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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

A 'revolution' to on-board users and then airdrop them free money in order for the Reserve Bank of India to deploy their own CBDC on top of UPI. [0] [1]

Just like the catastrophic e-Naira and the widely adopted and dystopian digital Yuan this 'revolution' is all about CBDCs.

India is being a bit more clever in moving everyone in India on to their e-rupee CBDC and using the UPI hype and free money airdrops to do that.

[0] https://techmonitor.ai/policy/digital-economy/nobodys-using-...

[1] https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/what-is-e-rupi-d...

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Although cbdc is a goal, the main purpose of UPI is simplified digital payments. UPI grew because of its technical superiority to existing methods, even regular people could see that difference. It's not because of incentives that it is so popular and most people never recieved them

So that governments can track, freeze and seize your funds at will or add savings limits to your account to get you to spend more and save less. [0] [1]

Once the government does something extremely unpopular, I will only see the same thing that happened with the trucker protesters with their bank accounts getting frozen which will happen in other countries for just protesting [2] and next time, CBDCs will play a significant role on who actually controls your money and they will do anything like banning the use of ATMs [3] to get you to use CBDCs.

[0] https://www.premiumtimesng.com/business/business-news/571691...

[1] https://reclaimthenet.org/digital-euro-spending-saving-limit...

[2] https://www.newsweek.com/banks-have-begun-freezing-accounts-...

[3] https://www.pymnts.com/cbdc/2022/nigeria-cuts-atm-cash-withd...

A court order in any country in the world will accomplish this goal. Bu itself upi has been a revolution. We need not think of farfetched conspiracies

> Bu itself upi has been a revolution. We need not think of farfetched conspiracies

Again. You are missing the forest for the trees.

I already substantiated the fact that a central bank has already banned the use of ATMs for the purpose of its users to be forced to adopt their CBDC. That is a fact, not a conspiracy, and there is no reason why this cannot happen in other countries that have finalized and are already deployed their own CBDCs, especially very authoritarian governments such as India or China.

The e-rupee is already being developed on UPI as E-RUPI which that IS a CBDC, controlled by the Reserve Bank of India. That isn't a conspiracy and you cannot convert it to cash either [0] as the point of it is to be totally cashless.

The end game of this 'revolution' is more about "control" than the technology and who really owns your money and what you can spend it on and how much you can save. More mass surveillance on top of savings limits isn't something to be celebrated.

[0] https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/what-is-e-rupi-d...

The problem is that the Indian government has already essentially full control. Americans enjoy more freedoms so maybe the conspiracies are justified. But the Indian government already has near total control in the financial sense. From an Indian perspective this is just pure convenience, since the control aspect is present regardless

> But the Indian government already has near total control in the financial sense. From an Indian perspective this is just pure convenience, since the control aspect is present regardless

That doesn't mean it cannot happen elsewhere (as I have already shown) which is my entire point.

Celebrating mass surveillance and total control of new digital currencies in the form of a CBDC and throwing free money into people bank accounts to pursue wider adoption, should scare us all and not celebrated, especially in the US, UK and other countries.

There will a point where governments will do worse things to discourage protests or donating to protest groups by using CBDCs against their own people even when they do something very unpopular.

Why on earth in the US should protestors be financially suffocated for simply protesting against their government if they did the same thing that happened in Canada with the truckers or in Nigeria with banning ATMs?

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