US Lawmakers Introduce 'ECASH' Bill in New Push to Create a Digital Dollar (coindesk.com) 88
A group of U.S. lawmakers says the U.S. Treasury Department may be the right government entity to create a digital dollar -- not the Federal Reserve. A new bill introduced Monday would authorize just that. CoinDesk reports: Reps. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), Jesus Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) introduced the "Electronic Currency And Secure Hardware Act" (ECASH Act) to direct the Treasury Secretary to develop and issue an electronic version of the U.S. dollar, with an eye to preserving privacy and anonymity in transactions. The electronic dollar, as defined in the bill, would be a bearer instrument that people could hold on their phone or a card. The system would be token-based, not account-based, meaning if someone were to lose their phone or card, they would lose the funds. In other words, it would be like losing a wallet with dollar bills in it. This electronic dollar would be deemed legal tender and be functionally identical to a physical greenback.
Rohan Grey, an assistant professor at Willamette University who consulted on the bill, told CoinDesk the bill is meant to create a true digital analogue to the U.S. dollar. "We're proposing to have a genuine cash-like bearer instrument, a token-based system that doesn't have either a centralized ledger or distributed ledger because it had no ledger whatsoever. It uses secured hardware software and it's issued by the Treasury," he said. This form of e-cash would support peer-to-peer transactions, and given the nature of its setup, it would support fully anonymous transactions. Thus, it would differ from other proposals for a digital dollar, which are based on stablecoins or other decentralized ledger tools. The full text of the E-CASH Bill can be read here.
Rohan Grey, an assistant professor at Willamette University who consulted on the bill, told CoinDesk the bill is meant to create a true digital analogue to the U.S. dollar. "We're proposing to have a genuine cash-like bearer instrument, a token-based system that doesn't have either a centralized ledger or distributed ledger because it had no ledger whatsoever. It uses secured hardware software and it's issued by the Treasury," he said. This form of e-cash would support peer-to-peer transactions, and given the nature of its setup, it would support fully anonymous transactions. Thus, it would differ from other proposals for a digital dollar, which are based on stablecoins or other decentralized ledger tools. The full text of the E-CASH Bill can be read here.
need to ban apple from taking 30% or each transact (Score:2)
need to ban apple from taking 30% or each transaction
Wouldn't this make illegal activities easier. (Score:2)
Wouldn't this be the preferred cash of criminals. Better than bitcoin for for shifting large sums of extortion/drug/bribe money around?
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Re: Wouldn't this make illegal activities easier. (Score:2)
I'm a bit curious about how it's going to be protected against being hacked since if it's not properly protected it would be a great way to make trillions of dollars.
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I think it will be just a really long serial number. Impossible to guess and will be just checked against a database of valid dollars.
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It won't be. It will be a target of hackers that will steal billions. However, ultimately the real challenge will be to launder it back into legitimate looking income so it can be spent. Like today If I show up at a car dealer with 100 grand in cash, there are some questions that are asked.
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I think if they want this to be anonymous then you will be able to buy this card from 7/11 and load some cash on to it. Of course your face will be on their security cameras but no one is stopping someone from reselling these cards anonymously.
Or perhaps you could install the software on a burner phone.
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If by some miracle there was a digital currency that was truly anonymous I would be surprised if the methodology didn't include a maximum amount a digital wallet could contain or transfer.
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Who believes the US government is capable of building anything? If you want to see failure and waste on an epic scale, just give the task to the government. The fact is the most competent and knowledgeable people don't work for the government. Just look at the sponsors of this bill. They do not even know the difference between "equity" and "equality".
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Who believes the US government is capable of building anything?
Anyone with an IQ above room temperature.
Re: Wouldn't this make illegal activities easier. (Score:2)
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If you want to see failure and waste on an epic scale, just give the task to Oracle.
Fixed that for you.
Logically, the US government doesn't exist. (Score:1)
Who believes the US government is capable of existing? Existing would require having been capable of building something at some point in time. The fact is the incompetent and unknowledgeable people don't work for the government either. That would require the US government having built office buildings for them to work, some level of communications infrastructure, etc.
And who believes the US government is capable of building ANYTHING?
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What is the point? (Score:2)
Other than maybe being harder to counterfeit, what is the benefit?
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I'm thinking:
1. Probably no transaction and account keeping fees.
2. No KYC so better for the unbanked.
3. Better for the merchant as you don't need a merchant bank account and no fees.
4. Instant settlement.
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(well a crime they don't like such as walk into the capitol building when the doors are open)
Hahaha, oh man, what a gem you are. You mean the doors they had to beat down and bear spray a bunch of cops to get through?
Pro tip: If you want to be taken seriously on anything don't confabulate unrelated "alternate histories" (to put it as nicely as I can put it) with what you're talking about.
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Physical currency requires quite a bit of infrastructure that costs money. Bills and coins need to be manufactured, stored and transported, old worn out ones are returned to be destroyed and exchanged for new ones. Every step along the way there's a risk of loss by accident or theft, and countless people need to be employed to make it all work.
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Still, to me, worth it.
This is still truly the only way you can keep your purchases and purchase history private.
It's worth the extra cost.
Re: What is the point? (Score:2)
never let politicians design anything (Score:1)
Why in the world would we want system where loss of devices means loss of tokens? Just as easy to make system with archive and recovery.
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You mean you don't like physical dollars? If you lose them you can't get them back.
But wait, what if you lost your phone or it broke or was stolen the money would be gone? Maybe there could be centralized brokers of these coins where you only access them through your phone when paying. Sort of a place they could be deposited. We could call it a bank! Then we could pay electronically and it would be convenient, secure, and efficient. Thank god we have this kind of progress, how did we spend money before the mighty eDollar?!?
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Haven't used physical dollars much in last ten years ( or more?) so no. Have a pile for emergency use.. for a particular kind of emergency I've only seen once but mostly they're a PITA.
Credit/Debit cashier systems went down in our area after start of lockdown and it was cash only but just for that day. ATMs got depleted fast but I had my *drumroll* survival pile of greenbacks w0h00.
okay I could have just gone grocery shopping the next day, don't bring me down man.
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By comparison, a system like this could really be quite cheap. If you're storing it on a phone it can probably be free, and if you need a physical device like a smart card that
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anonymous credit and currency system designs are very old. Anonymous recovery is possible, the "proof" doesn't have to be personal ID. Distributed databases are old hat (and the one cryptocoins use is the worst and most inefficient kind)
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Check 21 is not a valid comparison. That system brought electronic clearing to a previously by-mail system, thus significantly reducing delays in check fulfillment and verification. There's nothing by-mail about current cash transactions, they already work in real time at the point of sale. All this ECASH nonsense does is add a new layer of potentially (read: likely) exploitable hardware onto an already working system. Storing your cash on a chip card might as well be storing your cash in your mattress -- i
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if you need a physical device like a smart card that can be quite cheap (certainly under $10 and reusable for years
and when the years have passed and the card fails suddenly and without warning, all your money is gone with no chance of recovery. Great.
It's a lot worse than that (Score:2)
This proposal has a much bigger problem than being designed by politicians. A problem that has destroyed economies many times.
When the politicians who are seeking votes and public support control the currency, the boost the economy by printing more lira/pesos/dollars. That gives a boost to the their popularity. A year or two later, everyone pays the price in inflation.
The next politician comes in, or the same guy is back a year later, and the economy is going to shit. So they give it a boost by printing mor
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The claim the the Federal Reserve is independent is funny, seeing how its members are appointed and how easy it is for the President to threaten anybody. The President's control of the Fed is limited and clumsy, but not nonexistent.
The proper goal of currency control is to keep the value of currency as constant as humanly possible. A little deflation is not inherently implosive, it just sets up different incentives than constant inflation.
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Threaten what? Trump didn't like that the fed kept the value stable. He wanted the fed to flood the country with cash, devaluing the currency. The fed told him to go fuck himself.
> A little deflation is not inherently implosive, it just sets up different incentives than constant inflation.
PhD economists debate under what conditions deflation triggers a deflationary spiral and crashes the economy. Neither you or I knows who is right, and I don't think either of us wants to find out what completely crashe
ha ha ha, just remember... (Score:2)
most politicians are the sort of people who decided in high school that they wanted to be in so-called "student government" - the geeky sort who had no actual geek interests or skills but who decided that smiling, shaking hands, and speaking were the path they preferred for a career. These tend not to be the brightest, the most productive, or the wisest people in any room. There's a reason why any governmental actions aimed at designing a horse (figuratively speaking) end up with a camel or a giraffe...
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There's a reason why any governmental actions aimed at designing a horse (figuratively speaking) end up with a camel or a giraffe...
Yeah, and the reason is that democratic governments, by design, are required to serve many needs.
Woo Hoo! (Score:2)
We dont need no stinking ledgers! (Score:2)
a token-based system that doesn't have either a centralized ledger or distributed ledger because it had no ledger whatsoever
IANACPA (I am not a certified public accountant), but I did take numerous accounting and finance classes along my educational path. No ledger equivalently means no accounting.
Also, there is no such thing as 'secure hardware', not really. We can make it hard (really hard) to clone tokens across these, but you can never make it impossible. Someone, somewhere (likely a foreign country), with lots of spare cash laying about, is going to see this as a business opportunity, and is going to 'invest' in the R&D
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FTFB
(7) capable of instantaneous, final, direct, peer6 to-peer, offline transactions using secured hardware devices that do not involve or require subsequent or final settlement on or via a common or distributed ledger
While you're at it, can you guys also finish inventing zero-point energy and flying ponies? We're all really excited to see these be reality soon
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I think you vastly over-estimate how easy it would be to duplicate a hardware token. Hardware-embedded private keys have existed for a very long time, and while there have been attacks on EMV they've mostly been man-in-the-middle or social engineering attacks, not direct duplication of the chip (which realistically requires extremely soph
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Yea.. hardware devices are totally securable. You're right. Ask DirecTV how unhackable their set top box smartcards were in the 2000s.
The rule of thumb is that if you can physically touch it, you can crack it with enough time and resources. Something like this only needs to have 1 good dupe flaw, and you'll be printing money all day long. And since it supports offline transactions, you'll have no way to know if the edollars you're accepting are dubious.
Hell, if a merchant ever got fucked on a transaction, t
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Hold please while I register my new business that specializes in sorting your onhand edollars based on validity, so that the duped dollars may be optionally given out in preference of known-good dollars...
Maybe I should also file a patent while I'm at it. You know, to be sure I'm the first to have this idea.
I can probably just assume there will be some optional central system I can verify against. Seems reasonable.
Retirement secured!
I'm sorry sir... (Score:3)
You're rent payment was declined. The reason stated was voted for Trump. You have 30 days to find alternative lodging.
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Exactly!
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Don't be retarded. This ecash thing doesn't expose who you voted for any more than dollars already do. Plus, it's also already against the law to discriminate when it comes to housing. Please imagine a new scenario where you are the victim.
It makes sense (Score:1)
Since "digital dollar" held in a bank, can easily go *poof* and disappear, as exhibited by Russian sanctions, other holders of USD (such as other nations, or corporations) are naturally wondering if that will happen to them as well if they cross some imaginary line that US government deems unacceptable. That and beginning of oil trade in currencies other than dollar, will make the dollar A LOT less important. Possibly worthless, not in such a distant future.
So this type of digital dollar makes sense. Sure,
"with an eye to preserving privacy and anonymity" (Score:2)
with an eye to preserving privacy and anonymity in transactions
Really? Their goal is to do the one thing a blockchain is guaranteed to not ever do???
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When you let the mental midgets set the rules of the game, brace yourself to be underwhelmed...
The fundamental flaws in this idea are numerous. They might as well have asked for the Treasury to develop cost effective alchemy, so we could just 'print and sell gold' out of our internationally held debt.
Someone needs to take these representatives aside and explain to them how computer security actually works. They seem to think it's just magic.
Canada proved this is a terrible idea (Score:2)
Trudeau locked bank accounts, confiscated donations and tried to confiscate crypto wallets.
This is the foundation of a social credit system. This is every government's wet dream to shut down the opposition.
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>Trudeau locked bank accounts, confiscated donations and tried to confiscate crypto wallets.
Ya, and so does EVERY gov't in the world, whenever they are dealing with criminals, and he was dealing with criminals, who were being mostly funded by right-wing US nutjobs that thought Jan 6th was a good idea.
Look, I don't like Trudeau: I think he is doing a lousy job as PM. But I can't fault him on this: no one here wants that American right-wing treasonous BS coming across the border. No one is crying over the
Only a FUCKING IDIOT (Score:1)
Would ever believe the US Government would ever create a financial instrument that is anonymous.
My God, are you people little such mental midgets as to not know that it is literally the government's stated goal to literally track your every single move, whether physical or on Al Gore's Internet?
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Well, if you bother to read the bill, it says it requires the platform to support fully offline transactions, which will make tracking at the level you're suggesting quite difficult.
I'm sorry, this isn't a dystopian tracking-every-move scenario, but is in fact the very opposite -- where money has become so anonymous that counterfeiting fraud becomes mildly easier to trace, but also completely impossible to stop.
It's short sighted and begging to be owned entirely, in whole, with a single working and repeatab
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it says it requires the platform to support fully offline transactions, which will make tracking at the level you're suggesting quite difficult.
Do you even computer, bro?
Have a memory in secure device that logs all offline transactions. Do a log dump whenever secure device is in range of a government approved network.
How does that sound for supporting fully offline transactions?
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Have a memory in secure device that logs all offline transactions. Do a log dump whenever secure device is in range of a government approved network.
Sure, that could get you back to the dystopian setting where all transactions are eventually logged, except for...
From the bill:
offline transactions using secured hardware devices that do not involve or require subsequent or final settlement on or via a common or distributed ledger, or any other additional approval or validation by the United States Government or any other third party payments processing intermediary
And a bit more from the bill:
(2) PRIVACY.—The Secretary shall require that any hardware device authorized to hold or otherwise facilitate transactions involving e-cash shall be secured locally via cryptographic encryption and other appropriate technologies, and shall not contain or be subject to any surveillance, personal identification or transactional data-gathering, or censorship-enabling backdoor features.
It's basically cash secured by the magic of unbreakable cryptography. And we all know how unbreakable cryptography has proven to be over the years.
Diablo money dupe hack go brr...
XMR already exists (Score:2)
So, they'd like to develop a national government controlled version of Monero.
I'm no expert, but I'd think if you were looking for a private and anonymous digital version of cash, you'd use the one which exists today, is proven to actually be private, anonymous and secure, and is not controlled by a government.
Yeah. No thanks. (Score:2)
Piss the wrong person off and "You are overdrawn. Fucked around and found out."
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How exactly is that any different than today? It’s called a mugging. Or bank fraud. Or a bank robbery. There are plenty of valid reasons to object to this system, but yours is not among them.
If you value liberty, privacy, freedom... (Score:2)
or indeed, your very life, digital currency is a VERY BAD IDEA. With paper money, you may make purchases of products and/or services anonymously and no third party (like a political clown with a government job) can block the transaction, or make a record of it, or note what you have obtained or transferred to somebody else. With digital money, every transaction can be tracked, recorded, stored, and even blocked. As Putin and his odious "friends" are now learning, things like cryptography are only a minor in
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I agree with you,
Government run crypto currencies will be anything but anonymous. Your spending habits will likely be fully tracked. The information will inevitably be used against you. Unfortunately all governments have a horrible track record of misusing personal data.
The government will have next to no ability to protect the data. As proven time and time again.
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You seem to be not acknowledging the fact that pretty much everybody already keeps their cash in a digital context that is easily tracked or seized by the government and that no one I've seen is talking about this as a replacement for physical dollars so you would still have that as an alternative.
As long as merchants have to take cash we'll be fine and no I won't buy onto a slippery slope argument that just because we do this it means that we'll get rid of cash next.
[David Chaum enters the chat] (Score:2)
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Surveillance and control (Score:2)
Whatever claims they make, there is only one reason for a digital currency: power. The government will be the central clearing house, and will see every transaction. It will also be able to control and block those transactions at will.
We already have electronic bank transfers and debit cards. Those *are* effectively a digital currency. Add in Venmo and similar apps, and tell me what value eCash will add. The only problem is: the transactions are stored at the bank, and the government has to jump through (
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The first benefit to come to mind would be that it would be great for merchants. Currently they have to pay credit card companies a not at all insignificant percent of every single transaction they take via a card whether the money is coming via credit or your own bank account https://www.fool.com/the-ascen... [fool.com] . It's the ultimate extortion racket as very few merchants can afford to refuse all digital transactions in this modern era and I have no problem with our government breaking that up.
The only problem is: the transactions are stored at the bank, and the government has to jump through (far too few) legal hoops, in order to get at all your information, or to empty your bank account. *That* is the problem eCash is meant to solve.
You're going to h
Ohh I've seen this! (Score:2)
"Mr. Robot" called it, only the name was slightly different - Ecoin instead of ECASH.
It did not end well.
Digital asset with offline DRM (Score:2)
“functionally identical to a physical greenb (Score:2)
Nope (Score:2)
>"This electronic dollar would be deemed legal tender and be functionally identical to a physical greenback. "
1) It might be trackable in some way or another at some point.
2) It might be the gov can disable the money in some way.
3) It requires technology to perform transactions.
Those make it very much not functionally identical to cash. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, just that it should not be an excuse to eliminate or restrict cash, nor should it be misrepresented.
Not in this universe... (Score:2)
This form of e-cash would support peer-to-peer transactions, and given the nature of its setup, it would support fully anonymous transactions.
Hahahahahahahahaha
Wait, let me laugh some more:
Whahahahahahaha hahahahahahahah ahahahahahahahahahaha.
That should cover it.
"National Treasure" (Score:2)
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How are the dangers you describe any different with the implementation of digital currency? No one is talking about it replacing the physical dollar meanwhile the vast majority or Americans already do most of their monetary transactions digitally with all of the potential draw backs you claim might happen.
And please don't feed me a slippery slope "once we let this happens it's only a matter of time before they get rid of the physical dollar" argument.
Nope! (Score:1)
"A group of U.S. lawmakers says the U.S. Treasury Department may be the right government entity to create a digital dollar -- not the Federal Reserve."
In case these congressional idiots hadn't heard, and judging by the above statement they haven't, the Federal Reserve is NOT part of the government. It is a cabal of banks.
Now, ANY congress-idiot that supports, endorses, and/or votes for this crap needs to be out on their a$$ starting with the four listed in the article. If you're US based, contact your repre
It's a Magical Proposal - Unicorns Not Included (Score:1)
Without a ledger of some kind to either verify spending or "Proof of Work", it becomes the digital equivalent of cash with no anti-counterfit capabilities.
copy ... copy ... copy ... copy ... copy ... copy ... copy ...
This will forever remain a pilot in the treasury (Score:2)
Just too many problems they haven't thought through ! Or even realized.
I'll bet anything this will forever remain a pilot in the treasury depts' cafeteria !
Also Hw token / wallet will need to connect over the internet to another hw token/ wallet. Unless they want only physically proximate txns like BLE NFC.
And need OTA updates unless you want to replace tokens twice a year whenever u find a new bug in hw / fw.
So hackers will have full time physical access to these devices connecting to each other to revers