Is the world ready for real time digital money?

Was wondering if our world can handle real time digital money. People would be able to perform all financial transactions in real time. This has significant social implications that I’m not sure our world can handle.

There are the obvious concerns of fraud and crime. Real time would allow criminals to cash out on their loot right away with no ability to track them.

The closer to real time money mechanisms are the harder it is to fight crime and cyber crime. It’ll take a hacker fractions of a second to steal ludicrous amounts of money in a world of real time digital money. The system must be 100% air tight.

Our mechanisms to stop crime are so poor right now that they’re regulations to slow down the entire process, I mean it can take a number of days to transfer large amounts of money (by the way where is the money during this time? Who earns interest on it? If you know the answer please comment). We’re slowing down transactions to take the time to vet them and make sure they are “kosher”, but in a real time world either we’re giving up this right or we have amazing capabilities to police this in real time.

I don’t have an answer if we as a society can handle this. These are just some thoughts I had on the subject, would be happy to hear other thoughts and learn more about this.

To me this is the real question about Bitcoin, we don’t have an idea how a world in which Bitcoin in the primary currency would look like. Do we have the social tools to handle this world? Not saying I’m against Bitcoin, on the contrary, quite interested to see how Bitcoin will disrupt the financial system (and almost every other system in our world), just think we should consider this aspect of the issue as well.