Snippings

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First, let us list the goals. We’ll try to cover the cases of (i) ICOs, (ii) NFTs and (iii) conference tickets (really a type of NFT) at the same time; most of the desired properties are shared between the three cases.

Fairness: don’t completely lock low-income people out of participating, give them at least some chance to get in. For token sales, there’s the not quite identical but related goal of avoiding high initial wealth concentration and having a larger and more diverse initial token holder community.
Don’t create races: avoid creating situations where lots of people are rushing to take the same action and only the first few get in (this is the type of situation that leads to the horrible auctions-by-another-name that we saw above).
Don’t require fine-grained knowledge of market conditions: the mechanism should work even if the seller has absolutely no idea how much demand there is.
Fun: the process of participating in the sale should ideally be interesting and have game-like qualities, but without being frustrating.
Give buyers positive expected returns: in the case of a token (or, for that matter, an NFT), buyers should be more likely to see the item go up in price than go down. This necessarily implies selling to buyers at below the market price.
We can start by looking at (1). Looking at it from the point of view of Ethereum, there is a pretty clear solution. Instead of creating race conditions, just use an explicitly designed tool for the job: proof of personhood protocols! Here’s one quick proposed mechanism:

From Alternatives to selling at below-market-clearing prices for achieving fairness (or community sentiment, or fun):

Now, you have to understand that for a mere advisor, such as myself, to see that Vitalik’s considered views are congruent with mine is (frankly) rather exciting. So to see Vitalk promulgate two things that I have long argued for is nerd nirvana.

First, event tickets. Some years ago I worked on project for a blockchain provider. They had teams looking a few different use cases, most of which never went anywhere, but one of the use cases that I worked on was event ticketing. The idea was to non-fungible tokens as the tickets so that 

It makes sense. Event tickets are unique and should not be cloneable or counterfeitable. They should belong to one and only owner, And they should be able to be transferred between owners.

 

Identification, the fourth function of money
Posted on August 25, 2021 by bbatiz
This was an original contribution to The Conversation (France). Posted as per original and creative commons licence.

 

Translated from the French by the author with Deep L

Patrice Baubeau

Senior Lecturer HDR, History, Economic History, Université Paris Nanterre – Université Paris Lumières

In short, such a currency, freed from its civic dimensions, tends to become its own end, feeding inequalities and discord within the Polis. This is why money, a political artefact, is also a marker of citizenship: its use inserts the user into a political, social and ethical community and identifies him/her with it.

This function of identification through currency possession or use has not remained the prerogative of the Greek city-states: a constant feature of currencies is the concern of issuers – unless they are counterfeiters – to identify the origin of their currencies, usually territorial or political, by marks indicating the place of production, the issuer or the date.

The multiplication of social and complementary currencies since the 1970s corresponds moreover most often to a “territorial” project consisting in constituting a limited-size monetary space of solidarity. In this way, the use of money can become not only a militant act (sustainable, alternative, ecological economy…) but also support or manifest an identity – this is notably the case with the Basque currency eusko.

From Identification, the fourth function of money | The Cashless Society:

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In general, a process of “nationalization” of money has progressively made the limits of the modern state coincide with those of the monetary spaces of which these states have become the masters.

At the same time, the state assumes another function that is crucial for the proper functioning of civic and social life, beyond payment systems alone: the identification of individuals.

 

Metaverse

 

A first model, already old, consisted in delimiting virtual spaces within which specific monetary forms are employed: massively multiplayer “game” platforms generally provide techniques for accumulating symbols of wealth in order to attach objects, services or skills to avatars.

 

This is where Facebook’s diem (ex-libra) virtual currency project makes sense. Users have an identity, guaranteed by the platform and to which, more and more, rights and duties are attached, concerning freedom of expression, the integrity of the “profile”, and even the post-mortem destiny of accounts.

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Thus, abandoning to the highest bidder these two key elements of the construction of the ancient Polis or of the modern State, which are money and identity, announces the worst of all worlds.

From Identification, the fourth function of money | The Cashless Society:

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he year is 2021. We have a blockchain. The blockchain contains not just a powerful decentralized finance ecosystem, but also a rapidly growing suite of all kinds of non-financial tools. The blockchain also presents us with a unique opportunity to reset social norms.

From Alternatives to selling at below-market-clearing prices for achieving fairness (or community sentiment, or fun):

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ust so as you know, I am acquainted with the person who first coined the term ‘virtual currencies’. In fact, it was me!

How do I know? Because Wikipedia suggests that the term was coined (so to speak) in 2009 by CNN, whereas I wrote a Financial Times management report entitled ‘Virtual Currencies’ a good decade earlier, in 1999.

From The man who coined the term ‘virtual currencies’… – Radix Think Tank:

As it happens, I have it on the shelf behind me. And here it is…

USDC, which is issued by Coinbase and Circle, drew criticism earlier this month after Bloomberg reported that the Coinbase website said that each stablecoin was backed by $1 “in a bank account,” even though its own report showed that 9% of USDC’s reserves were in commercial paper. 

The report prompted Coinbase to change the USDC description on its website and on Monday, Coinbase President and COO Emilie Choi tweeted that the company’s “language could have been clearer” and that Coinbase should have moved faster to update its site. She also said that starting in September, all USDC reserves will be held in cash and short-term U.S. Treasuries, which are less risky investments than commercial paper.  

That switch would make USDC more in line with Paxos’ USDP, which has all of its reserves in cash and Treasuries, according to Paxos’ latest reserve report.

JP on Circle S4

 

The big problem of small change, which is that it’s hard to charge $1.01 for a dollar. The yield on these reserves is tiny.

So what is the stablecoin business model?

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When we asked financial institutions globally about how quickly open banking will have a major impact on the industry, it was clear that time is not on the side of those slow to react. While only 13% of all respondents see open banking as having a significant impact on their business in the next 12 months, an additional 72% see the greatest impact between 2 and 5 years. Not surprisingly, the largest financial institutions were the most likely to see the impact the fastest.

From Open Banking Transforming Business Models Forever:

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atWest and Mastercard have announced the extension of their Pay by Bank app (PbBa) for secure online payments to mobile app users across NatWest Group brands Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster Bank and Coutts.

From NatWest and Mastercard extend payments app to almost half of UK mobile banking users.

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Modern banks – and most other financial institutions – trade in securities, and the growth of such trade is the main explanation of the growth of the finance sector.  Lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services – which most people would imagine was the principal business of a bank – is literally an insignificant part of their balance sheets. For British banks today, it amounts to about 10% of their total assets.

From Robust and Resilient Finance – John Kay:

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Many aspects of the modern financial system are designed to give an impression of overwhelming urgency – the endless ‘news’ feeds, the constantly changing screens of traders, the office lights blazing late into the night, the young analysts who find themselves required to work 30 hours at a stretch.  But very little that happens in the finance sector has genuine need for this constant appearance of excitement and activity.  Only its most boring part – the payments system – is an essential utility on whose continuous functioning the modern economy depends.

From Robust and Resilient Finance – John Kay:

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