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Fed’s Brainard On “Digitalization Of Payments And Currency” Is VERY BAD NEWS FOR BITCOIN

6-2-2020 < SGT Report 23 987 words
 

from Silver Doctors:



If you’re a holder of Bitcoin, be thy forewarned. Time is of the essence after all, and in a “dead crypto walking” kind-of way…


Fed Head Lael Brainard is out today at Stanford in a speech titled “The Digitalization of Payments and Currency: Some Issues For Consideration”.


Here’s the start of her speech (via the Fed):




I want to thank Darrell Duffie for inviting me to discuss the future of payments.1 Digitalization is enabling consumers and businesses to transfer value instantaneously, technology platforms to scale up rapidly in payments, and new digital currencies to facilitate these payments. By transforming payments, digitalization has the potential to deliver greater value and convenience at lower cost. But there are risks. Some of the new players are outside the financial system’s regulatory guardrails, and their new currencies could pose challenges in areas such as illicit finance, privacy, financial stability, and monetary policy transmission.


Given the stakes, the public sector must engage in order to ensure that the payments infrastructure is safe as well as efficient and fast, assess whether regulatory perimeters need to be redrawn or new approaches are needed in areas such as consumer data and identity authentication, and explore the role of central bank digital currencies in ensuring sovereign currencies stay at the center of each nation’s financial system. These issues are complicated and consequential. I will only touch on them today in the spirit of sketching out an agenda for the public sector along with the private sector and research community.


Digital Players
Technology firms—from BigTechs to FinTechs—are driving the digital transformation of payments. Not only are the new players bringing innovation to the way payments are made between businesses and consumers and peer-to-peer, but they are bringing new business models that bundle payments with other activities in novel ways.


Payments have traditionally been a service provided by trusted intermediaries such as banks. The operations of banks and some related financial service providers, such as card companies, are subject to regulatory oversight for sound risk management. Banks offer important consumer protections, including deposit insurance, error resolution, and fraud protection. In addition to providing payments services, banks generally provide credit, with deposits providing stable funding. Many banks rely at least in part on legacy technology.



LINK TO REST OF SPEECH AT FEDERALRESERVE.GOV


For now, I just want to focus on three points.


First, this whole concept that somehow payments just aren’t fast enough, highlighted in today’s speech, and nearly perfectly regurgitated as a talking point:



These systems will enable consumers and businesses to settle retail transactions in real time, at any time



Um, yeah.


Customers and businesses are already able to settle retail transactions in real time, at any time.


In fact, I can’t recall a time recently when I haven’t been able too.


I’m always buying things – online, in the store, at the gas station pump, etc, and I never have a problem as a customer transacting in “real time”.


OK, “Hey Half Dollar, you don’t get it man, this is so you can transact internationally in real time”.


Oh.


I see.


Well, I guess you have a point, because whenever I buy somebody in Mexico a gift, such as a Christmas gift or a birthday gift, I always use Xoom to send the money for the gift to a specific person in Mexico, and while I can do this any time I want to, it does take up to an hour to process the transaction.


So yeah, I guess being inconvenienced by having to wait one hour to convert one’s currency into another and have it in the recipient’s account of choice in less than an hour is pretty darn slow.


Unacceptable!


How ya gonna make a dang impulse buy if ya can’t get the money right now!


Here’s the cold hard truth: If you absolutely can’t wait one hour for money to be transferred, then you have far more pressing issues in life than transaction speed.


Anybody and everybody can wait one hour.


And don’t take ‘Ol Half Dollar’s word for it but just ask any terrorist who’s taken a bunch of hostages and demanded a ransom.


Secondly, Brainard says:



 The digitalization of currencies and payments is being driven by technology players that are bringing new business models to this space and fresh attention to age-old questions.



Yeah, because we need something round that rolls, and we already have the wheel, but let’s re-invent it anyway so it’s round and rolls.


A-freakin’-mazing.


This is a scam and a con.


There is only one answer to the “age-old question”, and it has been given and accepted ages ago and to this very day: Gold & silver.


Digitalizing it is easy – a non-issue quite frankly.


Finally, well, Bitcoin Fanboys will not be happy about this:



Stablecoins were designed specifically to overcome the volatility of first-generation cryptocurrencies by tying the digital currency to an asset or basket of assets, such as commercial bank deposits or government-issued bonds.





We’ll ignore the whole concept of “backing” a stablecoin with debt-based fiat currency for now and just focus on the explicit.


You see, just before this sentence quoted above, Brainard was talking about Bitcoin, which means Bitcoin is a “first-generation” crypto (explicit), and stablecoins are a “second gen” crypto (implicit), so by the time FedCoin rolls out, well, Bitcoin’s long since dead-n-buried (my speculation).


Anybody remember dial-up internet?


Is that still a thing, or was that, like, first gen?


Meh.


People will learn the hard way, and all it takes to learn the hard way about Bitcoin is not understanding math, or technology, or money.


First mover advantage?


Ha!


Read More @ SilverDoctors.com





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