Which coin would you keep in your everyday electronic wallet?
To answer this question, you need, by far, to compare their acceptability and profitability. Let’s start with the latter:
USD and any national token are inflationary currencies. Deflation is not favored in current economics. Fed, ECB are proud if they meet the inflation targets – in other words: if keep their currency holders away from seigniorage profits.
Imagine a public corporation that does not distribute dividends and, in case of share price increase, immediately issues new shares to the management, diluting out capital gains of stock holders without their consent. National currencies are designed like this. The only reason people continue to hold them in their wallets is their wide acceptability.
Some would argue that acceptability of national currencies is enforced by law. But would that keep holding? What if tomorrow Google, Amazon, Facebook, issue their tokens? What if airports and hotels start accepting Lufthansa miles? What if corporations get involved in international currency wars and Alibaba, WeChat, Gazprom issue their tokens? What if corporate shares get digitized, granulated and you pay with your stock holdings? What if cryptocurrency community succeeds in their anarchistic plans?
At which point the monopolistic state of the national currencies collapse?
We don’t know that, but we are ready to propose a nice utopian app today:
You have a digital wallet in your smartphone. It has your bank cards listed along with a dozen of cryptos and all your stock investments, also available as payment method. When you pay with your wallet, it automatically choses the best available method (discounts, rebates). You can lock some coins that you do not want to spend – those with the highest growth, for instance.
Which coin would you keep in your everyday electronic wallet?