we already got a tease in Canada of what is to come.
The same can be said for any kind of protest once deemed by governments illegal, that gave you your current rights, from child labor laws to environmental regulations...
Also in what part of a democratic playbook is it written that if you "illegaly protest" you "give up your rights" to everything, including your financial assets, and by government fiat nonetheless. Because in 20th century plus western democracies at least, this is an unprecedented step.
For instance, ~25 people died during the US protests in summer 2020. Not many, but probably more than in the convoy protests. If the US Government had gone ahead and frozen the assets of the people involved, how would one feel?
It didn't make it right, just legal.
You could implement a block chain somewhere in there but it's not really clear what a central bank would gain from that. They have central in the name. They aren't interested in decentralizing
Yes, absolutely. Unless bitcoin wins, I have no doubt whatsoever that this is what's going to happen.
If we let the government do whatever, no technological moat is going to stop them.
How about we just stop electing people who are going to use power against their own citizens? If you think that's impossible, then how about we change the system such that it is.
That seems much more constructive than erecting barriers for ourselves because we can't control the beast we've constructed.
Well sure, but for that you've got quite a road. Elections were precisely designed to extract power from the citizens into the hands of the few. If you truly want freedom and equality then you need to build power from the bottom up and never let anyone "represent" an entire population... because noone ever can represent millions of people faithfully.
I mean, you could take the 500 brightest and nicest people on Earth and put them in a parliament and you would still get widespread injustice and misery. We need to abolish the Nation States and empower people and communities to organize (anarchism).
You have too much faith in humanity.
> If you think that's impossible, then how about we change the system such that it is.
Because that's impossible too?
It's like buttered butter. The system is made of humans.
Who is "we"? The people who can change the system are those in elected offices of power. Your suggestion means convincing them to change it so that most of them will not get reelected and will lose all power. That can never happen, human nature.
That can happen, and has happened throughout history. It tends to be a bloody ordeal though.
A parallel society is such a way.
How would that go? Who would ask you or me how to run the system? And who we should alternatively elect, given that the elections system is a rigged game with a couple of mostly-agreeing between them horses alternating in power in most countries?
furthermore the internet has show really why democracy doesn't work at scale. it's so easy to manipulate the unwashed masses.
you think if fox made up a smear campaign on you, there wouldn't be hoards of people at your door with pitchforks the next day.
Neither of it is possible the average Joe/Jill buys into all the bs sprouted by the powers.
Dealing with taxes takes like 5 minutes each year. It is all electronic. Just like you can sign anything electronically using encryption keys for any nationally reckognized ID system in Norway. I just electronically signed papers to start a company. 15 minute process online.
Its pretty much the same in the USA if you just have income from a standard job. You send them your W2 form with the last year's salary and make sure everything is right. If you're self-employed, earned income some other way (capital gains, etc), or live in a state with additional state income tax, you have to fill out some more forms.
Then it gets a bit complicated calculating deductions. Which means you have to put in some effort if you want to lower your effective tax rate. There's deductions for everything under the sun since the tax code is very complex. You get some money back if you paid interest on student loans, have kids, bought a house, spend money on office supplies, gave to charity, etc. Some people spend a few hundred on a tax advisor to do it for them and still come out ahead. Many people simply don't bother and let the money go. The IRS only comes after you if you underpay, not overpay.
The US is deliberatly difficult because
1) Companies make a fortune selling "solutions" to this, thus spend a lot of money ensuring it continues
2) Americans don't like taxes, so by making it more obvious the government is taking your tax money, and making it painful in the process, to fund their military, it helps cement that idea there's should be a small state
The US takes 27% of the GDP in tax, the UK 33%, although personal taxes for normal people tend to be about the same, its just that the US pretty much requires an accountant, or at least some expensive proprietary software, and hours of your time.
That would be another thing that would be great for the GAO (U.S. Government Accountability Office (U.S. GAO)) to produce reports about.
Where are (my / your) Tax dollars going? How does that compare to other countries, in absolute, per person, GDP and other metrics, etc?
They do report that.
https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...
https://datalab.usaspending.gov/about/
""Who We Are
This site was created by the Office of the Chief Data Officer at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (Fiscal Service), which is part of the Department of the Treasury. Fiscal Service is responsible for managing public debt, central payment systems, and government accounting. Our team is comprised of data analysts, developers, and UX designers who are passionate about putting trusted data in the hands of the people.""
So that site is created by the disbursement arm of the bureaucracy, which explains the overly generic output bins as well as no metric for adjusting based on taxes paid in by an individual, nor for area of the country. I was rather hoping for something with an order of magnitude or two of greater depth that dynamically adjusted the context of graphical representation based on what mattered to the viewer.
I don't think taxes goes to healthcare (either in France or the UK). I think that's paid up for with your social security contribution?
NI is about 19% of tax revenue, Income Tax 27%, VAT 18%, local taxes (council tax and business rates) about 10%.
It doesn't include other receipts, things like profits from state owned business.
Total government revenue (about 10% higher than total taxation) does not cover total government expenditure, hence a deficit, and some branches of economics considers revenue and expenditure separate in a system which controls its own currency.
Either way, the US spends more on government healthcare (per head of total population) then the UK, the decision not to have universal healthcare isn't a funding one
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
The US as a whole in 2019 spent 16% of its GDP on Health, 4% on Military
The UK meanwhile spent 10% on Health and 3% on Military
Caused a few wars though
There is no CBDC needed for that.
(In fact, all the article’s fears about payment prevention and free speech restriction are all possible without CBDC, and already in place in some segments that gained popular support, which minorities and SW have been complaining about across the decades.)
For most people, no. However, as you make your way up the income bracket or acquire investments or property it gets more and more complicated.
…and if you mess it up the IRS will be sure to tell you what you’ve done wrong and what you actually owed.
(check username)
The rest are just pro-forma excuses. If they were serious about money laundering, why are the banks only fined 10-15% of profits they make from laundering cartel money, and literally no key decision makers go to jail? And you still think they care about money laundering? lmao.
It's not about money laundering, never was. It's just to CONTROL you, and absolutely nothing else.
Here is right from the horse's mouth: General Manager of the Bank of International Settlements: “We don’t know who’s using a $100 bill today and we don’t know who’s using a 1,000 peso bill today. The key difference with the CBDC is the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that… and that makes a huge difference.”
absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use
absolute control on the rules
absolute control
I mean... I'd say that at least two of these are ordinary citizens, probably actually three of them...
You mean, like you can with cash?
I understand being skeptical of the government, but we already have "electronic" money in the form of Credit cards, where everything you speculate about is already possible by BOTH the government AND private banks.
Government enforcement against people committing all kinds of crimes is uneven and unfair, but I doubt the Federal Government is interested in mobilizing against parking ticket offenders, unless their crimes somehow relate them with Al Capone. If the Federal Government believes you have ill-gotten money in your possession, you can have that money seized right now; no need for fancy digital or crypto stuff.
The Feds have taken on ransomware gangs and others in the crypto realm already -- doing "bad things" that are illegal with crypto is still illegal, without the need to have fancy escrow/approval/gov't stuff in there.
A.K.A. biometric vaccine passport
I feel like too many people confuse the two, but it's fundamentally different, in every meaningful way.
> With cash, we don't know who is using the 100 dollar bill today ... a key difference with CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that determine the expression of that central bank liability .. also we will have the technology to enforce that ... if an advanced economy issues a CBDC, and someone in a 3rd country wants to use it, it will require the consent of the central bank of the residence of that person, therefore the degree of control will be far bigger.
June 2021 in the UK, https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/bank-of-england-tells-...
> Tom Mutton, a director at the Bank of England, said during a conference on Monday that programming could become a key feature of any future central bank digital currency ... what happens if one of the participants in a transaction puts a restriction on [future use of the money]? ... Sir Jon Cunliffe, a deputy Governor at the Bank, said digital currencies could be programmed for commercial or social purposes ... “You could think of giving your children pocket money, but programming the money so that it couldn’t be used for sweets. There is a whole range of things that money could do, programmable money, which we cannot do with the current technology.”
This is so terrible.
There are countries who try really hard to control the USD exchange rate of their own currency. In practice, it means anyone getting paid in USD has their money confiscated and forcibly exchanged for their own nearly worthless local currency at absolutely terrible rates.
I've seen people posting about it here on HN: they claimed the government was pocketing about 50% of their earnings through this process and that bitcoin is a better proposition.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30141563
These CBDCs would empower governments to do so much worse.
This is, by and large, how it currently works today. Not that often do actual pallets of cash get moved from one bank to another; a lot more often, some centralized bank has a big ol' ledger, where various banks move money from one column to another. One of those centralized banks is The Fed, that's how the US was able to freeze so much of Russia's money; there is a bank account at The Fed, and that account is where Russia keeps its US dollars (or the bank that Russia works with keeps its dollars, some of which are Russian, or the bank that the bank that Russia works with... you get the idea).
The biggest difference between a CBDC is that there wouldn't need to be a printed dollar to back that ledger, so instead of rare pallets-of-cash movements, it would be entirely digital. Printing money would be an UPDATE statement rather than through a printing press.
CBDCs will probably happen in a similar way. Cheap and easy to implement. No room to make noise about the abuses because the people targeted won't have the money to defend themselves, let alone speak out in an unfavourable media environment being paid/given incentives/on board with the plan to Think of The Children. A lot like the how surveillance ended up the abuses are fairly quiet so people aren't really sure what specifically they need to fight.
That's stretching the concept 'money' a bit, is it still money if it's non-fungible? What on earth happens if the money is paid to someone? Can you 'launder' the restriction away by swapping money with a friend? Does the restriction remain indefinitely, making it completely non-fungible?
It's weird to call it swiss BIS, the place where international institutions are headquartered is not usually relevant :) We don't say Swiss FIFA, or Swiss WHO.
A good reason to have them would be that it'd be really easy for the government to pay you, for instance if we had a UBI or one of those things everyone on here loves. Right now they're surprisingly bad at it. A lot of government agencies have to pay people with prepaid debit cards, and there's people who never got their stimulus checks still.
[1] mainly unjustified because they're already tracking you in regular bank accounts so it can't even be any worse…
That's one way to look at it. Another way is to see that tracking will be backed up by efficient enforcement and control. That's more than a step further, that's something that completely re-organizes society.
You could argue that something like that is necessary in the 21st century, but besides the paranoia there's concern about who controls a system like that.
That seems like a good reason to not have them. Sending people checks is profoundly simple 17th century technology. Putting people who can't even master that in charge of securing against stealing an arbitrarily large amount of money over the internet is like that xkcd about voting software:
Just no.
A few years after I managed to get them to give me an account, I overdrafted my checking account by a few dollars and they disabled my ATM card. After my next deposit cleared, I went back to that bank branch to get my card reinstated. They did not want to do it. The manager eventually said he could help me if I "promised I wouldn't do it again". I asked for my account to be closed instead, and I will always remember how pleased the guy seemed to be losing me as a customer.
It is not easy for everyone to get and maintain a bank account.
This sounds uncomfortably similar to the "reason" the IRS can't do our own taxes for us and send us the bill.
Also, everyone here is arguing "the government shouldn't know about my finances", and I feel like "the government should do my taxes for me" conflicts with that?
[1] for instance, I don't remember the legal status of mailing cash through USPS, but pretty sure it's different privacy-wise even though it's "the government"
Uhm, isn't that what literally every bank in the world is nowadays?...
The only difference between a blockchain and a traditional database is that a blockchain has an inherit audit trail due to the use of crypto algorithms and digital signatures. A traditional database can have similarly immutable record keeping with digital signatures as well.
Although I see your point about targeting ordinary citizens, so the thing about that is the real criminals are scary, nowadays because they are getting into America at such alarming rates they have tons of ways of getting to the people that get to them, while the ordinary citizens will never retaliate for cracking down on them, so the natural thing to do, the cowardly thing but at any rate, is to crack down on ordinary citizens.
Similar to recording police or criminals with your phone. People do it to police all the time, because it's safer at least in California, whereas violent criminals will retaliate criminally, so recording them to their face takes courage.
- The government's not going to have an official true cryptocurrency where anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can just generate a private key and anonymously send / receive coins.
- The system won't allow an address to send / receive coins without approval from a government key, and that approval will only be given if the government's gotten a name / SSN / real-life identity to associate with that address.
- The system will provide a function where a government-controlled key can freeze any address's ability to send or receive funds.
- The government's going to say "But we need to take a stand against terrorists / Russian oligarchs / drug kingpins" and then it ends up being used against successively lower and lower degrees of criminals, such as money launderers / tax dodgers / deadbeat dads / unpaid parking tickets, and eventually ends up targeting ordinary citizens.