behavior and speculative investment.
Neither of these functions offers
much of an incentive for ordinary
users to exchange their existing
currencies or payment mechanisms
for Bitcoin. Because of its important
role as an investment vehicle, much
of the development effort for directly
interacting with Bitcoin has been
put into developing interfaces for
managing currency-trading exchanges,
but considerably less has been put
into its use for everyday activity. The
massively distributed computational
architecture of payments processing
for Bitcoin means that delivering proof
of payment is relatively slow, again
limiting its potential for more routine
forms of exchange. These forces—
and they all arise through deliberate
design choices—conspire to mean that
Bitcoin is not currently used much as
a form of regular exchange. It seems
unlikely to replace the regular forms
of government-backed (known as
fiat) currency that we typically use to
make payments. Bitcoin is not unique
in how these kinds of design choices
affect the use and usefulness of digital
money systems, but by understanding
both the ways in which people use
money and the ways in which different
system configurations afford different
opportunities for interacting with
money, we can look to support different
ways of transacting with money.
There is a huge diversity in the
possible forms that money may take
in the future. It is likely that a new
ecology of systems will develop around
niches in the financial infrastructure,
each with its own opportunities for
interaction design. However, there is
an elephant in the room: the influence
and interests of national governments,
and in particular, the role of central
banks in economic control and
management. Their interests lie in
ensuring financial stability via control
of the money supply. Reductions
in financial liquidity, impacts on
inflation or deflation, opportunities for
fraudulent behavior, and so on, have
huge potential to damage national
concerns, and so the regulatory
environment for financial technologies
is under continuous review and tight
control. Nevertheless, central banks
themselves are taking an increasing
interest in developing digital
currencies based on the distributed
ledger technology (DLT) that Bitcoin
is built on that integrate with their
existing forms of fiat currency. That
they are doing so has ramifications
for all citizens and our daily lives due
to the pervasive influence of money
across our individual, social, and civic
activities. Getting the design right in
this instance is critical to much of what
we take to be otherwise unremarkable
and ordinary. Indeed, as Andrew
Haldane, chief economist at the Bank
of England, states:
Whether a variant of this technology
could support central-bank-issued digital
currency is very much an open question.
So, too, is whether the public would accept
it as a substitute for paper currency.
Central-bank-issued digital currency
raises big logistical and behavioral
questions too. How practically would it
work? What security and privacy risks
would it raise? And how would public and
privately issued monies interact?
These issues are of core concern to
interaction designers as much as they
are to economists.
Outside of the industrial-scale
interactions carried out in the wider
banking sector, the majority of the
financial interactions that involve
money are relatively small-scale.
Buying a car or a house are important
but irregular events for most people.
Consider your own daily spending, for
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