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Re your last paragraph, isn't this what pegged cryptocurrencies are? You couldn't have the same amount circulating in both fiat and crypto at the same time so t

• lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  Yes. But instead of trusting that (is it Binace?) has a million dollars in the bank (no really honestly !) you are trusting that say the US government has. Full faith etc. It sounds simple but even a moment makes for some hard problems. Amount of actual cash in circulation - yeah that's fine the US Mint probably has a spreadsheet. So we could just go with that. Let's say that's 10% of the "total". But who uses cash these days? You want all the currency in bank accounts denominated in US dollars - ok we just go ask CitiBank et al. Now that probably gets us to 70%. Now we hit the hard stuff. The dodgy bank accounts (That's going to be fun one - hiding money off shore. We are about to make any dollars not "registered" effectively unspendable) Now what about things that are not really US dollars but convertible? There are a thousand weird instruments I barely have heard of. God knows if they should get a UUID? And loans - look everyone loves to rag on fractional banking but we want the amount of currency in circulation to prety much match the value. Having banks create currency at the margin works pretty well as a distributed solution (we like those). Imagine the federal government assessing what your widget factory is worth every ten years. Do we stop banks doing that? do they hand out UUIDs as well? Will there be two tier currencies (see Scottish banks). It should be a simple solution, but nah.