Cryptocurrency Essay

1434 Words3 Pages

Cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, has brought in a lot of media attention over the past few months and has been raising eyebrows within government agencies worldwide. Here’s why: Appropriately constructed, cryptocurrency could potentially upend our established global economic system. This newfound technology poses as a serious threat to our currency-issuing central banks and also to the global financial intermediaries. To truly understand the changes that cryptocurrency could potentially bring, you will need to have a general understanding of our current economic system.

Financial markets as we know them were arguably started in the 14th century by Venetian merchants tied to the moneylenders - the bankers of their time. They basically bought …show more content…

Cryptocurrency isn’t tied to a single nation. Its value cannot be affected by perception of an individual nation. In that respect it can be viewed as a commodity like gold or silver. There’s a fixed amount of precious metals, as there’s a fixed amount of cryptocurrency. The value of precious metals fluctuates with just as cryptocurrency does. But unlike precious metals, cryptocurrency mining isn’t fixed to geography in the same sense. For all of these reasons, cryptocurrency could even be looked at as a commodity rather than an actual currency.

What does this mean for cryptocurrency? If it’s viewed as a commodity that’s not based on a national interest or beholden to monetary policy, it can’t be manipulated in the same way. Of course private entities that hold huge blocks of it could flood the market and affect the exchange price, but that’s no different to any other precious …show more content…

There’s either a transaction record on a computer somewhere or the actual serial numbers on the currency itself. It’s illegal to physically transport more than $9999 across national borders. Any amount of $10,000 or more must be regulated by a central bank. With cryptocurrency being based on cryptography and transactions being made on the internet, governments will have a hard time regulating these new movements of money. Foreign workers from impoverished nations will now be able send money back home and stand to benefit enormously by avoiding exorbitant taxes and fees. The extra wealth flowing into some of these small nations will directly help lift its people out of

Open Document