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G7 finance officials endorse principles for central bank digital currencies
- micropresident 5y agoCBDCs will be an absolute disaster for personal privacy, and personal liberty. Piss off the wrong person in the right position and suddenly there's a "mistake" where you can't function at all in society. I highly recommend Brett Scott's writing on this subject: https://twitter.com/suitpossum?lang=en https://twitter.com/suitpossum?lang=en
- kwere 5y agoyou could design them from the ground up with human rights in mind and limit the control from centralized authorities
- lettergram 5y agoNot really looking forward to a global currency, with a government that can monitor the entire chain, tied to a vaccine passport...
- inter_netuser 5y agoIt's gonna happen. The same vendors developing vaccine passports have been bidding on CBDC contracts.
- bpodgursky 5y agoI can't wait for Visa to reject my burrito order because my tweets are marked as hate speech in Pakistan.
- legulere 5y agoHow is that connected in any way to a vaccine passport?
- inter_netuser 5y agoBecause quite literally the same vendors who built vaccine passports are bidding on CBDC contacts?
- bpodgursky 5y agoDo you think it's many steps away? For example: Seattle is about to ban in-person dining w/o a vaccine card. An easy way to enforce that? Have the credit card processors reject payment at a dining establishment from anyone who hasn't proven vaccination status w/ Visa and MasterCard. When there's a central gov agency with control over financial transactions I 100% guarantee every crusade of the moment is going to try to use it as leverage.
- walterbell 5y agoLocal restaurants can reject discriminatory and un-scientific vaxport mandates by closing their in-person dining room and serving takeout only -- to any customer. With a discount for cash purchases. Or get a good lawyer, pool with other restaurants and challenge the fines. Some states have lost in court against challenges to 2020 restrictions, fines were voided and the state had to cover legal costs for the lawsuit which challenged the state.
- te_chris 5y agoThat’s not an easy way to enforce that! An easy way is just to have people check ids, like they’re going to do I assume -same way most of Europe is doing it.
- bpodgursky 5y agoIt's much, much easier for the government to exert control over the financial institutions than to ensure that businesses are checking IDs manually (many businesses will not bother, out of either principled disagreement or apathy).
- rich_sasha 5y agoThis probably wouldn’t even be a blockchain right? Just an emphemeral account balance on a gov server. I’m far from anti-government libertarian but I like nothing about this. It doesn’t solve any user issues over what’s in place now but adds a massive privacy concern.
- Ekaros 5y agoGovernment already can get access to my financial data in many instances... And sadly I trust my government slightly more than I trust VISA/MC. Ofc, also the charges for banking start to feel bit high, so if this was free or fully tax paid I would be up for that reason too.
- lsiq 5y agoThat's funny you say that, because Visa founder Dee Hock is now retired and on twitter and thoughtfully warning about the massive centralization of power that is unfolding behind the scenes.
- jeofken 5y agoDo you have a link to share?
- walterbell 5y agohttps://twitter.com/deewhock https://twitter.com/deewhock
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- inter_netuser 5y agoAll your payments data is aggregated, correlated across different providers, repackaged and resold on such a massive scale that any notion that you have any privacy left is sadly very quaint.
- ur-whale 5y ago> Not really looking forward to a global currency Yeah, this is a fascist's wet dream.
- ChainOfFools 5y agobitcoin maximalists want exactly this to happen
- eliasmacpherson 5y agoI can't envisage a central bank digital currency for which the general public user can retain all the keys to an account, as per bitcoin wallets. Crypto people assure me that old style banks would gladly facilitate handing over complete control of all the keys to users but I'm entirely unconvinced. Due to this lack of control, I believe this is the intended endgame: https://blogs.imf.org/2019/02/05/cashing-in-how-to-make-negative-interest-rates-work/ https://blogs.imf.org/2019/02/05/cashing-in-how-to-make-nega...
- anm89 5y agoYou are fundamentally misunderstanding CBDCs here by conflating CBDCs with cryptocurrencies. The concept of a CBDC is simply a digital currency where normal people hold digital accounts with the central bank instead of using a retail bank. That's it. No prescription for the storage mechanism. It could be a relational database, a block chain or memory on J Powell's old graphing calculator from highschool. A CBDC is digital in the same way that your credit card is digital. It's just that a computer tracks the Fed liability not a little green piece of paper. Here's a piece of legislation proposing a US CBDC . https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/3571/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/357... Go look for the words cryptocurrency or blockchain in it. They aren't there. It's simply a mechanism for retail banks to hold "pass through" accounts for consumer accounts at the fed.
- baby 5y agoGP is talking about retail CBDC, which is user-facing in addition to being bank-facing only like current central banks. Not all CBDCs talk about retail, and it’s not clear if any would actually aim to provide that feature.
- anm89 5y agoA vast majority of discussion about CBDC is about retail CBDC. Interbank and internation transactions are already digital. The Fed already has wholesale digital liabilities
- baby 5y ago> They reiterated that no global stablecoin project should begin operation until it addresses legal, regulatory and oversight requirements, echoing a similar statement made by the larger Group of 20 finance officials earlier Wednesday. We’re in a weird space, where statements from these authorities are only targeting government-based digital ledgers while private companies are already operating these stablecoins (celo, usdc, tether, dai)
- null_object 5y ago> while private companies are already operating these stablecoins (celo, usdc, tether, dai) I think these plans are aimed at projects that are backed by real money instead of fictional money and/or criminal Ponzi schemes.
- baby 5y agousdc is backed by real money
- cinquemb 5y agomakerdao is incorporated in any jurisdiction? 3 of 4 of those are centralized and incorporated (there are also many more non incorperated decentralized ones cropping up, like fei, ohm, etc)
- ilaksh 5y ago> any CBDC should be grounded in our long-standing public commitments to transparency, the rule of law and sound economic governance Only way to do that which I am aware of is a type of cryptocurrency.
- sofixa 5y ago> the rule of law and sound economic governance > Only way to do that which I am aware of is a type of cryptocurrency. Is there a cryptocurrency you associate with rule of law and sound economic governance?
- ilaksh 5y agoIt starts with transparency. The basic requirement is to be able to verify that people aren't cheating. Cryptocurrencies are the best known way to do this.
- walterbell 5y agoCBDCs could upturn existing assumptions about the role of currencies, e.g. from June of this year, https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/bank-of-england-tells-ministers-to-intervene-on-digital-currency-programming/ar-AALhtDP https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/bank-of-england-tells-... > Tom Mutton, a director at the Bank of England, said during a conference on Monday that programming could become a key feature of any future central bank digital currency ... what happens if one of the participants in a transaction puts a restriction on [future use of the money]? ... Sir Jon Cunliffe, a deputy Governor at the Bank, said digital currencies could be programmed for commercial or social purposes ... “You could think of giving your children pocket money, but programming the money so that it couldn’t be used for sweets. There is a whole range of things that money could do, programmable money, which we cannot do with the current technology.” At an IMF meeting in Oct 2020, Swiss BIS director Carstens commented on CBDCs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVmKN4DSu3g&t=1451s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVmKN4DSu3g&t=1451s > With cash, we don't know who is using the 100 dollar bill today ... a key difference with CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that determine the expression of that central bank liability .. also we will have the technology to enforce that ... if an advanced economy issues a CBDC, and someone in a 3rd country wants to use it, it will require the consent of the central bank of the residence of that person, therefore the degree of control will be far bigger. Well-intentioned initiatives like Linux Foundation's global vaccine passport (https://www.goodhealthpass.org/ https://www.goodhealthpass.org/), EU digital health certificate and Apple+Android digital driver's license can all be drafted into the service of CBDC initiatives which require digital identity for digital currency wallets, unifying online and offline policy for programmable "permissions" like carbon/food quotas or other social credits. If western citizens acclimate to "showing papers" for routine daily movement, then real-time currency policy can be applied for admission and activity control. This could replace fungible currency with "colored credits", with policy attached to both the origin of money and a whitelist of possible destinations, goods or services. As a current example, PayPal has amended their ToS to include merchant content regulation as a condition of payment processing. That's just scratching the surface. Some proposals would eliminate the ability of retail banks to issue loans/money, restricting this function to central banks. Retail banks could then be repurposed as fintech data custodians and risk management, similar to Chinese social credit. Some of these ideas are discussed in the "FedAccounts" paper and related testimony to Congress, https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2215&context=faculty-publications https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a.... > Congress should authorize the FederalReserve to give everyone-individuals, businesses, and institutions-the option to maintain accounts at the central bank. We call these accounts FedAccounts. Unlike the CBDC approaches currently under discussion, which would use complicated and inefficient distributed ledger technology and be walled off from the existing system of money and payments, FedAccounts would be seamlessly interoperable with the mainstream payment system, relying on technologies that the Federal Reserve has used for decades. What are the options for those who prefer physical currency? In the US, pre-1965 ("junk") silver coins can be used to conduct local commerce based on the value of silver content, rather than face value. In theory, regional digital currencies could be created that are backed by precious metals or other physical, non-fiat assets. Texas has a state-administered bullion depository. CBDCs will require enabling legislation in each country, so there will be political debate in the next year or two, including the fates of decentralized cryptocurrencies and corporate digital currencies (e.g. Facebook, Amazon). For historical background on central bank policy, see the 2014 documentary "Princes of the Yen", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Ac7ap_MAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Ac7ap_MAY & https://moviesteve.com/review-princes-of-the-yen-2014/ https://moviesteve.com/review-princes-of-the-yen-2014/ or the upcoming 2021 documentary "The Trust Game", https://vimeo.com/ondemand/trustgame/626995630?autoplay=1 https://vimeo.com/ondemand/trustgame/626995630?autoplay=1
- lsiq 5y agoPeople need to wake up and see that CBDCs are literal serfdom. It is the imposition of micro-level, algorithmic economic sanctions on YOU. Once they are fully implemented and a network effect has taken hold, we will truly own nothing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chinathrow 5y ago> we will truly own nothing. So cash to the rescue?
- walterbell 5y agoPlus local bricks & mortar transactions where human trust is still a factor. Circulate precious metals locally, which have some intrinsic value above fiat currency.
- teh_infallible 5y agoCrypto to the rescue! It is a mistake to conflate a CBDC or a fiat-based stablecoin with an actual cryptocurrency. (I will refrain from shilling a specific one.)
- chinathrow 5y agoIt's a mistake, that (any) crypto would solve any of the issues at hand.
- beebmam 5y agoThis is a good example of what someone posts when they're deep into some kind of ideology. Isiq I sincerely hope you reflect on this post and question exactly what you mean by some of the terms you use here: "serfdom", "micro-level", "algorithmic economic sanctions", "network effect". Each of these have meanings that are probably not what you mean, but nevertheless, I will attempt to address this comment in good faith. Under your assumed perspective, all forms of taxation are "sanctions" or "theft", regardless of how useful taxes are to improving the lives of everyone. Fine, believe that if you want, but good luck building this extreme society; I want no part of it. It's quite a ridiculous notion to believe that CBDCs will lead to no one owning anything. Have banks in general led to people owning less? I think it's just the opposite; the banking system has created enormous amounts of wealth for everyone. Sure, there are inefficiencies, especially in housing, but there are many, many reasons for that (supply of homes and building regulations/codes, for examples). Ownership has zero meaning at all outside of a government system which enforces property rights with the power of force. Good luck keeping that government system functional without taxation. Even the US tried to do that a few centuries ago and failed miserably. I really have a hard time taking your comment seriously by the way you framed it, but regardless, I have tried to keep this in good faith by assuming a few of your (unstated but implied) positions. Let me know if you think I assumed incorrectly
- throw_m239339 5y agoIt doesn't solve anything if there are central banks to begin with. The same old stuff, ripping off people with inflation, making the rich richer with low interest rates only rich people can borrow at... > Stablecoins are a type of digital coin pegged to traditional currencies. And that's issue, with "stablecoins", exchanges become cartels operating fractional reserves, no different from the traditional banking system... the crypto world was really quick at just re-inventing the same old banking model, but with their own made up monopoly bills...
- sul_tasto 5y agois this in any way related to the OECD international tax agreement?
- Proven 5y agoPrinciples? Here we go: - Retain the full ability to print as much funny money as necessary, same as now - Track every user and every transaction - Tax the shit out of everyone, fix the "cash problem" - Cancel wallets of "terrorists" such as people who had Covid-19 and don't want to get vaccinated