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Fedcoin Rising?

Posted by timothy on from the insert-quarter dept.

giulioprisco writes US economists are considering a government-sponsored digital currency. On February 3, David Andolfatto, Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, wrote a blog post based on a presentation he gave at the International Workshop on P2P Financial Systems 2015 [YouTube video]. The title of the blog post is "Fedcoin: On the Desirability of a Government Cryptocurrency."

2 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Of course by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Unfortunately this is such a bad, outdated idea that the government will probably go for it.

    We already have digital currency - those bits that record our current balances, etc in our bank accounts, etc. It's not like the bank takes physical money and moves it from one drawer to the other, or that when you pay with a credit card that the credit card company sends the merchant a wad of cash and some coins.

    --
    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  2. What if apples were oranges by random+coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This whole article seems to be a discussion of "if apples where oranges."

    He goes off the rails right from the beginning with his definition of money. He says money cannot be a store of value; when in fact that is one of the most important properties of money. It is from there were he misses why bitcoin is taking off somewhat. He should know this as he points out it is deflationary and thus a good store of value. So he completely misses why it is cryptographic, and why that matters. Talks about the fed controlling the exchange on the one hand yet talks of mining or the fed mining on the other, so he obviously doesn't understand that the mining is the how of the supply of bitcoin, nor that the idea of bitcoins is to work without a trusted third party, which he puts back in as the FED.

    Without that cryptographic underpinning that is impossible if the FED controls supply what is left? The fed distributes signed serial numbers that they generate with their special random number generator? And at any time they could release a near infinite supply of them and crash the market. Think of the possibility to perfectly counterfeit FEDCOIN if someone hacked the FED's key!

    This would surprise me if the FED actually did this. Not even they are this stupid.