Yeah, the world is not going backwards. That's for sure!
Your point about monetary systems is what always strikes me as odd about the Fed's stance. I mean, why not explore programmable currency and go out and make a USD version of it? What's the harm? The only downside is that it would cost some money to fund the research (which they could just print anyway). But I guess it has to do with the fact that the Fed is a very narrowly defined institution. It only can pull a few monetary levers (interest rate, money supply, discount window, reserve requirements, and now QE stuff) in reaction to a couple different statistics (unemployment rate, GDP growth rate). That's it. The Fed actually writes tons of good papers. But I guess somehow this kind of forward-thinking tech-y stuff is outside their scope.