US Digital Currency

The US Dollar is already a digital currency, only a small portion of it is represented by notes and coins.

Sam seems to not understand that most fiat currency is already "digital"

What is this... jotting down some notes? I guess this will generate discussion because Sam wrote it, but it is probably one of the most boring and banal ideas in the space. And the exposition is very... shallow to say the least.

"A tricky part of this would be how to balance letting the network have control over itself and letting the government have some special degree of input on ‘monetary policy’. It’s certainly ok for the government to have some, but I think the network needs to be mostly in charge (e.g., the government couldn’t be allowed to arbitrarily inflate the currency when it wanted to)."

This is how the current monetary system works. The "government" can't "arbitrarily inflate the currency". I'm surprised at the lack of depth of this article, is this a brainfart? Haha.

We’d be copying what Venezuela did with their “Petro” :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petro_(cryptocurrency)

I think we'll get viable cryptocurrencies when the people designing them understand the basic and well-known economics of how money works; AND, when basic scalability problems are solved.

It's well-known that deflationary currencies do not work. That is a severe problem that must be solved before cryptocurrency is viable. Limiting the total number of coins means that the currency is deflationary. Furthermore, our current system of loans is based on printing money and requiring payback with interest. That won't work with a limited number of coins.

It's also well-known that blockchain can't scale to handle the volume of transactions that the Visa network handles.

Most of the USD is already electronic. Could we get something cryptocurrency-like with minor improvements? Probably. Will the "crypto" community like it? Probably not, because the "crypto" community knows nothing about how real economics work.