The Atlanta Fed recently hosted a workshop, "Financial System of the Future," which was cosponsored by the Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk at Georgia State University. This macroblog post discusses the workshops discussion of digital currency, including Bitcoin, Libra, and central bank digital currency (CBDC). A companion Notes from the Vault post provides some highlights from the rest of the workshop.
The introduction of Bitcoin has sparked considerable interest in cryptocurrencies since its introduction in the 2008 paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" by Satoshi Nakamoto. However, for all its success, Bitcoin is not close to becoming a widely accepted electronic cash system. Why it has yet to achieve its original goals is the topic of a paper by New York University professors Franz Hinzen and Kose John, along with McGill University professor Fahad Saleh titled "Bitcoin's Fatal Flaw: The Limited Adoption Problem."
Their paper suggests that the inability of Bitcoin to achieve wider adoption is the result of the interaction of three features: the need for agreement on ledger contents (in blockchain terminology, "consensus"), free entry for creating new blocks (permissionless or decentralized), and an artificial supply constraint. The supply constraint means that an increase in demand leads to higher Bitcoin prices. Such a valuation increase expands the network seeking to create new blocks (that is, increases the number of Bitcoin "miners"). But an increase in the network size slows the consensus process as it takes time for newly created blocks to reach all of the miners across the internet. The end result is an increase in the time needed to make a payment, reducing the value of Bitcoin as a means of payment—a significant consideration, obviously, for any type of currency.
As an alternative to the Bitcoin consensus protocol, they suggest a public, permissioned blockchain that results in faster transactions because it imposes limits on who can create new blocks. In their system, new blocks would be selected based on a weighted vote based on the blockchain's cyptocurrency held by validators (in other words, approved block creators). If validators were to approve new and malicious blocks, that would erode the value of the validator's existing cryptocurrency holdings and thus provide an incentive to behave honestly.
Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta visiting economist Warren Weber presented some work with me on Libra, the new digital coin proposed by Facebook. Weber began by pointing to another problem with using Bitcoin in payments: the cryptocurrency's volatile value. Libra solves this problem by proposing to hold a portfolio of assets denominated in sovereign currencies, such as the U.S. dollar, that will provide one-for-one backing of the value of Libra. This approach is similar to that taken by some other "stablecoins," with the exception that Libra proposes to be stable relative to an index of several currencies whereas other stablecoins are designed to be stable with respect to only one sovereign currency.
Drawing on his background in economic history, Weber observes that introducing a new private currency is hard, but not impossible. For example, he pointed to the Stockholm Bank notes issued in Sweden in the 1660s. These notes worked because they were more convenient than the alternatives used in that country. The fact that other U.S. payments systems are heavily bank-based might afford an advantage to Libra.
Although no one is certain of the public's interest in using Libra, policymakers around the world have taken considerable interest in the potential implications of Libra for monetary policy and financial regulation. Could Libra significantly reduce the use of the domestic sovereign currencies in some countries, thus reducing the effectiveness of monetary policy? How might financial institutions providing Libra-based services be regulated?
One of the other possible policy responses to Libra is central banks' introduction of digital currency. Economists Itai Agur, Anil Ari, and Giovanni Dell'Ariccia from the International Monetary Fund consider some of the issues in developing a CBDC in their paper "Designing Central Bank Digital Currencies." They start by observing some important differences between cash and bank deposits. Cash is completely anonymous in that it reveals nothing about the identity of the payer. However, lost or stolen cash can't be recovered, so it lacks security. Deposits have the opposite properties—they are not anonymous, but there is a mechanism to recover lost or stolen funds.
The paper develops a model in which CBDC can be designed to operate at multiple points on a continuum between deposits and cash. The key concern from a public policy perspective is that the more CBDC operates like bank deposits, the more it will depress bank credit and output. However, if the CBDC operates too much like paper currency, then it could supplant paper currency and eliminate a payments method that some individuals prefer. The paper proposes that CBDC be designed to look more like currency to minimize the extent to which CBDC replaces bank deposits. The problem then becomes how to avoid CBDC reducing the usage of cash to the point where cash is no longer viable. (For example, merchants could decide to stop accepting cash because they find that the few transactions using cash do not justify the costs of accepting it.) The way the paper proposes to keep CBDC from being too attractive relative to cash by applying a negative interest rate to the CBDC. The result would be that those who most highly value CBDC will use it, but the negative rate will likely deter enough people so that cash remains a viable payments mechanism.
By Larry Wall, director of the Atlanta Fed's Center for Financial Innovation and Stability