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Comment by lucozade | Hacker News Reader

Practically, it will make little or no difference to you.

Currently, central banks manage money supply by managing currency transfers to commercial banks and via managing the amount of cash in circulation. The commercial bank transfers are (almost) all digital. Cash, obviously, isn't.

There is reasonable reason to assume that cash will become less and less prevalent as digital payment flows become more ingrained. So central banks are looking at mechanisms to replace/supplement their retail money supply mechanism ie cash, with one that makes more sense for a more digital economy.

So, many central banks have been exploring digit fiat currencies, how they could be implemented, implications etc.

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> Practically, it will make little or no difference to you.

So when the fed reserve decides inflation is too high because they printed too much money and kept interest rates low- instead of trying to "soften the labor market"/drive unemployment up and more people into poverty - with a digital currency, they can simply zap your money away. No need for financial "austerity" for the poor's to endure. What could go wrong?

This doesn't get to the social credit scores we see in use in China, and how a solely digital currency lends power to that system. We are already doing it to the market with ESG scores, wait til you have an ESG score for your personal life.

But I'm just a guy that thinks that the federal reserve just needs to be abolished. It's just a clever mechanism to ensure that monetary system doesn't let the wealth spread out too much. It's all done through cycles of recessions and booms, where they take wealth from the pockets of poor people and hand it to the ultra wealthy to consolidate more assets.

> with a digital currency, they can simply zap your money away.

Brazil did that in the 90s, digital currency wasn't needed.

Yes, but with an open, global system like bitcoin, they can't do this any longer.

Central banks kept printing money despite the existence of blockchains. There is an ongoing global inflation crisis as result.

It seems no Blockchain was able to overcome fundamental scalability issues, which are key to actual adoption.

> So when the fed reserve decides inflation is too high ...

Nothing stops them doing that with cash ie stopping extant currency being legal. Just happens that the US has never done that (to my knowledge). Other countries do it fairly regularly though.

I won't address your other points as they have nothing to do with digital currencies.

> "wait til you have an ESG score for your personal life"

How exactly do you suggest the 'G' part would work? It's short for "corporate governance" you know.

I get the feeling you're getting these bizarre talking points from some right-wing echo chamber where they're coming up with a new scary acronym panic on a regular basis. "Watch out, the ESG will CRT you into the NWO!"

Did I need to spell out more explicitly the connection between social credit scores and China implements them and ESG scores that have been brought to the rest of the world, and that maybe having digital, government managed currencies will allow our own western governments to follow the China experiment?

Thanks for nitpicking a loose use of the term ESG, and then dismissing everything else with the categorical label of right wing echo chamber nonsense.

I didn't get these ideas from a far right echo chamber either. The following paper comes from an advocate of banning cryptocurrency, and replacing it with federal coins, that can then manage monetary policy way more precisely than the current system we have. Part of that policy would be the ability to literally reduce people's ledgers as a form of inflation control. Oh, and the author was going to be tapped as a wall street regulator, but barely missed confirmation. While she didn't make the cut, seems like her ideas did.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3715735

It's not nitpicking when you're using the term in a completely inapplicable, absurd sense.

A framework used to evaluate corporate investment candidates has nothing to do with social credit score boogaboos. It makes as much sense as saying: "Soon Big Government will be assigning buy/hold/sell ratings to you!"

It's absolutely nitpicking. The "G" just stands for governance, otherwise it'd be a "C". On an individual level that could mean paying taxes on time, maintaining employment, etc.

> A framework used to evaluate corporate investment candidates has nothing to do with social credit score boogaboos.

Functionally, ESG _already is_ a social credit score for companies and a tool for compliance. Do you think companies are taking ESG measures because they want to?

> ”The "G" just stands for governance, otherwise it'd be a "C". On an individual level that could mean paying taxes on time, maintaining employment, etc.”

That’s not at all what governance means in the corporate context.

So you’re basically saying that ESG can be applied to individuals as long as you redefine it to something completely else.

As far as companies getting rated, well duh, there’s a giant industry around that. Companies don’t have civil liberties and they don’t have the right to receive investments from anyone who doesn’t choose to invest.

> So you’re basically saying that ESG can be applied to individuals as long as you redefine it to something completely else.

There are 802 million Google results for "personal governance". I'm not redefining anything.

> Companies don’t have civil liberties and they don’t have the right to receive investments from anyone who doesn’t choose to invest.

When the investment (or not) comes through trillion dollar asset managers by way of the Fed, it looks a lot more coercive.

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