Ecuador creará su propia moneda virtual

El gobierno de Rafael Correa anunció que lanzará la primera divisa digital en el mundo respaldada por un Banco Central. Mientras tanto, los analistas especulan con una eventual devaluación o desdolarización de la economía. ¿Será posible?  

Ecuador está en camino a convertirse en el primer país del mundo en crear su propia moneda electrónica emitida y distribuida por su Banco Central. La medida impulsada por su presidente, Rafael Correa, sin dudas es una de las más audaces e innovadoras que su país ha vivido en términos de administración financiera y política monetaria.

Esta moneda, que todavía no tiene nombre, circulará a través de las redes de celulares a partir de diciembre y en forma paralela con el dólar, la única divisa oficial del país actualmente. Su uso será voluntario, y estará respaldada por activos líquidos del Banco Central ecuatoriano.

Con una paridad de 1-1 ante el dólar, la cantidad de dinero que se emita dependerá de la demanda del mercado. Y aunque en un comienzo sólo podría ser utilizado a través del celular, se prevé que se extienda al resto de las plataformas tecnológicas en un futuro.

“En lugar de tener un sistema de pagos basado en especies físicas (billetes o monedas) que requieren de costos logísticos, aprovechamos la infraestructura existente y reducimos los costos de transacción”, explicó Gustavo Solórzano, subgerente del Banco Central, a la agencia AP.

El dinero digital será controlado por el Estado, por lo que no comparte las mismas características de una “criptomoneda” como el Bitcoin, que fue prohibido para dar lugar a este nuevo lanzamiento.

Y si bien hasta el momento no se sabe demasiado sobre su funcionamiento, algunos analistas sospechan que la moneda podría crear las condiciones para una eventual devaluación o desdolarización de la economía.

Aunque, por su parte, el gobierno de Correa insiste en que la idea es que ambas monedas circulen en paralelo, sin deshacerse del dólar como divisa circulante.

¿Puede la nueva moneda virtual reemplazar al dólar?

Una de las ventajas que podría traer este lanzamiento, según un artículo de BBC News, es el inicio de un camino hacia el fin de la dolarización en Ecuador, lo que provocaría que Quito tuviese plena soberanía en el manejo de su política monetaria.

Así, el Gobierno podría transitar este largo camino empezando por incrementar el circulante de la e-moneda para devaluar la capacidad de compra de los tenedores de dólares.

“Insisten en que no buscan deshacerse del dólar porque están tratando de mantener la confianza en la situación actual y lo último que querrían hacer antes de lanzar esta divisa digital es menoscabar la confianza de la gente en el sistema financiero actual”, dijo Garrik Hileman, historiador económico de la London School of Economics y experto en Bitcoin, al sitio de noticias.

Según Hileman, para facilitar una hipotética transición hacia la nueva moneda, el gobierno podría empezar a ofrecer ventajas a la hora de pagar impuestos y otros incentivos para que la gente cambie de manera natural.

En el sentido opuesto, Jean Paul Lam, economista de la Universidad de Waterloo (Canadá) dijo que “si fuera alguien con muchos ahorros en Ecuador que viera esto como una forma de reemplazar el dólar, mi respuesta sería sacar el dinero del país. Puede ser la intención del gobierno, pero no parece factible”.

Por lo pronto, habrá que esperar hasta diciembre, momento en que la moneda entre en circulación, y ver cómo evoluciona su manejo y utilización.

Alleged Bitcoin founder denies involvement

Reuters

 

Bitcoin: Crypto Currency - Forbes

Forbes.com

Andy Greenberg

Want to buy socks or psilocybin without being traced? Bitcoins are for you.

Gavin Andresen, a Bitcoin developer, shows what he thinks about state-backed currency.

The Internet has left plenty of dead and maimed paper-based institutions in its wake. If Gavin Andresen and his underground cadre of cypherpunks have their way, another archaic slice of pulped tree may be next: the dollar.

Bitcoin is a grassroots nonprofit project that seeks to fashion a new currency out of little more than cryptography, networking and open-source software, and Andresen is the closest thing the project has to a director. Bitcoin is not, he explains, just a new way to digitally spend dollars, pounds and yen. That's been tried before. Remember Beenz and Flooz?

Bitcoin is different: It wholly replaces state-backed currencies with a digital version that's tougher to forge, cuts across international boundaries, can be stored on your hard drive instead of in a bank, and--perhaps most importantly to many of Bitcoin's users--isn't subject to the inflationary whim of whatever Federal Reserve chief decides to print more money.

"Bitcoin is designed to bring us back to a decentralized currency of the people," says Andresen, a 44-year-old software developer and entrepreneur based in Amherst, Mass. "This is like better gold than gold."

As with shiny-metal-backed currencies, Bitcoins derive their value partly through their scarcity, which is defined not by how much can be dug up with shovels but by a cryptographic lottery. Anyone can get Bitcoins without paying cash for them by downloading and running Bitcoin's "mining" program. The machines in Bitcoin's mining network, now in the thousands, compute an encryption function called a "hash" on a set of random numbers, and coins are awarded every ten minutes to whichever miner happens to compute a number below a certain threshold.

That lottery tightly controls how many Bitcoins are created. There are currently close to 6 million in existence. By 2014 there will be about twice that number. Bitcoin's distributed software is set to slow production over time so that there will never be more than 21 million in circulation. "No banker can control it. No evil dictator tyrant can print zillions and destroy the value," says Bruce Wagner, organizer of New York's Bitcoin developer's meet-up.

Of course, the other factor that determines the worth of a currency is whether anyone will accept it in exchange for goods and services. And for Bitcoin, a subculture of geek-friendly merchants is catching on. About $30,000 worth of Bitcoins change hands every day in electronic transactions, spent on Web-hosting, electronics, dog sweaters and alpaca socks.

Also drugs. Particularly illegal ones. Since Bitcoins can be spent on the Internet without the use of a bank account, they offer a convenient system for anonymous purchases. There's no centralized storage of funds, so accounts can't be frozen by law enforcement or PayPal administrators. "Illegal stuff will be a niche for Bitcoin," admits Andresen. "That bothers me, but it's just like any currency. You can't stop dollar bills from being used for the drug trade either. That's an unfortunate feature of any cashlike system."

Bitcoins' anonymity was no accident. The system was originally designed by Satoshi Nakamoto, a mysterious, privacy-obsessed figure who first described the currency's specs in a series of posts on a cryptography e-mail list in late 2008. Nakamoto declined to be interviewed for this story, and not even Andresen, who took over the project as technical lead in May 2010, has communicated with Bitcoin's founder except through e-mail and posts on Web forums. Nakamoto has compared Bitcoin to the systems of anonymous financial transactions sought by the anarchist cypherpunk movement in the 1990s, whose adherents saw cryptography as a way to shift power from institutions to individuals.

Thanks in part to its growing uses, both black- and white-market, the newborn currency is appreciating at a wild clip. In just the year since Andresen joined the project, it's jumped from half a penny in value to about a dollar.

That possibly irrational exuberance may be a sign that Bitcoin is headed for a speculative bubble. The currency already swings as much as 50% in value over some single days. But Bitcoin's supporters are confident the free market can solve that problem as Bitcoin's advantages attract more nonspeculative buying and selling.

One way they hope to bring more normals into the fold: by expanding Bitcoin's applications to the real world. Bitcoin devotees in New York's informal developer group are rolling out an Android app for mobile Bitcoin buying. They're also building open-source software that can be integrated into point-of-sale terminals.

"Someday this will probably have the Fed scrambling," says the New York meet-up's Bruce Wagner. "They still don't know what Twitter is. By the time they figure this out, it will have already taken hold."

The Flaw that May Bring Down Bitcoin or Change it Forever

Global Guerrillas

arstechnica.com

Bitcoin is currently being used as a publishing system due to a design feature/flaw.   That flaw threatens the viability of Bitcoin as a currency.
How so?
Some folks have expoited that feature/flaw to publish Wikileaks cables and pedophile porn links in bitcoin's blockchain.
Of course, that's a problem.  It may attact some aggressive behavior from governments, well before it reaches a maturation.
However, that's a problem.  Since bitcoin is decentralized, the steps required  to prevent people from publishing information.
This now becomes the multi-billion $$ question:  can Bitcoin fix itself or will it end up becoming an illegal backwater?
To find out how it's done and what can actually be done about it, I contacted Jeff Garzik on the Bitcoin software team (it's a little technical, but you can follow the logic):

Sending bitcoins requires two pieces of data: a bitcoin address, and an amount (number of bitcoins). There is no "comments field" or anything of that nature. A bitcoin address is just a random 20-byte piece of data. Normally those 20 bytes are derived from the RIPEMD160 and SHA256 algorithms, but a valid 20 bytes cannot be distinguished from an invalid 20 bytes. Therefore, if you are willing to waste money -- albeit very small fractions like 0.00000001 bitcoins -- by sending that money to invalid bitcoin addresses, you essentially have created a channel for random data transmission. The bitcoin blockchain is in one sense a massively replicated ~7GB database that stores data for all eternity.

There remains the open question of what happens if somebody dumps data into the blockchain, that a government finds illegal. Smart people argue the legal theory "mens rea" and similar mitigating factors are applicable. But it remains an unknown. The vast majority of people are burdened with this awful data they don't care about, simply to use the bitcoin payment system they do care about. There are many conflicting motives and incentives (very Brave New War-ish):

• Anarchist activists want to publish this information, to force authorities to act (or not) when this illegal data is published. *
• Bitcoin activists want to publish this information, to force developers (us) to address The Filter Issue
• Some people see more value in bitcoin as "eternity data storage", if expensive and inefficient, than bitcoin as a currency

It is, quite literally, impossible to prevent use of bitcoin as data storage. It is a purely digital currency. Who can say which digits are "evil" or "good", allowed or disallowed? You can detect certain patterns, and possibly filter those

Many bitcoin users are using bitcoin for its intended purpose, as currency transfer, and dislike carrying the costs for these other uses.  As this carrying-data issue rears its head, it increases the costs for anyone running a P2P node on the all-volunteer bitcoin P2P network. This shrinks the total number of bitcoin P2P nodes.  As such, due to both legal and resource-usage issues, "data spam" has long been theorized as an attack vector.  

The "Filter Issue": There are very large ramifications to filtering out transactions, even ones that are obviously data spam. Fungability: currently, all bitcoins have the same value.  My 1.0 BTC and your 1.0 BTC are equivalent in value. Once you start filtering transactions, you are injecting policy-based censorship into the mix. Some bitcoins are accepted by all, some bitcoins are only accepted by a few. A value of a bitcoin itself becomes a product of its ancestry.

If this policy is implemented, perhaps by court order to a bitcoin mining pool, it could lead chain forks, where i.e. bitcoin users in the United States see a different set of spendable bitcoins than users outside the US. It is widely speculated, based on common forum comments in the crypto-anarchist community, that this current round of data spam is intended to force bitcoin users, developers and governments of the world to take action to censor -- or not -- certain bitcoin transactions. Trying to force the issue, to establish a precedent one way or the other. Or, more pessimistically, a party could be simply trying to shut down bitcoin.

The bitcoin community is very staunchly anti-censorship, but if data spam were to threaten the life of bitcoin, I imagine ideology-neutral "it looks like data, not currency" filtering would appear. Bitcoin is ultimately a product of voting -- you vote by choosing which software version and software ruleset to download. The users can always vote data spam off the island... but will they? :) Is data transmission a valid use of bitcoin? The users themselves choose the definition of "valid."