NY Fed Says Months-Long Test on Digital Dollar Shows Speed Advantage

A monthslong test with some of the world's largest banks found that digital dollars could be an effective way to improve domestic and cross-border payments, according to a unit of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A report adds: The Fed's New York Innovation Center spent 12 weeks testing a technology known as a regulated liability network, which allows banks to simulate issuing digital money representing their customers' own funds before settling through central bank reserves on a distributed ledger. The test proved to the Fed that these so-called digital dollars have the ability to improve wholesale payments, and that the use of the ledger didn't alter the legal treatment of the deposits. "From a central banking perspective, the proof of concept was conducive to exploring tokenized regulated deposits and understanding the potential functional benefits of central bank and commercial bank digital money operating together on a shared ledger," Per von Zelowitz, director of the New York Innovation Center, said in a statement.

Now not only can you lose your bank accounts

[Shadow of Eternity]

you can also have all of your money simply turned off or revoked if you anger the ruling class.

Re: Now not only can you lose your bank accounts

[chill]

That's been true for decades. Just ask any cam girl what happens when a platform loses a payment processor. Can't accept Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, Discover and the like? Good luck getting paid in today's world.

Re: Now not only can you lose your bank accounts

[poity]

I hope I don't need to explain the difference between losing a month's paycheck and losing access to all the money you have.

Re:

[mrclevesque]

Of course. Someone can also have their bank account frozen.

And in Europe

[gweihir]

We just have instant bank transfers.

Re:

[The Faywood Assassin]

Same in Canada. I don't understand what the difference is.

Re:

[Can'tNot]

Volume, and the article mentions something about a distributed ledger. Those "instant transfers" that you're talking about work on credit. One bank is just sending an IOU to another bank, and the other bank gives you the money "instantly" based on that promise. Settlement happens later, and is never as fast as you'd think it should be.

Re:

[gweihir]

Those "instant transfers" that you're talking about work on credit. ... Settlement happens later, and is never as fast as you'd think it should be.

Nope. Maybe that is how it works in the US, but if so they are even more behind than I thought. The only thing that happens later (end of day) is the bookkeeping on both sides and that is just for convenience. There is no actual "settlement", this is a true instand bank transfer.

Adversarial testing

[VeryFluffyBunny]

So when are they going to invite security experts to have a go at finding vulnerabilities & exploits? How about some nice big fat bug bounties? I think it'd be preferable the embarrassment of losing $billions further down the line.

Simulation?

[Motleypuss]

I just can't even.

Distributed Central Bank

[sudonim2]

Having a distributed ledger adds considerable computational overhead to the system. It would be far more efficient to use a closed blockchain with a central authority. Like some sort of "Central Bank" to act as a clearinghouse for bank transfers. If only someone would create a central bank and some sort of closed distributed ledger, we could move into the future that is the 20th Century!