Today I’m going to get a timestamp on this prediction: Two nations will team up to privately acquire a large amount of a popular cryptocurrency and adopt it as a national currency. It will be announced as a way to keep up with technology, but the true motive will be to reduce national debt.
When?
When one is adopted largely enough, and shows the ability to scale for national use. I’m predicting accumulation starts within 3 years, and announcement within 2 years of that. We’re looking at roughly 5 years.
Why?
Nations like the USA have been using quantitative easing (QE) for years to stimulate economy and have for the most part not seen major consequences for it. More people are identifying it as unconventional, as a bubble, and are trying to stop it. The problem is they’ve accumulated a lot of debt, and what to do about it?
The best strategy is changing policies when people shine lights on them. It helps if you’re preparing for that, so that your economy doesn’t crash when it happens. The goal is to keep dodging collapse long enough that the rest of the world is in decline just enough that they’ll turn a blind eye to your printing of money. It helps if you’re the USA and some nations depend on you so much they can’t even buy oil without US dollars. The world turns a blind eye to the monetary policies, prints their money, stimulates their economy, and when they’ve had their fill, they open their eyes and put attention into what everyone else is doing. Nations of the world are basically just playing peek-a-boo with each other. And it works, until it doesn’t. If your country is printing money, it can really help drive advancements, until it bursts. The goal is to inflate and burst, just not large enough to cause a depression. The reason bubbles burst is not just because they are bubbles, it’s because we identify them and there’s a catalyst event that cause widespread FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. During economic despair, Franklin D. Roosevelt actually campaigned against fear, and it’s believed that he brought USA out of the Great Depression.
If you’re basically printing money, and it’s usually years before you get called out, why not use that to accumulate something of limited supply, and of value to other people? Like say gold, as China is doing. That way when people shine the light on your exploited economic policy, you can switch it up, and communicate something like: “we have all this gold so that’s why you should continue to value our currency highly even though we’ve been printing money”. There will come a time when that will be cryptocurrency too.
Why not their own?
They will be able to profit off the rest of the world continuing to use it, and pay off their fiat debt with the demand for the cryptocurrency. Most likely candidate at the moment is Bitcoin, because it was the first, there’s no single leader, its singular purpose is store of value, it has a known and unchanging amount of coins (21 million), and it’s the most widely adopted. Better technology may exist but those need to be fully explored, gain adoption, and ideally are released anonymously.
Why together?
If it’s just one nation, everybody else can ignore them and potentially abandon that cryptocurrency. That cryptocurrency would be associated singularly with that nation. However if it’s 2 or more, particularly in different regions, it gives it validity to it being a world currency. Other nations continue to use that cryptocurrency, the value goes up, or rather, the value of other currencies goes down in relative to that cryptocurrency. Now those USD you owe don’t seem so monumental. It doesn’t mean they’ll continue to use this currency forever, but it will be a stepping stone, another economic policy shift to keep the national interest moving. The cryptocurrency would then essentially be loaned to citizens based on their credit rating, and the migration away from printed monetary value would begin.
Which nations?
My bet is on Japan and Australia. Both of them have taken strides in regulating cryptocurrency. Regulation, if moderate, is a great thing, as it recognizes it as legitimate and makes it more friendly for businesses and sets the groundwork for wide spread adoption. Australia fixed taxation, and I’ve heard the government is already good at directing bank policies. Japan amended the law legalizing major virtual currencies. Japan and Australia are cooperating to innovate and support the fintech industry. Japan is also in between a rock and a hard place. Japan has an aging population and declining birth rates. I believe that has been pushing, and will continue to push, their efforts in tech innovations and robotics, with the hope of stimulating their economy as they did in the 1980s with electronics. Japan is a nation that’s strangely attached to paper money, at the same time have been doing so much else electronically way before Western nations, and I while I was visiting recently a robot told me our future co-existence will be prosperous. I hope it will be robot, I hope it will be.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator behind Bitcoin, famously said, “In twenty years time Bitcoin will either have died a death or will be a universal phenomenon.”
Well, it doesn’t seem to be on its way to death. Is this what he meant?