Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $1,172.09.
Traders are happy because the SEC is expected to rule on a Bitcoin ETF by March 11.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports China Is Developing its Own Digital Currency.
After assembling a research team in 2014, the People’s Bank of China has done trial runs of its prototype cryptocurrency. That’s taking it a step closer to becoming one of the first major central banks to issue digital money that can be used for anything from buying noodles to purchasing a car.
At the same time as it builds up its own capabilities, the PBOC is increasing scrutiny of bitcoin and other private digital tenders. It doesn’t want a bitcoin bubble to blow up. And since currencies have historically been issued by the state, not private players, it doesn’t want to cede the cryptocurrency space to companies it has no control over.
Chinese people have embraced online payments for just about everything. To buy a can of Coke, thirsty commuters scan QR codes on their smartphones rather than feed coins into a vending machine. At Lunar New Year gatherings, money is exchanged via a few presses on a smartphone instead of crisp notes handed over in red envelopes.
All of that poses a challenge to the PBOC’s status as the central bank of both the digital and physical realms. So if you can’t beat them, join them.
“Getting to know more precisely how much banks lend, where the money goes and the pace of credit creation is key to curbing money laundering and making monetary policy more effective,” said Duan Xinxing, vice president of Beijing-based OKCoin Co., one of the country’s biggest bitcoin exchanges. Issuing digital currency will make it easier for the PBOC to monitor risk in the financial system and track transactions economy-wide, he said.
OKCoin is among cryptocurrency exchanges that has recently taken steps to halt bitcoin withdrawals amid efforts to clamp down on capital outflows.In January 2016, the PBOC said it will have its own cryptocurrency “soon,” but there has still been no formal start date announced. In the meantime, there’s been strong advocacy from senior officials, including Fan Yifei, one of the PBOC’s deputy governors.
“Cutting costs is an obvious benefit, but the impact of shifting to blockchain-based digital money from the current payment structure goes beyond that,” said Larry Cao, director of content at the CFA Institute in Hong Kong. “There’s a potential you can pay anybody in the system, any bank, and any merchant directly. Blockchain will change the whole infrastructure. This is revolutionary.”
Real-time data
For the PBOC, using blockchain, the technology that underpins the digital currency bitcoin, will allow it to trace transactions and collect “real-time, complete and authentic” data to compile precise monetary indicators such as money supply growth, OKCoin’s Duan said.
“The transparency of economic activities in every corner in the country will significantly improve,” Duan said. “The central bank will have unprecedented knowledge of how the economy runs.”
So instead of relying on monthly surveys of businesses, or collations of spending from the statistics authority, the PBOC and therefore the government would have real-time readings on the pulse of consumers. Policies could then be fine tuned on a day-to-day, even hour-to-hour basis, giving an unprecedented level of precision to monetary management.
Capital Flight
Bitcoin is a primary means of capital flight out of China. How long will that last?
Here’s one key thought on bitcoin from the article: “OKCoin is among cryptocurrency exchanges that has recently taken steps to halt bitcoin withdrawals amid efforts to clamp down on capital outflows.”
When China launches its own cryptocurrency, will it ban Bitcoin transactions?
If so, what happens to the price of Bitcoin?
Contrary Indicators
The launch of a Bitcoin ETF reminds me of those waiting for the launch of JDSU Leap Options in 2000 so they could “load the boat”.
During the 1990s, JDS Uniphase stock was a high-flyer tech stock investor favorite. Its stock price doubled three times and three stock splits of 2:1 occurred roughly every 90 days during the last half of 1999 through early 2000, making millionaires of many employees who were stock option holders, and further enabling JDS Uniphase to go on an acquisition and merger binge. After the telecom downturn, JDS Uniphase announced in late July 2001 the largest (up to then) write-down of goodwill. Employment soon dropped as part of the Global Realignment Program from nearly 29,000 to approximately 5,300, many of its factories and facilities were closed around the world, and the stock price dropped from $153 per share to less than $2 per share.
Blockchain Technology
I like the blockchain technology behind digital currencies like Bitcoin. Blockchain is perfectly suited for recording mortgages, deeds, autos, etc.
Title insurance companies will cease to exist, at least as stand alone title companies.
Scalability
Every transaction is recorded on the blockchain so the requirement of resources to process and store the information continually grows.
This poses a scalability issue for high volume transactions. Recording every payment would certainly constitute high volume.
Scalability Articles
- The Real Blockchain Scalability Challenge
- Waves Platform Implements New Blockchain Scalability Approaches
- Blockchain scalability
If blockchain can scale to the point where governments can ban cash and record every transaction, expect instant tax collection and loss of privacy.
Digital Downside
- The government will know where every penny is at every second.
- The government will know every monetary transaction real time.
- You will no longer be able to give the babysitter, gardener, bartender, a friend, or anyone else an extra penny without the government knowing.
- Sales tax collection and VAT tax collection will be instantaneous.
- Governments can impose negative interest rates and other confiscation schemes at will.
If cash is banned, the blockchain will record every penny you spend, and who you gave it to.
Money laundering will become much more difficult, but the cost will be a loss of privacy, threats of negative interest rates, and other cash confiscation schemes.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Money laundering will become much more difficult, but the cost will be a loss of privacy, threats of negative interest rates, and other cash confiscation schemes. Mish
Physical fiat, a.k.a. “cash”, can still be allowed to some degree for petty transactions. And people can continue to use private depository institutions for as much privacy as those may afford (hopefully without government provided deposit insurance and other privileges for the banks).
As for negative interest rates at the central bank, these should not be applied to individual citizens up to, say, $250,000 since SOME risk-free initial capital formation and liquidity is legitimate.
Also, positive yielding sovereign debt constitutes welfare proportional to wealth so even the longest maturity sovereign debt should yield no more than 0%. But who will buy that debt if they can get 0% at the central bank with no maturity wait at all?
Bitcoin = tulip bulbs 2.0. Paying big time for a digital number is really dumb. Governments and central banks can decide to make the possession of bitcoin illegal and the price drops to zero. History repeats again, whether tulip bulbs, dot.com stocks or houses.
Yes bitcoin is not annonymous. But there are already other cryptocoins which allow to make complete private transactions and are untracable. For example Monero and zcash (with private wallets).
Zerocoin type double blind currencies are perfectly workable, just not at too granular a level due to resource constraints. But as a form of low level “reserve currency”, they could work fine. People could then use them to fund anonymous demand accounts, which are ridiculously cheap to operate, since the anonymous funding effectively removes any reason to report and record anything other than what is needed for immediate operations.
So, you get both anonymity and low cost. With capital at risk limited to how much you at any one time feel you need to have available for immediate spending. With the rest of your holdings kept entirely anonymously on the “blockchain.”
Trying to utilize the blockchain for everything down to vending machines, is just overdoing it, for the sake of some myopic dream of mathematical purity. If it can be made to work efficiently, fine; nothing better than mathematical certainty. But the chances of that is pretty slim, as it conceptually demands no differentiation being made between the settlement mechanisms desired for a trillion dollar transfer to fund a nuclear war machine for an invading army, and that of buying a counterfeit can of Coca Cola from a vending machine in some remote Chinese village somewhere.
As long as the big money flows can be properly anonymized, hence kept away from snooping governments and ambulance chasers, the free market can be relied upon to arrive at the proper means of handling the small day to day stuff. With a proper balance of security, anonymity and cost. That’s what free markets are good at, after all.
I question whether bitcoin was ” a primary means of capital flight out of China.” I think that might be somewhat fake news. The Chinese exchanges were wild, leveraged casinos in which ordinary “traders” had little chance against high speed trading algorithms that paid zero trading fees. The PBOC had legitimate reasons to impose regulations to protect citizens.
I also question your comparison of bitcoin to a hyped tech bubble stock. There are reasons to believe bitcoin may be undervalued rather than overvalued.
I don’t think that a government controlled PBOC-Coin would pose much threat to the value of bitcoin; it would just be another fiat currency that loses value over time. If China tries to ban bitcoin, they know it will be driven underground and possibly replaced by a more anonymous and robust cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is the biggest and most secure cryptocurrency, but it is not the most technically advanced.
it would just be another fiat currency that loses value over time. Michael Sykes
Not necessarily since except for physical fiat*, ONLY depository institutions in the private sector may even use fiat. Thus the demand for fiat is artificially suppressed and thus its price in real goods and services is suppressed too.
But a central bank which allows the non-bank private sector to use fiat in an inherently-safe, convenient form** should increase the demand for fiat, especially if privileges*** for depository institutions (a.k.a. “banks”) are removed too.
Also, governments are forced to use their fiat to ameliorate the damage the government privileged usury cartel causes with unjust purchasing power creation. Remove those privileges and the need for fiat creation should be reduced.
*coins and bills
** Which raises the question of why a crypto currency is needed since ordinary accounts at the central bank such as the banks have should suffice?
***e.g. deposit insurance, lender/asset buyer of last resort, etc.
You make an interesting point about this centralized cryptocurrency having the potential to remove the privileged status of private banks to create, process, and profit from money. However, this would just further concentrate monetary power in the government-controlled central bank. I see no reason to believe they would not continue their currency devaluation policies, as virtually all governments have done in the past.
As for why they want a fiat crypto-currency, I think it may enable them to consolidate and simplify their record keeping. It may also make their monetary system more efficient. Instead of having multiple monetary systems for retail transactions, customer bank transfers, bank-to-bank transactions, etc, it could all be handled on one blockchain.
As someone who is definitely not a goldbug, this would definitely be good for precious metals. Folks who wanted some level of privacy, as well as a hedge against negative interest rates, Would use their excess crypto-currency to buy gold, instead of keeping it in a bank.
While true, purchasing gold with a crypto-currency pretty much means the government will know when you bought it and how much. Exchanging gold FOR cryptocurrency entails pretty much the same data.
The upside is that, even if the intention is to replace proper, anonymous currencies with a spy apparatus, the end result is likely to to be a population, whose increased familiarity and comfort with blockchain currencies, quickly finds a way to route around the official version, in favor of a real one. Kind of like official exchange rates in the Venezuela and the former Soviet Bloc.
Considering what the governments know about their infrastructures, placing all your eggs in that basket isn’t a good idea. If we, as a global pop, can ever have unfailable energy, then yes, this sort of storage and transaction record keeping would work well. But we don’t have that on any grand scale as of yet. Take out the power, and the whole digital world goes away. The planet is only one massive solar flare or emp away from finding out just how well all digital works in a failed power structure.
Just something to keep in mind when cheering this on.
Please Disregard previous post with typos.
I still do not completely understand Bitcoin as well as I should but, this article brings up more questions than anything else. If any country declared a digital currency and had access to all transactions couldn’t they also prevent or deny transactions they deem forbidden? Couldn’t they stop purchase of bitcoins, gold or incandescent light bulbs?
How would the block chain prevent government from inflating the currency and lowering the value of each digital coin? I understand that new bitcoins are created in the current system via mining so it does permit adding additional coins. Currently each bitcoin is backed by an exchange rate to a currency. In a purely digital world that implies no physical currency what would establish the value of the coin? Perhaps we would live in a Utopian world where the government established the value according to their needs.
Bitcoins are not “backed” by anything. Just their own scarcity, usability for trade (and for things like capital flight??) and, as of currently probably the dominant reason, speculation.
The algorithm that creates Bitcoin is publicly known, and allows for coins to be minted according to a well known protocol. With the number of new coins minted, as a share of the total outstanding, declining asymptotically until total coins ever minted reach a well known final number. “All coins ever minted” being operative, as coins lost cannot be restored, unless the math is broken. So, in practice, the final number is much lower than the theoretical max. Ask anyone who have lost multiple retirements in Switzerland worth of dollars, at current valuations……… The “lost” coins are still sitting on the blockchain. It’s just that noone (or perhaps some future Fields Medal winner….) can claim them, and use them for transactions. So they are, in essence, not part of the money supply any more than a gold stash somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy is.
All “coins” have their history back to minting available forever on the blockchain. Hence, any attempt to sneak in coins beyond what the well known minting mechanisms allow for, will be immediately detected, with the result that the attempt will be denied.
The “new coin minting phase” is only temporary. Added to give miners an early incentive to verify transactions. Which is what mining in practice does. Miners get freshly minted coins, according to a well known and declining over time schedule, as a reward for contributing to transaction verification.
Once all coins are minted (the theoretical max is reached), the more fundamental means of rewarding miners, which is currently running alongside new coin minting, will be the only reward: And that is transaction fee per verified transaction. So, the system will remain self supporting even past the end of new coins being minted. Meaning, it’s not a case of inflate or become irrelevant for the ecosystem as a whole, anymore than it is for gold.
The blockchain that China hopes to create and use would be very different from the bitcoin blockchain. The bitcoin blockchain is an open, democratic, decentralized network of trust in which participants have agreed (due to self-interest) to a prescribed schedule of bitcoin creation that will result in no more than 21 million total coins. China is creating a closed, centralized blockchain in which an elite group of people will decide when and how many coins to create, with no limits.
You mention a downside, but don’t discuss the fact that bitcoin is backed by NOTHING! Its real value is $0 and that is where it will eventually go. This is Tulip mania, plain and simple.
I has portability and unbreakable encryption. It can also be used to make smart self enforceable contracts. That’s not NOTHING. People see gold as a barbarous relic as well. Does that mean gold is nothing? Bitcoin has utility- same as gold
Absurd. Gold is valued because people enjoy it and it has industrial uses. Gold has been used a jewelry for thousands of years. Can you wear bitcoin? Can you eat it? You can’t do anything with it and it’s backed by nothing. Wait and see. Within 10 to 15 years the collapse of bitcoin will be the biggest financial story of the decade.
Cryptocurrencies are here to stay. I expect Bitcoin will still be the leading crypt-currency in 10-15 years, but it is also possible that a different cryptocurrency will overtake it.
The people who see gold as a barbarous relic are quite obviously idiots. It has been proven as a store of value over thousands of years.
Bitcoin, in blinding contrast, hasn’t even completed its first decade.
Animals were the dominant motive force for transportation for almost as long as gold has been a store of value. Then horses, elephants, and mules and sled dogs, as beasts of burden became essentially obsolete. Fast.
Revolutionary technologies happen. Crypto currency technology is overwhelmingly superior to all other known forms of currency on all the criteria of a currency, so much so that but for their tax collection power, governments would be out of the money business as Tower Records is out of the music delivery business.
Tax collection tender is a big wrinkle. Apart from that, cryptocurrency is unstoppable.
And vs. gold, as a stable store of value? Well, nongovernmental cryptocurrency obsoletes gold as completely as an automobile does a horse. So, now, the main remaining questions are which cryptocurrency or crytocurrencies will emerge to become a currency, not a speculative novelty, and when.
Making tax collection compatible with crypto currencies, even completely anonymous ones, are no harder than restricting taxation to mechanisms that does not require spying on ones own citizenry.
Import tariffs (as long as government is assumed to have a legitimate interest in keeping tabs on what flows across it’s border inbound), and land taxes (kind of hard to ask for government help in protecting your exclusive use of a plot of land, without telling the government where it is….) being the obviously workable ones.
In fact, by thusly restricting arbitrary means of government shakedowns in the name of taxes, crypto currencies can’t help but making taxation more fair and universally accepted. And in addition, by restricting government’s ability to add arbitrary cost to simple, interpersonal economic activity, crypto currencies also cannot help but making the economy work more efficiently and equitably. Allowing for more wealth and more freedom for more people. Which, unless one is a progressive measuring ones happiness solely in terms of how many others one can “help” by managing and lording over, cannot help but being a good thing.
I forgot camels. Camels, too, are mostly obsolete as a means of transportation.
Taxation, Stuki Moi, I meant to write is what stymies nongovernmental crypto currency from supplanting governmental currency without governmental action. To limit taxation as you suggest would require a government to agree to cease, for example, income taxation. Unless that happens, government can ensure that its currency continues to exist. If you can only pay U.S. income tax in U.S. dollars, then there will be U.S. dollars. The powerful natural forces that favor a currency independent of any government and which, unchecked, would obsolete governmental currency are, in fact, checked by the even more powerful power to tax.
I hear you. Governments will always be the enemies of liberty, just as they always have been. Hence, they will most certainly fight tooth and nail against any currency, and anything else, that makes it harder for them to keep their peons dependent and enslaved.
What (properly anonymized) crypto currencies have going for them, is that by allowing people to engage in economic transactions anonymously, those people become harder to levy incomes taxes on. Or otherwise harass. Since the government don’t know who is paying whom, nor for what. So, while everyone may still need some dollars to may income taxes with, they can move more and more of their economic activity under the radar of the totaliltarians.
Currently, the cost and complexity of transacting anonymously in Bitcoin, are keeping all but those most concerned about harassment (those buying and selling drugs et al) from bothering with it. But as the technology becomes more familiar, and more people get comfortable with it, its use will spread to more mainstream sectors as well. As the state and it’s hangers on have grown ever more totalitarian and confiscatory, the incentives people have to route around the confiscation and harassment, have gotten stronger. And neither of those trends look likely to reverse anytime soon.
The same holds true for using Bitcoin (or some derivative) as an anonymous store of value. What governments, ambulance chasers and kidnappers don’t know you have, is something they won’t confiscate, nor otherwise try to extort, from you. So again, people have strong, and growing stronger, reasons to get on board.
Same as other fiat currencies, but Bitcoins require a great deal of electric power to generate them, so can’t be printed.
So when the power goes out, how do you pay for something? All currencies have drawbacks, but crypto-currency definitely has flaws.
What is a real value of gold?
Ok, seriously if there is an EMP/solar flare mad max type of event then not even 10 tons of gold would help you. That’s not an argument. IF China adopts a digital currency than people will have to choose to use it. Constantly inflating your currencies value away tends to lead to capital flight itself. China would own the keys to that currency. Nobody owns keys to Bitcoin. China could ban use of the currency but peer to peer networks would still offer a way to keep transactions away from the government. Unless your wallet is connected to a platform that connects your identity to it it is still untraceable otherwise they would have found the Mt. Gox thiefs. Other currencies such as Dash and Monero keep TOTAL anonimity by actually bundling the transactions and using blind proofs. Short of shutting down the internet there’s nothing they could do to stop the use of digital currency. PLeASe learn all you can about digital currency. Once you truly understand it the knowledge will blow you away!!!!!
Sorry one more thing. An ETF is a part of allowing the average investor access which is just adding to the Bitcoin infrastructure. The more infrastructure that’s added, the more the inherent with in my opinion. A bigger event than that is Japan basically almost recognizing it as legal tender and actually changing and making laws to accomodate it. Those laws go into effect in early April.
For those with gold & hard cash, there will be lots of unique and interesting things for sale in North Korea when it collapses..
Besides instant taxation, it also enables instant wage and price controls.
“When China launches its own cryptocurrency, will it ban Bitcoin transactions? If so, what happens to the price of Bitcoin?”
If I need to buy something, and determine that bitcoin affords me a cheap and easy way of purchasing the item, then I would use bitcoin. However, I would never ‘save’ bitcoin for any longer than required to make a purchase. Doing so is speculation using the greater fool theory. Bitcoin is probably only useful as a medium of exchange – not as a unit of account or store of value.
“Sales tax collection and VAT tax collection will be instantaneous.”
Is there any difference between sales tax and VAT tax?
I think having a digital currency is fine as long as it is optional. The rest of the world lemmings may go along with their governments if they want to eliminate cash but I hope we have enough people here to resist this tyranny. It will give big brother ultimate control. Of course the govt. will say its for our safety as it will reduce crime, terrorism etc. Typical lie to get more control over the population and tighten the noose. The ultimate irony is when the good little sheep see their bank accounts debited as the govt. institutes negative interest rates.
If/when cash is banned, it will be the start of the darkest period in human history. Totalitarian regime like never seen before.
This:
“The government will know where every penny is at every second.
The government will know every monetary transaction real time.
You will no longer be able to give the babysitter, gardener, bartender, a friend, or anyone else an extra penny without the government knowing.
Sales tax collection and VAT tax collection will be instantaneous.
Governments can impose negative interest rates and other confiscation schemes at will.”
reminds me of this:
“Revelation 13:16-17 King James Version (KJV)
16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”
There’s a reference to a dragon in that passage – isn’t China represented often as a dragon?
I’m not religious, but the parallels here are not very reassuring.
No they won’t! For Godsakes research double blind proofs and encryption!! Monero won’t even tell you which wallet went to which! Dash keeps transactions completely private as well. You have obviously NOT researched this!
What makes you think that governments will allow private companies or individuals to create a supply of digital money that is not controlled by governments?
It may very well be technically possible to make it anonymous, but that does not mean that the taxmen will ever allow anybody to create an unauditable supply of money.
They went after the guy who claimed that he invented Bitcoin and tried to shake him down:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/09/bitcoin-founder-craig-wrights-home-raided-by-australian-police
http://themerkle.com/possible-bitcoin-creator-craig-wright-is-under-criminal-investigation-for-tax-issues/
Digital currency. A totalitarians dream come true. .gov decides who sinks and who swims. And with nothing backing this instant costless creation of revenues, the sky is the limit for gumnut redistribution and spending. Short Brinks? Won’t need those self driving trucks to distribute tonage of paper around to special interest constituents any longer, when a simple keystroke will suffice.
What could go wrong? Too much money concentrated among the opposition? Simply delete it until after the election.
Digital currency as a store of value? Why not keep it in the IRS’s free iCloud?
Only question at this point is, what will be the new grey market currency? The one congressmen and drug peddlers can stuff in their freezers? Because there will certainly be alternatives available shortly after this nonsense is instituted.
The dollar is covered by debt, bitcoin is covered by…nothing: two peas in a pod.
Or: The Dollar is covered by the issuing government’s unrestricted ability to rob and debase you. Bitcoin by your ability to escape the robbery and debasement……..
The dragon r beast is the antiChrist
Government digital currency is the most Orwellian thing I have ever heard of.
“The government will know where every penny is at every second”
The government has no idea where my bitcoins are. And they never will. So no, Mish.
Just be very, very careful whenever you attempt to exchange any of them for anything that can be, in the case of governments even statistically, “linked” to your physical representation.
As Bitcoin becomes more nominally valuable, it really, really needs to morph into something with much stronger anonymity guarantees. Government’s don’t need to, nor care about, “proving” a given set of Bitcoins belong to you. All they need is some sort of likelihood that narrows their “harass space”. If they need to arrest, torture and kill 10, or perhaps 100, people to get to some sort of certainty they did get the owner of the bitcoins that annoy them, that’s just par for the course for government work.
That’s why there’s Dash and Monero!!!
To further answer Emanon in Rev 16:12 China is referred to as the Kings of the East who can field an army of 200 million men!
We worry about fiat currencies that aren’t backed by anything except the ability to collect taxes, then laud entirely imaginary, virtual currencies.
Note that cryptocurrencies can be anonymous (you just have a cryptographic credential), but if the government assigns them and ties them to people or corporations in meatspace, they will know everything, but it is also possible that EVERYONE will know everything (and there will be the usual phishing attacks).
Your rental of an X-rated movie will be there for all to see!
But Venezuela is the bitcoin mining capital of the world since electricity is heavily subsidized, so they can run the computers cheaply.
http://tomwoods.com/ep-798-how-the-disasters-of-venezuelan-socialism-have-been-a-boon-for-bitcoin/
Bitcoin is the future of money – whether people like it or not. It is still early stage and many more will accept BTC – even Governments. Even the most knowledgeable on BTC today do not know the way this monetary technology will transform the use of money for the whole world. If you have even an inkling of foresight – you will be wise to buy a couple of BTC today while you still can afford it.
All governments want a way to collect tax from all transactions. As all governments are in need of revenue to finance the pensions they have “promised” to their civil servants.
Different governments have sought different means.
India just made large notes worthless unless you can prove that you paid the tax on the activity that produced them. European governments have often “expired” old notes to force the holders into the banking system. The U.S. has never done this and is one reason the U.S. Dollar is rising in value.
Others are making cash transactions above a certain amount “illegal” and forcing these transactions to occur in the banking system. The U.S. has done this first at the $10,000 level and now at the $3,000 level.
They all are saving their large banks as their large banks finance their deficits.
Once a test case proves that it can be done, agencies like the ECU will make these means “mandatory” under the excuse that it is to deter “money laundering” by criminals.
Bitcoin Technology, the block chain, is a way of validating these transactions so that the people have faith in the new system.
By eliminating “cash” governments will have control and be able to tax all transactions and at the same time save their big banks who finance their debts.
This is on the table and is only a question of when and not if.
Reblogged this on sentinelblog.
Everyone is totally missing the problem with any central bank doing a private implementation of blockchain. The beauty of the public blockchain is a decentralized ledger that cannot be co-opted, corrupted or taken over by any party due to the nature of the large decentralized network of compute that’s use to validate and verify transactions. This is why the bitcoin implementation of blockchain is so powerful, there’s a huge global network that makes it impossible for a government, private, or nefarious corruption or influence of the ledger. If you own 51% of the compute power on any blockchain network – you can control transactions, duplicate entries and re-write transactions. This is another reason why central banks and financial companies want to control a blockchain implementation – they want to be able to manipulate the supply and inflows/outflows of any virtual currency in the same way they manipulate their currencies.