A number of commentators have argued that technological innovation is about to change the institutional structure of the retail payments system. Through the potential private issue of currency via new electronic payments systems – electronic money – individuals will create currencies based on units of account different from the dominant unit of account in the respective market. Thereby, the eff...

The popularization of Bitcoin, a decentralized crypto-currency has inspired the production of several alternative, or “alt”, currencies. Ethereum, CryptoNote, and Zerocash all represent unique contributions to the cryptocurrency space. Although most alt currencies harbor their own source of innovation, they have no means of adopting the innovations of other currencies which may succeed them. We...

Modern metabolism would not work without ATP and phosphate, but in primordial biochemical networks, energy currencies might have been simpler. Goldford et al. report a novel systems approach to reconstructing energetics in ancient metabolism, with very interesting results.

This paper lists fifteen key policy implications resulting from a decision to introduce retail and/or wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). It makes the distinction between ‘medium of exchange’ and ‘exchange mechanism’. The former is one functions money. latter function technological approach in establishing unit account, store value, payment protocol. Payments, transfers settlemen...

In this paper we show that the exchange rates of some commodity exporter countries have ability to predict price spot and future contracts aluminum. This is shown with both in-sample out-of-sample analyses. The theoretical underpinning these results relies on present-value model for rate determination tight connection between prices currencies countries. We using traditional statistical metrics...

*Correspondence: Sgouris Sgouridis, Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 54224, Abu Dhabi, UAE e-mail: [email protected] The universal adoption of fiat currencies and of the fractional reserve banking system coincided with access to and ability to utilize energy-dense fossil fuels leading to unprecedented rates of economic expansion.The depletion of economically recoverabl...