"Cryptocurrency is coming. It could be Bitcoin, it could be something else, it could be a new trading framework that incorporates many cryptocurrencies. The important thing is that in a decade’s time, governments will have lost the ability to look into their citizens’ wealth and income.

This, in turn, means that no taxation or welfare can be based on wealth or income.

I argue that the proper way to tackle this problem from an information policy perspective is to shift the taxation base entirely to consumption and therefore shift all income tax to VAT. To keep taxation progressive, and to keep welfare systems functional, you will also need to combine it with a basic unconditional income for every citizen that amounts to some level of minimum sustenance."

"I think every body who’s breathed the air around eco nom ics gets the the sis that money is an eco nomic prod uct sub ject to sup ply and demand like any other. But to actu ally see it bro ken down as analy sis of dis crete things — a fiat cur rency backed by the full faith and credit of the US gov’t but whose weight and mate ri als and cost and dura bil ity and shape all turn out to be cru cial to its suc cess or fail ure — man, it’s another thing altogether. "

"One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success. Had the zero rupee note reached the old lady sooner, her granddaughter could have started college on schedule and avoided the consequence of delaying her education for two years. In another experience, a corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen."

"While demurrage is a natural feature of private commodity money it has at various times been deliberately incorporated into currency systems as a disincentive against hoarding of money, as well as to achieve other perceived benefits. In particular, with regards to long term investment financing it has the effect of changing the dynamics of net present value (NPV) calculations. All else being equal, a currency system with demurrage places an increased emphasis on the value of long term returns on an investment. As such it may create an incentive to invest in initiatives which offer more in the way of longer-term returns."

"Consequently I think it is possible to think of AIG as the insurer-of-last resort to the United States’ own shadow financial system. That shadow financial system just operated offshore. There was a reason why investors in the UK were buying so many US asset backed securities during the peak years of the credit boom."