Hacker News Reader

Comment by realce | Hacker News Reader

So your opinion is that the UK gov't has plenty of terrifying control over people's bank accounts, so a little bit more is a-ok?

View on HN

My point is that it's hyperbolic to describe a digital pound as terrifying. A person may take issue with modern day banking granting the ability for people to be surveilled, and they might take issue with the UK's PAYE system which requires employers report their employee's income to the tax authority in real(ish) time... but that's nothing to do with a digital pound. A digital pound is a small incremental change in the context of privacy, and so ranting and raving about a digital pound being terrifying is the wrong target. People could waste years of their lives ranting and raving about the horrors of a digital pound, and convince the government to abandon all plans... and nothing about the actual privacy of day to day people would change.

Agreed. A better question- how can we build a government which we can trust with unprecedented levels of centralized information?

The centralization of information is going to happen one way or another (the powers that be wouldn't have it any other way), and we've already been on this trajectory. So how can we build a system that actually respects privacy and upholds the common good?

>> respects privacy and upholds the common good?

That's not how consolidation of power by a government works.

>> The centralization of information is going to happen one way or another

This is not necessarily the case, thanks to encryption, which plays on the side of the weak. A weak can encrypt data that a strong can never decrypt.

> a strong can never decrypt

Is "a weak" using an encryption random number generator that was designed by "a weak" or "a strong"?

One can generate one's private keys by physically rolling dice and choosing words, thus avoiding the problem of rigged random number generators. The government still doesn't control physics (or economic laws, come to think of it!).

> physically rolling dice

Thanks for the reminder to buy (in person) and secure dice against physical tampering!

Encryption can be banned or otherwise regulated. While it wouldn't prevent people "with something to hide" from using encryption regardless, it would deter most regular people, which is good enough from the government perspective for the purposes of this exercise.

That's a dumb question, sorry. We can't. That's why government's powers and role are constitutionally limited, and why the explicit limitations (even though the government is not supposed to have any powers other than those explicitly given to it) need to be updated as technology changes. The idea that we could build a government we can trust is absurd. It's equivalent to suggesting we could build a police force that can monitor everything we do, but will have some kind of structure that makes it not abuse that power. It's not even wrong, it's too ridiculous to even give the time of day to

You decentralize the government. The result might not be much better on average, but then at least people who believe that privacy is a common good can find a space for themselves and be left alone by the rest.

Wouldn't a digital pound give the government direct view of people's financial transactions?

Right now they don't they at least need a court order (i.e. they'd have to prove probably cause) to compel a bank to give them people's data?

Sounds like a big change to me, and further erosion in the protection rule of law theoretically provides people against tyranny.

I disagree with the framing you’re using: if the only protection today is policy, then a new technology (the digital pound) is immaterial. The government doesn’t need new technology to be able to change policy. Anyway, to answer your question, the tax authority here does not need a court order.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com