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Comment by yesbut | Hacker News Reader

I'm not familiar with Brazil's system, but moving a central bank to being democratically controlled is betterbthan leaving this in the hands of a private company. The US central bank isn't currently democratically controlled, but it could be. Then collectively we could decide how a Brazil type system should function. People are better served when their banks aren't run for-profit.

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Until it’s politically uncool to be you, and the gov’t bans your ability to buy food. The Nazi’s got elected in their first time, democratically (ish).

Brother fckn nazis taking the government is a much bigger systemic problem that no financial system can protect against.

The system works if democracy works. If we lose democracy, of course, the blocks built on top of it would crumble. That does not means everyone should stop building on top of democracy. Even more so for things that makes the life of the people better.

No, making it so you can’t buy anything without the gov’ts permission makes it not only more tempting for someone like Nazi’s to take over, but also much more effective for them to keep it and far more damaging when they’re in. Germany is a strongly ‘cash’ society partially because of this, but also because of what the Stasi did to East Germany.

You really don’t want the folks in power to have even more of that kind of power, no matter how convenient it is most of the time.

At least Visa/MasterCard, etc. mainly just care about making money. The gov’t doesn’t even have to care about that!

Using ‘we’re currently in a democracy’ to justify creating an even more tempting and likely to be abused tool of oppression is not a good idea.

A central payment system is absolutely not a tool of oppression. Case in point: don't like it? Don't use it. People are still free to not use it just like it even didn't exist. For everyone that chooses to, there is now an instant and free payment method. Where is the oppression?

In your hypothetical scenario of nazis taking the gov, lets assume there is no central database. Nazis would go: ok banks give me your databases or else. Banks gives databases because they care about money. There, now nazi have central database. And in this scenario you have deprived the people of enjoying a really nice service.

Where is the win here I don't see it. Let's not do good thing because, oh, in a doomsday scenario good thing might be bad. Like, shouldn't we channel efforts in ensuring doomsday never comes to reality in the first place? This way we all enjoy good life with ever improving services.

This is getting even more fantastical by the moment.

I’m also pointing out not-that distant past events, and you’re also just completely ignoring them.

Good luck! Just don’t do it in my economy.

Look into the efforts of individuals within Nazi controlled territory during the war to save Jews and other persecuted people. When the SS comes knocking, if you’re a good person, you have a chance of “losing” some records before you hand them over. If it’s all in one government controlled database then there is no chance for individuals to work against the system. Hey, I think they even made some movies and books about this stuff.

That central electronic payment system is a problem if it causes the government to stop issuing and securing paper currency.

If the nazis take power, and you happen to be one of their targets, having cash won't help much when your photo is being displayed everywhere with wording saying there's a bounty on your head as a dangerous terrorist.

But guess what makes it easier to identify and target individuals? Being able to do something like SELECT * FROM transactions WHERE recipient like ‘synagogue’

What's stopping someone to doing exactly that in the current system?

There is no such central database, for one.

All the transactions are controlled by multiple independent parties, whose interests do not align to do that as they’d lose their customers to their competitors when it came out what was happening.

Some of the data does go through central clearing at some step (ACH, Fedwire), but credit card charges, Zelle, cash, checks deposited at the same bank, etc. do not.

Since we are talking about nazis, it doesn’t really matter what is in the interest of independent banks and CC companies. The nazis will simply send the storm troopers to them and get the lists of people donating to synagogues, easy peasy.

With cash, you stay out of those databases in the first place.

Which takes time, so records can be disappeared. And since they don’t control the format of the records (yet) or what’s in the records (yet), they are also a ton of work to use.

Definitely not impossible, but much harder than if there was a single centralized system - dramatically harder.

Cash is king though, as you say.

Important comment: PIX is not a bank killer and isn't designed this way. Banks still exist in Brazil and they rake in pornographic profits just like everywhere else. The absolute majority of the banks profits here does not comes from payments processing fees. The fees exist to cover the transaction operating cost. Since for PIX there is a much much lower operating cost, it makes the service free for people and businesses! The ones losing here aren't banks, but credit cards companies.

Brazil Central Bank has a well paid and competent bureaucracy. The very successful PIX payment was its initiative, but the gov in power tried to pretend it was their.

BTW, Brazil Central Bank now is "independent", that is, their president was indicated by the looser candidate can do what he wants. In USA at least they respond to Congress.

There should be no central bank.

Now THAT's going cashless, like, literally.

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