US Presidential Hopefuls Rally Against a Digital Dollar Ahead of 2024 Elections
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
When it comes to encryption D & Rs are both claiming "it's for the children" and scare tacits. We have incredibly invasive KYC rules that have corporations storing ids and live biometric data. We have a coast to coast driver tracker system. We also have "anti-bad thing" tracking on minor person to person transfers. (You can't say certain words in zelle, venmo, etc transfers) I don't think I fully understand why they're pushing for the digital dollar.
For person to person transfers, this seems to be highly suspect. Why does the president need to know that you exchanged 2.50 with your friend over a payment of potentially embarrassing product. (I'm talking non-illegal but no one's business for a private trade of say conterfit Star Wars actions figures)
Iterated "Well, sure, the other team's guy is going to abuse the hell out of that power, but my team's guy will only use it to do the best, most right, wonderful things ever!" dilemma. Executive Orders, among others. Can't do it legally? Issue an EO and by the time it winds out being illegal through the courts, you've gotten most of what you wanted anyway. Among other games played.
D & R tend to fight tooth and nail for the 24/7 media ecosystem, but if you ask them, "Hey, could you use more data on what those little peons you rule over are doing in order to fight Bad Things?" - they both agree fully. And, even better, there are lots of tech companies (looks around the current place...) who have outdone each other to excel at "doing the bidding of the current government, or what they think the current government might like them to do," in exchange for the expected favors.
And... and yet. People still manage to do Bad Things. People still manage to fund Bad Causes (honk). If only they had a little bit more. If only people couldn't still exchange value with mostly untraceable methods (I assume, for no reason beyond "It's technically possible and someone probably thought it could be useful to someone," that the serial #s on bills handed out from the ATM are tracked - especially to the sort of people who ask for $100s - though bank tellers don't obviously log them unless the ordering of them is logged on drawer insertion).
All this is why I'm happy to offer "Metal, cash, computer hardware, or digital - in that order!" when I owe someone locally money.
It used to be that you had to wait for decades to be able to say “told you so.” These days the flip flops are happening so fast it gives me whiplash. People cheering for nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration have turned on a dime and are decrying the idea that one random judge in a forum shopped district can overturn federal policy in all 50 states.
I forgot about the forced voluntary program to collect biometrics from Americans leaving the country. That was inacted by Trump by EO and hasn't been removed by Biden. (Thanks Biden)
It's the natural tendency of governments. The founders of the USA understood this and tried to create a system of government that was very weak centrally. This has been slowly eroded over the past 250 years, and especially since WWII and the cold war.
I'm more scared of local politicians than national ones. One reason is that natl politicians tend to get much more attention and oversight.
But it's not clear to me that there will end up being better and worse places, instead of each place having its own brand of shitty local elites. And I don't want to bow down to elites allegedly on my side of the political spectrum, I don't want any of them having power over me.
Founding to 1920: women can't vote
1919 to 1933 - adults can't decide to drink alcohol
1942 to 1945 - Industry lobby group wins executive action to imprison competitors in concentration camps
1964 - Local law enforcement murder civil rights activists.
2023 - Local law enforcement reminisce about how it's harder to murder journalists, sue journalist who reveals their death threats against his family
Edit: The last example I gave up top illustrates the problem. Every iteration of the US government has had local law enforcement. They've always been able to abuse their power, but greater centralized government power has brought about some limited accountability.
I agree the national government should be shrinked a bit, but increasing the state and local government is the wrong way to go. Sub-national government should be shrinked an order of magnitude more than the national government.
women not being able to vote is not an example of authoritarianism in the US. Neither is the 18th amendment. These were democratically selected and the US did not appear to resemble an authoritarian regime at the time. Note that using authority is not the same as being authoritarian. The examples you gave from 1942 onward are though. It should be noted that the FBI was also famously involved in a number of illegal activities[1] See [2] for authoritarianism.
Women didn't vote to not have the right to vote.
Just because something is democratically voted on doesn't mean it can't be authoritarian. A majority can democratically vote to repress a minority. Note that the comment I'm replying to is (correctly) calling potential laws the Senate might enact authoritarian.
Authoritarianism is not when citizens vote for things we currently find unpalatable. It's when elected, and especially unelected rulers oppress the populace, with the populace having little recourse, or ways to protest.
Athens is a significant example of an early democratcy. They were still working the bugs out back then.
It's authoritarian to enslave people, and it's authoritarian to deny people rights on the basis of sex. They did both.
> It's when elected, and especially unelected rulers oppress the populace, with the populace having little recourse, or ways to protest.
Yes, but the critical point is it doesn't have to be 51% of the populace. If rules oppress 10% of the populace that can still be authoritarianism.
Suppose I agreed with your definition though. That could explain away Japanese internment, but I don't see how it justifies disenfranchising women. They made up close to or even an outright majority of the country. Unless they aren't people, and thus not part of the populace? Surely a minority can't declare everyone else doesn't count and thus claim to be the majority position?
From what I can tell, the root issue is that most people are item-oriented instead of system-oriented.
People are animals and animals need to survive. Survival is path dependant, so people think today is more important than tomorrow. In actuality, today and tomorrow are the same thing.
The American experiment seems to be failing its two pillars of capitalism and democracy for the same reason: they require input from most people. Rather, they require _thoughtful_ input from most people - and most people ain't that good at thinkin.
As far as I can tell, the game is already lost. Competition in all key products is at best reduced to 4 players. Money's influence on politics is hiding in plain sight. At least taco bell delivers.
they have agendas that they have worked on long before they get selected and they are often chosen specifically to implement this plan without anyone in the public knowing what it is. This explains how the anti-privacy, anti-encryption agenda manages to appear simultaneously in both the US and EU. There are people working behind the scenes to push this stuff. Then it appears and suddenly elected politicians are voting on something with thousands of pages that no one in the public has read, or a non-elected bureaucracy is suddenly rapidly implementing something with a plan that appears very well designed.
[0] https://hbr.org/2021/10/what-if-central-banks-issued-digital...
Blockchains are a solution to byzantine consensus, but with a central authority you can always trust the central bank (in the consensus problem sense of trust), so I don't see what problem gets solved by moving to a slower and worse database.
I'd say that any Merkle tree with a strong hash function, and an ability to upgrade it, would do. Say, something like git.
I think it's very important to point out something that may be obvious to some, but likely not to all: these two things are the exact opposite of one another.
One is centrally controlled, the other is decentralized.
One has potentially infinite supply an can be used by governments to grow the debt to infinity, the other has a mathematically demonstrably finite supply.
One is a potentially very dangerous way for a government to have absolute control over what money is used for, the other - while not perfect in that regard - tries to be at least obfuscate what money is used for and by whom.
One allows a government to blacklist users that they deem unworthy, the other is designed so that can never happen.
One is a tool to curb freedom and make the job of government as easy as possible, the other is designed to enhance freedom, restrict government control over its citizens and be an escape hatch whenever governments become unbearably controlling.
I am very glad to see that at least some politicians understand that a digital dollar would be a catastrophe for freedom and are pushing back against it.
The argument I always hear against this point is that you can simply continue to subdivide the currency infinitely. We just get into smaller and smaller fractions of "satoshi's" or whatever the base unit may be.
> tries to be at least obfuscate what money is used for and by whom.
It really doesn't in any meaningful way. I'd suggest the true benefit is that there is no centralized preconditions on what transactions can be added to the ledger. Any two valid addresses can always transact if they pay the ledger fee.
> the other is designed to enhance freedom
It's designed to not have centralized control outside of 51% attacks. Whether that actually "enhances freedom" remains to be proven. Having to tether yourself to the internet and pay a fee on every transaction may strongly work against this actual point in practice.
> The argument I always hear against this point is that you can simply continue to subdivide the currency infinitely. We just get into smaller and smaller fractions of "satoshi's" or whatever the base unit may be.
That's a different problem, that's the market-cap / # of coins issue. You don't spend an integer number of bitcoin, you spend the fraction you need, so it's not really a problem.
The PP was talking about how Bitcoin was devised to not allow anyone to arbitrarily make more coins. (Some BTC forks have different minting policies, but BTC itself can't be changed.)
Our central banks on the other hand, were devised precisely to allow the government to create money when needed.
There's no way the USA would adopt BTC as its central currency for example because it would lose that ability.
Yup. A government surrendering their ability to print money is unthinkable. They'd be giving up a major policy enforcement tool.
To quote the obviously relevant: "“Give me control of a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes its laws.” So said Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty.
Now imagine that just by holding onto money, you made more money- no need for pesky investments or risk. If btc became the dominant currency, it would quickly become a regressive tax on people who actually need to spend money.
An opinion, neither backed by any obvious nor posted arguments.
> Currencies, by their nature, are abstract constructs devoid of value.
My above remarks goes triple for this one. Bordering on the dogmatic as a matter of fact.
> If btc became the dominant currency
I don't think that'll ever happen.
First because Bitcoin isn't very practical as a currency - it's pretty obvious at this point -.
Second and much more importantly: Bitcoin is an should remain an escape hatch.
Every functioning human organization needs checks and balances to be functional.
For every power, there needs to be a counter-power so that said power can't be abused.
Until very recently, there was pretty much no counter power when it comes to the ability of governments to debase their currency (aka imposing a hidden tax on their citizenry).
Bitcoin is exactly this: it is a counter-power that finally allows folks to run with their wealth if a government starts to mismanage their currency (and historically they have always proven that given enough time, they will).
I would never wish for Bitcoin to become the dominant currency.
It's perfect where it's at right now.
You can subdivide Bitcoin to a very tiny fraction indeed, and in that sense, the supply is quasi infinite.
However, if you own _one_ Bitcoin, you own exactly 1/21millionth of the entire supply of the stuff there will ever be, and that will never change for as long as you hold on to it. In that sense, the supply is absolutely finite.
A close analogy is gold: if you assume for a second that there is a finite amount of gold on the planet (not an unreasonable assumption), then: you could cut up a gold coin down to its individual atoms, and that would be a whole effing lot of them (not practical, obviously, which is why gold didn't last as a currency. OTOH, Bitcoin, being digital doesn't have that problem).
And if you own one ounce of gold, you own a never-changing fraction of the supply.
So: Gold supply, according to definition one (divisibility) is infinite.
But according to definition two (they don't make any more of the stuff), it's finite.
I am of the opinion that the second definition is the one that matters when it comes to understanding the properties of Bitcoin as a financial instrument.
Seems pretty easy to blacklist a crypto wallet address.
The supply being finite is not that relevant. The relevant part is that the supply is predetermined, and that yearly supply inflation is acceptably small [1].
[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...
Yeah, some folks - notably the Ethereum crowd IIRC - are of that opinion.
I'll confess that I'm sort of undecided on the topic. In fact, I believe the overall effect are identical (because the currency can be divided to quasi infinity).
But my gut tells me that finite supply is better. Also, with finite supply, the math involved in anything forward looking is most certainly simpler.
However, I do agree that predetermined is way nicer than the amount of currency injected in the economy being controlled by whomever corrupt asshat is in control of the central bank at a given point in time.
The flaw there is that if too many people use something like Bitcoin as an escape hatch from an unbearably controlling government, that government can close the escape hatch by becoming even more controlling.
You can't actually do anything physical with Bitcoin. For all your physical needs you have to trade your Bitcoin with someone for the physical goods, either directly or indirectly.
An unbearably controlling government could focus its monitoring on the physical goods, and make it illegal to buy physical goods using anything other than the official government currency. They could require all banking to be done at a government bank or at banks that report everything to the government.
It isn't.
The existence of other countries does give me the option of emigrating from my country if there is a less controlling country that will allow me in.
Worth noting that several countries have just adopted the US dollar as their official currency, including El Salvador and Panama
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurodollar 'Eurodollars are U.S. dollars held in time deposit accounts in banks outside the United States, which thus are not subject to the legal jurisdiction of the U.S. Federal Reserve'
When you use regular Eurodollars you only need to trust your bank and you may have deposit insurance. With USDC you need to trust:
* Circle
* Your exchange
* Your own security
The latter generally isn't a factor with fiat, as transactions are reversible
What if there is an understanding at all levels, base and otherwise, that the unintended negative consequences of a digital dollar might exceed the benefits?
Your local, totally trustworthy, benevolent government that just needs a teensy tiny little bit more data to deal with terrorists, child pornographers, and crypto ransom gangs is.
Hence why it would be forced on you. And why we see an irritating reduction in the usability of cash these days. At least in the US, the "value per maximum bill size" has gone down dramatically over the years, to the point that a modern $100 isn't worth much more than a $20 when a lot of our grandparents were growing up.
And, of course, there are places that are card only. There remain a few restrictions on that with regards to "debt payment" (you can't serve someone a meal and then demand card only, but you can refuse to let them order up front with cash), but a lot of businesses are happily going the "No icky cash!" route.
It's quite the problem if you'd rather various data aggregators not collect all your spending data, and, of course, you pay a bit more if you're not willing to let stores aggregate your data with "loyalty" programs. Local area code, 867-5309 still works for most, though!
If I didn't know that my kind, loving, wise government had my best interests at heart, I might detect some sarcasm in your post.
> $20 in 1900 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $718.66 today, an increase of $698.66 over 123 years. The dollar had an average inflation rate of 2.95% per year between 1900 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 3,493.29%.
We'd need a denomination like a $5k bill just to be able to put as much cash in your pocket as a person could a century ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_denominations_of_United_...
Cash is terribly inconvenient to the powers that be. In addition to the irritating ability for me to transfer value to other people or companies without an overt trace, it puts a reasonable lower bound on the effective interest rate - you can't go much below 0% without people just paying to hold cash. It's not relevant right now, but a few years back, the noises about how awesome negative interest rates would be to properly stimulate demand were rather loud. There are a few books written as cover fire for this concept as well. If you put $1000 in your bank account today and will have $995 next year, may as well spend it to stimulate the consumer economy instead of "hoarding" it, right?
I know plenty of people, some I'm related to, who are full in on what amounts to "Well, they know everything anyway, why shouldn't I use the most convenient payment option?"
Summary:
> This paper examines the pros and cons of a potential U.S. central bank digital currency, or CBDC, and is the first step in a discussion of whether and how a CBDC could improve the safe and efficient domestic payments system. Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation (PDF) invites comment from the public. Importantly, the paper does not favor any policy outcome.
> The paper summarizes the current state of the domestic payments system and discusses the different types of digital payment methods and assets that have emerged in recent years, including stablecoins and other cryptocurrencies. It concludes by examining the potential benefits and risks of a CBDC, and identifies specific policy considerations.
> Consumers and businesses have long held and transferred money in digital form, via bank accounts, online transactions, or payment apps. The forms of money used in those transactions are liabilities of private entities, such as commercial banks. Conversely, a CBDC would be a liability of a central bank, like the Federal Reserve.
> While a CBDC could provide a safe, digital payment option for households and businesses as the payments system continues to evolve, and may result in faster payment options between countries, there may also be downsides. They include how to ensure a CBDC would preserve monetary and financial stability as well as complement existing means of payment. Other key policy considerations include how to preserve the privacy of citizens and maintain the ability to combat illicit finance. The paper discusses these and other factors in more detail.
[1] - https://archive.is/4zpuD
Call me crazy but I heard Biden was actually elected
So far, Kennedy is the only one who sounds sane to me.