Towards a post-cash society: An application to convert fiat money into a cryptocurrency

(2017) Towards a post-cash society: an application to convert fiat money into a cryptocurrency. This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available. Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. In this paper, we discuss an application that uses blockchain technology to transfer fiat money into a cryptocurrency — Ether. A typical use of this technology could be to become a component of a larger system, whereby, after traveling, a customer can exchange leftover foreign currency for their local denomination. However, a more interesting application could be to convert fiat money into a cryptocurrency to facilitate a demonetisation scheme, such as that implemented recently in India. In the latter context, we describe the development of our blockchain application against the ramifications of demonetisation and whether the Indian government could have augmented that scheme through technology such as ours. We discuss why the Indian government has not contemplated such a measure, which also leads to a discussion of whether they might have considered adopting their own cryptocurrency. However, even though the Indian public seems willing to adopt the technology, we find that unlikely. Finally, we show that our application demonstrates that fiat money to cryptocurrency conversion is technically feasible, but the Indian government is unlikely to consider such technology due to issues surrounding monetary sovereignty.