1* Atomicity is a necessary element for reliable transactions (Financial Service Technology Consortium, 1995; Camp, Sirbu and Tygar, 1995; Tygar, 1996). Anonymity is also an issue of great importance not only to designers of commerce systems, (Chaum, 1982; Chaum, 1989; Chaum, Fiat & Naor, 1988; Medvinski, 1993), but also to those concerned with the societal effects of information technologies (...

Payment channels emerged recently as an efficient method for performing cheap micropayment transactions in cryptographic currencies. In contrast to the traditional on-chain transactions, payment channels have the advantage that they allow nearly unlimited number of transactions between parties without involving the blockchain. In this work, we introduce Perun, a new system for payment and state...

THE GEOGRAPHY of money is changing. Once upon a time it was not inaccurate to think of monetary spaces in simple territorial terms. Many currencies existed, but for the most part each circulated separately within the political frontiers of a single nation-state. Each government was in charge of its own sanctioned money. Today, however, the world’s monetary landscape is being rapidly transformed...

A country’s rise to economic dominance tends to be accompanied by its currency becoming a reference point, with other currencies tracking it implicitly or explicitly. For a sample comprising emerging market economies, we show that in the last two years, the renminbi (RMB) has increasingly become a reference currency which we define as one which exhibits a high degree of co-movement (CMC) with o...

Emerging technologies, particularly the synthesis of cryptographic software and tamperresistant smart card hardware into the electronic purse, will make the cost of entry into the currency issuing 'market' quite small. Many organisations may then wish to enter this market, for example as a means of supplying credit (as envisaged by Frederick Hayek), of raising finance, or of encouraging custome...

It has been proposed that some wind-pollinated plants have the necessary conditions for an optimal sex allocation that is male biased, though there are few data that address this prediction. We determined that two prairie grass species (Andropogon gerardii and Sorghastrum nutans) had reproductive characteristics that theoretically would result in a male-biased allocation: both species were self...

Persistent differences in interest rates across countries account for much of the profitability of currency carry trade strategies. The high-interest rate “investment” currencies tend to be “commodity currencies,” while low interest rate “funding” currencies tend to belong to countries that export finished goods and import most of their commodities. We develop a general equilibrium model of com...