I find it difficult to understand why a digital pound is anything more than an incremental improvement (or worsening from your perspective). What does a digital pound enable the government to do that would interfere with the everyday person's life, that isn't already possible?
(Also, cigarette prohibitions and social credit scoring are hot button issues for people who believe in the sanctity of individual rights but they're not at all related in the context of this discussion. There's nothing terrifying about a cigarette prohibition to most people, especially in the UK, where we've literally had various cigarette restrictions imposed over the years to the point where a NZ style prohibition would probably not even register for almost everyone.)
The centralization of information is going to happen one way or another (the powers that be wouldn't have it any other way), and we've already been on this trajectory. So how can we build a system that actually respects privacy and upholds the common good?
That's not how consolidation of power by a government works.
This is not necessarily the case, thanks to encryption, which plays on the side of the weak. A weak can encrypt data that a strong can never decrypt.
Is "a weak" using an encryption random number generator that was designed by "a weak" or "a strong"?
Thanks for the reminder to buy (in person) and secure dice against physical tampering!
Right now they don't they at least need a court order (i.e. they'd have to prove probably cause) to compel a bank to give them people's data?
Sounds like a big change to me, and further erosion in the protection rule of law theoretically provides people against tyranny.
Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/digital-currency-yuan-c...
> Tom Mutton, a director at the Bank of England, said during a conference on Monday that programming could become a key feature of any future central bank digital currency ... what happens if one of the participants in a transaction puts a restriction on [future use of the money]? ... Sir Jon Cunliffe, a deputy Governor at the Bank, said digital currencies could be programmed for commercial or social purposes ... “You could think of giving your children pocket money, but programming the money so that it couldn’t be used for sweets. There is a whole range of things that money could do, programmable money, which we cannot do with the current technology.”
Good catch. Need a browser plugin that converts text to phoenetically similar terms.
Basically it was used successfully to keep a local economy going during the great depression.
Alberta, for example, tried circulating banknote-analogues that required a stamp to be added every week to remain valid; the goal was to encourage people to spend them rather than having to pay for the stamp.
In the context of something like economic stimulus payments, where the goal is to force jumpstarting the economy NOW, how would prevent people who can afford it from just setting aside their payment for later use?
Any doom-mongering about a hypothetical future in which The Government is doing Bad Things because they know what you’re doing with your money is, well, ignoring the thousands of bad things that we don’t need to theorise about because they’re happening at this very moment.
For example, our government has starved our national health service over the last decade and there are very real threats to its long term survival: I care orders of magnitude more about that than I care about the hypothetical world in which the government make money expire or deduct from my social score because I exceeded my quota of beans at the grocery store this week.
Gold standard advocates passionately debated about terrible problems with silver in the 19th century. Crypto demonstrated that digital cash has value - even when that is backed by various grifts.
Is brilliant and the only way to realistically ban cigarettes without screwing over entire generations who are already addicted to nicotine.
Let's give a real example. My great aunt in her late 60s has a 40 year pack a day smoker. There is zero chance whatsoever she would be able to quit before she dies and it would be cruel to try and make her. There is no way you can pick a single date after which smoking is banned for everyone, it will be so loudly, and rightly, fought that it would never pass. I don't want to live in a world where a not insignificant percent of the population simultaneously goes through nicotine withdrawal. Because I've seen my friends quit and patches and gum don't keep you from being miserable.
If you don't think cigarettes should be banned, fine. Valid stance. But if you think they should this is the way.
Regardless, I disagree with the line of reasoning that because it can be repealed it's okay to pass it in the first place. The core problem is creating laws that artificially inflate their support by making them only apply to some sub-group. Passing laws that only restrict a minority due to practical reasosns is bad enough. For example, cities' anti-camping laws basically only apply to the homeless, because no-one chooses on a whim to camp in downtown Los Angeles. That's not great, because its a tyranny of the majority situation, but at least in theory the general populace has to weigh the loss of their ability to camp in downtown against the pros of not having homeless camps in downtown.
In a situation where the law explicitly only applies to the minority, especially a minority that no one in the majority could ever eventually belong to, the majority get to have their cake and eat it, too, leading to artificial support for your bill. If you can't find the political support to ban cigarettes outright, back-dooring democracy is not the right way to do it.
The NZ smoking case is interesting, though, because over time it will apply to the majority.
> If you can't find the political support to ban cigarettes outright, back-dooring democracy is not the right way to do it.
Requiring all public buildings to immediately retrofit for wheelchair access wasn't practical, but in the US proponents were able to get support for requiring this for new and heavily renovated buildings (the ADA). Having a gradual intermediate choice makes a lot of sense in cases where a full ban is really bad for people (or buildings) that are dependent on the old way and we also don't want to continue to allow it indefinitely.
In contrast, NOBODY who voted for NZ's law will be restricted by it.
So, I get your point, and I don’t necessarily disagree. But if we agree on that logic, then I care far more about stopping climate change, for the sake of future generations democratic welfare, than I do about allowing them to smoke.
Having said all that, I don’t know how NZ ranks in terms of climate policies, perhaps they are already the best in the world.
If we vote to, say, ban the sale of new internal combustion automobiles, sure, it restricts future generations. But it also restricts the voting body, today, by restricting their ability to purchase new cars. The voters are weighing the necessity of fighting climate change against the restriction of their freedom to purchase an automobile. Perfectly fair. If we instead are voting on "lets ban the sale of automobiles to anyone born after 2000" or "lets ban the sale of automobiles starting in 2123", then the people voting on it are not, and never will be effected by the restriction that they voted to put in place. THAT is unjust.
All this would do is get rid of the middleman and the defacto tax assessed on all commerce, both direct or indirect through sale of data.
It's no surprise to me to see government gold buying on an absolute tear. [1] The powers that be are well aware of the importance of having real physical goods for the sake of trading and maintaining wealth.
[1] https://financialpost.com/commodities/mining/central-banks-b...
China and Russia buying non-dollar reserve assets has nothing to do with “people…using government money.”
Genuinely curious - what do you think will happen (and what would be used)?
I genuinely can't imagine most of the people in my life (be that older relatives, non-tech friends, whoever) using anything but whatever 'money' is convenient. None of them care the government might be watching, and if they were going to barter for anything they're probably already doing it ("you help me with this DIY, I'll take you for dinner").
FWIW I'm in the UK, so perhaps my perspective is skewed?
I don't know if the UK is different from much else of the developed world, but here there is a tremendous amount of off-by-book transactions in the largest industries such as farming and construction. I do not think that the disappearance of cash will remove this economy, but it will have to migrate to other assets with similar qualities.