Comment by bboygravity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bboygravity | Hacker News Reader

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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 we tax you).

About the whitelists? Already the case. My bank account in Portugal just got frozen 2 days ago for trying to buy crypto through Coinbase (we're talking about less than 100 EUR transaction here). This involved transferring money to an Estonian account, which according to support is "a blacklisted country" (even though it's an EU member state and an attractive European country for tech related businesses). I tried transferring money from my other EU fintech bank accounts which worked perfectly fine and almost instantly (so the blacklist excuse is bs). I still can't access my funds in that account 2 days later. Computer says no. Support can't help. I'm strongly suspecting this has nothing to do with Estonia and everything to do with banks not liking crypto.

So for everybody who wonders what problems crypto currencies are solving? Well, there ya go...

The difference, is that the CBDC will be even more centralized. To control currency flows requires the participation of many separate entities. With this new 'digital money' it requires only the participation of those who control the blockchain. ie political policy can be achieved programmatically, by having complete control over all currency transactions in a nation. This is very different from the status quo. It should be noted that cash will soon be eliminated.

The potential for abuse here is enormous. If you think shadow banning is problematic from a free speech perspective. Imagine being silently shadow banned from your local grocery store. Imagine not being able to donate to a particular cause/political party. Imagine not being able to give a friend in need financial support because their social score is too low.

People have no actual freedom without economic freedom, and this system will create a sword of Damocles that will hang over each and every person.

> People have no actual freedom without economic freedom, and this system will create a sword of Damocles that will hang over each and every person.

You cannot use technology to fix a people (in this case, political) problem. Codify your rights in statute and executive governance authority. Using a distributed ledger ain't gonna fix your laws and courts.

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.

They could easily decline a single card payment instead of suspending the whole account.

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