Recently, the relevant person in charge of the People's Bank of China stated in public that the development of a digital currency system is being promoted and that "the era of digital renminbi is coming."
At the third China Finance 40 held recently, At the People's Yichun Forum, Mu Changchun, deputy director of the Central Payment and Settlement Department, said that the research institute affiliated to the central bank began developing a digital currency system as early as 2018, and the central bank's digital currency is "ready to come out."
The central bank’s research and issuance of digital currency is not a temporary move. It started in 2014. The research on central bank digital currency has been carried out for 5 years. In 2017, the Bank Digital Currency Research Institute was officially established. Currently, the institute It has applied for 74 patents involving digital currency.
China’s electronic payment is already very developed. Why does the central bank still launch a legal digital currency? "For ordinary people, the boundaries between basic payment functions and central bank digital currency are relatively blurred. The central bank digital currency that the central bank will launch in the future will be very different from electronic payment in some functions." Mu Changchun said that in the past, fund transfers of electronic payment instruments had to be completed through traditional bank accounts, but central bank digital currency can realize value transfer without traditional bank accounts, greatly reducing the degree of transaction environment to account transactions. In layman's terms, central bank digital currency It can be like cash, conducive to the circulation and internationalization of RMB, and at the same time can achieve controllable anonymity.
From this point of view, the central bank’s launch of digital currency is neither a popular electronic wallet or online payment, nor a complete “replacement of the existing RMB currency system”, but a certain impact on circulating cash. An alternative new cryptocurrency system.
Digital currencies have swept the world. With the in-depth development of Internet technology and the increasing number of mobile payment products, countries are developing their own legal digital currencies. Denmark is at the forefront of the world in terms of cashlessness. Starting in 2014, the Danish Central Bank has decided to stop printing banknotes and replace them with electronic payments. Sweden and the United Kingdom are also studying the possibility of replacing cash currencies with digital currencies.
Digital currency is the general trend. In the long term, digital currency and banknotes will coexist and circulate together. For ordinary people, when they go to the bank to withdraw money in the future, they can choose to exchange it for physical cash. You can also choose to exchange for digital currency, which will make it easier for legal digital currency to gradually replace paper money within the existing currency operating framework, rather than subverting the existing currency issuance and circulation system.