Its the dream of anyone with a deep seated hatred for all things banking. Being able to create and use your own currency. Now thanks to a ruling of the ECJ this is possible, in Europe. The court ruled that Bitcoin is a currency, detailing exchanges that transfer traditional currencies into the crypto-coins for a fee are to be exempt from consumption taxes. This means that any exchange between coins is also tax exempt, and thus any cryptocurrency will be.
Of course this will be a bonus for Bitcoin, as anyone wanting to use it in Europe can now exchange it with Euros and back, even if this is not the raison d’etre of Bitcoins. All this does is load more money transfer work onto banks, who by the way are eager to take part in some virtual currency trading. It’s simply a better system to have block chain secured ledgers than vulnerable AS400 systems maintaining them with much less robustness and verifiability.
But bitcoins are not where banks are going to suffer. It is with people that understand money, that know it is a contract, usually empty or good for fossil fuels in our carbon credit economy, but something the function of which can be fully replaced by any cryptocoin provided there is a linked asset/commodity that is highly liquid (like oil, gas, coal). Nothing stops farmers to demand all payment for their grain in their own crypto currency, making such currency instantly valuable and necessary in the European economy, and the farmers instantly powerfull in it.
We always agued for IT people to adopt the Bitcoin, because it takes some understanding of software and computers to even protect Bitcoin from attacks. It is actually vulnerable to attacks, especially because the rate of production for Bitcoin is slowing down. We where always against Bitcoin because of its basic wastefull energy intensity. The sectors that has most profited from Bitcoin until today are the energy and mining hardware producers. Banks have suffered from untraceable money transfers, because every time someone spends 1000 european bitcoins in the US, somehow the euro’s invested in Europe have to be exchanged for the Dollars cashed in in the US.
The shortest route for banks to die of the comming bonfire of commodity/service/sector specific cryptocurrencies is to 1. Replace internal money exchange with these currencies and 2. Start producing goods you only sell for a cryptocurrency you produce (and thus manage the value of that currency by matching the amount of it solde with the amound of goods/services produced). 3. Sell renewable energy in them, so the value of the RE will not constantly be implicitly compared with that of oil, coal and gas.
We are stoked. This is the end of currency capture, also because any well run cryptocurrency can be used to pay taxes (as it is easy to exchange with the legal means to do so). Wake up European producers, you are free to trade as you wish now.