Recently, the Ministry of Commerce issued the Overall Plan for Comprehensively Deepening the Innovation and Development of Service Trade, and announced the pilot areas of digital RMB: Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and qualified pilot areas of digital RMB in the central and western regions. According to Xinhua News, the top-level design, standard formulation, function research and development, joint debugging and joint testing of digital RMB have been completed, and internal closed pilot tests will be conducted in Shenzhen, Suzhou, xiong'an new area, Chengdu and future Dongao. In other words, if it goes well, the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics may be able to "see the beautiful scenery".
In fact, as early as 20 14, the central bank established the digital currency Institute to study the feasibility of issuing the statutory digital currency; At the end of 20 17, with the approval of the State Council, the central bank organized commercial banks such as China Industrial and Commercial Bank, China Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, China Banknote Corporation, Shanghai Bill Exchange and other relevant institutions to jointly develop the digital RMB system (DC/EP), and in February of 20 18, the experimental production system of the digital bill platform of Shanghai Bill Exchange was officially put into trial operation. In 2065438+2009, when the central bank held a conference call in the second half of the year, it requested to speed up the research and development of China's legal digital currency (DC/EP).
So, what is the reason behind the launch of digital currency?
This issue of Intelligent Internal Reference recommends two research reports on digital currency by Guohai Securities and New Era Securities, revealing the past lives in digital currency and the logic behind the central bank's introduction of digital currency.
1, the principle of digital currency and the development of various countries.
Digital currency is the inevitable result of the continuous evolution of the monetary system, belonging to the monetary 4.0 stage. Money is another important invention invented by human beings besides words. After barter and gold and silver standard, credit currency has become an important leap in the history of currency.
Among them, the initial barter is a decentralized institutional arrangement. However, due to the extremely low transaction efficiency, the difficulty in coupling supply and demand, and the lack of a unified value measurement standard, human economic activities and trade scope are greatly limited, so they are gradually replaced by precious metals such as gold and silver. This trading system has experienced a long time in the history of currency development. Due to natural wear and tear, insufficient currency price, insufficient weight, shoddy, bad money driving out good money and other phenomena, paper money with national credit background-pure credit money began to appear. Paper money not only saves the issuing cost, but also overcomes the inconvenience of carrying precious metal currency, which greatly promotes the development of trade in modern history and makes it possible for the central bank to operate monetary policy.
If paper money has achieved the first leap from concrete objects to abstract symbols, then digital currency based on blockchain, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and big data has achieved the second leap from paper form to paperless direction. Digital currency did not change the credit endorsement behind the currency, but only changed the existing form of the currency. Currency has completed the evolution of commodity currency-precious metal as universal equivalent-credit currency-digital currency. Therefore, the evolution of the existing monetary form means that the operating cost of the monetary system is lower, safer and more efficient. Digital currency is the inevitable result of the continuous evolution of monetary system from commodity currency to credit currency.
Digital currency is not a substitute for electronic money. According to different issuers, digital currency can be divided into statutory digital currency issued by the central bank and private digital currency. At present, there is no uniform standard and definition about digital currency. According to the definition of the digital currency Institute of the Central Bank, the narrow sense of digital currency mainly refers to the pure digital currency that does not need physical carriers; Digital currency in a broad sense is equivalent to electronic money, which refers to all currencies that exist in electronic form, including electronic money, virtual money and digital currency.
According to different issuers, digital currency can be divided into statutory digital currency issued by the central bank and private digital currency. Among them, the digital currency issued by the central bank refers to the legal tender issued by the central bank in the form of encrypted digital strings representing a specific amount. It is not a physical entity itself, nor a physical entity as a carrier, but digital information used for online investment, trading and storage, which represents a certain value; Privately issued digital currency, also known as virtual currency, is a kind of digital currency, such as Bitcoin, which is issued and controlled by developers and circulated among members of virtual communities without government supervision.
Digital currency in a broad sense can be roughly divided into three categories: one is completely closed currency that has nothing to do with the real economy and can only be used in a specific virtual community, such as game currency in the virtual world; Second, it can be purchased in real money but cannot be exchanged back into real money, and can be used to purchase virtual goods and services. For example, Libra was initiated by Facebook; Third, it can be exchanged and redeemed with real money according to a certain proportion, which can buy both virtual goods and services and real goods and services, such as the legal digital currency issued by the central bank.
Digital currency is the monetary development form of digital economy. Since its outbreak in 2020, the digital economy characterized by "new investment, new consumption, new mode and new format" has become an important force to promote the stable economic and social development of China. According to the data of the National Bureau of Statistics, although the GDP in the first quarter decreased by 6.8% year-on-year, the digital economy showed a good development momentum. Among them, the output of electronic components and integrated circuits increased by 16% and 13. 1%, the added value of information transmission, software and information technology services increased by 13.2%, and the investment in e-commerce services increased by 13.
After experiencing the test brought by the epidemic, China's digital economy has entered a period of rapid development. It is urgent to realize the coordinated development of data, technology, industry, commerce and system, build a new production relationship of digital economy, and further stimulate digital productivity through factor marketization reform. Digital currency is based on node network and digital encryption algorithm, which meets the needs of the development of digital economy and is its specific currency development form.
Based on the complex network theory, digital currency takes the blockchain technology as the core, which fully embodies the characteristics of anti-tampering and encryption security, and realizes the bottom digital currency and intermediate digital financial account system, covering the central bank payment system, commercial banks, non-bank institutions and other vertical total account systems. At the same time, we will realize the interconnection between the payment and clearing systems of central banks and the top digital identity authentication systems, and realize the transformation from the traditional monetary system to the digital currency system through big data and cloud computing.
The earliest appearance of digital currency can be traced back to 1982. American computer scientist and cryptographer DavidChaum founded DigiCash and introduced two digital currency systems: E-Cash and cyberbucks. Both systems are blind contract signing based on Chaum, which can make users anonymous and their identities difficult to track. However, there was a lack of sufficient technical support at that time, and it was impossible to be completely anonymous, which eventually ended in failure.
1996, DouglasJackson, a famous oncologist, launched E-gold supported by real gold, which was very popular and even expected to attract more than 5 million users from hundreds of countries. Unfortunately, the platform continued to be hacked and attracted a lot of illegal transactions, and the company got into trouble in 2009.
1998, a Moscow company launched WebMoney, which is a universal digital currency that can provide a wide range of peer-to-peer payment solutions covering Internet trading platforms. It is also one of the few surviving unencrypted digital currency. Today, this currency is still widely used and accepted by millions of people. At the same time, it can also be converted into legal tender, such as ruble, dollar, pound and even bitcoin.
In June, 5438 +065438+2008 10, Satoshi Nakamoto put forward the concept of bitcoin and published his famous paper "Bitcoin, a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". Blockchain appeared for the first time in this paper, which can establish a decentralized electronic trading system on the basis of distrust. In 2009, 65438+1October 3, Bitcoin was officially born. Bitcoin is a virtual encrypted digital currency in the form of P2P. It uses open source blockchain technology to store transaction information in distributed ledger, which makes it almost impossible to crack the network. In addition, its point-to-point transmission constructs a decentralized payment system. Since then, the Bitcoin system has gradually matured, and the government has released new versions one after another, adding many functions.
In 20 13, ether was born. It is a virtual cryptocurrency based on Ethereum technology, and it is the second highest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin in market value at present. Ethereum is based on blockchain, similar to Bitcoin, but using completely different technologies. It is a public * * * segment chain platform with **artcontract function, which can be implemented after both parties reach the contract terms. From 20 10 to 20 14, bitcoin multi-node mining and PPcoin were born, which played a role in mining. 20 13 August, Germany recognized the legalization of Bitcoin.
Private digital currency, represented by Bitcoin, does not have the function of money in essence, but it poses a great challenge to the current monetary and financial system. In order to meet this challenge, central banks all over the world are actively developing or implementing legal digital currency. As early as 20 13, Shoaibetal. The concept of official digital currency is put forward. The report released by Bank of England (BOE) in 2014 clearly takes distributed ledger technology (DLT) as the classification standard of digital currency. One is encrypted digital currency, that is, digital currency generated by distributed ledger technology, and it is pointed out that Bitcoin is the first encrypted digital currency in history.
The other is non-encrypted digital currency, represented by Ripple coins; Subsequently, the Committee on Payment and Market Infrastructure (CPMI) under the Bank for International Settlements defined the legal digital currency as cryptocurrency, and divided the legal digital currency into the digital account of the central bank and the digital currency of the central bank according to whether the existing form was based on the central bank account. According to the "flower of money" model proposed by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the concept of central bank digital currency is clarified, that is, the central bank digital currency is a digital central bank currency, which is different from the digital funds deposited in the margin account and clearing account of the central bank by traditional financial institutions.
▲ "Flower of Money" model
The relationship between digital currency and the government is quite complicated, and governments all over the world are both afraid and curious. Discussions, experiments and experiments on digital currency will continue, because if any economy starts to use digital currency, it will have a global spillover effect, so all economies will pay more and more attention to this new phenomenon and trend.
1, Federal Reserve Federal Currency Project. This is a kind of retail central bank digital currency, which can be exchanged with the US dollar (that is, the exchange rate is 1: 1). There are many similarities between this currency agreement and Bitcoin, and the differences are mainly reflected in two aspects. First, in Fedcoin, there is a user (Federal Reserve) who has special rights and can create and revoke the right to use account books at will. Second, the number of issues does not have predetermined rules like Bitcoin, but can be adjusted like cash.
2. CADcoin project of the Bank of Canada. This is a wholesale central bank in digital currency. The Bank of Canada has established a large-scale payment system based on distributed account books, and CADcoin is the currency used in this system. Recently, in an internal briefing in Calgary, the Bank of Canada showed the electronic version of Canadian dollar -CAD-Coin that they are developing. The original intention of this innovation, code-named "Jasper", is to help the central bank issue, transfer or dispose of central bank assets through distributed general ledger technology. Some major Canadian banks, including Royal Bank of Canada, Dominion Bank and Imperial Commercial Bank of Canada, participated in the project.
3. eKrona Project of Swedish Central Bank. At present, Sweden is gradually transforming into a cashless society. The data shows that since 2009, the number of Swedish banknotes and coins has decreased by 40%, and residents prefer to use bank cards, smart phones and e-wallets to handle daily transactions. With the decreasing use of cash, the Swedish central bank tries to provide people with a payment method without going through intermediaries such as retail banks. The Swedish central bank requires eKrona to be able to be used for small purchases. As it has not been decided which technology to use, eKrona has two possible forms, one is the deposit currency unit (that is, individuals open accounts directly in the central bank, not in commercial banks), and the other is the retail central bank digital currency.
▲ The latest developments of overseas countries or organizations in digital currency.
The financial system and monetary policy system of each country are different, so whether it is necessary to adopt digital currency interest rate as a new monetary policy tool of the central bank must be analyzed in detail. Overseas countries don't want to lose the opportunity to occupy a place in digital currency, so policies and regulations often change, sometimes lenient and sometimes strict.
Bank for International Settlements. 20 15, 1 1 year1October, the Bank for International Settlements released the report "digital currency", which introduced in detail the influence of digital currency as a means of retail payment. From 2065438 to March 2008, the Bank for International Settlements published the report "The Impact of Central Bank digital currency on Payment, Monetary Policy and Financial Stability", and analyzed the issuance of digital currency.
International Monetary Fund. 2065438+June 2007, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a report on the development of financial technology industry, Fintech hand financials services: initial considerations, and put forward suggestions on how to effectively supervise the distributed ledger technology (DLT) and digital currency based on it. In 20 18, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Group of Twenty (G20***) jointly issued the interim report "Tax Challenges Brought by Digitalization", proposing to supervise the transaction information of digital assets formed by cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
Britain. The Financial Committee of the United Kingdom has evaluated the encryption algorithms and concluded that they will not pose a risk to the monetary or financial stability of the United Kingdom at present. However, encryption algorithms do bring risks to investors, and anyone who buys encryption algorithms should be prepared to lose all his money.
Japan. As the world's largest bitcoin trading market, the Japanese government has a very positive attitude towards digital currency. Since last year, digital currency has been exempted from consumption tax, and digital currency's legitimacy and monetary attributes have been recognized. In 20 17, Japan began to implement the fund settlement law, recognizing the legitimacy of digital currency as a means of payment. After that, the Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA) promulgated the Payment Service Law, which implemented all-round supervision of the digital currency Stock Exchange. All exchanges operating in Japan must obtain permission from the Ministry of Finance and the Financial Services Department.
Singapore. Under the guidance of the Singapore government's financial technology principle of "not seeking zero risk and not stifling technological innovation", Singapore actively develops blockchain technology and actively promotes the development of digital currency. Singapore is one of the countries that most support the development of digital currency in Asia. Due to the positive and good institutional environment in Singapore, many exchanges choose to do business in Singapore, such as WBFEXCHANGE, which has close cooperation with the Singapore government.
In March 2020, monetary authority of singapore (MAS) officially announced the list of enterprises exempted from payment service business licenses. Entities on the list all obtained the licenses and business rights of specific payment services or related payment services in digital currency during the exemption period, including Singaporean entities of large institutions such as Alibaba, Alipay and Amazon.