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Monetary reform is any movement or theory that proposes a system of supplying money and financing the economy that is different from the current system.
The Basel Accords refer to the banking supervision accords issued by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS).
Digital currency is any currency, money, or money-like asset that is primarily managed, stored or exchanged on digital computer systems, especially over the internet. Types of digital currencies include cryptocurrency, virtual currency and central bank digital currency. Digital currency may be recorded on a distributed database on the internet, a centralized electronic computer database owned by a company or bank, within digital files or even on a stored-value card.
A private currency is a currency issued by a private entity, be it an individual, a commercial business, a nonprofit or decentralized common enterprise. It is often contrasted with fiat currency issued by governments or central banks. In many countries, the issuance of private paper currencies and/or the minting of metal coins intended to be used as currency may even be a criminal act such as in the United States. Digital cryptocurrency is sometimes treated as an asset instead of a currency. Cryptocurrency is illegal as a currency in a few countries.
George Selgin is an American economist. He is Senior Fellow and Director Emeritus of the Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, where he is editor-in-chief of the center's blog, Alt-M, Professor Emeritus of economics at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, and an associate editor of Econ Journal Watch. Selgin formerly taught at George Mason University, the University of Hong Kong, and West Virginia University.
Virtual currency, or virtual money, is a digital currency that is largely unregulated, issued and usually controlled by its developers, and used and accepted electronically among the members of a specific virtual community. In 2014, the European Banking Authority defined virtual currency as "a digital representation of value that is neither issued by a central bank or a public authority, nor necessarily attached to a fiat currency but is accepted by natural or legal persons as a means of payment and can be transferred, stored or traded electronically." A digital currency issued by a central bank is referred to as a central bank digital currency.
Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, an unknown person. Use of bitcoin as a currency began in 2009, with the release of its open-source implementation. In 2021, El Salvador adopted it as legal tender. It is mostly seen as an investment and has been described by some scholars as an economic bubble. As bitcoin is pseudonymous, its use by criminals has attracted the attention of regulators, leading to its ban by several countries as of 2021.
Richard Henry Timberlake Jr. was an American economist who was Professor of Economics at the University of Georgia for much of his career. He became a leading advocate of free banking, the belief that money should be issued by private companies, not by a government monopoly. He wrote about the Legal Tender Cases of the U.S. Supreme Court in his book Constitutional Money: A Review of the Supreme Court's Monetary Decisions.
Scott B. Sumner is an American economist. He was previously the Director of the Program on Monetary Policy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, and a professor at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. His economics blog, The Money Illusion, popularized the idea of nominal GDP targeting, which says that the Federal Reserve and other central banks should target nominal GDP, real GDP growth plus the rate of inflation, to better "induce the correct level of business investment".
A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or colloquially, crypto, is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it.
Thomas MacGillivray Humphrey was an American economist. Until 2005 he was a research advisor and senior economist in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and editor of the bank's flagship publication, the Economic Quarterly. His publications cover macroeconomics, monetary economics, and the history of economic thought. Mark Blaug called him the "undisputed master" of British classical monetary thought.
Stellar, or Stellar Lumens (XLM) is an open-source, decentralized cryptocurrency protocol for digital currency to fiat money low-cost transfers which allows cross-border transactions between any pair of currencies. The Stellar protocol is supported by a Delaware nonprofit corporation, the Stellar Development Foundation, though this organization does not enjoy 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status with the IRS.
A blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (blocks) that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data. Since each block contains information about the previous block, they effectively form a chain, with each additional block linking to the ones before it. Consequently, blockchain transactions are resistant to alteration because, once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be changed retroactively without altering all subsequent blocks and obtaining network consensus to accept these changes. This protects blockchains against nefarious activities such as creating assets "out of thin air", double-spending, counterfeiting, fraud, and theft.
"Fintech", a clipped compound of "financial technology", refers to the application of innovative technologies to products and services in the financial industry. This broad term encompasses a wide array of technological advancements in financial services, including mobile banking, online lending platforms, digital payment systems, robo-advisors, and blockchain-based applications such as cryptocurrencies. Fintech companies include both startups and established technology and financial firms that aim to improve, complement, or replace traditional financial services.
A distributed ledger is a system whereby replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data is geographically spread (distributed) across many sites, countries, or institutions. In contrast to a centralized database, a distributed ledger does not require a central administrator, and consequently does not have a single (central) point-of-failure.
Bitcoin was designed by its pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, to work as a currency, but its status as a currency is disputed. Economists define money as a store of value, a medium of exchange and a unit of account, and agree that bitcoin does not currently meet all these criteria.
A central bank digital currency is a digital currency issued by a central bank, rather than by a commercial bank. It is also a liability of the central bank, unless it is dividend-paying, then it is an ownership stake in the central bank, and is a new form of legal tender, unlike regular retail CBDC which is denominated in the sovereign currency, as is the case with physical banknotes, coin and existing reserves.
The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age is a 1997 non-fiction book by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson. Later republished on 26 August 1999 by Touchstone, it forecasts the development of the twenty-first century; focusing on the rise of the internet and cyberspace, digital currency and digital economy, self-ownership and decentralization from the State.
Saifedean Ammous is a Palestinian-Jordanian economist, author, and prominent advocate of Bitcoin. Ammous is best known for his book The Bitcoin Standard (2018), which explains the economics of Bitcoin grounded in the principles of Austrian economics and critiques modern fiat currencies and contemporary economics. He has gained a significant following among Bitcoin enthusiasts, libertarians, and those skeptical of mainstream economic systems.
References
- ↑ Epstein, Jim (July 22, 2018). "Can Bitcoin Become the Global Monetary Standard?".
- ↑ https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2018/bitcoin-standard-decentralized-alternative-central-banking-saifedean-ammous
- ↑ Barbados, Central Bank of. "Book Review:". www.centralbank.org.bb.