The digital currencies that matter
(Caveat: I have not read the paywalled article. What follows is a response to the general sentiment of the comments in here.)<p>I&#x27;m all for decentralized systems and not having to trust a central authority in most regards. I think that technologies that allow distributed, uncensorable, untamperable communication, for example, are great. I, too, desire decentralized means of conducting monetary transactions. But I cannot for the life of me fathom why people also wanna throw out centralized government control of the money supply with the bathwater in this way. To me, it seems to be a <i>good</i> for most people when a competent central bank in a well-functioning democracy can regulate money supply in order to keep inflation present and moderate. Why would we want to give that up? Taking the hands off the leavers of money supply seems like a disaster waiting to happen: no more increased money supply to help weather crises, no more increased money supply to stave of the horrors of deflation, no more constricting money supply to cool inflation. No tools to combat whole damn currencies turning into investment objects. Sure, with it you get decentralized transactions, but it just doesn&#x27;t seem worth it to me. Is an embrace of Bitcoin-like cryptocurencies not just a return to a barter economy? A digital, decentralized such, but a barter economy nonetheless?<p>These &quot;govcoin&quot; systems seem a lot more attractive to me. Sure, they&#x27;re not perfect, but they do leave central banks with the aforementioned control and offer some levels of decentralization.<p>I found the Swiss National Bank&#x27;s writeup on the GNU Taler cryptocurrency very very interesting and promising: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snb.ch&#x2F;en&#x2F;mmr&#x2F;papers&#x2F;id&#x2F;working_paper_2021_03" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snb.ch&#x2F;en&#x2F;mmr&#x2F;papers&#x2F;id&#x2F;working_paper_2021_03</a>