Federal Reserve releases digital currency paper [pdf]
federalreserve.gov
federalreserve.gov
> While no decisions have been made on whether to pursue a CBDC, analysis to date suggests that a potential U.S. CBDC, if one were created, would best serve the needs of the United States by being privacy-protected, intermediated, widely transferable, and identity-verified
So privacy-protected sounds great, as well as widely transferable.
Intermediated and Identity-Verified seem like terrible requirements. And they water down "privacy-protected" almost immediately:
> Privacy-protected: Protecting consumer privacy is critical. Any CBDC would need to strike an appropriate balance, however, between safeguarding the privacy rights of consumers and affording the transparency necessary to deter criminal activity
So, to be clear, not private.
Intermediated is kind of necessary because I don't believe that the Federal Reserve charter allows them to hold non-bank funds, so unless this requirement is lifted it's probably the best they can do.
Rohan Grey, a prominant MMT theorist who works with Ro Khanna, has repeatedly expressed a demand for "Digital Fiat Currency" [1] as opposed to "Central Bank Digital Currency" precisely because a central bank is always going to try to treat money more like bank money and less like cash, because bank money is so much more "legible" to the state and law enforcement. But the illegibility of money is still important, inconvenient as it is.
You want to avoid an experience where people are being told "send the money to trustmereallytheaccountspayabledeptnojoke@company.com", or worse yet, a context-free account number. It's too easy to typo or have tampered malicious data on there.
Some form of "identity verification" service solves that problem. Your commercial recipients can register their accounts, and when you put their contact info or account number in the "send to" field, the client can pull up and display the associated data. The customer can feel much more confident he is sending to the right firm.
If you limit it to being opt-in, solely for registered legal entities with a documented paper trail, you can preserve consumer anonymity to a degree, and the exclusivity helps to make it part of the normal customer flow: all your major bills are going to go to validated recipients, so anything asking to be paid to an unvalidated account, or where the name doesn't match the expected one, calls for extra scrutiny.
Yes, it can be manipulated, but I suspect gaming a federal payments system is the sort of thing that 1) leaves a hell of a paper trail and 2) would get prosecuted aggressively.