The overconsumption theory of bitcoin (and decentralization in general)

Bitcoin mining farm (via CoinDesk)

There are two extreme theories about cryptocurrency energy consumption, both of them bitterly opposed to each other. The first I'll call the big waste theory. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum serve no useful purpose. Yet they are sucking up huge amounts of useful electricity. Let's ban them.

The second theory is the vital cog theory. Cryptocurrencies are a useful bit of global financial infrastructure. And so the huge amounts of energy that they are consuming is beneficial. Let's not impede them.

(This is an adaptation of an article I wrote for the Sound Money Project. Do head over to read it.)

In this post I'm going to trace a reasonable path between these two extremes with an overconsumptionist theory of bitcoin and decentralized technologies.

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The vital cog theorists are right about one thing. Decentralized technologies like Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum are useful.

But here's my modifier. These curious technologies are only inherently useful to a small group consisting of hobbyists, outsiders, and criminals. It's in the nature of a hobbyist to seek out complex and obscure things (such as decentralization, rare stamps, or ham radio) and consume it in abnormally large quantities. As for outsiders, they may get cut off from centralized service providers because they are engaged in legal but unfashionable activities. They need a decentralized alternative that can't censor them. Finally, criminals are drawn to places where they can operate unimpeded. Decentralized technologies are perfect for that.

For mainstream audiences, however, decentralized services are without value. Regular folks don't have a hobbyist's sensibilities for abstruseness, nor do they have the outsider's problem of being cut off from mainstream technologies, nor do they engage in criminal behavior. Introducing them to Bitcoin or Ethereum is like opening up a $5000 '67 Merlot for a friend who thinks all wines are the same – it's overkill.

Which gets us to the big waste theorists. They are right. Huge amounts of energy are being wasted by decentralized technology. Electricity thrown down the toilet.

But electricity isn't being wasted for the reasons that the big waste theorists typically put forth. Decentralized technologies are truly useful for passionate hobbyists and disconnected outsiders.

Rather, let's blame all the mainstream users who have decided to onboard themselves into these expensive energy-intensive technologies. Most mainstream users don't get any utility from decentralization. And so the huge amounts of electricity being devoted to their activities is wasteful.

More concisely, the problem isn't that bitcoin is wrong. The problem is that society is consuming too much bitcoin.

Next, I'm going to try and explain why mainstream users are over-consuming decentralization.

No doubt about it. Decentralization is EXPENSIVE. The process of securing a decentralized ledger requires thousands of competing computers, or miners, to perform redundant calculations. I’m not going to give a detailed description of how this mining process works. Suffice to say that it demands massive amounts of electricity. The miners who burn this energy don't work for free. They have to be paid significant amounts of money to cover their energy bills.

By contrast, centralized ledger technology, say an Excel spreadsheet, sips energy. That's because storing and updating a centralized ledger requires a single computer. Here is Matt Levine on ExcelCoin:

This cracked me up...Bloomberg's Matt Levine on Musk's quest for a more energy efficient crypto pic.twitter.com/fIv2QeIeSH

— Chris Weston (@ChrisWeston_PS) May 13, 2021

If decentralized ledgers are so pricey, why are mainstream users migrating over to them? Your neighbour owns Litecoin, your daughter holds Dogecoin, and your brother-in-law has some Bitcoin. Shouldn't these people be sticking to cheaper centralized options like ExcelCoin? After all, regular folks don't typically pay $6,000 for a '67 Merlot. They're perfectly happy buying a 2018 Pinot for $12.

I suspect that mainstream users are switching over because they don't directly experience the huge costs of decentralization. That is, they don't see the a line item called  "decentralization costs" in their monthly bills. There is no uncomfortable feeling of fees draining out of their wallets to pay electricity guzzling miners.

But these costs do exist. The problem is that they get paid in a very opaque way. Most of the costs of supporting decentralized networks come in the form of "inflation," or the issuance of new coins.

Below I've built a table showing how much it costs in inflation, or new coins, to support seven popular decentralized networks:

So for instance, every 13.2 seconds the Ethereum network creates two new Ether tokens out of nothing to pays to miners. At a price of $3,780 per token, this comes out to around $49 million per day, or $18 billion per year. Given that the value of the entire Ethereum network is $440 billion, this $18 billion in maintenance amounts to 4.1% per year.

4.1% is a lot. It's waaaay more costly than Matt Levine's ExcelCoin. My Vanguard ETF management fee comes out to just 0.1% or so.

But as I said, Ethereum users don't actually feel the pain of a yearly 4.1% fee. If you hold 10 Ether tokens, it's not as if 0.41 of that gets deducted from your personal stash each year.

The same goes for Bitcoin. Around $16 billion in new bitcoins gets paid to miners each year. That's 1.8% of the total value of the network. But bitcoiners don't actually see their balances being docked a 1.8% fee. Nor do Dogecoin holders have to foot Dogecoin's 4.1% maintenance, or Litecoin fans feel the pain of Litecoin's 3.9% mining costs.

Some of you are probably thinking: Ok JP, maybe you're right. Cryptocurrency users don't have to pay explicit fees. But surely mining costs are personally felt because they dilute the value of everyone's holdings? Doesn't this dissuade mainstream users from switching over to crypto?

Put differently, the point being made is that the $18 billion (or 4.1%) in new Ether push down everyone's Ether balances by a corresponding 4.1% each year. Likewise, Bitcoin's 1.8% inflation push everyone's bitcoin balances down by 1.8%.

Nope. There's no such thing as dilution.

That's because each networks' entire issuance schedule is already built into its price. Bitcoin's $50,000 price already includes the fact that Bitcoin miners must be paid 1.8% each year in new bitcoin.

I tried to explain how this works in my Sound Money article, but I'll repeat it here. Every two weeks Microsoft must pay its employees. But if I own Microsoft shares, the price of my shares doesn’t fall every time employee payday arrives. The price of Microsoft shares already includes the information that salary must be paid.

The same goes for Bitcoin. The fees paid to miners, like Microsoft’s salaries, are already factored into Bitcoin’s price.   

So people who hold cryptocurrencies don't feel any of the painful costs of decentralization. They neither endure explicit recurring fees nor regular price dilution. And so they are consuming expensive decentralization on the false sense that it is a free good.

Which gets us back to our two theories. The big waste theory says that all consumption of decentralization is wasteful. The vital cog theory says that none of it is wasteful. My middle of the road theory is that only the mistaken, accidental consumption of blissfully unaware mainstream users is wasteful.

Say that users actually had to pay an explicit 4.1% Dogecoin mining fee each year out of their own pocket, or a 1.9% Bitcoin mining fee. Our story would be very different.

Connoisseurs of decentralization would be happy to pay these fees. So would outsiders and criminals. But most people wouldn't. The moment Coinbase starts docking a fee every 10 minutes from Joe Regular's Coinbase account, Joe is going to move his $1000 back to the ExcelCoin alternative, say a centralized options & futures account. Or maybe to a sports betting website.*

And thus if the costs of decentralized technologies—Dogecoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Zcash, and whatnot—were transparent, they would never have gained such a widespread user base. And we wouldn't be in the midst of the energy consumption disaster we are in.

The big waste theory calls for a ban on cryptocurrency. The vital cog theory calls for acceptance. Splitting the difference, why not fix the mistake of overconsumption by levying a yearly tax on the value of cryptocurrency holdings? Like a carbon tax, it would force mainstream users to internalize the costs of consuming decentralization. But unlike a ban, it would allow outsiders and hobbyists to continue to use decentralized products.

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* Even if we made the painful costs of decentralization explicit, would this actually stop people from playing? From the mainstream user's perspective, the attraction of buying Dogecoin is to make a 1000% return. Even if people have to pay a 4.1% decentralization fee out of their own pocket (rather than via opaque inflation), they may be willing to still play if only to get exposure to a potential jackpot.

A nickel is worth more than a nickel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's the solution? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is DeFi unregulatable?

 Government's can't regulate DeFi, can they? It's too wild and uncontrollable.

DeFi, or decentralized finance, is the set of anarchic financial tools built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. These tools mimic what you'd see in the real world. MakerDAO is a decentralized bank, Compound and Aave are decentralized lending marketplaces (like Lending Tree), and Uniswap is an exchange, like the NASDAQ, except on a blockchain.

Unlike regular financial institutions, none of these Ethereum-based institutions operates with a license, registration, or a permit.

MakerDAO, for instance, recently financed some real world mortgages by issuing U.S. dollar deposits. So it seems to be operating as a commercial bank. However, MakerDAO hasn't secured a banking license from any of the world's biggest banking regulator, say OSFI, the FCA, OCC or any of the 50-some U.S. state financial departments.

Because DeFi is so new, it operates in a grey zone. On the one hand we can argue that the collection of smart contracts and governance mechanisms that comprises MakerDAO probably ought to do the bankerly thing and apply for a banking license. On the other hand there doesn't seem to be an express written rule about smart contracts on Ethereum requiring licensing.

But lets say that a bank regulator made an explicit announcement that MakerDAO and other DeFi tools acting as banks all had to get a license. Could MakerDAO get away without complying?

Because tools like MakerDAO are built on blockchains, and blockchains are too wild to be controlled, the theory is that there is no way for a regulator to exert sufficient pressure on the tool owners to instigate change. MakerDAO's owners will just laugh and keep doing what they've been doing. So would Aave, Uniswap and Curve. Smart contracts are just bits of unstoppable code, after all. They can't be punished for non-compliance. 

So DeFi is not only unregulated, goes the theory. It is unregulatable.

I think regulating DeFi would be fairly easy. U.S. regulators just announce "thou art now regulated and must comply with the following set of rules" and that'd be sufficient. Pretty soon, the biggest DeFi tools would fall into line.

Much of a regulator's leverage is exerted indirectly, via users. Even if the operators/administrators of major DeFi tools are against the idea of falling into line, their users will drag them towards it. 

Right now, the status of most DeFi tools is undefined. Users aren't doing anything illegal by interacting with them. They aren't doing anything legal, either. So people just shrug and use them. But regulation would change that status. Suddenly, tools and their users would be placed squarely in the illegal category, albeit with a pathway to legality.

U.S.-based financial institutions make up the largest group of financial tool users. And financial institutions generally prefer to avoid doing unlawful things, say like connecting to illegal financial tools. Retail customers, a less important customer group, are less picky. Some will do illegal things. But they mostly prefer to be on the side of the law.
 
That means any decentralized financial tool that wants to continue capturing the two biggest pools of money —institutional capital and licit retail funds—will have to make it legal for these users to connect to them. The proper licenses will have to be secured, regulatory-compliant smart contracts created, and a mechanism devised for users to port over. The biggest DeFi tools will choose to conform... if they want to stay the biggest.  

Sure, plenty of DeFi tools won't bother complying with regulation. But these tools will only end up appealing to an underground clientele, and that's always going to be a smaller market than the pool of licit users.

Network effects will be on the side of regulators. Read on...

There will always be DeFi users (traders, borrowers, liquidity providers, token issuers etc) who are indifferent between lawful DeFi tools or illegal tools. They just want to use the best ones. These agnostics will probably end up using the regulated tools by default. That's because the biggest pool of capital is always going to be licit capital that sticks to lawful trading venues. And so regulated DeFi tools will end up with the best liquidity, tightest spreads, and lowest fees. Hobbyists and criminals will put up with the low liquidity of unregulated DeFi, but everyone else's go-to choice will always be regulated DeFi.

This network effect operates in the same way as the U.S. government's decision to impose Daylight Savings Time. You may hate DST or you may be indifferent, you may not understand it or you may have forgotten about it. But come March 14 and November 7 you unfailingly move your clocks forward or backwards. Using a different clock than everyone else is just too much of a burden. Likewise, if the government announced a DST equivalent for DeFi, much of the space would get dragged, perhaps kicking and screaming, into a state of being standardized, or regulated. Remaining out-of-standard is too costly.

Regulated tools would probably stop interacting altogether with illegal tools. DeFi, currently an open playground, would further balkanize into underground DeFi and legit DeFi. Choosing underground DeFi would be an increasingly costly choice, since one risks being forever cut-off from legit DeFi.

So DeFi, or at least a big part of it, can probably be regulated. However, there will always be an unregulatable anarchic edge. Good luck stopping an Ethereum-based ponzi scheme, for instance. These are blockchains, after all. And they are open to everyone.

Why did Dogecoin take off but Feathercoin didn't?

Dogecoin makes us all shake our heads. Introduced in December 2013 as a joke, Dogecoin is now worth over $50 billion, more than Ford Motor Co. Meanwhile Feathercoin, a more serious cryptocurrency that debuted in April 2013 (and initially worth more than Dogecoin), is currently valued at a tiny $10 million.

Here's the December 2013 list of top cryptocoins. After the first 3, all of them are pretty much dead/inactive except for the one that was started as a joke and is now worth $17 billion. 🤷https://t.co/ImBu5CUxpr pic.twitter.com/R0tPBWl35C

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

How are we supposed to understand the strange thing that is Dogecoin?

Let's start by exploring what these odd instruments are. While Dogecoin and Feathercoin seem like an entirely new phenomenon, I'd suggest that they're both really just an updated version of a fairly old financial instrument. You may remember those chain letters your parents used to get in the mail. "Send $5 to each person on the list, then copy it (adding your name to the bottom) and send to their friends," the letter would say. "Then wait for the money to flow in."

Old fashioned chain letters were simple ranked lists that propagated through the post. Propagation occurred in a decentralized manner. There was no "schemer" administering the whole thing. Each player was responsible for abiding by the letter's rules.

Dogecoin (along with Feathercoin) is an updated version of your parent's decentralized chain letter. To begin with, the deployment mechanism is different. Doge propagates over the internet, not the post. Secondly, Dogecoin software ensures honesty. By contrast, old fashioned chain letters – reliant as they were on pen, paper and photocopy machine – were dogged by cheaters who snuck their name to the top of the list.

Rather than have people manually append their names to the list, Dogecoin software creates all the entries in at the outset. And instead of being hierarchical, all spots in the Dogecoin list are equal, or fungible. (All of this goes for Feathercoin, too.)

But other than that, the core concept of a chain letter remains the same: those who already have a spot in the decentralized list are paid off by late-comers.

Sophisticated markets have sprung up to serve those who want to buy & sell these modern honest and fungible chain letters. PayPal, Robinhood, and newly-public Coinbase all let users buy Dogecoin. And so Dogecoin has been effectively fused into the regular financial system.

This degree of mass adoption never happened with your parent's chain letters. Prior to the emergence of cryptocurrencies, chain letter list entries weren't fungible. And so secondary markets never developed. Lacking any sort of integration into regular finance, the chain letters of the 1980s and 90s never went beyond being a sketchy underground phenomenon.

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Fans of honest & fungible chain letters (or HFCLs) like to explain them by adopting the complicated rhetoric of monetary economics. Feathercoin says it is for "feather lite payments." More famously, Bitcoin has been variously marketed as a "coin", a store of value, digital gold, or a form of electronic cash destined to "replace fiat currency." This has given the cryptocurrency sector a certain gravitas.

But as Joe Weisenthal points out, Dogecoin doesn't have any of these pretensions. It's just a fun token with a Shiba Inu dog as a mascot. And so all of the rhetoric that traditionally gets attached to cryptocurrency is conveniently stripped away. We get to see Dogecoin and Bitcoin for what they truly are, HFCLs.

Dogecoin's cuddly Shiba Inu has proven be a great tool for propagation, better even than bitcoin's marketing strategy of co-opting the stodgy lingo of monetary economists. In the chart below, I compare the market capitalization of the first 2,690 days of Dogecoin and Bitcoin respectively.

After 2,690 days, Dogecoin's market cap has hit $52 billion. This outranks bitcoin's market cap of $7 billion when it was 2,690 days old. Bitcoin didn't breach the $52 billion level until day 3137, more than a full year (447 days) after Dogecoin did. 

Think of market capitalization – the number of list entries multiplied by their current market value – as a measure of an HFCL's success. But take that number with a grain of salt. If all existing list entry owners actually did try to sell at once, an HFCL's value would fall to zero.

Nor is this the first time that Dogecoin has moved ahead of its older HFCL cousin. As the chart above shows, Doge's market capitalization outranked bitcoin through much of its early life. It also took the lead around days 1,300 and 1,600.

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Bitcoin fans aren't pleased. Dogecoin is a bit like your embarrassing younger sibling, the one that you want to hide in the closet because he/she reveals a little too much of the family's foibles. Cryptocurrency is supposed to be about monetary revolution, not fun dogs.

Bitcoiners have adopted various mental blocks to avoid being associated with coins like Dogecoin and Feathercoin. This involves publicly tarring any coin that isn't Bitcoin as a memecoin or a shitcoin. Not only are Dogecoin and Feathercoin categorically different from Bitcoin, they claim, but the category that they belong to is an inferior one.

I'll grant there are some differences, but none as deep as bitcoiners might prefer. Yes, Bitcoin is a bit older than Doge and Feathercoin. And they all have very different marketing techniques i.e. fun vs serious. And one of them, Dogecoin, has been (pound for pound) a bit more successful. But apart from that, they're all the same thing. They are all HFCLs.

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Whenever experts warn against chain letters, the point they always bring up is that chains cannot be sustained indefinitely. For everyone to make money, a chain letter must grow exponentially. But at some point the math stops working. There won't be enough people left on earth to feed the chain letter.

Does cryptocurrency have to end in tears? 

I'm not so sure. Yes, HFCLs require a constant stream of new players to buy in so that earlier players can exit at a profit. At some high enough market capitalization, there simply won't be enough buyers on earth to pay off ensuing waves of sellers. The HFCL collapses.

It doesn't have to collapse to zero, though. After a 90% or 95% fall the HFCL's price will start to stabilize. The peak-collapse-trough-mania-peak-collapse-trough-mania cycle begins anew.

Feathercoin offers a good template. Feathercoin and Dogecoin were both part of a huge influx of new HFCLs in 2012 and 2013. This crop included Peercoin, Terracoin, Novacoin, Litecoin, Sexcoin, Worldcoin, Ixcoin, and hundreds of others. You can see some of them on the list in the tweet at top of this post. Funny enough, I wrote about the 2012-13 cryptocurrency wave on my blog: see here and here. (Wow, hard to believe I've been doing this for so long.)

Below is a chart of Feathercoin's market capitalization over the last eight years. It has generally moved around between a trough of $100k-$1m and a peak of $10m-$100m. (Note that I am using a log scale axis.) Buy Feathercoin early and hold till its peak and you've effectively turned $100 into $10,000. It is this whiff of huge gains that tempts people into playing HFCLs. Buy too late, however, and your $100 becomes $1.

Of the 2012-13 crop of HFCLs, many of them look like Feathercoin. They haven't grown, but they still exist. Dogecoin is different (and so is Bitcoin). It shares the same general peak-to-trough pattern as Feathercoin. But its peaks and troughs have been steadily rising. 

What I think is happening here is that there is a huge pent up demand to play HFCLs. They are a fun way to potentially make huge amounts of money. But this demand eventually gets focused on a few lucky chains. After all, the market doesn't need 200 HFCLs when two or three large one will do. 

How does the market settle on two or three? I suspect it probably comes down to luck. Finicky things like mascots, logos, influencers, and catchy names probably play a role too. In Bitcoin's case, being first is a huge benefit. And so most HFCLs sort of putter around like Feathercoin. They don't die. But they don't expand either. 

I suspect that Dogecoin and Bitcoin will eventually follow the same pattern as Feathercoin. Growth will peter out. Peaks will start to roughly align with previous peaks. Troughs will form at the same level as previous troughs. And in-between these peaks and troughs, huge fortunes will continue to be made and lost.

The Biden stimulus and the big jump in cash

Since mid-March, the stock of U.S. banknotes has surged by $45 billion. That's a 2.1% increase in just 30-days.  

This jump surprised me (ht to David Beckworth, who brought it to my attention). That's because cash demand patterns are typically quite predictable. We always see a seasonal Christmas/New Year's rush for cash. After Christmas vacation is finished the stock of cash always falls as notes and coins are returned to banks. For the rest of the year the stock of notes slowly rises. During crisis (i.e. Y2K, 9/11, the 2008 credit crisis, and the coronavirus panic) the demand for cash spikes.

But there shouldn't be a cash surge in the middle of a quiet March.

To see how odd this spring's jump in the stock of cash is, I've plotted banknote data from the period beginning November 2020 to now and compared it to equivalent November-to-October periods from 2013-2019. (I've omitted 2020 due to coronavirus-induced oddities). To better facilitate comparison, I've set the opening banknote balance for each period to 1.

The large increase in cash beginning in mid-March 2021 goes far beyond the range set between 2013 and 2019. (Also, take a look at the strange out-of-season pattern in January. We'll get into that further down.)

Here's what I think is happening. On March 13 the Biden stimulus checks started to arrive. For the next few months around 150,000 150 million Americans are expected to receive individual payments of $1400. Those with a child dependent will receive an additional $1400. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the total amount of stimulus is budgeted at $411 billion. By now most of this amount has already been sent out, either in the form of direct deposit, a paper check, or a plastic prepaid debit card.

We'd expect Americans to withdraw a chunk of the $411 billion in stimulus in the form of cash. After all, many people still like to use cash for payments. And many businesses still operate on a cash-only basis. As the chart shows, that's exactly what has happened.

Because banknote patterns are stable, we can use data from previous years to get a pretty good idea about what the stock of cash would be absent stimulus checks. Using weekly data from 2013 to 2019 to infer 2021 numbers, I estimate that there would normally be around $2.067 trillion in banknotes outstanding by mid-April. But this number is clocking in at $2.101 trillion. So thanks to the Biden stimulus, there appears to be $34 billion in extra notes that wouldn't otherwise be there. This averages out to $100 per American.

There are a lot of assumptions in this estimate. I'm assuming that the Biden checks are the only factor explaining the difference between the actual stock of banknotes and an imputed "no stimulus" stock. But this assumption could be wrong.

Cash being withdrawn into circulation is a sign that the stimulus is working. As Claudia Sahm writes here, one goal of a stimulus is to kick-start a self-reinforcing spending loop. My spending on goods & services at your businesses encourages you to spend on goods & services, which gets the next person to do the same. The big jump in cash-in-circulation shows that people are indeed spending their $1400 stimulus rather than saving it in their bank accounts. Put differently, if we didn't see any increase in cash-in-circulation we'd be worried that the $1400 stimulus was being hoarded, not spent.

By the way, we can also see the effects of Trump's earlier stimulus on cash demand in the above chart. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, signed into law in late December 2020, entitled all American adults to a one-time $600 plus $600 per child dependent. The CBO set the total cost of Trump's stimulus checks at $164 billion. This round of checks began to arrive in bank accounts on December 30 and continued into January.

But here things get a bit more complicated. The $600 stimulus payments began to be distributed around New Year, thus overlapping with the traditional unwinding of the big Christmas/New Year splurge in cash. This year the Christmas/New Year effect may have been muted given that many families avoided vacationing and travel due to COVID-19. But in any case, the two effects have counterbalanced each other. The traditional post-New Year's slump in the banknote stock didn't occur this January. Instead, banknotes-in-circulation slowly grew thanks to the stimulus check effect.

The chart shows that by late February 2021 the stock of banknotes had returned to its 2013-2019 average. This suggests that all of the extra Trump stimulus that had been withdrawn as cash had been spent at shops, only to be redeposited at banks, and then the Federal Reserve.

I suspect that the same thing will likely happen with the Biden stimulus. By June, the big bulge in cash will have shrunk. Having been spent, the notes will be sent back by retailers to their bank via Brinks trucks, and then on to the Fed.

One would hope that not all of it disappears. As I suggested earlier, stimulus is supposed to set off a multiplier effect. When this effect has played out, prices and/or output should all have risen by a bit. This means that the ending stock of cash should be a bit higher than before. After all, if the economy has improved, then we all need to hold a bit more cash in our pockets to support our new spending habits.

From Circle-of-Gold to Mega$Nets to Bitcoin

We tend to dismiss chain letters as mere scams or frauds. In this post I want to get readers thinking about chain letters as a type of financial innovation, one that has been steadily updated over the decades.

Chain letters are lists. Players own a spot on that list. That list is governed by a rule: the first people on the list are to be paid by the latecomers. The chain letter stop working, or paying out, when no one else wants to join up.

The amount of money flowing to early-birds who joined the list is equal to the amount arriving from latecomers. No additional value gets created. That's why chain letters are zero-sum games.

The greatest technological strength of a chain letter is its decentralization. Each node, or participant, is independently responsible for receiving, copying, updating, distributing, and marketing the chain letter. Without a central schemer to indict, it's almost impossible for the authorities to stop the letter from propagating. Think of chain letters as the honey badgers of the financial world: tough, indestructible, and durable.

One of the most famous chain letters was the Circle of Gold letter. It reportedly started out in San Francisco and ripped through the rest of the U.S. in 1978. Here's how it worked:

In brief, I'd buy a copy of the Circle of Gold letter from you for $50 cash, and then mail $50 to the name at the top of the list, for a total outlay of $100. I'd then make two copies (removing the name at the top of the list an inserting my own at the bottom) and sell each for $50 to friends/family, for a total of $100, thus breaking even. The buyers in turn made copies and sold them on, the chain continuing. At some point my name would arrive at the top of the list and the money would begin to arrive in my mailbox.

Law enforcement declared the Circle of Gold letter to be illegal. But there was little they could actually do to stop it.

Chain letters like Circle of Gold may be difficult to eradicate, but they suffer from two big problems. I'll explain each of these problems, and also show how they were eventually fixed.

If decentralization is a chain letter's greatest strength, it is also the root cause of its main weakness. A buyer of a Circle of Gold letter had an incentive to break the rules by sneaking their name to the top of the list. Without a centralized administrator, there is no one who can prevent players from cheating.

This is the first weakness of chain letters. We'll call it the dishonesty problem. The dishonesty problem undermines a chain letter's credibility. If everyone knows that cheating will be rampant, they won't bother getting involved at all. Thus the odds of a letter widely propagating is going to be quite low.

To help make a chain letter more transmissible, what is needed is some sort of procedure that solves the dishonesty problem while preserving decentralization.

Enter Mega$Nets.

Mega$Nets was an ingenious 1990s-era chain letter that relied on software to prevent cheating. Here's how it worked:

• I buy a $20 Mega$Nets disk $20 from you
• After booting up the software I'd be asked to input my name and address, which was now locked into the program
• Before I could make copies of the disk, I had to mail $20 in cash to five others above me on the list. Once the $20 was received, these people would mail a code back to me.
• Only after I had entered the codes into the software could I duplicate the disk and sell it for $20. If the chain grew and my name worked up the list, I'd eventually start receiving a stream of $20 payments in the mail.

Mega$Nets software prevented names and addresses from being erased, thus preserving the list order. Importantly, it solved the dishonesty problem without compromising the decentralized nature of a chain letter. After all, Mega$Nets software ran independently on each individual machine, not from a central server.

Source: Donald Watrous's chain letter links

If Mega$Nets solved the dishonesty problem of chain letters, it didn't stay around very long. Eventually a programmer hacked Mega$Nets and figured out how to cheat the system. To undermine trust in the chain letter, he published his crack to the internet so that others could download it.

Now let's get to the second major weakness of traditional chain letters. Even if a chain letter manages to solve the dishonesty problem, it still suffers from another big weakness: lack of fungibility.

Fungibility is the idea that all members of a population are perfectly interchangeable with each other. Rice is fungible because one grain of rice is pretty much identical to another. My Tesla shares are fungible with yours. Dollar bills are fungible.

But positions in a chain letter like Mega$Nets are not fungible. A spot at the top of a chain is more valuable than a spot further down. And a spot on branch A of the Mega$Nets chain may have a different value than a spot at an equivalent height on branch B of Mega$Nets.

This lack of fungibility impinges on a players' ability to sell their spot in the chain letter to someone else. With every position in a chain letter being radically different, it's a huge chore for potential buyers to evaluate the market value of any single spot. And so a healthy resale market for chain letter spots can never develop.

Why would we want to be able to sell out of a chain letter? One of the big attractions of buying stocks, ETFs, bonds, gold, or currency is that we can resell these instruments, maybe two minutes later, maybe two decades later. If we are locked into an investment forever, we probably wouldn't want to invest very much in the first place. Likewise with chain letters. If a spot in a chain letter can be easily resold at a later time, then making an initial investment in the chain letter becomes a much more attractive proposition.

But is it possible to design a fungible chain letter? And if so, can we also solve the honesty problem while preserving decentralization? It sounds impossible.

Enter bitcoin, the world's first honest & fungible chain letter.

The novelty with bitcoin is that there is a fixed number of spots in the list.* New players can only join by purchasing a pre-existing position in the chain.** 

This approach is different from a more traditional chain letter like Mega$Nets or Circle of Gold. With Mega$Nets, the list is dynamic, not static. The number of spots in the list starts out small and expands organically as people join up, append their name, and generate a new spot in line. No need to buy someone's position out. Just add your own. New spots, however, are subservient to old spots

But Bitcoin software creates all spots on the list ahead of time, so no spot is superior or inferior to the others unlike . All bitcoin positions are fungible from the get-go.

As with every other chain letter, players "win" at Bitcoin by being early. The difference is that with bitcoin, winning is achieved by being one of the first to buy up a spot in a fixed non-hierarchical list. With a traditional chain letter like Mega$Nets, winning is achieved by creating one of the first entries in a hierarchical list that lengthens over time. Either way, the earlier one arrives, and the more latecomers who join up down the road, the richer one gets.

Because every single spot on the bitcoin list is fungible, buyers can easily appraise the worth of any single bitcoin (i.e. chain letter spot). And so a robust secondary market for bitcoins has developed where early bitcoin players fluidly auction off their positions to newer players. This marketability is one of the things that has turned bitcoin into such an incredibly contagious chain letter.

Bitcoin doesn't just solve the fungibility problem. It also fixes the dishonesty problem. Bitcoin software ensures that it is impossible for anyone to conjure up a new spot on the bitcoin list, or re-arrange the distribution of existing spots. (Some people describe this as solving the double-spending problem of electronic cash, but in this blog post it is the honesty problem of chain letters that is being fixed).

Finally, bitcoin achieves all this while being just as decentralized as its chain letter predecessors. 

Bitcoin is decentralized because individual participants can buy and sell bitcoin (i.e. spots in the list) in bilateral pairwise meetings. No need to rely on a central planner to distribute funds from late entrants to early birds. Secondly, much like Mega$Nets software, bitcoin software is deployed on thousands of computers all over the world. No central server. So like its traditional chain letter predecessors, bitcoin is very difficult for the authorities to attack.

In conclusion...

At first blush bitcoin seems like an entirely novel financial technology. But as I suggested in my post, it's just a meaner & badder version of chain letters like Circle of Gold and Mega$nets. 

What is revolutionary about bitcoin is how it has modified the chain letter model in order to solve the dishonesty and fungibility problems. Until bitcoin arrived in 2009, we had never seen the full capabilities of chain letters. Sure, chain letters regularly popped up, but they never lasted for more than a year or two. They were niche financial games played by odd people. Upstanding folks didn't touch them.

By solving the two problems of chain letters, bitcoin has radically dialed up the contagion factor for chain letter technology to a degree never experienced before. Bitcoin has become the first chain letter to go mainstream. It is the first chain letter to go global. Your sister is playing, your cousins are in, and so is your neighbour. Old-fashioned chain letters were for folks on the fringe. But playing bitcoin is something that regular people do. The abnormal ones are those who haven't yet secured a spot in line.

 

*Bitcoin has a 21 million cap. These 21 million coins were not created at inception. However, the protocol sets out the rules for their creation ahead of time.

** Players can also join by "mining" bitcoins. Mining is one of the processes that updates & secures the chain letter. Computers that engage in mining are rewarded with new bitcoins and/or a small fee out of the existing stock of bitcoins.

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.

Tether, a bigger badder PayPal

My recent article on Tether, a stablecoin, was just published at Coindesk. In the article I commented on Tether's recent settlement with the New York Attorney General's office. Because the settlement forces Tether to adopt a bunch of new practices, I think it's a win for stablecoin consumers.

Why have I been focusing so much of my time on Tether stablecoins? Diligent readers will recall I wrote about it twice last month. (1 | 2 ).

First, I've been writing about stablecoins for a long time now, and Tether has always been the biggest of the bunch. So it merits our attention. But it isn't just the biggest stablecoin. These days it's also becoming big by regular fintech standards. According to its website, Tether recently passed $35 billion in deposits, ranking it above PayPal's $34 billion. Which means that by my estimates it is now the largest U.S. dollar non-bank payments platform in the world ranked by customer funds.

Tether now holds $35.4 billion in customer funds, more than PayPal held at the end of last quarter.

Does that make Tether the largest fintech in the world ranked by US$ customer balances held?

Source 1: https://t.co/EjdXpH6wLR 2: https://t.co/wIz520nP5N

— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) March 2, 2021

Tether imprints dollars onto a blockchain. PayPal registers dollars in a centralized database. But apart from that, they're technically the same beast. Both keep some dollars (or not) on deposit with their banker and then issue dollar IOUs to their customers. And customers can in turn use these IOUs to make payments amongst each other.

The second reason I've been writing about Tether is that it is dubious. As I wrote here, it avoids U.S. money transmitter regulation by locating itself offshore. And it has somehow managed to wrest first spot away from PayPal despite doing very dangerous things with its customers' funds.

Its impropriety is a matter of public record. Even before last month's settlement with the New York Attorney General we already knew that, among other things, the firm had invested millions of dollars of customer money in a fraudulent third-party payments processor, all the while informing users that Tethers were backed by dollars "safely deposited in our bank accounts." If you want to get into this in more detail, Bennett Tomlin has been exploring these things in far more detail than I.

I am fascinated by this strange combination of popularity and sketchiness. And I'm not the only one. Tether analysis is a growing sub-field of cryptocurrency analysis.  

Tether is imbued with an aura of Trumpian invincibility. Hey, look at all these bad things we do. But we're getting away with it. The market keeps buying. We're bigger than PayPal! Tether's success makes outside observers wonder whether up is down, or bad is actually good.

But I want to dispel some of this seeming invincibility.

As I suggested in my Coindesk article, much of Tether's stablecoin dominance is probably due to network effects. That is, Tether was the first stablecoin to market, and so a Tether standard of sorts emerged. Like any standard, once everyone plugs into it it's hard to move away to a better standard. New and safer stablecoins—ones that have been licensed under a financial regulatory framework—have certainly emerged, including Paxos Standard, TrueUSD, Gemini Dollar, Binance USD, and USD Coin. But Tether enjoyed a four-year head-start, and so even if it murdered someone in the middle of 5th Avenue it would still be the leading stablecoin.

For instance, Tether is the only stablecoin that doesn't provide regular attestations.

Among stablecoins, attestations have become industry standard. An independent accountant is engaged to verify that the stablecoin has the reserves that it claims, according to an accepted standard for carrying out attestations. See table below. ⬇️

Two things stand out... pic.twitter.com/sGm9oJqwV0

— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) February 4, 2021

Why doesn't Tether make an effort to adopt an industry-wide practice? It could be that it is just too sketchy to be able to hire an accounting firm to provide attestations. Alternatively, maybe its position as the standard stablecoin means it needn't bother. It gets to coast while everyone else has to peddle.

But if it's difficult to move away from a given standard, its not impossible. The first example that pops to mind is how the international monetary system was on a British sterling standard in the 1800s, but now we use U.S. dollars. Somehow sterling dominance evaporated. The same can happen with Tether's dominance.

In fact, I'd argue that we're already seeing a movement away from the Tether standard, particularly in decentralized finance, the set of financial protocols established on the Ethereum network.

It's hard to underestimate how much decentralized finance, or DeFi, dislikes Tether. Consider the biggest DeFi lending platforms, Compound and Aave. Both platforms allow USD Coin stablecoins to serve as collateral. (USD Coin is the second largest stablecoin). But these platforms say no to Tether. That is, if you want to get a loan from Compound or Aave, you can't use your stash of Tether as security. As I pointed out in my article, Compound's decision is based on reports that Tether is “undercollateralized” and has the “potential to collapse at any time.”

MakerDAO, a combined stablecoin/lending protocol and one of the top-three DeFi tools, has also adopted a say-no-to-Tether policy . It sets a hawkish 8% borrowing rate and 150% collateralization ratio on anyone who wants to take out a Tether-backed loan. That may sound like gibberish, so let me translate. For a $100 loan from Maker you've got to lock-up a hefty $150 in Tethers. You'll pay 8% in interest each year on the loan.

But if you want to take out a USD Coin-backed loan (remember, USD Coin is one of the newer safer coins), Maker's terms are far more dovish. It'll cost 0% and 101%. So to get a $100 loan, you need only provide $101 in USD Coin. And the interest costs is nil.

Given Maker's policy, there's absolutely no reason why you'd take out a Tether-backed loan rather than a USD Coin one. And that's why to this day Maker has a measly $700 in Tether sitting in its smart contracts versus a massive $700,000,000 in USD Coin. Below is an abridged list of collateral that has been deposited in Maker as security. The top red circle highlights how much USD Coin (USDC), that it holds. And the bottom circle indicates its Tether (USDT) holdings.

Source: Makerburn

It's worthwhile to revisit the policy meetings where Maker originally established its Tether policy. Citing Tether's "history of opaqueness and fractional reserve," administrators recommended conservative parameters in order to "protect Maker." At the same time, looser parameters were suggested for Paxos Standard stablecoins because it was "significantly more transparent."

In another discussion, Maker community members disapprovingly cited a tweet in which Stuart Hoegner, Tether's lawyer, jokes about Tether's approach to safeguarding customer funds. I've screenshotted it below.

Source: MakerDAO forum

Maker voters went on to approve a stringent approach to policing Tether, and rightly so given Tether's cavalier approach to managing customer funds. Defi grew exponentially in 2020. So did Maker. But almost all of its thirst for stablecoins was directed into non-Tether stablecoins. That's why there's still just $700 in Tether in Maker.

A back-of-the envelope calculation reveals how much money Tether may have missed out on. Had Tether taken pains to become safer to consumers, say by providing regular attestations and/or applying for a money transmitter license (like USD Coin and other competitors have done), it might have around $300 million Tethers sitting in Maker right now. Assuming that it invested this extra $300 million at an interest rate of 1%, Tether would be earning $3 million more each a year. 

And that's just one platform. Do the same for Compound, Aave, and more, and Tether's reputation has cost it tens of millions of dollars in profit.

Below I've charted out the ratio of the total value of all Tether stablecoins in existence to the total value of all USD Coins.The Tether-to-USDC ratio typically registered around 10 Tethers to each USDC through 2019 and early 2020, but this month it fell below 4 for the first time. USD Coin is steadily catching up to Tether for the title of largest stablecoin.

We all like the idea of justice. If you shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue, people should be appalled. In the case of a financial company, if you manage your customers' funds in a reckless manner and avoid informing them about the mistakes you made (and then joke about it after), then the market should discipline you, not reward you.

In the case of Tether, that is happening. As the chart above illustrates, Tether's poor stewardship of customer funds means that it is inexorably being replaced by safer stablecoins. Gresham's law, the adage that bad money pushes out good money, does not apply. The good is slowly pushing out the bad.

Ponzis and bitcoin as a response to a bad economy: the case of Nigeria

Usually when I think about gambling and speculative excess, I've always associated it with giddy prosperity. When an economy is doing well, productivity is improving, new technology is being introduced, and unemployment is low, people have extra income that they can throw away at the casino. Or they put it into their brokerage account and, with the help of margin, generate speculative bubbles.

But lately I've been rethinking this view. Speculative bubbles and over-gambling are just as likely to be driven by sick and decaying economies as they are by prosperous ones. And Nigeria is a prime example of this.

Nigeria, one of Africa's largest major oil producer, plunged into recession in 2015 as oil prices collapsed. It saw only anemic growth from 2017 to 2019 before COVID-19 pushed it back into a much deeper recession.

Over that period Nigeria has seen an explosion of ponzi schemes. It started with MMM in 2016. Since then Ultimate Cycler, Icharity Club Nigeria, Get Help World Wide, Givers Forum, Twinkas, Crowd Rising, and Loom have all ripped through the country. Jack & Ibekwe (2018) provide a full list below, although it misses a large chunk of ponzis since it doesn't go past 2018.

Jack & Ibekwe (2018)

Jack & Ibekwe's paper is just one in a burgeoning Nigerian academic literature on ponzi schemes. This body of work provide us with plenty of useful information about what sorts of Nigerians are participating in ponzis and why.

How many Nigerians participate in ponzis? In a survey of 287 Port Harcourt business students, Bupo & Abam-Smith (2017) found that an astonishing 72% of students were involved in various ponzi schemes. Onoh's (2018) survey of 230 Nigerians found a participation rate of 78%.

The high participation rates that Bupo & Abam-Smith and Onoh pinpoint are confirmed in a 2016 poll run by NOIPolls, an established Nigerian polling agency. After querying 1000 Nigerians, NOIPolls found that 68% of survey participants had either participated in a ponzi, or knew someone who did. I would find a 5-10% national ponzi participation rate to be mindbogglingly high. But if the above data is correct, Nigeria far exceeds this. Given a population of over 200 million, tens of millions of Nigerians have participated in ponzis.

Who are the Nigerians that are playing? In their survey of 135 ponzi investors, Jack & Ibekwe found that young Nigerians aged 20-29 were most likely to be involved in ponzi schemes. Participants tended to be students and had post-secondary education. In a 2018 survey of 190 ponzi investors in the city of Calabar, Agba et al (2018) reported similar results. Most investors were unemployed, held a Bachelor of Science degree, and had a low income.

Another fact that blew my mind away is that many of the Nigerians who are involved in ponzis are self-conscious ponzi investors. That is, these aren't dupes. They know the nature of the game they're playing.

For instance, 66% the university students that Bupo & Adam Smith surveyed were aware that they were participating in a scam, one that would soon crash, but they played anyways, presumably because they believed they were skilled enough to get out before the end. Onoh found somewhat less ponzi self-consciousness in his survey of 230 Nigerians, with 34% realizing at the outset that the scheme made high returns by re-cycling contributions. But that's still a lot of savvy players.

-----

Let's back up a bit and define the term ponzi scheme. A ponzi is a type of zero-sum game, much like a lottery or a casino game such as roulette. By zero-sum, I mean that nothing of value is created. For each person who makes a profit, there is necessarily someone who loses. Put differently, ponzis and lotteries don't generate funds, they redistribute funds.

All zero-sum games have an algorithm, or sorting method, for figuring out who will lose and who will win. A lottery, for instance, redistributes funds from all losing ticket numbers to the winning ticket. A poker game redistributes the pot from bad card hands to good hands. A ponzi scheme's unique algorithm is to pay early entrants at the expense of late entrants.

What attracts people to zero-sum betting games is the allure of massive returns. Buy the right lottery ticket and your life will change. Choose the right number on the roulette table and you earn an immediate 3400% return on your investment. Get in early on the right ponzi, and you'll be vaulted into a totally different socioeconomic class. Of course, on net these schemes don't generate any wealth.

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Back to Nigeria. What the Nigerian ponzi scheme literature suggests is that ponzi schemes were self-consciously used by Nigerians as a coping mechanism for economic malaise.

For instance, in their survey of ponzi investors Jack & Ibekwe found that 60.3% cited harsh economic conditions as their reason for joining ponzi schemes. In a survey of 384 ponzi investors, Obamuyi et al (2018) found that one of the most popular reasons for participating in ponzis was the "current economic situation." And in Bupo & Abam-Smith's analysis of 287 Port Harcourt business students, 231 agreed that the scheme helped reduce the impact of the present recession.

So let me paint a picture. Nigeria has always been a highly unequal country. The poor are very poor, the rich are very rich. There is plenty of poverty (although this is improving) and not much of a government-run social security net. Nigeria also suffers from endemic corruption, and this impedes the ability of regular folks to improve their lot.

The yearning and frustration that this creates gives rise to a constant demand for quick financial escapes, or zero-sum games. But what sorts of zero sum games? Nigerian authorities take a relatively paternalistic approach to gambling. Depending on the game, Nigerian law either prohibits it outright or limits it. For instance, Nigeria has only three land-based casino for 200 million people. Non-skill based card games are illegal. Apart from sports betting, online casinos are prohibited, and many foreign websites don't accept Nigerians. 

So a big part of the demand to play life-changing betting games gets channeled into whatever the underground market can provide, like ponzi schemes.

If you start with a large population of unhappy young people who want to play life-changing zero-sum games, combine that with limitations on legal gambling, and add in a massive economic collapse which only makes their lives worse, you're going to get a big wave of illegal ponzi schemes cropping up.

Canada and the US also have problems with inequality and poverty, albeit not as extreme as Nigeria. Our economies have also been hit by the biggest shock in decades.

But unlike Nigeria, Canada and the US have well-developed capital markets. So when desperate Canadians and Americans look for long shot life-changing bets, they needn't limit themselves to traditional gambles like lotteries, casinos, or online poker. Online brokerages like Robin Hood and Wealthsimple make it easy for us to make hundred-to-one bets in options markets or leverage up on Tesla or GameStop stock.

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In addition to embracing ponzi schemes, Nigerians have also become the world's most prolific owners of cryptocurrencies, as the chart below illustrates. This data comes from Global Web Index via this article.

[Source]

I've been tracking bitcoin usage in Nigeria for a while now. We know that bitcoin is being used in combination with gift cards by Nigerian-based business email compromise and romance scammers as a convenient way to repatriate extorted funds:

"Paxful portrays itself as bringing financial services to the world’s unbanked, and perhaps they are, but the US-based company has become a bazaar for West African scam artists selling stolen gift cards."

How Nigerian BEC gangs launder money via Paxful: https://t.co/5XGRuwNJ6w pic.twitter.com/SsFK1eVNbz

— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) October 15, 2020

We also know that Nigerians living in the US are making remittances to their Nigerian friends and family using this same combination of gift cards and bitcoins. Buying gift cards and exchanging them for bitcoin and then Nigerian naira may sound like a circuitous way to make remittances. But it is economical because families get the superior black market exchange rate rather than the official rate.

Great article by @MattAhlborg. He documents an exotic remittance corridor that has sprung up between US and Nigeria to avoid exchange controls:

US cash → Gift cards (iTunes, Amazon, etc) → Bitcoin → Nigerian naira deposits. Quite the crazy journey.https://t.co/2yQ5Urwemg

— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) December 5, 2019

Nigerians who shop at foreign online stores face monthly card limits, some as low as US$100. Again, this is because Nigeria's central bank rations access to foreign exchange. Cryptocurrencies may be a hack around this. Also, Nigerian importers have been using cryptocurrency as a trade currency for Chinese imports. Rather than having to rely on acquiring carefully-rationed foreign exchange from the Central Bank of Nigeria, they can offer a Chinese exporter some bitcoins and the goods will be shipped.

So cryptocurrency is certainly being used as an alternative form of doing payments. But this can't explain why 20% of Nigerians (around 40 million people) hold some of the stuff. After all, unofficial imports, scams, and remittances are a small part of economic activity.

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I'd suggest that Nigeria's cryptocurrency adoption is a natural extension of its earlier ponzi scheme addiction. 

Like a poker game or roulette or the lottery, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Litecoin are zero-sum betting games. They redistribute a fixed pot among participating players. Of all types of zero-sum games, cryptocurrencies are most similar to ponzi schemes. Both use an "early bird" redistribution algorithm: late entrants' funds are paid out to early birds. But cryptocurrencies are not quite ponzi schemes. Whereas ponzis such as MMM or Ultimate Cycler are centrally managed by a coordinator, a cryptocurrency is spontaneous and decentralized.

In the same way that young Nigerians turned to ponzi schemes as an economic drug for coping with the 2015 collapse and ensuing lack of opportunity, they may be doing the same with cryptocurrencies. COVID-19 has pushed Nigerian unemployment to its highest level in a decade, the young being hurt the most. And so once again desperate Nigerian students are on the hunt for life-changing zero-sum bets. This time they've settled on cryptocurrency, the decentralized nature of which renders them almost impossible for authorities to stop.

My "ponzi" interpretation of Nigerian cryptocurrency adoption runs counter to the crypto-optimist view.

Cryptocurrency advocates see adoption of cryptocurrencies in developing nations like Nigeria as a vindication of cryptocurrency-as-monetary technology. Their thesis is that legacy payments systems and central banks in developing countries are failing at their task, and so cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are being adopted because the offer a better monetary alternative.

The crypto-optimist view overestimates the usefulness of cryptocurrency-as-currency. There are certainly some cases where Nigerians are using cryptocurrencies for payments, and I presented them above. But the main reason that cryptocurrencies are popular is why any zero-sum game is popular: they intoxicate players with the promise of huge price gains.

Viewed in this light, Nigerian adoption of cryptocurrencies isn't a bitcoin fixes this moment. Rather, it's a repeat of Nigeria's earlier adoption of MMM and Ultimate Cycler. That these games keep sweeping through Nigeria is a symptom of underlying economic misery. Desperate to escape their plight, young Nigerians are once again making last-ditch bets on zero-sum betting games.

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There is a silver lining.

Traditional ponzi schemes are often run by scammers rather than honest game managers. In an honest ponzi, 100% of the invested funds are paid out by the manager before the game closes down. But in a ponzi scam, the game manager absconds with the pot. And so ponzis often collapse before coming to their inevitable, natural end.   
 
Cryptocurrencies aren't run by a central game manager. As long as players custody their own coins, there is no one who can abscond with players' funds. So a desperate Nigerian student who wants to make a potentially life-changing zero-sum bet may do a bit better buying ₦10,000 of bitcoins than putting ₦10,000 into the next version of Ultimate Cycler, since bitcoin is more secure. (See this post for more).

But let's not kid ourselves. A nation of desperate gamblers, ponzi players, and cryptocurrency punters is a sad development. It is a symptom of a sick economy, one in which unemployed young people are flocking to make zero-sum bets because that is the only way they see their lot in life improving.