Official digital currencies of states will replace cryptocurrencies in 5-10 years after their appearance, Professor of Economics at New York University Nouriel Roubini said during a meeting of VTB Private Banking with wealthy clients.
“In the next few years, central banks around the world will begin to introduce their digital currencies: Chinese, Swedish, sooner or later European, American, Russian. And when a reliable, cheap, trustworthy digital currency becomes available, people who prefer to do digital transactions will be able to use the digital currency of central banks. So I think that in this incarnation – calculated – cryptocurrencies will live for another 5-10 years since the emergence of digital currencies, which will be much more reliable and more predictable, ”he said.
Roubini noted that bitcoin is today an “unreliable store of value”. There are now 10,000 different cryptocurrencies and 80% of them were created for fraudulent purposes, the economist noted.
According to the professor, now many countries, including China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Russia and European states, have realized the need to regulate cryptocurrencies, since they “do not want to live in a world where you can easily transfer money anonymously from the United States to Seychelles or any other an offshore center without any monitoring. ” When the appropriate regulation begins to work, the value of this type of asset will decline, predicted Roubini. However, he noted that he does not believe that cryptocurrencies will completely “end”.
The Bank of Russia regularly speaks out against cryptocurrency. In February this year, when bitcoin was gaining in price at a rapid pace, the chairman of the Central Bank Elvira Nabiullina pointed to the high volatility of this asset and warned that its use is fraught with risks. Moreover, the cryptocurrency can be actively used for all sorts of dubious transactions, she added then. The first deputy chairman of the Central Bank Sergei Shvetsov, in turn, in August compared the acquisition of cryptocurrency with entering a minefield. He explained that such funds are not protected by law, which means that if they are stolen, the state will not be able to help. On September 15, Shvetsov said that participants in the Russian banking system would begin to slow down people’s payments to crypto exchanges in order to protect the population from “emotional purchases” of cryptocurrencies.
In early September, the press secretary of the Russian president, Dmitry Peskov, said that the country was not ready, following El Salvador, to recognize bitcoin as the official currency. He stressed then that such “quasi-currencies and de facto equating them with monetary instruments” can bring nothing but harm to the financial and economic systems.
In October 2020, the Central Bank announced the beginning of the development of the concept of the digital ruble. Testing of a prototype platform for this form of money will begin in January next year. It will start with the most simple transactions – for example, transfers between individuals, as well as from individuals to legal entities when paying for goods and services. In general, testing will take the entire next year, and only then the Central Bank will determine which roadmap for the implementation of the digital ruble platform will be implemented and in what time frame.
The digital ruble has the properties of both cash and non-cash money. Transactions with it will be carried out through a single platform, which will be implemented in banking applications. At the same time, like banknotes, each of which has its own number, the “units” of the digital ruble will be identified by a unique digital code. For this form of money, special digital wallets will also be developed. The authorities plan to make the digital ruble a third form of money by 2030.
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