Wednesday was interesting to say the least, with a technical glitch halting trading on the New York Stock Exchange not long after United Airlines was forced to ground its entire air fleet because of an “automation error.” On top of that, the Wall Street Journal’s website went dark for a time, along with a decent portion of Washington, D.C.’s Adams Morgan neighborhood.

While the only common factor tying all of these mysterious events together is timing, that’s enough for a lot of folks to wonder if America wasn’t the victim of a cyberattack yesterday. And according to cyber security firm Norsecorp, which provides real-time data on hacking attacks, there was a suspicious amount of traffic coming out of China yesterday.

China’s developed a reputation for these attacks, with most people blaming Chinese hackers for the massive breach of government computers back in June that captured sensitive information on millions of government employees. While our government isn’t exactly blaming the Chinese for all this, and the Chinese understandably aren’t taking it, the growing consensus is that China has developed a lot of technological firepower.

A lot of folks are worried that the Chinese are gunning for the dollar, too.

Already the second-largest economy in the world, the Chinese yuan, otherwise known as renminbi (RMB), is the world’s fifth most-used trade currency globally. That brought the RMB to the attention of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) earlier this year.

The IMF maintains a special currency reserve mechanism known as Special Drawing Rights (SDR), which is basically a basket of key international currencies, which can be exchanged for any freely usable currency. When we call a country’s money a “reserve currency,” it’s because it is included in that basket, which right now is made up of U.S. dollars, Japanese yen, British pounds and euros.

That basket isn’t set in stone and the IMF reexamines it every five years to make sure it is an accurate representation of the world’s most used currencies. We are at the beginning of one of those cycles and the IMF is sending strong signals that might be ready to add the RMB.

That’s raised the hackles of our own U.S. congress and the Japanese, and left many Americans wondering what impact the move would have on the U.S. dollar. The short answer is not much, at least at first.

The IMF assesses a number of key criteria before adding a currency to the SDR basket and one of the most important is if the currency is freely usable, i.e., can it be easily exchanged for other currencies. Given that the Chinese are known for their fairly tight currency controls, the RMB doesn’t quite hit the mark there. But then, the Japanese yen wasn’t generally recognized as fully convertible until two years after it was added to the SDR basket.

The Chinese have been making progress on that score, opening up their stock and bond markets to more foreign investors and developing a deeper and more liquid foreign exchange market for the RMB. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) will also allow entities more freedom to sell RMB-denominated debt in China, while easing limits on Chinese investment in foreign assets.

On top of all of that, more than 60 global central banks are already invested in RMB-denominated assets, to the tune of more than $100 billion according to the PBOC. According to the IMF’s own data show that the RMB is weighted just behind the Canadian and Australian dollars in terms of global currency reserves. That’s up from essentially nil just a decade ago.

Despite the RMBs gains, the U.S. dollar is still the most held currency in the world at 62.9% of global foreign exchange reserves. U.S. dollar allocations hit their highest level in six years in the final quarter of 2014. The allocation to RMB is still just in the low single digits, while the euro gets 23%, the yen 4% and the British pound comes in at 3.9%.

The simple fact is that adding a currency to the SDR basket is just a reflection of the existing economic reality. True, it is a tacit recognition of that reality, which will give China more clout with the IMF, but China is already involved in most of the world’s major monetary decisions.

So while China will gain some more economic firepower out of the deal, it won’t necessarily speed the decline of the U.S. dollar since the RMB has been gaining acceptance regardless. And at any rate, the RMB still has a lot of catching up to do, even as the Chinese government must make its financial system more open and competitive by virtue of inclusion in the SDR.