Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

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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.

June 2021 in the UK, 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.”

> 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30141563

These CBDCs would empower governments to do so much worse.

(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.

> Swiss BIS

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.

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