If we had a constitutional money system, the US Treasury would create all money, physical and digital. Since most money is created upon loan origination, in a fractional reserve system, the US government would have a federal system that provided loans directly to individuals, corporations, cities and states through locally administered non-profit Safety Societies. The US governemt would collect prime interest on all money creation in a “just-in-time” economic syatem (voluntary tax). Local Safety Societies would collect loan origination fees to cover overhead only.
Safety Societies wouldn't need to amass profits to make more loans as megabanks do today. Safety Societies can create money on-demand and approve a loan based on the the projected value of a real asset (house or building or community aquatic center) that is desired to be built. Safety Societies would never lend for things of speculative value. This is what makes them safe.
Bitcoin was supposed to be a distributed, decentralized virtual currency. Its main value is for laundering large amounts of illicit money and sending money overseas. However, for day-to-day usage, bitcoin is too slow and limited with huge fees a small block size of 2 mb per block. Each block is mined every 10 minutes, and those transactions that pay the largest fees go first. Bitcoin cannot handle generalized adoption. Despite all its crazy processing power on its network (exa-hashes), it cannot possibly process all the needed transactions fast enough.
A company called Bitstream is fighting to prevent Bitcoin from increasing its blockchain size and keeping high fees in favor of their “lightning network” which would allow side transactions to occur through nodes with established side- channels. If you establish trading channel with another entity, the channel stays open allowing others to transfer bitcoin through that established channel called nodes. The consequence of thus idea is that the lightning network will centralize a system that was meant to be decentralized.