Britcoin

Britcoin is the name used casually for some kind of digital pound. The decline in the use of physical cash for payments and the use of smart phones with digital wallets or apps has led to the UK Government contemplating what a digital pound might look like.

A consultation on that topic is underway.  There are some important questions about digital money. Not least the 1.2 million people who don't have bank accounts, privacy, Government monitoring of spending and more. 

The name Britcoin is really a nod to the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Bitcoin is often cited as being anonymous. It isn't. Each transaction is recorded. Cash is currently the main anonymous currency in the world. A present the Government prints physical cash. Less of it is being used but there is a need for the certainty that cash provides. Making a payment with digital cash issued by the Government might well be a way of providing citizens with the same utility as cash in a world that is using less of it. 

Cash has some advantages. Being trusted, anonymous and easy to transfer in a person-to-person transaction are just some. On the other side working for cash, and not paying tax, is tempting. Cash is also expensive to move and secure. 

Digital currency is already in use. Whether it's Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Gift Cards, contactless or something else. People are already using digital cash. The question now is whether the Government can play a role to ensure that people are not excluded from this. A well designed socially responsible digital currency has a role. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Powershell Symlink to Onedrive

Image
I have more than one PC. To be precise, and overly pedantic, 3 Windows 10 laptops. All are slightly different and of various ages. One I use with a Windows 10 Insider Build to keep up with the next thing coming down the pipeline. On each, I do a bit of Powershell . Powershell is the latest generation of Windows command line tools. The Linux enthusiast would look down on the Windows command line of whatever generation but Microsoft has always provided command line tools. In the early days MSDOS was a command line OS. It did little but create directories (folders), copy, move or delete files. It ran “command.com” which some said was just a basic file system manager and way of loading programs into memory. It wasn’t difficult to disagree. Developers brought out alternatives to this such as 4DOS , literally “for dos”, by JP Software . They also produced 4NT, which enhance the Windows NT command processor and 4OS2. The latter was for the IBM OS2 Operating System of the late 80s and ea
Read more

Being progressive rather than universal

Image
Microsoft was not short of ambition for its tiled interface and One Windows strategy . Microsoft was doing what no other tech firm had done - uniting mobile to desktop/laptop PCs in one experience. Apple had two OSs available - IOS for phone/tablet and OSX for its desktop/laptop users. They were different and had different interfaces. Google had two OSs - Android for phone/tablet and ChromeOS for its Chromebook devices. Of course, even One Windows doesn't mean exactly the same OS but it does mean components have such similarity that the interface appears the same to users and, with little modification, apps can run on all platforms. Unfortunately, the app platform UWP (Universal Windows Platform) was hobbled from day one. Microsoft had a poor quality application store, ever-changing developer tools and standards and a Store that only worked (on the PC side) for Windows 8 and latterly Windows 10. While people used legacy versions of Windows such as Windows 7 and XP t
Read more

Digital Gold

Image
A while a go I bought the book Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper . It turned out to be a pretty good read overall. This is not a technology book in the sense of explaining Bitcoin or cryptography. Instead it is driven by the 'story' of Bitcoin. My interest is primarily in the technology but I also understand that to varying degrees people are also interested in the economics and politics of it. The book reads a lot like the history of the Internet or the development of the Linux OS. By that I mean it starts off with some 'out of the box' thinking and gradually gathers interest to the point at which it draws in a wide range of characters. So if you go back to 1995 you will find a number of people telling you why the Internet would fail .  I mention this because reading the book was a bit like reading about email in the 1980s, the Internet before web pages existed, Linux in the early 1990s. So as well as being told the Internet would not catch on, no-one would ever
Read more