The Bank of England’s views in this respect echo the findings of The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Digital Currency Initiative (DCI). Their “Project Hamilton” Phase 1 executive summary notes that they found "a distributed ledger operating under the jurisdiction of different actors was not needed to achieve our goals."
Digital Currency Initiative by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
You read that right. A distributed ledger will not be needed to achieve Global Bank agendas. According to phase 1 of "Project Hamilton" distributed ledgers do not "meet the trust assumptions of [the project's] approach". This statement leads intelligent minds to believe that Project Hamilton's approach will be operated by a central acting authority. However, the project asserts that even a blockchain controlled by a central actor will be subject to "performance bottlenecks," given the nature of blockchain architecture.
Not that these entities found the blockchain useless; rather, not a right suite for CBDC. Blockchain is essentially a consensus mechanism for coming to an honest consensus when there is the possibility or probability of dishonest actors present. In the Federal Reserve's case, they don't see the potential for bad actors to participate in consensus, since, they themselves certainly are not bad actors.
Another point- blockchains, of course, do not discern validity of identity of actors- they discern the validity of the transaction being processed. For the Federal Reserve, identity is very important. In fact, identity is important to every national bank for one reason or another; anonymity won't fly with any national bank. That's a big reason blockchain is looking more and more toast as an option for CBDC consensus. An addition to that reason is that whatever system national banks end up implementing will need to facilitate access, intermediation, institutional roles, and data retention. A blockchain like Bitcoin keeps a record of transaction and address holding, nothing more. That's the quintessential decentralized blockchain; addresses hold a share of currency and nothing more. Obviously, Project Hamilton wants alot more information about CBDC holders than just their net worth; that's why the Project suggests theorizes a sort of account based system that can contain this information. Other national banks agree-
"The Deputy Governor [of the Bank of England} further said that any proposed digital pound would likely be managed through some sort of account rather than working like coins or banknotes. His comments seemed to imply that tokens on a blockchain were not all that when it comes to a population-scale cash alternative or some form of electronic legal tender."
Really, what central banks should name Central Bank Digital Currencies is Centralized Institutional Identification, because that's really what they're out to create. They're still far out from their mission- Project Hamilton is still gearing up to begin phase 2. The Bank of England envisions eventually creating an outline of a digital currency service that they control; yet delegating the actual transactional work to third party PIPs, or Payment Interface Processors. Read more about the Bank of England's vision here.
All banks mentioned, including the Bank of Japan, understand that there's still quite the journey before anything like this perfected. I'd like to know your guys thoughts. Could this end well? What option would you choose over blockchain?
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