Real ID + needing it to browse anything on the Internet: https://community.qbix.com/t/the-coming-war-on-end-to-end-en...

From what I see people on HN writing, by and large they downplay the risks of these as well as AI. Or alternately seem to suggest that CBDCs and national IDs are not coming, and that it’s a conspiracy theory. However, the “enshittification of Big Tech platforms” is already a fact, so they simply complain about it, but anytime solutions involving open source, decentralization, and utility tokens are introduced, they are violently voted down. So — since no solutions are welcomed, I guess many denizens of HN support hurtling toward extreme centralized control. After all, we’ll be able to complain about it once it’s in place, and that’s enough!

Edit: literally 5 seconds after I posted it, I received downvotes. Not fast enough for a human to read the message let alone explore the links. I wonder if it’s even automated by keyword now.

Similarly with digital payments, I'd much rather trust the government with that than some rando cryptobro of the week.

There is nothing extreme about this. The government already does both functions in the analog world. It's about time they caught up digitally.

Meanwhile some YouTuber screeching about some Bible quote... not a convincing start

I can vote for Parliament I can't vote for PayPal's board of directors.

Most politicians back it, so voting differently makes little difference. Labour and the Conservatives support the Online Safety Bill, the Patriot Act was bipartisan, and voters have very little control over the EU and can’t stop Chat Control. And most of “government” isn’t directly elected: you can’t vote out the NSA, and Congress has little power over them either. The government blunts corporate abuses but doesn’t stop them: revolving doors ensure authorities target small fry while big companies like Visa keep going unimpeded. And finally, most voters don’t mind surveillance that much, since government and media manufacture consent for it. Don’t count on ordinary people to “vote it out” until it’s too late.

Lobbying against government surveillance helps marginally, but it's an eternal struggle. Governments take as much power as they can get, while abuses are exponentially harder to detect and stop than refusing to grant that power in the first place. The “slippery slope” isn’t a fallacy, it’s the record of the last twenty years. Don’t let them track speech and money with a central ID and digital currency, just because you don’t like a few tech bros or online trolls.

Ditching Google is not the same thing as removing Google from governance of your life, though. I don't use Google search, but I am sure they know who I am and sell that data to anyone who wants it, including government agencies which can't legally obtain that data on their own due (ostensibly) to citizen oversight.

However, the average person at least has some teeny tiny say in government via democratic processes and oversights. They have zero power against a big company unless they are a major shareholder.

The fundamental difference of "one person, one vote" and "one dollar, one vote" should not be lost in this discussion.

Big bureaucracies are terribly disempowering no matter who runs them, but in government at least you have some tiny amount of representation vs zero in the private sector.

Taxes? So I get some roads and schools and parks and old people healthcare, and lose some to corruption. Better that than making Bezos and Zucky even richer.

1970, though I hope we aren't at risk of that happening again anytime soon. The modern military has been pretty good at staying apolitical.

Meanwhile the government protects many of my "freedoms" from private intrusions when it comes to things like bankruptcy protections, credit bureau limitations, telemarketing, angry gunowners, etc.

I've run into trouble with the law on a few occasions, but it was never terribly oppressive -- probably largely thanks to my race, class, and politics. If I were a poor Black man or a conservative white man, I'd probably have a very different view of government.

Thinking about it some more, I think think this just circles back to the old "freedom from" and "freedom to" debate... not sure that's worth getting too much into here, since we're unlikely to change anyone's minds or reveal new perspectives.

The government is authorized by it's own citizens to use force on some citizens (such as criminals).

That being said, your point might have been when did the government last use force in an unjust manner? That's a matter of constant political debate.

While not an outright ban on religion per se, there is continued state pressure against religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antireligious_campaigns_of_the...

What makes this tradeoff (of convenience vs privacy) acceptable to me is not that I trust the government, but that I already accept I have near-zero privacy right now, as it is. Making it slightly easier for them isn't a big deal. I'm not a very exciting person to begin with.

And frankly I suspect that outside of techno-libertarian echo chambers, this is the case for most regular people. They just don't really care if the government knows about them. Not everyone has the same degree of desire/need for privacy.

In legal circles, for example, there's the refrain that you should never share unnecessary information with police, even if you're well intentioned and have nothing to hide, because innocence isn't a preclusion from being royally fucked in court. It's true that "the government" as a homogenous blob has mountains of information on you, but I guess I'm not so eager to dissolve what few helpful divisions within that blob exist.

On the whole though I agree that my information existing somewhere in that blob isn't the hugest deal.

This kind of already exists: https://login.gov

I have to use this to login to the VA.

And reintroduce all the chilling effects of knowing everything you say is on a permanent record linked to your name. I know the government wouldn't be running the sites, but they'd have activity metadata, and data breaches could be correlated to work out who the "opaque" ID refers to (perhaps it would be possible to mitigate that by having the IdP identify users to the site as a hash combining the site and the user. Not sure). There are a few types of companies that may have a genuine reason for requiring government auth, but generally we should not make it easy for Facebook or Google to require it

A community with fewer bots and trolls should be accomplished with moderation, and not just allowing a firehose of signups

Ideally, the government login/auth would be an opt-in for sites where anonymity isn't important. Facebook, for example, already has a real-name policy but still has fake accounts. Moderation alone isn't sufficient; it's hard to keep up with the number of bad actors. Limiting signups to verified humans, and possibly validating their nationality, can help with that IRT to bots and foreign agents.

It's important that the mechanism be opt-in, though, and yeah, metadata would be a problem. But realistically it's just a matter of degree... they already have access to all of that metadata today with just a subpoena or national security letter. Centralizing the login would make it easier for them to collect it, but also make it easier to audit via government mechanisms (FOIAs, etc.) compared to the opacity of private companies (which are under zero obligation to reveal how things are stored).

I would be 100% unwilling to engage with public online communities if I had to reveal my real-world identity to do so.

The hope is not that it would kill anonymity altogether, but that it would create some alternative communities linked to real-world identities, and maybe that would help people behave better, with real-world decorum, in those specific identities. Yeah, some people would never sign up for those... and maybe that's OK, as long as the remaining community is more civil and thoughtful?

I don't think that would be the result, really, because when sites do have real identity requirements, it doesn't increase civility much, if any.

I think it's the absence of a physical presence that makes people feel OK with being less civil. Emotionally, it doesn't feel like you're talking with real people.

But I don't know.

Why do you lie when it takes 1 second to verify the facts? I wasn't interested, but clicked on the video and the man is talking in a calm and collected manner, not even close to "screeching". Or is it always "screeching" when somebody says something you disagree with?

>Here we go. CBDCs are next, and also national Digital IDs

No, this is a long term replacement for ACH, a function that the Federal Reserve was already carrying out.

I'd love to read this, for anyone more familiar with the legislation/where to find it.

It's so weird to me that people are afraid of the government knowing who you are when like every private company asks for the same kind of information all the time, and data brokers gobble that up and resell it all the time (including to government), and nobody bats an eye.

Any citations on every trans person in the South being singled out for denial of services by the government? Because that sounds like inflammatory nonsense.

Additionally in living memory, many businesses and government services were segregated by race. In some cases some races were denied access to services or those services were severely underfunded. The legacy of that legal system still has impacts today.

[0]: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2023-03-30/... [1]: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1182121291/colorado-supreme-c...

For children. Or for state funding, but the state doesn't pay for the vast majority of plastic surgery.

> Additionally in living memory, many businesses and government services were segregated by race.

Race doesn't need affirming medical care, or identification to single out. Also, businesses and government services weren't abstractly segregated by race, they were specifically discriminatory toward black people.

2. The example of racial segregation was to point out an additional time that a minority group was discriminated against. Black people getting less than adequate medical treatment is not them needing specific affirmative care and being denied it but an example of discrimination that was government sanctioned. Beyond pointing to the two sets of laws and their discriminatory natures the link is superficial, just another example of legal discrimination.

I cannot speak for you but denying the government the power to discriminate or oppress minorities and empowering the rights of individuals to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is worthwhile to me. Which is why seeing all these states pass these discriminatory laws is disheartening.

Case in point, the no fly lists, they literally don't care if they just ban all the John Smiths.

There is no central database of:

* Citizenship

* Births

* Drivers Licenses

* Marriages

* Deaths (SSA death reporting is voluntary and customary by funeral homes -not required)

* Education history

* Criminal Records

* Firearm Ownership

* Property Ownership

* Vehicle Ownership

The only thing the feds or even the state government has a certain idea of is, how much you made in a given reporting period - not that reporting periods always overlap in any meaningful way. There is no requirement (as far as I can tell) to even request a social security number - most parents do, because they want to claim their children on their taxes.

Now, many of those records do exist - they exist at the county, state or local level in some manner or fashion - and of course, its not standardized either, sometimes its at the county, sometimes the state, sometimes at the county or state for the same record type based on year. (e.g. Marriages from 1902-1962 are in county records, and 1962 to current in state, or the other way around.)

Trying to link all of this data in a meaningful way, would be a monumental task that would likely require a vast amount of manual data matching - and it would still be wrong 40% of the time.

Not sure you need firearm / vehicle / education history for an ID system

That's already the case.

The secondary "national" IDs most of us use are simply state IDs or driver's licenses. They're not in a federal database, but I don't understand how that's meaningfully different. It's still a big government tracking system.

They used to carry a disclaimer: FOR SOCIAL SECURITY PURPOSES • NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION

Nobody has seriously discussed a CBDC for months in the U.S. FedNow is the American financial system catching up to the 1990s. It has nothing to do with crypto beyond the cursory.

It isn't being seriously discussed for implementation. The working groups are disbanded. The Fed won't write it off--they shouldn't. But CBDCs are as proximate as postal banking.

I can't begin to parse your comment.

A CBDC would mean cutting out the bank - you would hold your money digitally with the Fed, and the Fed would be liable for it.

FedNow creates a ledger that allows two banks holding their money digitally with the Fed make an instant transfer. You never become a direct customer of the Fed, but your bank and the bank of the person you're exchanging money with - both already Fed customers - have a quicker way to record the transfer.

The only relation between FedNow and a CBDC is that the Fed is involved, and, like, computers, I guess? Other than that, their mechanisms and effects have very little in common.

Wish we could do the same for the credit card companies. Would be great if the Federal Government could intervene in some way to have Visa / Mastercard / American Express / Discover use the same API interface for payments. Would dramatically increase competition for providers.

There is probably a neobank opportunity in providing this. FedNow is, reasonably, administered by banks. (The Fed doesn't want to provide end-user customer service nor incur liability for fraud.)

Far too much lobbying for any REAL competition to shake up the industry.

This will be exclusive to the federal government and state governments I imagine.

So when a completely dissimilar example of 'digital money' comes up, they equate it to crypto, even though it lacks many of the intrinsic aspects of crypto.

So, unfortunately, for these “crypto” maximalists, the crypto aspect of their digital currency is just some fun trivia and not something they even bother to leverage.

I don’t know whether the fed’s investigation into CBDCs will result in it adopting one. But FedNow has been designed in such a way that it could easily be modified to support one. You’d just have to implement a version of it where the allowed participants were everybody who’s allowed to have a bank account, rather than only banks.

Curious how this would work, it would be a pretty big inversion of asset control to make it work.

Saying "just have to" is a very big "just", considering it was aimed at only a few thousand institutions with very tight reporting requirements being the target audience instead of hundreds of millions of nontechnical users that would need something that just werks.

they are centralized in which funds can be seized, censored, and they all have money services licenses just like their corresponding banks do.

right, not like bitcoin, like bitcoin exchanges, just like the person said and you somehow ignored.

far more similarities than differences for this comment and the other comments at your level to be focusing on the differences and confused about the existence of similarities.

Now is a matter of banks to pay the providers[2] to integrate with their systems and ledgers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le8Me8AfK8k

[2] https://www.frbservices.org/news/press-releases/072023-fedno...

I've never in my life received a wage in cash, as in, hard dollars.

Maybe a long time ago, but I get my pay which is supposed to be on the 1st and 15th on like the 13th and 29th or something. Getting paid "two days early" is a pretty common feature with Direct Deposit these days. It is always credited to my account before my actual paycheck technically gets posed.

> maybe charging a transaction fee

I imagine someone would be paying for the transaction of physically handling all the cash, no? Its not like having all the logistics of handling cash to potentially thousands of employees is a zero dollar cost. I imagine its massively cheaper for everyone to pay whatever marginal cost my employer is paying for ACH/DirectDeposit through their payroll app than paying a ton of people to handle and keep track of the cash.

My bank seems to trust my paycheck deposits, though, and they "clear" (update my balance and become spendable) under 24hrs after they show up as "pending."

So when my bank is crediting my account with my paycheck early, its because my work told them I'm getting paid that amount. Otherwise they wouldn't necessarily know of the amount. Sure, its like some kind of loan in a way, but its essentially paperovering the slowness of the ACH to actually clear in a decent timeframe.

You would think there would _at least_ be a ceiling price. Makes me wonder why they can't show _any_ pricing.

"Spend the time and energy to build us into your product first and then we can talk price" is not the most reassuring of pitches.

I think the pricing is weird because you can start (and run!) for free, while the end to end solution requires negotiating with multiple parties.

Those middle companies have lobbyist representation and the govt has no intention of cutting any companies out of the payments industry.

For e-commerce, isn’t that SRC?

https://www.emvco.com/emv-technologies/secure-remote-commerc...

however, the payment itself is almost besides the point. the tricky part is the scheme / governance surrounding payments. who is liable for what, preventing fraud, etc. these large payment actors + the middlemen are more about fostering trust networks than moving the actual dollars and cents.

fraud in P2P payment networks (e.g. Zelle) is already a huge issue because a lack of a governing actor like a card network.[0] a different question is would the government ever provide this mediating role / lay out guidelines? would we want it to?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/business/payments-fraud-z...

https://incometaxindia.gov.in/communications/circular/circul...

Besides this, stakeholders/partners of the NPCI are mandated to offer UPI services. I'm not sure if signing up was optional, but it would honestly be suicidal for a bank not to, given that there are so many competitors offering the same.

I keep appreciating the regulations in India, it is overall supportive of the common man. From say SEBI regulations on derivative markets to digital payments. For eg. credit cards are becoming less frequent, people here won't take out their cards for every other expense. People have become aware of the fact that money at the end is in bank and spending from the bank account hits much more real than a 30 day stream of cash 3-4 times your salary handed to you whenever you need. And so, low income and middle income groups spend wisely and don't get caught in spend cycles above their capacity.

Such an angle goes unappreciated, but hopefully this continues and money still be real and in our pocket.

A bank does not want to interact with you in the same channel as it interacts with another bank.

What there will be are services provided by banks which utilize this for instant transfers.

The middle companies between transfers you want. Most of the actual work is fraud prevention and dispute resolution... unless you want the only means of settling a dispute is through the courts.

Not really. All it will do is let the same companies change the way they handle average citizens' payments.

It's the same as Open Banking in Europe. It is supposed allow small businesses to leverage this to enable innovation and all that stuff, but when you want to use these APIs you find there are limitations on who can actually use it. For example, you can only put your service to production by being on a "directory" of approved providers, and to be on that directory you need something 25k or 50k in an account. So, not really that useful for a small startup wanting to make a product out of it.

Banking systems are the backbone of world power dominance, big players won't let small people share it.

That's modest angel investor money in a small city.

I do think this is a bit of a weak justification, though.

I mean, 50k puts it out of “a couple people starting something in their garage”, but it doesn’t really lock out much beyond that. That’s pretty close to the franchise fee for opening a McDonald’s.

Yes, it could be more equitable, but if that’s the only barrier to access, it’s… pretty open for even quite small businesses.

If you can’t scrounge together $50k to start a banking business, you probably should not be starting a banking business.

Bruh, I could get $50k right now if I go through a line of credit for small businesses as a regular person.

Look into going into the business and you will realise other hurdles like having some insurance that will cost you tens of thousands, and more costs. When you compare that to, say, creating an app and putting it up on an app store, we can agree that there is a huge difference.

Of course I understand that banking means playing with people's money and therefore measures need to be put in place. But instead of requiring financial assets maybe the 'measure' should all be around technology and your service will need to have gone through extensive testing to ensure it won't be exploited. Otherwise 50k is peanuts like someone said when it comes to covering any financial loss incurred if your service is messed up. So that 50k is just to filter out a huge majority of individuals wanting to create something for themselves.

The network of banks supporting FedNow is still small, so we may not see meaningful payment volume for a while compared to ACH, Wires, Checks, etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31114620

It's never the merchant that gets hosed. It's the people not using credit cards.

Because, of course, the merchant just takes his banking expenses and forwards them right back to all customers by increasing prices across the board.

And it's not only the people not using credit cards that get hosed. Even the people with credit cards lose out - because the cash back is practically always smaller than the fee the merchant payed and forwarded to the customer.

As always, the real winner is only the bank. There's a reason for the market cap of MasterCard and Visa...

If FedNow can fit in with ApplePay, then it can displace credit cards in the first place! The corollary I’m drawing, is from India where “UPI” payments (something similar to FedNow) was launched about 7 years ago and today is the more dominant payment mode than credit cards.

FedNow can replace credit cards for cases where chargeback or actual credit isn't necessary. So for many ordinary cashless payments.

Arguably even for many cases (small to medium amounts of money) where the possibility of chargeback seems useful FedNow could be better in expectation, because the fees are lower. The credit card companies are making money after all. Using them for chargeback is like buying insurance for things you can replace out of pocket: On average, you make a loss.

I have no idea about fednow but you can directly transfer an unlimited amount of USDC to someone in about a second for $0.0025 right now on Solana.

In the demos I watched, There is account number and routing number

On the other hand routing plus account number is kinda long.

My UPI handle is just my HN handle@upi. I can link this to any of my bank accounts(and change the account it's linked to in seconds) and any one can send me money with this. It's easy to spell out on phone and most of my friends/family/... remember it now so I don't have to tell them where to send money.

What people are accusing them of is taking steps toward creating a digital dollar. This is their response, which is pretty mealy-mouthed if it's meant to address those accusations. A better way to express a denial would be "the Federal Reserve has no intention of creating a digital dollar and is not planning for nor working on that project," if indeed that is true.

Because if they DO create one in the near future, then this product SHOULD be designed as a step toward that. If they create a digital dollar and it uses any version of FedNow, then they're liars. If they create a digital dollar and it uses an entirely different product, they're incompetent.

The CBDC is still planned. But way far in the future (couple years, at least). And why wouldn't it solve settlement itself?

FedNow is shipping today. If it is not the future solution, that is fine. It gives us better performance now.

The characterization of the Federal Reserve as incompetent is the strong opinion I observed. I personally don't agree with the logic you communicated. I think a completely separate CBDC project that is separate from FedNow is perfectly appropriate.

IMO, many policy makers view FedNow as a better ACH.

Whereas, CBDC is a much more controversial project for some policymakers.

Separating the two projects offers some risk mitigation and ensures we will at least have something usable (1) in the short to medium term and (2) even if CBDC is mired in political non-consensus.

Perhaps they are planning for that already. My main complaint is the lack of both transparency and clarity in the quoted statement. I don't believe their response will satisfy anybody who is wondering if the Fed is working on a digital dollar, when it would have been very easy for them to do that. I sort of expect that kind of needle-threading response from private companies and individuals, but (naively) expect more transparency from public institutions.

If if that were true at this instant, they could change it at whim.

What is really needed is a constitutional protection of privacy.

Meanwhile, wealthier people get paid in ‘unrestricted’ currency.

I'd just as soon give everyone dollars via UBI

Christian Gelleri made this proposal to solve the Greek crisis: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3144910

The government provides coupons that allow you to buy food which is remediated to the seller in dollars. The authority and funding to provide that service is something that voters can impact or change.

These are very different things, not "that already exists" at all.

This is an primarily American phenomenon though and it's only really true because of the dominance of the US and US petrodollars over global society. It's probably not easy to spend Turkish lira in Madagascar, for example. Yes there are banks which will exchange approved currencies, but that's one step removed from being paid in a global global currency as you imply.

If anyone ever mentions petrodollars, CBDC, or crypto to you, they are crazy and I recommend stealing their wallet.

At best this kind of stuff is a harmless ideological pressure release valve for a discontented middle class / small business / entrepreneurial layer squeezed from above (esp after COVID). At worst it veers into outright authoritarian & xenophobic politics and often blends in some anti-Semitism. Starts with rants about Bretton-Woods and the next thing you know you're hearing about the Rothschilds.

There was a whole wing of this stuff ascendant in the 1930s (in western Canada we had "Social Credit", for example) whose ideological purpose was to displace left wing populism and anti-capitalist politics with an explicitly pro-capitalist highly social conservative narrative which pinned blame for problems on "international banking" and, ultimately, Jewish people.

The latest flavour is obsessed with talk about "petrodollars" and cryptocurrency, and then you scratch a little and there's the face of Sergei Lavrov or Marie Le Pen hiding under the paint.

The world is f*cked and unjust but not for the reasons that these people go on about.

I do agree that the bulk of the foundation of the world's economy is constructed over the petroleum economy. Though I also don't think the nature of power in the world would change significantly if that were to be replaced with something else or if the nationality of the currency it is traded in were to change.

I actually prefer we give out UBI, in a tracked manner, as well.

"cash" they can spend on anything, but with data collection so we can do society improving retrospectives on how it was spent.

Then you can enforce meat and fossil fuel rations with no way to buy yourself around it.

If there were political motive and will to implement such a system, it could be done without a CBDC and certainly without modernization of ACH (heh).

Conversely, if there's not political motive and will, then the presence of a CBDC doesn't change that fact.

Many are concerned that cdbc will allow the gov to create carbon rations that are enforced by disallowing purchases. Cash is fungible while regulated digital currency isn't.

Plus, if the goal is to limit carbon emissioms, it's more of a liberal market-shaping attitude that mainstream economists have to simply tax carbon heavy activities rather than invent new and unpopular technological measures to force it to happen. Same applies to the fears about limiting meat consumption, etc.

(I’m not in any way a climate denier, just a huge pessimist when it comes to attempted solutions)

In fact, the private sector solution is perhaps even worse from a civil rights perspective.

Consider a prosecutor in Jurisdiction A hell-bent on violating the civil rights of a citizen in Jurisdiction B, and suppose Jurisdiction B is sympathetic to this citizen. This isn't even hypothetical in the USA. Abortion, immigration, civil disobedience, etc. In the corporate duopoly setup, Jurisdiction A can compel the ISP to comply -- either by physically entering the property of the ISP and taking data by force, or by threatening market access. In the muni ISP case, Jurisdiction B says "shove it".

And that's before noting that corporations such as modern ISPs are -- like governments -- also large bureaucracies endowed with incredible power that are de facto impossible to opt out of. Except at least in representative government you have some sort of voice, however small, which isn't dependent on amassing vast sums of cash.

I dream of the day my municipality does this. The idea of buying service from whoever I want rather than be forced to use Comcast... -swoon-

Why is it horrible?

* the Biden administration is planning to monitor smaller denomination transactions (in an inflationary environment!)

* IRS resources historically and presently target low-income, low-wealth households/individuals for audits

https://www.cnbc.com/select/irs-600-reporting-rule-delayed/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-audit-eitc-five-times-as-li...

For high net wealth audits, you could have potentially dozens of people working on it for years so there is a possibility that a judge / jury rules in your favor.

They are going after low effort people, but making it up by volume.

I'll let you figure out why.

I'll shorten the explanation even further: many more easy/no contest wins.

Wrong question. The correct question is:

What benefit would the IRS targetting low wealth individuals have to high wealth individuals?

This also depends if by "audits" you include every kind of correction letter the IRS sends you.

If we could actually increase their funding substantially, this would be less true, but it's difficult and expensive to go after wealthy individuals.

Fixed this for you.

I don't really want a gigantic federal agency having insight into every financial transaction I make. Hard, fucking, pass.

If that's the case, I have bad news for you about the banking system of literally every developed country.

I can buy an icecream anywhere in the world without anybody tracking me. Even with the "wrong" political opinion (even if I would be a trucker in Canada during certain protests).

I cannot do that with CBDC.

No. CBDC (aka: the ultimate totalitarian's dream) is not the same as the current banking system, despite the current banking system also being very horrible for privacy.

* All of the above assuming that cash will be banned and CBDC will be mandatory for everybody.

No you can't. Companies like OpenEye and Deep Sentinel offer facial recognition solutions that are targeted at loss-prevention, and these systems are commonplace in the USA. Facial recognition-based consumer analytics systems are also available.

In fact, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a pint of ice cream that you can buy without having a camera pointed at your face. Even the little stand at the beach in the state park near my old place had a camera, and I didn't even have real LTE coverage there.

Privacy comes only from the force of law; not the other way around.

Anyways, the whole conversation is a red herring. This is a replacement for ACH, which already exists, and there isn't substantively more information sharing between banks and governments than already exists.

Anyways, it's not (fully) about information sharing. It's about control. It's the difference between read access and read/write access.

Anyways, you missed the point.

The anti-new-technology and anti-gov-technology response to privacy and control is misguided. Corporations will fuck you, left unchecked, and governments will fuck you through corporations. There is no technical solution to political problems, and physical cash vs FedNow vs digital currency is a suite of technical solutions.

Trying to solve a political problem by eliminating technology is literally the same thing as trying to solve political problems with technology. The fallacy is in focusing on technology where the actual problem is political.

The problem is political and needs to be treated as such. The solution is building and maintaining political consensus in favor of strong privacy and personal property rights, not carrying around a billfold full of physical cash.

Can’t even recall to ever pulling some out other than some casino entertainment night. I understand all the “freedom” (or whatever one might call it) I’m losing, but the positive sides are much better (never have to care about losing my wallet, much faster transactions, convenience and etc.). Sure, sounds bad on paper, but I haven’t felt any negatives in 10+ years, especially when in practice makes my life easier.

Unfortunately, in my experience, I'd have to agree with you on that. But it also brings to mind a relevant Samuel Adams quote:

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

Are you think they won’t need search warrants?

This is what's bizarre to me about the FedNow hysteria. It's not a government system replacing a private market system. It's a government system replacing an older, worse government system. It's like having a panic attack because the Federal Reserve is updating their PCs to from Windows XP to Windows 10.

I'm torn on this. Visa, MasterCard, Venmo (aka PayPal), etc. all know about large subsets of my transactions, and they go and sell my personal data to other companies in sleazy ways to cover their costs.

Is that better or worse than the government knowing all this stuff? Sure, the government can also legally use force against me and deprive me of my freedom and possessions, and might pervert my transaction history into justifying doing bad things to me. But that's a risk, not a certainty. Private companies selling my data and using it in nefarious ways is a certainty.

the government already knows.

the freezing of accounts related to the "Freedom Convoy" is quite different, as it was an exercise of emergency powers. the Trudeau admin could have ordered gas stations to not sell fuel to them, or Visa/MasterCard to not process certain cards, or anything similarly extraordinary.

The point of keeping the government out of the banking business would be to keep the door cracked for the chance to improve it later. That door slams shut once the federal government has the insights into every transaction, and more importantly the ability to deny ones they don't want us to do. We also Wil have much less control over the creation of a social credit score, theoretically the government would have everything it needs to make that happen with control over our transactions.

But the list goes on..

CBDC really isn't a big issue either, because it almost certainly won't happen. Americans are very unlikely to want a system like that.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Arguably the US government effectively has these powers today, but beingtthat they don't directly own our banks there is a level of red tape they have to go through. As long as they are technically separate there is also the opportunity for us to change the laws and strip them of that access, once combined we give up that possibility.

The US was originally design with a very strong distrust of our own federal government. For the last 80 years we've completely flipped the script and given more and more power to a massive federal government, but the undertone of distrust is still around for quite a few Americans.