If you are a miner and you get a block reward for mining a block in Ethereum, you are not forging currency; this is the structurally correct way for Ethereum to be created.
Similarly only the Fed has the ability to make new dollars; although technically the US Treasury has this ability in a narrow sense. There's a lot of mummery around how the Fed goes about doing it, but that is the structurally correct way for dollars to be created. Calling it forgery or "theft by inflation" or whatever are political talking points.
Forgery is specifically when any other party in the world decides that they can mint coins or print bills.
Other parties can create dollars in other ways, like by committing fraud or by taking advantage of the fact that certain forms of IOUs are so liquid that they are considered cash equivalents. In the US this is a little locked down (although the overnight lending market is a particularly insidious form of shadow banking) but internationally the Eurodollar market is the wild west where anything goes. Anything, that is, except actually forging coins or bills.
No, banks make new dollars, every time they make a loan. The amount of dollars on the books vastly exceeds the amount of currency printed, and is dominated by bank deposits. The Fed controls the money supply by regulating banks.
"Certain forms of IOUs" would include money in checking accounts, which is much more money than the total of all bills in circulation, and this is part of M1.
Banks can create dollars in the sense that they can synthesize contracts to deliver dollars. These contracts are liquid enough that they are considered equivalent to cash, and in many cases superior (as I describe above).
There is absolutely nothing stopping an institution from accepting deposits of ETH, and then lending those ETH out by crediting other account holders with more ETH in their account. And it is equally possible to imagine that some vendors might prefer to receive their ETH payments as credits to their bank accounts, and thus the IOUs represented by these deposits become "ETH" in the same sense that bank deposits become "dollars".
But here we are strictly discussing the underlying specie. If account holders in a dollar bank demand their payment in specie, the bank is exposed to that risk. This risk is small but significant for modern banks because the credit market for dollars is very liquid, so they can easily sell loans for their present value to increase their cash exposure, and thus make good on the demands for specie.
The credit market for ETH is all but nonexistent except in very specific cases (basically just margin for exchanges) so an ETH bank would be extremely exposed to the risk of a run, and given the level of volatility and general deflationary trend in ETH it would be almost impossible to set a value on future ETH.
> Anything, that is, except actually forging coins or bills.
Of course none of it is forgery, but the net impact is no different. As soon as the USD loses its reserve status, the US won't be able to maintain its hegemony that is funded largely via
> Fed has the ability to make new dollars; although technically the US Treasury has this ability in a narrow sense
Similarly only the Fed has the ability to make new dollars; although technically the US Treasury has this ability in a narrow sense. There's a lot of mummery around how the Fed goes about doing it, but that is the structurally correct way for dollars to be created. Calling it forgery or "theft by inflation" or whatever are political talking points.
Forgery is specifically when any other party in the world decides that they can mint coins or print bills.
Other parties can create dollars in other ways, like by committing fraud or by taking advantage of the fact that certain forms of IOUs are so liquid that they are considered cash equivalents. In the US this is a little locked down (although the overnight lending market is a particularly insidious form of shadow banking) but internationally the Eurodollar market is the wild west where anything goes. Anything, that is, except actually forging coins or bills.