I would agree with that, even though bitcoin seems extremely volatile, and it is volatile. It has been since its inception.
The question is this: Do people have a fundamental right to opt out of a monetary policy in their local jurisdiction? It's not something on which I can say “One hundred per cent, everyone should agree, yes,” or “One hundred per cent, everyone should agree, no.”
The fact is that it's is what these technologies enable. If someone was living in Argentina and holding the Argentinian peso when it was one to one to the U.S. dollar, and the government then converted their U.S. dollars into pesos and they had a worse rate than the bank a number of years later, and now.... I haven't looked at the rate recently, but it was something like 90 pesos to one U.S. dollar. Citizens in that jurisdiction would 100% benefit from being able to hold bitcoin or a tokenized version of a U.S. dollar or a Canadian dollar. That's where I see the opportunity.
As I mentioned earlier, when we're thinking about CBDCs or the digitization of the Canadian dollar, is there an opportunity to leverage into this technology and to lean into it in a compliant way that is very collaborative with industry, and recognize that people are going to want to hold other national currencies in a way that they maybe haven't had access to before?
As much as the U.S. may complain that the tokenized U.S. dollar and the stablecoins have been issued without oversight or in a compliant way, the reality is that U.S. dollars have become the default “quote currency” in many of these decentralized finance applications. Hundreds of billions of dollars are now sitting in tokenized U.S. dollars. I think the U.S. can lean into that and try to encourage more countries to want to adopt their currency.
There's also an opportunity for Canada to figure out how we push our currency into this technology, help other countries and strengthen the long-term ability of the Canadian dollar to remain relevant.
