A Catholic Bitcoin? Vatican may launch a “blessed” cryptocurrency, taxed in favor of world poor
A proposal was made for the Holy See to use its “blessing power” over a bitcoin-like currency with a built in cut taken from the recipient of the currency in any transaction. The cut will be marked as Vatican Owned, and convertible per its current rate to any fiat currency which will be managed by the Pope apparatus towards help and support for the poorest people on earth.
The idea is to promote the “Catholic Bitcoin” in churches world wide, white-wash it from the shady reputation that stains bitcoin and attract hundreds of millions of worshippers that would never touch bitcoin, but rush to trade with the Pope’s money. Being super-national, the Pope is a fitting “mint” of a cross-border currency.
The fear is that nefarious traders will continue their schemes, now under the blessing palms of the Pope.
A world-wide call from Holy Sea, echoed by hundreds of thousands of clergy around the world might create a flood of traders, a fast rising coin value, and a corresponding tangible support to the most needy. Also, a Vatican blessed currency will not be easily dismissed, nor vilified by central banks managing and manipulating legacy currencies and fiat currencies.
It is the “taxation void” of crypto currencies that attracts this initiative. This void is especially attractive given the fact that all crypto transactions are exposed on a general ledger, making transaction taxes so readily enforceable. And what’s more: traders can be taxed without having their identities exposed. The Vatican angle will replace the ugly word of taxation with the uplifting word of charitable contribution.
Some analysts expressed concern that this idea might be preemptively taken up by nimble Muslim clerics, cajoling more than a billion muslims to trade with a “caliphate cryptocurrency” and pour money to terrorists.
It is the very fact that Bitcoin ‘backed-by-nothing’ currency is steadily gaining in value that sends more and more people towards creative imitations, with some hard to foresee consequences.
Gideon Samid (BitMint CTO) warns that well motivated as this initiative may be, it stands the risk shared by its peer currencies — sudden collapse of value. Such a collapse will rob millions of Catholic worshippers of their hard earned assets. Prof. Samid proposes to implement this idea using the BitMint centralized mint currency where there is zero risk of a crypto-value collapse, while keeping the basic idea in force, as described in “Tethered Money” Elsevier.
