Introducing the Academic Blockchain Podcast

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Listen Now to our exclusive interview with the Director of Economics at the Center for Aerospace and Securities Studies in Pakistan, Dr. Usman Chohan.

The Academic Blockchain Podcast is a weekly podcast where we interview academics regarding papers that they recently wrote on the topic of blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

In this inaugural edition, we discuss why Dr. Chohan believes that cryptocurrencies will be the future, and that stablecoins are just a short-term intermediary step. Dr. Chohan does not believe that stablecoins will be able to maintain their pegs in the long-term because:

  1. Stablecoins that are backed by collateral are not scalable. If a stablecoin like Tether has to store dollar reserves, then eventually Tether would need to own and store trillions of dollars in order to service the world’s demand for a reserve currency.
  2. Speculative attacks on coins that are unbacked can break the peg. This is what we saw when Thai authorities abandoned the US dollar Thai baht peg on July 2, 1997, and when the Bank of England broke their peg to the Deutsche Mark during the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) in 1992.

We discuss that Pakistan’s currency devalued from 10 rupees to 1 USD dollar in the 1980s to the current exchange rate of 150 to 1. We discuss why pegs fail, and why blockchain probably will not help currencies maintain their pegs.

We also discuss how the Triffin Dilemma is all about the trade-offs between short-term benefits and long-term costs when a country’s currency becomes the global currency. We discuss how the United Kingdom’s pound hegemony and the US dollar’s hegemony have not helped these countries in the long-run.

We also discuss how Saudi Arabia’s exclusive use of the US dollar for oil sales is keeping the entire economy running on dollars, and why any oil producing country that moves away from the dollar is a major target for US warmongering.

In the following weeks, we will be releasing our podcast with ConsenSys discussing their central bank digital currency white paper released during the World Economic Forum’s 2020 conference in Davos, Switzerland. On the lineup also includes an interview with Stanford University Professor Dan Boneh who recently wrote a paper on problems with MakerDao’s Oracle data.

Tomorrow our weekly newsletter comes out. The report compares the Corona virus and the 9/11 Terrorist Attack crisis in 2001. Both are Main Street crises that the Fed is responding to by lowering rates. In the newsletter, we discuss all of the actions that the Fed has done over the past two weeks.

We discuss how the Fed’s three newest collateralized lending programs and the daily $1 trillion dollars in repurchase agreements or “Repos” do not mean that the dollar is being devalued in the long-term. On the other hand, we discuss how buying securities outright is bullish for crypto. Sign up for the newsletter now to make sure you understand what the Fed is doing and whether or not the Fed’s actions will devalue the dollar and send crypto soaring.

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