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Bank of England to explore a potential Central Bank Digital Currency

bankofengland.co.uk

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Re: Bank of England to explore a potential Central Bank Digital Currency

#141

Post by chromatin »

staticman2 wrote: post #89
marcus_holmes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My parents grew up with the "old money", and my father in particular always said that it was easier to work with because everything divided by 2,3 or 4 easily. His opinion was always that the new money was introduced to make computerisation easier. In other words, the benefit wasn't for humans (who prefer working in 12's), but for computers.

Humans have 10 fingers and 10 toes. We almost certainly prefer working with 10s for that reason, all things being equal.

Many ancient human cultures had base 12 and base 60 number systems because there are 12 digit segments that can be indexed by pointing your thumb — 3 segments/digit x 4 fingers

Re: Bank of England to explore a potential Central Bank Digital Currency

#142

Post by Angostura »

KaiserPro wrote: post #30

I've not really understood the need for a "digital" pound, the pound is pretty digital already. I can already have an entirely digital bank account from at least three "challenger" banks. There are also now at least two business accounts that also entirely virtual. "Faster Payments" (customer bank transfers) are delivered in seconds. I can see a need for speeding up BACS, and reducing the price of CHAPS, but apart fr…

> A government isn't ever going to allow a normal citizen to have a anonymous payments system so I don't see them allowing a purely private and anonymous currency (ala-monero)

Actually, the UK got pretty close to it in the 1990s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex

Re: Bank of England to explore a potential Central Bank Digital Currency

#143

Post by kolinko »

KaiserPro wrote: post #126
selfhoster11 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as you've alluded to, its not open to consumers, only financial institutions, with good reason. It gives you lots of access to do all sorts of things. How so? There's no reason a bank account shouldn't be programmable. If the worry is fraud and account hacks, that already happens when the computer is compromised or people get scammed.

> There's no reason a bank account shouldn't be programmable Agreed. But until we have a better system of plainly showing access levels to one's account its a scammer paradise to allow access via said API. You and I are educated in the world of API access, so will think twice before clicking "agree" to allowing emoji corp access to my bank account to "verify your identity", but a significant number of people would bl…

> But until we have a better system of plainly showing access levels to one's account its a scammer paradise to allow access via said API.

Nobody says such API would be connected to a person's life holdings. It could be low amounts that are safe to lose in case of a hack.

Of course, you need to educate people to not put all their life savings into those accounts. But the same applies to multiple other services.

Re: Bank of England to explore a potential Central Bank Digital Currency

#144

Post by throwaway3699 »

max_ wrote: post #81
jfjfntntkt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell me how I can transfer one pound from me to you using a 20 line Python script? That's what people mean by digital currency. If you are going to mention the open banking API initiative, then what are the requirements to get access to that? You can't as an individual. Also, this was the easy case, inter-UK. Now tell me how to transfer using Python and without applying to all kinds of regulators for API acces…

Or better, 0.000001 pounds for streaming a song from my privately hosted streaming service.

That's a tiny amount of money. Or are you going to listen to a million songs for £1? It's still reasonable to batch a few hundred listens for a small transaction every month.

Re: Bank of England to explore a potential Central Bank Digital Currency

#145

Post by BitwiseFool »

Angostura wrote: post #142
KaiserPro wrote: post #30

I've not really understood the need for a "digital" pound, the pound is pretty digital already. I can already have an entirely digital bank account from at least three "challenger" banks. There are also now at least two business accounts that also entirely virtual. "Faster Payments" (customer bank transfers) are delivered in seconds. I can see a need for speeding up BACS, and reducing the price of CHAPS, but apart fr…

> A government isn't ever going to allow a normal citizen to have a anonymous payments system so I don't see them allowing a purely private and anonymous currency (ala-monero) Actually, the UK got pretty close to it in the 1990s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex

I don't know much about UK politics, but the government over there seems to adore surveillance and has no qualms with recording as much information as they possibly can. I simply don't see them accepting the idea of an anonymous payments system.

Re: Bank of England to explore a potential Central Bank Digital Currency

#146

Post by BayesianDice »

There's lots of speculation here on what the Bank of England means by a central bank digital currency (CBDC) - people may be interested in the more concrete indications of what the Bank is / has been considering in a discussion paper which they published in March 2020: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/paper/2020...

The chapter on Technology Design states "Although CBDC is often associated with Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT — see Box 5), we do not presume CBDC must be built using DLT. Most existing payment systems are run on centralised technology stacks, and there is no reason CBDC could not also be built this way. However, DLT includes a number of potentially highly useful innovations, which can potentially be adopted independently of each other, allowing us to use the specific features of DLT which are most relevant and appropriate, without using DLT in its entirety."

The paper also discusses the risk-free nature of the currency (compared to deposits held in a commercial bank where consumers in principle face credit risk if the bank defaults), resilience, and innovation. And it notes the interesting related questions of whether the CBDC would be interest-bearing, and to what extent consumers switching from commercial bank deposits to the CBDC would impact the commercial banking model (using deposits to fund lending).

Re: Bank of England to explore a potential Central Bank Digital Currency

#147

Post by TheBlight »

KaiserPro wrote: post #30

I've not really understood the need for a "digital" pound, the pound is pretty digital already. I can already have an entirely digital bank account from at least three "challenger" banks. There are also now at least two business accounts that also entirely virtual. "Faster Payments" (customer bank transfers) are delivered in seconds. I can see a need for speeding up BACS, and reducing the price of CHAPS, but apart fr…

>I've not really understood the need for a "digital" pound, the pound is pretty digital already.

The need isn't for the consumer. It's advantageous for the central bankers. With it they can more easily control demurrage/inflation/deflation/confiscation (like the Chinese government plans to do with the e-RMB).

Re: Bank of England to explore a potential Central Bank Digital Currency

#148

Post by iudqnolq »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #108
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems you and others are confused here and do not understand what is meant by "digital currency" You started of staying "currency is not digital", a broad statement about which I don't think there's any confusion, it's just flat-out incorrect. If it's not digital then what is it then, analogue? Now you're talking about a particular form of digital token, which OK, maybe currency isn't that, and the usefulness of…

Guys, please try to read about "digital currency" before writing snarky replies and downvoting. Currency is currently not digital in the sense meant here. Otherwise the BoE and other central banks would not discuss the possibility of issuing digital currency. It's rather the banks' ledgers and transfer instructions that are digital. In my previous comment I have only tried to explain what CBDC is. Perhaps I did not d…

> Currency is currently not digital in the sense meant here. Otherwise the BoE and other central banks would not discuss the possibility of issuing digital currency.

The alternative is of course that it's all meaningless hype. Just because the government does something doesn't necessarily prove it makes sense.

Re: Bank of England to explore a potential Central Bank Digital Currency

#149

Post by casi18 »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #82
casi18 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I now barely use my bank account, i get paid in dai, i pay others in dai. occasionally i have to move dai into fiat for bills. hopefully these central bank digital currencies help bridge that last step. i love it because i can write programs to move my money around. I can stream payments with https://sablier.finance i can lend and borrow with https://aave.com I get paid universal basic income each hour from https://w…

A lot of jurisdictions if everything goes wrong: https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ - exists since 2021-01-20 | whois unavailable | 1 Guy from Brazil on Github https://yearn.finance/ - exists since 2020 | Iceland https://sablier.finance - iceland https://app.pooltogether.com | canada https://alchemix.fi/ Charlestown? - France monolith.xyz | US No thanks. I'll keep everything through the bank in my country, which I can c…

Those are mostly just front ends (expect monolith which is just for visa, not a long term thing), I can make/host my own front ends for the protocols if i want.

e.g. the yearn dai vault address is 0x19D3364A399d251E894aC732651be8B0E4e85001 i can call the functions at that address via my own node with my own code if i want to.

It isn't in a jurisdiction, no-one else is responsible for my money but me. That comes with risk sure, but it also comes with liberty. They are decentralized applications and I can always opt out and move somewhere else. I can take their code for their financial application, fork it and re-deploy my own version under my central control if i wanted too. Imagine forking a HSBC savings account. It is wild and crazy. Some people don't like that. I love it.

You can feel free to do as you like. A lot of the interest in crypto is that if these tools allow people to coordinate and communicate more effectively than the old tools, then they will come to replace them. If it works as we imagine then you may end up using it and not even knowing.

Re: Bank of England to explore a potential Central Bank Digital Currency

#150

Post by corobo »

StavrosK wrote: post #39
corobo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness Bitcoin wasn't designed by committee and it's up there with CFCs in how much of a detriment it is to the environment

Bitcoin uses energy. Energy is a detriment to the environment, but it doesn't have to be. The problem isn't the energy usage, the problem is that we're bad at generating energy without killing the planet.

Ok so turn the safe generators on then

Until then I feel my point stands

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