A senior official for the central bank of The Netherlands has presented the results of two cryptocurrency tests designed to explore how bitcoin’s blockchain might be adopted by national banking institutions.
The experiments by De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) sought to simulate bitcoin both in its early days and in the year 2140, when the final bitcoins are expected to be mined. The bank presented the results at the third-annual Dutch Blockchain Conference, held just outside Amsterdam earlier this month.
The tests, conducted in 2015 but not reported until earlier this year, utilized an experimental digital currency called DNBcoin.
In a speech given at the event on 20th June, the head of the central bank’s market infrastructures policy department, Ron Berndsen, explained that researchers within the institution wanted to get a hands-on experience working with the technology.
Berndsen told attendees: "The general idea was that by adapting the Bitcoin software ourselves we could learn deeper how an actual implementation of the blockchain really works than if we would only perform desk research and go to conferences such as these, no matter how interesting." Bitcoin in the beginning
To create the simulation environment, the DNB put together a working group of in-house experts who would act as fictional participants in a digital currency system.
To do so, the bank "bootstrapped" a team of “intrinsically motivated” members of the bank, said Berndsen. The group then adapted the open-source bitcoin software to replicate what its members believed the bitcoin ecosystem might have looked like in the first two months of the digital currency’s existence.
Using five networked laptops, the DNB team mined their first DNBcoin block – known as the genesis block – and quickly generated “thousands” of more blocks. Along they way, they sent coins to one another, testing the ins and outs of the process like setting […]
