Central Banks Face a Moment of Truth on Crypto The head of the Bank for International Settlements, Agustin Carstens, recently set out a dark vision for our financial future, quoting Goethe’s “Faust” and claiming that the “soul” of money was at stake. He warned that the proliferation of unregulated cryptocurrencies and the spread of Big Tech firms into payments risked damaging consumer trust and splitting the monetary system. To build a safer alternative, he said, central banks should issue digital cash, which would serve as a bedrock for private-sector payments technology while also curbing the industry’s rent-seeking excesses. The most remarkable part of Carstens’ speech wasn’t his call for central-bank digital currencies (CBDCs) — the idea has been around for years — but rather his acknowledgment of the head-spinning pace of change in financial technology since the pandemic. Carstens nodded to the metaverse, to DeFi and to stablecoins, showing how rapidly things have moved since Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook announced its controversial and eventually aborted Libra currency project in 2019. ____________________________ Can crypto holders avoid negative real interest rates?
It's almost like the pace of change in the crypto world is happening so fast that the government can't even come close to keeping up with it all. I mean, just within the last few years we've seen the rise of bitcoin, ethereum, smart contracts, defi, lending and staking of digital assets, countless other crypto coins, layer 2 solutions to speed up blockchain transactions, and the list goes on and on. Meanwhile, the government is still mired in a two-year lawsuit against Ripple Labs just trying to figure out if XRP is a currency or a security.
It seems like the financial institutions are now afraid. Because a lot of profit is directly going to people, they feel left out. They should have introduced something like crypto long ago.
Oppressed counties need to trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Our country has had an explosion of crypto ETFs for about a year now (too many to keep track of), our crypto-exchanges are licensed and regulated (easy to do), and our provinces fight over which one can give Chinese and Russians the biggest tax-breaks for moving their miners over to their region. Not sure why USA is still stuck in the pre-metric era or what the big fuss is all about.