25/4/21: Impact Finance perspective of the systemic threats to blockchain applications

 

New paper (pre-print version): 

Gurdgiev, Constantin and Fleming, Adam, Informational efficiency and cybersecurity threats: A Social Impact Finance perspective of the systemic threats to blockchain applications (April 25, 2021). Forthcoming, Chapter 12 in Innovations in Social Finance: Transitioning Beyond Economic Value, eds. Thomas Walker, Jane McGaughey, Sherif Goubran, and Nadra Wagdy, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3834032. 

Abstract: 

Crypto-assets and blockchain technologies hold the promise of providing more secure systems for managing public and private data, enhancing public trust in data collection, and increasing the efficiency of social impact finance transactions. However, to-date, blockchain technologies have struggled to deliver on these promises. Specifically, cybersecurity threats to blockchain technologies are accelerating and becoming more impactful over time, generating growing risk to the use of the blockchain technologies in social impact finance services provision. Our analysis data on cybersecurity breaches involving cryptocurrencies trading platforms from 2014 through 2019 shows that cryptocurrencies markets have, to-date, failed to develop informational efficiencies necessary to sustain these technologies’ deployment in impact finance. Faced with increasing cybersecurity threats permissionless blockchain systems appear to be more vulnerable to shocks, than they were in the past. Cyber breaches in the cryptocurrency markets create major risk contagion pathways, which are dramatically increasing volatility of both directly attacked currencies and other major cryptocurrencies; as well as present an increased risk of system-wide attacks that threaten not only the accounting and transactional accuracy and efficiency of the crypto-based fintech solutions, but also the data stored using public blockchain protocols. These findings lead us to conclude that, absent dramatic improvements in the regulation of cryptocurrencies and exchanges, public blockchains based on traded crypto-assets are not suitable for large scale deployment in social impact finance applications.

21/1/20: Investor Fear and Uncertainty in Cryptocurrencies

Our paper on behavioral biases in cryptocurrencies trading is now published by the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance volume 25, 2020:

We cover investor sentiment effects on pricing processes of 10 largest (by market capitalization) crypto-currencies, showing direct but non-linear impact of herding and anchoring biases in investor behavior. We also show that these biases are themselves anchored to the specific trends/direction of price movements. Our results provide direct links between investors' sentiment toward:

1. Overall risky assets investment markets,
2. Cryptocurrencies investment markets, and
3. Macroeconomic conditions,

and market price dynamics for crypto-assets. We also show direct evidence that both markets uncertainty and investor fear sentiment drive price processes for crypto-assets.

9/1/20: Herding and Anchoring in Cryptocurrency Markets

Our new paper, with Daniel O'Loughlin, titled "Herding and Anchoring in Cryptocurrency Markets: Investor Reaction to Fear and Uncertainty" has been accepted to the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, forthcoming February 2020.

The working paper version is available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3517006.

Abstract:
Cryptocurrencies have emerged as an innovative alternative investment asset class, traded in data-rich markets by globally distributed investors. Although significant attention has been devoted to their pricing properties, to-date, academic literature on behavioral drivers remains less developed. We explore the question of how price dynamics of cryptocurrencies are influenced by the interaction between behavioral factors behind investor decisions and publicly accessible data flows. We use sentiment analysis to model the effects of public sentiment toward investment markets in general, and cryptocurrencies in particular on crypto-assets’ valuations. Our results show that investor sentiment can predict the price direction of cryptocurrencies, indicating direct impact of herding and anchoring biases. We also discuss a new direction for analyzing behavioral drivers of the crypto assets based on the use of natural language AI to extract better quality data on investor sentiment.

20/9/19: New paper on Cryptos pricing

Our paper "Fractal dynamics and wavelet analysis: Deep volatility and return properties of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple" is now available in The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance - early stage print version - here https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1062976919300730.

5/12/18: Bitcoin: Sell-off is a structural break to the downside of the already negative trend

Bitcoin has suffered a significant drop off in terms of its value against the USD in November. Despite trading within USD6,400-6,500 range through mid-November, on thin volumes, BTC dropped to a low of USD3,685 by November 24, before entering the ‘dead cat bounce’ period since. The Bitcoin community, however, remains largely of the view that any downside to Bitcoin is a temporary, irrationally-motivated, phenomena (see the range of forward forecasts for the crypto here: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2018/11/201118-bitcoins-steady-loss-of.html).

Dynamically, Bitcoin has been trading down, on a persistent. albeit volatile trend since January this year. Based on monthly ranges (min-max for daily open-close prices), the chart below shows conclusively that as of mid-November, BTCUSD has entered a new regime - consistent with a new low for the crypto.

This regime switch is a relatively rare event in the last 11 months of trading, singling that the BTC lows are neither secure in the medium term, nor are likely to be replaced by an upward trend. While things are likely to remain volatile for BTCUSD, this volatility is unlikely to signal any reversal of the downward pressures on the crypto currency.

Consistent with this, we can think of two possible, albeit distinctly probable, scenarios:

1. Scenario 1 (the more likely one): BTCUSD will, in the medium term of 1-3 months, drop below USD3,000 levels, and
2. Scenario 2 (least likely one): BTCUSD will repeat its December 2017 - January 2018 ‘hockey stick’ dynamics.

Noting the above dynamics, the lack of any catalyst for the BTC upside, and the simple fact that since mid-November, larger volumes traded supported greater moves to the downside than to the upside, current trading range of USD3,900-4,100 is unlikely to last.

Scenario 2 supports going long BTC at prices around USD3,800, but it requires a major, highly unlikely and unforeseeable at this point in time, catalyst. A replay of the 2017 scenario needs a convincing story. Back then, in September-October 2017, a combination of the enthusiastic marketing of bitcoin as a 'solve all problems the world has ever known' technology, coupled with the novelty of the asset has triggered a massive influx of retail investors into the crypto markets. These investors are now utterly destroyed, financially and morally, having bought into BTC at prices >$4,000 and transaction costs of 20-25 percent (break-even prices of >$5,000). The supply of new suckers is now thin, as the newsflow has turned decidedly against cryptos, and price dynamics compound bear market analysis. Another factor that led BTC to a lightning fast rise in December 2017 was the promise of the 'inevitable' and 'scale-supported' arrival of institutional investors into the market. This not only failed to materialise over the duration of 2018, but we are now learning that the few institutional investors that made their forays into the markets have abandoned any plans for engaging in setting up trading and investment functions for their clients. In the end, today, the vast majority of the so-called  institutional investors are simply larger scale holders of BTC and other cryptos, unrelated to the traditional financial markets investment houses.

Scenario 1 implies you should cut your losses or book your gains, by selling BTC.

15/11/18: BIS on payments systems and cryptos / blockchain

On November 1, Agustín Carstens, General Manager, Bank for International Settlements delivered a pretty punchy speech on the topic of payments systems evolution in modern age of digital technologies. Punchy, in the sense that much of it is focused on, indirectly, enlisting the evidence as to the lack of the markets for the blockchain and cryptocurrencies deployment in the payments systems at the wholesale and retail levels.

Take the following:  "One of the most significant developments in the evolution of money has been its electronification and, more recently, digitalisation. ...Realtime gross settlement (RTGS) systems for interbank payments, ...emerged in the 1980s. ...RTGS systems allow banks and other financial institutions to send money to each other with immediate and final settlement. They are typically operated by central banks and process critical (read: high-value) payments to allow for the smooth functioning of the economy. Today, the top interbank payment systems in the G20 countries settle more than $17.5 trillion a day, which is over 50 times a working day’s global GDP. ...Given the technology cycle, many central banks are currently looking at next-generation RTGS systems to offer more robust operations and enhanced services."

What does this imply for the world of cryptos? In simple terms, there is no market for cryptos as platforms for interbank payments settlements - the market is already served and the speed of services, cost and security are underpinned by the Central Banks.

Next up: retail payments systems.

Starting with back office: "For retail payment systems, ...in Mexico consumer payments operate at the same speed as interbank payments... The beneficiary of a payment is credited money in near real time. That is, if I were to send you money from my Mexican bank account, you would see the funds in your Mexican bank account in 15 seconds or less. ...Based on a BIS analysis, fast payment systems are likely to become the dominant retail payment system by 2023."

Again, what's the market for blockchain systems to be deployed here? I am not convinced there is one, especially as payments latency and costs are, to-date, more prohibitive under blockchain systems than using traditional payments platforms.

Front office: Carstens notes the progress achieved in delivering what he describes as "payments ... made using bank account aliases" in Argentina that are instant in time, and the ongoing trend toward development of the front-end payments interfaces, based on "cashless systems – no cashiers, no lines, no cash, no physical payment devices. Amazon and others envision a future where you walk into a store, take what you want, and are automatically billed for the items using facial recognition and artificial intelligence. Though this approach may seem a bit scary, it is less so than having microchips implanted inside us, which some firms are also piloting! To be frank, though, neither of these options – facial recognition or microchip implants – are particularly appealing to me."

Carstens presents the evidence that shows current Advanced Economies already carrying more than 90 percent of wholesale payments via cheap, lightning fast and highly secure centralized RTGS systems, with 75 percent of payments via the same occurring in the Emerging Markets:

Given this rate of adoption, coupled with the evolving technology curve (that enables similar systems to be deployed in smaller settlements), one has to question the extent to which cryptocurrency solutions can be deployed in the payments systems.

Beyond the not-too-optimistic view of the market niche size, cryptos and blockchain are also facing some serious pressure points from already ongoing innovation in centralized clearance systems. "Although much attention has been focused on cryptocurrencies as the “it” innovation in payments, there’s much unheralded innovation going on" in the Central Banks and elsewhere (read: legacy providers of payments). "Central banks have been pushing the boundaries of what technology can achieve for operational robustness, including switching seamlessly between data centres at short notice and synchronising geographically dispersed data centres."

Carstens notes the potential for the distributed Ledger Tech (aka, blockchain based on private, enterprise-level blockchain) in this space, where innovation is also a domain of the centralized players, as opposed to decentralised crypto markets. "One interesting development in the central banking community is ongoing experimentation with distributed ledger technology (DLT) as a means to enhance operational robustness. People often use DLT and Bitcoin interchangeably, but they are not the same! ...DLT is simply a set of processes and technologies that enable multiple computers to maintain collectively a common database. DLT does not mean mining of coins, public ledgers and open networks. And no central bank that I’m aware of is contemplating these properties in its DLT experimentation."

There are some problems, however, for DLT enthusiasts:
1) "...a Bank of Canada study noting that a DLT-based payment system meeting central bank requirements would be similar to what we have today (ie private ledgers, closed networks and a central operator). The difference is that a network of computers would be used to settle a transaction instead of one computer." In other words, there is a case, yet to be proven, that DLT offers anything new to the payments systems to begin with.
2) "The second is an ECB and Bank of Japan study concluding that processing times would be three times longer using DLT versus current systems." In other words, DLT/blockchain cannot deliver, so far, on its main premise: higher processing efficiency than legacy systems.

Carstens sums it up: "My take is that current versions of DLT are not any better than what we already have today."

In other words: DLT/blockchain solutions appear to be:

• Not necessary: the technology is attempting to solve the problems that do not exist in the payments systems;
• Inefficient with respect to its core tenants/promises: the technology is inferior to existent solutions and the pipeline of ongoing improvements to the legacy systems.

Which begs two questions that the DLT/blockchain community needs to answer: What niche can blockchain occupy in payments systems going forward? and Is there a sustainable market within that niche that cannot be captured by alternative technologies?

But there is more. Carstens explains: "Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Ether and Tether, do not serve the core functions of money. No cryptocurrency is a true unit of account or a payment instrument, and we have seen this year that they are a poor store of value. This then raises the question: what are they?" The answer should be a wake up call for anyone still long cryptos: "From my perspective, cryptocurrencies are, at best, an asset of some sort. Perhaps an asset comparable to a piece of art for those who appreciate cryptography. Buyers of cryptocurrencies are buying into nothing more than a software algorithm. Some firms are trying to back cryptocurrencies with an underlying asset, such as cash or securities. That sounds nice, but it’s the equivalent of making art from banknotes or stock certificates. The buyer is still buying an idea or a concept or, if you will, an asset that is the equivalent of art hanging on your wall. If people want the underlying asset, they might be better served just buying that."

Carstens previously (February 2018) claimed that the #cryptos are “combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster.”

Nice perspective. If you are an observer. For a holder of cryptos, this is a serious risk. Playing cards in a casino is fun, but it is not investing. Playing investing in the cryptos world is probably the same.


Note: for an even more 'in your face' assessment of the #Bitcoin and #Cryptos, there is ECB's Executive Board member, Benoit Coeure, who called #BTC the “evil spawn of the [2008] financial crisis, per Bloomberg report of November 15 (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-15/cryptocurrencies-are-evil-spawn-of-the-crisis-for-ecb-s-coeure).

The reality of #cryptos investments is that they are, empirically, a massively overvalued bet on the largely undeveloped and unproven (in real world applications) technologies that have only tangential relation to the coins currently traded in the markets. It is, in a way, a derivative bet on a future contract.

3/9/18: Bakkt: One New Exchange, Two Old Exchanges, Same Crypto Story?

My comment on the new #cryptocurrency exchange project involving Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Microsoft, Starbucks, and Boston Consulting Group: https://blokt.com/news/bakkts-cryptocurrency-exchange-is-coming-but-will-institutional-investors-follow. In the nutshell, hold the hype, but watch it develop...

19/5/18: The Scary Inefficiency & Environmental Costs of Bitcoin

Bitcoin is just one of the cryptocurrencies, albeit the dominant one by market capitalisation and mining assets deployment. The cryptocurrency is best known for volatility of its exchange rate to key fiat currencies and other commodities, but the more interesting aspect of the Bitcoin (and other cryptos) is their hunger for energy. Cryptos are based on blockchain technologies that promise a range of benefits (majority unverified or untested or both), amongst which the high degree of security and peer-to-peer data registry, both of which are supported by the mining processes that effectively require deployment of  a vast amount of hash/algorithmic calculations in order to create data storage units, or blocks. In a sense, energy (electricity) is the main input into creation of blockchain records of transactions.

As the result, it is important to understand Bitcoin (and other cryptos) energy efficiency and utilisation, from three perspectives:
1) Direct efficiency - value added by the use of energy in mining Bitcoin per unit of BTC and unit of information recorded on a blockchain;
2) Economic efficiency or opportunity cost of using the energy expended on mining; and
3) Environmental efficiency - the environmental impact of energy used.

To-date, estimating the total demand for electricity arising from Bitcoin mining (let alone from mining of other cryptos) has been a huge challenge, primarily because Bitcoin miners are too often located in secretive jurisdiction, do not report any data about their operations and, quite often, can be highly atomistic. Although Bitcoin mining is a concentrated activity - with a small number of mega-miners and mining pools dominating the market - there is still a cottage industry of amateur and smaller scale miners sprinkled around the globe.

Thus, to-date, we have only very scant understanding of just how much of the scarce resource (energy) does the new industry of cryptos mining consume.

A new paper, published in a peer-reviewed journal, Joule, which is a reputable academic journal, titled "Bitcoin's Growing Energy Problem" and authored by Alex de Viries (Experience Center of PwC, Amsterdam, the Netherlands) attempts exactly this. The paper is the first in the literature to be peer-reviewed and uses a new methodology to discern trends in Bitcoin's electric energy consumption. The paper does not cover other cryptos, so its conclusions need to be scaled to estimate the entire impact of cryptocurrencies energy use.

The findings of de Viries are striking. He estimates the current Bitcoin usage of energy at 2.55 gigawatts, close to that of Ireland (3.1GW), approaching 7.67GW that "could already be reached in 2018", comparable to Austria (8.2GW). When reached, this will amount to 0.5% of the total world electricity consumption.

Per 'efficiency of blockchain', a single transaction on Bitcoin network uses as much electricity as an average household in the Netherlands uses in a month. Which is, put frankly, mad, wasteful and utterly unrealistic as far as transactions costs go for the network.

Per de Viries: "As per mid-March 2018, about 26 quintillion hashing operations are performed every second and non-stop by the Bitcoin network (Figure 1). At the same time, the Bitcoin network is only processing 2–3 transactions per second (around 200,000 transactions per day). This means that the ratio of hash calculations to processed transactions is 8.7 quintillion to 1 at best. The primary fuel for each of these calculations is electricity."

The key to the above numbers is that they vastly underestimate the true costs of Bitcoin and other cryptos to the global economy. The paper focuses solely on energy used on mining. However, other activities that sustain Bitcoin and blockchains are also energy-intensive, including trading in coins/tokens, storage of information blocks, etc. Worse, mining and processing / servicing of the networks required use of constant electricity supply, which means that the energy mix that goes to sustain cryptocurrencies operations is the worst from environmental quality perspective and must rely on heavy use of fossil fuels in the top up range of electricity demand spectrum. The environmental costs of Bitcoin and cryptos is staggering.

Scaling up Bitcoin figures from de Viries; paper to include other major cryptocurrencies would require factoring in the BTC's share of the total crypto markets by energy use. A proxy (an imperfect one) for this is BTC's total share of the cryptocurrencies publicly traded markets which stood at around 37.3% as of May 16, 2018. Assuming this proxy holds for mining and servicing costs, total demand for electricity from the cryptocurrencies and blockchain use around the world is more than 2.55GW/0.37 or more than 6.9GW, with de Viries' model implying that by year end, the system of cryptocurrencies can be burning through a staggering 1.35% of total electricity supply around the world.

The problem with the key cryptocurrencies proposition is that the system of blockchain-based public networks can deliver lower cost, higher efficiency alternatives to current records creation and storage. This proposition simply does not hold in the current energy demand environment.



The full paper can be read here: de Vries: "Bitcoin's Growing Energy Problem" http://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30177-6.

2/2/18: CFR: What Financial Economics Tells Us About Bitcoin

My new contribution to the Cayman Financial Review is available, covering the key aspects of the fundamentals (or lac of such) behind the crypto currencies valuations: http://www.caymanfinancialreview.com/2018/01/29/learning-from-the-present-what-financial-economics-tells-us-about-bitcoin/.

21/12/17: Blockchain is Just Your Cup of Tea...

Undoubtedly, undeniably, and absolutely consistent with the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, the Long Island Iced Tea rebranding as a Long Blockchain is resulting in a robust, fundamentals-consistent boost to the company share prices: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/crypto-craze-sees-long-island-iced-tea-rename-as-long-blockchain.

Which, of course, given the global, decentralized, fully secured, anti-inflation hedge, future of everything properties of the blockchain cryptocurrencies markets, is perfectly rational.

No, no, folks, there are no bubbles in crypto world. Never. It's all pure mathematics, you see... 

20/12/17: My Forex Analytix Interview Link

My today's interview with Forex Analytix on Cryptocurrencies and Central Banks is now on youtube, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvOF6xCjGzo&feature=youtu.be.

18/12/17: Of Winners and Whiners: Bitcoin's Path to Value

One of the key Bitcoin issues is concentration of miners. Concentration in Bitcoin markets occurs primarily due to high cost of energy used in mining. Bitfury, one of the largest miners on the market today already holds roughly 11 percent of the total mining power and is planning a major expansion. In mining equipment, Bitmain is estimated to hold some 70 percent of the market share worldwide. Here is the map - by country - of Bitcoin and other cryptos mining operations:

Source: http://www.scmp.com/tech/start-ups/article/2120373/chinas-bitcoin-miners-wary-tighter-government-scrutiny-make-plans.

The above shows not only the traditional concentration risk (with China and Georgia dominating the market), but also the unsavoury nature of geopolitical risks links. China is a highly unregulated, non-transparent market with production of miners linked closely to access to energy that can be easily shut down by the Government, were it to decide to pull the plug on cryptos and their potential distortion of the markets for Renminbi. Georgia is a country with archaic energy grid and political regime with low degree of predictability.

Current market structure for Bitcoin is skewed, in terms of financial returns, in favour of a small number of large miners, mining equipment makers, exchanges trading Bitcoin and Bitcoin payments processors. The second tier of earners - due to high transactions costs - are local dealers, a handful of leveraged investment funds and earliest holders of Bitcoin (who are, predominantly, early stage BTC companies principals).

Which means that BTC’s primary function is transfer of money from investors to intermediaries and miners.

Current technology behind the Bitcoin is also skewed. Miners - who hold their own wallets and require no exchanges - are secure in their asset holding to the point of their own security. Exchanges are security pressure points for smaller investors who cannot efficiently transfer BTC to their own wallets (due to time lags and costs involved). Intermediaries are secure only to the point of holdings transferred to own wallets, and are not secured for any trading accounts held on exchanges. In fact, they are in the worst possible state, because their exchange accounts are larger in volume (more lucrative target for attacks).

Which means that BTC’s secondary function is transfer of funds from retail investors and traders to cyber criminals.

In neither part of the transactions chain there is any value added created, except for those ‘investors’ using BTC to launder money or evade capital controls. Other returns are pure speculation on BTC’s volatility and its trend (separately for both). As information/data storage and processing platform, BTC is useless: mining - which in theory supports both functions - happens irrespective of meaningful information arrival, which means that any blockchain functionality of BTC is ad hoc, or put differently, at best accidental. This is one of the key reasons why BTC is the worst thing that could have happened to blockchain and also why it is the best thing that could have happened to private blockchain.

Because BTC has no value-added component to it, there is also no possibility for price gains (capital gains) over and above those warranted by its function as illicit money transfer mechanism. Otherwise, BTC would have had an effect of creating financial value out of zero real value-added. Which is impossible outside pure behavioural hype and speculation.

When someone compares the BTC, in the above terms, to stock markets, they are simply revealing massive degree of ignorance. Stock markets have two functions: (1) Primary issuance that raises capital for the firms, and (2) Secondary trading that determines future Weighted Average Cost of Capital for the firm. As such, stock market creates value-added. It might be not exactly what drives stocks valuations all of the time, but in the long run, it is what determines these valuations to a large extent. Stock is a claim against current and future dividends and/or sale/M&A value of the firm assets. Speculation overlays the fundamentals for BTC. In the BTC case, speculation is the only fundamental.

So you can bet on BTC at any valuations you fancy for yourself, but be aware: if you are betting on it speculatively, you are facing a severe liquidity risk. If you are betting on its fundamentals, your bet is that more people around the world will embrace it as a vehicle for tax evasion, capital controls evasion and/or money laundering. Which might be fine in theory, except that theory assumes status quo ante of zero regulation, enforcement and oversight over BTC. Which, of course, is rapidly changing, as the countries like France are calling on G20 to impose global oversight over BTC, and countries like Japan, China, U.S. et al are either imposing increasing degree of tax and regulatory controls over investors in BTC or considering imposition of such. At any rate, does global drugs trade need a USD300 billion payments technology?..

But, hey, don’t just take my word for it. Read this: http://www.businessinsider.com/one-of-the-co-founders-of-bitcoincom-has-sold-all-of-his-bitcoin-2017-12?r=UK&IR=T.

2/12/17: Bitcoin Craze Heads for the Moon

Just about 10 days ago, I wrote about the Bitcoin being a bubble. And since then, few things happened:

1. The bubble has now gone into public euphoria stage, witnessed by an ever-growing number of discounted brokerage platforms actively selling access to Bitcoin markets with leverage in excess of 100:1.
2. The bubble has gone from hyperbolic to hyperbolic+ trajectory, adding a massive degree of volatility to the trend. Earlier this week, Bitcoin managed to drop some 21 percent within a day and then go back above pre-drop levels within less than 24 hours. The confirmation phase is now complete with buy-on-the-dip 'investors' triggering waves of herding.
3. And the hype has gone institutional. In my post, I said "This is not just a shoe-shine-boy moment, folks. It is white-powder-under-the-nose-and--empty-bottles-of-vodka-on-the-floor hour for high school dropouts with cash to burn." Yeah, read this from as always excellent Matt Levine of (not always excellent) Bloomberg View: "One of the presenters at the conference... “Decentralization will change more in our lives over the coming years than possibly any other technological shift we’ve seen,” he says, likening the crypto rush to the Reformation. He describes building anarcho-capitalist city-states on the back of the blockchain. “If you’re going to built a new city, you’re not going to have the DMV – we don’t like the DMV,” he says at one point. Later: “We can actually tokenize the moon with a startup society.” When I ask him about the SEC’s role in the space, he waves the question off as irrelevant. “Under crypto-anarchy,” he explains, “we’ll get to determine the government that we want.”" Nasa should worry now, not just the SEC, for one day, the International Space Station will have to be flying through clouds of Bitcoins spread around space by the Moononizers of anarcho-capitalist-libertarian variety who securitized their moonhomes using blockchain contracts enforceable only under the anarchy laws.

Yes, bottles of vodka are empty now. 'Investors' have moved onto magic mushrooms.

20/11/17: Bitcoin: an Unknowable Bubble?

There is a much-discussed in the crypto-sphere chart making rounds these days, plotting Bitcoin price dynamics against the historical bubbles of the past:

The chart is striking. Albeit simplistic. See Note 1 below for a technical argument on the chart timing.

On price dynamics alone, Bitcoin looks like a sure bubble - a disaster waiting to happen. But Bitcoin dynamics are basically not suited for any empirical analysis of any significant accuracy.

As noted by some commentators, Bitcoin had numerous 80-90% and larger drawdowns in the past (given its immense volatility). It keeps coming back from these. Some claim this to be the evidence that Bitcoin it not a bubble. Which is neither here nor there: bubbles are generated by exuberant expectations of investors, not by actual parameters of price processes. Causality does not flow from dynamics to bubbles, but the other way around. So to identify a bubble, one needs to identify exuberance. See Note 2 below for more on 80% drawdowns.

In the case of Bitcoin fans, there is clearly such.

No investor or serious analyst has been able to provide a fundamentals-based valuation model for Bitcoin.

A disclosure in order here: myself and a graduate student of mine have looked at the fundamental modelling for Bitcoin over the summer. We found no tangible relationship between any economic or financial parameters tested and Bitcoin price dynamics. In another piece of research, myself and two co-authors are currently looking at empirical dynamic and fractal properties of Bitcoin. Again, we finding nothing consistent with a behaviour of an asset with fundamentals-derived valuations.

Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. But, taken together with the general lack of credible fundamentals-linked modelling of the crypto-currency, this means that, at this point in time, Bitcoin price can be potentially driven solely by… err… expectations held by its enthusiasts, plus the incentives by the predominantly China-based investors to avoid extreme risks of capital controls and expropriations. If so, both drivers would make it a speculative bubble.

The only quasi-fundamentals-linked argument for Bitcoin has been the blockchain one - the promise of Bitcoin serving as a key tool for data aggregation, recording and transmission. This argument, however, no longer holds. Blockchain technology has migrated from public blockchains, like Bitcoin, to either open blockchains, like Ethereum or, increasingly more frequently, private blockchains. It is the latter that currently hold the promise to serve as viable platforms for data economy.

As a libertarian, I should like a private currency system that supports anonymity of transactions. As an economist, I should like the innovative nature of Bitcoin. And, put simply, I do. Both.

But as an investor, I do not have the stomach for Bitcoin’s valuations and volatility, as well as for its higher moments behaviour (in particular worrying are kurtosis, co-skews and co-kurtosis, which severely complicate empirical dynamics analysis, see Note 3 below). And I have even less enthusiasm for the crypto market that is sustained increasingly by undertakings, like BitMEX - a purely speculative platform trading some $35 billion in Bitcoin derivatives with leverage up to x100 to the amateur speculators who, put frankly, have zero idea what they are buying and at what price. The vast majority of Bitcoin investors have no clue what a butterfly option looks like and how it can be valued. And the vast majority of financial markets analysts and professionals won’t be able to price a butterfly strategy for Bitcoin, given its painfully twisted moments. Yet, within a month of starting trading, BitMEX reached 1/3 of the market capitalisation of Bitcoin. This is not just a shoe-shine-boy moment, folks. It is white-powder-under-the-nose-and--empty-bottles-of-vodka-on-the-floor hour for high school dropouts with cash to burn.

Another worrying issue with Bitcoin is the argumentation of its main supporters.

This ranges from the cognitively biased “you don’t know anything about the Bitcoin” to “Bitcoin is scarce & limited in supply” to “Bitcoin is a promise of liberating the masses from the oppression of the Central Bankers”.

The first sort of argument exhibits not just Jurassic ignorance of logic, but also a gargantuan dose of arrogance. Repeated sufficiently enough, it signifies the absurd degree of exuberance of investors’ expectations.

The second argument is patently false. Bitcoin has undergone splits, and engendered dozens of other cryptos, with unlimited supply of such into the future. Bitcoin itself is divisible ad infinitum and, with forks, its supply is potentially unlimited. Worse, Bitcoin rests on man-made mathematical foundations. Which means it has no physical bound or constraint. Anything man-made (and even more so, anything mathematically derived) is, by definition, fungible and axiomatic. Just because to-date no one cracked the code to alter Bitcoin mid-stream or drain blockchain-held information does not mean that in the future such a code cannot be written. So hold your horses: gold is physically limited in quantity (even though in the Universe, it is not as scarce as it is on Earth, which makes long term supply constraint on gold potentially non-binding). Bitcoin is limited by our capacity to alter the underlying code defining it. Anyone thinking of an algorithm as a 'law' needs to go back to Godel's mathematics.

Finally, there is an argument of ‘liberation’. Bitcoin value is only sustained as long as it remains convertible into goods, services and other currencies. This means that Bitcoin cannot remain a government- regulation-free asset, as long as its popularity as a medium of exchange and a vehicle for store of value grows. Which means that in the medium terms (3 years or so?), Bitcoin will either cease to be, or cease to be anonymous. All protection from the dictate of the Central Bankers will be gone.  Benign tolerance of Bitcoin by some regulators can quickly turn into outright prohibition on trading - as current and past examples of China, Vietnam, Nigeria, Colombia, Taiwan, Ecuador, Bangladesh, Kyrgyzstan and Bolivia, Russia, and Thailand suggest. Evolution of cybersecurity measures and regulatory and supervisory tools, including their spread into cryptocurrencies domain will only increase effectiveness of such measures into the future. So, unless you are planning to live in a libertarian paradise, where legal norms of other states do not apply, good luck committing much of your wealth to Bitcoin as a safe haven for oppressive or coercive actions of the nation states.

Worse, anyone claiming that Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation fails to understand how modern markets work. Again, to increase in value, Bitcoin requires higher rates of adoption. Higher rates of adoption bring about higher rates of asset instrumentation (see above for BitMIX). Higher rates of instrumentation and adoption, taken together, imply higher holdings of Bitcoin by institutional and diversified portfolio investors. So far so good? Right, now the kicker: these holdings imply greater, not lower, positive correlations between Bitcoin and other asset classes in shock-experiencing markets. That's right, dodos: Goldman holdings of Bitcoin are correlated to liquidity supply in general markets, because if such liquidity starts evaporating, Goldman will sell Bitcoin to plug holes in other instruments. Sell-off in the markets can trigger sell-off in Bitcoin. Now, another kicker: Bitcoin is currently less liquid than any major asset class (see extreme volatility of pricing across various Bitcoin exchanges). Which means that smart folks at Goldman will be dumping Bitcoin before they dump gold and other assets. Hipsters hugging their laptops will be the last to wake up to this momentum (behavioural evidence suggests, they might actually buy into falling Bitcoin in hope of speculatively gaining on a bounce, which, incidentally, can explain why large drawdowns in Bitcoin can turn so fast into upward trends).

The tricky bit about Bitcoin is that its enthusiasts need to learn to live in the real world first. Until they do, Bitcoin will continue its upward path, and this process can go one for quite a while, depending on the supply of cash in the markets for Bitcoin. Once they are taught a sufficient lesson, however, the rest of us will be learning the long term fundamentals valuations of Bitcoin. I, for now, have no idea what these valuations might be.

So Bitcoin, then. A bubble or not? If you ignore the arguments that attempt to justify its valuations, it looks like one, albeit with dynamics that are very hard to interpret. If you listen to them, it looks that way even more, with more confidence in the arguments bogus nature. Draw your own final conclusions.



Note 1: In defence of the chart above, without validating its implied conclusions: the chart plots Bitcoin evolution from 3 years ago through today. This starting point makes sense. Until mid-2014, Bitcoin was extremely obscure, hype-only investor vehicle, with volatility so off the charts, any analysis of its dynamics was futile (I know, I did such analysis and presented the results in my talk at Bloomberg two years ago). Those us who do research in finance generally and routinely disregard the first 3-4 years of existence of Bitcoin for exactly that reason.

Note 2:  A note due here: Bitcoin's returns from 80-90% drawdowns is not a solid evidence of the crypto-currency not being a bubble, because they are in line with Bitcoins' overall massive volatility. In other words, a valid comparative for these drawdowns relative to other asset classes is not "an 80% drawdown in  Bitcoin ~ an 80% drawdown in stocks", but "an 80% drawdown in Bitcoin ~ an 8% drawdown in stocks". Apples to apples. Dust to dust.

Note 3:  Interesting Elliott Wave analysis of Bitcoin dynamics here: https://atozforex.com/news/29-september-bitcoin-elliott-wave-analysis/ and here https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/20/bitcoin-bubble-dwarfs-tulip-mania-from-400-years-ago-elliott-wave.html, although I am not convinced Bitcoin price trends are established enough for this technique to work.

14/10/17: Bitcoin's Rise: Bentleys in Vancouver?

Two charts highlight the recent dynamics of #Bitcoin rise back to the top of the newsflow:

and decomposing the above:

As a fan of blockchain technology (but not a fan of Bitcoin as an asset), here are some notes of worry:

• The rise has been exponential to-date, while
• The volatility has been absolutely atrocious (albeit weaker than volatility in Ehterium and Ripple, two other top-3 cryptos); and
• The periods from peak to next peak are getting more and more compressed

All of which should make you pause and wonder: what fundamentals, if any, can account for the rise of Bitcoin - a question that many tried to answer and few succeeded. As a disclaimer, I have a couple of papers forthcoming on this in the next month or so. And as a taster for the disclaimer, both papers show absolutely no fundamental drivers capable of explaining the rise of Bitcoin from its first day of trading through the end of 1H 2017. The dynamics of Bitcoin are pure memory (Hurst process) and as such contain no bearing with any real asset in the Universe. 

Put differently, Bitcoin is a hedge against things that cannot be hedged in the markets, most notably, the risk of state-administered expropriation / capital controls in... err... China. So if you want an asset that can (at a staggering risk-premium and transaction cost) hedge your Shanghai property yields against Beijing's reluctance to allow you offshore your cash into a Bentley parked in Vancouver, be my guest. If you have no such need, why, sit back and enjoy the wild ride and gyrations of the crypto to USD/BTC 6,000 and beyond... you can do the latter by playing some Russian roulette speculating on BTC, but do avoid becoming a hostage to St. Petersburg Paradox, should a correction pop the frothy top here and there. In other words, should you want to speculate on Bitcoin, by all means - do. But mind the tremendous risks.

Stay tuned for the aforementioned research papers coming soon.

24/2/17: Distributed ledger technology in payments, clearing, & settlement

A new research paper from the U.S. Federal Reserve System, titled “Distributed ledger technology in payments, clearing, and settlement” (see citation below) looks at the rapidly evolving landscape of blockchain (distributed ledger technologies, or DLTs) in the financial services.

The authors note that DLT “is a term that [as of yet]… does not have a single definition”. Thus, the authors “refer to the technology as some combination of components including peer-to-peer networking, distributed data storage, and cryptography that, among other things, can potentially change the way in which the storage, record-keeping, and transfer of a digital asset is done.” While this definition is broader than blockchain definition alone, it is dominated by blockchain (private and public) typologies.


Impetus for research

Per authors, the impetus for this research is that DLT is one core form of financial sector innovation “that has been cited as a means of transforming payment, clearing, and settlement (PCS) processes, including how funds are transferred and how securities, commodities, and derivatives are cleared and settled.” Furthermore, “the driving force behind efforts to develop and deploy DLT in payments, clearing, and settlement is an expectation that the technology could reduce or even eliminate operational and financial inefficiencies, or other frictions, that exist for current methods of storing, recording, and transferring digital assets throughout financial markets.” This, indeed, is the main positive proposition arising from blockchain solutions, but it is not a unique one. Blockchain systems offer provision of greater security of access and records storage, higher degree of integration of various data sources for the purpose of analytics, greater portability of data. These advantages reach beyond pure efficiency (cost savings) arguments and go to the heart of the idea of financial inclusion - opening up access to financial services for those who are currently unbanked, unserved and undocumented.

In line with this, the Fed study points that the proponents “of the technology have claimed that DLT could help foster a more efficient and safe payments system, and may even have the potential to fundamentally change the way in which PCS [payments, clearance and settlement] activities are conducted and the roles that financial institutions and infrastructures currently play.” The Fed is cautious on the latter promises, stating that “although there is much optimism regarding the promise of DLT, the development of such applications for PCS activities is in very early stages, with many industry participants suggesting that real-world applications are years away from full implementation.”

Per Fed research, “U.S. PCS systems process approximately 600 million transactions per day, valued at over $12.6 trillion.” In simple terms, given average transaction cost of ca 2-2.5 percent, the market for PCS support systems is around USD250-310 billion annually in the U.S. alone, implying global markets size of well in excess of USD750 billion.

DLT Potential 

Fed researchers summarise key (but not all) potential (currently emerging) benefits of DLT systems in PCS services markets:

• Reduced complexity (especially in multiparty, cross-border transactions)
• Improved end-to-end processing speed and availability of assets and funds
• Decreased need for reconciliation across multiple record-keeping infrastructures
• Increased transparency and immutability in transaction record-keeping
• Improved network resiliency through distributed data management
• Reduced operational and financial risks

One of the more challenging, from the general financial services practitioners’ point of view, benefits of DLT is that it is “essentially asset-agnostic, meaning the technology is potentially capable of providing the storage, record-keeping, and transfer of any type of asset. This asset-agnostic nature of DLT has resulted in a range of possible applications currently being explored for uses in post-trade processes.”

The key to the above is that blockchains ledgers are neutral to the assets that are recorded on them, unlike traditional electronic and physical ledgers that commonly require specific structures for individual types of assets. The advantage of the blockchain is not simply in the fact that you can use the ledger to account for transactions involving multiple and diverse assets, but that you can also more seamlessly integrate data relating to different assets into analytics engines.

Due to higher efficiencies (cost, latency and security), blockchain offers huge potential in one core area of financial services: financial inclusion. As noted by the Fed researchers, “financial inclusion is another challenge both domestically and abroad that some are attempting to address with DLT. Some of the potential benefits of DLT for cross-border payments described above might also be able to help address issues involving cross-border remittances as well as challenges in providing end-users with universal access to a wide range of financial services. Access to financial services can be difficult, particularly for low-income households, because of high account fees, prohibitive costs associated with traveling to a bank. Developers contend DLT may assist financial inclusion by potentially allowing technology firms such as mobile phone providers to provide DLT-based financial services directly to end users at a lower cost than can (or would) traditional financial intermediaries; expanding access to customer groups not served by ordinary banks, and ultimately
reducing costs for retail consumers.”

Lower costs are key to achieving financial inclusion because serving lower income (currently unbanked and unserved) customers in diverse geographical, regulatory and institutional settings requires trading on much lower margins than in traditional financial services, usually delivered to higher income clients. Reducing costs is the key to improving margins, making them sustainable enough for financial services providers to enter lower income segments of the markets.

Incidentally, in addition to lower costs, improving financial inclusion also requires higher security and improved identification of customers. These are necessary to achieve significant gains in efficiencies in collection and distribution of payments (e.g. in micro-insurance or micro-finance). Once again, DLT systems hold huge promise here, including in the areas of creating Digital IDs for lower income clients and for undocumented customers, and in creating verifiable and portable financial fingerprints for such clients.

The Fed paper partially touches this when addressing the gains in information sharing arising from DLT platforms. “According to interviews, the ability of DLT to maintain tamper-resistant records can provide new ways to share information across entities such as independent auditors and supervisors.” Note: this reaches well beyond the scope of supervision and audits, and goes directly to the heart of the existent bottlenecks in information sharing and transmission present in the legacy financial systems, although the Fed study omits this consideration.

“As an example, DLT arrangements could be designed to allow auditors or supervisors “read-only access” to certain parts of the common ledger. This could help service providers in a DLT arrangement and end users meet regulatory reporting requirements more efficiently. Developers contend that being given visibility to a unified, shared ledger could give supervisors confidence in knowing the origins of the asset and the history of transactions across participants. Having a connection as a node in the network, a supervisor would receive transaction data as soon as it is broadcast to the network, which could help streamline regulatory compliance procedures and reduce costs…”

Once again, the Fed research does not see beyond the immediate issues of auditing and supervision. In reality, “read-only” access or “targeted access” can facilitate much easier and less costly underwriting of risks and structuring of contracts, aiding financial inclusion.


Key takeaways

Overall, the Fed paper “has examined how DLT can be used in the area of payments, clearing and settlement and identifies both the opportunities and challenges facing its long-term implementation and adoption.” This clearly specifies a relatively narrow reach of the study that excludes more business-focused aspects of DLTs potential in facilitating product structuring, asset management, data analytics, product underwriting, contracts structuring and other functionalities of huge importance to the financial services.

Per Fed, “in the [narrower] context of payments, DLT has the potential to provide new ways to transfer and record the ownership of digital assets; immutably and securely store information; provide for identity management; and other evolving operations through peer-to-peer networking, access to a distributed but common ledger among participants, and cryptography. Potential use cases in payments, clearing, and settlement include cross-border payments and the post-trade clearing and settlement of securities. These use cases could address operational and financial frictions around existing services.”

As the study notes, “…the industry’s understanding and application of this technology is still in its infancy, and stakeholders are taking a variety of approaches toward its development.” Thus, “…a number of challenges to development and adoption remain, including in how issues around business cases, technological hurdles, legal considerations, and risk management considerations are addressed.” All of which shows two things:

• Firstly, the true potential of DLTs in transforming the financial services is currently impossible to map out due to both the early stages of technological development and the broad range of potential applications. The Fed research mostly focuses on the set of back office applications of DLT, without touching upon the front office applications, and without considering the potentially greater gains from integration of back and front office applications through DLT platforms; and
• Secondly, the key obstacles to the DLT deployment are the legacy services providers and systems - an issue that also worth exploring in more details.

In both, the former and the latter terms, it is heartening to see U.S. regulatory bodies shifting their supervisory and regulatory approaches toward greater openness toward DLT platforms, when contrasted against the legacy financial services platforms.


Mills, David, Kathy Wang, Brendan Malone, Anjana Ravi, Jeff Marquardt, Clinton Chen, Anton Badev, Timothy Brezinski, Linda Fahy, Kimberley Liao, Vanessa Kargenian, Max Ellithorpe, Wendy Ng, and Maria Baird (2016). “Distributed ledger technology in payments, clearing, and settlement,” Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2016-095. Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, https://doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2016.095. 

18/1/17: Bitcoin Demand: It's a Chinese Tale

Bitcoin demand by geographic location of trading activity:

H/T for the chart to Dave Lauer @dlauer

It shows exactly what it says: Bitcoin is currently driven by safe haven instrument (and not as a hedge) against capital controls. Which implies massive expected price and volumes volatility in the future, wider cost margins and artificial support for demand in the near term.

17/1/17: Economics of Blockchain

One of the first systemic papers on economic of blockchain, via NBER (http://www.nber.org/papers/w22952) by Christian Catalini and Joshua S. Gans, NBER Working Paper No. 22952 (December 2016).

In basic terms, the authors see blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies influencing the rate and direction of innovation through two channels:

1. Reducing the cost of verification; and 
2. Reducing the cost of networking.

Per authors, for any "exchange to be executed, key attributes of a transaction need to be verified by the parties involved at multiple points in time. Blockchain technology, by allowing market participants to perform costless verification, lowers the costs of auditing transaction information, and allows new marketplaces to emerge. Furthermore, when a distributed ledger is combined with a native cryptographic token (as in Bitcoin), marketplaces can be bootstrapped without the need of
traditional trusted intermediaries, lowering the cost of networking. This challenges existing
revenue models and incumbents's market power, and opens opportunities for novel approaches to
regulation, auctions and the provision of public goods, software, identity and reputation systems."

A bit more granularly, per authors,

• "Because of how it provides incentives for maintaining a ledger in a fully decentralized way, Bitcoin is also the first example of how an open protocol can be used to implement a marketplace without the need of a central actor." In other words, key feature of cryptocurrencies and blockchain is that it removes the need to create a central verification authority / intermediary / regulator or repository of data. The result is more than the cost reduction (focus of the Catalini and Gans paper), but the redistribution of market power away from intermediaries to the agents of supply and demand. In other words, a direct streamlining of the market away from third parties power toward the direct power for economic agents.
• "Furthermore, as the core protocol is extended (e.g. by adding the ability to store documents through a distributed ledger-storage system), as we will see the market enabled by a cryptocurrency becomes a  flexible, permission-less development platform for novel applications." Agin, while one might focus on reductions in the direct costs of innovation in that context, one cannot ignore the simple fact that blockchain is resulting in reduced non-cost barriers to innovation, further reducing monopolistic market power (especially of intermediaries and regulators) and diffusing that power to innovators.

So what are the implications of this view of economics of blockchain? "Whereas the utopian view has argued that blockchain technology will affect every market by reducing the need for intermediation, we argue that it is more likely to change the scope of intermediation both on the intensive margin of transactions (e.g., by reducing costs and possibly influencing market structure) as well as on the extensive one (e.g., by allowing for new types of marketplaces)." So far, reasonable. Intermediation will not disappear as such - there will always be need for some analytics, pricing, management etc of data, contracts and so on, even with blockchain ledgers in place. However, the authors are missing a major point: blockchain ledgers are opening possibility to fully automated direct data analytics and AI deployment on the transactions ledgers. In other words, traditional forms of intermediation (for example in the context of insurance contract transactions, those involving data collection, data preparation, risk underwriting, contract pricing, contract enforcement, contract payments across premia and payouts, etc) all can be automated and supported by live data-based analytics engine(s) operating on blockchain ledgers. If so, the argument that the utopian view won't materialise is questionable.

The paper is worth reading, for it is one of the early attempts to create some theoretical framework around blockchain systems. Alas, my gut feeling is that the authors are failing to fully understand the depth of the blockchain technology. 

2/1/16: Financial digital disruptors and cyber-security risks

My and Shaen Corbet's new paper titled Financial digital disruptors and cyber-security risks: paired and systemic (January 2, 2017), forthcoming in Journal of Terrorism & Cyber Insurance, Volume 1 Issue 2, 2017 is now available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2892842.

Abstract:
The scale and intensity of digital financial criminality has become more apparent and audacious over the past fifteen years. To counteract this escalating threat, financial technology (FinTech) and monetary and financial institutions (MFI) have attempted to upgrade their internal technological infrastructures to mitigate the risk of a catastrophic technological collapse. However, these attempts have been hampered through the financial stresses generated from the recent international banking crises. Significant contagion channels in the aftermath of cybercriminal events have also been recently uncovered, indicating that a single major event may generate sectoral and industry-wide volatility spillovers. As the skillset and variety of tactics used by cybercriminals develops further in an environment of stagnating and underfunded defensive technological structures, the probability of a devastating hacking event increases, along with the necessity for regulatory intervention. This paper explores and discusses the range of threats and consequences emanating from financial digital disruptors through cybercrime and potential avenues that may be utilised to counteract such risk.

9/11/16: Bitcoin vs Ether: MIIS Students Case Study

Following last night's election results, Bitcoin rose sharply in value, in line with gold, while other digital currencies largely failed to provide a safe haven against the extreme spike in markets volatility.

In a recent project, our students @MIIS have looked at the relative valuation of Bitcoin and Ether (cryptocurrency backing Ethereum blockchain platform) highlighting

1. Fundamental supply and demand drivers for both currencies; and
2. Assessing both currencies in terms of their hedging and safe haven properties

The conclusion of the case study was squarely in line with Bitcoin and Ether behaviour observed today: Bitcoin outperforms Ether as both a hedge and a safe haven, and has stronger risk-adjusted returns potential over the next 5 years.

See the case here: http://www.economist.com/whichmba/mba-case-studies/investment-case-study-competition-2016/middlebury-institute-international-studies and please, give your vote to the team of our students.