The digital currency’s value depends on it becoming digital gold—or on criminals
There is no chance whatsoever that bitcoin can displace the dollar, for the simple reason that it is badly designed. Bitcoin can handle a pathetically small number of transactions, and uses an inordinate amount of electricity to do so, making it entirely unsuitable to replace ordinary money.
.. Even if bitcoin worked better, it is in a Catch-22 because of Gresham’s law, the nostrum that bad money drives out good. Given the choice of spending inflationary government-issued money or something which holds its value, everyone would spend the bad paper stuff and hoard the bitcoin. You wouldn’t want to be the person who spent 10,000 bitcoins on two pizzas in 2010, when a bitcoin was worth a fraction of a cent. Those bitcoins are now worth $40 million. But if no one spends bitcoin, it will never get established as a currency.
.. There are two somewhat less ambitious claims for bitcoin that could give it value.
- The first is that it is a limited form of money because of its usefulness for dealing illegal drugs and dodging capital controls.
- The second is that it is a form of digital gold: an insurance that will keep its value even if governments confiscate or inflate away the buying power of the currencies they issue.
In any currency, the money supply multiplied by how often it circulates equals
- the price level times
- the number of transactions.
For bitcoin we can estimate three of the four variables
.. Assume that all drug dealing moves online, that bitcoins circulate as rapidly as ordinary currencies and estimate a $120 billion-a-year market for illegal drugs, and the formula spits out an ultimate value of $571 for a single bitcoin. The more drugs traded, the higher the value, and the more bitcoin hoarded rather than spent, the higher the value.
.. On this basis the recent price of $3,950 is mostly speculation, and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive James Dimon’s comparison to the 17th-century Dutch tulip mania is apt... the potential to replace gold gives us some figures to work with. Thomson Reuters GFMS estimates there were 2,155 metric tons of gold held in exchange-traded funds. Switch all of that into bitcoin and it would justify a price of about $5,500 for the 17 million bitcoins currently outstanding.
Central bank digital currency: the end of monetary policy as we know it?
I argue that taken to its most extreme conclusion, CBcoin issuance could have far-reaching consequences for commercial and central banking – divorcing payments from private bank deposits and even putting an end to banks’ ability to create money. By redefining the architecture of payment systems, CBcoin could thus challenge fractional reserve banking and reshape the conduct of monetary policy.
.. Because banknotes and coins circulate in the economy, they are also referred to as ‘currency’. Yet currency is only a very small part of money (see McLeay et al (2014)). Money mostly consists of electronic deposits: broad money consists of (currency and) households’ and firms’ deposits with commercial banks, while base or CB money consists of (currency and) commercial banks’ deposits with the CB (‘CB reserves’).
.. Another scenario would see a large-scale shift of customer deposits into CBcoin, forcing banks to sell off their loan books. Bank deposits could still exist but as saving instruments, no longer used to make payments. Banks could still originate loans, provided they lent money actually invested by customers, say, in non-insured investment accounts that couldn’t be used as a medium of exchange. Banks would operate like mutual funds, losing their power to create money and becoming pure intermediaries of loanable funds, as described in economic textbooks.
.. Under this scenario, the contraction of broad money (bank deposits), and the attendant emergence of ‘private-sector base money’ made of CBcoin would mark the demise of fractional reserve banking (see Sams (2015)). The conversion of bank deposits into CBcoin deposits at the CB would amount to 100% reserve backing for deposits. This could usher in a system similar to the Chicago Plan, a set of monetary reforms proposed by Irving Fisher during the Great Depression and recently revisited by Benes and Kumhof (2012).
The Plan’s call for the separation of the credit and money-creating functions of private banks would be addressed – with 100% reserve backing, banks could no longer create their own funding – deposits – by lending.