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BIS_2018年度经济报告之虚拟货币(英文)24页

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92BIS Annual Economic Report 2018
A brief history of money
Money plays a crucial role in facilitating economic exchange. Before its advent
millennia ago, goods were primarily exchanged for the promise to return the favour
in the future (ie trading of IOUs).3 However, as societies grew larger and economic
activity expanded, it became harder to keep a record of ever more complex IOUs,
and default and settlement risks became concerns. Money and the institutions
issuing it came into existence to address this growing complexity and the associated
diffculty in maintaining trust.
Money has three fundamental and complementary roles. It is: (i) a unit of
account – a yardstick that eases comparison of prices across the things we buy, as
well as the value of promises we make; (ii) a medium of exchange: a seller accepts it
as a means of payment, in the expectation that somebody else will do the same;
and (iii) a store of value, enabling users to transfer purchasing power over time.4
To fulfl these functions, money needs to have the same value in different
places and to keep a stable value over time: assessing whether to sell a certain
good or service is much easier if one is certain that the received currency has a
guaranteed value in terms of both current and future purchasing power. One way
to achieve this is by pure commodity moneys with intrinsic value, such as salt or
grain. But commodity money by itself does not effectively support exchange: it
may not always be available, is costly to produce and cumbersome in exchange,
and may be perishable.5
The expansion of economic activity required more convenient moneys that
could respond to increasing demand, be effciently used in trade and have a stable
value. However, maintaining trust in the institutional arrangements through which
money is supplied has been the biggest challenge. Around the world, in different
settings and at different times, money started to rely on issuance by centralised
authorities. From ancient times, the stamp of a sovereign certifed a coin’s value in
transactions. Later, bills of exchange intermediated by banks developed as a way for
merchants to limit the costs and risks of travelling with large quantities of coinage.6
However, historical experience also made clear an underlying trade-off, for
currencies that are supplied fexibly can also be debased easily.7 Sustained episodes
of stable money are historically much more of an exception than the norm. In fact,
trust has failed so frequently that history is a graveyard of currencies. Museums
around the world devote entire sections to this graveyard – for example, room 68
of the British Museum displays stones, shells, tobacco, countless coins and pieces of
paper, along with many other objects that lost their acceptability as exchange and
found their way to this room. Some fell victim to the expansion of trade and
economic activity, as they were rendered inconvenient with a larger scale of use.
Some were discarded when the political order that supported them weakened or
fell. And many others fell victim to the erosion of trust in the stability of their value.
History proves that money can be fragile whether it is supplied through private
means, in a competitive manner, or by a sovereign, as a monopolist supplier. Bank-
issued money is only as good as the assets that back it. Banks are meant to
transform risks, and therefore, under certain extreme scenarios, confdence in
privately issued money can vanish overnight. Government-backed arrangements,
where assuring trust in the instrument is a centralised task, have not always worked
well either. Far from it: a well known example of abuse is the competitive
debasement of coins issued by German princes in the early 17th century, known as
the Kipper- und Wipperzeit (clipping and culling times).8 And there have been
many others, up to the present-day cases of Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Avoiding
abuse by the sovereign has thus been a key consideration in the design of monetary
arrangements.
93BIS Annual Economic Report 2018
The quest for solid institutional underpinning for trust in money eventually
culminated in the emergence of today’s central banks. An early step was the
establishment of chartered public banks in European city-states during the period
1400–1600. These emerged to improve trading by providing a high-quality, effcient
means of payment and centralising a number of clearing and settlement operations.
Such banks, set up in trading hubs such as Amsterdam, Barcelona, Genoa, Hamburg
and Venice, were instrumental in stimulating international trade and economic
activity more generally.9 Over time, many of these chartered banks functioned in
ways similar to current central banks. Formal central banks, as we know them today,
also often emerged in direct response to poor experiences with decentralised
money. For example, the failures of wildcat banking in the United States eventually
led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System.
The current monetary and payment system
The tried, trusted and resilient way to provide confdence in money in modern
times is the independent central bank. This means agreed goals: clear monetary
policy and fnancial stability objectives; operational, instrument and administrative
independence; and democratic accountability, so as to ensure broad-based political
support and legitimacy. Independent central banks have largely achieved the goal
of safeguarding society’s economic and political interest in a stable currency.10 With
this setup, money can be accurately defned as an “indispensable social convention
backed by an accountable institution within the state that enjoys public trust”.11
In almost all modern-day economies, money is provided through a joint
public-private venture between the central bank and private banks, with the central
bank at the system’s core. Electronic bank deposits are the main means of payment
between ultimate users, while central bank reserves are the means of payment
between banks. In this two-tiered system, trust is generated through independent
and accountable central banks, which back reserves through their asset holdings
and operational rules. In turn, trust in bank deposits is generated through a variety
of means, including regulation, supervision and deposit insurance schemes, many
ultimately emanating from the state.
As part of fulflling their mandate to maintain a stable unit of account and
means of payment, central banks take an active role in supervising, overseeing and
in some cases providing the payments infrastructure for their currency. The central
bank’s role includes ensuring that the payment system operates smoothly and
seeing to it that the supply of reserves responds appropriately to shifting demand,
including at intraday frequency, ie ensuring an elastic money supply.12
Thanks to the active involvement of central banks, today’s diverse payment
systems have achieved safety, cost-effectiveness, scalability and trust that a
payment, once made, is fnal.
Payment systems are safe and cost-effective, handling high volumes and
accommodating rapid growth with hardly any abuse and at low costs. An important
contributor to safety and cost-effectiveness is scalability. In today’s sophisticated
economies, the volume of payments is huge, equal to many multiples of GDP. Despite
these large volumes, expanding use of the instrument does not lead to a proportional
increase in costs. This is important, since an essential feature of any successful money
and payment system is how widely used it is by both buyers and sellers: the more
others connect to a particular payment system, the greater one’s own incentive to use it.
Users not only need to have trust in money itself, they also need to trust that a
payment will take place promptly and smoothly. A desirable operational attribute is
thus certainty of payment (“fnality”) and the related ability to contest transactions
that may have been incorrectly executed. Finality requires that the system be largely
94BIS Annual Economic Report 2018
free of fraud and operational risks, at the level of both individual transactions and
the system as a whole. Strong oversight and central bank accountability both help
to support fnality and hence trust.
While most modern-day transactions occur through means ultimately supported
by central banks, over time a wide range of public and private payment means has
emerged. These can be best summarised by a taxonomy characterised as the
“money fower” (Graph V.1).13
The money fower distinguishes four key properties of moneys: the issuer, the
form, the degree of accessibility and the payment transfer mechanism. The issuer
can be a central bank, a bank or nobody, as was the case when money took the
form of a commodity. Its form can be physical, eg a metal coin or paper banknote,
or digital. It can be widely accessible, like commercial bank deposits, or narrowly so,
like central bank reserves. A last property regards the transfer mechanism, which
can be either peer-to-peer, or through a central intermediary, as for deposits.
Money is typically based on one of two basic technologies: so called “tokens” or
accounts. Token-based money, for example banknotes or physical coins, can be
exchanged in peer-to-peer settings, but such exchange relies critically on the
payee’s ability to verify the validity of the payment object – with cash, the worry is
counterfeiting. By contrast, systems based on account money depend fundamentally
on the ability to verify the identity of the account holder.
Cryptocurrencies: the elusive promise of decentralised trust
Do cryptocurrencies deliver what they promise Or will they end up as short-lived
curiosities In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to defne them more
The money flower: a taxonomy of money Graph V.1
Source: Adapted from M Bech and R Garratt, “Central bank cryptocurrencies”,
BIS Quarterly Review
, September 2017, pp 55–70.
Widely
accessible
DigitalCentral bank-issued
Cash
Commodity
money
Cryptocurrency
(permissioned DLT)
Central bank
deposited
currency
accounts
Central bank
digital currencies
(wholesale)
Virtual
currency
Cryptocurrency
(permissionless DLT)
Peer-to-peer
Bank
deposits
Central
bank
digital
currencies
(retail)
Central bank
reserves and
settlement
accounts