Today money is going through an evolutionary process as I write. The choices the finance sector, and the consumer, make today will shape the future of money, and we can already see that the world’s sovereign currencies are under siege from cryptocurrencies and stablecoins.
Bitcoin has not yet brought about the massive revolution that some expected on the one hand, but on the other, if “governments and central banks can’t offer a sound version of the sovereign money for the digital age, their downfall could be tragic,” Marcelo M Prates writes at Coindesk.
Prates envisages a ‘ future fantasy’ scenario in 2028 that may become reality. Amongst other things he sees, “ see drones dropping bags of money in the neighborhoods most affected by the latest cyber-attack on the e-Gov platform.” Regardless of whether the attack is foreign or domestic, “nobody can transfer digital dollars or even check their FedAccount balance.”
In his view, this kind of disaster could happen if the government decided not to offer an offline account option. Why not? The government might believe “people would finance domestic terrorism with an offline FedCoin that could be transferred from person to person without identification.”
As a result, every time the e-Gov platform is attacked, the government has to send out bags of old dollar bills so that people can make payments.
There may also be a global Big Tech Alliance offering its own digital asset that launches before a government-backed one, and it could potentially result in a fall in demand for dollars, especially if inflation is rising at a record pace.
Governments will have to deal with the fallout from the huge expansion in spending during 2020. Nations’ debts will be soaring, and it’s foreseeable that printing more money might well become a response.
Banks will also be affected if an organisation, such as Prates’ Big Tech Alliance offers customers a compelling reason to empty deposits in traditional banks, and use it for the consolidation of other debts, thanks to favourable loans. The result would possibly be multiple bank closures.
This entire scenario is likely to happen due to central banks’ ambivalence about digital currencies. In Prates’ world, “Many believe that the breaking point came when the government insisted on having exclusive control over the digital ID scheme created to provide every American citizen and corporation with a single digital identity. The goal was to keep track of the vaccination progress amid different coronavirus variants and better target the relief money sent monthly.” However, centralization is rejected, as it “was seen as a further step toward the growing surveillance state.”
What is clear, even now, is that the technology available makes a multi-faceted Money-verse entirely possible, because as Prates says, “Money does not need to be controlled by a government or limited to a sovereign territory anymore.”
Central banks need to get their digital strategy right, or face the consequences in the not too distant future.