FRA: But would governments necessarily allow private-based cryptocurrencies to coexist with government-based cryptocurrencies?
Danielle DiMartino Booth: I would have to say no. What we have seen with the parabolic thousand point increase, and we are at a thousand points at 8:26pm EST on November 29th, Bitcoin crossed the $10,000 mark and it didn’t even take it 12 hours to go across the $11,000 dollar mark. What we are witnessing is clearly a bubble that is going to implode on its own weight. I think that we can all hopefully agree on that; we are all adults in the room. But I think that central bankers know good and well that once these cryptocurrency bubbles burst, laying in their wake will be a very refined technology that allows central bank cryptocurrencies to rise up where they have left off. To your question, do I think that they will be allowed to coexist? – I think not.
FRA: So you see a phasing out or an abolishing of Bitcoin and other types of private-based cryptocurrencies?
Danielle DiMartino Booth: I hate to inflammatory words like abolishing, but you could certainly see a sequence of events whereby if the Bitcoin bubble ends up bleeding into other overvalued asset classes that then bleed into an economic contraction leading to recession, and then causing the central banks of the world, starting with the Fed, to go back to the zero-bounded interest rates. Once we get to that point, and I hope we don’t, I hope that our new chairman, Jay Powell, is going to say, “You know what, zero-interest rates didn’t work. We are not going to go back there.” But if we get to the point where we are back to zero-interest rates or worse, negative interest rates, the next logical step for central bankers is the eradication of cash and controlling our buying which can only really be done electronically with this emerging cryptocurrency technology.