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Comment by yarky | Hacker News Reader

I agree, they'll just use a blockchain to replace some old database and that's it, let's digitally print some more ...

Just a note - I’m not sure how serious you are with this comment, but it’s nothing like how it’ll work (I’ve been keeping up with the CBDC literature and it might not even be a blockchain)

Well now you make me wonder if there's some noble technology I don't know about. Oh wait, are they still running on mainframes and will just switch to aws, is that the whole CBDC point ?

Ok that one was a joke, but I am honestly curious about your literature review since all I see are banks trying to upgrade old databases, yet relying on the same old economic principles.

There is practically zero chance it will be a blockchain.

There are two active projects in research stages at the moment - without knowing internal politics, it's equally likely.

If by “blockchain” you mean “Merkle tree ledger with any kind of mining”: the only reason to go with a blockchain design is trustlessness. In an environment where you can (or have to) trust one party with the operation of the whole thing, blockchains are an absurdly inefficient way of doing things.

If by “blockchain” you only meant the Merkle tree ledger part but without any kind of mining, well, that gets rid of the absurdly inefficient part, but it would still be a rather surprising design.

It depends on if we do end up with only one party, or if banks end up running nodes too. I believe Visas blockchain projects require institutions to run nodes. If you are using USD-CBDC as a reserve currency for your country you'd sure as hell want to make sure that the currencies aren't being changed from under your feet, as would banks sending money between each other.

You can weigh up the costs and benefits of each and make a judgement call as to whether they see it the same way or differently. I'm making it and saying it's not even close.

It's difficult to organize a bet, but if it were easy and you were offering even money, I'd take that bet.

> It's difficult to organize a bet, but if it were easy and you were offering even money, I'd take that bet.

Ironically one of the use cases I advocate blockchain for is how difficult bets are with strangers without smart contracts, albeit for this one I'm not sure we'd be able to agree on the data source as input :P

Maybe we could get a trusted party to act as an intermediary? :)

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