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Comment by scyclow | Hacker News Reader

I think what a lot of people are missing about stablecoins is that it's not just about clearing transactions faster than SWIFT. With stablecoins you get programable money without having to deal with the wild fluctuations of crypto.

A simple (and contrived) example: Let's say I want to send you $100 on Tuesday, but only on even-numbered hours. This is a trivially easy smart contract to write. Sure, you could do this with crypto, but if you want to protect yourself against price fluctuations it makes sense to use a stablecoin.

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> A simple (and contrived) example

What about a simple but not contrived example (or if no good simple examples exist, a complex one)? Smart contracts are neat but I'm not sure there's any real benefit, especially for banks which likely don't need to do things without trusting each other.

Not sure why op didn't go with "$100 on the 1st of every month."

That's just "automatic bill pay" without a bank, etc.

I wanted to pick an example that is slightly more complicated than what existing banking software provides out of the box. But my point was that you can just write your own logic without relying on the bank or another third party.

I want to buy an event ticket from you, but we're strangers. So I write a contract that releases the money to you once you send the ticket, or vice versa.

The ticket would have to be on the chain and you could then see just how much TicketMaster was making and we can't have that.

Well, the good news is that you could also program event ticketing logic with a blockchain and build a TicketMaster competitor. But now we're venturing outside simple examples :)

ebay has somehow managed to support this use case for something like 20 years on the normal existing banking infrastructure

Yeah, but the idea is that you can eliminate the middleman or implement some as hoc logic that the middleman doesn't support.

You could also do this with any other kind of API a bank might expose? Why is crypto necessary here?

In this scenario, imagine that “you” are in a different country or perhaps you don’t have a bank account. Or maybe you don’t want to pay $10+ or X% to receive funds.

crypto isn't necessary... it's just that no bank wants to take on the risk of exposing an api to the regular consumer.

Crypto doesn't require 3rd party permission to send money or verifying anyone's authenticity, real name, or legal compliance. So it's much easier to build APIs around. If you created banking APIs you'd need very extensive controls and monitoring for anti-money laundering and so on.

One thing is stronger guarantees for the receiver, who can verify that the smart contract will automatically transfer the funds. Another is interoperability. The receiver can write a contract to e.g. always donate half of that income to a charity as soon as it is received every two hours. Another is transparency and verifiability, anyone can check that the receiver is giving half this income to charity.

Not trying to get pulled into any arguments about whether cryptocurrency is good or bad, just some potential answers to your question.

E.g. Automatic bill pay to a VPN. Now you have very good anonymity.

If you’re making regular payments from a known wallet on a public ledger, where is the anonymity coming from?

A known pseudonym doesn't destroy anonymity?

It puts you one mistake or bit of misplaced trust away from permanent de-anonymization. In our example, you have to avoid ever using that wallet for anything else, scrupulously fund it using mixers, and hope that your VPN provider never does something which makes it possible to link your activity to that wallet.

This is not realistic for the average person.

I mean sure -- but right now there's no such thing as "realistic money anonymity for the average person."

In roughly the same way there's no such thing as "very good cybersecurity for the average person."

> I mean sure -- but right now there's no such thing as "realistic money anonymity for the average person."

I know HN skews hard for electronic payments but cash is still heavily used. One nice trait is that its weaknesses are highly intuitive: there’s no retroactive de-anonymization or tracking across unrelated transactions, and people are familiar with how physical objects are stolen.

Sure, you could technically wire something together that does this, but maybe the other party wants a strong reassurance that the payment will actually go through. They don't want to rely on your server making the right API call.

This is not simple at all.

What happens if you don't have the money available? If you want to provide some guarantee, how would you do it without locking up N x $100 forever? What are even numbered hours - which timezone? What happens if your transaction doesn't get accepted within that timeslot? Etc. etc.

Okay, I'm simplifying a little bit. It wouldn't work exactly like that. You'd lock up $100 (or approve the contract to spend up to $100), specify the time I'm unix timestamps, and leave it up to the recipient to claim their money.

That's sort of besides the point though. I'm just saying that you have the ability to implement whatever ad hoc or arbitrarily complex payment logic you want without relying on a middleman.

This doesn’t feel like a good thing to me. I can imagine a lot of pretty abusive smart contracts.

How are you going to abuse sending other people money?

It's a pretty common scam already. "Sign this to receive airdrop". Haha, you just signed away all the money in your wallet. People are already losing lots of money this way and they're the ones who at least understood the concept a little bit.

Like what? It's just a streamlined and versatile way to escrow money.

US govt creates a list of companies eligible to receive social welfare money, and the smart contract money will only be exchanged with those companies. They can remove companies from the list at will, on a whim. They could also do this with all money if it’s something like FedCoin. They could do all kinds of interesting, dystopian things. I bet there’s a black mirror episode somewhere like this.

Sure, but we already have something similar to that in NY called SNAP. And honestly, it would probably be easier to keep doing that without getting the blockchain involved.

In any case, I don't think that's the sort of product that commercial banks are itching release when they launch their new stablecoins. I'm sure a lot of coins will have a deny list for AML/KYC reasons, but an allow list would be pretty cumbersome to maintain and probably turn off most users.

Or they could use fed now?

Yeah, great innovation. Also allows for many amazing and useful features for us people, such as allowing these tokens to expire and disappear from your account, or programming specific tokens to be only transferable to specific accounts or for specific goods, or for example controlling all token accounts in every single country on earth from the central location. E.g. for example Trump (assuming a USA stabletoken) not only sends you to the Salvador death camp, but also blocks and confiscated all your tokens and blocks you from ever having a token account in the future, all with a single click from NY central bank. Or replace the same with any other country and central bank.

Amazing utopia awaits for us, can't wait to take part in that hell economy :)

And we can clearly see that some people are defending their utopia agressively by trying to fade your comment to gray

It's mindboggling really. And the most puzzling to me is that this forum has a large proportion of independent thinkers. Some care about privacy, some care about removing copyright (I disagree, but respect their position), some care about free access to information etc. How can these same free thinkers advocate for a single most oppressive authoritarian system we have ever seen? And a very real system currently in late stages of testing, soon to be worldwide, not some abstract future evil.

People who want independent currency, or maybe less dependent on the govt would get a currency absolutely under control of a small group of people in the govt. People who donate to privacy foundations or buy privacy tools would see that they simply aren't allowed to do that with their "money" (non-fungible tokens). People who want to pirate stuff or download some info would have DMCA strikes not on their neat little blog or youtube channel, they will have DMCA 2.0 strikes right on their bank account, because all that shit will be automated and centralized. Just imagine, downloading something and then getting all your accounts go to 0. Or maybe not to 0 but have a fine applied and subtracted from your token balance automatically, on the discretion of the megacorp across the ocean in a different country.

It is literally dystopia, no scare quotes, no ifs no maybes, it just is.

Sure, but banks can lock your account without the blockchain, so you're not enabling any new dystopian behavior here. And if you're worried that they can restrict your transaction behavior, then don't hold that coin! Swap your money into a stablecoin that doesn't have spending allowlist logic encoded into the smart contract.

Not even close. I can have a legal USD account in some Veishnoria country and Trump has almost zero influence on it (yeah, there are clearing banks involved at the US side, but all in all the whole scheme is mostly in semi-independent blocks). At the same time I can have there an account in EUR, or any other currency. All legal, all according to the Veishnoria andd international law. But resilient and not dependent on the flavor-of-the-day madness in the USA.

But if it would be a token system, then ALL accounts in that token in ALL countries are fully under control of the USA central bank.

Also currently all dollars, or yen, or yuan, are fully fungible. You can spend any single dollar on anything you want and in reverse any sold good/service acan be bought with any dollar in existence, they are the same. Now tokens are not like that, they are non-fungible and can (and will) be limited in multiple ways. For example you can have 1000 tokens in your account, but out of them only 200 can be spend on the "bad" goods like alcohol or gambling or whatever (on political opposition support, on different religion donation etc.). Or for example you have 1000 but they have an expiration date and will go to 0 in one calendar year, so that you won't save them. The possibilities are endless.

In fact, all of that has been already tested in my Eastern Europe country (Ukraine). We had a pilot program of digital tokens. They required a separate account of course, they couldn't be converted o the regular digital money. Every tranche had an expiration date (for example first one was half a year, next one a year iirc). They could have been spent only on a specific list of goods defined by the government - in that pilot it was only approved entertainment like books, movies and also donations were allowed.

I'm personally horrified by this very real and very close future prospect. Like that's not even some abstract Matrix or Cyberpunk level horror. It is here, it is almost deployed. EU is talking all the time about it. It is mind boggling to me how regular people aren't protesting this shit. Don't you all see the implications?

All valid concerns for the dystopian world we already live in, but crypto doesn't make any of this any more likely. You can make all the same arguments against existing bank accounts or credit cards. What's to stop Visa from spending more than $200 on "bad" products? At least stablecoins are managed by a smart contract, so you can see if that functionality even exists in the first place. If it doesn't then they can't add it in later. If it does, then you can swap you money for a stablecoin that doesn't have spending limits.

Also, there's nothing stopping foreign banks from issuing their own stablecoins. Owning a US bank-issued stablecoin is like having an account with that bank. If you have a problem with that, then you can swap your balance for a EUR-backed stablecoin issued by a European bank. Or better yet, you could sell it for real USD or EUR.

Visa is a tiny little middleman compared to a Federal Reserve, however crazy that may sound. Visa is a) only one of similar middleman, b) it has no power over bank accounts or any other entity holding USD, it's only involved during a transaction. In fact, I could probably survive without touching Visa/MC for a long time (and without touching their Chinese or other alternatives). I can for example wire money from bank acc to bank acc directly and people can self organize to do that at scale and not involve a proxy. It's just won't be as convenient, no cards, no card terminals etc. There are multiple proto alternatives too, for example BLIK in Poland. EU has pretty robust bank system.

All that text above is just underscore this - a future Fed owned token would be on a completely different level of control. Cross border control too.

Regarding alternative token systems - a) outside of maybe 2-5 tokens all others won't be adopted and die out (unless enforced in a totalitarian way), b) the survivors will share the same traits, copied from one to another, after all they will be controlled by the same orgs - central banks.

And finally - no, you won't be able to sell tokens to money. Only if the owner of all tokens (a central bank) will graciously allow it. For example in the pilot in my country it did not. Thinking logically - if token system is created to restrict freedoms and bring more control to the govt, why would that govt allow "exiting" this new system? Everyone who cares and all potential targets will sell this token and go back to using money. So of course any bridges will be either heavily restricted (for the inner circle, corrupt officials, oligarchs etc.) or won't be allowed at all from the start.

Again, not saying this is a totally crazy scenario, but you're describing a level of control that the US government can already exercise using the current banking system. Good luck using fedwire/swift without a bank. The difference is whether the rules are encoded in public infrastructure and are easy to see, or they're hidden within private systems and institutions.

Also, you can always write wrapper coins for other stable coins that don't have any spending restrictions. And yeah, issuers can play whack-a-mole and ban those contracts. But at that point we're talking about a coin that no one would even recognize as money any more. Why would anyone use it? If they're already on the blockchain it would be a pretty seamless switch to just use the native token.

And at the end of the day, if you can exchange your dystopian stablecoins for USD (as the legislation requires) then you can functionally spend your money with the same restrictions that are on your bank account anyhow.

> you're describing a level of control that the US government can already exercise using the current banking system

You’re handwaving this away. Just because something is theoretically possible, it doesn’t mean that it’s as likely to happen as something else that is order of magnitudes less complex (imposing the level of fine-grained control discussed in this thread on the existing system, versus building it in from the beginning in a new one). Friction and inertia matters in the context of preventing government overreach

> Why would anyone use it?

Because the government mandates it. Because the only employers that will hire you pay out wages in it. You can imagine many scenarios where individuals don’t have much of a choice. Which could be a reason for someone to want this idea to not catch on, lest the current system gets replaced by something worse. Cheerleaders and enthusiasts may take the opposite view

> if you can exchange your dystopian stablecoins for USD

Yes, if. And for how long?

I’m not saying a motivated totalitarian regime controlling all levers of powers could necessarily be prevented from implementing their dystopia anyway, but we also don’t have to expedite technology that would make it significantly easier for them

This is a very strange scenario you're describing where: a) the global economy has moved onto the blockchain; b) the government has repealed all the major points of the legislation that we were originally talking about; c) the government has also exhibited complete dictatorial control over the logic of the major stablecoins, and banned all of the functionality that makes them actually useful; d) people decide not to use the blockchain's native token to settle transactions for some reason.

Remember, issuers want people to use stablecoins because they get to invest the funds in treasuries and hold onto the interest. If everything is blacklisted then no one will want to use them and the issuer won't make any money.

stablecoins don't protect you against price fluctuations. they don't even guarantee reliable mapping to their underlying currency.

Sending $100 on Tuesday only on even-numbered hours is not a very likely use case for it.

Paying wages that are only valid for a month, are split into parts which can only buy specific foods and goods inside a geofenced zone and can't be tranfered to any other person are much more likely.

I said it was a contrived example! But people have really specific payment logic that doesn't seem to make much sense from the outside.

What you're describing can only be achieved by encoding specific logic into the coin's original contract, so you'd know what you're getting yourself into ahead of time. And this is tantamount to agreeing to be paid in a specific gift card with a really small payment network. No need to get crypto or stablecoins involved.

> so you'd know what you're getting yourself into ahead of time

That does not mean that you have the power to do anything about it.

You could do something about it in the same sense that you can opt to be paid in dollars instead of itunes gift cards of chuck e cheese tokens. If someone has the power to decide how they're paying you then they can screw you just as easily without crypto.

“Opt to be paid in..”

Seems like you haven’t had much time with the history of company towns and company stores.

I haven't, but it sounds like they can restrict their employees' spending just fine without crypto. Also, if they can exchange their Company Stablecoins for USD (as the legislation requires) then it makes it pretty hard to restrict their spending.

"you'd know what you're getting yourself into ahead of time"

Yeah. We would know. We DO know it now. It is being tested now, exactly like described by GenshoTikamura. I've wrote you a longer comment about that below.

Do you see people protesting? I don't. Lol, even here at HN, at the bastion of independent thinking or close enough, people aren't protesting. Most it seems aren't even aware about the scope of the features of such token system, and the implications to the daily life.

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