17 Sept 2014 / Mother Jones – With Thursday’s Scottish independence referendum too close to call, opponents of an independent Scotland have been stressing the would-be country’s lack of a reliable currency. An independent Scotland could either keep using the British pound and lose control of its monetary policy, join the eurozone’s well-known squabbles, or create a new national currency that’s almost certain to be weak. But there’s an intriguing fourth option: adopting an online crypto-currency such as Bitcoin.
Scotland actually has some historical experience with this sort of thing: Instead of relying exclusively on the British pound in the 18th and 19th centuries, many Scottish banks issued their own currencies—a fact noted by Guy Debelle, the assistant governor of Australia’s central bank, at a recent conference on digital currencies in London. Here’s Debelle in the Guardian:
“The Scots can go back to experimenting with a multitude of currencies, Bitcoin and the like, and we can just sit back and see how it goes. A nice natural experiment about the future of money in Scotland—again. Because, as I said, they tried this in the 18th and 19th centuries. It worked for awhile, but eventually fell apart.”
In the ensuing discussion, David Birch, the director of the digital currency consultancy Hyperion, argued that Scotland’s currency experiment was more successful than one might think….. Read more
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/scotland-independence-referendum-currency-bitcoin
