Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are one-of-a-kind digital assets that are stored on a blockchain. Examples of NFTs include art (e.g., image, video, animation), collectables (e.g., autographs), and objects from games (e.g., weapons and poisons). NFTs provide content creators and artists a way to...

Parrondo’s paradox was introduced by Juan Parrondo in 1996. In game theory, this paradox is described as: A combination of losing strategies becomes a winning strategy. At first glance, this paradox is quite surprising, but we can easily explain it by using simulations and mathematical...

The UK Supreme Court held in Asset Land Plc v. FCA [2016] UKSC 17 that the land-banking scheme required authorization as a collective investment scheme in order to be sold to retail investors. This article critically analyses that decision in light of various approaches to regulating real estate...

The paper seeks to throw light at two discrete phenomena that were deemed as decisive for the development of the ancient Hellenic world and for urbanization in that part of the world via the emergence of sovereign urban entities, the Greek poleis. Although distinct, they are two conceptually and...

The ambiguous phenomenon of corruption has long been the cause of great theoretical debate in economics. By using Structural Equation Modelling, with the two types of corruption as a latent variable, this paper employs causal and indicative variables to the Latin American region to test for rent...

This paper answers three of the most frequently asked questions received in response to the paper crypt into crypto. We also received questions about stable coins, alt coins and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), which we’ll cover in a future paper

Provincial coinage gives us a unique insight into the Roman world, reflecting the values and concerns of the elites of the many hundreds of cities in the Roman empire. Coins offer a very different perspective from written history, which usually represents the views of the senatorial class, and...

Existing cryptocurrencies are too volatile to be used as currencies for daily payments. Stable coins, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to other stable financial assets such as the U.S. dollar, are desirable for payments within blockchain networks, whereby being often called the “Holy Grail of...

After the Global Financial Crisis, central banks became identified as banks’ closest allies, rescuing them from failure when things go wrong. Banks, in turn, emerged as complex and unstable institutions that privatize profits and socialize losses, to the despair of taxpayers. And regulation...

The purpose of this study is to analyse which kinds of monetary taxation and coinage policies the minting authorities applied in Sweden in the period 1153–1512. In medieval Europe, old coins were frequently declared invalid and were exchanged for new ones at fixed rates and dates. Here, the...

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether encourage the owners of computing resources to bring ever-increasing levels of processing power to bear in validating the distributed ledger of cryptocurrency purchases and sales. Initial coin offerings (ICOs) involve the sale or other distribution of...

Monetary history is largely a repeated narrative of currency debasement. Yet historic Venice (1172-1797), ruled by elite patricians, stands out as an example of relative monetary stability. This paper provides a historical case of Venice’s Zecca Mint which provided the elite patricians of...

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether encourage the owners of computing resources to bring ever-increasing levels of processing power to bear in validating the distributed ledger of cryptocurrency purchases and sales. Initial coin offerings (ICOs) involve the sale or other distribution of...

The procedure of tossing quantum coins and dice is described. This case is an important example of a quantum procedure because it presents a typical framework employed in quantum information processing and quantum computing. The emphasis is on the clarification of the difference between quantum...

In this paper, we explore the conversion of market frauds from stocks to virtual assets. We investigate the transition from traditional to digital for six schemes: ransomware, price manipulations, “pumps and dumps”, misrepresentation, “spoofing” and Ponzi schemes to find that the advent...

Across the ages, moneys exhibit a recurring set of design elements: they are made of debt; that debt is specifically fashioned to create liquidity; and the debt medium that results comes with a pledge of value (commonly collateral, convertibility, a commitment of public faith, and/or insurance)...

Since the inauguration of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin has been under pressure from competing tokens. As Bitcoin is a public open ledger blockchain coin, it has its weaknesses in privacy and anonymity. In the recent decade numerous coins have been initiated as privacy coins, which try to tackle...

ICOs stellen eine neuartige Finanzierungsmethode dar, welche es Start-ups ermöglicht Kapital von einer Großzahl vorwiegend Kleinanleger einzusammeln. Innerhalb meiner Dissertation widme ich mich ICO-Investoren, um darzustellen wie Investoren diese neuartigen Investitionsumgebung navigieren....

Renovatio Monetae, myntförnyelse, är ett latinskt uttryck som syftar på periodiska myntindragningar där gamla mynt förklarades ogiltiga och ersattes med nya. Myntindragningarna gav viktiga intäkter för den medeltida myntherren och de kunde ske så ofta som varje halvår. Vid dessa...

The rise and scams of cryptocurrencies have attracted much public, academic, and economic attention. While most cryptocurrencies have already failed, less attention has been given to the long-term regulation of those that might be successful, all of which purport to be 'eternal' stores of value...

"An examination of coined money and its significance to rulers, aristocrats and peasants in early medieval EuropeBetween the end of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the economic transformations of the twelfth, coined money in western Europe was scarce and high in value, difficult for...

Some economists have argued theoretically that the private minting of circulating precious metal coins would be inefficient: Due to information asymmetry, money-users would be chronically victimized by low-quality or underweight coins. An examination of experience with private mints during gold...

In this paper, we document the historical performance of collectable coins from 1967 to 2015. Collectable coins have a 9.7% annualized nominal return and a 5.5% real return over this period. We show collectable coins provide large diversification benefits based on their Sharpe ratios and are...

Euro coins have a common European side and an individual national side. Thanks to coin migration, coins bearing a panoply of national sides are in circulation throughout the euro area. In this paper, we model the mixing of coins circulating in the euro area countries and in particular the extent...

"In Search of the Eternal Coin: A Long Finance View of History" provides a history of the eternal coin. Richard Veryard summarises some of the main themes of the paper: "The eternal coin is an imaginary construct (Cooper calls it a thought experiment), so it's a curious kind of history,...

There is a marked philosophical distance between social media monopolies and cryptocurrencies, the former being of digital capitalist persuasion while the latter being of cryptoanarchist provenance. This discussion paper considers an important case of the melding of the two: Facebook's proposed...

The security of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains rests on the assumption that a large number of contributors have incentives to maintain copies of the underlying distributed ledger. However, excessive block rewards may inflate the value of each unique PoS coin. In this paper, we evaluate the...

This article analyzes the main problems and the solutions adopted in the market for Initial Coin Offerings (ICO), an alternative financing solution that has experienced spectacular growth and notoriety in recent years. This market relies on the use of Blockchain protocols and is, therefore,...

This paper sets out the decision of the UK Supreme Court in Asset Land Plc v FCA [2016] UKSC 17 where it was held that the land banking scheme there required authorization as a collective investment scheme. The HK definition is quite similar as to how authorisation works in practice which is...

Digital tokens — variously intended to function as currency, as securities, or as vouchers for deferred goods and services — have burst into the mainstream over the past 12 months in high-worth ‘Initial Coin Offerings' (‘ICOs'). Prior to the important questions of legal characterization...

"This volume is about ways of studying medieval money, and especially the most direct manifestation of money: coinage. It is intended to introduce readers to a range of approaches to a subject that has traditionally been seen as somewhat specialized; a domain of highly technical study which often...

We discuss several uses of blockchain (and, more generally, distributed ledger) technologies outside of cryptocurrencies with a pragmatic view. We mostly focus on three areas: the role of coin economies for what we refer to as data malls (specialized data marketplaces); data provenance (a...