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John Paul Koning
@jp_koning
, 3 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
"At the height of the Iraq & Afghanistan conflicts in 2004, the Army collected more than $480 million in U.S. cash in theater. Today, EagleCash has reduced that number to near $0." usafmcom.army.mil/News/Article-D… ht @stmdc

The US military has had some innovative payments ideas... 1/3
An occupying force wants to use a money that...
-doesn't dollarize the nation they are occupying
-can be tracked, thwarting black marketeers
-is lightweight
-if they lose, the enemy can't reuse it
Dollar bills are bulky, infiltrate local economies, and aren't enemy-resistant.
2/3
So we get innovations like EagleCash. Other ideas:
-Military Payment Certificates jpkoning.blogspot.com/2017/04/c-day-… & overprinting jpkoning.blogspot.com/2017/04/leavin… (demonetizations thwarted enemies & dollarization)
-Pogs, which were lighter than metal coins 3/3
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John Paul Koning
@jp_koning
Early strains of American bitcoinism were motivated by glacially-slow ACH transfers. But these strains have disappeared thanks to several new US instant payments initiatives:
-MasterCard Send (2015)/Visa Direct (2016)
-Zelle (2017)
-TCH's Real Time Payments (2017)
-FedNow (2023)
International bitcoinism was less driven by slow ACH—many nations already had fast domestic payments. Still, all strains could agree that cross-border payments were awful. But new real-time initiatives dashed this consensus:
-Swift gpi (2017)
-Transferwise
With so many strains of bitcoinism being whittled away, just a few remain:
-if we can't do mainstream payments, we'll do payments for the excluded
-digital gold i.e. bitcoin isn't for paying, it's for hoarding
-bitcoin isn't a monetary technology, it's a gambling technology
Read 3 tweets
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John Paul Koning
@jp_koning
Wow Starbucks, what a great gig.

Starbucks has ~$1.6 billion in 'stored value card liabilities' i.e. the Starbucks Card. So ~6% of the firm's liabilities are comprised of coffee addicts paying 0% for the privilege of lending to their supplier.
Source: s22.q4cdn.com/869488222/file…
Few companies can get that much free financing. But don't forget breakage—balances that will never be redeemed. In 2018 Starbucks recorded breakage of $155 million,~10% of all card balances.

So the true rate at which customers are lending to Starbucks is probably closer to -10%.
Starbucks is really good at harvesting seigniorage.

Walmart's annual sales are 20x larger than Starbucks sales (~$500b vs $25b). But Walmart only has $1.9 billion in unredeemed gift card balances, not much more than Starbucks. Source: s2.q4cdn.com/056532643/file…
Read 3 tweets

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