The Central Bank Money Flower

Okay the Bank for International Settlements relents and let's slip about its insecurity on threats from the onslaught of noise from the cryptocurrency corner in a new publication it has titled "looking beyond the hype".

Right up front, here we go:

"They [ cryptocurrencies ] garner attention because they promise to replace trust in long-standing institutions, such as commercial and central banks, with trust in a new, fully decentralised system founded on the blockchain and related distributed ledger technology (DLT)"

V Cryptocurrencies | BIS [LINK]

Well if you want to be honest, I would say the typical crud the average bank serves up to its clients through costly bureaucratic compliance heavy transaction systems, it's no surprise why everyone from Mrs Miggins through to the big players isn't looking for alternatives. The entire spectrum of financial services from settlement and payment solutions to new investment channels are potentially up for disruption but more on that in another post.

A Taxonomy of Money | BIS

Anyway, this is an interesting publication that takes the reader through a brief history of money [ oh yes, carefully crafted to avoid becoming tangling up in breaks from tradition with US dollars, gold standards (an endnote) and Bretton Woods ] into the central bank is "free of fraud and operational risks, at the level of both individual transactions and the system as a whole" where central bank endorsed payments help the planet with as they put it, controlling the "elastic money supply".

All rhetoric aside, this is an informative and useful read, between the lines and beyond, and I do recommend all those tangled up in banking to take a look [LINK].

Cryptocurrencies aren't without their problems and Bitcoin has plenty of issues but there are reasons why these pools of presumed wealth have come into existence and fundamentally centralised payment systems need to evolve because they are not political or risk free.