Welcome to Chain Letter! Great to have you. Here’s what’s new in the world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies. | | Estcoin: don’t call it a currency. Estonian government officials would like to make something clear: if the country develops a crypto-token, it will not be a national cryptocurrency. Bloomberg reports that Estonia will not peg its planned crypto-token, called Estcoin, to the euro or distribute it to all of its citizens. “We are not building a new currency,” Siim Sikkut, an official in charge of Estonia’s IT strategy, said in a local interview.
Last year, Kaspar Korjus, managing director of Estonia’s “e-residency” program, floated the idea of issuing crypto-tokens via an initial coin offering. Noting that other countries are experimenting with their own digital currencies, Korjus said Estonia’s “advanced digital infrastructure” gives it a clear advantage. But the idea drew a sharp rebuke from European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, who said European Union member states cannot have their own currencies.
So what is it? Sikkut says it will only be a “means for transactions inside the e-resident community.” Korjus, meanwhile, tells Bloomberg that the details for “community Estcoin” have yet to be determined. | | Election security expert on blockchain voting: “Just stop.” Last month, West Virginia became the first state to allow blockchain-based voting, part of a pilot test involving absentee voters during a local primary. But after two fellows at the Brookings Institution penned an essay celebrating the milestone and encouraging further use of blockchain technology for elections, Matt Blaze, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, tweeted that he begs to differ. It’s not that blockchain is bad, he said. It’s that it would introduce new vulnerabilities, and whatever problem it would be meant to solve is “more easily, simply, and securely” solved in other ways.“The requirements for elections have literally evolved over centuries of democracy,” tweeted Blaze, who testified (PDF) before Congress last year on the issue of election cybersecurity. “Voting is not a testbed application for your too-clever-by-half startup idea.” | | Money, transformed. That’s the title of the new issue of the International Monetary Fund’s quarterly magazine, which touches heavily on crypto-assets and their implications for the global monetary system. A few highlights: Christine Lagarde compares the emergence of crypto-assets to that of the telephone. Stefan Ingves, governor of Sweden’s central bank, Riksbank, ponders how the role of central banks should change when cash goes away, as is happening in his own country. And Dong He, director of the IMF’s monetary and capital markets department, asks how monetary policy might change if the “deficiencies” of crypto-assets, particularly their volatility, are addressed and the technology achieves widespread adoption.
(Also see “Governments are testing their own cryptocurrencies”) | | Loose Change Fill your pockets with these newsy tidbits. | | | The EOS blockchain still isn’t live. (CoinDesk) | | | | The top 10 holders of EOS tokens own nearly half of the coins. (Bloomberg) | | | | Baidu is apparently creating a blockchain system called “Super Chain,” which it says will be super-fast and super-efficient. (ETHNews) | | | | India’s cryptocurrency exchanges are pleading with the country’s central bank not to ban them. (Quartz) | | | | Steve Wozniak says he buys Jack Dorsey’s vision of Bitcoin as a single global currency, but doesn’t “necessarily believe it’s going to happen.” (CNBC) | | | The Money Quote “We'd like the bubble to break.” —Ella Zhang, head of Binance Labs, a venture incubator arm of the popular cryptocurrency exchange, to Bloomberg. Zhang, who is in charge of investing $1 billion in blockchain companies, says today’s valuations are “high and unreasonable,” and that it would be “a good thing for the industry” if the bubble were to burst. | | | |
