- The government's not going to have an official true cryptocurrency where anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can just generate a private key and anonymously send / receive coins.
- The system won't allow an address to send / receive coins without approval from a government key, and that approval will only be given if the government's gotten a name / SSN / real-life identity to associate with that address.
- The system will provide a function where a government-controlled key can freeze any address's ability to send or receive funds.
- The government's going to say "But we need to take a stand against terrorists / Russian oligarchs / drug kingpins" and then it ends up being used against successively lower and lower degrees of criminals, such as money launderers / tax dodgers / deadbeat dads / unpaid parking tickets, and eventually ends up targeting ordinary citizens.
>The "occupiers" gave up their rights by holding an illegal protest.
The same can be said for any kind of protest once deemed by governments illegal, that gave you your current rights, from child labor laws to environmental regulations...
Also in what part of a democratic playbook is it written that if you "illegaly protest" you "give up your rights" to everything, including your financial assets, and by government fiat nonetheless. Because in 20th century plus western democracies at least, this is an unprecedented step.
One just has to consider how they would feel if the shoe was on the other foot.
For instance, ~25 people died during the US protests in summer 2020. Not many, but probably more than in the convoy protests. If the US Government had gone ahead and frozen the assets of the people involved, how would one feel?
Gave up their rights by "illegally" protesting, huh? So basically if you protest the government, and that government says your protest is illegal, you lose your rights. I don't see that being such a healthy path for a free society.
A free society is not one where a few hundred idiots get to take a road trip to the capital and demand they form government. It is not the one where you are free to break any law you choose as long as you label it "protest"
This principle and precedent only seems digestible since the majority is on the side of it. In practice, one can imagine the SAME principle and practice being applied against us and in nefarious ways. It is indeed a slippery slope.
Banks in Canada are authorized to freeze ordinary citizens' accounts if they believe those citizens are associated with a protest, and the citizens have no recourse.
CBDCs have zero intrinsic link to crypto. They are digital in the same way your credit card is digital which is to say they use servers that run on a computer which access a database.
You could implement a block chain somewhere in there but it's not really clear what a central bank would gain from that. They have central in the name. They aren't interested in decentralizing
> The government's going to say "But we need to take a stand against terrorists / Russian oligarchs / drug kingpins" and then it ends up being used against successively lower and lower degrees of criminals, such as money launderers / tax dodgers / deadbeat dads / unpaid parking tickets, and eventually ends up targeting ordinary citizens.
Yes, absolutely. Unless bitcoin wins, I have no doubt whatsoever that this is what's going to happen.
How about we just stop electing people who are going to use power against their own citizens? If you think that's impossible, then how about we change the system such that it is.
That seems much more constructive than erecting barriers for ourselves because we can't control the beast we've constructed.
> How about we just stop electing people who are going to use power against their own citizens?
Well sure, but for that you've got quite a road. Elections were precisely designed to extract power from the citizens into the hands of the few. If you truly want freedom and equality then you need to build power from the bottom up and never let anyone "represent" an entire population... because noone ever can represent millions of people faithfully.
I mean, you could take the 500 brightest and nicest people on Earth and put them in a parliament and you would still get widespread injustice and misery. We need to abolish the Nation States and empower people and communities to organize (anarchism).
The state suggests that people cannot play nicely en masse without violent control, but doesn’t actually back this assertion up with anything. Maybe I’m a conspiratorial nutcase, but my relationship with the state consistently feels like interacting with the world’s biggest protection racket.
Some authors clearly analyzed/described many facets of this: Leopold Kohr (the breakdown of nations), Mancur Olson, James C. Scott (Zomia), Jacques Ellul...
I too believe that the path in which we progress towards peace and prosperity involves dissolving the Nation State and creating mechanisms that empowers the peaceful, good faith people, and prevents the Nation State from coming back.
> If you think that's impossible, then how about we change the system such that it is.
Who is "we"? The people who can change the system are those in elected offices of power. Your suggestion means convincing them to change it so that most of them will not get reelected and will lose all power. That can never happen, human nature.
> Your suggestion means convincing them to change it so that most of them will not get reelected and will lose all power. That can never happen, human nature.
That can happen, and has happened throughout history. It tends to be a bloody ordeal though.
A long time back I had see the video. Not the best points in the video, a little like how to make a million bucks. The concept is sound but the execution is hard. Most independent thinkers cannot even conceive of a parallel society. For the few that do, the numbers are really tiny, to the point that bumping into each other is near impossible. Either that, or they are so off radar that it's impossible to find them.
>How about we just stop electing people who are going to use power against their own citizens? If you think that's impossible, then how about we change the system such that it is.
How would that go? Who would ask you or me how to run the system? And who we should alternatively elect, given that the elections system is a rigged game with a couple of mostly-agreeing between them horses alternating in power in most countries?
>How about we just stop electing people who are going to use power against their own citizens? If you think that's impossible, then how about we change the system such that it is.
Neither of it is possible the average Joe/Jill buys into all the bs sprouted by the powers.
Aren’t taxes already done automatically. My taxes here in Norway have been filled out by the government for as long as I can remember (I am 44). All I got to do is look over what they have filled out and correct it if I think anything is wrong. If no it is automatically delivered.
Dealing with taxes takes like 5 minutes each year. It is all electronic. Just like you can sign anything electronically using encryption keys for any nationally reckognized ID system in Norway. I just electronically signed papers to start a company. 15 minute process online.
>All I got to do is look over what they have filled out and correct it if I think anything is wrong.
Its pretty much the same in the USA if you just have income from a standard job. You send them your W2 form with the last year's salary and make sure everything is right. If you're self-employed, earned income some other way (capital gains, etc), or live in a state with additional state income tax, you have to fill out some more forms.
Then it gets a bit complicated calculating deductions. Which means you have to put in some effort if you want to lower your effective tax rate. There's deductions for everything under the sun since the tax code is very complex. You get some money back if you paid interest on student loans, have kids, bought a house, spend money on office supplies, gave to charity, etc. Some people spend a few hundred on a tax advisor to do it for them and still come out ahead. Many people simply don't bother and let the money go. The IRS only comes after you if you underpay, not overpay.
Are taxes in the US that painful? In the UK I do my tax return every year and it takes me all of about 30 minutes and I only need a few browser tabs open in front of me (typically just my broker and HMRC)
That's unusual, majority of people in the UK have simple taxes and don't need to fill in any forms.
The US is deliberatly difficult because
1) Companies make a fortune selling "solutions" to this, thus spend a lot of money ensuring it continues
2) Americans don't like taxes, so by making it more obvious the government is taking your tax money, and making it painful in the process, to fund their military, it helps cement that idea there's should be a small state
The US takes 27% of the GDP in tax, the UK 33%, although personal taxes for normal people tend to be about the same, its just that the US pretty much requires an accountant, or at least some expensive proprietary software, and hours of your time.
For that 33% (+6%) you also get universal healthcare (which isn't accounted for in the 27% Americans are paying), so those numbers aren't apples to apples.
That would be another thing that would be great for the GAO (U.S. Government Accountability Office (U.S. GAO)) to produce reports about.
Where are (my / your) Tax dollars going? How does that compare to other countries, in absolute, per person, GDP and other metrics, etc?
This site was created by the Office of the Chief Data Officer at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (Fiscal Service), which is part of the Department of the Treasury. Fiscal Service is responsible for managing public debt, central payment systems, and government accounting. Our team is comprised of data analysts, developers, and UX designers who are passionate about putting trusted data in the hands of the people.""
So that site is created by the disbursement arm of the bureaucracy, which explains the overly generic output bins as well as no metric for adjusting based on taxes paid in by an individual, nor for area of the country. I was rather hoping for something with an order of magnitude or two of greater depth that dynamically adjusted the context of graphical representation based on what mattered to the viewer.
It's all taxes, and it all goes to the same pot, there's no hypothecation, the NHS budget is not related to the money brought in from NI contributions, and National Insurance is included in the tax revenue along with VAT, Fuel Duty, CGT, Stamp Duty, Income Tax, etc
NI is about 19% of tax revenue, Income Tax 27%, VAT 18%, local taxes (council tax and business rates) about 10%.
It doesn't include other receipts, things like profits from state owned business.
Total government revenue (about 10% higher than total taxation) does not cover total government expenditure, hence a deficit, and some branches of economics considers revenue and expenditure separate in a system which controls its own currency.
Either way, the US spends more on government healthcare (per head of total population) then the UK, the decision not to have universal healthcare isn't a funding one
The United States spends more money per capita in healthcare than any country in the world, and 2-3x as much as most European welfare states. There are a lot of problems with the system, but "not enough money funneling into it" is not one of them.
The US government still spends more on healthcare as a total amount per person (about $1.4T, or $3,880 per person, just for medicare+medicaid), compared with the UK (about $3,300 per person)
The US as a whole in 2019 spent 16% of its GDP on Health, 4% on Military
The UK meanwhile spent 10% on Health and 3% on Military
Have you been to a doctors office in the US? There are more administrators filling out insurance papers than doctors. US spends money on healthcare administration, not on healthcare. The same dollar in the US buys ten times less insulin than a dollar in Canada.
In France, it went all the way to where I don’t do any tax filing; the government does it for me, and sends me a PDF itemizing their tax, and automatically debiting it from my account.
There is no CBDC needed for that.
(In fact, all the article’s fears about payment prevention and free speech restriction are all possible without CBDC, and already in place in some segments that gained popular support, which minorities and SW have been complaining about across the decades.)
Yeah it sucks pretty bad. Like my wife’s company does RSU transactions every like month and we need to adjust the cost basis for each one for some reason. This is a Fortune 50 company.
Agreed. The only reason why government want CBDCs is convenience. They can already seize whatever bank account they like, it doesn't give them any more powers. It's just easier than having 50 different systems to have one unified system.
Eventually? That's is the actual plan, the only plan. Control of ordinary citizens.
The rest are just pro-forma excuses. If they were serious about money laundering, why are the banks only fined 10-15% of profits they make from laundering cartel money, and literally no key decision makers go to jail? And you still think they care about money laundering? lmao.
It's not about money laundering, never was. It's just to CONTROL you, and absolutely nothing else.
Here is right from the horse's mouth:
General Manager of the Bank of International Settlements: “We don’t know who’s using a $100 bill today and we don’t know who’s using a 1,000 peso bill today. The key difference with the CBDC is the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that… and that makes a huge difference.”
absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use
> The government [is] not going to have [it] where anyone [...] can just anonymously send / receive coins
You mean, like you can with cash?
I understand being skeptical of the government, but we already have "electronic" money in the form of Credit cards, where everything you speculate about is already possible by BOTH the government AND private banks.
Government enforcement against people committing all kinds of crimes is uneven and unfair, but I doubt the Federal Government is interested in mobilizing against parking ticket offenders, unless their crimes somehow relate them with Al Capone.
If the Federal Government believes you have ill-gotten money in your possession, you can have that money seized right now; no need for fancy digital or crypto stuff.
The Feds have taken on ransomware gangs and others in the crypto realm already -- doing "bad things" that are illegal with crypto is still illegal, without the need to have fancy escrow/approval/gov't stuff in there.
CBDCs do not even aim to be cryptocurrencies. In fact there's very little connection between the two, unless you only care about similarities in UX and not what's 'under the hood'.
Swiss BIS (Bank of International Settlements, the central bank for all central banks, including US and UK) Director Carstens on CBDCs at an IMF meeting in 2020, 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.
> 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.”
> 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
This is so terrible.
There are countries who try really hard to control the USD exchange rate of their own currency. In practice, it means anyone getting paid in USD has their money confiscated and forcibly exchanged for their own nearly worthless local currency at absolutely terrible rates.
I've seen people posting about it here on HN: they claimed the government was pocketing about 50% of their earnings through this process and that bitcoin is a better proposition.
(Disclaimer: not an expert, I read patio11 and Money Stuff when I'm pooping and that's about it)
This is, by and large, how it currently works today. Not that often do actual pallets of cash get moved from one bank to another; a lot more often, some centralized bank has a big ol' ledger, where various banks move money from one column to another. One of those centralized banks is The Fed, that's how the US was able to freeze so much of Russia's money; there is a bank account at The Fed, and that account is where Russia keeps its US dollars (or the bank that Russia works with keeps its dollars, some of which are Russian, or the bank that the bank that Russia works with... you get the idea).
The biggest difference between a CBDC is that there wouldn't need to be a printed dollar to back that ledger, so instead of rare pallets-of-cash movements, it would be entirely digital. Printing money would be an UPDATE statement rather than through a printing press.
It'll be interesting to see how quickly it gets bought in. The experience over the years with the political flow of things like the surveillance state or financial repression, etc, is that when these systems for controlling people are bought in they are effective enough at hiding what they do, so they never really generate the outrage they deserve. It seems like it will be a routine thing for presidential candidates to be accused of corruption and investigated by the spooks during campaigns for example. It doesn't seem important enough to people that it would bridge the partisan debate.
CBDCs will probably happen in a similar way. Cheap and easy to implement. No room to make noise about the abuses because the people targeted won't have the money to defend themselves, let alone speak out in an unfavourable media environment being paid/given incentives/on board with the plan to Think of The Children. A lot like the how surveillance ended up the abuses are fairly quiet so people aren't really sure what specifically they need to fight.
>programming the money so that it couldn’t be used for sweets
That's stretching the concept 'money' a bit, is it still money if it's non-fungible? What on earth happens if the money is paid to someone? Can you 'launder' the restriction away by swapping money with a friend? Does the restriction remain indefinitely, making it completely non-fungible?
These are good questions to be asking, and they are all theoretical possibilities. Some people see this as an opportunity for improvement, others find it deeply concerning. Central banks do not necessarily need to abide by the old definition of money.
It's weird to call it swiss BIS, the place where international institutions are headquartered is not usually relevant :) We don't say Swiss FIFA, or Swiss WHO.
The explanation of a digital currency, when you get past the paranoia about an increase in tracking you[1], sounds exactly like a "narrow bank". But the Fed has always been against those, because they think customer banks will be too poorly capitalized if everyone uses a government bank directly. That seems like the best reason we wouldn't get one.
A good reason to have them would be that it'd be really easy for the government to pay you, for instance if we had a UBI or one of those things everyone on here loves. Right now they're surprisingly bad at it. A lot of government agencies have to pay people with prepaid debit cards, and there's people who never got their stimulus checks still.
[1] mainly unjustified because they're already tracking you in regular bank accounts so it can't even be any worse…
> mainly unjustified because they're already tracking you in regular bank accounts so it can't even be any worse…
That's one way to look at it. Another way is to see that tracking will be backed up by efficient enforcement and control. That's more than a step further, that's something that completely re-organizes society.
You could argue that something like that is necessary in the 21st century, but besides the paranoia there's concern about who controls a system like that.
> A good reason to have them would be that it'd be really easy for the government to pay you, for instance if we had a UBI or one of those things everyone on here loves. Right now they're surprisingly bad at it. A lot of government agencies have to pay people with prepaid debit cards, and there's people who never got their stimulus checks still.
That seems like a good reason to not have them. Sending people checks is profoundly simple 17th century technology. Putting people who can't even master that in charge of securing against stealing an arbitrarily large amount of money over the internet is like that xkcd about voting software:
That's literally an American problem. Here in the UK, it's extremely easy to set up a bank account even if you don't earn very much, or if you recently declared bankruptcy. If America wanted to help the unbanked, they have every opportunity to do so.
There are plenty of ways for the unbanked to get an account. From online banks with $0 deposit requirements, to local banks with $25minimums. While there certainly are literacy or accessibility issues, the number one cause of not having a bank account, according to FDIC surveys is not trusting banks.
The first time I tried to get a bank account as a mostly broke college student, I walked into a branch of the bank that had an agreement with my university to supply ATMs on campus. I said I wanted an account. They did everything in their power to not give me an account. Eventually, they rejected me because I had a NYS non-driver's ID card instead of a license. "We've had problems with these," they said. This bank branch was in downtown Manhattan, where roughly no one drives.
A few years after I managed to get them to give me an account, I overdrafted my checking account by a few dollars and they disabled my ATM card. After my next deposit cleared, I went back to that bank branch to get my card reinstated. They did not want to do it. The manager eventually said he could help me if I "promised I wouldn't do it again". I asked for my account to be closed instead, and I will always remember how pleased the guy seemed to be losing me as a customer.
It is not easy for everyone to get and maintain a bank account.
I just looked like someone who was not worth their time. I never did have more than $100 in the account, and dealing with me might have cost them more than they made on me since I didn't pay any fees except for the one time I overdrafted.
I still think (hope!) the real reason central banks (and governments) want a digital currency is that they're not sure completely replacing cash-infrastructure with one or more privately-owned, possibly foreign-owned, alternatives is such a great idea.
> The explanation of a digital currency, when you get past the paranoia about an increase in tracking you[1], sounds exactly like a "narrow bank". But the Fed has always been against those, because they think customer banks will be too poorly capitalized if everyone uses a government bank directly.
This sounds uncomfortably similar to the "reason" the IRS can't do our own taxes for us and send us the bill.
Sort of, but TurboTax actually lobbies for that. A lot of large banks don't even want you as a customer in the first place, but the government makes them do it.
Also, everyone here is arguing "the government shouldn't know about my finances", and I feel like "the government should do my taxes for me" conflicts with that?
Since I don't have any lawyers on hand, I'm not qualified to design a private system so I don't feel like making one up[1]. But since I remember how bank transfers work right now (hint: they go through the government), I can say people claiming they have some right now are wrong.
[1] for instance, I don't remember the legal status of mailing cash through USPS, but pretty sure it's different privacy-wise even though it's "the government"
Why is it not put your transaction history into a database that the government can subpoena if they want to know what you've been buying, which all of us have already been doing if you're not conducting transactions in cash? I have a lot of facts about myself I'd like to keep mostly hidden, but are not hidden from law enforcement officers who can get a warrant.
Exactly this. We already have digital currencies. They are called US Dollar and Euro. They exist as numbers in bank accounts, transfers are safe and very efficient.
That's not what they're working on though. No one is dumb enough to try to make a central (and traditional) database/system for digital money. They could do it, and if they do it eventually will get hacked. They will use blockchain technology because of the security benefits (encryption, redundancy, validation). The part they're removing is the decentralized aspect.
Okay, I may have went too far there. I didn't properly think that through, but I still think it's a bad idea to not use a blockchain for a new currency.
What do you think the Federal Reserve Bank does? Every bank in the US has an account with the Federal Reserve. The Fed maintains a central database of the transactions between those accounts.
The only difference between a blockchain and a traditional database is that a blockchain has an inherit audit trail due to the use of crypto algorithms and digital signatures. A traditional database can have similarly immutable record keeping with digital signatures as well.
With all these things there's degrees of freedom. Yeah, if you don't support your government for shit, and always value the taxes you pay them at exactly 0, don't volunteer for anything for it, lie to get out of jury duty, film the police when they're in the right, well in time you get the government you deserve.
Although I see your point about targeting ordinary citizens, so the thing about that is the real criminals are scary, nowadays because they are getting into America at such alarming rates they have tons of ways of getting to the people that get to them, while the ordinary citizens will never retaliate for cracking down on them, so the natural thing to do, the cowardly thing but at any rate, is to crack down on ordinary citizens.
Similar to recording police or criminals with your phone. People do it to police all the time, because it's safer at least in California, whereas violent criminals will retaliate criminally, so recording them to their face takes courage.
- The government's not going to have an official true cryptocurrency where anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can just generate a private key and anonymously send / receive coins.
- The system won't allow an address to send / receive coins without approval from a government key, and that approval will only be given if the government's gotten a name / SSN / real-life identity to associate with that address.
- The system will provide a function where a government-controlled key can freeze any address's ability to send or receive funds.
- The government's going to say "But we need to take a stand against terrorists / Russian oligarchs / drug kingpins" and then it ends up being used against successively lower and lower degrees of criminals, such as money launderers / tax dodgers / deadbeat dads / unpaid parking tickets, and eventually ends up targeting ordinary citizens.