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Comment by fab1an | Hacker News Reader

It's surprising to see that there are liberal proponents of this. You don't have to be a raging libertarian to see the risks of unlocking this much financial reach for governments. We (in the West) may now mostly live under reasonable governments, but there's obviously no guarantee that this won't change (including towards your <current political opponents>), and implementing social credit score systems and other dystopian things would be much easier under CBDC than it currently is?

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I never understood this argument. It is not like governments can't tell the banks and payment processor not to accept payments or freeze all funds of certain people. Courts can already order automatic confiscation in cases like bankruptcies and so on.

Does it require 1 click?

Friction in a process can be an amazing deterrent and prevents you from abusing power en masse. Whenever there is a cost to doing something, it demands prudence.

I wish this was more widely understood. It's relevant when talking about the danger of ubiquitous/dragnet surveillance; it's relevant to our habits around communication, and consumption of media. Friction is a key determining factor in human behavior.

The friction is already there and it is mandated by law.

Absolutely. If it remains an alternative, it's fine. But if they try to force out physical cash completely in favor of CBDCs, you better be wary.

Because societies function very differently in a dense & community driven country like India vs sparse nuclear nations like the US.

Once you reach a certain level of density, be that most of India or east-coast American cities, you have to rely on public services to facilitate most things in your life. The Govt. already has indirect financial veto power on you. This won't change anything the Govt. is already able to do everything that you claim CBDCs will facilitate.

Note that 90+% of India operates in a permanent survival mindset. All positives associated with libertarianism are much higher on Maslow's pyramid. These people are on the bottom rung, so the rights citizens would have to forfeit as part of CBDCs feel trivial.

Second, India is a low trust society. So, anything that increases tracking, surveillance and transparency is welcome. Trustless systems are welcome. Cash is easy (to launder) and cash is simple (to hide). The elimination of cash adds significant barriers to the most important facilitator of the low trust economy : cash.

Do you realise that some of the people behind CBDCs are Bitcoin developers?

They get money to make some software but clearly aren't proponents of a totalitarian system

I don't know about totalitarian systems. They are involved with CBDCs. How do you know they aren't proponents of CBDCs?

Because CBDC are the complete opposite of bitcoin philosophy. Bitcoin is about personal freedom and separating state and money. CBDC is about centralised govt control and monitoring

So if you found out that a top pentagon official was working as a military advisor for the Taliban, that wouldn't ring any alarm bells to you. It's completely normal and there's nothing to worry about.

You obviously have your own theory so please go ahead and share it. The bitcoin devs working on CBDCs are a small minority

I don't have a theory (other that both CBDCs and cryptocurrencies are dumb). I'm merely pointing out that the idea that CBDCs are absolute evil while bitcoin is absolutely against evil is rather inconsistent in light of the fact that some of the people behind CBDCs are also involved with bitcoin.

It's not inconsistent when the designs are the opposite.

Bitcoin is permissionless and payments are uncensorable. A tool against govt power and individually empowering.

CBDC have central control and govt control in the name. The Chinese govt will be jumping at the chance to implement CBDC. Bitcoin is only a threat to their control

But I get the impression that most people's minds are already make up about bitcoin and it's be a while until people are open to new ideas

I'll leave you alone with your mental gymnastics.

I'll leave you alone with your smug ignorance. Highly doubt you know the technical details of these systems.

Classic crypto bro retort. The "technical details" of these systems were neither the topic nor had any relevance to these conversation, and at any rate you haven't got any clue whether I'm ignorant about them.

If you had technical knowledge you would given any reply with some substance but you just derived my response as "mental gymnastics" after baiting me into a discussion

And now name calling

You just wanted to get out your superficial preconceptions on the topic after wasting my time

I simply pointed out a fact that is never addressed by bitcoin propagandists, which is the fact that bitcoin core developers are also working on implementations of CBDCs.

What sort of "technical knowledge" is required to make such an observation? None. Therefore trying to discredit what I said on the grounds that I lack technical knowledge is ridiculous. Calling the statement of a fact a "superficial preconception" is equally ridiculous.

It's not surprising. Liberals want the government to take money from people to fund itself. A digital currency allows them to do that much more efficiently.

True. I hope you like negative interest rates on your savings account.

Negative interest is supposed to be applied on cash and bank reserves (this includes checking accounts). Not on savings accounts.

The entire point of negative interest rates is to get people to stop holding 70% of their balances at the bank in checking accounts. Because checking accounts cannot be used for loans, the bank creates new money which lands on another checking account which repeats endlessly like some sort of out of control recursive function resulting in a perpetual increase in the M1 money supply.

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