So... digitisation certainly has a lot of disruption potential. I would frame it differently though... I also don't think it's the only factor.<p>First, digitisation has already happened. Most money has been digital for a long time. The full consequences of digitisation just haven't materialised yet. Centralisation of the banking & financial services world, regulation, cascading structure (clearing houses, etc) and general conservatism buffered the change.<p>I would argue that large parts of the financial system actually failed 13 years ago. Bailouts restored them. Without bailouts, many large institutions would have become defunct and a new generation would have taken their place. This change is occuring regardless, just more slowly. Robinhood's upcoming IPO is an example though possibly a trite example.<p>Cryptocurrency (also crypto-stocks/bonds/etc.) role is still anyone's guess. I reckon it creates an opportunity to bypass the old, evolved "structure" of the financial industry. How clearinghouses work, who controls them. All that immovable, weird, invisible stuff determining how financial markets work may finally change.<p>Also... Monetarism seems to have ended. That's a big deal and its hard to guess where this leads. Fiscal and monetary policies are no longer bound by the same constraints, and it's not obvious what the new constraints are. There isn't an obvious monetarism replacement.<p>The end of monetarism is most alarming for the eurozone. The whole system is basically premised on it. Most plausible successors to monetarism treat fiscal and/or tax policies as part of the monetary system in some way. The eurozone has a hard structural separation between these.<p>In any case, monetary "revolutions" aren't that uncommon. They happen every couple of generations. We're due.
Agree with all in this article. +1 for link to Democracy for Realists.<p>If there's one silver lining today, it's that we're coming to terms with our multitude of "folk theories". An encyclopedia spanning critical reassessment of common knowledge and common sense.<p>For more of same: historian Jill Lepore's The Last Archive podcast blew my mind. Highest recommendation. For example, TIL anti-vax is as old as vax. Same talking points, same tribes, same consequences. TIL the privacy battle was fought, and lost, 50+ years ago.<p><a href="https://www.thelastarchive.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.thelastarchive.com</a><p>--<p>My first exposure to the idea of "misinformation" was Raine Eisler's "The Chalice and the Blade" <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Chalice-Blade-Our-History-Future/dp/0062502891/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Chalice-Blade-Our-History-Future/dp/0...</a>. Eisler explains how victors didn't just write history, they actively rewrote it. Actively seeking out and obliterating any contrary narratives. Remything (repurposing) stories for their own purposes.<p>Then Orwell's "1984", of course.<p>--<p>Younger me was probably a postmodern and Popperian hybrid. I really thought the truth was knowable and would eventually be discovered. The major hurdles were effort and "science progresses one funeral at a time". I applauded the skeptics debunking pseudoscience and so forth.<p>Now I am starting to acknowledge and recognize reactionaries and unbelief. Constant. Overwhelming. Exhausting.<p>Worse, any progress begats pushback, backlash, doubling down.<p>It's like we can't win.<p>Today, I subscribe to David Graeber's theories for making social progress. Work in the margins. Push forward where you can, strategically. Don't storm the castle. Conserve your strength. Pick your battles. Take the (really) long view.
Of everyone I talk to within the finance community no-one (and I mean NO ONE) actually has interest in CBDC's besides the banks themselves.<p>I frankly just don't understand why anyone should care. If they want to roll out a federated IBAN/SWIFT/SEPA just do so and leave us out of it. It never touches any of the qualities that make a cryptocurrency or even a digital currency interesting or adoptable by the masses.<p>So I'm entirely sure why we're getting hit by a slew of narrative op-eds extolling the virtues of this to the public. It's not like the masses really care how the backend system will be setup. If it's better just do it, but don't think for one second I'm believing it will benefit the small folk.
A good question to ask is whether a digital currency can be created that can withstand nation state attempts to thwart or destabilize.<p>I like the notion that each currency to date is just a growing bug bounty.
Why does there have to be a "war"? There have been times in history when multiple currencies have been used in parallel for international trade.<p>See <i>How Global Currencies Work: Past, Present, and Future</i> by Barry Eichengreen, Arnaud Mehl, and Livia Chitu:<p>> <i>At first glance, the modern history of the global economic system seems to support the long-held view that the leading world power’s currency—the British pound, the U.S. dollar, and perhaps someday the Chinese yuan—invariably dominates international trade and finance. In How Global Currencies Work, three noted economists provide a reassessment of this history and the theories behind the conventional wisdom.</i><p>> <i>Offering a new history of global finance over the past two centuries, and marshaling extensive new data to test established theories of how global currencies work, Barry Eichengreen, Arnaud Mehl, and Livia Chiţu argue for a new view, in which several national monies can share international currency status, and their importance can change rapidly. They demonstrate how changes in technology and in the structure of international trade and finance have reshaped the landscape of international currencies so that several international financial standards can coexist. They show that multiple international and reserve currencies have in fact coexisted in the past—upending the traditional view of the British pound’s dominance prior to 1945 and the U.S. dollar’s dominance more recently.</i><p>> <i>Looking forward, the book tackles the implications of this new framework for major questions facing the future of the international monetary system, from whether the euro and the Chinese yuan might address their respective challenges and perhaps rival the dollar, to how increased currency competition might affect global financial stability.</i><p>* <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177007/how-global-currencies-work" rel="nofollow">https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177007/ho...</a>
The EU is already working on a "digital euro". As for the comparisons with blockchain, the free nature of it is an illusion. Someone is paying dit the power and data the networks consume, but those costs are abstracted away in electricity bills, nnetwork subscription costs and incentives for as long as processing and mining makes business sense.<p>At the moment, the banks and payment processors get paid small amounts to run what in crypto terms would be the payment processing network.<p>Decentralised currencies are not in the interest if governments and most citizens. While they allow some people to live "off the grid", they also make money laundering trivial through mixers and anonymous wallets. Whatever decentralised equivalent you come uo with, you'd need to subject to massive privacy infringing rules to prevent all kinds of fraud. No government will give away the limited fraud prevention methods they've fought hard for to get back.<p>What you're left with is a network similar to what we have now, with individually run processing nodes instead of centralised bank nodes, and a nation state's ability to secretly inflate another bloc's currency by suddenly turning on a massive mining/processing super computer plant.<p>Instead of looking at crypto to revolutionise the ecosystem, we should look into evolving the current system to make transactions easier. We've already standardised bank account numbers through IBAN. Transferring money between banks connected in the right way already takes literal seconds and is free. If we integrate these systems into each other, we can have EU or even worldwide money transfer with no transaction costs, no delays, and barely any extra costs in total. The "digital euro" may be a solution to this system, allowing for easy bank to bank transfers while still interfacing with customers.<p>As for the currency war, that's been going on since the beginning of trade. The EU threatened to use the Euro as an oil currency to trade with Iran, angering the US greatly. Only in countries with bad or mediocre banking systems will there be any risk of currency wars, but the governments will likely make sure that no stores accept the "wrong" currency if a digital currency ever becomes widespread.<p>In practice, you can't just create your own currency, as Bernard von NotHaus found out the hard way. Crypto is a nice way for people to speculate and lose money in, but it won't replace the existing currencies any time soon.
Another day, another "Error establishing a database connection."<p>Could someone tell me why Caching is not on by default for blogging platform?