Then Cryptocurrency I'd Like To See
Disclaimer: Some of the factual statements in this article might be incorrect.
Bitcoin’s creation and emergence steam in part from a utopian vision of money. Satoshi and a lot of people in the bitcoin community see bitcoin as a way to replace the current monetary system we have with a system that is decentralized and annonymous. This revolutionary ideal often comes with the desire to bypass the institutions that control the money supply and monetary policy (the federal reserve in case of the United States), and any control the government over money, including taxation. In my opinion (and I won’t go into this) this is not something that will happen or that we want. It is too disruptive. Like the creation of communists states at the beginning of the 20th century or the french revolution, dreams these lofty are often not well implemented in practice. These statements are definitely all arguable, but I’m not interested in that. Instead, I’d want to talk about what kind of cryptocurrency I’d like to see and which doesn’t seem to exist yet.
While many in the bitcoin community want to get rid of the fed, I think it would be much more useful to have a much less ambitious target: Visa and Mastercard. How would a cryptocurrency look like if it was meant to replace the current currencies we used for everyday transactions? How could we have a currency that lives alongside the dollar, while slowly taking it over? How would governments tax this currency (Hooray highways!)? In the current space of cryptocurrencies, there’s still a space for a currency that aims to replace the ones we have, but which focuses on reducing friction and costs for all types of financial transactions, across any international borders.