| 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. At the moment, the banks and payment processors get paid small amounts to run what in crypto terms would be the payment processing network. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. |