I will address eight common claims about bitcoin: 1. Physical bitcoins exist; 2. The founder of bitcoin is a person called Satoshi Nakamoto; 3. Bitcoin is mainly used for criminal activity; 4. A lack of security plagues bitcoin; 5. Mining is a waste of energy; 6. Bitcoin too small today to be an...

The need for a legal framework that explains a decentralized system is compulsory to understand whether regulation could be useful and effective. Previous academic frameworks did not manage to explain the intimate development and success of a decentralized cryptocurrency system interpreting the...

Bitcoin is the most successful cryptocurrency and one of the best types of private money ever. The blockchain technology underlying bitcoin is presented with the spotlight on distributed consensus, allowing for proper understanding of its peculiarities. Notarization and trust anchoring are...

The creation of the European single economic market led to an unprecedented increase in economic activity between firms and individuals across the European Economic Area (EEA). This necessitated the development of a payment services and processing infrastructure to match the increasing activity...

This paper examines Bitcoin from a legal and regulatory perspective, answering several important questions. We begin by explaining what Bitcoin is, and why it matters. We describe problems with Bitcoin as a method of implementing a cryptocurrency. This introduction to cryptocurrencies allows us...

The creation of central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, is typically discussed from the standpoint of tradeoffs, as if the crucial question at hand were only how to improve the efficiency and security of the payment system, or, more ambitiously, how to design money to fend off global warming,...