Indian Economy Questions

A software developer called Satoshi Nakamoto proposed bitcoin, which was an electronic payment system based on mathematical proof. The idea was to produce a currency independent of any central authority, transferable electronically, more or less instantly, with very low transaction fees. Bitcoin’s most important characteristic, and the thing that makes it different to conventional money, is that it is decentralized. Bitcoin is created digitally, by a community of people that anyone canjoin. Bitcoins are ‘mined’, using computing power in a distributed network.This network also processes transactions made with the virtual currency, effectively making bitcoin its own payment network.The bitcoin protocol –the rules that make bitcoin work –say that only 21 million bitcoins can ever be created by miners. However, these coins can be divided into smaller parts (the smallest divisible amount is one hundred millionth of a bitcoin and is called a ‘Satoshi’, after the founder of bitcoin). Bitcoin stores details of every single transaction that ever happened in the network in a huge version of a general ledger, called the blockchain.

The life-cycle theory of consumption, popularly known as life-cycle hypothesis,' was developed by Ando and Modigliani" in the early 1960s.

The life-cycle hypothesis postulates that individual consumption in any time period depends on

(i) resources available to the individual,

(ii) the rate of return on his capital, and

(iii) the age of the individual.

The resources available to an individual consist of his existing net wealth and the present value of all his current and future labour incomes. According to the life-cycle hypothesis, a rational consumer plans consumption on the basis of all his resources and allocates his income to consumption over time so that he maximizes his total utility over his life time.