If you're talking pure financial volume, most of it doesn't concern individuals at all. I'm focused on the privacy rights angle where small cash transactions are absolutely crucial.
You can also cash a check, of course.
Only a little part of Keynesianism involves the state, if you take a conventional definition of the theory. The only part that even involves the state isn’t all that controversial: people buying and selling is fine and self supporting, until the buyers don’t want to buy enough to support the sellers, which is the only time the government has to step in a buy stuff.
So Keynesians don’t put the state first. And the people who do put the state first don’t like all that buying and selling on the open market. Really disjoint philosophies.
Specifically, Keynes argued for driving down the rate of interest to zero permanently -- he believed this could be done in a single generation:
"On such assumptions I should guess that a properly run community equipped with modern technical resources, of which the population is not increasing rapidly, ought to be able to bring down the marginal efficiency of capital in equilibrium approximately to zero within a single generation; so that we should attain the conditions of a quasi-stationary community where change and progress would result only from changes in technique, taste, population and institutions, with the products of capital selling at a price proportioned to the labour, etc., embodied in them on just the same principles as govern the prices of consumption-goods into which capital-charges enter in an insignificant degree.
If I am right in supposing it to be comparatively easy to make capital-goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero, this may be the most sensible way of gradually getting rid of many of the objectionable features of capitalism." - General Theory Chapter 17
If you really follow this thread to its logical conclusion, you see an incredible arrogance and desire for state control that is a lot more than just "stimulating the economy during a recession"
Not sure you’re reading the rest as intended either.
This is not a prescription for the government to drive down interest rates to zero so that no investor makes a profit, ever. It just means that when sufficient liquidity, the marginal return on capital should be zero, like any commodity. What’s wrong with that?
Now, Bitcoin is a digital yuan with an infinite history of every purchase made with it (the blockchain). No thanks.
At this point, I'm starting to think the only viable alternative, from a medium-of-exchange perspective, is in commodity money -- metals and other materials that possess intrinsic value.
What role do you believe intrinsic value plays?
Intrinsic value is useful if you're trying to "peg" a currency to some other measure of wealth. But that only works for relatively small markets.
Currencies are a representation of wealth in a society. The wealth in a society is necessarily greater than that of any single asset. As such, the value of a currency based on an asset must be surplus to any supposed intrinsic value that asset has.
This means intrinsic value serves no direct useful purpose for a currency - at best, it's a secondary consequence of some more important property, such as scarcity.
Currencies are a major lever of control that governments use to run their countries. In small countries, foreign currencies like the US dollar are already used widely for their stability and ease in foreign trade. Imagine if this becomes digital with zero friction, and you can see how a country could lose all demand for its currency.
Larger countries face a similar dilemma with Bitcoin. If Bitcoin is frictionless and reliable, demand for the dollar could drop in favor of Bitcoin, and again, the US government loses a major source of power. Or worse, imagine the digital yuan becomes the new global standard for trade and storing value among China’s new friends.
The Economist’s original coverage also discusses the privacy and tax implications (China already experimented with programmable money that “expired” at a certain time, to make sure it was used for stimulating the economy).
They also talk about how CBDCs could end banks, because there would be no reason for a layer between the central bank and individuals, and the impact this would have on lending. Overall a fascinating topic, and I recommend reading their coverage as a high-level broad introduction to a lot of interesting topics.
In other words, to me, it seems like a public transparent blockchain is inevitable, whether you're using encryption or not.
A government is simply a corporation with a monopoly on the business of violence. Democracy is unique in that it's a corporation owned by the employees. Let's make it work for us instead of trying to beat or force its hand through tech. That won't work.