Hey Ben, that's not a bad link but it could be a little confusing for some. It doesn't fully explain the story behind digital currency and crypto currency. Granted, like you said it's just a quick and simple tutorial to understand the basics.Originally Posted by Ben Rhimene
What I said earlier about the fact that digital currency is already happening/occuring was also a slight misnomer. Part of the problem is that the line between our physical and fiat currencies (e.g. dollars, euros...) and digital transactions in a mostly cashless society are becoming blurred. We in fact do live in a nearly cashless society that relies on heavily on digital transactions. Those are not technically a form of new legal tender, as it's all still based on government issued, centralized, fiat money distributed by the respective authority.
There is already a project by the Digital Dollar Foundation to launch a pilot program over the next 12mos to gather data on how a new form of digital currency in the US might work.
That digital currency, however, is intended to be a separate form of currency and not to replace "cash" or the dollar. It's primarily to speed up certain types of transactions even further. So, it would simply be another available option [potentially].
I don't know that we will move away from the dollar anytime soon. A digital currency will likely just be a faster form of the US backed dollar, very similar to how cashless digital transactions happen today. A US issued dollar, as are most world currencies today, are fiat currencies anyway. Meaning they have nothing "backing" their value (such as gold).
Every currency today are simply a function of the global markets, supply and demand, and so on.... Their value could just as easily be stored in a centralized database without a single printed piece of "cash" in existence (theoretically anyway). That's what much of our money is like today anyway; data points inside bank database ledgers.
Crypto IS a type of digital currency. It is not a digital currency that will replace government issued currency (i.e. dollars or euros) and it is nothing at all like the concept of a government issued digital currency. So, crypto is digital BUT digital currency does not have to be cryptocurrency. Not at all. In fact, a more general purpose government issued currency replacement almost certainly won't be anything like the privatized crypto available today.
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