Ou is a blockchain engineer at
Global Financial Access in San Francisco
who writes about technology for
Bloomberg Opinion. This column doesn’t
necessarily reflect the opinion
of Bloomberg LP and its owners.cyberspace. It proposed technological
solutions to facilitate cooperative
behavior in the absence of a governing
body. The goal was anarchy—not in the
sense of chaos, but in the sense that no
one would be in charge. Instead of relying
on regulators and police, user-defined
rules would be enforced with economic
incentives and software.
Bitcoin is the most prominent
example. It’s a bearer instrument, but
instead of a certificate, cryptographic
signatures are used to authorize
unforgeable transactions. Ledger history
is stored in a database replicated across
tens of thousands of machines around
the world, and users are expected
to verify transactions for themselves.
In a world where confidence in the
establishment has fallen to an all-time
low, “Don’t trust us” is an attractive sales
pitch. When Facebook announced Libra,
the company was careful to emphasize its
limited authority over the proposed
cryptocurrency. Libra will be managed by
a Swiss foundation of which Facebook
is only one member.
The company didn’t fool anyone
with those decentralization claims,
but the goals are instructive. Facebook
knows that the best way to win over
users is to minimize its own involvement.
EVEN CENTRAL BANKS can appreciate
this. At this year’s Economic Policy
Symposium in Wyoming’s Jackson Hole,
Bank of England Governor Mark
Carney suggested a synthetic hegemonic
currency that could be provided
through a network of central bank
digital currencies.
It’s a distinct break from a half-
century of dollar dominance. U.S.
Treasuries make up about two-thirds of
global reserve holdings, all residing as
database entries at Federal Reserve
Banks, where every transaction can be
monitored or stopped.
Other countries don’t share
Americans’ appreciation for U.S.
regulatory authority, especially those at
the receiving end of sanctions.
European Union member states
are reluctant to sacrifice trade and
investment opportunities with Russia,
Iran, and other economies by adhering
to U.S. sanctions. As a solution, European
banks set up a special-purpose vehicle
called the Instrument in Support of Trade
Exchanges, or Instex, to help companies
do business with Iran without actually
sending money across borders. Instex
acts as a clearinghouse that matches
credits and debits for trade, but
transactions get netted and batched sothat money doesn’t cross Iranian
borders. It hasn’t been put to much
use so far, but an informal version has
existed for centuries. Hawala is an
international value-transfer system
that relies on a global network of brokers.
It may look primitive because of the
absence of contracts and courts,
but hawala scales remittances to poor
countries that international banks find too
risky to serve. Hawala brokers
don’t comply with KYC requirements—
not in the legal sense, anyway.
Participants know each other based
on informal relationships in local
communities.
A crypto version exists as well.
Bitcoin Lightning is a decentralized
clearing system where participants send
Bitcoin payment messages all around
the world. Earlier this year, a series of
Lightning payments took place between
users in the U.S. and Europe, then to
Iran, then Israel, concluding with a
donation to a humanitarian aid program
in Venezuela. The payments were
privately cleared through the Lightning
protocol, and if participants hadn’t
announced their game on Twitter, no one
would have known.TRUST TAKES a long time to create but
only a moment to destroy. When people
lose confidence in the institutions that
serve them, economic activity breaks
down. The solution isn’t to make powerful
institutions even more powerful but to
create technology that reduces the need
to trust powerful institutions.
The greatest innovations leverage
human instinct to expand what’s
possible. Financial institutions talk a lot
about banking the unbanked, but that
might do the unbanked a disservice.
A monolithic panopticon is no substitute
for local knowledge.
This all sounds bad if you’re in
charge of U.S. foreign policy or any type
of regulation. It’s good if you want
a world where people can cooperate
without interference. After all, that’s how
economic progress is made.Depository institution Money services business OtherGrowing Distrust
Suspicious Activity Reports filed with the U.S. Department of the Treasury Financial Crimes
Enforcement Network, by industry90k30608/0
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