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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

#171

Post by nexuist »

suprfsat wrote: post #165
rahimnathwani wrote: post #163

A bunch of comments in this thread claim that the pound is already digital, because you can send and receive pounds using a mobile app or online banking. But these transactions simply transfer obligations (debts) denominated in pounds between parties. They are not operations on actual pounds (i.e. on the central bank currency). You can trade 'pork bellies futures' quickly, and using nothing but a computer. But no one…

Are British bank accounts not FDIC insured?

Does the FDIC cover any other country's banks than the US?

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

#172

Post by jollybean »

jfjfntntkt wrote: post #72
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…

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…

"That's what people mean by digital currency."

So often not though. Money without oversight will instantly attract the most nefarious users that governments don't like, so it's unlikely anything a government would propose is going to very easily allow things to happen without some kind of regulatory control.

It's hard to fathom exactly what the point would be, because even the benefit of reducing VISA style transaction taxes from the current 2.5% to about 0.1% (which is where it should be) would incur the wrath of the institutions that make money from that and sponsor centre-right politicians in the UK.

It's too early to tell, it could just be a political football for now, something to talk about, get attention, distract us etc..

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

#173

Post by aww_dang »

bobthepanda wrote: post #161
TheBlight wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

How is it different from what we currently have, assuming that digital pounds/dollars/whatevers are convertible with existing currency? Is existing currency not issued digitally? When central banks issue cash now are they literally sending billions of dollars to the mint, trucking it off to a bank, and then the bank records it on a digital ledger? Seems wasteful.

It is about giving more control to central bankers.

Going fully cashless will make negative rates impossible to avoid. UBI can be more specifically targeted as well.

Generally speaking, the money supply exceeds the total amount of cash in most countries.

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

#174

Post by aww_dang »

yunesj wrote: post #162
rvense wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also just a control thing. When private enterprises control (and create) money, they will do so based on their own interests. These might not align with the best interests of society at large.

Is it really your experience that the market fails to cater to the interests of the people, and politicians are uniquely capable of it? Politicians can’t print a dollar without abusing it to promote religion (“In God We Trust”), funding war, or handing it out to get reelected.

Removing "payable to the bearer on demand" seems especially relevant.

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

#175

Post by pessimizer »

jollybean wrote: post #172
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…

"That's what people mean by digital currency." So often not though. Money without oversight will instantly attract the most nefarious users that governments don't like, so it's unlikely anything a government would propose is going to very easily allow things to happen without some kind of regulatory control. It's hard to fathom exactly what the point would be, because even the benefit of reducing VISA style transacti…

Why would the money have no oversight? It would have complete oversight.

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

#176

Post by pessimizer »

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…

There's no difference between this and the transfers I can do on my bank's website. If anything, having a government crypto account would mean that the government would know who was on both ends of every transaction made through it, and could trivially reverse payments.

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

#177

Post by tim333 »

Mauricebranagh wrote: post #138
tim333 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the British Sovereign with a nominal value of a pound an an actual value of about £320 judging by ebay https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524...

Because a Sov is actual currency you don't pay VAT and CGT doesn't apply.

Cool.

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

#178

Post by pessimizer »

300bps wrote: post #77
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…

What happens if the person you send the money to doesn’t deliver? What happens if someone compromises your account and sends all of your money away fraudulently? These are just two basic things that the current financial system deals with thousands of times per day. And what about fees? BTC, ETH and many other coins are essentially unusable for smaller transactions. Sending .02 ETH (about $45) from my MEW wallet cost…

Any government crypto wouldn't be a clone of bitcoin. It wouldn't place any importance on anonymity, untraceability, or immutability (quite the opposite.) There's absolutely no doubt that there would be massive controls over any international payments.

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

#179

Post by gm3dmo »

We've seen this kind of technology in search of a problem before in the UK and specifically with cryptocurrency:

http://www.open.ac.uk/research/news/blockchain-startup-calle...

This was sold as: our bitcoin/govcoin solution will keep people from being evicted from their homes because banks take 3 days to pay. Which if you spent 15 minutes looking into you would find out it's a total nonsense.

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

#180

Post by Nursie »

casi18 wrote: post #60
RichEO wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be over estimating the overlap between the FOSS/Linux community and the crytobro community - at least as it exists in 2021

I think HN repeatedly underestimates the overlap of these communities. FOSS ideology is critical in pretty much all crypto/defi projects.I can probably pick any dev in the space and they'll most likely be running linux. HN refuses to change its collective position it settled on a decade ago. It seems people here got stuck on some abstract projections of "crypto-capitalism-cruelty" and refuse to admit there might be s…

The problem with that is that there doesn’t seem to be anything interesting going on, beyond speculative hyper-capitalism. All the problems crypto was going to solve were illusory, or crypto was not a useful tool in solving them. Instead we’ve had years and years of hype and bubbles and solution-looking-for-a-problem but nothing much of any practical value.

“Move fast and break things” now has a bad rap too in much of society - it turns out not everyone wants their things broken, and some of that stuff was useful. The world is not as in-love with the output of Silicon Valley startups as it used to be, having seen some of them play out.

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