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Digital Money Across Borders: Macro-Financial Implications

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Re: Digital Money Across Borders: Macro-Financial Implications

#31
post #8

I find it interesting that the paper focusses on Central Bank Digital Currencies and Global Stablecoins, but pretends not to see/prefers not to deal with the elephant in the room - Bitcoin. If anything is a candidate for a potential Reserve Currency, BTC is it, imho. Deep in the footnotes comes the contorted logic," According to the IMF Treatment of Crypto Assets in Macroeconomic Statistics, crypto assets such as Bit…

If Central Banks were to get into Bitcoin, they would make early investors in Bitcoin very rich. Like 1 person would own 25% of all the world's wealth.

That wouldn't be proper Central Banking :)

Re: Digital Money Across Borders: Macro-Financial Implications

#32
post #8

I find it interesting that the paper focusses on Central Bank Digital Currencies and Global Stablecoins, but pretends not to see/prefers not to deal with the elephant in the room - Bitcoin. If anything is a candidate for a potential Reserve Currency, BTC is it, imho. Deep in the footnotes comes the contorted logic," According to the IMF Treatment of Crypto Assets in Macroeconomic Statistics, crypto assets such as Bit…

The USA is super strict on making sure every transaction they can control gets monitored and tracked. Any financial firm that touches dollars must comply or they'll get fined literally billions. There is no way BTC will be allowed to go mainstream unless the US regulators can track every user on the blockchain.

Re: Digital Money Across Borders: Macro-Financial Implications

#33

We already have a digital Euro/Dollar/Yen, just look at the banking app on your phone or the transactions you do with a bank or credit card. But I'm very scared to see what those digital wallets for CBDC will turn into. If central banks get control over money flows they can do horrible stuff: * set a maximum limit on the amount of money you are allowed to have/save in your CBDC wallet. * give you an x amount of money…

They are unlikely I think to put more restrictions on central bank digital currency than they do on regular fiat currency. Though those are getting worse - I just got a demand from a brokers of proof of "sources of wealth' ie. where my money came from, which is the first time that has happened in 40 years of having banks accs & stocks. How many people have documentary proof of how they got money 35 years ago - in my case? And that's not because I'm dodgy - IB UK are doing it for all customers - coming to a financial institution serving you soon probably.

Re: Digital Money Across Borders: Macro-Financial Implications

#34
post #25
post #20

I was in many crypto presentations during the 2018 BTC rise. The crypto-anarchists (left and right leaning) were getting their spotlight and laying out their "dream". Basically an updated version of Kropotkin's and Bakunin's work for the blockchain-era. I really don't get what is the hate with the central banks getting control over the money. Yes they are not appointed by the Government but it does not matter, the mo…

Look, there was a gold-pegged currency without any digital equivalent, all in the form of untraceable cash. It was, for instance, the US dollar as late as 50 years ago. Back in 1950s people in the US were economically secure at currently unbelievable levels. Or, say, 100-120 years ago the US experienced colossal economic growth, while levels of inequality were lower than today's. I would rather posit that central ban…

Statists forget that insane monetary policy and extreme wealth inequality happened under their own fiat banking system. We are in a debt-based world where savers are punished for trying to improve their lives. It’s absurd.

Re: Digital Money Across Borders: Macro-Financial Implications

#35
post #32
post #8

I find it interesting that the paper focusses on Central Bank Digital Currencies and Global Stablecoins, but pretends not to see/prefers not to deal with the elephant in the room - Bitcoin. If anything is a candidate for a potential Reserve Currency, BTC is it, imho. Deep in the footnotes comes the contorted logic," According to the IMF Treatment of Crypto Assets in Macroeconomic Statistics, crypto assets such as Bit…

The USA is super strict on making sure every transaction they can control gets monitored and tracked. Any financial firm that touches dollars must comply or they'll get fined literally billions. There is no way BTC will be allowed to go mainstream unless the US regulators can track every user on the blockchain.

It becomes an asset that eats dollars. Print more dollars and BTC goes up. Just like gold sits in vaults, Bitcoin can sit in cold storage.

BTC is also something that individuals can buy in extremely small increments. It is an escape valve for people in Argentina, Turkey, Venezuela, etc. to protect their wealth from horrible and corrupt central bankers.

Re: Digital Money Across Borders: Macro-Financial Implications

#36
post #4

We already have a digital Euro/Dollar/Yen, just look at the banking app on your phone or the transactions you do with a bank or credit card. But I'm very scared to see what those digital wallets for CBDC will turn into. If central banks get control over money flows they can do horrible stuff: * set a maximum limit on the amount of money you are allowed to have/save in your CBDC wallet. * give you an x amount of money…

Attach those digital wallets to biometrics and just like that, we have the nightmare to which you are alluding. Going against the zeigeist again but if something gets pushed onto us for something silly like "pandemic preparedness" or "contact & trace" like 9/11 has brought onto us...that offers identity management that can be expanded into a system like this... If that happens, can we please stop pretending like some…

Thank you. Check out this recent AMA from a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University: https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/jcxsb1/...

Re: Digital Money Across Borders: Macro-Financial Implications

#37
post #8

I find it interesting that the paper focusses on Central Bank Digital Currencies and Global Stablecoins, but pretends not to see/prefers not to deal with the elephant in the room - Bitcoin. If anything is a candidate for a potential Reserve Currency, BTC is it, imho. Deep in the footnotes comes the contorted logic," According to the IMF Treatment of Crypto Assets in Macroeconomic Statistics, crypto assets such as Bit…

> Why the aversion? Students of central banking are familiar with central banking in the era of gold and why it was almost universally a disaster. (Most of Bagehot [1] concerns itself with bank runs.) This paper’s audience is familiar with that history. Talking about Bitcoin would be like addressing why machine language wasn’t used in a CS paper. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lombard_Street:_A_Descriptio...

I doubt if anything made changed since the era of gold, just sizes of economies went up dramatically, more common people are banked, and there are more option to do bank run against.

Gold [https://goldprice.org/charts/history/gold_6_month_o_usd_x.pn...] is of course one of them, but costs of many other liquid commodities have shot up counterintuitively this time as well.

There is nothing "magical" that has happened to banks when they switched to fiat money.

Re: Digital Money Across Borders: Macro-Financial Implications

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that all of that is already more or less the case with the central banking system as we have it now: negative interest rates, money only insured up to 100k per person in EU bank accounts, massive decrease in buying power (look at the price of real estate/gold/crypto expressed in EUR/USD over the past 10 years), Dutch citizens pay "capital tax" over any capital over some 30k EUR (literally: spend it or w…

to be fair, crypto purchases have a high incidence of chargeback fraud. this is expensive for banks. edit: i chuckled at the little britain reference :)

The risk of charge backs for banks is not really a good argument, charge backs for SEPA (eurozone) transfers initiated by the account holder himself are not a thing that exist as far as I know. You can't reverse a small erroneous transfer if you initiated it as the account holder (in contrast with credit card payments in the US for example).

Furthermore, I'm not exactly the first person to buy crypto through the largest crypto exchange in the world (Coinbase) with such a Portuguese bank account. They know this Coinbase bank account, they know what it's for (buying crypto) and they know it's not a scam.

Re: Digital Money Across Borders: Macro-Financial Implications

#39
post #22
post #8

I find it interesting that the paper focusses on Central Bank Digital Currencies and Global Stablecoins, but pretends not to see/prefers not to deal with the elephant in the room - Bitcoin. If anything is a candidate for a potential Reserve Currency, BTC is it, imho. Deep in the footnotes comes the contorted logic," According to the IMF Treatment of Crypto Assets in Macroeconomic Statistics, crypto assets such as Bit…

BTC has no benefit over central counterparty clearing and settlement. Even if the technology would adapt cryptographic ledgers, there is no reason to use another currency for that. You use sovereign currencies as before.

Obviously, if you are a user of the currency and don't want it to be inflated by the central bank, there's at least one thing in bitcoin's favor, as it has a fixed maximum supply.

You can argue that's a bad thing if you want, but just ignoring that it exists doesn't make much sense.

Re: Digital Money Across Borders: Macro-Financial Implications

#40
post #8

I find it interesting that the paper focusses on Central Bank Digital Currencies and Global Stablecoins, but pretends not to see/prefers not to deal with the elephant in the room - Bitcoin. If anything is a candidate for a potential Reserve Currency, BTC is it, imho. Deep in the footnotes comes the contorted logic," According to the IMF Treatment of Crypto Assets in Macroeconomic Statistics, crypto assets such as Bit…

What I love about the Bitcoin enthusiasts is how they picture it to be the be all/end all magical money that will solve everything Meanwhile the real big money-movers (legal or illegal) are still using bank accounts and paper companies in "business-friendly" jurisdictions.

The "market" is always active and always looking to select the best of everything, including money. Bitcoin isn't be-all/end-all magical money - but it is a massive, order-of-magnitude improvement on history's greatest "hard money" (gold). The markets of the world are slowly coming to understand the value of this "best reserve asset and best collateral asset ever seen" (Raoul Pal).

A new digital, internet-native asset with the greatest monetary properties in history is monetizing before your eyes; meanwhile you're relying on your understanding of an old world to convince yourself it doesn't matter and the people who see something deeply interesting are kooks.

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