The Ecuadorian ambassador to the US wrote a letter to the editor of the WSJ the other day that talked about this. He made it very clear that the currency would not be similar to bitcoin. He kind of implied that it would look more like paypal.
From what I can tell the currency would be backed by some asset to give it value, and the government would essentially act as a central authority to keep track of who owns how much of the currency.
Sounds like a clueless bureaucrat. How can PayPal be similar to a currency?
Money in your paypal account is backed by dollars at paypal's bank. If you have one dollar at paypal then one dollar is backing your account. The value of your account is not going to ever be more then one dollar because someone could simply deposit one dollar into their own account to get the same value. The value of your account will never be below one dollar because you could simply withdraw the dollar into your bank account.
