The recent rise of dollar, pound, and euro inflation rates has rekindled the debate over potential alternative monies, particularly gold and Bitcoin. Though Bitcoin has been much discussed in recent years, a basic understanding of how it and gold would work as monetary standards is rare....

To support the understanding that banks' debt issuance means money creation, while centralized nonbank financial institutions' and decentralized bond market intermediary lending does not, the paper aims to convey two related points: First, the notion of money creation as a result of banks' loan...

Cryptocurrency is private money and is costly to produce. In this paper, I ask whether cryptocurrency can serve as a medium of exchange, and whether it can coexist with fiat money as a widely accepted medium of exchange. To answer these questions, I develop two search-theoretic models: a model...