Robert M. Townsend
Autor von Welfare gains from financial liberalization
Über den Autor
Robert M. Townsend is Elizabeth James Killian Professor of Economics at MIT and the coauthor of Chronicles from the Field: The Townsend Thai Project (MIT Press).
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thankfully absent from the book are the usual shitty political hobbyhorses of the crypto crowd--crank neo goldbugism and the ancap-flavored obsession with decentralization for its own sake. there is a defense of cryptocurrency and smart contracts as useful supplements to ordinary fiat currency and paper contracts. that said, neolib economists have their own hobbyhorses like microfinance, which i am unsure about.
one point i found especially interesting (tho briefly treated) is the need to translate between human-readable and machine-readable contracts. googling reveals some of the projects mentioned in the text as working on this are now defunct -- uh oh.
Best parts related distributed ledgers to historical inventions like tally sticks, islamic banking with trusted lenders, databases, M-Pesa in Kenya, double-entry bookkeeping, and balance sheets for firms. none of these comparisons are new, appearing in more popular books, but this book explains how DLT offers some new features these earlier technologies did not: eg, ensuring consistency between balance sheets kept by counter-parties (bob's sale is alice's purchase) and the utility of those features (public log of transactions facilitates lending based on anticipated cash flows, to bob's benefit here; or optimizing government money supply, to everyone's benefit). it also call attention to fact that DLT cannot escape long-appreciated constraints of other tech like databases: the CAP theorem says among consistency, accuracy, partitioning one must choose two.
i do not wish to read more on this topic for some time, and i suppose that is a credit to this book.… (mehr)