MARK OF THE BEAST WATCH: Israel Considers a Digital Currency

MARK OF THE BEAST WATCH: Israel Considers a Digital Currency

Israel’s central bank is considering a digital currency hoping to limit the amount of cash in the economy in an effort to curb tax evasion and money laundering.
The emergence of bitcoin and other so-called cryptocurrencies has led some economists to predict the technology could be used one day across entire economies, with digital currencies created by central banks.



According to Reuters, a Bank of Israel source said any digital currency introduced by the country’s central bank would be centralized, safe and abide by money laundering rules - in contrast to bitcoin and its peers, which are decentralized and whose value has often oscillated wildly. It’s being reported that if Israel goes ahead with the plan, the digital currency would not be Bitcoin but a digital shekel supervised by the Bank of Israel.
Cryptocurrencies allow parties to transact payments directly without a central intermediary, by means of blockchain technology that uses a shared ledger that verifies, records and settles transactions in a matter of minutes.
The Israeli government has been seeking to limit the amount of cash in the economy for a few years since the black economy is estimated at some 22 percent of national output.
Last month, the Bank of Israel published a public consultation asking for proposals for the creation of at least one infrastructure that would support immediate payments in Israel, similar to that used in Britain and Sweden.
In such a system, the initiator of the payment is debited immediately and the beneficiary is credited within a very short period of time, the central bank said, adding payments can be made 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
A fast payments system is one option, while “a central bank- issued digital currency is another form of an advanced payments system which currently does not exist,” the source said.

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