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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

> But governments have to allow those things to happen.

I very much doubt that. Hell, I think the government would be all-for open payment standards as long as they're dollar-based and conform to tax legislation. The real roadblocks are the current protocol-holders like Apple and Google - their ability to profit off these technologies leave them in direct opposition to what you consider progress. And if iOS/Android doesn't adopt your open standards, you can forget about the general public adopting it.

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The government would also want such a system to conform to anti-money-laundering and sanctions regulations.

Great!

Money laundering/sanctions laws apply regardless of the currency you use.

Yes, and governments prefer technology reduces the cost of legal compliance.

> the government would be all-for open payment standards

The caveat to that is to have regulated players the gov can control up to a point. Basically official banks.

Since the dawn of commerce governing entities have made critical efforts to regulate circulating money, there's no reason our current govs would allow that aspect to get out of their hand without a fight (that's basically why Facebook's crypto effort got canned)

> Hell, I think the government would be all-for open payment standards as long as they're dollar-based and conform to tax legislation.

The ones that are in favor of that already have open payment systems running (a lot do). If your country does not have one of those nowadays, it's because it's not important for the government.

You haven't been paying attention.

Or you're going by what they say, not what they do.

Donations to wikileaks getting shutdown by payment providers under government pressure because they didn't like the journalism coming out of it exposing their wrong doings, donations to any inconvenient cause.

Yes, we have to make it happen

Governmnets are A-OK with outsourcing the police, secret services, public order etc to Google and Apple. It's cheap for them and easy , and nobody complaints. It shouldn't be any of those

no, it wouldn't. the government wants to be able to freeze and seize and track money too. this is why it doesn't like crypto, or facebucks, or e-gold etc. because the government always wants control. so the next generation of digital payments will be made to run off fedwire (not shitting on it specifically, it's not a bad idea by itself) and later some CBDC.

next time the canadians have a civil disobedience problem they will not have to go to a bank to freeze money. they will just do it directly.

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