Created to avoid banks, bitcoin’s blockchain technology may end up helping them, is the subtitle of an article of IMF employees in the latest edition of the organisation’s monthly publication Finance & Development (F&D) entitled “The Internet of Trust”.
The article discusses the role of technology in potentially making payment more simple and cheaper, explaining the concept behind Bitcoin and the blockchain technology. It answers basic questions about the cryptocurrency like how safe they are and how and where to use them. The article also discusses whether the distributed ledger technology can transform the financial sector and how, giving, for instance, the reduction of settlement times for security transactions as an example of its enormous potential and describing the long list of possible applications.
The authors conclude with an outlook on the usefulness of the blockchain in central banks despite its current limitations.
The full article is available here.