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Comment by ntrz | Hacker News Reader

So, the reason is that the entirety of the customer data must be stored locally in India, rather than on a server located elsewhere[0]? Does anyone know why the rule in India is so much stricter than the equivalent GDPR rule[1], which allows transfer of data outside the EU in various circumstances (basically if it's assured that it won't lead to the data being subject to much laxer standards of protection)?

According to the article, the banks are saying the reason it's much stricter than the equivalent EU data residency requirements is to ensure the Indian government can spy on customer data. Is there a more reasonable, less malicious reason they may have written the requirements this way?

[0] https://rbi.org.in/CommonPerson/english/Scripts/FAQs.aspx?Id...

[1] https://gdpr.eu/article-44-transfer-of-personal-data/

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If I was running a large country, I'd want transactions to be entirely local for national security reasons. Generally, in the event of a world war, I wouldn't want it to be trivial for other countries to remotely cut off my whole economy.

From the text of the rule:

> There is no bar on processing of payment transactions outside India if so desired by the PSOs. However, the data shall be stored only in India after the processing. The complete end-to-end transaction details should be part of the data.

So this only applies to the customer data, not the actual systems that do the transaction processing and verification. The systems that actually do the work could still be cut off from India, leaving them with nothing but a database of customer transactions.

How about just avoiding wars? Global interdependence of countries is beneficial for this reason. Also, India's military is no match for and unlikely to have any reason to fight the external countries where MasterCard's data is likely to be stored (US, UK, etc).

In the case of MasterCard that might be true, but the law applies generally. It's not inconceivable that another piece of critical infrastructure could be provided by a country who has a data center in a more likely adversary, say, China. In general, the Indian approach is not to whitelist everything and then blacklist whatever specific exceptions become necessary, but the reverse.

As for avoiding war: sure, but how should we conduct things until utopia arrives?

> How about just avoiding wars?

Countries simply do not have the unilateral ability to avoid wars.

The easiest way to prevent war is to make it uneconomical -- like it was in the past. War should bankrupt a country. Years long fighting like we saw in the 20th century is a product of loose monetary policy.

When a country can print itself out of debt (or more accurately, kick the can down the road for the next generation), war is inevitable. If we remove the ability to do this, a prolonged war becomes far less likely.

But, again, that's not something a country can unilaterally control.

If a nation's neighbors have the capability to fight a years long war, but that same war would bankrupt the nation, then the

The game theory of the situation (again, from an individual nation's perspective) means no one nation will "remove the ability to do this" unless there's a massive collective action.

Have you heard about the 100, 70 and 30 years wars? The massive death toll and destruction in the world wars was largely a result of much more effective military technology. There was simply no way to kill as much people and destroy as much property in such a short time frame in any preceding wars.

And I don't really see what a loose monetary policy could have anything to do with this. Before the 20th century countries rarely had the means to mobilize their economies by directing most of the output to the war effort, they had no capacity to enforce this and in any case there wasn't enough surplus produced to a wage total war without everyone starving to death and/or the central government collapsing.

I am advocating hard monetary policy (ala a gold standard, a bitcoin standard) as a method for disincentivizing war.

When you cannot replace the capital spent on war via inflation, war is less likely to occur. I acknowledge this is a fringe philosophy, but time will tell.

> but time will tell

Well the gold (or silver) standard had been a thing for thousands of years and I don't think there is much empirical evidence to suggest that a country's inability to control it's monetary policy somehow inherently disincentivizes it's government from waging wars.

Talking about inflation specifically, there was relatively little of it during both WW1 and WW2 since all countries implemented price controls and rationing and pretty much nationalized all the available production capacity.

There was the debasement of the currency of the Roman Empire, which lead to its failure. This was done for reasons of waging war.

I am arguing that if you remove the ability for a state to create money (or at least debase it), it removes the ability for it to wage war. Continuous war requires continuous capital to wage. If this continuity is ended, wars end.

Then you're arguing for abolishing the state in general. Because otherwise individuals would have no way of preventing the state from either taking away their non-inflationary money/coins or banning which would result in significant reduction it's value.

> There was the debasement of the currency of the Roman Empire, War was the reason why Roman empire existed in the first place. In fact some argue that the Roman economy was only sustainable as long as Rome continued conquering new lands, enslaving their populations and taking away their property. As soon as the empire stopped expanding they were long able to maintain their army. Arguably, without debasement the collapse might have happened sooner they would have ran out of gold to pay their soldiers anyway.

Prior to the revolution of 1789 the French state was pretty much in a permanent state of bankruptcy for the past several hundreds of years (and unlike the Romans they couldn't really debase their currency). Did that prevent them from waging wars?

Not the state in general, just the ability to create money. The state can still raise funds via taxation, but they need to be more careful in how it is spent, as it cannot be magic'd into existence.

And how would you enforce this if the state continues to have the monopoly on violence? Who would prevent it from banning doing the same thing Roosevelt did in 1933 (banning the private ownership of gold) (of course for crypto currencies they would ban the usage and ownership) or suspending the free market itself like in 1941?

And that is what is so wonderful about Satoshis great invention. The state has far less power over Mathematics, Cryptography and Game Theory.

A gun is useless against ECDSA. A government cannot stop a person holding, saving, spending or transacting in bitcoin. As long as there is a channel, anywhere in the universe that allows submission of valid, signed transactions to peers, the state cannot stop it.

Sure it can, it can just ban crypto currencies and start fining all businesses which accept them and/or allow exchanging them for fiat currencies. While technically people still be able to transfer them I'm not sure how useful that would be in practical terms.

Countries rarely go to war with countries that they don't share borders with. For India, that's China, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. Making sure that MasterCard does not store their transaction data in any of those countries should be sufficient.

There are many rare events that a country would still want to protect itself against.

"Should be sufficient" and "Will be sufficient" are different enough to cause anxiety for people who have to safeguard against those kinds of outcomes.

>How about just avoiding wars?

that's a silly remark. are you suggesting that countries can simply avoid wars and accept the consequences just because some credit cards will stop working ?

edit: formatting

Yes, if they believe that the cost of waging the war would outweigh anything that they might gain even if they win it. Why would any two countries wage a war against each other if their governments knew that both countries economies (and most of their capacity to produce military material) would immediately collapse?

The GDPR didn’t give a 6 month timeline.

And GDPR had a long transparent process that in addition to the official implementation time, gave companies a lot of time to see what sort of rules they would likely be working under even before it was approved.

The worst government since liberalization, however, makes capricious rules, without input or deliberations, drops them on the world like they are a JayZ album, and then gives atrocious timelines for compliance.

More often than not they will then backtrack on those rules once enough time has passed so people will forget how atrocious those rules are (like during COVID), or in some cases (such as demonetization), they will double down never mind the generational economic damage and direct death toll.

>>> The GDPR didn’t give a 6 month timeline.

This ruling came out in 2018 and they were given an extension until now, 3 years is sufficient enough to implement most things

This applies to a critical infrastructure one of national security.

GDPR is about privacy.

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