Put it differently, banks have failed to implement something more efficient and the “bitcoin” innovators have also failed on practical aspects. As a result we have a void and it’s anyone’s game right now. Facebook is throwing money at it. A small chance it works but public trust is a big factor in currency isn’t it?
Here’s what I think: any alternative currency tied to the USD (meaning a currency without intrinsic value) is DOA. The next generation currency cannot be tied to resource constraints.
FedWire transfers are instantaneous and cheap if not free at many institutions. The “bank transfers are slow and expensive” argument is financially illiterate.
I agree. I think we should have used Keynes' Bancor proposal [1], rather than gold and therefore USD as a reserve currency.
> Keynes was able to make his proposal the official British proposal at the Bretton Woods Conference but it was not accepted. Rather than a supranational currency, the conference adopted a system of pegged exchange rates ultimately tied to physical gold in a system managed by the World Bank and IMF. In practice, the system implicitly established the United States dollar as a reserve currency convertible to gold at a fixed price on demand by other governments. The dollar was implicitly established as the reserve by the large trade surplus and gold reserves held by the US at the time of the conference.
Here’s what I think: any alternative currency tied to the USD (meaning a currency without intrinsic value) is DOA. The next generation currency cannot be tied to resource constraints.