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Comment by cryptica | Hacker News Reader

CDBCs are going to be a goldmine for hackers. If implemented as centralized systems, some hackers and insiders are going to have access to unlimited free money. The fact is that nobody, no group of people on this planet is trustworthy enough to implement such an important system. Such people don't exist. Such centralized system is guaranteed to be corrupted.

This is why such important financial systems MUST be decentralized, at least to the extent that anyone should be able to verify the correctness of the system's state independently.

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I have been cashless for pretty much a decade, I'm more interested in what smart money that can be programmed can do.

Like can i get paid instantly for every KWH i deliver back to the grid via solar panels. Can my salary or hourly contract be streamed to my bank account. These sort of things are all possible in crypto.

So is irrevocably draining your net worth in half a second if your vendor makes a mistake.

Can you not get paid for every KWH you deliver to the grid right now? My friend has a solar power setup at his house and he gets credits to his bill when he produces more than he consumes. That would be pretty simple to make into an ACH to his bank account.

It just seems to me that everything you can do with crypto you can do with the existing financial system. Maybe not 100% of crypto's features, but easily what a huge majority of people and institutions rely on and use today.

They are also possible with the instantaneous bank transfer system that exists in Europe. If an employer wanted to pay you once an hour, they could. I’m not sure what the point is, though.

SEPA is often heralded as being that convenient but this isn't complete information.

Basically there is a parallel instant SEPA that is only partially implemented in between certain banks in some countries. Cross border SEPA between two SEPA system countries is much more likely to be just as slow as the US ACH system.

So the only way people could possibly believe this works is if they and their friends use the same banks. Which is basically the case, most Europeans don’t even use the SEPA system to another European country compared to using a few big banks in their single tiny country with their friends and local businesses. But if an outsider wanted to do business in the European banking system, wanting to believe the experience Europeans come on forums to talk about, they likely wont be able to experience it.

Expect 3 - 7 business days and some questions for your banking partners who might not know where the transaction currently is.

This is not true at all.

SEPA payments are cleared five times a day on every business day. Payment Services Directive establishes that money must be credited to a recipient's account at the latest by the end of the next business day.

On top of that, about a quarter of all banks already support Instant SEPA, which clears immediately 24/7/365.

I’ve had and others have had a different experience. The user experience with many banks doesn’t match the technology or regulations.

Its clear that current implementations of decentralized finance are also deregulated. There is a reason that we have some regulation, every single financial scam that is regulated in centralized systems is currently active in decentralized systems. Your concept of decentralization has been corrupted from the start.

You seem to be conflating hacked contracts and hacked coins.

AFAIK, none of the major cryptocurrencies have ever been "hacked."

Banks are centralized systems. They do guard against attacks from hackers. It doesn't seem to result in unlimited free money. How is this different?

A national currency would be even more centralized, and centralized banking systems have not been free of problems either. They acted irresponsibly for years and then many got bailed out because they were "too big to fail". And people that society doesn't approve of can get screwed over if the payment processors choose not to do business with them. Moving in the direction of eliminating cash for these people scares me.

Has anyone ever hacked normal central bank vs bank pipes and injected new balances, for example? Or wholesale siphoned off stuff from payment systems? Why would a decentralized system be stronger? Would really more people care to actively monitor it?

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