Hacker News Reader

> If all a CBDC is is digital cash, then we already have that system (Visa, e-payments, etc)

It has taken me a while today to get my head round this, but no we don't have digital cash.

Visa, e-payments etc. are all claims on financial institutions (banks, payment providers etc.). Those banks then indirectly have a claim on the Central Bank currency for us.

The only thing that gives private individuals a direct claim on CB currency is cash, which is increasingly less a part of society. This is the Bank of England (potentially) empowering private individuals and making us less beholden to banks.

There’s no difference in reality. If you have money in a U.K. building society or credit union they are two steps away from the Bank.

All deposit takers in the U.K. are agents of the Bank.

The UK has had rationing before (in wartime, and for some time after) and didn't need a CBDC to implement it. It also already has the power to freeze assets, levy taxes, ban products, introduce license requirements, etc. Why do you think a CBDC makes the government more likely to use its powers in a manner similar to what China and the USSR were doing long before CBDCs were conceived of?

Do you want to make it even easier for the government to do that? Sure the government can come to our house tomorrow and seize from us under one charge or another - but there is a price to pay in terms of public opinion and the physicality and limitations of applying coercive force to you. But digital tools, if you made it easy and convenient enough, then it becomes another matter.

Justifying extensions of government power with "but they can already do that" is cowardice at best and disingenuous at worst.

Sometimes government needs to do that and when it does it's costly and the cost comes from our collective pocket. So making it easier just saves us money.

There's of course argument that if it's easier it will do it more often so it costs more. But that's something that will need to be controlled through political system.

Basically development of humanity is making forms of oppression increasingly more painless and predictable to both the oppressor and the oppressed. Predictability and painlessness is good for business so we thrive.

You can't get rid of oppression. Humans will always divide into the ones that hoard power and those who don't with former living off the latter. Best we can do and the best we've actually done is to make this process as painless and as predictable as possible. Currently we are at the stage of territorially divided monopolies on violence. We learned in world wars that "territorially divided" is a very important part.

Starting to go off topic but, there is no such thing as painless oppression or making it "less painful". You can view the matter in abstract from a distance like this, but if it ever falls on you or your family then it becomes a different matter. We can all view the matter impersonally and without passion, the philosophizing stops the moment it lands on our own heads - and I don't believe one can go through life without ever being on the wrong end of that.

> there is no such thing as painless oppression or making it "less painful"

What kind of opression do you prefer? Filling a tax form every year and paying what you calculated under the threat of arrest (while telling yourself you are voluntarily contributing to society and less fortunate) or being raided by a warband with guns on random intervals taking whatever they please and leaving you only what they at the time believe will let you bounce back so they can raid you again sometime in the future?

Either you are one who enacts or profits from violence or you are affected and robbed by violence. It's a constant setup since the beginning of the human race (or even before that). The only change that evolution of civilization delivers is making the violence predictable and gradual, thus less painfull, thus allowing for more efficient economic activity. If you make oppressors work harder for their cut they'll just take more from you once they do take it.

Winning elections is a lot of work to get to the point where one can collect their cut. Should we get rid of that obstacle and return to hereditary nobility in the interest of making violence less painful?

Hereditary nobility doesn't result in less painful violence. It results in way more painful violence less often in the form of revolutions either successful or supressed.

The main value of democracy is making the oppressed docile and easily subjugated.

And yes, winning election in US is way too costly. Budgets for campaigning should be capped. Other countries manage to sustain democracies with far less. Ultimately it doesn't matter who wins as long as it's not the same faction all the time. In that case unrest wouldn't be suppressed and violence would necessarily get more painful.

Democracy didn't win because it's moral or just. It won because it's most efficient system of maintaining oppression in post industrial technological landscape. You can look at how fragile single party system of China is, or Soviet Union was in comparison to even just rudimentary two party system like in US.

Because you can push a single button and a person is in the cold. There will be no disruption for anyone else, just your one neighbor with the dangerous views can't pay rent and buy food anymore. I can't think of anything more dystopian.

Do you understand that by definition a government is able to exert violence against citizens? Surely you must find this more terrifying than the possibility that they might be able to stop someone from making payments.

They have always been able to do things like this in a targeted way to particular people at some cost as well as at some inconvenience to judges and police officers, but not efficiently, programmatically, instantaneously, at scale, and integrated with the rest of their surveillance infrastructure. This creates similar risks and incentives for politically targeted abuse and the advancement of totalitarian, technocratic forms of government masked by secrecy laws to those presented by the FISA court system.

That’s kind of distorted. Government has the monopoly on violence, true, but only to the extent as the law grants it. A prime focus of constitutional law is to set strict limits to and legal recourse against acts of government.

Well, in that case, the same applies to CBDCs, but so far all criticisms of CBDCs assume that the government will use CBDCs as a means of oppression unrestrained by any laws.

Are you saying that it's unlikely that the government might abuse it's power? Look at history.

I'm saying that, if we assume that the government will oppress people (that's the assumption that CBDC critics make), it's silly to assume that it WILL use CBDCs to oppress people, and at the same time assume it WON'T use violence to oppress people.

[redacted]

That sounds completely unacceptable. With CBDC we would be in an even worse situation, that's my point.

> That is what a CBDC has the potential to evolve to and what worries me - a digital ration book. If all a CBDC is is digital cash, then we already have that system (Visa, e-payments, etc)

Famously, credit cards prevented microtransactions from ever being a thing, and may have very well lead to the ad dystopia we now live in. Insisting on taking a % cut of every transaction, and not allowing small transactions to occur, has dramatically limited business models across a multitude of industries.

Imagine going back to 1999, before clickbait journalism, when newspapers were incredibly well staffed with fact checkers and when long form journalists could easily spend months upon months on a single article.

Now instead of forcing a race to the bottom of ads and needing to get as many eyeballs as possible, imagine if it was even possible to experiment with a 5 cent per article view microtransaction.

Reddit and Twitch have both shown that users are very willing to invest in microtransaction ecosystems for large enough content platforms.

Saying Visa is the same thing as digital cash is rather inaccurate!

> Reddit and Twitch

Are those examples we want to emulate in broader society though? At various points in my life, I have used both of those services extensively. I have never spent money on Reddit, despite being a registered user for 12+ years. I lurked for a year or two at least before creating an account.

On Twitch, I did have a free Prime sub that I would use, but I never spent any more on the service. I'm admittedly behind on the meta now, but is it even possible to give a streamer 1 "bit"? Or is there a minimum requirement of 10 or 50 bits? When I watch streams, I see some people donate with bits, but it seems like a way to save the user from making multiple purchases in a row, rather than a new paradigm of wealth transfer. "Hey, I'm gonna buy 500 bits now and donate 50 per stream" as opposed to needing to pull out the credit card on streamlabs or paypal 5 times a week.

The accounts are already electronic and can be frozen at the government's will, and the government can already set new spending rules which apply to all bank accounts whenever it wants. Commercial banks have the same purely theoretical capabilities to issue electronic accounts with time limits or spending restrictions on the money as the central bank, but the central bank has a lot less incentive to do so

All of Europe had severe rationing during and post-WW2.

Gringos don't know how good they've had it.

It wasn’t to the same extent I’m sure but the USA did have rationing during WW2 with ration books and all. It was organized through the Office of Price Administration.

Also, this kind of restricted spending is already a function of US EBT (food stamps for the poor), no digital currency needed.

Or, simply a gift card.

Not even, US EBT is already this.