Australia may be the ton intense hotbed of Bitcoin activity on Earth. Followers of this website have seen this country run the field on Bitcoin acceptance and public consumption. Some Australian cities are ready to run with Bitcoin as their primary, as our article on Tasmania’s Launceston revealed.
As I pieced just days ago, Australia is ready to access fiat currency-based Good and Services Taxes (GSTs) upon Bitcoin. Australian residents have in the offing also paid tens of thousands of dollars in bills with Bitcoin. Now, the Australian government is prepared to have a “Senate enquiry” on the role of digital currency in Australia’s financial future.
Also read: Andreas Antonopoulos Explains Bitcoin to the Canadian Senate
Australian Senators: Is this the End of Patriotic Currencies?
Matthew Canavan (Queensland senator for The Nationals) and Sam Dastyari (Labor senator for Australian NSW) are spearheading this reconnaissance into Bitcoin and digital currency today in Canberra. Maybe it will be fashioned much like the recent body hearing in Canada, where Bitcoin oracle Andreas Antonopoulos held court on the education and future opportunities Bitcoin can take under ones wing, if handled with care. It does not look like Andreas will grace the Senate committee with his clear-headedness at this time.
“The emergence of Bitcoins and other forms of digital currency could revolutionize money markets. If the rivalry is so good in markets for products, why shouldn’t we allow competition in markets for currency too?” query Canavan and Dastyari. “The short-term advantages of printing lots of money are as enormous as you want them to be, but the long term costs of inflation and loss of reputation are enthralling.”
The powerful title of their recent op-ed piece in the Sydney Morning Herald seems highly indicative of their mindset when it put in an appearance to “The Future of Money.” The first country that truly welcomes Bitcoin as a legal tender currency may take some initial risks, but result of its anti-inflationary design, may enrich the users for years to come. Can Bitcoin handle the potential demands of a major nation take to Australia in the near future? Who knows? As Ford has done with its best-selling F-150 pick-up truck, deciding to go to a virginal aluminum construction, maybe the best way to find out is to jump in with both feet. Betting the farm on a totally new construction paradigm is certainly hazardous. Or a more prudent way forward is to let a smaller country try it out as a beta test, which will happen eventually.
Of course, no one is introducing that Australia is getting ready to welcome Bitcoin to the standing of their Australian Dollar with open arms. The creation of that notion is officially on government’s table as we speak. Canavan and Dastyari posit the look forward thusly:
“There is no persuade why more competition and choice in money markets can’t deliver the same kind of benefits that more competition and best have delivered in product markets: greater stability, greater choice and ultimately better outcomes. Even if it means move up some of their powers, governments should be taking the emergence if digital currencies seriously.”
Is Bitcoin flat out haler than the current Central Banking/Federal Reserve/Fiat currency model the world has fallen victim to past the last century? In theory, it can right many of the wrongs currently imposed by an unelected few who govern the production and supply of shin-plasters. Paradoxically, bitcoins are produced and somewhat controlled by miners, also unelected, independent, privately-funded currency producers. The rest is the amount of bitcoin production is finite, scheduled, and regulated by the Blockchain as a whole, not behind closed doors, without audit or inadvertence. Bitcoin has necessary checks and balances on a public ledger, whereas the current Federal Reserve system, regardless of setting, has far fewer than needed. The only checks seem to be cut to their private shareholders, at 6% annually (At least in the U.S.. Your places may vary). These Senators brought up “competition”. What does that tell you?
Bitcoin’s Blockchain has numerous advantages upon the current highly corruptible system. The real question is will it be ready for national prime time distribution if visited upon? My Daddy taught me you learn by doing. And with Canada and Australia taking Bitcoin very seriously, swimming in civil debts while looking for anything shaped like a life preserver, it might see Center Stage far sooner than we recognize. Using a well thought-out economic standard for Bitcoin as a currency, like Switzerland has may be a great place to start (Switzerland seems to unexceptionally be a great place to start, economically, doesn’t it?)
“Any (Federal Reserve) system which gives so much power and so much volition to a few men, [so] that mistakes, excusable or not, can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it hand overs a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic. This is a key argument against an independent central bank. In money is much too serious a matter to be left to the Central Bankers.” – Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman
What do you reflect on? Comment below!
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