Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it tries to rally confidence

Re:Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it trie... by twblalock on Monday December 19, 2022 @02:00PM (#34056124)

We already mostly have that.

Most of the US dollars that exist are already digital -- numbers in a bank account, only some of which is backed by actual dollar bills. It is trivially easy to use them to pay for things or transfer them to other accounts, and they can easily be converted to/from paper money in reasonable amounts.

What we have now is fine. I don't see any benefit to making our existing currencies more "digital" than they are.

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Re:Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it trie... by mypastself on Monday December 19, 2022 @02:25PM (#34056441)

The commenter you’re responding to was specifically talking about digital cash, not digital currency. Properties of cash are distinct from other forms of money in specific ways. “Ease” of conversion from one to the other doesn’t make them identical.

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Re:Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it trie... by twblalock on Monday December 19, 2022 @04:03PM (#34057675)

I haven't yet seen anyone demonstrate a meaningful distinction between "digital currency" and "digital cash" that actually matters for how people use money.

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Re:Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it trie... by mypastself on Monday December 19, 2022 @04:15PM (#34057819)

Anonymity (or pseudonimity) is a key appeal of cash as opposed to other forms of money. Combined with the ease of use of digital payments, I can completely understand the attraction that the original comment was referring to.

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Re:Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it trie... by Xelynega on Monday December 19, 2022 @08:57PM (#34060589)

Except that the lack of anonymity in payments is one of the main features of blockchains. Which is it? Is digital cash a public ledger or an anonymous payment system?

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Re:Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it trie... by RinTohsaka on Monday December 19, 2022 @09:03PM (#34060636)

Monero bridges the two of these things together nicely.

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Re:Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it trie... by mypastself on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @01:23AM (#34062313)

The ledger is public, but the users’ identity needn’t be. And as the other commenter noted, different blockchains use different approaches, some of which do offer full anonymity. You’ll also notice that I said “anonymity (or pseudonymity)”.

But that’s immaterial to the discussion. The original question was whether or not the idea of digital cash (regardless of implementation) has any value.

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