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Bank of England and Treasury think UK is 'likely' to need digital currency

reuters.com

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Re: Bank of England and Treasury think UK is 'likely' to need digital currency

#51

Post by namaria »

nmca wrote: post #3

A huge proportion of crypto projects by count and an embarrassing proportion by market cap are scams. Nonetheless, I really hope someone cracks the remaining crypto issues (scalability, identity, ux, anonymity, governance protocols) well enough to provide sufficiently stable infrastructure for gvts to bootstrap off instead of rolling their own. I worry about the centralization of power otherwise.

All these issues have been solved already by the banking system. It's remarkable how people who believe in cryptocurrencies as a silver bullet cannot see they are just re-implementing an existing system, and stumbling upon all the problems we already solved for as a society, without adding anything of value. Yes, it's automated and abstract and makes you feel smart.

The fundamental problem here is that a clean slate favors the most powerful players.

Re: Bank of England and Treasury think UK is 'likely' to need digital currency

#52

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

namaria wrote: post #42
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will be much easier to track and control how we spend our money Will be? will in future ? The majority of my GBP transactions are digital already - they are not pieces of paper with picture of the late Queen changing hands, they are database records, mediated by a "buy" button in the web browser, or the tap of a card onto a reader. The currency is mostly digital, already.

Yeah, over distributed databases controlled by multiple competing entities. With a single system under the government's purview, it's orders of magnitude easier for any government agency to get that data consolidated.

> it's orders of magnitude easier for any government agency to get that data consolidated.

I don't buy that; if the government (UK or otherwise) wanted a consolidated view of all transactions (at what stage: acquired, captured or cleared ?) then they could get it from a low double-digit number of sources.

Building their own payments processing system is hard, perhaps as hard as getting feeds from all of those.

Re: Bank of England and Treasury think UK is 'likely' to need digital currency

#53

Post by alchemist1e9 »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #18
burlesona wrote: post #4

Interesting topic but there’s not much in the article beyond the headline. The only given rationale is that the BoE might need to issue a digital currency or else “Big Tech” might end up “controlling money.” Perhaps there’s a better article with more insight, but from this alone I get the feeling this is may just be politicians creating pork for consultants.

I work in a sort of tangential field, and know a lot of people who are involved with digital currency related public policy. The governments motives for taking an interest in this are basically the exact opposite of the motives of decentralized digital currency proponents. Decentralized digital currency offers the potential for increased anonymity, and a lack of central control/regulation/oversight/ect… Centralized d…

The ultimate irony will be the harder governments try to push CBDCs the more they will increase demand for Bitcoin. Which sounds like better money: 1. money that can expire. be tracked 100% and censored. be auto taxed. auto inflated. or 2. money that has limited supply. is permission-less and uncensored. and no single party can control.

It’s the ultimate foolishness of governments to believe the will win that competition. That leads to the proposal they try to ban the 2nd type, but yet again, ironically, that will only increase the demand for it.

Re: Bank of England and Treasury think UK is 'likely' to need digital currency

#54

Post by namaria »

vagabund wrote: post #47
namaria wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, a government with unlimited capacity for raising taxes will just expand its scope indefinitely.

Even considering the Laffer curve, no government today has tax rates at what empirical analysis suggests would be revenue maximizing, so not sure this is true.

> no government today has tax rates at what empirical analysis suggests would be revenue maximizing

Because of all the friction in raising taxes on a cash based system. That's the whole point.

Re: Bank of England and Treasury think UK is 'likely' to need digital currency

#55

Post by vagabund »

namaria wrote: post #54
vagabund wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even considering the Laffer curve, no government today has tax rates at what empirical analysis suggests would be revenue maximizing, so not sure this is true.

> no government today has tax rates at what empirical analysis suggests would be revenue maximizing Because of all the friction in raising taxes on a cash based system. That's the whole point.

What? No, the Laffer curve already describes that. And best approximations of the rate at which the incentive to shirk taxes is so high as to lower total revenue are nowhere near where rates sit now, basically everywhere.

Re: Bank of England and Treasury think UK is 'likely' to need digital currency

#56

Post by alchemist1e9 »

cbeach wrote: post #7

> Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak asked the BoE to look into the case for a CBDC in 2021 when he was finance minister Rishi’s father in law is founder of Infosys. I just checked infosys.com. Their lead headline was “What’s next for U.K. Public Sector Digital Services” https://www.infosys.com/uk/public-sector/insights/digital-go... The U.K. public doesn’t need a CBDC. Those of us who’ve seen the sinister conseque…

> Those of us who’ve seen the sinister consequences of CBDCs in China are vehemently against them.

What, if any, change in opinion on Bitcoin, would you you say those people have had after seeing those sinister consequences?

Re: Bank of England and Treasury think UK is 'likely' to need digital currency

#57

Post by worik »

I have read all the comments here (always a pleasure)

People's greatest fear seems to be control by the state

I fear that too, but I fear private power more.

Private power is accountable to none but the owners. Where I live the state can be held politically accountable. It is an imperfect system, and we the people are forever contesting control of the state with private power, but we have agency in that struggle

Private power is much more scary now

Re: Bank of England and Treasury think UK is 'likely' to need digital currency

#59

Post by motohagiography »

A CBDC is merely a tool of oppression. It needs to be said, and it is wrong to allow their collaborators in media and politics to act surprised when the oppressiveness of the scheme is revealed. I think that governments have mostly given up on the polite fiction that they serve their citizenry, and their logic today comes down to the minimum coalition necessary to maintain their seat of power. A computational currency reduces that coalition to a tiny oligarchy.

The progress of CBDC's will likely rhyme a lot with the origins of Facebook and Linkedin, where there was open aggression and campaigns to discredit people who declined to adopt them, and today there are people on social media, and those who are not. Vaccine passports revealed the ugly and hysteria prone sadism of ostensibly normal people, and while nobody is perfect, these cetralizing technologies elevate the absolute worst aspects of human behavior as they compete to climb over one another to ingratiate themselves with compliance to it.

Re: Bank of England and Treasury think UK is 'likely' to need digital currency

#60

Post by AmericanChopper »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #53
AmericanChopper wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in a sort of tangential field, and know a lot of people who are involved with digital currency related public policy. The governments motives for taking an interest in this are basically the exact opposite of the motives of decentralized digital currency proponents. Decentralized digital currency offers the potential for increased anonymity, and a lack of central control/regulation/oversight/ect… Centralized d…

The ultimate irony will be the harder governments try to push CBDCs the more they will increase demand for Bitcoin. Which sounds like better money: 1. money that can expire. be tracked 100% and censored. be auto taxed. auto inflated. or 2. money that has limited supply. is permission-less and uncensored. and no single party can control. It’s the ultimate foolishness of governments to believe the will win that competi…

> It’s the ultimate foolishness of governments to believe the will win that competition.

I don’t think it’s foolishness at all. The government today has much more power than it did when I was a child. When did anybody ever succeed in reversing this trend? This type of regulation is perfectly poised for success as well, as most people will be unaffected by it, and most people won’t even have any motive to understand the concepts involved. The big financial players don’t really care either, because their roll in the system isn’t really threatened by most of this.

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