Comment by bananaquant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bananaquant | Hacker News Reader

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I think that cryptos are going to become more popular in the coming years with the ordinary people. As for the businesses — they don't want to own them, since they are not widely recognized currencies. When CBDCs come along, that would be a totally different story. They will be likely just made the official currencies of their countries.

Having said that, I can see a case for payment systems to start transacting in existing cryptos, so long as they can satisfy the regulators. They already do that with different real-world currencies. When you have a card in one currency and a business charging you in a different currency, the payment processor does automatic conversion between them for you. With cryptos, everything works the same way, except there may be a crypto-exchange in the middle. The payment processor just needs to guarantee the delivery and some stable exchange rate.

Admittedly, these are not pure crypto transactions. But businesses can already do those directly over blockchain. The major thing stopping them is that there are few other businesses who would accept crypto. Hopefully, payment processors adding support for cryptos could move everyone else to broader adoption.

I still think that the mainstream financial sector has more than a fighting chance against crypto.

A lot of the features that cryptocurrency offers are primarily appealing to specific narrow categories of customers, who are very close to being bad actors on a broader stage. Your typical consumer isn't screaming about "I want an economic policy hard-coded into the currency so everyone's hands are tied when the economic-political situation changes" or resenting the fact that you can get fraudulent transactions reversed in most payment systems today.

The things regular consumers like about crypto can be done as well if not better with a centralized infrastructure. Faster and cheaper transactions, and hassle-free cross-bank and international transactions are not exactly out-of-the-blue expectations. The current players are just hamstrung by business processes, and to a lesser extent, regulations, that date to the era of paper cheques and IBM 360s. And then, of course, the margins in charging $25 and taking 24 hours to push around less than a kilobyte of data.

> Faster and cheaper transactions, and hassle-free cross-bank and international transactions are not exactly out-of-the-blue expectations.

I think a lot of these problems originate from the fact that deposits at banks exist only as records in the bank's database, and therefore can only really be moved between accounts at the same bank.

To create the illusion of moving deposits between banks, another bank must accept to take on the liability in exchange for something else, something that can actually be moved between banks. This is what is referred to as "reserves", which is what we call the special money that only exists as records in the central bank's database.

So we can think of deposits as "JP Morgan Chase dollars", "BoA dollars", "Wells Fargo dollars" etc. while the real money is the "reserve dollars" that cannot be acquired by individuals.

Innovations like CBDC might put the reserve money directly into the hands of individuals and fix the issues that you mentioned. So that would mean that the central banks will be the ones with the fighting chance against crypto, not the private financial institutions.

Agree with you. If I may add, this would be feasible only: If gov issued is own digital currency, which will mechanically would lead the value of the others digital currency worth near zero..

I'd be also curious to see which space (if anything left) Visa would be moving on the retail side. They have already filed a patent which could be an additional indicator [1].

In general, once a national CBDC is in place it'd become rather difficult to foresee the position of middle players between issuer of cash (CB) and user of cash (people) in retail space, e.g. Visa and commercial banks. In a world where anybody can send cash to each other without a middle player (even offline), the role of middle players would probably reduce from "money printers" and large-scale trusted actors to "security box"-holder financial players and value-added service providers.

On the private sector side, there are also quite strong players stepping in, likes of Celo and various other public chains. On the public sector, China's DC/EP would be publicly out in 2022 creating a strong inertia [2], followed by couple of other central banks in various stages.

Things are going to get really interesting next few years, which certainly will change the today's financial landscape.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbrett/2020/05/14/visa-subm... [2] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Cryptocurrencies/China-aim...

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