Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom
It is always wise to be careful in choosing with whom you associate and do business. The older I get the more this has proven true. I’ve known Jonathan and Brad, the founders of ChooseFI, for a long time. I was one of their first podcast guests and have been honored to be invited back […]
The Simple Path to a Lucrative Career
Gordon Fletcher, University of Salford
Efforts to explain Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general have generally focused on how they are both a new form of money as well as a challenge to existing forms of money.
Cryptocurrencies are novel as they are only possible because of the ready availability of high-speed computing and networks. They are a challenge to today’s currencies because of their decentralised nature, taking them out of national governments’ control. Small signs that Bitcoin has filtered into the popular imagination include its appearance in US courtroom television drama The Good Wife, in an episode called “Bitcoin for Dummies”.
What has been given less attention is the mechanism that makes the bitcoin network possible, the blockchain. To own and use bitcoin or any other cryptocurrencies requires no knowledge of how the blockchain works. Nevertheless the concept is relatively straightforward. It is best thought of as a complete ledger of every bitcoin transaction ever made, of which every bitcoin user has a copy that is constantly updated as new transactions are made.
But this accounting analogy is something of a disservice; the blockchain has the potential for so many other uses beyond exchanging value that it shouldn’t be ignored.
Foremost among those pushing alternative uses is the Ethereum project. Although it also provides its own cryptocurrency, ether – it sold 61m ether in its opening sale this month, raising around US$15m – the project sets out to do much more.
Ethereum includes a programming language, EtherScript, with which users can systematically set out a contract in a programmable form – a smart contract. Current examples of smart contracts are digital rights management such as is included in some digital media files, which is a smart contract means of enforcing copyright licensing. Or software that automatically throttles network traffic to within acceptable limits is a form of smart contract to deliver and enforce service-level agreements between service providers and clients.
Ethereum smart contracts are notated in a form of logic similar to that found in typical contracts, and are programmed into the blockchain, where they reside, as binding, self-enforcing and self-executing statements. The use of the blockchain means that each contract is distributed across the network with time triggers agreed and written into the contract. As each contract is widely distributed there is no prospect of dispute at a later date.
Some may recoil from this mix of cryptocurrency, programming language and contract law, while others may see the appeal of a secure and unbreakable contract written systematically and consistently in a common (programming) language. Various controversial claims around Ethereum suggest it will remove the need for lawyers, or even the need for bankers.
The immediately obvious applications for Ethereum are financial, so uses such as new cryptocurrencies and peer-to-peer gambling are those that are regularly cited. But disentangling Ethereum from its cryptocurrency heritage opens up still wider potential applications.
The Ethereum White Paper outlining the concepts and aims of the project describes how using the blockchain can be used to form decentralised autonomous organisations (DAO). In effect, any business process that requires trust and knowledge can be programmed into the blockchain as a smart contract so that it functions automatically and consistently when a small financial transaction is injected into it in order to activate the contract.
By becoming a DAO, organisations can benefit from the sharing of resources including computing power. Being distributed places corporate security in the hands of the network rather than any one individual. The principles of collective organisations can also be boosted with the use of the blockchain to potentially determine the outcomes of debates and discussions conducted systematically through the network.
While there are few practical examples yet, there are many potential uses. Using Ethereum’s blockchain to define “prior art” could redefine how intellectual property included in patents is created and defended. In a similar way open innovation could become a more powerful mechanism by using the blockchain as an arbitrator that offers attribution of original ideas in the correct chronological order. The blockchain can also be applied to education, used to verify attendance and identity for exams held at remote locations. More ambitious applications could capture entire business processes and ensure their compliance throughout an organisation – the effects on running entire businesses could be as revolutionary as any claim to bring about the end of lawyers.
Just as there was enormous excitement with the realisation of what cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin were capable of, so too will there be excitement around the different applications for Ethereum. Bitcoin was the first of many cryptocurrencies, and Ethereum is just the first to exploit the blockchain in novel and creative ways.
Others are already arriving, for example IBM’s Adept project takes the blockchain in an entirely different direction, putting it at the centre of a future internet of things. Here the blockchain is used to authenticate devices so they can communicate with each other, using the blockchain to store a record of devices that have done so. This would offload much of the computing-intensive processing required, meaning longer battery life for internet of things devices.
Ethereum and Adept, and those that will follow, could change the way we do so many things, redefining how trust is traced and recorded, and the ways in which organisations store and exchange knowledge and value. Watch this space.
Gordon Fletcher, Centre for Digital Business, University of Salford
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Sam Dallyn, University of Manchester
Bitcoin has recently received favourable acknowledgement from Apple and significant recognition from the Bank of England, but it has just suffered another serious slump in value and some more fundamental questions are being raised about its future usefulness.
At least it still has oceans of web comment to keep the ball rolling. Bitcoin generates far more noise online than its current financial footprint would suggest. It only amounts to a tiny portion of overall financial activity, currently just under US$6 billion at total market capitalisation – that is the current exchange rate value of all Bitcoins in existence. The most vociferous of Bitcoin advocates continue to talk about it as a kind of dawning social revolution, but the current state of play is a long way behind this rather utopian projection.
Bitcoin’s value fell from US$622 in July to below US$387 at last check, with big investors likely to step in to shore up the value soon. So this marks a useful moment to pause and reflect on where Bitcoin is and where it might be going. The currency has had an extremely volatile history but the latest dip is a rather more significant one – it does not appear to have been driven by any major regulatory warnings or a problem with a major Bitcoin exchange.
In a previous piece I argued that a number of economists and journalists had been far too hasty in declaring the end of Bitcoin. That was partly because they were not recognising the underlying libertarian ethos of many of its users who are not likely to abandon ship any time soon. More recently a new generation of commentators have emerged who are more reasoned and informed, and make criticisms that some electronic currency advocates are also prepared to acknowledge. For example, one of the most perceptive pro-electronic currency investors Tuur Demeester noted on his Twitter feed on August 13: “pain in the cryptomarkets. Now is a day to relax, take a step back and contemplate fundamentals”.
One key reason for this slow down in the Bitcoin party is that the electronic currency still has real barriers to overcome before it can become widely used in everyday transactions, despite a growing number of merchants accepting it. Recently Dell and Overstock.com announced that they were accepting payments in Bitcoin. Smart Bitcoin businesses like BitPay and Coinbase have taken the lead in facilitating this process. Basically these companies offer to process transactions in Bitcoin at cheaper cost than is offered by services like PayPal, and also make the transfer back to national currency to give merchants protection from Bitcoin volatility.
In addition to these positive news stories Apple has recently taken a more favourable position to Bitcoin wallet devices – having reversed its previous decision to block the Bitcoin wallet from its online App Store. The Bank of England also issued a tentatively positive report on Bitcoin’s potential, in which it noted that while Bitcoin was unlikely to become a serious challenge to major banks it was still a significant development that should be watched.
Yet despite this Bitcoin has not taken off at the level of transactions, in fact since May it has been parked at roughly 60,00-75,000 transactions per day with no signs of increase. It is still pretty difficult to get hold of Bitcoin. A user could create their own wallet and find a suitable Bitcoin seller online before then making an exchange from their own bank account – a process that is time consuming and likely to be off-putting for many. Or users hold their Bitcoin in online wallets on exchange sites, but these are dependent on user feedback within electronic currency communities to vouch for their reliability. Bitcoin exchanges have been likened to a “Wild West” of payment systems – a realm without legal recourse – something that was clearly borne out by the bankruptcy of Mt Gox in February.
Another reason, of course, for the lack of everyday use of Bitcoin is its continuing volatility. Cyber enthusiasts and speculative investors – who tend to be overwhelmingly male – seem to be the dominant groups shaping Bitcoin at present. One issue that Bitcoin faces is that people hold virtual currency for different reasons and their objectives can be at odds with one another. Speculative investors are interested in Bitcoin as a way to profit from market movements; they are short-term speculators who play the trading data. The trouble is that mid- to large-scale investors in this bracket – including hedge funds – like to see volatility as volatility means profits for some and losses for others. Those interested in Bitcoin as a potential future currency, however, are likely to be discouraged from using it, precisely because the peaks and troughs through which traders gain their profits make the currency unstable as a unit of account.
This means that although Bitcoin will stay with us as a speculative and volatile financial asset or digital commodity of some value, there remain few signs as yet of it going mainstream because of the difficulties around its ease of use and around its volatility. The first issue might still be addressed by some innovative start-ups that manage to make Bitcoin much simpler and easier for everyday consumers to use. But the volatility problem is trickier to resolve.
Having noted these barriers to Bitcoin becoming an everyday currency, the “blockchain” still offers real promise. The blockchain is a clever piece of computer coding in which each Bitcoin transaction that is made is linked to the previous history of transactions which led to that point. This creates the expanding chain of “blocks”. It is essentially an inventive piece of cryptography and it is what makes libertarians and computer scientists so excited because it presents a decentralised platform that effectively cuts out the middleman or indeed the need for a central bank. It may not transform everyday life in quite the way that some have claimed but it presents some interesting possibilities and platforms. A number of decentralised ventures have already been created in an attempt to explore this potential, like Ethereum.
The blockchain presents significant opportunities in some areas of finance and online payments. It could make remittance payments a great deal easier and cheaper; it could lower transaction costs for merchants and consumers and it enables the development of financial innovations like equity crowdfunding – in which all investors get a proportional return on what is invested in a venture. Whether these advantages of the blockchain become more widely utilised remains an open question. As Finn Brunton has said:
Getting a significant new technology that is instilled with cultural values and political goals to “work” is an act of assembly of mobilising different groups, ideas, forces, and stakeholders together.
The key point here is that no digital innovation is groundbreaking in itself – it requires broader communities to utilise it. And this is why for supporters, increasing Bitcoin use at the level of everyday transactions is so very important.
Sam Dallyn, Lecturer in Management and Organisation Studies, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The Conversation is a network of not-for-profit media outlets that publish news stories on the Internet that are written by academics and researchers, under a free Creative Commons licence, allowing reuse but only without modification.
It first launched in Australia in March 2011,[1] and has expanded into editions in the United Kingdom in 2013,[2] United States in 2014,[3] Africa[4] and France[5] in 2015, Canada in 2017,[6] Indonesia in 2017,[7] and Spain in 2018.[8] In September 2019, The Conversation reported a monthly online audience of 10.7 million users onsite, and a combined reach of 40 million people including republication.[9]
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In 2016, the FactCheck unit of The Conversation became the first fact-checking team in Australia and one of only two worldwide units accredited by the International Fact-Checking Network, which is an alliance of fact-checkers hosted at the Poynter Institute in the U.S.[12] The assessment criteria require non-partisanship, fairness, transparency of funding, sources, and methods, and a commitment to open and honest corrections.[13]
The Conversation uses a custom publishing and content management system built in Ruby on Rails. The system enables contributors to collaborate on articles in real time. Articles link to author profiles—including disclosure statements—and personal dashboards show authors’ engagement with the public.[14]
The Conversation was co-founded by Andrew Jaspan and Jack Rejtman,[15] and first launched in Australia.
Jaspan first discussed the concept of The Conversation in 2009 with Glyn Davis, vice-chancellor at The University of Melbourne. Jaspan wrote a report for the university’s communications department on the university’s engagement with the public, envisioning the university as “a giant newsroom”, with the academics and researchers collectively providing authoritative and informed content that engaged with the news cycle and major current affairs issues.[16] That became the blueprint for The Conversation.
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Jaspan secured $10m launch funding over three years from four universities (Melbourne, Monash, Australian National University, University of Western Australia) and CSIRO, the Victorian State Government, the Australian Federal Government, and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The Conversation Media Group opened its Carlton office in November 2010 with Jaspan as editor and a small team of professional editors and developers. The service launched to the public in March 2011.
From its first Melbourne-headquartered Australian edition, The Conversation has expanded to a global network of eight editions, operating in multiple languages.
| Edition | Year of Launch | Editor | Management | Number of Editors |
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| Australia | 2011 | Misha Ketchell | Lisa Watts (CEO) | 24[18] |
| United Kingdom | 2013 | Stephen Khan | Chris Waiting (CEO) | 23[19] |
| United States | 2014 | Beth Daley | Bruce Wilson (Chief Innovation and Development Officer) | 17[20] |
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Andrew Jaspan secured seed funding to develop the case to launch The Conversation into the UK in 2012.[27] It launched in the UK on 16 May 2013 with Jonathan Hyams as chief executive, Stephen Khan as editor and Max Landry as chief operating officer, alongside co-founder, Andrew Jaspan. It had 13 founder members, including City, University of London. City’s president, Professor Sir Paul Curran chaired its board of trustees. Landry took over from Hyams as chief executive shortly after launch.
Membership grew to more than 80 universities in the UK and Europe, including Cambridge, Oxford, and Trinity College Dublin. By 2019 it had published 24,000 articles written by 14,000 academics.[28] In April 2018, it appointed former BBC and AP executive Chris Waiting as its new CEO.[29]
Andrew Jaspan was invited in 2012 to bring The Conversation to the United States. Thomas Fiedler, then dean of the School of Communications at Boston University, offered to host The Conversation U.S. and provide space for the first newsroom. With a university base established, he was able to raise the $2.3m launch funding. The U.S. edition of The Conversation was first published on 21 October 2014,[30] initially led by Jaspan as U.S. CEO, Margaret Drain as editor, and Bruce Wilson leading development and university relations. The U.S. pilot was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and four other foundations. Beth Daley was appointed editor and general manager in March 2019, when Maria Balinska moved to the US-UK Fulbright Commission.[31]
Source: The Conversation (website), https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Conversation_(website)&oldid=1032977413 (last visited Aug. 3, 2021).
David Glance, The University of Western Australia
In terms of a life-cycle of technology, it is easy to see Bitcoin as being at the same developmental stage as babies going through the “terrible twos”. All of its technological possibility lies ahead, nobody is sure what particular path it will take, but in the meantime it is going to give everyone a rough ride.
The Inside Bitcoins conference, held this week in Melbourne, has brought together more than 500 people to discuss Bitcoin’s possible futures – all within the framework of an industry that needs to develop in order to support that future.
The key take-home message of the views expressed by speakers at the conference was that Bitcoin was still a long way off from being used as a currency for everyday transactions. Most of the activity in Bitcoin today, and for the near future, is to do with people trading the currency. Government regulation is unlikely to change that.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7D7tv45Fbc?rel=0]
This view was particularly reinforced by Asher Tan, CEO of local Bitcoin exchange CoinJar. He has concentrated on simplifying the process of buying and selling Bitcoin in Australia with seamless user identification and currency transfer. The company itself has been funded by venture capital provided by Blackbird Ventures whose managing director, Niki Scevak, is particularly enthusiastic about the potential for Bitcoin-based companies to develop out of the local market.
CoinJar is about to launch an ATM card that will automatically convert Bitcoin into cash, making it far simpler to spend. The fact that this is needed is again a reflection of the lack of avenues for spending Bitcoin directly. This is possibly a consequence of Bitcoin’s struggle to gain acceptance as a currency.
Here’s my interview with Asher Tan at the conference:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIMA3fbowDY?rel=0]
Economist Nicholas Gruen, CEO of Lateral Economist and chairman of The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, was emphatic in stating that Bitcoin did not yet demonstrate one of the main functions of money in being a unit of account. Simply put, whenever anyone deals with Bitcoin, they immediately trade it for some other currency like Australian or US dollars. We haven’t reached the stage where people hold onto Bitcoin because it is a generally useful currency in its own right.
On a more general note, and from more of a philosophical view, Gruen went on to discuss the general notion of Bitcoin being a “public good privately provided”.
Gruen framed the notion of Bitcoin as being something that is being supported and developed by the private sector and not governments. It is a public good because anyone can benefit from the use of Bitcoin’s underlying protocols as no single person or government is in control of the technology.
This is not necessarily a view that all economists share. Some would argue that the only reason anything will thrive when it is provided by the private sector is if the public benefit financially from it.
The biggest benefit from Bitcoin and the thing most talked about is still the technology called the “blockchain”. This underpins every transaction that takes place in the Bitcoin network. The blockchain is the technology that ensures that no Bitcoin is ever spent twice and it does this without the need of a bank or payment third party as is necessary with normal currency transactions. The blockchain is public and is monitored by everyone using Bitcoin.
It turns out that you can do lots of very clever things with the blockchain. One of those people trying to take advantage of this is Leon-Gerard Vandenberg, a Bitcoin technologist working on being able to use Bitcoins through regular SIM card technologies found in every phone. He talked about the potential for organisations like the World Bank to use blockchain technology to ensure that funding is trackable and is used only as agreed. This would be impossible to do using any non-blockchain-based currency.
Vandenberg explains more about blockchain here:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACNXZwoyypk?rel=0]
A more concrete example of a current use of the blockchain is digital proof of ownership of a file. This has been an ongoing problem because you need to prove not only that you owned the file, but that you owned it at a particular time. A site called Proof of Existence allows a user to upload a file and have the digital signature of that file added to the Bitcoin blockchain. Because the entry’s ownership is known only to the person adding it and it is independently verified and shared in the Bitcoin network, it provides incontrovertible evidence of ownership at a specific time.
As perhaps a reflection of the nascent state of Bitcoin, there were few companies exhibiting products or services at the conference. Disappointingly, it was not possible even to buy a coffee using Bitcoin. Maybe next year.
David Glance, Director of Innovation, Faculty of Arts, Director of Centre for Software Practice, The University of Western Australia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Stephen McKeon, University of Oregon
Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency linked to an asset like the U.S. dollar that doesn’t change much in value.
The majority of the dozens of stablecoins that currently exist use the dollar as their benchmark asset, but many are also pegged to other fiat currencies issued by governments like the euro and yen. As a result, the price of stablecoins fluctuates very little, unlike high-profile cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum that are prone to sudden ups and downs.
The first stablecoin, created in 2014, was Tether, which many other stablecoins are modeled after. Users receive one token for every dollar they deposit. In theory, the tokens can then be converted back into the original currency at any time, also at a one-for-one exchange rate.
As of July 28, 2021, there were about US$62 billion in Tether outstanding, or a bit more than half of the $117 billion market capitalization of all stablecoins worldwide. The next-largest is known as USD Coin, which has a market cap of about $27 billion.
Originally, stablecoins were primarily used to buy other cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, because many cryptocurrency exchanges didn’t have access to traditional banking. They are more useful than country-issued currencies because you can use them 24 hours a day, seven days a week, anywhere in the world – without relying on banks. Money transfers take seconds to complete.
Another useful feature of stablecoins is that they can work with so-called smart contracts on blockchains, which, unlike conventional contracts, require no legal authority to be executed. The code in the software automatically dictates the terms of the agreement and how and when money will be transferred. This makes stablecoins programmable in ways that dollars can’t be.
Smart contracts have given rise to the use of stablecoins not only in seamless trading but also lending, payments, insurance, prediction markets and decentralized autonomous organizations – businesses that operate with limited human intervention.
Collectively, these software-based financial services are known as decentralized finance, or DeFi.
Proponents hold that moving money via stablecoins is faster, cheaper and easier to integrate into software compared with fiat currency.
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Others say the lack of regulation creates big risks for the financial systems. In a recent paper, economists Gary B. Gorton and Jeffery Zhang draw an analogy to the middle of the 19th century era when banks issued their own private currencies. They say stablecoins could lead to the same problems observed in that era, when there were frequent runs because people couldn’t agree on the value of privately issued currencies.
Worried that stablecoins could pose risks to the financial system, regulators have also taken greater interest in them recently.
The Conversation U.S. publishes short, accessible explanations of newsworthy subjects by academics in their areas of expertise.
Stephen McKeon, Associate Professor of Finance, University of Oregon
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The White House and city officials across the country are scrambling to avoid an eviction crisis.
The federal housing eviction moratorium that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put in place in September 2020 expires on July 31, 2021. After that, millions of Americans who owe tens of billions of dollars in unpaid rent will lose that protection and may face eviction and a loss of their homes. Meanwhile, a group of landlords is suing the U.S. government to recover damages it says its members suffered from not being able to evict tenants who didn’t pay rent.
Although Congress allocated more than $46 billion for emergency rental aid, most of it hasn’t reached many of the people who need it as state and local governments struggle to distribute the money. Many renters are unaware relief is available.
We’ve been following the issue throughout the pandemic and picked three articles from our archive to get you up to speed.
Millions of Americans lost their jobs when the COVID-19 pandemic forced lockdowns across the country in March 2020, while many others strained to put food on the table or pay the rent.
But even before the crisis, tens of millions of people struggled to pay for housing, according to University of Michigan professors Roshanak Mehdipanah and Gregory Sallabank. As of 2018, an estimated 38 million, or over a quarter, of U.S. households spent at least 30% of their income on housing-related expenses. About 12 million spent half their income, making it hard if not impossible to afford other essential expenses like food and health care.
The CDC moratorium and similar eviction bans in states and cities across the country have helped low-income Americans endure the pandemic, but these solutions were always going to be short term, Mehdipanah and Sallabank explain.
“While these interventions have reduced a source of anxiety and stress for households, they are temporary,” the scholars write. “Once they expire, these people will still have the same debts, same housing costs and the same bleak financial picture.”
While the federal moratorium has ensured some renters don’t lose their homes, many others haven’t been so lucky as evictions continued throughout most of the pandemic.
For example, in Idaho, which didn’t have a statewide eviction ban, evictions fell in April and May 2020 as most courts closed because of local lockdowns. But when courts reopened, evictions headed back toward 2019 levels. Other states and cities also saw eviction spikes after bans expired.
As coronavirus relief funds run out and the CDC eviction ban expires, more renters throughout the country will likely face eviction, argue Benjamin Larsen and McAllister Hall, who research housing issues at Boise State University.
“Those households may still be feeling the pressure from the pandemic – and may not be able to come up with current rent, much less months of back rent they might also owe,” they write. “The aid may be coming to an end, but the potential for an eviction crisis remains – in Idaho, and around the nation.”
Read more:
Despite federal moratorium, eviction rates returning to pre-pandemic levels
Before landlords can evict a renter, they first must take them to court.
But eviction courts aren’t about due process and getting a fair hearing, explains Katy Ramsey Mason, a law professor and director of the Medical-Legal Partnership Clinic at the University of Memphis.
States created eviction courts to offer landlords a “summary process” to ensure cases are handled very quickly – sometimes in less than a week. As a result, the odds are “stacked heavily in favor of landlords,” she writes.
“Tenants who go through eviction court not only could lose their homes, but the final judgment also becomes a black mark on their credit reports, making it more difficult for them to obtain safe and affordable housing in the future,” Ramsey Mason writes. “The current court process is not designed to account for these consequences, especially on the mass scale resulting from the pandemic.”
Read more:
Despite federal moratorium, eviction rates returning to pre-pandemic levels
Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.
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Bryan Keogh, Senior Editor, Economy + Business, The Conversation
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Posted on 14 February 2017. Eco-citizenInnovationLifestyleFacebookTwitterShare
The process invented by an Israeli start-up converts the remains of meals into gas for cooking, and into fertilizer! A 100% circular innovation that means anyone can produce their own gas.
An Israeli start-up has developed a device that turns leftover meals into gas for domestic use.
What if you could produce natural gas at home from your organic waste? And what if we could prepare dinner with the energy produced from the remains of lunch? This is what the Israeli start-up HomeBiogas is offering with its domestic digester.
HomeBiogas can gobble up as much as 6 liters of food waste (or 15 liters of manure) per day. 1 kg of food waste produces 200 liters of gas – the amount needed for one hour of fast cooking, and produces liquid fertilizer for the garden too. The inventors of the device claim that it can eliminate one tonne of organic waste per year and reduce users’ CO2 emissions by six tonnes – equivalent to the consumption of a car.
How does it work? By anaerobic digestion – a natural biological process that breaks down organic matter in the absence of oxygen. Fermentation produces a gas rich in methane, called biogas. Municipalities, manufacturers and farmers have long been producing biogas from organic waste (agricultural by-products, sewage sludge, etc.). Individuals, for their part, sometimes transform some of their waste into fertilizer via composting, but have not been able to make use of anaerobic digestion in order to produce energy.
HomeBiogas makes this process accessible to everyone. The eponymous start-up has developed a system specifically designed for domestic use, which makes it easy to produce biogas on the scale of a household scale. The device, in which you just have to put your leftover meals (vegetable peelings, dairy products, meat fat and bones, etc.) or manure, is connected to the cooker in the house so that the gas produced can be directly used for cooking.
The digester can be installed in a couple of hours and is discreetly located at the bottom of the garden. HomeBiogas recommends using an authorized technician to connect the gas hose to the cooker and specifies that the system operates optimally when the temperature is around 17°C. Selling at $1,090 (around €1,050) all over the world, it would pay for itself – according to company’s calculations – in three years…
In addition to allowing families to reduce their carbon footprint, HomeBiogas is an innovative solution that can provide energy for people living in remote rural areas. In 2015, the start-up installed about forty digesters in the Palestinian village of Al-Awja as part of a project financed by the European Union.
Source: https://www.livingcircular.veolia.com/en/eco-citizen/homebiogas-small-home-digester loaded 29.07.2021
2 minute read
ULSAN, South Korea, July 9 (Reuters) – Using a toilet can pay for your coffee or buy you bananas at a university in South Korea, where human waste is being used to help power a building.
Cho Jae-weon, an urban and environmental engineering professor at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), has designed an eco-friendly toilet connected to a laboratory that uses excrement to produce biogas and manure.
The BeeVi toilet – a portmanteau of the words bee and vision – uses a vacuum pump to send faeces into an underground tank, reducing water use. There, microorganisms break down the waste to methane, which becomes a source of energy for the building, powering a gas stove, hot-water boiler and solid oxide fuel cell.
“If we think out of the box, faeces has precious value to make energy and manure. I have put this value into ecological circulation,” Cho said.
Women take a look at items at a faeces currency market at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) in Ulsan, South Korea, July 6, 2021. Picture taken on July 6, 2021. REUTERS/Daewoung Kim
An average person defecates about 500g a day, which can be converted to 50 litres of methane gas, the environmental engineer said. This gas can generate 0.5kWh of electricity or be used to drive a car for about 1.2km (0.75 miles).
Cho has devised a virtual currency called Ggool, which means honey in Korean. Each person using the eco-friendly toilet earns 10 Ggool a day.
Students can use the currency to buy goods on campus, from freshly brewed coffee to instant cup noodles, fruits and books. The students can pick up the products they want at a shop and scan a QR code to pay with Ggool.
“I had only ever thought that faeces are dirty, but now it is a treasure of great value to me,” postgraduate student Heo Hui-jin said at the Ggool market. “I even talk about faeces during mealtimes to think about buying any book I want.”Reporting by Minwoo Park, Daewoung Kim; Editing by Karishma Singh and Gerry Doyle
Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korean-toilet-turns-excrement-into-power-digital-currency-2021-07-09 loaded 28.07.2021
Steven Pressman, Monmouth University
Another big fight is brewing over the U.S. debt ceiling, which is a statutory limit on how much the government can borrow to pay its bills. In an interview, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Republicans won’t agree to lift the debt ceiling in “this free-for-all for taxes and spending” environment. Congress suspended the debt ceiling in 2019 for two years, ending July 31, 2021.
The U.S. Treasury can take emergency measures that allow it to keep borrowing without an increase in the limit until as late as November. But if the ceiling isn’t raised by then, the U.S. faces either drastic across-the-board spending cuts or the prospect of an unprecedented default – with potentially dire economic consequences. Economist Steve Pressman explains why we have a ceiling – and why he thinks it’s time to abolish it.
Like the rest of us, governments must borrow when they spend more money than they receive. They do so by issuing bonds, which are effectively IOUs with a promise to repay the money and make regular interest payments. Government debt is the total sum of all this borrowed money.
The debt ceiling, which Congress established a century ago, is the maximum amount the government can borrow. It’s a limit on the national debt.
Currently, U.S. government debt is $28.5 trillion, about 29% more than the value of all goods and services that will be produced in the U.S. economy this year.
Around one-quarter of this money the government actually owes itself. The Social Security Administration has accumulated a surplus and invests the extra money, currently $2.9 trillion, in government bonds. The Federal Reserve holds over $5 trillion in U.S. Treasuries.
The rest is public debt. As of May 2021 foreign countries, companies and individuals owned $7.14 trillion of U.S. government debt. Japan and China are the largest holders, with over $1 trillion each. The rest is owed to U.S. citizens and businesses, as well as state and local governments.
Before 1917, Congress would authorize the government to borrow a fixed sum of money for a specified term. When loans were repaid, the government could not borrow again unless authorized to do so.
The Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917, which created the debt ceiling, changed this. It allowed a continual rollover of debt without congressional approval.
Congress enacted this measure to let then-President Woodrow Wilson spend the money he deemed necessary to fight World War I without waiting for often-absent lawmakers to act. Congress, however, did not want to write the president a blank check, so it limited borrowing to $11.5 billion and required legislation for any increase.
The debt ceiling has been increased dozens of times since then and suspended on several occasions. The last change occurred in August 2019, when Congress suspended the limit until July 31, 2021.
The new ceiling, effective Aug. 1, will become the debt outstanding at the end of July 31 – around $28.6 trillion.
The U.S. government generally spends more than it takes in – $3.1 trillion more in fiscal 2020. Once it hits the debt limit, borrowing to make up the difference is not possible. The government can spend only its cash on hand and its tax revenues.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will then have to begin using “extraordinary measures” to conserve cash. One such measure is temporarily not funding retirement programs for government employees. The expectation is that once the ceiling is raised, the government would make up the difference.
Working in Yellen’s favor is that the Treasury should have $450 billion in cash on hand at the end of July, which should last a month or so. In September, estimated tax payments from companies and individuals will be paid to the Treasury. Things then get difficult in October.
If the debt ceiling isn’t raised before the Treasury exhausts its options, decisions will have to be made about who gets paid with daily tax receipts. Government employees or contractors may not be paid in full. Loans to small businesses or college students may stop.
When the government can’t pay all its bills, it is technically in default. Some pundits have claimed that a government default would have dire economic consequences – soaring interest rates, markets in panic and maybe an economic depression.
Such fears seem overblown, primarily because once markets start panicking, Congress and the president usually act. This is exactly what happened in 2013 when Republicans sought to use the debt ceiling to defund the Affordable Care Act.
But Americans no longer live in normal political times. The major political parties are more polarized than ever.
The U.S. is one of few countries with a debt ceiling. Other governments operate effectively without it. America could too.
In my opinion, having a debt ceiling is dysfunctional. It makes it harder for the Treasury to pay bills when they come due.
The best solution would be to just scrap the ceiling altogether. Congress already approved the spending and the tax laws that require more debt; it shouldn’t have to approve the additional borrowing as well.
It should be remembered that the original debt ceiling was put in place because Congress couldn’t meet quickly and approve needed spending to fight a war. In 1917 cross-country travel was by rail, requiring days to get to Washington. This made some sense then. Today, when Congress can vote online from home, not at all.
This is an updated version of an article originally published on July 18, 2019.
Steven Pressman, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Finance, Monmouth University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
