Dr. Eswar Prasad

Yet again, the United States continues to post pretty robust growth amid all the global turbulence and uncertainty.

For the rest of the world, it's not this pretty a picture.

This has put a damper on what was already a pretty soggy set of economic prospects.

Thank you so much for having me on, Dan.

So it's worth thinking about where we are in the evolution of money, Dan.

So for a long time now, since the establishment of central banks in most countries, most money that is used for transactions and as a store of value has been issued by national central banks that are backed up by governments.

now when bitcoin emerged on the stage it was attempting to do something completely revolutionary which was to enable payments between people between businesses between businesses and people without relying on a trusted intermediary like a credit card company or a commercial bank or using central bank money

So Bitcoin was the original cryptocurrency and it aimed to basically set up this sort of payment system that would be decentralized, that is, it would not go through any centralized institution or trusted third party.

And the technology underlying Bitcoin is really quite remarkable.

Essentially, if you think about what Bitcoin was trying to do, it sounds mind-boggling.

You know, if I was trying to buy you a cup of coffee, Dan, and use a payment medium where, you know, there is no regular payment provider involved, and in fact, where if it was not a cup of coffee, but we were undertaking a digital transaction, where we could do it with a

digital identities rather than real identities, it sounds basically impossible.

And what Bitcoin did was take a lot of cryptographic and computer science related tools and created technology for doing this.

Now, when you hear about a cryptocurrency, it sounds like everything is obscure and obfuscated.

But the remarkable thing about Bitcoin is that, in fact,

All of the transactions using that cryptocurrency are actually available on a public ledger that is maintained on multiple computers around the world so everybody can see every transaction.

And that transparency, which I think of as a radical transparency, is actually what ends up making Bitcoin very secure in transactions.

Now, along the way, unfortunately, the revolution got subverted because it turns out that while the Bitcoin technology is remarkable, the ability to use Bitcoin to make payment transactions is actually not great.

It turns out that the Bitcoin network can handle only a limited amount of transactions per second.

It has very slow processing times and so on.