News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
So, Fiat currency is going to shit the bed and be quickly replaced by the digital dollar Which will of course destabilize the world banking system.
The US will probably try to pay off its existing trillions in debts using the USD and causing massive inflation before replacing it with the digital dollar.
America clearly thinks it won’t matter, and it can be self-sufficient until it drives enough people into a digital currency, while ignoring the massive inflation caused on the USD.
I wouldn't go as far as saying that all Fiat currency will suffer, but the USD's status as the World's Reserve Currency is definitely at risk and the effects of that are going to be massive, especially as all those excess dollars around the World rush back to the US causing massive inflation (in fact, the US seems to already have huge inflation judging by the price of essentials, it's just not officially recognized).
However, for people to rush from that to Digital Currency would require people to trust Digital Currencies as a safe holder of value and effective trade token, which is almost the opposite of reality: after over a decade of scam after scam and massive volatility in that domain the overwhelmingly majority of people wouldn't trust Digital Currencies even with the USD falling to half or even one third of its value, both because of the perception of trustworthiness of them and because such a fall, which would be massive and unheard of fall in the USD, is a common event in even the most stable of Digital Currencies, such as Bitcoin.
It seems to me that Digital Currencies are actually further away from being adopted as currencies now than they were a few years ago before all the scams and well-established perception as pretty much gambing tokens (or, in nicer terms, highly speculative investment vehicles).
Also aren't digital currencies like, the opposite of useful as mediums of exchange? They cost money to transfer, take hours for a transfer to go through, and are volatile enough that that hours long window is enough for value to fluctuate that someone could be ahead or behind hundreds or thousands of dollars on the transactions before it's even complete.
Yeah, I totally agree.
That's part of the point I was trying to make when I said they were not seen as "an effective trade token", but I ended up talking mostly out the lack of trust on them due to all the scams.
People already mostly pay through mobile, cards, online, etc. The trust is already there. Digital currencies don't have to be a cryptocurrency. A well-known institution like the federal reserve could issue a digital currency and provide assurances for stability of value as well as measures like the ability to roll back fraudulent transactions. Since it's just a number in a database and not tied up in investments, you wouldn't even need the FDIC since your account and the amount of money in your account will remain as long as the federal reserve is still around.
People already mostly pay through mobile, cards, online, etc in existing government backed currencies, using existing payment networks.
The hill that needs to be climbed for trust in truly digital currencies (rather that just the digital representation of existing currencies, which is already what we mainly have with fiat currencies in things like online banking and electronic payments) is far vaster than that "people are used to doing some things digitally hence would trust everything else digital" one-dimensional take on the subject you put forward - it requires trust in the currency itself as well as in the payments network itself, which are the difficult parts (just notice how hard it is to get away from VISA and Mastercard as payment networks),
Mind you, maybe a government backed digital currency would work (though if I remember it correctly Colombia's attempt at that failed miserably) but that's really just a variant of a fiat currency that's fully digital and in practice fiat currencies are already mostly digital (most people's money exists as entries on bank databases, most payments are 100% digital and do not involve physical cash in any way form or shape and in fact most money in circulation developed nations isn't in physical form).
I mean, a government backed digital currency would indeed technically be a digital currency, though controlled by a government, same as fiat currency, hence technically it would also be a fiat currency.
Trust is why I brought up a federal reserve issued digital currency. The federal reserve already creates US dollars. This would be the same except there wouldn't be an entity printing physical dollars and you'd need an account to work with it, like a debit or credit card.
My point, going back to the original post I replied to, is that Fiat Currencies wouldn't at all suffer from there existing such a government backed digital currency because that would be a fiat currency too, just one which is 100% digital rather that 90-something percent.
Such a thing defeats the original purpose of digital currencies.