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I can imagine a world where China finalizes their "official" crypto currency, transitions their entire economy over, forces all international trade to use it, a

I can imagine a world where China finalizes their "official" crypto currency, transitions their entire economy over, forces all international trade to use it, and it becomes the standard currency for logistics. It'll provide traceability for them for all Chinese-connected transactions forever. The best oversight and control mechanism. They find current sanctions ineffective because the levers aren't strong enough yet, but they'll be more than happy to sanction countries themselves in the future.

andy_ppp 5y ago
Haha except there will be no customers and manufacturers will move to other cheaper places… if you think the dollar is going away without a fight we’ve seen how the money works now and it’s all controlled by the West right now. That’s why the Chinese want to change it and not a single western nation will agree to it ever because how does it work for them?
- natch 5y ago
  Just spitballing, China could strike a deal to be the exclusive seller of Russian oil and gas to Europe, and then demand payment in their own cryptocurrency. Why would Russia do this? As a payback for China’s support, for one thing.
  - fleddr 5y ago
    Whatever gas is flowing to Europe right now, keeps flowing with no change in price or conditions. The Kremlin made it an explicit point to guarantee this, even in war time. They are not in a position to demand anything because if they do, the dependency will soon be resolved. Europe is already working with the assumption that this is not future-proof, so alternatives will be found, rendering any demand useless. Not even almighty China can lay heavy "demands" on the West or build dominant international alternatives. China needs the world far more than the world needs China. Just a few decades ago, we didn't depend on anything coming from China. We can dial that back. The opposite is not true. China has a useless geography making them heavily dependent on many external geographies just to acquire the very basics to sustain their population. The world wants the western model, even if imperfect. People migrate to the west, nobody wants to live in Russia or China. When given a choice, every former Soviet territory wants to join the EU, not Russia. I think that says enough.
    - mring33621 5y ago
      Oooh a guarantee from the Kremlin! That settles it then!
      - andy_ppp 5y ago
        It’s about crippling your economy slowly or quickly. We are definitely getting away from Russian fuel as soon as possible. Work has already begun.
    - treeman79 5y ago
      Genuinely Curious want you mean by useless. As In low amounts of good farm land?
      - wbsss4412 5y ago
        Calling it “useless” is overstating the case. China has good farmland, that’s how they were able to grow to such a large population. However, at this point, China is extremely dependent on imports of commodities including food and other raw materials.
    - dirtyid 5y ago
      > dependency will soon be resolved. Europe is already working with the assumption that this is not future-proof, It will be resolved but not soon, likely years. US is trying to temporily divert from allies but most supply already locked in long term contracts and apacity can't expand that fast. n mean time RU can make demands, alreadying threatening 2000 euro per 1000 cubic meter as norm. Maybe EU can weather it, but long term EU would have pivotted to newly discovered UKR gas. Divorce inevitable IMO so RU might as well as gamble while there's some leverage, even if it backfires spectacularly. >China needs the world far more than the world needs China. Just a few decades ago, we didn't depend on anything coming from China. We can dial that back. A lot changes in decades, dialing back will take decades in the mean time there's mutual dependancy but PRC along with US are least dependant major economies in terms of trade:gdp and indigenous production. PRC hasnt been export driven for a while. China needs US and US needs China for the foreseeable future, neither needs anyone else. > China has a useless geography As does most of west, OECD countries that can be self sufficient in energy is like US/CA/NO/NX. Most of west EU apart from France imports net calories. Granted there's major western producers for both but also many none west producers especially for critical minerals for PRC to tap. It's an issue if there's war when SLOCs are blocaded. But that's war and PRC produces enough of almost everything domestically for indefinite war economy. PRC is not Japan who needs to supply reources outside to maintain war economy. Of course no one is as blessed as US. > world wants the western model Democracy index is declining globally, including in post soviet states, majority of whom are not even flawed democracies. Countries seem to be converging more towards PRC model if anything, including recent EU censorship and west broadly re-adopting PRC tier industrial policy. > People migrate to the west Rich west with migration driven economies good at brain draining sure, but MENA authoritarian states get plenty of expats as well. >former Soviet territory wants to join the EU For security not governance model. They've remained authoritaran/hybrid and general trend on democracy index in last few years have been decline.
  - veganhouseDJ 5y ago
    I think this is exactly what is going to happen. The world order from 2 weeks ago is gone forever. The Russian stock market still hasn't even opened this week. They are basically going to have to start over economically. They are not going to build back the same way as they did the past 20 years. We have basically left them no choice other than to build back with China. I think history will view this decision to completely cut them off from the Western financial system as a huge mistake. A completely myopic decision.
- Cymrukicks 5y ago
  Then they (the west) would have to pay a higher price. Thats the weakness with capitalism if you have a choice between paying more or less for the same thing with the same quality less is always better.
delusional 5y ago
What would "crypto currency" mean here? How would it be different from a real currency?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- throwawayffffas 5y ago
  I think it would mean cryptographic provable public ledger.
  - smt88 5y ago
    China will create a digital currency, and it may use something like blockchain, but it probably will not have a public ledger.
    - randomhodler84 5y ago
      Created, launched and in production! Was used at the Olympics! It exists today.
    - throwawayffffas 5y ago
      I don't disagree but I don't think anyone would call it a "crypto currency" then. Hell I am pretty sure that even if it were public people would still not call it a "crypto currency".
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dathinab 5y ago
    Probably, also most likely federated with a design similar to PoS. Also probably just semi-public.
- zitterbewegung 5y ago
  At that point I don't know why you would essentially need that kind of infrastructure. Just tell everyone that on some date in the future paper cash will not be legal tender and everyone has a government issued bank account. You could use a permissioned ledger (a hyperledger) at this point.
netsharc 5y ago
Since all crypto transactions are traceable, I doubt it's something corrupt officials want to implement, they wouldn't be able to hide their stealing that way. The Chinese government most likely can already see virtually all transactions made by the common Chinese folk, since WeChat/AliPay is very popular there.
- rvz 5y ago
  That is the whole point of having a blockchain where all the transaction are public and even if the criminal gangs, money launderers use it, the addresses are all traceable. No where to hide. Now when you have a cryptocurrency that uses an encrypted blockchain where the transactions are private and are only known by the sender and the receiver, then you know that the Chinese government will not like such a thing to be used since they know that the criminal gangs and scammers are most exactly going to use something like that with Signal E2EE and MobileCoin for their illegal activities. Certainly, it is very easy to hide your laundered digital cash on MobileCoin than it is on Bitcoin, or a stablecoin.
- beaunative 5y ago
  You do realize if you use credit or debit card, your banks gonna know, so therefore your government? Let's not pretend using WeChat/Alipay is somehow better or worse for that matter.
zelon88 5y ago
What makes you so sure that Chinese oligarchs want traceable money?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- maerF0x0 5y ago
  What makes you think the Chinese oligarchs wont be given an anonymous enough backdoor? -- Typically when I've seen authoritarian things it's authoritarian across most, but nice little exceptions for the "special" people.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    What makes you think the Chinese oligarchs wont be given an anonymous enough backdoor? There's no such thing as a backdoor for some limited group of people. If there's a backdoor then it's for anyone who can discover it and chooses to use it. This is the flaw in the thinking of every single politician who ever talks about encryption and crypto. You can't compromise the security in something and expect it to remain a secret. Things are either secure by design, or they're not secure.
    - tyre 5y ago
      In this case the government could mandate that every address be KYCed. Then they give out some addresses with either fake KYC stubs or don’t KYC them at all. This wouldn’t be done at the protocol level, in the same way one can get around TLS via MITM without sabotaging the encryption algorithms.
    - rtkwe 5y ago
      That's only true in digital systems. In bureaucracies it's easy to do, you just have someone approve exceptions based on unspecified rules and label non-compliant accounts as compliant or ignore their non-compliance. There's a recurrent meme in the tech world to try to treat the law and governments like rigid rule bound computers but they're not, it's a system composed of people and people bend rules every day.
robjan 5y ago
The Digital Yuan is a digital currency but not a cryptocurrency. It works similarly to a bank account except instead of having an account with the bank, you have one directly with the government, although currently all e-RMB accounts are attached to traditional bank accounts.
- anthony_r 5y ago
  This. I don't understand how more people are not catching up to this simple fact that central bank "digital currencies" are nothing more than a by-pass of distributed private banking (brick and mortar + online banks). It's just moving more levers closer to central authorities.
  - asah 5y ago
    Well... digital currency = programmable money = big differences... for example, giving people money which must be spent by a certain date on certain types of goods or services.
- rvz 5y ago
  Precisely this. This is where some other countries are going to when it comes to the digitisation of many currencies as CBDCs. It is especially towards those part of the ISO 20022 [0] standard which the technologies will be based on some cryptocurrency technologies like Stellar [1][2], XRPL [3][4], Algorand, etc. [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/iso-20022-cryptos-5-compliant-194204661.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/iso-20022-cryptos-5-compliant... [1] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/12/14/ukraine-commercial-bank-to-test-digital-currency-built-on-stellar/ https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/12/14/ukraine-commercia... [2] https://resources.stellar.org/stellar-for-cbdcs https://resources.stellar.org/stellar-for-cbdcs [3] https://ripple.com/insights/bhutan-advances-financial-inclusion-and-sustainability-with-ripples-cbdc-solution/ https://ripple.com/insights/bhutan-advances-financial-inclus... [4] https://ripple.com/insights/ripple-joins-the-digital-pound-foundation-designing-a-path-for-a-cbdc-forward-future/ https://ripple.com/insights/ripple-joins-the-digital-pound-f...
- beaunative 5y ago
stickfigure 5y ago
Every time someone voices a sentiment like this, I post this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_partners_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa... China is a large economy but it's nothing like the dominant force many people seem to think. China is 16% of US trade, 22% of EU trade, 22% of Japan's trade, 22% of South Korea's trade, etc... the numbers are the same for just about everyone. If you add up all the West-aligned countries (including Vietnam, Philippines, etc - they're already in a cold war with China over the South China Sea), you're looking at 80-90% of China's total trade volume. Without some kind of major political split in the dollarized world, China just doesn't have that kind of leverage. We're currently seeing the opposite of that split.
- chii 5y ago
  plenty of countries are "allies" with the west because of convenience and alignment - but that can change on a dime. And countries aren't stupid; if you can see that currency sanctions can have such a major affect, you would prepare by ensuring that you are diversified. I say that the current currency and banking sanctions are a one use tool - it is effective in the short term at hurting the russian economy, but the west will be paying a future price for it, one where the west's currency and institutions are trusted less than it would have been had they not done this. You can argue that these sanctions are preferable to war. After all, any war with russia and the west will be nuclear, without a doubt. So the west is choose the lesser of two evils to deploy. But i'm not so sure that nuclear war is not averted.
- Aperocky 5y ago
  > China is a large economy but it's nothing like the dominant force many people seem to think. China is 16% of US trade, 22% of EU trade, 22% of Japan's trade, 22% of South Korea's trade, etc You seem to think of those percentage as small - they represent the largest trading partner of each of those country/entity.
  - godtoldmetodoit 5y ago
    China is 3rd largest trading partner to the US behind Canada and Mexico. https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/highlights/top/top2112yr.html https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/highlights/t...
otikik 5y ago
... And then they pull the rug on everyone.
xadhominemx 5y ago
> I can imagine a world where China finalizes their "official" crypto currency, transitions their entire economy over, forces all international trade to use it Funny, I could not imagine this happening

andy_ppp 5y ago

Haha except there will be no customers and manufacturers will move to other cheaper places… if you think the dollar is going away without a fight we’ve seen how the money works now and it’s all controlled by the West right now. That’s why the Chinese want to change it and not a single western nation will agree to it ever because how does it work for them?

natch 5y ago
Just spitballing, China could strike a deal to be the exclusive seller of Russian oil and gas to Europe, and then demand payment in their own cryptocurrency. Why would Russia do this? As a payback for China’s support, for one thing.
- fleddr 5y ago
  Whatever gas is flowing to Europe right now, keeps flowing with no change in price or conditions. The Kremlin made it an explicit point to guarantee this, even in war time. They are not in a position to demand anything because if they do, the dependency will soon be resolved. Europe is already working with the assumption that this is not future-proof, so alternatives will be found, rendering any demand useless. Not even almighty China can lay heavy "demands" on the West or build dominant international alternatives. China needs the world far more than the world needs China. Just a few decades ago, we didn't depend on anything coming from China. We can dial that back. The opposite is not true. China has a useless geography making them heavily dependent on many external geographies just to acquire the very basics to sustain their population. The world wants the western model, even if imperfect. People migrate to the west, nobody wants to live in Russia or China. When given a choice, every former Soviet territory wants to join the EU, not Russia. I think that says enough.
  - mring33621 5y ago
    Oooh a guarantee from the Kremlin! That settles it then!
    - andy_ppp 5y ago
      It’s about crippling your economy slowly or quickly. We are definitely getting away from Russian fuel as soon as possible. Work has already begun.
  - treeman79 5y ago
    Genuinely Curious want you mean by useless. As In low amounts of good farm land?
    - wbsss4412 5y ago
      Calling it “useless” is overstating the case. China has good farmland, that’s how they were able to grow to such a large population. However, at this point, China is extremely dependent on imports of commodities including food and other raw materials.
  - dirtyid 5y ago
    > dependency will soon be resolved. Europe is already working with the assumption that this is not future-proof, It will be resolved but not soon, likely years. US is trying to temporily divert from allies but most supply already locked in long term contracts and apacity can't expand that fast. n mean time RU can make demands, alreadying threatening 2000 euro per 1000 cubic meter as norm. Maybe EU can weather it, but long term EU would have pivotted to newly discovered UKR gas. Divorce inevitable IMO so RU might as well as gamble while there's some leverage, even if it backfires spectacularly. >China needs the world far more than the world needs China. Just a few decades ago, we didn't depend on anything coming from China. We can dial that back. A lot changes in decades, dialing back will take decades in the mean time there's mutual dependancy but PRC along with US are least dependant major economies in terms of trade:gdp and indigenous production. PRC hasnt been export driven for a while. China needs US and US needs China for the foreseeable future, neither needs anyone else. > China has a useless geography As does most of west, OECD countries that can be self sufficient in energy is like US/CA/NO/NX. Most of west EU apart from France imports net calories. Granted there's major western producers for both but also many none west producers especially for critical minerals for PRC to tap. It's an issue if there's war when SLOCs are blocaded. But that's war and PRC produces enough of almost everything domestically for indefinite war economy. PRC is not Japan who needs to supply reources outside to maintain war economy. Of course no one is as blessed as US. > world wants the western model Democracy index is declining globally, including in post soviet states, majority of whom are not even flawed democracies. Countries seem to be converging more towards PRC model if anything, including recent EU censorship and west broadly re-adopting PRC tier industrial policy. > People migrate to the west Rich west with migration driven economies good at brain draining sure, but MENA authoritarian states get plenty of expats as well. >former Soviet territory wants to join the EU For security not governance model. They've remained authoritaran/hybrid and general trend on democracy index in last few years have been decline.
- veganhouseDJ 5y ago
  I think this is exactly what is going to happen. The world order from 2 weeks ago is gone forever. The Russian stock market still hasn't even opened this week. They are basically going to have to start over economically. They are not going to build back the same way as they did the past 20 years. We have basically left them no choice other than to build back with China. I think history will view this decision to completely cut them off from the Western financial system as a huge mistake. A completely myopic decision.
Cymrukicks 5y ago
Then they (the west) would have to pay a higher price. Thats the weakness with capitalism if you have a choice between paying more or less for the same thing with the same quality less is always better.

delusional 5y ago

What would "crypto currency" mean here? How would it be different from a real currency?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwawayffffas 5y ago
I think it would mean cryptographic provable public ledger.
- smt88 5y ago
  China will create a digital currency, and it may use something like blockchain, but it probably will not have a public ledger.
  - randomhodler84 5y ago
    Created, launched and in production! Was used at the Olympics! It exists today.
  - throwawayffffas 5y ago
    I don't disagree but I don't think anyone would call it a "crypto currency" then. Hell I am pretty sure that even if it were public people would still not call it a "crypto currency".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dathinab 5y ago
  Probably, also most likely federated with a design similar to PoS. Also probably just semi-public.
zitterbewegung 5y ago
At that point I don't know why you would essentially need that kind of infrastructure. Just tell everyone that on some date in the future paper cash will not be legal tender and everyone has a government issued bank account. You could use a permissioned ledger (a hyperledger) at this point.

netsharc 5y ago

Since all crypto transactions are traceable, I doubt it's something corrupt officials want to implement, they wouldn't be able to hide their stealing that way. The Chinese government most likely can already see virtually all transactions made by the common Chinese folk, since WeChat/AliPay is very popular there.

rvz 5y ago
That is the whole point of having a blockchain where all the transaction are public and even if the criminal gangs, money launderers use it, the addresses are all traceable. No where to hide. Now when you have a cryptocurrency that uses an encrypted blockchain where the transactions are private and are only known by the sender and the receiver, then you know that the Chinese government will not like such a thing to be used since they know that the criminal gangs and scammers are most exactly going to use something like that with Signal E2EE and MobileCoin for their illegal activities. Certainly, it is very easy to hide your laundered digital cash on MobileCoin than it is on Bitcoin, or a stablecoin.
beaunative 5y ago
You do realize if you use credit or debit card, your banks gonna know, so therefore your government? Let's not pretend using WeChat/Alipay is somehow better or worse for that matter.

zelon88 5y ago

What makes you so sure that Chinese oligarchs want traceable money?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
maerF0x0 5y ago
What makes you think the Chinese oligarchs wont be given an anonymous enough backdoor? -- Typically when I've seen authoritarian things it's authoritarian across most, but nice little exceptions for the "special" people.
- onion2k 5y ago
  What makes you think the Chinese oligarchs wont be given an anonymous enough backdoor? There's no such thing as a backdoor for some limited group of people. If there's a backdoor then it's for anyone who can discover it and chooses to use it. This is the flaw in the thinking of every single politician who ever talks about encryption and crypto. You can't compromise the security in something and expect it to remain a secret. Things are either secure by design, or they're not secure.
  - tyre 5y ago
    In this case the government could mandate that every address be KYCed. Then they give out some addresses with either fake KYC stubs or don’t KYC them at all. This wouldn’t be done at the protocol level, in the same way one can get around TLS via MITM without sabotaging the encryption algorithms.
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    That's only true in digital systems. In bureaucracies it's easy to do, you just have someone approve exceptions based on unspecified rules and label non-compliant accounts as compliant or ignore their non-compliance. There's a recurrent meme in the tech world to try to treat the law and governments like rigid rule bound computers but they're not, it's a system composed of people and people bend rules every day.

robjan 5y ago

The Digital Yuan is a digital currency but not a cryptocurrency. It works similarly to a bank account except instead of having an account with the bank, you have one directly with the government, although currently all e-RMB accounts are attached to traditional bank accounts.

anthony_r 5y ago
This. I don't understand how more people are not catching up to this simple fact that central bank "digital currencies" are nothing more than a by-pass of distributed private banking (brick and mortar + online banks). It's just moving more levers closer to central authorities.
- asah 5y ago
  Well... digital currency = programmable money = big differences... for example, giving people money which must be spent by a certain date on certain types of goods or services.
rvz 5y ago
Precisely this. This is where some other countries are going to when it comes to the digitisation of many currencies as CBDCs. It is especially towards those part of the ISO 20022 [0] standard which the technologies will be based on some cryptocurrency technologies like Stellar [1][2], XRPL [3][4], Algorand, etc. [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/iso-20022-cryptos-5-compliant-194204661.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/iso-20022-cryptos-5-compliant... [1] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/12/14/ukraine-commercial-bank-to-test-digital-currency-built-on-stellar/ https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/12/14/ukraine-commercia... [2] https://resources.stellar.org/stellar-for-cbdcs https://resources.stellar.org/stellar-for-cbdcs [3] https://ripple.com/insights/bhutan-advances-financial-inclusion-and-sustainability-with-ripples-cbdc-solution/ https://ripple.com/insights/bhutan-advances-financial-inclus... [4] https://ripple.com/insights/ripple-joins-the-digital-pound-foundation-designing-a-path-for-a-cbdc-forward-future/ https://ripple.com/insights/ripple-joins-the-digital-pound-f...
beaunative 5y ago

stickfigure 5y ago

Every time someone voices a sentiment like this, I post this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_partners_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa... China is a large economy but it's nothing like the dominant force many people seem to think. China is 16% of US trade, 22% of EU trade, 22% of Japan's trade, 22% of South Korea's trade, etc... the numbers are the same for just about everyone. If you add up all the West-aligned countries (including Vietnam, Philippines, etc - they're already in a cold war with China over the South China Sea), you're looking at 80-90% of China's total trade volume. Without some kind of major political split in the dollarized world, China just doesn't have that kind of leverage. We're currently seeing the opposite of that split.

chii 5y ago
plenty of countries are "allies" with the west because of convenience and alignment - but that can change on a dime. And countries aren't stupid; if you can see that currency sanctions can have such a major affect, you would prepare by ensuring that you are diversified. I say that the current currency and banking sanctions are a one use tool - it is effective in the short term at hurting the russian economy, but the west will be paying a future price for it, one where the west's currency and institutions are trusted less than it would have been had they not done this. You can argue that these sanctions are preferable to war. After all, any war with russia and the west will be nuclear, without a doubt. So the west is choose the lesser of two evils to deploy. But i'm not so sure that nuclear war is not averted.
Aperocky 5y ago
> China is a large economy but it's nothing like the dominant force many people seem to think. China is 16% of US trade, 22% of EU trade, 22% of Japan's trade, 22% of South Korea's trade, etc You seem to think of those percentage as small - they represent the largest trading partner of each of those country/entity.
- godtoldmetodoit 5y ago
  China is 3rd largest trading partner to the US behind Canada and Mexico. https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/highlights/top/top2112yr.html https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/highlights/t...

otikik 5y ago

... And then they pull the rug on everyone.

xadhominemx 5y ago

> I can imagine a world where China finalizes their "official" crypto currency, transitions their entire economy over, forces all international trade to use it Funny, I could not imagine this happening