Huckle, Steve, White, Martin and Bhattacharya, Rituparna (2017) Towards a post-cash society: an application to convert fiat money into a cryptocurrency. First Monday, 22 (3). ISSN 1396-0466

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Abstract

In this paper, we discuss an application that uses blockchain technology to transfer fiat money into a cryptocurrency — Ether. A typical use of this technology could be to become a component of a larger system, whereby, after traveling, a customer can exchange leftover foreign currency for their local denomination. However, a more interesting application could be to convert fiat money into a cryptocurrency to facilitate a demonetisation scheme, such as that implemented recently in India. In the latter context, we describe the development of our blockchain application against the ramifications of demonetisation and whether the Indian government could have augmented that scheme through technology such as ours. We discuss why the Indian government has not contemplated such a measure, which also leads to a discussion of whether they might have considered adopting their own cryptocurrency. However, even though the Indian public seems willing to adopt the technology, we find that unlikely. Finally, we show that our application demonstrates that fiat money to cryptocurrency conversion is technically feasible, but the Indian government is unlikely to consider such technology due to issues surrounding monetary sovereignty.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Bitcoin; Ether; Ethereum; Blockchain; Cryptocurrency; Demonetisation; Fiat Money; Banknotes; Currency; Sovereignty; Monetary Sovereignty
Schools and Departments:	School of Engineering and Informatics > Informatics
Research Centres and Groups:	Creative Technology
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA0075 Electronic computers. Computer science
Depositing User:	Martin White
Date Deposited:	07 Mar 2017 11:08
Last Modified:	02 Jul 2019 19:06
URI:	http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/67013

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