What led to the meteoric growth and popularity of cryptocurrencies, primarily Bitcoin? concepts preceded development modern cryptocurrencies? is blockchain what architecture different distributed public ledgers? use value digital money in everyday transactions international trade exchange? This paper tries answer above questions decipher highly complex technical jargon that usually accompanies ...

We use de-identified data from Facebook to construct a new and publicly available measure of the pairwise social connectedness between 170 countries 332 European regions. find that two trade more when they are socially connected, especially for goods where information frictions may be large. The connections predict in specific products those regions product is produced exporting country it used...