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Comment by abigail95 | Hacker News Reader

All of that makes the money have lower value, and is similar to how central banks manage money supply by making it easier and harder to get.

The rest of it already exists for normal money. Tyrannical control over finance isn't a property of a digital currency, it's a property of the government. Your causality is backwards. A bad government will do that whether they have a digital currency or not, and a digital currency has no moral properties as it's just a tool.

Whether a digital currency makes it easier at the margin to oppress people, I don't think it does. You can imagine how many headaches an imperfect implementation could cause.

If the digital currency is so restricted that people would rather use cash, it will death spiral to zero as merchants who accept it can't trade it for full value to others. The only way around that would be for the govt to backstop it and trade 1:1 with cash, which would defeat the purpose of the restrictions.

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according to this logic, total video surveillance is ok too, because it's just a tool. the government scanning all your private conversations is ok too, as long as the government is good.

but all these could be used by a government to influence the voter behaviour such that they stay in power forever, China style.

you are ready for communism.

It doesn't make those things OK because the argument against those things isn't that they enable the government to act in an authoritarian manner but that they are violations of individuals' right to privacy. Total surveillance is a bad thing in its own right. A CBDC is, as far as I've seen so far, not. And the argument that it should be seen as bad because it could be used for bad things by a bad government doesn't hold water, because preventing a CBDC wouldn't materially restrict the powers the government could wield if it were to become authoritarian.

You're clearly convinced that governments slide inevitably towards authoritarianism and can only be prevented from doing so by practically restricting their powers, but it's a rather backwards way of thinking about things. An authoritarian government takes whatever powers it wants and wipes its arse with any rules that have been written to supposedly prevent it. If an authoritarian government thinks a CBDC will be useful it can just make one. Not that it would have to, because the government's existing powers are already sufficient to implement all the nefarious schemes people are worrying about in this thread.

The way to avoid the threat of an authoritarian government is to have a fair and well run electoral system, a healthy national political dialogue and a well educated population (not that these things are easy), not to assume the government is inevitably going to go bad and block it from implementing useful policies in a futile attempt to curtail the powers of the dictatorship you've convinced yourself it will one day become.

In the US it is commonly held belief that the government powers must be restricted because all governments slide into corruption more quickly without.

Yes, it's in the cultural DNA of the USA in a way it isn't in the UK, so it's a viewpoint you see a lot on hn. But this is a UK proposal.

It sounds like you imagine a totalitarian regime’s rise as a one hit move, with it rising to power and immediately abolishing laws, etc. in reality, it’s usually a slow crawl with another kind of freedom being taken away every time. With any such increment towards totalitarianism, folks like you will stress how this particular small step isn’t the one thing that enables totalitarianism. Totalitarian rulers like Orban and Erdogan owe everything to people like you.

It is counter to the logic that, because cameras exist that they enable surviellance or because private conversations exist that enables the capture of those private conversations or ultimately because voters exist that enables someone to influence the voter.

The solution to that logic is to abolish everything.

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