At the end of this 2019 we can say that we are at the point where governments and banks around the world, which once despised Bitcoin's ability to offer an alternative to the monetary system, are each theorising their own digital currency that is stable and with solid support behind.
Recently, President of the People's Republic of China Xi Jinping publicly announced that he understands the importance of blockchain for all "digitized" countries, arguing that China will focus on the technology behind Bitcoin nationwide, with the prospect of expanding into the whole world once it is able to master it, while other countries are still debating whether cryptocurrencies should be taken seriously or not. To commit itself in the same direction as China we also find Facebook with its Libra project.
Will Libra Overcome Bitcoin?
The world's largest social platform with over two billion users in its community is studying financial regulations in order to become a global banking institution that offers not gold, not dollars, but Libra. Facebook's private, internal cryptocurrency could represent a cross-border token capable of combining different currencies, physical and digital, under a single umbrella.
Focusing on the Eurozone, we see that the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and most of the Economy Ministers in Europe have publicly expressed their views on cryptocurrencies over the past year. From Bruno Le Mair, who said that Libra should never arrive on European soil while agreeing with the Germans that we should work on a digital version of the euro, to the Bank of England which says “No to Dollar, Yes to Crypto ”, the EU has shown a keen interest in cryptocurrencies.
Despite this, however, it continues to maintain some distance from the issue, most likely waiting for other countries to make mistakes by beginners and then take a step forward with their version of a sovereign digital currency.
China is moving too
To conclude, looking at how China is moving fast in this sector, also considering the fact that long before the birth of cryptocurrencies, China was a highly digitized company, equipped with advanced payment apps and telematic services, we can just be sure that all this will soon be the norm in Europe too, much earlier than we tend to believe.
It also seems clear that the EU is evaluating a digital version of the euro as a single currency, and even if the old euro project fails as a physical currency, the plan would remain the same. The digital currency is here to stay and over time it will only get more space in the payments industry.
Basically, therefore, the question about cryptocurrencies must no longer be "if", but "when". And when digital money has become the norm in modern smart societies, nothing will really have changed for those companies that have started to use the benefits of this new technology long ago.
