I think the m-Pesa is quite like Bitcoin except for the fact that Bitcoin is an economy on it's own.
Bitcoin is not owned by anyone, so a company introducing it is simply not possible. They can only utilize, accept or deny it.
There are many e-money ideas that didn't really make it for example Apple iCash and Google Wallet.

The one point of Bitcoin that is a major advantage and disadvantage is it's lack of control.

On one hand nobody can touch what is yours and you control who gets money and nobody can stop you doing what you want.
On the other hand nobody can help you if you get robbed. Bitcoin is as good as gold and cash. You must protect it at all cost.
Bitcoin is financial anarchy and we're all pirates arrrr....

We do not trust banks yet a lot of our societies are dependant on loans and the security of your money in banks.
Currently banks can use backing of "real" cash to loan out "fake" cash as long as they have liquidity. (All cash is fake but I will stick to the government propaganda for now...).
Problem is that you cannot loan out more bitcoins than you have so you will always need an IOY system and that happens to be fiat.
If you do not have an IOY system there would be no business case for a bank unless they skim a few satoshi.

Then again....
- Like gold, bitcoin can back IOYs and thus back up fiat.
- Like gold, bitcoin can be held in your own posession.

However all govenments have broken the fiat-gold and fiat-silver backing so why in the hell would they consider backing fiat by Bitcoin?


Other points to think about are governments, how are they expected to function if they have no control?!? Anarchy is not the solution, neither is a dicatorship.

So my conclusion is that there is no optimal situation and we will always get screwed or screw other people....

Before we go into whether there *should* be a Bitcoin central bank, we should ask if there *could* be one. What should such a central bank do, exactly? How would they enforce their decisions?

i think that the central bank would ensure that the bitcoin is at a stable price using monetary policies, like am thinking of bitcoin banks(banks holding deposits in bitcoins), so the bitcoin banks would have a certain interest thy pay on deposits and interest thy charge on loans. then there is controlling the liquidity.

"monetary policies" such as? Are you proposing we lift the 21M BTC issuance cap and allow a trusted party to issue new BTC at will? If not, how would the central bank gain the leverage to enforce any policies? Trying to dampen volatility by selling and buying large amounts of coins seems like a great way to go bankrupt.

So basically we're talking about off-chain transactions, essentially creating a centrally issued currency backed by BTC? That's what I get from the idea of controlling velocity by charging fees. The incentive for large holders to deposit BTC would be interest paid on deposits. Where would the money come from to pay this interest? If it's transaction fees, then essentially it's a zero-sum game - fees must equal interest payments, but then there's overhead to account for as well, meaning you either need an additional source of income or depositors will end up with a negative return overall.

 don't see the attraction.

The concept of a p2p central bank is vague to me. Maybe if the OP would lay out more specific details on how all this would work people could give better comments.

For example, how do I become part of the central bank and how can I effect its decisions?

No we don't need a central bank in Bitcoin, ever! Even though some kind of central authority like this would speed up decision making processes and even make us adopted faster with some big company maybe, in the end it would make us much more weaker as an ecosystem.

The decentralized path that we have taken is a way to go. Even though it's much slower way to go, once we gain a momentum, we will be unstoppable!