In brief
- Nearly 25% of surveyed Americans want a digital dollar in place of the US dollar.
- While still a minority, the mark is double than seen in a 2019 survey.
- The Genesis Mining survey also sampled financial knowledge and bank perceptions.
An official, government-backed United States digital dollar might still seem like a far-off possibility, despite some chatter in Congress earlier this year and over the summer, but a new survey suggests that Americans are at least coming around to the idea.
Genesis Mining, a large-scale BitcoinBitcoin mining operation with facilities in Iceland and Sweden, recently released the results of a survey conducted in July with 400 Americans, each of which was asked questions about the US Federal Reserve, banking, and other related topics.
According to the survey, nearly 25% of respondents believe that the United States should replace the dollar with a digital dollar, while about 15% said they didn’t know and 60% said no. While still a minority of people with that belief, it’s nearly double the 13.3% who responded yes to the same question in Genesis Mining’s 2019 survey.
Furthermore, 48.3% of respondents said that they do not believe that the United States will still use physical money in 100 years, while only 26.8% replied yes. Additionally, 87.3% of those surveyed said that they have heard of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, and in a separate question, some 35% said that crypto is an “interesting idea that may have potential, but too early to tell.”
Elsewhere, the survey suggests a gulf in understanding how the US dollar and Federal Reserve actually work today. For example, when asked what the US dollar is backed by, 28.5% of those surveyed replied gold—but the dollar hasn’t been tied to gold since 1971. And asked who is responsible for creating more US dollars, just 58.8% of respondents correctly said that it was the Federal Reserve.
Digital dollar would give Fed too much power, says bankers association
The American Bankers Association, a private consortium of American banks, said in a testimony at a US FinTech task force hearing earlier this month that a central bank digital currency (CBDC) puts an uncomfortable amount of power in the hands of the Federal Reserve. A Fed-run digital currency would be one that “implicates societal values and privacy,” it wrote in a June 11 statement. But other testimonies provided to a Senate Committee hearing today disagreed. A central bank digital currency is...
Genesis Mining also surveyed perceptions about banks—and found that banks compared favorably to every other noted cultural institution, whether it’s the police (71% to 29%), Congress (89% to 11%), the media (87.5% to 12.5%), or lawyers (76.5% to 23.5%).
In short, based on the results of the survey, Americans apparently love banks, hate Congress and the media above all, and are gradually warming up to the idea of a centralized digital dollar and the end of cash.
