Comment by jefftechentin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jefftechentin | Hacker News Reader

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> The money itself is programmable. Beijing has tested expiration dates to encourage users to spend it quickly, for times when the economy needs a jump start.

Yikes, that is a lot of power. Been an ideological Bitcoin holder/gold bug/physical cash fan for quite some time now. The sophisticated mechanisms that Central Banks have to control the economy/money seems dangerous in shortsighted democracies, and nightmarish in more authoritarian states.

No anonymity in financial transactions makes it easier to catch drug dealers and tax evaders. The ability to control the money supply will keep the economy healthy (theoretically). Only problem is the ability of communities/individuals to economically resist national governments is so thoroughly squashed that citizens are turned into subjects when the nations elites decide subjugation is a good idea.

Dirty secret of politics is that rights become inalienable in the same way boxers become champions. By winning a lot of fights.

If I believed in crypto, a digital currency controlled by a government seems exactly like the wrong answer.

How is this materially different from the system we already have?

US dollars are just rows in a distributed database. The database is distributed over a network of banking nodes. The network is highly concentrated [1], and its super-nodes are already very difficult to distinguish from government in anything but a formal legal sense.

Insofar as I can tell, a digital currency would be the same thing as government saying "banks need to provide unrestricted access to their networks" which has basically happened already.

[1] https://www.ffiec.gov/npw/Institution/TopHoldings

It is not a Gov currency

What about if the citizens of each democratic nation voted to join other nations using the same blockchain?

First, that's irrelevant to the discussion here, which is China's digital currency. The citizens of China are not going to be given the chance to vote for any such thing.

Second, even if what you say comes to pass, so what? If I'm into crypto because of independence from governments, how does what you're suggesting make me any more interested in using that currency?

Because of the pitfalls of Bitcoin and because of the value that comes from trusted centralized services; just because there are existing problems with current governments doesn't mean the ideal or best solution is disregarding them and creating/supporting a wildwest situation.

The idea of expiring money is more than a century old, and has been tried on a small scale in a few municipalities ("stamped money").

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/08/27/754323652/the-...

I am not arguing that expiring currency is unprecedented. Further, I am aware governments have had control over the money supply for thousands of years.

Main thing that worries me is the sophistication of the control. What I do not want is all economical activity to be corralled into a financial system where states/bankers can see every transaction, take your assets at a key press, and destroy your savings.

State backed currencies seem like a good idea, so do legal alternatives and anonymous payment options like physical cash.

I'm not taking a position, just adding context.

Reminded me of how, from my understanding, citizens of China don't own their property when they buy a 900 sqft condo for $900k minimum - they're just getting a 70 year lease on it; built in scarcity with no real chance for citizens to increase their own or their familial wealth - unless you're in the CCP hierarchy of course.

Same is true for Singapore, you buy effectively a 99 year lease that gradually returns to the government.

It's actually a pretty brilliant policy that strikes a good middle-ground between giving individuals stake in the country without losing sight of the public interest to maintain control of land ownership.

This sort of combination between state control and individual ownership is vastly preferable to the patrimonial wealth acquisition in the US, which gives private interest groups extraordinary power at expense of both individuals and society at large, and it's an effective mechanism against generational inequality and it avoids creating a society dominated by heritage.

You do own the property after purchase, just not land. You lease the land. After 70 years, you will need to pay for the lease again, it automatically renews. I believe it is set to 2% (too lazy to do research now). About the price, it varies a lot depending on city and area.

hmm if chinese citizens had no chance to increase their wealth, how did they drive up housing prices around the world? Isn't the narrative that hot money from China was the cause?

What % of Chinese citizens do you think are investing in foreign property?

What % of us citizens are investing in foreign property? Is that a good indication of wealth?

The claim that chinese citizens had no way of gaining wealth is fundamentally false and kinda absurd. If you look at chinese consumer spending for the last decade it's been growing at 6-8% annually, are you saying all that spending is done by only CCP officials?

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