Thoughts and ideas on people and technology.
March 24, 2025
Welcome to part 4, the final entry in the What is Money series. We’re capping it off with “crypto” and CBDCs.
Let's start with crypto. Short for cryptocurrency, it’s a catch-all term for all of the non-fiat, blockchain-based, or non-government-operated new money systems that aren’t Bitcoin. Ethereum, Solana, and Dogecoin are some you may have heard of. There are actually thousands of cryptocurrencies in existence, but we’ll summarize some of the biggest ones by size and pop culture penetration. One thing they all have in common is that like fiat currencies, they have no supply limit and are therefore inflationary by nature.
Ethereum: Released in 2015 by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum is less of a money system and more of a network built to run “decentralized applications” (DAPs) on. “Smart contracts” and “tokens” are the most common of these. If none of those terms mean anything to you, you’re not alone. What they’ve essentially done is recreate the unending complexity of high finance in a computer system and replaced the bankers and lawyers with programmers.
Solana: Solana is much smaller than Ethereum but serves a similar function of being a wild-west finance platform. I’m only mentioning it here as it's been in the media a lot with numerous security compromises, lawsuits, and general drama. Your nephew who trades in Robux probably knows someone who lost their allowance savings in the 2021 crash.
USDT/Tether: This is the largest in a family of cryptocurrencies called “stablecoins”. They’re meant to offer the features of crypto but with the “stability” of having their value tied to a fiat currency, in this case the US Dollar.
Monero: Monero was designed from the ground up to be as anonymous as possible. Unfortunately it’s lack of popularity means it’s not particularly useful for purchases.
Dogecoin: Released in 2013, Dogecoin was created as a joke to poke fun at Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. As a joke it’s been wildly successful, but like most jokes there are many who decided to take it seriously over the years, which has driven its market cap to surpass that of Monera and most others. It’s currently in the top 10 by market cap, but you’ll struggle to find anyone who takes it as payment.
The concept of CBDCs (central bank digital currencies) has been making the rounds through media for some time. Some paint it as a boogeyman to be feared, while others see it as nothing more than an annoying waste of government resources. As you may recall from part 2 of this series, the Bank of Canada is not a retail bank with individuals for customers, instead acting as an administrative body and a bank for banks. CBDCs have the potential to change that. In a sentence, a Canadian CBDC would most likely be a system whereby individuals who struggle to get or maintain accounts at retail banks could be issued a Bank of Canada account. There may also be some integration with Payments Canada systems to make retail payments and transfers cheaper and more direct. Much of this is speculation though, as the BoC hasn’t announced any of this, only that research is ongoing. In any case it won’t be a replacement of the Canadian Dollar, just another system for moving Dollars around between ledgers and accounts.
I’d normally sign off with something like, “Want help with insert article topic here? You can find us at scalebright.ca”, but in the case of crypto I’m afraid we must decline. The other trait shared by all of these money systems beside inflation via no supply limit is that they’re all scams designed to steal from their customers. Bitcoin is the only digital non-fiat currency this doesn't apply to. So if you’d like help with Bitcoin, you can find us at scalebright.ca.
©2025 ScaleBright Solutions Copyright All Right Reserved.