In a short period of time virtual currencies have gained significant traction and become an economic reality, with Bitcoin being the most dominant among over 500 virtual currencies. Bitcoin and other virtual currencies present a particularly difficult and unique jurisdictional challenge to...

During 2013, the U.S. Treasury Department evoked the first use of the 2001 Patriot Act to exclude virtual currency provider Liberty Reserve from the U.S. financial system. This article will discuss: the regulation of virtual currencies; cybercrimes and payment systems; darknets, Tor and the...

This paper analyses the relationship between BitCoin price and supply-demand fundamentals of BitCoin, global macro-financial indicators and BitCoin’s attractiveness for investors. Using daily data for the period 2009-2014 and applying time-series analytical mechanisms, we find that BitCoin...

Over millennia, mankind has used hard cash in various forms ranging from shells to gold coins and paper. More recently, cash has become unpopular in political circles, as it effectively restricts states’ power to tax (explicitly or via negative interest rates) or to survey and potentially...

Digital currencies have attracted strong interest in recent years and have the potential to become widely adopted for use in making payments. Public authorities and central banks around the world are closely monitoring developments in digital currencies and studying their implications for the...

Bitcoin is the oldest and most widely established cryptocurrency network with the highest market capitalization among all cryptocurrencies. Although bitcoin (with lowercase b) is increasingly viewed as a digital asset belonging to a new asset class, the Bitcoin network (with uppercase B) is a...

We discuss the pros of adopting government-issued digital currencies as well as a supranational digital iCurrency. One such pro is to get rid of paper money (and coinage), a ubiquitous medium for spreading germs, as highlighted by the recent coronavirus outbreak. We set forth three policy...

The prospect of central banks issuing digital currency (CBDC) immediately raises the question of how this new form of money should co-exist and interact with existing forms of money. This paper evaluates three different scenarios for the implementation of CBDC in terms of their monetary policy...

Recently the term Cryptocurrency is a frequently used in the mainstream media. The main reason for that is a bitcoin occurrence with reference to the technology and cryptographic inventions that stand behind the bitcoin. Cryptocurrency is legal in region because the European Union has liberal...