At present, bitcoin is held mostly as a speculative vehicle, little used to pay for goods and services. Its value has been unstable, which impedes bitcoin’s wider use as a payment medium. We explain why the value of bitcoin has been so unstable. Then, we discuss entrepreneurial efforts that...

This paper surveys economists’ work on the theory and the history of free banking regimes. Support for free banking - a laissez-faire monetary system without a central bank, typically conceived as operating under a commodity standard - has been much rarer than support for free trade, even...

Note: This is a description of the paper and not the abstract as it appeared in the print journal. Some economists believe that the competitive survival of non-interest-bearing currency--the absence of price competition from markets for stored-value cards, banknotes, and token coins--implies a...

In 1826 the famous novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott entered an economic policy debate. Adopting a pseudonym, his Letters … from Malachi Malagrowther, Esq., on the Proposed Change of Currency fiercely defended the Scottish banking system from a British government proposal to ban banknotes...

F. A. Hayek's macroeconomic theory and policy ideas have gained renewed attention since the recent boom-and-bust cycle followed the basic Hayekian narrative of an unsustainable cheap- money boom ending with a crash. Only to a very limited extent, however, do we find Hayek's ideas on the agenda...

As the one-hundredth anniversary of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act approaches, we assess whether the nation's experiment with the Federal Reserve has been a success or a failure. Drawing on a wide range of recent empirical research, we find the following: (1) The Fed's full history (1914 to...

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....