CBDC - the DCEP Digital Yuan
Not so long time ago, we crypto people were insulted, called thieves, evaders and money launderers. And then, some time passes by our government start talking about Central Banks Digital Currency and all the banks start to sell bitcoin.
Oh well it's always like this. But let's talk about the first authorized state cryptocurrency, namely the Digital Yuan or DCEP, which will surely be a nice tool in the hands of Chinese economic policy.
Dcep is the acronym for Digital currency electronic payment and will be a national digital currency, or a digital national currency, or a digital form of FIAT currency.
Precisely in its digital form, one of the DCEP missions is the replacement of paper fiat money, practically what we hear about the abolition of cash to bring you to a society that can be defined as cashless. It should be noted that digital payments with apps such as WeChat are currently the norm in China and the change would not be as drastic as in European societies.
Let's go into the details of the Digital Yuan. This will be created by the PBoC People bank of China, it will be a centralized currency and will not be minable or stake. At the time of the creation of this video, the system is in the testing phase but in the Chinese government's plans there is the will to reach full operation and replace paper money by 2022. And I'm sure they will succeed.
The blockchain system on which the coin will run is called Chinas Blockchain Service Network BSN and is managed by a Chinese government agency that also manages some of the major state telecommunications companies such as China Telecom and China unicom. The BSN is designed to be easy to use and to be able to develop and operate nodes and applications on the blockchain.
At the time of writing, the digital yuan is only accepted in some chains in China, but the government has issued a decree requiring all merchants that accept digital payments such as AliPay and WeChat to also accept Dcep. These tech giants are also rocketing to make the currency compatible with their payment systems. In a short time, the DCEP will become the most used digital currency in the world.
In fact, even its practical use is oriented towards its diffusion. In fact, it uses the NFC system, which does not require your mobile phone to be connected to the internet during the transfer, which means that it can also be used in areas without a connection. It doesn't even require your wallet to be linked to a bank account. Think of all those people in the world who do not have access to banks, not only in China but also in all African countries. These people will be able to use the digital yuan without any problems.
The Dcep built on the blockchain and with cryptographic technology is designed to spread as a payment method in the world, dramatically increasing the circulation of the Yuan and competing with the US dollar as a world currency.
China wants to become independent from the dollar, protecting itself from possible sanctions and trade wars. With the digital Yuan we not only have a payment system but a system of geopolitical influence, which will transform the world as we know it.
I am sure that in a short time we will see similar currencies developed by the United States and the European Union as well.
It should be specified that the DCEP is very different from Bitcoin, since it is totally centralized and in the hands of a government. This will give full traceability of payments, preventing money laundering and illegal payments if possible. It will be the umpteenth instrument of citizen control in the hands of the state.
Atomic Swap
The Atomic Swap is a method for exchanging or trading your cryptocurrencies very quickly with another person, without an intermediary and trustless directly from your wallet and not from any exchange.
In fact, changing two cryptocurrencies implies that there are costs for using an exchange, plus the costs of handling the coins to which the wasted time such as registering for the exchange and completing all the paperwork. This obviously does not allow us to operate within a few minutes, perhaps making us miss out on interesting opportunities on the market.
With the atomic swap we skip all these problems. Swap means exchange while the term atomic comes from the computer world and implies that an operation is conducted as planned or not conducted at all.
So looking into the details of the exchange, this must happen exactly as we have organized or it will absolutely not happen.
To give you an example of a non-atomic swap, it would be like sending the coins to a stranger hoping that he doesn't run away or that he sends me the correct coin number we agreed on.
In the atomic swap there is no human error, manipulation or fraud and it only works with crypto and not with fiat currency.
The atomic swap works through the use of smart contracts, since these allow users to avoid fraud by checking that the funds involved in the exchange are really present in the wallets of the two protagonists. These smart contracts are called Hashed Time Lock contracts.
Funds are blocked within smart contracts and can be publicly controlled on the blockchain. These funds can only be unlocked with a key called preimage that matches the hash of this contract.
At any time before the exchange, one of the parties can withdraw and the funds will return free in the wallet of the previous owner.
Atomic swaps aren't perfect as they have limitations. In fact, exchanges must only be made with coins that support specific types of smart contracts and that have the same algorithm
Some wallets already include this exchange option within them. Learn more about wallet here.
As you can see, atomic swaps can be a useful solution to bypass exchanges when we want to trade particular coins. At the moment it is not possible with all of them and therefore we will still have to go through an exchange.