Not central bank digital currencies, nor state-backed stablecoins, but specifically Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will eventually replace the long-established fiat monetary system says Deutsche Bank’s latest research paper entitled “Imagine 2030”.
This is not the first time the major banking institution mentions the importance of cryptocurrencies in the future of the global economy. The German investment bank has previously praised IOTA, a domestic cryptocurrency project tailored for the machine economy that will sit on top of the already cultivating IoT infrastructure.
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While the new ‘konzept’ take on how the next decade might look like can be considered as accurate as any other speculation-driven prediction, the author of the research paper Jim Reid tried to not get ahead of his head, laying down some of the concepts that are most likely to take over, based on already established functions of society.
Considering myself a heavy-wet future-trends sponge, I’d say that this paper reminds me of the Japanese NTT Docomo’s ‘Visions’ of the future series, with fewer sci-fi scenarios and more pragmatism surrounding some of the most heated global technopolitical topics.
Reid himself, who acts as the Global Head of Fundamental Credit Strategy and Thematic Research at Deutsche Bank, admits that there is no such thing as a magic crystal ball that can accurately predict the future, yet this paper can inspire offsprings no one would expect analogizing the publication with Huxley’s “Brave New World”.
“After all, sometimes it takes a relative outsider to see what the experts miss. Consider that Aldous Huxley’s futuristic novel ’Brave New World’ predicted almost nothing about its main theme of human and social engineering, but was accidentally prescient about the formation of a European central bank!”
The paper addresses possible technological ‘forks’ of the next decade, climate change, and jokes about the fact that Taylor Swift could be one of the next presidents of the United States. Nothing should be a surprise after Trump.
But the main focus of the ‘konzept’ 2030 circles around the future of the broader economic system, with the word Bitcoin being mentioned four times, while crypto or cryptocurrencies were mentioned twenty-eight times in the 84-page release.
More specifically, Reid says that Bitcoin has already showcased its ability to be an active addition to the global inventory of money and not a substitute for fiat, and he believes that fiat currencies will eventually die from their own poison due to practical attributes related to inflation, integrity, physical space consumption and slow transaction and settlement times.
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Furthermore, the Deutsche Bank head says that it should be no surprise if we see an emerging cryptocurrency that may not even exist nowadays forming in the next decade that could change the way we see money from its core.
Centralized or not, the future of money is digital, and it should be already clear by now when economic super-powers such as China and the EU are testing public and private cryptocurrencies on national scales.
Among other keywords, China/Chinese is mentioned 117 times in the paper, and while the German financial behemoth is acknowledging the eastern efforts to maintain their monetary superiority through the digital era, Reid suggests multiple times how the western world and more specifically the EU should tackle with this as soon as possible in order to stay at least relative in the game, otherwise, there is high chance of ending up completely lost in the pipeline.