Curiously similar to "Pix" launched by brazilian central bank about a year ago. A quick Google search will show you dozens and dozens of countries getting instant payment systems promoted by their own central banks during the last years. Really makes you wonder who could be behind such a "coincidence".

One of the big issues in 2008 was that payments took multiple days to clear. That meant all the banks owed each other big chunks of money. That's not really a problem: if Bank A owes Bank B 1Bn and Bank B owes bank A 1.01 Bn, they're both solvent and you can just net them off to tell what your profit is.

But if Bank A suddenly goes Bankrupt, Bank B might still owe Banks A's creditors but won't get paid. So Bank B is fucked now too, even though they weren't doing anything dumb. In turn other banks will be pulled down when Bank B fails. This is why Lehmans was bailed out (in theory, conspiracies aside)

This is called Contagion, it's a type of counterparty risk: the risk that you make good deals and everything works out in your favour but the people who are meant to pay you welch.

To reduce this, there has been a big push to cut the time between trades\deals and settlement of payments. Ideally we want it to be immediate.

This is one reason central banks might be pushing this.

If there is any conspiracy, it would have to be how the hell did it take so long for all these societies to come up with an electronic payment utility.

Well, it's pretty simple, actually. Central banking is a monopoly, you don't need to be the best option if you're the only one. Curiously, all central banks start launching efficient payment systems as soon as crypto shows up.

Not really affirming any conspiracy here since I'm very uneducated at the subject, I just thinks it's suspiciously interesting to a point I can't ignore, almost as if all those central banks were coordinating as part of a larger goal.

One of my personal conspiracy theories is that bitcoin (and Tor) are the reason so many states have legalised weed: you have to permit what you cannot actually police.

Hopefully we'll see the same effect here with bitcoin or a single processor making a killing in the market for "sins"...