the basis of the principle that the ecb will do this, if you do that, we would lose our independence through such political give - and - take. and we would lose our credibility. couldn ’ t you have put off the purchases of government bonds a little longer? some members of the governing council are of the opinion that such a measure should only be taken when deflation is a given. nonetheless, almost all experts believe that it is far more difficult to combat deflation when in the midst of such developments. in that case, the central bank would have to spend many times as much and would still not be sure that deflation will be overcome successfully. that is the risk we wanted to rule out. the idea of helicopter money has also been discussed in academic circles : the ecb could give euro area citizens a one - off gift of €1, 000 in order to boost the economy. you rightly say in academic circles … but how is this money then distributed. should everybody get the same amount of money, rich and poor? it would be for parliaments to decide how to distribute it. but the ecb would then be directly involved in the monetary financing of governments, which it is not allowed to do. bis central bankers ’ speeches

the selling price in cash on the other hand. settlement in seconds, without the risk of the other party not delivering in time, could be a promising future. an often mentioned downside of using dlt in this context is settlement finality, which depending on how the blockchain is configured, cannot always be fully guaranteed. a third potential benefit is that blockchains can be designed so that the central bank or supervisor can see details of all transactions. this allows for regulatory supervision and oversight, which is needed for maintaining the high standards of integrity in the financial system. finally, one of the greatest obstacles to using blockchain in the financial system is its efficiency. banks and other firms process millions of transactions daily. but this is a major challenge for decentralized systems like dlt. energy efficiency is still a problem too : there are estimates that the bitcoin mining network uses a a similar amount of energy as the whole of ireland. public blockchains that make use of other consensus models could more efficient. also, a privately permissioned system, would greatly diminish energy consumption. but it seems very unlikely that blockchain will be able to process as many transactions as current systems do, at least not any time soon. undoubtedly, some of the benefits of blockchain will only materialize when the technology has been developed further. when the system as a whole is more mature. there should be more real - life examples to test the resilience of blockchain applications. certain financial firms have already taken the first steps. central banks are experimenting with blockchain and are open to further advancements, while keeping a close eye on the possible risks. for the moment however, we can only conclude that blockchain hasn ’ t led to any groundbreaking changes in the payments ecosystem. from a financial system perspective, the ‘ evolution of power ’ has not yet occurred. on cryptos and their risks blockchain ’ s most visible impact on the financial landscape has been the rapid rise of cryptos. this is a topic that deserves more attention. let me first clarify that we, as the central banking community, tend not to use the term ‘ cryptocurrencies ’. the word ‘ currency ’ implies money. our understanding of money is something completely different. it is based on the three functions of money – as a means of payment, store of value, and unit of account. even bitcoin, the most widely - recognised crypto,