Τρία ebooks για το bitcoin

Abstract

The decentralized digital currency Bitcoin—and its underlying “blockchain” technology—has created much excitement in the technology community, but its potential for building truly empowering social and solidarity-based finance has yet to be tested. This paper provides a primer on the basics of Bitcoin and discusses the existent narratives about the technology’s potential to facilitate remittances, financial inclusion, cooperative structures and even micro-insurance systems. It also flags up potential points of concern and conflict; such as the tech-from-above “solutionism” and conservative libertarian political dynamics of some of the technology start-up community that surrounds Bitcoin. As a way of contrast the paper considers “blockchain 2.0” technologies with more overtly communitarian ideals and their potential for creating “cooperation at scale”. It concludes with suggestions for future research.

Summary: New technologies are driving transformational changes in the global financial system. Virtual currencies (VCs) and the underlying distributed ledger systems are among these. VCs offer many potential benefits, but also considerable risks. VCs could raise efficiency and in the long run strengthen financial inclusion. At the same time, VCs could be potential vehicles for money laundering, terrorist financing, tax evasion and fraud. While risks to the conduct of monetary policy seem less likely to arise at this stage given the very small scale of VCs, risks to financial stability may eventually emerge as the new technologies become more widely used. National authorities have begun to address these challenges and will need to calibrate regulation in a manner that appropriately addresses the risks without stifling innovation. As experience is gained, international standards and best practices could be considered to provide guidance on the most appropriate regulatory responses in different fields, thereby promoting harmonization and cooperation across jurisdictions.

Digital currencies, and especially those which have an embedded decentralised transfer mechanism based on the use of a distributed ledger, are an innovation that could have a range of impacts on various aspects of financial markets and the wider economy. These could include potential disruption to business models and systems, as well as facilitating new economic interactions and linkages.

Currently, such schemes are not widely used or accepted, and they face a series of challenges that could limit their future growth. However, some digital currency schemes have demonstrated that their underlying technology could feasibly be used for peer-to-peer transactions in the absence of a trusted third party. Such technology may have potential to improve some aspects of the efficiency of payment services and financial market infrastructures (FMIs) in general. In particular, these improvements might arise in circumstances where intermediation through a central party is not currently cost-effective.

This report considers the possible implications of interest to central banks arising from these innovations.