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Comment by iskander | Hacker News Reader

An interesting angle that seems overlooked in articles about India and China "banning" cryptocurrencies is that these efforts are often linked to a desire to create centralized digital currencies.

e.g. from this article: "India is also looking to make a framework for the official digital currency that will be issued by the Reserve Bank of India."

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It's 100% about CBDC's. CBDC's are the endgame for tyranny, really. We should be doing absolutely everything we can to fight this.

How are CBDCs the "endgame for tyranny" in a way that (presumably) fiat currencies or cryptocurrencies aren't? Seems a bit hyperbolic, but maybe you have good reasons to be so alarmed.

You can't ban someone from owning or using cash. But you can do so with a CBDC.

You can also dictate how the funds in a CBDC wallet are spent. There was a proposal that CBDC wallets could be issued stimulus funds that expire unless they are spent within a certain time frame. This is to prevent people from just putting the check into a savings account.

CBDC are just a huge/national bank. It's a dream come true for the Marxists.

As far as I'm aware CBDCs are a largely theoretical concept right now, do you have any links to an implementation such as you're describing?

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...

Not hyperbolic at all. CBDCs are a permissioned private ledger controlled by the central bank. The central bank controls what addresses are allowed to transact and have access to every transaction. If they dont like what you are spending your money on you are no longer allowed to transact. If they think you have too much money they can just take it.

https://youtu.be/UW9LbfuCTP0

As far as I'm aware CBDCs are a largely theoretical concept right now, do you have any links to an implementation such as you're describing? No videos please, I don't watch them.

A cursory google search on your part would have easily turned up web pages like these from the central bank of Canada:

https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2020/02/contingency-planning-cen...

https://www.bankofcanada.ca/research/digital-currencies-and-...

Yes, I'm aware that they're an area of research in many countries, I was talking about actual projects that represent the "endgame of tyranny" as described above. The paper you've linked to talks about privacy and universal accessibility as core goals and I'm not sure whereabouts in this overview the tyranny is outlined - I'm sure you've read it and can point it out?

The issue is with accessibility, and raised by people who inherently mistrust the state, as the state can sort of cancel your participation in society if they so wish by revoking whatever authentication (digital ID) it has issued you to enable accessibility in the first place.

Now, why the state would do that, or why anyone would inherently mistrust the state, are open to discussion.

How is that in any way different than today's bank accounts, besides removing a largely useless intermediary ( a retail bank)?

Because the majority of people looking at the topic correlate the introduction of any sort of central bank digital currency with the introduction of efforts to curb the use of physical cash. India in particular had a recent change in their legal tender ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis... ) which has made some people concerned about these sorts of moves. If you’re willing to suddenly (from the perspective of those aggrieved by the changes ) declare a significant percentage, over 75%, of the banknotes in circulation as soon to be defunct and basically “turn over” your entire currency over like a compost pile in under a year, people get understandably concerned you might just declare cash illegal entirely as the government has established itself as willing to do dramatic things.

It's different like this:

"Citizen, too much meat eating this week. Your CBDC non-cash is now suspended until you lose 10 pounds"

Because it allows them to enforce policies on where and how you spend your money. In an authoritarian regime this can be abused pretty badly.

Existing traditional bank accounts can absolutely be frozen or seized. Not sure what CBDCs can do that is harsher than that.

Do you have evidence that "a desire to create centralized digital currencies" has anything to do with "banning cryptocurrencies"? Because lots of countries have expressed interest in CBDCs and most of them aren't talking about banning anything. Indeed, it's often central banks talking about CDBCs, which aren't even in the position of banning anything.

Seems to me that CDBCs are just the new topic for conspiracies about how cryptocurrencies are being held back by the Powers That Be.

The two are often juxtaposed in the coverage of crypto bans, I don't know if they're also juxtaposed in the political intentions.

Ie creating something that could be useful as an actual currency?

I find it amusing the baked in assumption of your post that currencies can only be real if they are backed by a state. I think that is... No necessarily true. Just because something held up for a long time does not mean there is some essential reason why things can't be another way.

That holds true of a lot of human innovations. People could not imagine automobiles or flying or computers, but that did not make them impossible.

> People could not imagine automobiles or flying or computers, but that did not make them impossible.

People imagined versions of those things for a long time before they were practical. People have imagined other types of currency as well, and non-state backed currencies aren't even novel given plenty of examples have and do exist.

They don't have to be backed by a state, however, it's quite obvious that "permissionless", "uncensorable" and "truly anonymous" are features that won't be accepted by states for a legitimate currency (just as they aren't really tolerated for cash, driving all kinds of restrictions and controls of non-tiny amounts of cash), so it's quite plausible that in the long run the legal businesses and law-abiding citizens will be allowed to interact only with payment mechanisms that have disabled those features in some way; so if any given cryptocurrency unavoidably has those features, then people will be prohibited to touch it, limiting their usage only to criminal purposes.

It would definitely have a lot more buy-in from banks if it were centrally sanctioned but I'm not sure if the functionality would be much different from a stablecoin on an efficient L2. I would personally rather have banks integrate with e.g. USDC on zkSync but I suspect that the lack of control is what makes that scenario undesirable for governments.

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