Last week I wrote about Vitalik Buterin meeting Valdimir Putin, and now I saw some news about another prominent figure from the Ethereum community, Consensys head of global business development Andrew Keys, who said that China is experimenting with ECR20 platform.
From his Medium article:
The Royal Chinese Mint is the subordinate unit of China Banknote Printing and Minting, which is responsible for the electronic banking mission of China Bank, concentrating on the research and exploration of the forefront of digital money, taking part widely in innovation and practice in the fields such as digital currency, mobile finance, smart-city construction and Internet based finance; it also actively promotes the application of blockchain technology in finance and related fields.
The Royal Chinese Mint is experimenting with the ERC 20 token standard and Ethereum smart contracts to digitize the RMB.
See the whole blog post here.
I see a powerful contradiction between the open nature of the blockchain and the political structure of both Russia and China. The blockchain, as a technology, can obviously be used as a transport and storage layer for "official" money as well, just like any other database, which may drastically improve the speed of transactions, for instance. That is true. And I guess when they talk about "experimenting with it", they talk exactly about that, not about the public, crowdsourced facet of the blockchain.
But make no mistake, it's not the technological advance of the underlying software that makes blockchain so popular, it's the decentralized, censorship-free nature of it.
Once you take that out, there's not much left.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
While I can sympathize with your concern that political entities such as Russia and China are 'experimenting' with blockchain, any implementation of cryptocurrency that wasn't decentralized, cryptic, and delivered of value by the valuers thereof, to wit, the possessors of the currency, would quickly be ignored to the extent possible by users of currencies possessed of those features.
Also, China and Russia face currency manipulation on a scale that may be difficult to conceive, and it may be that both are interested in currency that is manipulation proof. And counterfeiting proof. And theft proof. And I wouldn't blame them.
So, there is yet hope, and no need to despair. If they try to make another kind of funny money, just one that isn't printed on pieces of paper, they will reap what they sow. People will seek and find the cryptocurrency that best meets their needs.
From Golem to Steem, cryptos can be designed to meet those needs. If these economies do adopt actual cryptos that meets the needs of people competitively, whether proprietary or something extant, this will not negatively impact cryptos, but pump huge caps into the crypto corpus.
Even if that only trickles into extant cryptos, that will still be a good thing for holders of those currencies.
tldr; If the BRICS make crappy crypto, it won't be worse than the situation now. If they make or use good money, everybody wins. How can they take over extant blockchains? If they can take over one, the next one will find a way to prevent it. Why should they bother?
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Great point - Russia and China are looking at Blockchain for their own gains...that is....how can I track the transactions on a Blockchain
This does fly in the face of decentralised ledgers, but keeping them on board is probably a good idea 👌
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Vitalik stressed the fact that it will be virtually impossible to not have anonymous transactions going forward with his meeting with Putin. This is also why there will be public and private versions of blockchains. Think internet and intranet.
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Agreed - however it pans out I believe ethereum will do well 👌
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Projected worst-case scenario: Revelation 13.16-18
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Don't think we need to worry about Russia and China's interest in Ethereum. At least it's making crypto popular and making more people aware.
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Interesting post .. thanks for sharing @dragosroua
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Will it mean a lot more encryption so it is harder to identify people, which not really what we want?
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Thanks for sharing. I guess there and cons here. These countries investigation will lead to the West considering digitized national currencies sooner. However, with that might come regulations.
Maybe government interest might lead to less ICOs and less currencies which seems to be out of hand at the moment. :)
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Great news @dragosroua!
Russia and China are huge countries.
But remember, we are unaware of their agenda.
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