141–150 of 190 posts
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It depends on how Congress writes the law that would enable CDBC. They could simply copy & paste the existing laws regarding banking privacy, e.g., RFPA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Financial_Privacy_Act
As if the FISA courts wouldn't be employed to circumvent any constraints placed on the system by congress.
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>I haven't seen any real-world evidence that high levels of individual firearm ownership correlate with the preservation of liberty and democracy. Kurds in Northern Syria.
US military is occupying Northern Syria, it isn't just Kurds fighting the government on their own
>US military is occupying
US military has presence and has engaged in (importantly) air support, but to call it "occupying" all the Kurdish territory is an intentional I think misrepresentation. It's hilarious that anyone would call it "occupying" when the boots on the ground were minimal to almost non-existent. I really don't need to go off these ignorant statements when I bore witness to what was happening with my own eyes, but I'm sure you know more from whatever you read on the internet.
Many people on HN claim that the rise of crypto-currencies is a social catastrophe. Maybe so (I disagree), but wait until central-bank issued digital currencies become a reality, you'll very quickly learn the real meaning of social catastrophe. Spending 10 seconds thinking about it, I can come up with the following scenarios: - complete and utter "financial deplatforming" if you don't behave as a citizen. This is bas…
This is overwhelming one-sided... Why CBDC is good: - Efficiency: much of the legacy financial institutions are no longer needed in current form (going as far as the Fed and IRS). Opportunity to reform finance as a whole and remove legacy waste. - Fraud detection: money laundering and financial crime becomes very difficult to hide - Observability: much better data & insight into economic trends - Security: Infra bein…
Fraud detection: I'd be very concerned about false positives here.
Observability: forcing everyone to opt into a financial panopticon will have unintended consequences.
Security: we really struggle to hold any organization accountable. Public organizations are not magic, was anyone held accountable for solarwinds? The office of personnel management? If anything holding public entities accountable is even more difficult then private entities because of politics.
Responsiveness: The ability will be there, will it be used effectively or responsibly?
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Good list, and I'd add something crazy sounding to the long list of potential nightmare problems with some kind of future centralized digital currency: forced spending through expiring money. Keynesian economists that dominate a lot of official politics have a hard-on for viewing consumption as the root of all goodness and prosperity. In the midst of a future economic crisis with a central digital currency, it would…
inflation is literally expiring money. I guess the difference is you could expire some but not all money, but what's to keep me from spending my expiring money on equity or something?
If their goal was to spur consumption, they could block some types of investment from some or all people at any random time.
We already have different legal classes of investors based on wealth: you effectively need at least 25K in a broker to be able to day-trade, and the requirements to get a designation of accredited investor are even more substantial.
It would make it trivial to assign different rights based on wealth in a digital system and use it to enforce policy.
It’s an authoritarian’s dream.
"In our design users interact with a central transaction processor using digital wallets storing cryptographic keys. ... Despite using ideas from blockchain technology, we found that a distributed ledger operating under the jurisdiction of different actors was not needed to achieve our goals. Specifically, a distributed ledger does not match the trust assumptions in Project Hamilton's approach, which assumes that the…
Reading Matt Levine's latest column on this CBDC was sort of mind blowing. With a truly centralized digital currency the Fed would basically monopolize all bank deposits (why store money in the bank at all when your digital wallet is perfectly safe) and destroy the entire banking sector. So they are forced to decentralize the currency to some extent, so that banks are the ones to actually issue the currency (after bo…
Because banks lend the money out, earn revenue from that, and thereby pay you interest. Banks aren't vaults; they are money circulation machines. Their business is finding the best investments, which creates efficiency in allocation of capital in the economy.
i was wondering ... what if we circulate coin infinitely to harass central system? like keep exchanging coin between A and B. Can we halt entire system down?
Many people on HN claim that the rise of crypto-currencies is a social catastrophe. Maybe so (I disagree), but wait until central-bank issued digital currencies become a reality, you'll very quickly learn the real meaning of social catastrophe. Spending 10 seconds thinking about it, I can come up with the following scenarios: - complete and utter "financial deplatforming" if you don't behave as a citizen. This is bas…
We already have all of this. The government can tell your bank to do something, and your bank will do it. What a government digital currency would do is end the subsidy of banks as the only "safe" place to park money. If I have a government account with my money, banks don't get to gamble with it for their own benefit. If I want to do that, I could withdraw the cash from where it is safe and consciously put it at ris…
You can park your money safely anyway, just buy a vault. There are even specialized bank accounts where they just store you money and don't lend it out.
However, you won't earn any interest, and thus will lose opportunity cost and also lose value as cash inflates.
Additionally, the money that banks lend is critical to the economy - which includes your job and the general welfare - like water to a person. If banks stop lending - if all that money gets put in a vault - businesses and citizes lose access to money to develop things and we get talented people and valuable resources sitting dormant, a depression.
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History hasn't been kind to either of Jefferson's opinions in that sentence. The US did abolish the central bank for a while and nothing good happened as a result. Also, military coups are a problem in many countries, but not the US.
Nothing good has happened after central banking was established either. It's been one financial crisis after another. Also fun fact - back when the US had private currencies, people WILLINGLY preferred to use them despite a gov currency existing. It is only after the government passed high taxes on these currencies(ie having to pay tax for each transaction to exchange them) that they went out of favor. If they were r…
That's not what happened. After the Great Depression, we have not had any crises matching was a a regular cycle before then.
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History hasn't been kind to either of Jefferson's opinions in that sentence. The US did abolish the central bank for a while and nothing good happened as a result. Also, military coups are a problem in many countries, but not the US.
> History hasn't been kind to either of Jefferson's opinions in that sentence...military coups are a problem in many countries, but not the US. In fairness, if Jefferson had his way, there wouldn't be much of a military around to plot a coup in the first place. He'd also be considered a staunch non-interventionist were he alive today - "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations and entangling alliances…
That was the general approach of the United States until ~ the early 20th century. Before that, the 'standing' military was generally tiny, the employer of last resort (criminals, drunks, etc.), and was greatly expanded by volunteers in times of warfare.
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History hasn't been kind to either of Jefferson's opinions in that sentence. The US did abolish the central bank for a while and nothing good happened as a result. Also, military coups are a problem in many countries, but not the US.
> military coups are a problem in many countries, but not the US I wonder why