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Comment by Neil44 | Hacker News Reader

According to the PDF, the digital pound is issued by and backed by the bank of england and as such is classed as 'public money' in the same way as cash. You don't need to go begging to a private institution for the privilage of holding a bank account to hold your 'private money' which is effectively backed by the private bank. Private bank goes away, private money goes away. If private banks decide they don't like you any more your life becomes very difficult.

As physical cash goes away the digital pound is meant to plug that gap, plus a load of other things I probably don't understand.

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> If private banks decide they don't like you any more your life becomes very difficult.

Just wait and see what happens to your life if the state decides it doesn't like you.

You go to jail?

the broader point here is with digital money things that would require discretion become automated

which is the dystopia people fear

think about it, the vast majority of people break speeding laws. we are okay and on good days trust the cops to stop reckless drivers but let the morning commuters go.

apply the same logic to minor financial crimes

I'm sorry, I fail to imagine how this dystopia people are talking is any different than the current times. I feel people are assigning _way too much_ importance to the changes this will bring. Kind of how people assigned way too much importance to the changes cryptocurrency will bring. When crypto was young, really young, a lot of backers saw in it the brainchild of their favourite political system, the thing that will save them for tyranny. They just impregnated it with their wishes and desires. Well, I think that was silly.

And in the same way, I think impregnating cbdc's with all their fears is just as silly.

i’m old enough to remember the patriot act

over time it touched more and more people

even democratic governments can easily abuse their power so i’m off the mind to limit their power politically, financially, and technically.

I do worry about that as a general point. We're all guilty of something random, in the future it'll be possible to find out exactly what by running an sql query against some huge govt database. And when we're all guilty of something it gives massive leverage against us.

Only need to look so far as Canada for financial supporters of a protest movement getting cut off from the financial system in midwinter. Now imagine that was centralized and could be done without informing anyone outside the central bank.

Was it not centralized in Canada?

In the UK, there's the National Savings & Investment bank which is fully backed by the government. Any savings there aren't capped at 100k EUR (GBP equivalent) like other banks. This digital pound sounds a little bit like an extension of this imho.

> As physical cash goes away

Ah. I see where this is going now.

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