Do you agree with the points below?
Digital currencies, as presently designed, carry both risks and benefits. As explained in the companion piece to this article, digital currencies do not currently pose a material risk to monetary or financial stability in the United Kingdom, but it is conceivable that potential risks could develop over time. [...] The total stock of digital currencies is at present too small to pose a threat to financial stability [ ... ] Digital currencies do not currently pose a material risk to monetary or financial stability in the UnitedKingdom. Should they achieve limited adoption as a payment system, they are unlikely to undermine the Bank’s ability to achieve monetary stability.
Yes.
By the way, "too small to bother" was the answer of the Brazilian Central Bank, back in January or whereabouts, when someone asked them to regulate bitcoin.
The distributed ledger is a genuine technological innovation which demonstrates that digital records can be held securely without any central authority.
Yes. (But, as the BoE noted, the cost of Satoshi's solution is way too high.)
but further increases [ in the stock ] cannot be ruled out and it is conceivable in time that there could be an asset price crash among free-floating digital currencies that had the potential to affect financial stability. Potential risks to monetary stability would only be likely to emerge once digital currencies had achieved substantial usage across the economy. If a subset of people transacted exclusively in a digital currency, then the Bank’s ability to influence demand for this group may potentially be impaired. The incentives of existing digital currency schemes pose considerable obstacles to their widespread adoption, however. [ ... ] While that could, in theory, change if sterling were abandoned in favour of an alternative currency for a significant fraction of the economy, such a scenario is considered extremely unlikely at present. A variety of potential risks to financial stability could emerge if a digital currency attained systemic status as a payment system, most of which could be addressed through regulatory supervision of relevant parties.
Conceivable, sure. But I don't believe bitcoin adoption will get to the point of threatening the "old economy". On the other hand, I expect there will be regulation that will substantially hamper its adoption.
Ultimately every transaction involving a financial asset must be recorded and most of these records are digital. The structure of the broader financial system is similar to payments in that these records are held by centralised third parties. The application of decentralised technology to this platform of digital information could have far-reaching implications, other industries whose products were digitised have been reshaped by new technology. The impact of the distributed ledger on the financial industry could be much wider than payments.
Could ... maybe ...
The approach used in the modern banking system, which emerged as a computerised replication of earlier paper-based records, is for specialised entities (usually banks) to maintain master ledgers that act as the definitive record of each individual’s money holdings. In turn, they hold accounts recorded in the ledger of one central body (typically the central bank). Those holding the ledgers have the ability to prevent any transaction they deem to be invalid. In order to use the system, people must trust that these centralised ledgers will be maintained in a reliable, timely and honest manner. An alternative approach is to implement a fully decentralised payment system, in which copies of the ledger are shared between all participants, and a process is established by which users agree on changes to the ledger (that is, on which transactions are valid). Since anybody can check any proposed transaction against the ledger, this approach removes the need for a central authority and thus for participants to have confidence in the integrity of any single entity.
This is just a statement of the idea of distributed digital currency.