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Imagine being able to audit the total supply of money printed by your central bank. Or to audit that your retail bank indeed has the reserves it claims. And "a

Imagine being able to audit the total supply of money printed by your central bank. Or to audit that your retail bank indeed has the reserves it claims. And "audit" not as in "spend millions on an auditing firm to do it for you", but audit as in "independently verify it yourself on your own computer".

rlpb 6y ago
That would just require the ledger to be published; no need for it to be a "distributed ledger".
_peeley 6y ago
One problem with this (and a common misunderstanding of crypto as an "anonymous currency" by the general public) is that it would allow everyone to see exactly how much money everyone else has in their accounts, what they're spending their money on, etc. With Bitcoin there's at least a degree of pseudonymity if you're careful about publicly linking your wallet to your identity, but I could imagine that's not really possible for state-sponsored currencies. Having a cryptographically verified history of everything my government is spending on would be cool, but due to the nature of the distributed ledger it would require private citizens be put under the same microscope. At least with the alternative of one central bank controlling one central database, there's some degree of restriction to personal information (I'd imagine the bank wouldn't let any average Joe request ledger data on their neighbor just for fun, but public interests would be fair game).
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notahacker 6y ago
But you wouldn't be able to meaningfully audit a retail bank at all by looking at the ledger, because meaningfully auditing a retail bank involves understanding their loan portfolio (in particular whether the entities loaned to are likely to default more than predicted in future and whether assets loans are secured against retain their value). You're not going to get all that from a transaction ledger, and particularly not one designed with privacy in mind Simply knowing how many reserves the bank holds gives you no indication whatsoever of its solvency.
WJW 6y ago
Is that what bitcoin enthusiasts do? I did not expect that, given the state of Tether and the general sketchiness of the ecosystem.
- mtrycz2 6y ago
  The Tether scam needs to end asap. People are silent about it because Tether pumps their bags, sadly.

rlpb 6y ago

That would just require the ledger to be published; no need for it to be a "distributed ledger".

_peeley 6y ago

One problem with this (and a common misunderstanding of crypto as an "anonymous currency" by the general public) is that it would allow everyone to see exactly how much money everyone else has in their accounts, what they're spending their money on, etc. With Bitcoin there's at least a degree of pseudonymity if you're careful about publicly linking your wallet to your identity, but I could imagine that's not really possible for state-sponsored currencies. Having a cryptographically verified history of everything my government is spending on would be cool, but due to the nature of the distributed ledger it would require private citizens be put under the same microscope. At least with the alternative of one central bank controlling one central database, there's some degree of restriction to personal information (I'd imagine the bank wouldn't let any average Joe request ledger data on their neighbor just for fun, but public interests would be fair game).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

notahacker 6y ago

But you wouldn't be able to meaningfully audit a retail bank at all by looking at the ledger, because meaningfully auditing a retail bank involves understanding their loan portfolio (in particular whether the entities loaned to are likely to default more than predicted in future and whether assets loans are secured against retain their value). You're not going to get all that from a transaction ledger, and particularly not one designed with privacy in mind Simply knowing how many reserves the bank holds gives you no indication whatsoever of its solvency.

WJW 6y ago

Is that what bitcoin enthusiasts do? I did not expect that, given the state of Tether and the general sketchiness of the ecosystem.

mtrycz2 6y ago
The Tether scam needs to end asap. People are silent about it because Tether pumps their bags, sadly.