RE: China considering a switch from paper money and to cryptocurrencies, is this what we want?
The fight we are seeing play out is between the dominant fiat currencies like USD, EURO, JPY, etc and their lack of actual value. The central banks of the world are printing these currencies into a massive bubble, to the point of the making the biggest debt bubble in recorded history. China, Russia, and a few others like Iran, India, the Philippines, are making a move to shed the dominance of the fiat currencies and their central banks. There is a massive "correction" coming and these countries are getting a head start on the solution: ridding themselves of their reliance on fiat currency.
Currently, China and Russia are leading the way in terms of revolutionizing currency adoption. They have been stockpiling precious metals faster than the world can produce it. They literally are buying everything coming out of the ground. They are discussing making a new currency, backed by gold and/or silver, and potentially using blockchain technology, which will become the world's trade currency once the "One Road, One Belt" trade agreement/infrastructure takes hold.
We are seeing a shift in power and wealth from the West to the East, and it's not the East's fault. It's the West's central banks fault, which basically forced their hand, else suffer like the rest of us. China is one of the biggest sources of cryptocurrency miners in the world, and growing. Other countries will soon adopt crypto mining as a state sanctioned industry to keep their countries from going completely bankrupt once the West "corrects". Crypto and blockchain will be a huge part of the future, but there will be many scams as well, trying to lure in new investors.
Paper money once was an IOU for something else, gold, silver, something that required labor to produce. It is now fiat, meaning derived from nothing of value, or intrinsically worthless. China and Russia know this and are taking steps to step aside from the fiat collapse and continue on.
Great comment, you are absolutely correct. I have been a metals advocate for years and your points are spot on.