Alternatives to currency issued by banks and governments

[Intercoin-Greg]

Hi everyone. I have known about Bitcoin since 2013 and have been in the crypto space for years, and have had an account here lurking for a long time. But this is probably my first post.

I recently started interviewing people including Noam Chomsky (sociopolitical), Thomas Greco (economic), and Sara Hanks (regulatory) aspects of new payments systems and money. I think that if we don't build a decentralized payment system that can scale to handle an unlimited number of transactions around the world, we'll end up in a world where central banks of China and USA have their own digital Yuan and Dollar, and the whole monetary policy would be a lot more centralized. It'll be their world and we'll just live in it, just like we now live on privately-owned Big Tech platforms for our communication. We need a decentralized, open-source solution. Bitcoin is great as a store of value, but actual CURRENCY (money) needs to also be an EVERYDAY medium of exchange. So we need new technologies to make that happen.

This video is more about the economic aspect, though. It talks about the current money supply being issued by governments and banks, and what an alternative could look like. Money is a community phenomenon, like language, religion and culture, it benefits from a network effect. You speak English because others do. You pay with dollars because others will accept them. You are on Facebook because your friends are.

Anyway, I would love to have a discussion about the economics of having each community issue their own currency. Here is the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUacCM299zE

And here is a presentation of a possible future:
http://intercoin.org/communities.pdf

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[SFR10]

I think that if we don't build a decentralized payment system that can scale to handle an unlimited number of transactions around the world, we'll end up in a world where central banks of China and USA have their own digital Yuan and Dollar, and the whole monetary policy would be a lot more centralized.

You have a point but even if we didn't have to deal with scalability issues, we're still going to see the central banks ^{[for most countries]} trying to come up with their own cryptocurrencies, and that's simply because of the fact that they love having control over the supply and also how people ^{[in general]} use their currencies ^{[be it a national one or a cryptocurrency]}...
^{- We could come up with all sorts of new technologies to tackle that issue but at the end of the day, it'll be just a workaround since every single one of these alternative ways will be seen as a threat/competition to the main goal of those so-called central banks.}

[20kevin20]

So is Intercoin the perfect alternative? Because it seems like you're looking for the perfect one with unlimited txs while promoting it ..

We're probably never going to have a perfect open-source alternative to our current monetary system. Decentralization comes with a cost. Since decentralized means you don't need to trust, how do you do everything Bitcoin does but instantly and without occupying much storage space while keeping up its security and decentralization? There are a few alternatives, but none have proven yet to be a proper competitor to PoW and BTC's technology overall..

[hugeblack]

Bitcoin loses both privacy and scalability, which makes it ineffective for global use and therefore is not the currency that is used by everyone, perhaps by commercial relationships or as an alternative to the dollar in dealing between countries and companies, not individuals.

Some cryptocurrencies need to contain Bitcoin's advantages and to add to them the privacy and scalability to be a real crypto and not like what is happening now from DeFi, PoS, NFTs,...etc.
So unless bitcoin develops or a new currency is created, we are far from real crypto

[20kevin20]

So unless bitcoin develops or a new currency is created, we are far from real crypto

Well, we've already seen developments in lots of blockchains: BTC, XMR, ETH.. Monero has been able to drastically reduce tx sizes, ETH has moved to PoS.. there are lots of developments around the crypto area and the future will only bring positive changes to it. Change is gonna happen, we only need patience and new ideas. And since BTC is open source, we never have deadlines. New idea? Great, just adopt it as long as the community wants it. It's simply beautiful

[Welsh]

Well, in some ways banks have already achieved digital currency. The number in your bank account, doesn't directly correlate to gold being sent physically every time you issue a transaction. So, we are already approaching that digital world, where cash is becoming less, and less relevant. However, they haven't delved in Cryptocurrencies or at least their "own" digital currency as of yet. I'm not sure if they would be able to pull that off, as there would need to be some sort of benefit to it, and I suspect that this would attract a lot of tension between the governments, and the banks. Banks already have a massive amount of control with traditional currencies, and the governments can find out exactly how much you've got. So, at the moment we are already at that dangerous level of them having complete control of your money.

Bitcoin was created to allow you to take back that control. However, the scalability is the issue. My thoughts are that we will likely see either a sidechain or a complete alternative to Bitcoin to solve this. Bitcoin would then be seen as the foundation or building steps rather that the solution to the problem. I'm not quite sure which is more likely at this point, but there will definitely be change towards making either Bitcoin or cryptocurrency more viable in terms of scalability. We've already seen half solutions to the issue.