Comment by centimeter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by centimeter | Hacker News Reader

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> If digital currency becomes really successful then it will eventually put Visa out of business.

Not really - there don't exist any digital currencies that A) have desirable economic/security properties B) can scale to billions of users and C) have a UX that's accessible to unsophisticated users.

Visa's role in a Bitcoin-based economy is probably providing custodial wallets, Lightning payment routing, etc.

> the ability to transfer ... should be a fundamental right and core function of government

The government has historically done a pretty bad job of this (which is why 99.9% of consumer payments go through private systems).

Why would I want the government to manage this when we know how to do this well without a government involved? What's the benefit of using FedCoin over using something decentralized with good monetary properties?

> I think for government to stay relevant then it needs to start to encompass more distributed protocols. To the degree that it fails to do so then I think it loses relevance.

This is an oxymoron - if a protocol is distributed, it inherently obviates the need for governmental management.

This is a good read of the market and I agree with most of your points.

If you're saying the government shouldn't be innovating in the digital currency space or if the impact would be negligible due to feasibility or some other issue, I'd strongly disagree.

> What's the benefit of using FedCoin over using something decentralized with good monetary properties?

The government and existing banking systems are the actors with the largest degree of potential impact for any currency solution in the next 30 years. This solution doesn't necessarily need Bitcoin-like decentralization by any means to solve real problems with real innovative solutions.

To me, Bitcoin has proven itself limited to only a speculative store of value solution and has failed to deliver impactful, broadly felt impact. Any product based on Bitcoin will inheritly suffer a limited upside due to this. This is where the difference is for the existing entities, the central banks, domestic banking networks, financial intermediaries - unlimited upside.

"Why would I want the government to manage this when we know how to do this well without a government involved? What's the benefit of using FedCoin over using something decentralized with good monetary properties?"

Fed coin would be in fact very useful for the government itself... not sure if you have some understanding of the latest 2008 crisis and how the fed address the issue but there are many shortcomings in the solution proposed that would be easily addressed with a government backed digital currency. The main one would be , in my opinion, to be able to manage more efficiently money lent to banks. At that time the banks received a lot of money from the fed with the hope that the this money would be use to increase the loans ( and so the economy). However, banks were not very keen to follow that inventive and did not lend as expected. The point in having a digital currency would have let the fed to reward (with a lowest rates) banks playing the game. This just one example I have on the top of my mind right now, but I'm sure we can find others advantages.

>The government has historically done a pretty bad job of this...

I'd say the government is _currently_ doing a bad job of this. Historically, at least in the 1000+ years prior to the advent of digital payments, governments did a great job of facilitating uncensorable peer-to-peer payments by minting various types of currency (commodity, fiat or otherwise) that people could subsequently trade how they saw fit. It seems plausible to me that the last 100 years of private-organisation facilitated transfers is ultimately revealed to be an anomaly.

There are actually but probably you haven't used them. But that's not the point. It's just a matter of time that some digital currency will satisfy all your demands.

Name some.

Dyor

I have. I'm waiting for you to name some shitcoins you think meet the criteria I mentioned so I can dunk on you.

You need to look into what makes you a hater to some technology

Your reading of my comment was disingenuous.

I said "eventually".. I did not say it was ready to do that in the current state.

As I said, the government has done a bad job so far.. I suggested a new paradigm.

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