Wann? Donnerstag, 23. Mai 2019, 13:15-14:45 Uhr
Wo? Hörsaal 6 (1. Stock), Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften
Wie? ohne Anmeldung, einfach Vorbeikommen
Is it possible to have money without banks or central banks? Can such money have value? Nakamoto (2008) created bitcoin to “allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution”. Whether bitcoin has intrinsic, or fundamental, value is a challenging question. To answer it, one must go back to the very definition of money or currency. What is a currency? What is its fundamental value? To what extent can the answers to these questions be extended to bitcoin? To address these issues, we first build a simple economic model to try to clarify what is the value of money and that of cryptocurrencies. In doing so, we rely on standard tools of economics: agents optimise and have rational expectations, prices are set to clear markets, money and cryptocurrencies are used to solve the non-double coincidence of the want problem. This helps us clarify the similarities and differences between standard money and cryptocurrencies. Our next step is to convert this theoretical model to data. To do so we collected a new data set on bitcoin prices and volume and on fundamental variables potentially affecting the value of bitcoin. We then used econometric tools, similar to those used in asset pricing, to estimate the parameters of the model and test it. Hopefully you have the curiosity to come and find out the answer during the lecture!