Bitcoin (BTC) poses a significant threat to the world’s reserve currency, the United States dollar, according to a strategist at major American investment bank Morgan Stanley. Ruchir Sharma, chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, believes that the dollar’s reign is likely to end due to global distrust in traditional finance, while Bitcoin is likely to capitalize on that lack of confidence. In a Dec. 9 article in The Financial Times, Sharma provided a brief outline on the history of the world’s reserve currencies, noting that the dollar’s run had lasted 100 years at the start of 2020. According …

Bitcoin (BTC) starts another week aiming for $19,500 and beyond as crunch time for Brexit meets mass U.S. money printing. Cointelegraph takes a look at the price factors at stake for Bitcoin this week as shaky $19,000 support remains in play. $7 trillion money printing? The more controversial elements of U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s future tenure are already becoming clearer — and it’s good news for Bitcoin. As his inauguration edges closer, Biden has already said that he plans a $7 trillion recovery package to tackle the impact of coronavirus. This would add a huge new chunk of debt to …

As President-Elect Biden continues to round out his roster of appointees, he has tapped an Obama-era chair of the Federal Reserve to lead his administration's economic policy. According to a Wall Street Journal exclusive published on Nov. 23, the Biden team plans to nominate Janet Yellen to serve as Treasury Secretary. Obama originally appointed Yellen to the Fed in 2014, where she remained until early 2018. In a term that lined up with a massive expansion of public knowledge of cryptocurrencies and ended right after Bitcoin's dramatic 2017 bull run, Yellen was consistently critical of the space, calling Bitcoin "anything …

Since the United States Federal Reserve and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network opened for public comment a proposed rule to acquire more information on smaller international transactions, many crypto users have labeled the measure an invasion of privacy. On Oct. 23, the regulatory agencies published a notice of a proposal to modify a long-standing rule in which financial institutions in the U.S. are required to exchange client information for all international transactions greater than $3,000. The proposal — which includes “transactions involving convertible virtual currencies and digital assets with legal tender status” — would lower this monetary threshold to $250. …

Cash use has lost a ton of ground to digital payments as the pandemic has changed the way people transact worldwide. Some experts have recently argued that central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, could solve the problem of leaving that payments data in the hands of major tech platforms. In a blog post published Monday morning, Federal Reserve of New York researcher Michael Lee and University of California Santa Barbara economics professor Rod Garratt expounded on a paper they released earlier this month. The authors point to tech firms' troubling use of consumer data, which has landed everyone from Visa …

Bitcoin continues its bull run. The coin is up more than 12 percent over the last week and is now tickling $16,000. According to the Big Mac Index, a Bitcoin will now buy as many as 6,3421.26 of the giant burgers. It’s even passed the monetary base of the Russian ruble, and is on its way towards beating Canada. That will happen when Bitcoin is worth $18,000. It’s almost there. The coin already has a market cap bigger than that of Bank of America, Netflix, and Shopify. If it keeps rising, it will soon be in the top 20 assets …

Robert Bench, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s director of applied research, thinks privacy should be a focus during the creation of digital money, not an afterthought. “Privacy is a question that we have learned is critical from a technical perspective,” Bench said during a Chamber of Digital Commerce panel on Friday: “One of our learnings is that the questions of privacy and identity must be considered at the earliest stage of the architecture. Making privacy or identity an ad hoc process is suboptimal from both a privacy or identity perspective, and most importantly from a security perspective.” A largely …

Less than four days after his official acceptance speech, Joe Biden has already begun assembling a team including the former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as part of his transition to the 46th President of the United States. According to a Nov. 10 announcement from the ‘Biden-Harris Transition’, Gary Gensler has volunteered to join President-elect Joe Biden’s team as a financial expert. The former CFTC chair will be the lead tasked with ensuring as smooth a transition as possible with the Federal Reserve and banking and securities regulators. Gensler served as chairman for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, …

President of the Dallas Federal Reserve Robert Kaplan believes the US central bank should begin work on a digital currency immediately, a clear indicator that some policymakers view this as an urgent matter. Speaking Tuesday at a virtual conference hosted by Bloomberg, Kaplan reportedly said: “It is critical that the Fed focuses on developing a digital currency in the coming months and years.” The central banker’s remarks were part of a broader discussion on the economy and fiscal policy. Kaplan is a member of this year’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the organization tasked with setting monetary policy. The 2020 …

As Bitcoin (BTC) blasted through the $14,000 level, its market capitalization surpassed the monetary base of the Russian ruble. This measure includes both physical currency and bank reserves, both of which are typically held by a country’s central banks. The above chart may seem complicated at first glance, but it simply compares gold, silver, Bitcoin and the remaining global monetary bases. We can see that the U.S. has $4.9 trillion physical notes, coins, and bank deposits parked at the Federal Reserve. By dividing this number by the current 18.5 million outstanding BTC, we reach the $263,000 stated above. In order …

The United States Federal Reserve has broadened its research on central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, in a new review that was posted to its website Monday. In a report titled "Central Bank Digital Currency: A Literature Review," Fed economists Francesca Carapella and Jean Flemming compile research exploring the potential impact of a digital dollar on commercial banking and monetary policy. The review provides a theoretical underpinning for understanding how CBDCs could influence consumer adoption and financial stability. The authors write: “From a theoretical standpoint, the introduction of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) raises long-standing questions relating to the …

The United States is girding its loins for an election that has cast a pall over a far longer timeframe than we ever should have let it. But then again, what did you expect when so many people spent so much of the past year cut off from their normal lives and circles, growing increasingly dependent on social media as a way of connecting with the outside world? That's not a recipe for sanity, even if it was a race between sane people. The phenomenon of modern information flow has gotten an enormous amount of attention since the last, similarly …