Some of the highlights:
Option one: Government takeover
The year is two-thousand-something-big, and it’s the day your taxes are due. But you don’t file them. Instead an algorithm automatically makes a withdrawal from your electronic wallet, in a currency called Fedcoin.
Option two: Facebook sneak attack
If Facebook could persuade a large enough fraction of Bitcoin users and miners to run its own proprietary version of the Bitcoin software, the company would thereafter control the rules. It could then refashion Bitcoin as a corporate version of the Fedcoin described above.
Option three: Go forth and multiply
“My vision of the future is that there would be thousands if not millions of ways to pay for stuff,” says Duke University’s Harvey. If the Federal Reserve can create a token representing the US, he says, then there’s nothing stopping people from backing tokens with whatever they want: “This idea of collateralizing with dollars or gold is a pretty general idea. Why not instead of a million ounces of gold in the vault, you drop a million shares of Apple in the vault?”
The idea of that FedCoin is something I’ve thought about a lot. Makes me shudder. But also, I don’t even have to imagine this, I only have to read about what China’s doing to see this kind of thing.