¿Towards a world without tickets?
Blockchain technology facilitates new virtual payment schemes
Recently several studies are exploring the possibility of issuing, by central banks, virtual currencies similar to bitcoin that can replace banknotes. Until now, creating an exchangeable "digital cash" anonymously between peers and without intermediaries, such as tickets, was technically impossible. However, blockchain technology (which combines distributed information records and cryptography, allowing direct transactions between equals) facilitates these schemes.
The use of blockchain allows you to modify certain characteristics of cash: you can limit your circulation to a restricted universe (compared to the universal nature of banknotes); identify the holders (as opposed to the anonymity of the cash); or introduce the interest payment (against the fixed nominal value of the tickets). The existing proposals pursue several objectives: to streamline wholesale interbank payment systems, to partially or totally replace cash (and thereby reduce their costs of informality, fiscal concealment and ease of criminal activities), to increase the capacity of monetary policies to set rates of negative interest rates and reduce the likelihood of banking crises.
There are four modalities of virtual currencies of central banks, which roughly correspond to these objectives: for interbank payments, with a restricted currency, identified and without interest; as a substitute for cash, with a universal currency, anonymous and without interest; as a monetary policy tool, maintaining anonymity and introducing interest payments; and as an alternative to bank deposits, so that the entire population has a deposit identified in the central bank.
The analysis of central banks has so far focused on the last two options, the most disruptive. But both pose problems. On the one hand, the introduction of interest payments increases the capacity of monetary policies in the face of deflationary situations, but the legitimacy of central banks could be questioned by policies of financial repression that enter into the field of fiscal policies.
On the other hand, the creation of deposits in the central bank for the entire population implies a separation between means of payment and provision of credit, whose implications for the conversion of savings into investment are not obvious. It can increase financial stability, since it reduces the likelihood of banking crises, but it is not clear what alternative mechanism would transform sight deposits into medium- and long-term credit.
The advantages of less ambitious schemes are clear in efficiency and costs. But the balance between benefits and risks of the most ambitious variants is uncertain, which suggests a gradualist approach, starting with the introduction of a virtual currency for wholesale payments and valuing controlled progress towards more disruptive variants.