The Bank of England is working with researchers to design a Bitcoin clone of its own in the hopes of making retail payments more efficient and the financial system as a whole more resilient . In a paper titled Centrally Banked Cryptocurrencies [PDF], the researchers state: ‘ RScoin utilises the Internet to handle transactions , much like Visa , however unlike Bitcoin it would be centrally controlled by the bank itself , which would retain an encryption key that could be used to control the supply of the digital currency available . The processing of all the transactions would be done by " select third parties " , presumably large commercial banks , and would allow the new system to handle a high amount of transactions per second . The Bank of England is also interested in how the system could help banks and other financial institutions move conventional assets around and how it might automate certain transactions such as futures contracts .
The Bank of England is working with researchers to design a Bitcoin clone of its own in the hopes of making retail payments more efficient and the financial system as a whole more resilient . RScoin utilises the Internet to handle transactions , much like Visa , however unlike Bitcoin it would be centrally controlled by the bank itself , which would retain an encryption key that could be used to control the supply of the digital currency available . The processing of all the transactions would be done by " select third parties " , presumably large commercial banks , and would allow the new system to handle a high amount of transactions per second . The Bank of England is also interested in how the system could help banks and other financial institutions move conventional assets around and how it might automate certain transactions such as futures contracts .