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0 pointswalterbell4y ago0 comments

Some businesses would win, some would lose. Always good to be (friends of the) king. The implications will motivate closed-door debates and public prototypes for data collection. But it will be hard to resist the lure of population-wide transaction data for fintech and social credit analytics married to digital/healthpass identity.

Previously discussed, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27805709

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vkou4y ago

As I said, this can all be accomplished through tariffs, taxes, or straight up bans, without engaging some Rube Goldberg contraption of playing whack-a-mole with payment systems and processors.

A sovereign nation resorting to this to ban an undesirable category of business from its borders is swatting flies with a hockeystick. Possible? Yes. But why would it bother, when there are purpose-made flyswatters.

If the government wants to shut your business down, it can trivially do so, by revoking your business license, or banning your category of business outright. It doesn't need to get into this nonsense with payment processing - which has a number of workarounds.

walterbellOP4y ago

As stated publicly by the BIS (central bank that governs all other central banks) in the top comment of the referenced thread, the difference with CBDCs would be granularity of targeting, in real-time, at the transactional level.

As to the question of "why bother", one stated reason for CBDCs is to enable nation-state competition with Facebook's Diem cryptocurrency, whose stated reason for existence is to compete with Bitcoin, whose observed reason for existence is to make a small subset of humans more wealthy.

There are also incentives for non-government entities, https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/get-ready-for-the-no-buy-li...

> First, in January, PayPal blocked a Christian crowdfunding site that raised money to bring demonstrators to Washington on January 6. Then, in February, PayPal announced that it was working with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to ban users from the platform. This week the company announced it is partnering with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to investigate and shut down accounts that the ADL considers too extreme.