Coronavirus Stimulus Bill in Congress Proposes U.S. Digital Dollar | Hacker News Reader

Coronavirus Stimulus Bill in Congress Proposes U.S. Digital Dollar

forbes.com

14 pointswalterbell13 comments

From https://financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/waters_146...

> The term "digital dollar wallet" shall mean a digital wallet or account, maintained by a Federal reserve bank on behalf of any person, that represents holdings in an electronic device or service that is used to store digital dollars that may be tied to a digital or physical identity.

> Not later than January 1, 2021, all Federal reserve banks shall make digital dollar wallets available to all citizens and legal permanent residents of the United States and business entities for which the principal place of business is located in the United States.

If these people can not work with checks and banks, why would you expect them to handle an online system requiring computer and network access?

Those two things aren't correlated. Lots of people without access to the banking system have mobile phones, and services have emerged to bring them into the system. For example, M-Pesa [0] is the first one that comes to mind.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

Most of our dollars are digital now, just ledgers in servers. What difference does this make?

this is my question, maybe I'm missing something. I don't see how crypto really addresses the issues of people without bank accounts or physical addresses. as for people who do have bank accounts, why can't the government just work with them to deposit normal cash in their accounts instead of forcing them to implement something new?

I gotta say, I don't really understand the dem strategy right now. the failure to agree on a stimulus package in a timely fashion reflects poorly on both sides, but the democrats are looking especially bad. why can't they just toss out the most controversial parts, pass something, and then come back to the pie in the sky stuff next week?

Because the crocodile tears from Repubs are false and only serve to make Dems feel bad, look weak, and capitulate to a shit sandwich for workers, unemployed and essential personnel and services while Wall Street gets dollar bills like they just time travelled to the wild west with a kissing booth sponsored by Pornhub.

Dems were and are right to push for real direct cash payments (lol fuck off with tax breaks and other wonky voodoo), expanded sick leave and unemployment benefits among other things.

I guess it depends on what you consider 'controversial'. Part of what the Republicans want is essentially a $500 billion blank check for Mnuchin to spend as he pleases without strings attached, similar to the ransom note Hank Paulson tried to get away with in 2008.

Ol’ Moneybags Mnuchin.

I should have been a bit more clear. I'm saying both sides should table their most controversial parts and just pass the subset they appear to agree on. then they can go back to trying to cram student debt forgiveness and the huge blank check for wall street into the same bill.

Exactly, we print /currency/ like crazy. Take a deeper look at what quantitative easing is if you want to really go down the rabbit hole...

It's actually not a very deep hole. The mechanism is fairly transparent.

I like it. Banks money market accounts were clearly over leveraged and cannot be trusted. Cash may as well be directly backed by the fed instead of small bank IOU’s.

Retail learns not to over leverage after they blow out their accounts a few times. Banks never learn because their jobs depend on them not learning.

Is this really the time to add all this crap? People need financial relief and they need it yesterday. Fokus should on how to get this money to people the quickest way possible.

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