It was a pleasure to moderate this panel on scaling up #blockchains

The session starts at 5:28:50 on the video link below

Here's a short thread on my key takeaways:
Decentralization is motivated by the governance benefits - the idea is that the checks and balances of the community as a whole is the best way to safeguard the integrity of the system and avoid capture by a few powerful entities
But there has been an argument that the price to be paid for this better governance is the lack of scalability
There are two senses of scalability that seems crucial here; the first is the technological one of the time needed to reach consensus on every decision

This is about the laws of physics
But there is another (perhaps more important) sense of scalability that is about the incentive structure to maintain the protocol as an equilibrium of a game

This is about the laws of economics
To keep the system working well, the validators need to be rewarded to keep the system humming along; in game theory parlance, the payoffs of the game need to be such that following the protocol is an equilibrium of the game - and a robust one at that
Coordination can be enforced in equilibrium provided that the rewards to the validators are high enough, but we know from the global games literature that coordination is fragile

For instance, this piece bis.org/publ/work924.h…
The hot debates around miner extractable value (MEV) in Ethereum is a more concrete example
In any case, some proposed solutions for scalability look like ways to bring back intermediaries in some way, and to skip on-chain activity
But since the rationale for decentralization is for its governance benefits (the checks and balances mentioned above) bringing back intermediaries seems generate some tension here, to say the least
My biggest takeaway from today's discussion is that technology will only take us so far along this route to decentralization

The incentives of participants seem key to me; it's a social activity we're studying not something from nature
One question to ponder:

The rewards to validators are very high currently, as decentralization is in its early stages

The test of the incentives of validators will come when the system matures, rents decline and profits need to be spread more thinly

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More from @HyunSongShin

25 Jun
Timely outing on Odd Lots with @tracyalloway and @TheStalwart to discuss data silos and "walled gardens" in the digital economy

One thought occurred to me after the podcast.

Here's a quick thread.
Privacy looms large when CBDCs come up, as digital currencies rely on a ledger of some kind - a record of who owns what, when, and who pays what to whom; see this (tough but fair) interview with @izakaminska and @senoj_erialc I gave to @FTAlphaville
The idea of a digital ID-based CBDC causes discomfort (to say the least); it conjures up notions of compulsory national identity cards
See this classic episode of "Yes Minister", for instance
Read 11 tweets
7 Jun
The BIS is expanding coverage of its government bonds statistics

A thread follows
The BIS Quarterly Review out today has an introductory piece outlining what's new

bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_…
Bird's eye view of what's on offer from the BIS on its coverage of government bonds

Table C4 is brand new; it has the all-important breakdown by currency of issue

bis.org/statistics/sec…
Read 11 tweets
25 Jan
Happy to announce the launch of the BIS’s “Dreamcatcher” data visualisation tool with the latest BIS banking statistics:

bis.org/statistics/rpp…

A thread follows
Dreamcatcher puts into one package the BIS’s cross-border banking statistics; or more accurately, it gathers the BIS’s locational banking statistics that breaks out the cross-border bank claims according to the residence principle

bis.org/statistics/sta…
Hovering your cursor above the segment of the circle that represents a particular jurisdiction will bring up the full list of cross-border assets and liabilities of banks operating from there

bis.org/statistics/sta…

The example below is the United Kingdom
Read 8 tweets
10 Nov 20
Much can be learned on the payment system and the monetary-fiscal nexus from the rise and fall of the Bank of Amsterdam (1609 - 1820), one of the first central banks in Europe

Link to my BIS working paper published today:

bis.org/publ/work902.h…

A short thread follows
The Bank of Amsterdam started life as a rigid stablecoin, where holders of silver and gold coins delivered them to the Bank, in return for deposits
These deposits were used for wholesale payments - for settlement of financial instruments like bills of exchange where a payment was settled by debiting the account of the payer and crediting the account of the receiver, much like the modern wholesale payment system
Read 7 tweets
14 Aug 20
Corporate credit markets decoupled in March; bond issuance boomed but discretionary bank credit stalled

Unequal access to credit between large firms and the rest is the topic of today's #BIS_Bulletin

A thread follows

bis.org/publ/bisbull29…
First, some facts:

The weekly series on new borrowing in debt markets surged at the end of March (left panel); but most of the surge came from bond issuance (middle panel) rather than from syndicated loans
This decoupling of the bond and syndicated loan market is a repeat of what happened in the aftermath of Lehman, when loan volumes crashed and bond issuance surged (right-hand panel)
Read 15 tweets
23 Jul 20
Inflation tail risks have risen, mostly to the downside but some also to the upside

Today's #BIS_Bulletin sorts through the cases
bis.org/publ/bisbull28…
Phillips curve reasoning carries us a long way: subdued activity increases downside tail risk to inflation; but this is not the only story on inflation
The authors get at tail risks through quantile regressions that track outliers in realised inflation; the red curves below give the densities of 4-quarter ahead probability densities for inflation
Read 13 tweets

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