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Bank of England to explore a potential Central Bank Digital Currency

bankofengland.co.uk

181–190 of 277 posts

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

#181
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just no. Hard money is not desirable. Whatever comes out of this "the country's money supply should be determined by some cryptobros" is not going to be the result.

Agreed. The money supply should be flexible to help alleviate the effects of inevitable financial crashes. This of course devalues the savings of the average person when this happens, but it's the only way to recover from mistakes like the mortgage bubble.

Better than a system in which there are no tools to deal with such problems, and in which monetary supply causes a constraint on the economy, rewarding those who simply hold the currency rather than the productive or investors.

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

#182
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But you're using all sort of things which i already have access to.

I wouldn't want all my money on a platform with "risks", for something i already have.

Could be fun, doesn't make it useful though.

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

#183
post #62

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…

The important distinction is that currently all cashless payment systems are privately run for profit which is effectively a regressive transaction tax.

Yes, instead let's have a government payment system with funds expiration date.

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

#184

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).

I would imagine this could lead to interesting changes in how people are taxed.

IE taxes based on savings instead of income.

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

#185

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…

Likewise, explain how it works securely in fewer than 20000 words to a non-mathematician. that's what people mean by currency. ;-)

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment was about enabling micropayments, not the proper price for a song. Forest for the trees...

I guess I'm more wondering what possible value such a tiny micropayment could be. There's no conceivable business that would charge in such small increments. Even an average ad impression is more than a penny. In fact, things are heading the other way, with "micro"-transactions in mainstream games sometimes exceeding the price of the game itself.

Spotify for example pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream [0]

In the music business u don't make money on each song, you only make oney from hit songs.

That song streamed 10 million times can earn you $50k. And it could be more if spotify wasn't taking a bite out of it.

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-does-spotify-pay-pe...

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

#187

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 very unlikely to be what any central bank entities mean by digital currency.

Open Banking is not available to individuals by design. Can you imagine the fraud levels if it was?

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

#188
I'm curious what is the situation in the UK with regards to the universalness of banking services, especially electronic ones. .

In the US we have a large portion of the population that is "unbanked" for a varaity of reasons and have to rely on sketchy and scam financial services like those prepaid debit and credit cards and "check cashing places".

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

#189

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 Distri…

This is a key point. CBDCs have no intrinsic overlap with blockchain or crypto currencies. You could use a blockchain as part or all of the strategy for storing the data of your currency but you could do it without using these concepts at all. The more likely scenario here is that blockchains will not be used here.

People should not confuse CBDCs with crypto. They are unrelated concepts.

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

#190

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).

I would imagine this could lead to interesting changes in how people are taxed. IE taxes based on savings instead of income.

Digital currency makes negative interest rates possible, which is either exciting or terrifying depending on your view.
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