A funny thing happened on the way to bitcoin replacing fiat currencies. Speculative crypto mania collapsed (again) this year, and the original stateless digital token shed some 70% of its value. And then tech companies rubbed salt in the crypto bros’ wounds by appealing to the US Federal Reserve for help in upgrading digital payments.
A funny thing happened on the way to bitcoin replacing fiat currencies. Speculative crypto mania collapsed (again) this year, and the original stateless digital token shed some 70% of its value. And then tech companies rubbed salt in the crypto bros’ wounds by appealing to the US Federal Reserve for help in upgrading digital payments.
As electronic transactions have become more popular, now would seem like a time for budding, new-age decentralized systems to get implemented. Instead, the opposite is happening.
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Big tech firms including Amazon $AMZN, Apple $AAPL, and PayPal $PYPL are urging the US Federal Reserve to build the infrastructure for a real-time transactions, according to a trade group letter reported on by American Banker. Google $GOOGL, Square $SQ, and Stripe also signed on. The letter was in response to a request for comment from policymakers, who are debating whether to build a real-time system or leave it up to the private sector to handle. In payments, the US is already well behind places like the UK and China, while the European Central Bank launched a round-the-clock instant payment system last month.
Blockchain tech offers the promise of transactions away from centralized systems like those of a central bank. But many of the world’s biggest tech companies apparently want the government to have a role in money, even as it becomes increasingly digitized.
Large US banks have their own real-time system, but smaller lenders are wary of being beholden to them, according to the report. The big financial institutions counter that having two separate systems would be inefficient and counter productive. Tech companies brushed aside interoperability worries and said the bigger concern was falling further behind—something they said only the Fed can prevent.
Not all big tech has given up on crypto, however. Facebook $META is working on a token for money transfers in its WhatApp messaging service, according to Bloomberg. It will be interesting to see if Facebook discovers something that money-transfer specialist TransferWise has missed. The latter’s CEO is aiming to charge essentially zero to send money and hasn’t found benefits to using blockchain-style systems so far.
And to be fair, some people are using crypto for transactions. It’s de rigueur on the dark web for hackers and criminals, according to Andrei Barysevich, who works for the online investigation firm Recorded Future. But those who don’t value utmost discretion seem fine with money that flows through banks, big tech companies, or government systems.
As paper cash is used less often, this trend could paradoxically give governments more power and control over their currencies than they’ve ever had before. (Paper cash is out of sight once printed, but governments have more control and visibility of the digital version.) Crypto’s greatest strength is the relative privacy that comes from operating outside of the government’s grasp, but, for better or worse, there doesn’t seem to be much demand for that right now.
