by Xiong Yue
Mises.org
On January 20, 2016, People’s Bank of China (PBoC) released an announcement on its website about its digital currency conference. At the conference, the PBoC urged its digital currency team to speed up effort and release its own digital currency quickly. Similarly, Bank of England, Bank of Canada, and some other central banks also expressed similar intentions to or claimed that they had considered issuing their own digital currencies. Since its creation, Bitcoin and other digital currencies have inspired the issuance of many private-issued and denationalized digital currencies. Now, it looks like that the central bank-issued digital currency is also becoming a global trend.
Why do central banks, which already fully control the issuance of currencies, need to bother with its own digital currency?