Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona

Re:Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona by kragen on Thursday February 20, 2020 @12:05PM (#22376520)

This headline is goofy. Central banks have been using digital electronic currencies for decades. The difference is that now they want to include all Swedes in the electronic currency system, not just Swedish banks, as they have been for decades. (And the claim that this uses "blockchain technology" is just a lie; it's a centralized database. It's no more a blockchain than Git is.)

I think this is a terrible idea given both the current appallingly bad state of unintended vulnerabilities in computer security and the appalling intended security vulnerabilities inherent in centralized architectures like the one they're proposing.

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Re:Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona by socialdemocrat on Thursday February 20, 2020 @01:12PM (#22377141)

Most of your money is already on a centralized architecture of you are using a bank. But I agree that a decentralized system would be preferable.

However I can see a benefit in electronic money becoming a public utility rather than being controlled by private companies trying to extract rent.

Visa and MasterCard engage in massive rent extraction.

Would have been nicer with some form of robust international system for money transfer and exchange where middle men could not nickel and dime you the whole way.

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Re:Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona by kragen on Thursday February 20, 2020 @03:16PM (#22378174)

> a decentralized system would be preferable. ... a public utility rather than being controlled by private companies ... Would have been nicer with some form of robust international system for money transfer and exchange where middle men could not nickel and dime you

Well, in fact, the system you are describing has existed for 11 years and inspired the Swedish system being discussed here; presumably the attributes you are wishing for are precisely the ones that they want to eliminate by creating their own private system instead of just using Bitcoin.

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Re:Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona by kragen on Thursday February 20, 2020 @07:21PM (#22379903)

(And of course currencies have been digital, as opposed to analog, for thousands of years, and one of the leading hypotheses on the origin of digits as a way of representing numbers is that they were used for accounting. "Digital" is not simply a synonym for "electronic"; rather, it's the practice of representing numbers or other information as sequences of discrete, arbitrary symbols, rather than continuously varying quantities of something like weight, width, or voltage; symbols such as "4", coins, or cuneiform glyphs.)

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Re:Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona by vinniejames on Thursday February 20, 2020 @12:10PM (#22376559)

Git is somewhat like a blockchain though

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Re:Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona by volgar1x on Thursday February 20, 2020 @12:38PM (#22376818)

Without proof of work

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Re:Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona by azov on Thursday February 20, 2020 @01:19PM (#22377210)

The term you’re looking for is “Merkle tree”. Git and Bitcoin are both Merkle trees.

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Re:Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona by gruez on Thursday February 20, 2020 @01:32PM (#22377330)

having proof of work or not is orthogonal to whether it's a blockchain or not. see: blockchains for proof of stake cryptocurrencies.

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Re:Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona by bronipstid on Sunday February 23, 2020 @12:52AM (#22395372)

I think a lot of non-technical business people and journos didn't fully understand that the Bitcoin blockchain is more than just a Merkel tree, and so have started using "blockchain" to mean a bare MT, despite the fact that the blockchain in Bitcoin is only meaningful because of how it's computed.

So maybe proof of work can be replaced, but without some consensus protocol it's not a blockchain in any meaningful sense.

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Re:Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona by kragen on Sunday February 23, 2020 @01:01AM (#22395402)

"Merkle graph" may be a better term, since both Git and Bitcoin may have multiple hash references to the same node [in some sense].

I pretty much agree that "some consensus protocol" is probably the right place to draw the line. I'd add "decentralized", in the sense that no single entity can control the "consensus", which I think may be what you mean: "some decentralized consensus protocol".

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