshotted from a paper by Dirk Brandherm (2018).

6) Europeans liked their bronze fragments. As time passed, evidence from hoards shows that more and more bronze was used in Europe. And the proportion of bronze being subject to fragmentation increased over time as well.

7) Archaeologists have long speculated why Europeans cut bronze into pieces. One theory is the owners of the bronze intentionally did so just prior to burial for religious reasons. Brandherm (2018) goes into this theory in some detail. Breaking up bronze may have been part of a ritual of "killing" objects perceived as being animate beings. These bronze fragments may have been intended for use in the afterlife or as votive offerings.

8) Archaeologist Rob Wiseman (2018) recently flagged a problem with the religious theory of intentional bronze fragmentation.

If bronze was purposefully broken up, there should be a discernible pattern in the weight and/or length of pieces making up individual hoards. For instance, one hoard might have a lot of smaller fragments, and another larger ones. That would demonstrate intentionality. However, the characteristics of bronze hoards (Wiseman studied British ones) shows that they can be best modeled as if they had each been accumulated randomly.

9) According to Wiseman, Europe's bronze hoards are best thought of as personal stashes of bronze haphazardly assembled from already-circulating bronze fragments. These bronze hoards were probably only meant to be buried for a few weeks or months. Instead they ended up being forgotten or lost.

10) Which gets us to our next theory for Europe's bronze fragments. If the bronze was not fragmented just prior to burial for religious reasons, but while it was still in circulation, might it have been fragmented for commercial reasons? More specifically, was bronze a form of currency?

11) In a recent paper, Nicola Ialongo and Giancarlo Lago provide what they believe could be evidence for the currency theory. Through a careful statistical analysis, the two archaeologists have found a relationship between bronze fragments and balance weights used by ancient Europeans to measure mass. They believe that this compliance of bronze pieces to a system of weights and measures is a good indication that bronze fragments were used as currency.

12) The technology for weighing things -- balance weights and bone/antler balance beams -- arrived in Southern Italy in Early Bronze Age (2300 to 1700 BC) and by 800 BC had been adopted all across Europe.

Bronze age balance weights from Southern Italy (source)

13) In an earlier paper published in 2018, Ialongo teamed up with Lorenz Rahmstorf to analyze around 500 stone and bronze balance weights found all across Europe. They find that these balance weights tend to form a sequence, illustrated below in a frequency distribution chart.

The frequencies of balance weights for each weight in grams (source)

As you can see, the balance weights mostly fall within a number of major clusters. Taking the cluster of weights at 9.6 grams as the base unit, it's possible to see a logical sequence of roughly 1⁄3, 2⁄3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 for all weights between 3.1 grams and 393 grams.

It's pleasing to see this regularity, because it's what you'd expect of weights -- a degree of standardization.

14) In his subsequent paper with Lago, Ialongo searched for a link between these balance weights and the bronze fragments found in hoards. The two archaeologists measured the weight of 1411 bronze fragments found in modern-day Italy, Poland, and Germany. They then compared this data to balance weights found all across Bronze Age Europe. What they found is that the bronze fragments seem to have been systematically broken up in a way such that their mass aligns with the system of weights.

15) Below is a chart that illustrates this statistical relationship.

Bronze fragments (right) comply with balance weights (left). Source

(The archaeologists have used a tool called cosine quantogram analysis to pin down this relationship. If you are interested in the details of this process, please refer to their papers. But to understand what this chart is saying, read on.)

16) On the left, the data for the balance weights is depicted. The bell-shaped purple region between 9 grams and 11 grams is where most of the balance weights lie (with a best fit of 9.6 grams). That is, most of the balance weights either had a mass of ~9.6 grams or some multiple of 9.6 grams. As a multiple of 9.6 grams, that means they may have clocked in at 19.2 grams (9.6 x 2) or 96.2 (9.6 x 10) or some other even multiple.

Likewise, the chart says that weights were unlikely to clock in at a weight of, say, 6 grams, or some multiple of 6 grams (like 12 grams, 18 grams, 60 grams etc). There is no bell-shaped concentration on the chart at 6 grams.

17) Ialongo and Luca describe this regularity as evidence of a pan-European weight unit, a shekel, of about 9.4 grams to 10.2 grams, the same unit Ialongo pinpointed with Rahmstorf a few years before.

18) The right side of the chart shows that the bronze fragments are broken up in a way that aligns with a theorized European shekel. The bronze fragments tend to fall in the orange zone, with a best fit of 9.8 grams. That means they either weigh about 9.8 grams or an even multiple of 9.8 grams. (But they almost never weigh 6 grams or a multiple of 6 grams).

I don't know about you, but I find this three thousand year-old regularity remarkable. Both the fact that it existed and that we teased it out so many years later.

19) Why might bronze have been fragmented in a way that seems to comply with the 9.4 gram European shekel? 

Presumably if bronze pieces were being used as a medium of exchange, then it would be convenient for those engaged in trade if those pieces were broken up into standardized 9.6 gram chunks (and its increments such as 19.2, etc). The possession of multiple cleanly cut pieces would have sped up the process of exchange, sort of like how having five $1 dollar bills and three $5 bills in your wallet is more convenient than having just one $20 bill. Having many denominations allows one to cleanly reach a wider number of amounts, buy more things, and transact with more people.

20) I don't think this quite gets us over the line to currency, though. 

Bronze could have simply been a popular commodity at the time, not a medium of exchange. But why did bronze fragments comply with the weight system if there was nothing monetary about them? Because it was convenient. Even if bronze was just a commodity, cutting it up in a standardized way would have simplified the process of trading it.

21) Ialongo and Lago don't stop there, though. They turn to the Middle East for an analogy. Evidence shows that hacksilver (bits of broken up silver) found at Ebla, a dig site located in modern day Syria, complied with balance weights found all over the Near Middle East. In a 2018 paper with Luca Peyronel and Agnese Vacca, Ialongo illustrates this relationship with a chart.

Middle Eastern balance weights and hacksilver (in green) tend to overlap (Source)

Both the balance weights (in non-green colours) and the hacksilver (in green) tend to accumulate at regular intervals such as 8.36 grams, 16.58, grams (which is 2 x 8.36), 82.77 (which is 10 x 8.36) etc. This makes sense, since archaeologists have long believed that ancient Mesopotamia used a standard weight unit of 8.4 grams

22) To continue with Ialongo and Luca's analogy...

The statistical relationship between metal fragments and balance weights that we see in Bronze Age Europe is very much the same as the one we see see in Middle East. But in the Middle East we have textual evidence that hacksilver was a popular medium of exchange. Europe lacks textual evidence. Given that we know that hacksilver was a form of currency in the Middle East, and said currency aligned to a system of weights, could that mean that the alignment of bronze fragments to a system of weights in Europe indicates that bronze was also a type of currency?

23) It's a provocative argument. Ialongo and Luca's paper is still new, so it'll be interesting to see what their peers have to say.

24) Even if you don't buy the currency argument, it's still neat to see how bronze pieces all over Europe were being fragmented according to the same European weight standard. It implies that Europeans weren't primitive and isolated. They were engaged in continental commercial trade with each other, and were connected enough to merit the development of standardized systems of weights and measures.

Hacksilver

1. Over the last month or two I've been following an interesting archaeological debate over the discovery of coinage. I thought I'd share it with you.

2. It's generally accepted by archaeologists and numismatists that the first coins were invented in Lydia, modern day western Turkey, in the 7th Century B.C.E. (i.e. 610 B.C.E. or so). The idea quickly spread to Greece. The Lydians used electrum, a strange silver/gold mix, to make their discs. (I wrote about electrum coins here). I've included an example below.

Electrum coin from Ephesus, 625–600 BC [Source]

We don't know exactly why the Lydians used electrum, or even if they treated their discs in the same way that future generations would use coins. But when the Greek city states copied Lydian coinage in the 6th Century, they didn't use electrum. Their coins were pure silver.

3. Lydia's electrum coins aren't the topic of this post. The debate that I'm going to describe revolves around the belief among some archaeologists that a form of proto-coinage had been invented prior to the Lydians and their electrum coins. This proto-coinage came in the form of sealed and regulated bags of hacksilver (more on hacksilver later).

Others archaeologists disagree. They are adamant that Lydia remains ground zero for coinage.

For lack of better terminology, I'll call the first group of archaeologists, those who think there was a predecessor sort of coin, the proto-coiners.

So relax and follow along.

4. By the way, mine is an outsider's account on the archaeology of money and coinage. I am not an archaeologist, so I will certainly get a few things wrong. Nevertheless, I am hoping that my regular monetary economics readership will enjoy learning how archaeologists attack the problem of money.

5. How popular was silver in ancient society?

"Silver served as the main measure of value, the means of payment and credit, and as an indirect form of exchange in Near Eastern economies from the mid-3rd millennium onward," write archaeologists Tzilla Eshell, Ayelet Gilboa, Naama Yahalom-Mack, and Ofir Tirosh (Eshel et al) in a 2018 article entitled Four Iron Age Silver Hoards from Southern Phoenicia. The Near East is a catch-all term for modern-day Israel, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, and Syria. I will return later to Eshel and coauthors' paper.

Morris Silver, an economist who researches ancient economies, describes Mesopotamian texts of the middle of the second half of the third millennium that show silver being used by street vendors, to pay rent, purchase dates, oil, barley, animals, slaves, and real estate.

According to archaeologists Seymour Gitin & Amir Golani (2004), Assyrian economic texts from the 7th C B.C. show that the majority of all types of payments were already being made in silver, including those for tribute, craftsmen obligations, and for conscription and labor commutations.

Cuneiform tablet, loan of silver [Source: The Met]

The Old Assyrian cuneiform tablet above from around 1900 B.C.E. says that 6 minas (c. 3 kg) of silver are owed by two men to the merchant Ashur-idi. One third of the loan must be paid by the next harvest and the rest at a later date. If it is not repaid by that time it will accrue interest charged at a monthly rate.

6. If silver had already become a sort of medium of exchange sometime between 3000 B.C.E. and 2000 B.C.E., it wasn't in coin form, but as hacksilver. By hacksilver, what is usually meant by archaeologists is silver ingots, hacked pieces of ingot, silver scrap, and cut up bits of silver jewellery.

Below are some examples of hacksilver:

Hacksilver (i.e. cut silver ingots) from four Phoenician hoards, 11th-9th century BCE.

Hacking may have been used to check the quality of silver. Pure silver was soft. It would have been easier to chisel than silver alloyed with copper.

See: https://t.co/IIlwXKSTaz pic.twitter.com/vWsV0PCUOg

— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) January 14, 2021

7. One reason for the hacking or cutting-up of silver may have been to make small change. If 2 grams of silver was required to make a payment, but a payee only had a single 10 gram ingot, then a small part of it had to be cut off.

8. Another less obvious reason for hacking, suggested by Eshel & coauthors, is that it may have been a way for merchants to check for quality. Pure silver is soft. Mixing copper into silver makes for a harder ingot. A solid smash to the ingot may have been the accepted way of verifying whether an ingot was good silver or not.

9. It wasn't till 610 BC or so that the Lydians made the first coins. So for over a thousand years, silver circulated as a medium of exchange, in hacked form.

10. The big innovation with coins is the stamp. Because we trust the issuer's brand, we needn't weigh out or assay (i.e. smash/hack) silver prior to engaging in trade. So trade was much more fluid.

If you think about it, branding metal is a pretty big step for a society to take. It means that laws, norms, and institutions have become established enough for people to be confident in something as abstract as an issuer's emblem. Too much fraud, warfare, and lawlessness, and branding breaks down—you've got to go back to weighing and hacking silver yourself.  

11. The proto-coiners don't agree that Lydia was the first to "brand" silver. They suggest that bagged and sealed hacksilver was already circulating in a way similar to coins. Some authority, perhaps a government administrator or a merchant, pre-weighed a certain amount of good hacksilver, bagged it, and affixed their seal to it. And so anyone who was offered the bag in trade could treat it just as they would a coin. As a verified amount of silver, it needn't be weighed or hacked. The bag would have been accepted according to whatever information was inscribed on the seal.

12. If the proto-coiners are right, that means our ancestors were better monetary innovators than we originally thought. It pushes the effective date of coinage technology back by 500 or so years.  

13. It's a fascinating debate, especially because it invokes a set of mysterious old hoards that archaeologists have discovered over the years. These hoards are typically hidden in clay jars underneath the floors of houses by their owners, probably for safekeeping. And then they were forgotten or some disaster befell their owner, only to be rediscovered thousands of years later. Who were these people? Why did their hoard get forgotten?

14. One of the key hoards around which the debate revolves is the Tel Dor hoard, which was found north of Haifa in Israel. It was excavated in the 1990s by Ephraim Stern, an Israeli archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. One element of the Dor hoard is an old jug filled with silver, below.

The Tel Dor hoard (a) as displayed in The Israel Museum and (b) in situ, looking east [Source: Eshel et al]

15. Stern's description of this jug (published in this 2001 paper) quickly filtered into the archaeological community. Christine Thompson, archaeologist and co-founder of the Hacksilber Project, used Stern's findings to build a proto-coinage argument. It's worth getting into the details of her argument (and subsequent rebuttals) to see how archaeologists think. You can find it in her 2003 paper, Sealed Silver in Iron Age Cisjordan and the ‘Invention’ of Coinage.

Thompson (channeling Stern) tells us that the Tel Dor hoard dates to somewhere between 1000 B.C.E and 900 B.C.E. The hoard consists of a jug containing 17 bundles of hacksilver wrapped up by linen cloth (see photo of one of the bundles below).

16. Together the silver weighs 8.5 kilograms, which at today's silver price is worth around $8,000. But that's not a great way to think about how much this hoard was worth. According to a very readable article by Tzilla Eshel, a half-gram of silver was equivalent to a day-worker's wage. So the entire hoard was the equivalent of forty-six years of labour. In modern day terms, that would value the purchasing power of the hoard at well above $1 million.

17. Stern has speculated that the hoard may have belonged to a Phoenician merchant who used the silver to build and equip ships, or to buy merchandise for eventual exchange with countries in the western Mediterranean.

18. Most of the linen wrapping in the Tel Dor hoard has long since disintegrated. Thompson notes that the bundles were closed with bullae, or clay seals. (See below). But these seals do not contain a name, just a pattern.

One of the silver bundles found at Tel Dor, and an illustration of a clay bulla, or seal. Source: Ephraim Stern in The Silver Hoard from Tel Dor [pdf]

19. If the bundles found in the Dor hoard were treated by their owner as coins, then one would expect them to weigh a standard amount, just like all modern nickels and quarters weigh the same. And that is the gist of Thompson's argument. According to her, the 17 bundles all appear to be the same weight. .
 
20. One of these bundles had been removed by Stern to be weighed. It registered at 490.5 grams. Thompson suggests that this 490.5 grams might align with usage of the Babylonian shekel unit of account. Under this archaic weight standard, each shekel weighed 8.3g, and 60 shekels was worth 1 mina. Thus a mina would have weighed 500 grams.

So the 490.5 gram bundle found at Dor comes close to an even mina. It's as if the bundle was a very large denomination mina coin. Thompson attributes the missing 10 or so grams to loss of a few small pieces due to disintegration of the cloth.

21. The purity of the Dor hoard is quite high, notes Thompson, suggesting that the bagged silver, like a coin, had been checked and regulated.

22. Thus Thompson has created a plausible theory about bags of silver being treated as coins. Like a coin, the sealed bags of hacksilver found at Dor had a certain purity and weight. Presumably people who received them in payment didn't have to weigh the silver. Nor did they have to assay the silver by hacking or smashing it.

23. It's a convincing theory. Now for the counter-theory.

24. Raz Kletter, an archaeologist at University of Helsinki, is not convinced by the idea of a proto-coinage. In a 2004 paper, he points to the nearby Tell Keisan hoard, dated to around 1000 B.C., which also contained wrapped hacksilver bundles. The hoard includes 6 or 7 bags of cloth, says Kletter. Two of them weighed in at 24.5 and 25 grams, suggesting that they may have conformed to the same denomination. But two of the other bags measured at a 32 and 100 grams respectfully, which muddies the waters. Moreover, Kletter says that the weights of the bags does not correspond clearly to any known standard of weights and measures.

25. Tel Dor hadn't finished telling its story, either. Recall that at the time Thompson was writing, 2003, only one of Dor's 17 bundles had been weighed. It came in at 490.5 grams, and Thompson ascribed to this bundle the possible value of a clean mina of 500 grams, less a few grams due to thousands of years of wear and tear.

But in 2018, Eshel & co-authors opened a second Dor bundle. They found that it measured just 420.6 grams, which doesn't conform as closely to a mina. So that undermined some of the arguments in favor of proto-coinage.

26. That's not all. Eshel & co-authors did a chemical analysis of four hoards including both Tel Dor and Tell Keisan. Recall that Thompson suggested that the purity of Tel Dor silver indicated a degree of regulation, much like a mint controls the silver content of a coin. But Eshel & co-authors found that the silver from Tell Keisan, though "piously" packed in sealed bundles, was not so pure. It contained large amounts of copper, suggesting that it was a forgery. (See photo below). If the whole point of bagging and sealing was to create a trustworthy medium of payment, the deliberately-alloyed Tell Keisan silver seems to contradict this.

A bundle of hacksilver from Tel Keisan. Its green colour betrays its copper content. When silver corrodes it tarnishes black, but copper produces a green rust. Source: The Torah

27. This collection of counter-observations somewhat weakens the argument for an early proto-coinage in the Near East. But there are probably plenty of yet-to-be discovered hoards. Who knows, perhaps the next one will contain bundles of provably standardized hacksilver. It certainly is a provocative idea.

28. If the role of bundling and sealing of hacksilver wasn't to create a proto-form of coinage, than what was its function? Eshel & co-authors suggest that bagging was little more than a convenient manner of storing one’s wealth. Taking out a single cloth bundle and weighing it would have been much less awkward than removing individual pieces one-by-one and weighing them. 

If you're interested in learning more about the ancient hacksilver economy, I'd suggest reading How Silver Was Used for Payment, recently published in The Torah. Tzilla Eshel, the archaeologist who co-authored one of the papers I cite in my blog post, is the author and has written it with the lay-person in mind.

In-game virtual items as a form of criminal money

A few weeks back Vice had an interesting story about Valve, a game maker, putting an end to trade in various in-game items because "worldwide fraud networks" had been using these items to "liquidate" their gains. You can see the blog post from Valve here:

"Why make this change? In the past, most key trades we observed were between legitimate customers. However, worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains. At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced."

Having not played a video game since the original Super Mario Bros, this all sounded all very strange to me. But I couldn't resist digging a little deeper. After all, strange media-of-exchange are a major theme here on the Moneyness blog.

Let's set the stage. Anyone who plays Valve games can access something called the Steam Community Market. Players can go to this market to buy and sell in-game items from each other. So for instance, a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive game player may want to buy (or sell) a "skin" which is a texture that can make their gun look fancier. Some skins are apparently quite rare and valuable.

To make a purchase, players will need to have some funds in their Steam Market wallet. Wallets can be funded by credit card or a gift card. The catch is that once funds are on Steam, they cannot be directly transferred to other players. I can't send $100 in Steam balances directly from my Steam wallet to my friend's Steam wallet. Funds can only be used to buy items from other players. Furthermore, there is no way to cash-out of the system. Once money is deposited into Steam, it never leaves.

Now let's get to the fraud stuff, and we'll circle back to Steam later. Say that I'm a fraudster. My shtick is to dial up corner stores, claim that there is a bomb hidden in one of the aisles, and ask for a ransom of $5000 or I will set it off. The store owner has 30 minutes buy five $1000 MoneyPaks, then text me their PIN numbers. Upon which I quickly load the funds into my reloadable Green Dot prepaid debit card, the bomb being a hoax. (I kid you not, this is a true story).

Below is another variation of the scheme, the fraudster claiming to be law enforcement:

Bitcoin extortion scams are all the rage, but other semi-anonymous payments options like Green Dot prepaid MoneyPak cards will do in a pinch: https://t.co/gT2eEItrOw pic.twitter.com/xJCG1W1iDs

— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) September 11, 2019

There are many versions of these prepaid scams.

In any case, say I pull this threat off fifty times. This leaves me with $250,000 and a pile of prepaid cards. The Green Dot cards aren't linked to my identity, so I needn't worry. But I really want to do something with my money, say buy a house. To do so I will somehow have to get the $250,000 into my bank account, and probably quickly before the money gets frozen. How do I do this safely? Obviously I can't just directly transfer the money from my card to my account. The authorities will connect the dots pretty quick and arrest me. I need to obfuscate the transaction chain.

And that's presumably where Valve's Steam Community Market comes in. If I can send the stolen funds through a market like Steam, maybe I can throw off anyone who comes after me.

First, I go to as many drug stores as I can and use my prepaid cards to buy up Steam gift cards. I'd have to buy around 500 or so $500 cards. And then I upload the $250,000 in card value to a bunch of online Steam accounts that I've created.

Remember, Valve doesn't allow for cash-outs, so the money is effectively frozen in Steam. This is where the items listed on the Steam Market come into play. I now buy $250,000 worth of skins or some other digital knick-knack. These items are now my get-out-of-jail card.

I proceed to sell the items I've stockpiled to other players who desire them for legitimate in-game use. The important thing here is to get actual dollars in return, not Steam dollars. I won't use Steam's in-game market for this, but third-party venues like OPSkins, Bitskins, or Skins.cash. Each of these sites provides an external trading venue where buyers and sellers of in-game items can meet and advertise prices. They also offer a wallet and escrow service to ensure neither buyer nor seller scams the other.

Since I'm in a rush to sell my virtual items, I'll probably lowball my prices on OPSkins, which means I may only get $150,000 for the original $250,000 I've spent. This is a great deal for regular game players. They don't have to fund a Steam account with, say, a $100 credit card transfer. Instead they can buy items from me for $70 on OPSkins and sell them on Steam for $100, saving themselves $30!

I then have OPSkins wire the $150,000 I've earned to my genuine bank account. And now I buy a house. Voila, I've hidden the source of the my money by running it through Steam. Somewhere between converting my prepaid funds into Steam gift cards, and then buying digital items with them, and then selling them, a would-be law enforcement agent will likely lose my scent.

Now that's roughly what I think that Valve is talking about in its blog post when it talks about "fraud networks", add or subtract a few steps. I wouldn't know, I'm just a writer.

What about Valve's response to the fraudsters? From what I gather, one of the most liquid items on the Steam Market are Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) keys. The price of keys is quite stable. Valve sells them at a fixed price, whereas the price of other goods are set by the Steam community, and fluctuate. And so keys have become a sort of currency. By adopting keys as their exit route, fraudsters would have made them even more liquid, and thus better capable of serving as a medium of exchange.  

Valve's defence is to freeze keys. "Starting today, CS:GO container keys purchased in-game can no longer leave the purchasing account," it said. This effectively cuts off any fraudster from existing the system... via the key route. However, there remain many other CS:GO items that folks can buy on Steam and sell on third-party exchanges like OPSkins. And there are other games that provide in-game items, like Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2. One wonders if some other item will become a go-to digital currency for fraudsters now that the CS:GO key route has been terminated. On Reddit, a few players speculate that Dota 2 Arcanas will take the place of CS:GO keys.

Usage of in-game virtual items as a bridge currency of sorts isn't without precedent. When conditions are right, instruments that we don't traditionally use as money, like CS:GO keys, get recruited for that purpose. Usually this occurs because there is some sort of hurdle or friction that prevents mainstream media-of-exchange from functioning, and only an exotic instrument can overcome that speed bump.

Equities are one of the more common exotic media-of-exchange. For instance, to avoid exchange controls Zimbabweans have traded in the inter-listed shares of Old Mutual, lifting them from the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange to London. Argentinians used American Depository Receipts in 2001 to dodge the "corralito". I wrote about both of these here.

More recently, gold was recruited as a payments rail for evading Obama's sanctions.

Heck, even I'm guilty. In Canada, retail foreign exchange conversion fees are ridiculously high thanks in part to our banking oligopoly. So I use Norbert's Gambit to get around the blockade. The gambit involves using dual-listed stocks or ETFs as a bridging asset between U.S. dollars and Canadian dollars. Debit card fraudsters are doing the same when they use CS:GO keys as a go-between asset for cleaning their money.

The desire to engage in trade is voracious. Blockades may be put up, but people will devise all sorts of ingenious monetary solutions for getting around them.