Ecuador Turning to Virtual Currency
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Do other such "virtual" currencies exist, i.e. virtual merely because they only exist in ledgers and bank balances? I mean, other than the vast majority of US dollars and other traditional currencies.
All this talk of virtual currencies reminds me of how Europeans viewed Chinese paper money with suspicion when it was first described in The Travels.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/58/MB%2C_M1_and_M...
Correa is a gr8 president, but coming from the perspective of someone like myself who is well read on the intricacies of modern monetary systems, sticking with the dollar for this long has been one of the few very bad policies. From a political perspective its understandable given Ecuador's history of currency devaluations. This move will very likely permit Ecuador to continue this economic miracle and transformation that has taken place(lifting many out of poverty, etc) . These changes should enable Ecuador to increase GDP , reduce unemployment further, continue to improve public infrastructure, increase standards of living, and become less dependent on exports to drive the economy. Hopefully, this will become a lesson to the entire world wherein electing leaders that are literate about economics and the functioning of the modern monetary system -Correa has U.S. PHD in Economics- , who don't use inapplicable house-hold analogies ( i.e. gov should run like house-hold) to pander to voters ( are you listening EU ? ) can make the kind of strides that policy makers talk about but never achieve.
Read 7 Deadly Innocent Frauds of economic policy[1] : 1) Government spending is limited by taxation and borrowing 2) With Government Debts we are leaving our debt burden to our children 3) Government budget deficits take away savings 4) Social Security is broken. 5) The trade deficit is an unsustainable imbalance that takes away jobs and output. 6)We need savings to provide the funds for investment. 7)It’s a bad thing that higher deficits today mean higher taxes tomorrow.
[1] From Mosler's book http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf
It worked initially (better than I expected), but we have an inflation that was 1% or 2% over the dollar inflation. So after 10 years we have a 20% difference in price, but we maintained the "One Peso equal to One Dollar" until it exploded. IIRC in Brazil the transition from 1-1 to 1-X was softer.
It always seems like it's my lay-about, heavy-drinking, multiple-DUI-offending, chain-smoking, new-car-on-lease-every-two-years cousins who have the most trouble with money. I once saw one of them chug the leftover half of a bottle of whiskey, smash it over the back of his truck (oblivious to the damage he did to the tail light) and scream, "That's how we DO!" Yeah, you have no idea how truthfully you speak, you idiot. And those three kids by two women you had out of wedlock are the ones who suffer the most for it. But "live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse," amiright!?
If you don't get the analogy, my cousin is corrupt government, the kids are the people they govern. I'm not in general calling Ecuadorians drunken layabouts. And I'm not saying I specifically know this is the problem. I'm just saying, money is a communication of value, so if you have money problems, you most likely have value problems.
This is one of the biggest flaws in bitcoin that people just can't seem to understand (or just don't _want_ to understand). You can't have a good loaning system with an unstable currency.
Edit: I posted a better explanation below:
"You take out a 100k mortgage in USD. Over the next year, the USD suffers suffers from extreme deflation (increases in value). It is now worth twice what is was worth last year. As a consequence, wages begin to go down. Now let's say you were earning 50k a year while paying down a 100k mortgage (not assuming a downpayment, this is for simplification). Next year, you are now being payed 25k but still owe that 100k mortgage. And the house is now worth 50k."
You take out a 100k mortgage in USD. Over the next year, the USD suffers suffers from extreme deflation (increases in value). It is now worth twice what is was worth last year. As a consequence, wages begin to go down. Now let's say you were earning 50k a year while paying down a 100k mortgage (not assuming a downpayment, this is for simplification). Next year, you are now being payed 25k but still owe that 100k mortgage. And the house is now worth 50k.
As for how they would acquire bitcoins in the first place, all they have to do is mine enough for most citizens to access them and then distribute them. Or fork off a new blockchain with a different cryptocurrency that can only be mined by the central government (say, because it requires private keys to mine that only the government controls).
Bitcoin's designed to be decentralized, and I don't think it's possible to force Bitcoin into centralized control. If they are going with a virtual currency that's in their control their best bet is going to be a Ripple like currency, like the one Stripe backed last week.
There were many other online currencies proposed before bitcoins. The real innovation in bitcoins is decentralisation, so I suppose if you want to centralise it again, you can just throw out the whole blockchain idea.
Regardless, I think with the financial tools we have developed in the past few hundred years we are very well equipped to deal with volatile assets.
Perhaps it is you who doesn't want to think longer about Bitcoin than the two seconds it takes to realize that loaning Bitcoins might be a difficult problem.
Yeah because the Dollar was perfectly stable when it was five years old and accessible to only a select percentage of the population (how many people are really able to use a wallet with the cryptic addresses? Not my parents at least).
Besides, when many people buy their house in Bitcoin the market cap would be much higher and the price would not fluctuate 25% in one day. Not without a fatal flaw in the algorithm or World War III anyway.
The only reason Bitcoin is unstable is because it's not used by that many. That's not a flaw from Bitcoin, that's the network effect. Like Facebook versus Google+, though that's a bad comparison because G+ has no game-changing advantages, at least none that Facebook couldn't replicate.
Gold is pretty volatile compared to the dollar as well, and it's hugely traded.
A reputation system (credit reports/scores) only works because each human who borrows money can have at most one identity. In an anonymous/pseudonymous system that cryptocurrency advocates want, I could take out a loan, spend it, and then take out another loan with a new pseudonym (or Bitcoin address) minutes later.
There is no threat of inability to get credit in the future. Even if you had agents willing to commit violence to coerce people to pay their loans (or, if we're in civilization, a state that will do asset seizures and wage garnishment with some semblance of due process) you wouldn't know who in the real world to point them at. Why would anyone lend Bitcoin?
If you were going to do that, you would need to verify government-based identity and use government to recover your money from deadbeats. In which case, why are you using Bitcoin anyway? At that point you could just lend the local fiat currency so your debtors could use it to buy Bitcoin (or whatever else they wanted.)
Euro inflation is 0.2% or something like that and the ECB is not only demanding money for bank-to-ECB deposits, but giving away ECB-to-bank loans for free. Soon it's going to start buying government bonds. If that doesn't get inflation back to norm helicopter cash-drops are probably next.
Not sure how that would be smarter. They can spend these USDs (obtained via exchange into their EcuNewVirtualFiat) to pay back their USD debt, or to buy BTC or Dogecoin. Now, which one is immediately smarter?
"No fiat lives forever", true, but most well-managed fiat lives long enough for the former to be a feasible and indeed smart move.
I suppose I should not have been so excited. The title really does read a "virtual" currency and not a cryptography-backed cryptocurrency.
This isn't what it sounded like, it's just like Paypal except the government is in charge.
I have a house in Ecuador. I am a fan of Bitcoin. And I am, on the whole, probably still a fan of Correa.
But ... yikes.