Moneyness

Payments companies are regularly punished for engaging in money laundering. MoneyGram, for instance, has has to pay multiple fines . Western Union was famously busted in 2017. Meanwhile, Ca...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/04/thoughts-on-tornado-cash-defence-and.html

  I'm not a fan of mandatory investor education classes. The issue was brought up recently by former chair of FDIC, Sheila Bair, who sees early financial education as ways to stop future FTX-s...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/04/why-im-in-favor-of-financial-illiteracy.html

Last month American provocateur Tucker Carlson visited a Russian grocery store. Because it was filled to the brim with food, Carlson claims that western sanctions placed on Russia aren't having ...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-effects-of-russian-sanctions-as.html

There's a new financial loophole in town: stablecoins. Stablecoins are dollar, yen, or pound-based payments platforms that are built using crypto database technology. Financial institutions...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/03/how-paypal-can-use-stablecoins-to-avoid.html

I very much enjoy economist Robin Brooks's tweets, especially his charts showing how sanctions imposed on Russia have affected regional trade patterns. While direct trade between Europe and Russ...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/03/are-sanctions-on-russia-working.html

Call me a pedant, but I'm not a fan of the word "crypto". It may have been a serviceable category back in 2011 when there was only one type of crypto thingy – bitcoin. But it's ceased to be a ...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/03/its-time-to-get-rid-of-crypto.html

What do I like about Byzantine coinage? Most people probably admire the Byzantine solidus , a gold coin that maintained its weight and purity for over 600 years, which is quite remarkable for a ...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/02/why-my-favorite-coinage-is-byzantine.html

Turkish banks halted transactions with Russian banks last month and are only slowly reintroducing payments for a narrow range of products that are on a so-called "green list," reports Ragip Soyl...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-first-round-of-us-secondary.html

A Federal judge ruled last week that the emergency banking measures taken to end the Ottawa convoy protest in 2022 contravened the protestor's rights. In this post I want to provide my readi...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/01/what-does-recent-ruling-on-emergencies.html

Some folks are suggesting that a bitcoin ETF is absurd because it doesn't fit with Bitcoin's original ethos. On the contrary, I think it's a nice snug fit. It would be a misunderstanding of b...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/01/do-bitcoin-etfs-conflict-with-bitcoins.html

Russia is sometimes described as the world's most sanctioned nation. And while that's true , the long list of sanctions that the G7 coalition has placed on Russia in response to its attack on Ukr...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2024/01/its-time-to-impose-iran-calibre.html

I'll start with the conclusion. I don't think flatcoins are a good idea. The idea for flatcoins has been around for a while, but it got a wider airing when it popped up in a Coinbase market...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/12/are-flatcoins-good-idea.html

Coinbase, the U.S.'s largest crypto exchange, is openly processing Ethereum transactions involving Tornado Cash, a piece of blockchain infrastructure that was sanctioned by the U.S. government l...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-long-arm-of-ofac-reaches-into.html

Tether, a stablecoin, has been in the news for offering sanctioned actors such as Hamas a means to participate in the global payments ecosystem. In this post I want to explore in more depth...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/12/why-do-sanctioned-entities-use-tether.html

Many of you may not realize this, but in most parts of the developed world, banks automatically record and report our transactions to law enforcement. The logic behind this is that by giving up o...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/12/even-crypto-mixing-deserves-threshold.html

Central bank settlement systems are the the tectonic plates of the payment system: they are vitally important to our lives, but we never see them in action. All of a nations' electronic payme...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/11/are-central-banks-too-reliant-on-swift.html

Chris Blec asks the following question: Source: Twitter Chris's premise is that it is "not illegal" for him to get together with a bunch of strangers to mix cash. But that's not quite rig...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/11/is-it-legal-to-mix-cash-in-jar.html

It's been a full year since FTX International and FTX-US collapsed, and the shocking thing is – there is still no regulated crypto venue in the U.S.! You'd think some lessons would have be...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/11/kraken-v-kraken-or-how-to-protect.html

Two seemingly separate stories, a crypto and a banking story, have a common thread in anti-money laundering thresholds. In the first story, the New York Times shows how regular folks are increa...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/11/in-praise-of-anti-money-laundering.html

What role do changes in the supply of banknotes play in contributing to a central bank's ability to carry out monetary policy? Put differently, to what degree does "printing," or creating new...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/11/how-would-cash-only-central-bank.html

Source: America Loves Crypto You may have recently come across the America Loves Crypto marketing campaign, sponsored by Coinbase, the U.S.'s largest crypto exchange. In an attempt to prom...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/10/crypto-adoption-in-america.html

Last week I explored how Henry VIII resorted to coin debasement as a way to raise revenues in order to fight his wars. This provided Henry with the financial firepower to annex the city of Boul...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/10/inflation-as-tax.html

I've been writing on this blog for a while now – over ten years. Many of those posts are now forgotten (by myself included), but some were pretty popular at the time, and a few still get a ste...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/10/top-13-blog-posts.html

Henry VIII, after Hans Holbein the Younger It's fun to imagine traveling back in time and engaging with the then-prevailing technologies. Would you be able to ride a boneshaker or use a cou...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/10/how-to-debase-coinage-in-order-to-pay.html

Here's my quick first-pass take on Privacy Pools , the heir apparent to privacy tool Tornado Cash. My comments are on the legal side, and less so the technical side, although the two aren't m...

http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2023/09/thoughts-on-privacy-pools-and-law.html