Many experts, including in this article, are describing that future. It’s why crypto and what not are a highly risky long-terms solution. If it can be abused, it will by a political actor at some point.
Do you think this can't be done already with credit cards?
I love how this undermines the basic functioning of the market via supply/demand. If demand is artificially restricted by taking money out of the pockets of consumers, how is "what to produce" decided? I think increasingly that decision is pseudo-centralized in VCs and other large investors who decide what businesses to fund.
A digital centrally controlled currency means you never get to escape it.
Even if you switch landlords for example, it would be inescapable, you have the masters of the universe doing it to you, not just one person you can move away from.
You're referring to projects other than for example Bitcoin right? Since the whole purpose of Bitcoin is that it shouldn't be possible to control it centrally. Or are you saying Bitcoin will inevitably be controlled by a single entity? If that happens I expect its value to be zero.
Even Varoufakis understands that Bitcoin is good for the individuals, but not for the governments because it can't be controlled.
He is not saying that. He states that individuals that own a lot of it are incentivized to like its fixed monetary policy, at the expense of the safety of the majority.
> If you have gold, it is good for you if its supply is limited, fixed if possible. Same with Bitcoin, silver, dollars. (Nb. It is why the rich and powerful traditionally opposed expansionary monetary policy, crying ‘hyperinflation’ at the drop of a hat.)
> A fixed money supply translates into a deflationary dynamic which, in a system prone to under-employing its people and under-investing in things society needs (i.e. capitalism), is a catastrophe in the making.
If the world's biggest economies were to hypothetically legally ban crypto holding and exchanging for fiat, then bitcoin's value in relationships to fiat would tank overnight as it would become useless binary data nobody would want anymore.
Bitcoin on the other hand, if you were to remove its capability for financial speculation, then it would serve no other purpose and would just be some useless bits of data, just like NFTs.
Like say the US government accepted some coin for tax payments but tainted some of them. Lots of people wouldn't want the tainted coins if they couldn't use them for a payment like that.
(taxes are just one example, say a payment processor did the same thing, or whatever)
It's the same system we have today at the large scale - wealthy folks extracting money from the poor and middle class.