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The Almighty Buck

Opponents to a US Digital Dollar Include Several US Presidential Hopefuls (msn.com) 73

Posted by EditorDavid from the bucks-stop-here dept.
In the U.S., at least three early candidates for president from both parties "want to make it clear they would not support any proposals for a central bank-backed digital US dollar," reports Bloomberg — which may be a little premature, because "A central bank digital currency, or CBDC, is far from reality in the U.S." Some officials at the Federal Reserve have expressed doubt over the need for one, especially for use by everyday Americans. The Fed has also said it would want approval from Congress before moving forward with a digital dollar. But that hasn't stopped the relatively niche issue from emerging as a flash point for individuals eyeing a presidential run.

The idea of a digital dollar has already faced backlash from Wall Street and other banks, because lenders are worried about it acting as a direct competitor to private bank deposits. Digital-asset companies like Circle Internet Financial LLC that issue stablecoins — a form of cryptocurrency traditionally tied to reserve assets like the US dollar or gold and that offers similar features to a retail digital dollar — have also pushed back against certain CBDCs. Circle's Head of Global Policy Dante Disparte said he'd be opposed to a digital dollar if it allows the Fed to control users' access to funds, compromises privacy or disrupts a two-tiered banking and payments system. "I've gone as far as saying that's the version that is un-American," he said in an interview. In a report published last year in response to a Federal Reserve discussion paper, Circle also warned that a digital dollar could "destabilize" the banking sector.

In Congress, Republicans on Capitol Hill have introduced legislation to ban such direct-to-consumer CBDCs, saying they could be used by the federal government to surveil US citizens.

Proponents of a CBDC have argued that it could offer real benefits, including making payments — especially cross-border payments — faster and ensuring the dollar's dominance in the global economy. It could be particularly useful for settling certain financial-market transactions, such as interbank transfers, some Fed officials have said. The government has also indicated it would prefer to have private-sector intermediaries offer accounts and facilitate CBDC payments, rather than taking on that role itself. Supporters have argued it can be tailored in a way to protect consumer privacy, which the Fed has also said is critical if it decides to move forward.
Bloomberg also summarized the analysis of one political consultant specializing in cryptocurrency. "In addition to the potential appeal to libertarian voters and to constituents in banking and crypto, pushing back against a U.S. digital dollar can provide a relatively safe avenue for candidates to attract votes from conspiracy theorists who have rallied around the anti-CBDC movement."
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Opponents to a US Digital Dollar Include Several US Presidential Hopefuls More

Opponents to a US Digital Dollar Include Several US Presidential Hopefuls

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  • Postal banking. So there's about as much chance of it happening as of me winning the 2024 election running is an independent. You might see a few new tools for rich people to move their money around but something that would be useful to the 65% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck let alone the 4.5% who are unbanked is basically nil. The fact is for the vast majority of Americans there's no value to having your money in the banking system except that you have to put it somewhere and a mattress isn't ter

    • Still stumping for postal banking? Wow. At least you're consistent.

    • I'm not sure if you misunderstand what postal banking is, misunderstand what a digital dollar is, or just don't know what "equivalent" means. Maybe it's all three?
      • Well the summary said, "because lenders are worried about it acting as a direct competitor to private bank deposits." Which confused me, I don't see what this has to do with bank deposits, but it does seem to be similar to postal banking in that respect.
        • No idea if that's what the OP meant, if so, I guess it's option 3 - 'equivalent to' certainly isn't defined as 'has one tangential aspect in common with'.
  • rounds or bars, i want a few thousand dollars in one oz and quarter oz silver 999 fine, so when the SHTF I will have some bargaining power for food

    • Re: where can i buy silver? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by chill ( 34294 ) on Saturday April 22, 2023 @06:52PM (#63470120) Journal

      The fact that you still denominate them in dollars means you don't understand the fundamentals of what you're proposing. People have been counterfeiting, shaving, and generally defrauding metal coin economies for millennia. Good luck getting anyone in that situation to trust you enough to take your claims of purity and weight at face value. You trust THEIR scales, right?

      • Re: where can i buy silver? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Saturday April 22, 2023 @07:33PM (#63470180)

        The fact that you still denominate them in dollars means you don't understand the fundamentals of what you're proposing. People have been counterfeiting, shaving, and generally defrauding metal coin economies for millennia. Good luck getting anyone in that situation to trust you enough to take your claims of purity and weight at face value. You trust THEIR scales, right?

        If even just the US were to move to a gold or platinum standard, we'd be trading in atoms of the stuff.

        There just isn't enough of the stuff to run an economy this size. Although we'd be tearing the country apart trying to mine the stuff.

        If something like that were to happen - I'd be investing in mercury.

      • Re: where can i buy silver? (Score:5, Informative)

        by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday April 22, 2023 @09:27PM (#63470320)

        >"People have been counterfeiting, shaving, and generally defrauding metal coin economies for millennia."

        A scale on Amazon that is accurate to 0.1g is cheap and accurate. Now, determining the metal CONTENT is a bit more complicated, though. Surface is easy with a scratch test kit for around $20. But depth does require xray and/or density tester. And you can bet all the precious metal dealers have and use them (too expensive for we mere mortals, unfortunately).

        It is generally safe to buy from any reputable dealer- they have a TON to lose if they defraud. Trading with someone else requires some amount of trust, and that does restrict modern use of precious metals for "normal" transactions.

    • I think a gun and bullets will get you farther.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 )

        I think a gun and bullets will get you farther.

        An older dude my SO worked for was big on prepping for that so called SHTF time. Bragged about how much supples he had. I figured if it actually did happen, I'd take it from him, and be quiet about it.

        Oh - this was 1980, and like most of the SHTF scenarios, it didn't happen.

    • Food will have more value in that situation.

    • Re:where can i buy silver? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by currently_awake ( 1248758 ) on Saturday April 22, 2023 @09:51PM (#63470362)
      When a country collapses, things that you can't eat or use lose most of their value. People buy gold so they can take their wealth to another country, not because they think it will be sellable locally in the bad times.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by LeeLynx ( 6219816 )
        Correction: people also buy gold so they can convince suckers to buy it off of them because the gummint is commin' fer their guns, and they'll need it if they want to be able to trade for ammo when the race war they are so fervently looking forward to finally arrives.

  • In Congress, Republicans on Capitol Hill have introduced legislation to ban such direct-to-consumer CBDCs, saying they could be used by the federal government to surveil US citizens.

    But they have no problem when states [newsweek.com] surveil [techcrunch.com] U.S. citizens, or the multitude of already-in-place legislation at the federal level which surveils U.S. citizens.

    Consistency has never been their strong suit.

    • That's good surveillance, because those people are bad. This is to protect against bad surveillance, because it would be of good people, you silly little snowflake.

  • CBDCs only impact the rich (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bubblyceiling ( 7940768 ) on Saturday April 22, 2023 @07:11PM (#63470134)
    Dollars are already digital. The government already deducts part of your income as tax and the justice system can even garnish your income. CC companies already track all transactions and report them to the police. The $600 reporting rule means that now the IRS is automatically notified of income.

    But you know who all this doesn't cover. Rich people with access to the top lawyers. They can do whatever they want and hide their money in a maze of international entities & banks.

    That is who the CBDCs are truly for. So that before the next 9/11, they can already see the money moving around.

    • Re:CBDCs only impact the rich (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Asynchronously ( 7341348 ) on Saturday April 22, 2023 @07:49PM (#63470206)

      This. Money is largely just numbers in a computer. That's what fiat currency is. It's not backed by anything real. When your company pays you, numbers get deducted from their account and added to yours. Your transactions are already tracked by the government.

      • It is absolutely backed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday April 22, 2023 @08:36PM (#63470250)
        It's backed by the full faith of the United States government. It's backed by the entire productive capacity of the United States economy. Your dollars will have value because the US government creates legal constructs that guarantee value for your dollars.

        If the United States government collapses to such a state that your dollars cease to have value then you've got bigger problems than your dollars ceasing to have value. It means the most powerful military and civilization the human race is ever known has collapsed.

        Basically I'd like us to stop spreading this lie that US dollar isn't backed by anything. It's nonsense pushed by gold bugs and it leads to absolutely atrocious political decisions and worse monetary policy.
        • The United States government only issues common currency as coin. It also mints gold and silver dollars, which are intrinsically valuable, the weight of which was reset in the 1990s to be one troy ounce rather than the "dollar" weight of spanish silver coins which were in common use in the United States until the 1860s. For the most part, the average person only deals with U.S. government issued fiat currency in the form of coins, which represent a trivial amount of money given the scale of the U.S. economy

        • It's backed by the full faith of the United States government. It's backed by the entire productive capacity of the United States economy. Your dollars will have value because the US government creates legal constructs that guarantee value for your dollars.
          If the United States government collapses to such a state that your dollars cease to have value then you've got bigger problems than your dollars ceasing to have value. It means the most powerful military and civilization the human race is ever known has collapsed.

          At that point, "You will own nothing and be happy" because at least Slaves get gruel and those maggots are bonus proteins.

          • How is the society manage the exchange of goods and services isn't directly related to overt oppression (accepting as much as capitalism is problematic).

            Your own nothing and be happy only really applies to a Post Capitalism civilization. Think Star Trek. We are nowhere near that point. Marx had some good ideas but we're a long way off from that kind of civilization. That means we're still going to need mediums of exchange. Instead of doing away with them or replacing them with gold we should be focusing

    • It's not like we've been carrying little pieces of plastic that contain access to our money for DECADES or anything.....

      This is the government wanting to get into the crypto-scam bullshit and this is definitely a both-sides issue.

      What's next? NFT collector coins?

    • You need to think more seriously (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tiqui ( 1024021 ) on Sunday April 23, 2023 @02:16AM (#63470598)

      Dollars are NOT "already digital". Dollars still exist in the form of actual currency. Yes, government and banks etc currently interact with each other electronically doing lots of book keeping that way, but all those electronic transactions are actually only electronic representations of actual currency - and at any time, any of the parties could legally demand actual currency. What's currently being discussed flips this upside down and effectively makes the electronic thing "real" and the currency the optional part. This is extremely dangerous to a free people, and would ultimately enable totalitarianism.

      With the Dollar, as it currently exists, a person can conduct any transaction in cash without the government even knowing about it, and the government is certainly not able to intervene. If you have enough cash, and you want to purchase any product or service that is legal and not highly regulated, you can do it. Period. If the president of the United States does not want you to buy it, that's just tough, you can buy it and he'll never know. If you want to give money to a friend or family member, you can do it, and the government will not know and cannot block it.

      When the dollar is a digital token under control by the government, all manner of awful becomes possible. If you want to conduct a transaction, and the government does not want you to do it (maybe you gave money to the other candidate, or you exposed some secret that a politically-connected entity did not want exposed...) the transaction simply fails to complete. If you are a member of a disfavored group, maybe your bank account balance drops to zero or you suddenly are in deep debt. perhaps when YOU buy stuff, you pay higher prices or larger sales taxes than your neighbors. Every single thing you purchase is known to every government agency and bureaucrat, and every transaction can be weaponized against you. Want to buy a plane ticket to escape? Maybe your money does not work at the airport. There's simply no limit to the oppression possible. There is not a corrupt politician on Earth who would be unable to resist that level of power over the population.

      • Re:You need to think more seriously (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Can'tNot ( 5553824 ) on Sunday April 23, 2023 @04:31AM (#63470656)
        Those numbers in a bank are not an imaginary way to track "real" (paper) currency, as you are suggesting. Nor does this proposal get rid of paper currency, which is what you're basing your doomsday scenario on.

        Digital currency is a way for people to conduct transactions online without middlemen. And, in particular, without middlemen taking a cut of every transaction conducted on the internet. You may note that everyone in the summary who is protesting against digital currency is someone who profits from the existing arrangement, at the expense of everyone else in the country. And the world.

        Yes there are privacy concerns, though they aren't any greater than our existing privacy concerns from the transactions that we conduct with credit cards. Yes there are concerns about deplatforming, though I'd expect the government to be much more reticent to do this than private payment processors have demonstrated themselves to be.

        There's another aspect to this which I don't see in the summary and haven't seen mentioned in the comments here: there's no reason why digital currency needs to be dollars. If some other stable country provides a digital currency, and thus a more efficient way of doing business online, retailers will likely be happy to accept it. Preferentially, compared to credit cards. I picture them offering discounts to people who pay in cash.

        And I picture our politicians scrambling to prevent this from happening. First with heavy-handed fees and soap-boxing about how accepting foreign currency is unpatriotic, and then eventually by creating a the digital option for US currency that they should have done in the first place.

      • most dollars are digital and banks track serial numbers of bills. we already have digital currency, the Fed mostly doesn't print new bills when growing money supply

      • >With the Dollar, as it currently exists, a person can conduct any transaction in cash without the government even knowing about it, and the government is certainly not able to intervene. If you have enough cash, and you want to purchase any product or service that is legal and not highly regulated, you can do it. Period. If the president of the United States does not want you to buy it, that's just tough, you can buy it and he'll never know. If you want to give money to a friend or family member, you can do it, and the government will not know and cannot block it.

        If you have enough cash, and you want to purchase any product or service that is legal and not highly regulated, and the Government finds out you have enough cash, they can simply take it under Civil asset forfeiture [heritage.org] and if you're lucky, after a couple years of foot dragging and a hundred thousand dollars of legal expenses you'll get your cash back.
        Civil Asset Forfeiture has considerable constitutional problems involving

        1. The Fourth Amendment, unreasonable searches and seizures
        2. The Fourth Amendment, warrants m
    • Even if transaction are already electronic, CBDC will centralize every transaction in one place, the nation's central bank or ECB for EU countries, instead of being spread among every banks. It is again a clear step toward mass surveillance have no doubt about it. Replacing cash is not a hidden goal. Bonus: you can add smart contract on these things: being allowed to spend your money only at chosen location or with an expiration date. The whole thing is indeed being sold to the mass as: don't worry nothing

  • Bloomberg is trying to confuse you.
    We have a digital dollar already. CDBC is programmable.
    Go listen to Christine LeGarde talking about CDBC intentions for the EU in October. Believe them when they tell you what they intend to do.

       

  • NOT POSSIBLE (Score:3)

    by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday April 22, 2023 @09:12PM (#63470290)

    >"Supporters have argued it can be tailored in a way to protect consumer privacy"

    Sorry. NOT POSSIBLE.

    Once people are dependent on it, the rules can change at ANY TIME and lock people out of their accounts for any "reason" or restrict what/where/when/how they can buy, and all the 3-letter agencies *WILL* have access to every transaction detail, regardless of what any law or regulation says.

    If you think this cannot or will not be abused, you are EXTREMELY naive.

  • It has one purpose, control the populous like Canada did during the trucker protest.

    • Can you elaborate on this?

      • Re:States should outlaw the use of CBDCs (Score:5, Insightful)

        by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Sunday April 23, 2023 @12:38AM (#63470510)

        The Canadian government was faced with a trucker protest that crippled shipments across the border with the US in several locations. Instead of removing the trucks immediately and charging the (generally unarmed and non-violent) protesters with appropriate charges for blocking roads, they left them where they were for weeks and instead started locking their bank accounts so they couldn't get money from sympathizers who wanted to help them continue their protest.

        When that STILL didn't work, Trudeau went ahead and towed the trucks anyway.

        • Ok that's pretty much how I recall it happening. In fact the cops let protesters set up a hot tub in the middle of a street. https://www.reuters.com/world/... [reuters.com]

        • Yep. Far too lenient, but the feds didn't want the appearance of being authoritarian so they let the sympathetic (and thus unfit) Ottawa police let the protesters have their way for far too long.

          It wasn't a protest against anything specific anyway, it was a small group of riled-up marginals trying to feel powerful because they know they're impotent.

          Welcome to the party, morons, the average person IS pretty much helpless in the face of the forces at play in the world. Shitting in your neighbour's yard won'

          • At the same time, Trudeau's government came across as petty and totalitarian by messing with their bank accounts, which made very little sense since they committed no finance crimes or did anything against any banks. They just blockaded some roads.

            It's the same deal when the US gubment hassles payment processors into blocking the hated-industry-du-jour.

  • Direct accounts for citizens with the US Treasury, $0 ATM fees, $0 point of sale fees, $0 Wire Transfer Fees, Automatically tally up my sales tax (by requiring the information provided to the POS terminals) for deduction from my wages at income tax time, 100% fraud protection with videos of T-man captured scammers in federal prison. I don't want to give a totalitarian government a special invitation to abuse me, but I am sick and fucking tired of supporting a parasitic investor class.

  • That's always a nice juke move (Score:3)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Sunday April 23, 2023 @09:12AM (#63470896) Journal

    Bloomberg also summarized the analysis of one political consultant specializing in cryptocurrency. "In addition to the potential appeal to libertarian voters and to constituents in banking and crypto, pushing back against a U.S. digital dollar can provide a relatively safe avenue for candidates to attract votes from conspiracy theorists who have rallied around the anti-CBDC movement."

    Yes, your terrible authoritarian scheme that you came up with and are pushing is really somehow the fault of "conspiracy theorists" who, er ...just talk about what your scheme would actually, literally, transparently, do.

    And how dare candidates garner support by, er, opposing bad policies ... that's not how democracy is supposed to work!

  • The way it is many people pay using credit/debit so the banks get 1-3% of each sale for just shifting money from your account to the merchant and since it all done by computer the cost to them is actually very low. It would save the businesses money if you could pay with a digital dollar and there was no transaction fee. Even crypto has transaction fees, plus conversion fees for exchanging dollars to crypto so that didn't turn out as expected. Many people thought crypto would be the easy no/low fee method

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