[pessimizer]

We already have all of this. The government can tell your bank to do something, and your bank will do it. What a government digital currency would do is end the subsidy of banks as the only "safe" place to park money. If I have a government account with my money, banks don't get to gamble with it for their own benefit. If I want to do that, I could withdraw the cash from where it is safe and consciously put it at risk, rather than the government backstopping the finance industry.

If government bits are just the beginning of a banning of cash, that's the real problem; but there's no reason they can't ban cash now.

The benefit to some sort of government semi-distributed ledger would be that independent people could set up ATMs. Otherwise, I'd just be happy with postal checking/savings. We already have a bunch of post offices.

[reese_john]

  We already have all of this. The government can tell your bank to do something, and your bank will do it.

But can the government do that at scale ? I thought they needed at least a subpoena to get your bank records.

It's different from the mass surveillance that a CBDC enables.

[pessimizer]

That's assuming that your bank cares about keeping your transactions private enough not to voluntarily submit to anything asked of it.

If you hate the idea, you'd still be free to park your cash with some rando that promises to keep it safe, just without subsidy. Hell, the existence of a gov digital currency might ironically stabilize bitcoin or a bitcoin-like.

[rvense]

Why is it you think a CDBC can't be set up, legally, to require subpoenas?

[wolverine876]

> banks as the only "safe" place to park money

You can park your money safely anyway, just buy a vault. There are even specialized bank accounts where they just store you money and don't lend it out.

However, you won't earn any interest, and thus will lose opportunity cost and also lose value as cash inflates.

Additionally, the money that banks lend is critical to the economy - which includes your job and the general welfare - like water to a person. If banks stop lending - if all that money gets put in a vault - businesses and citizes lose access to money to develop things and we get talented people and valuable resources sitting dormant, a depression.

[whatshisface]

Recently, and for the foreseeable future, interest rates are/will be so far below inflation that they truly do not matter. A mattress might be just as good as a bank for the next decade or so.

[wolverine876]

What is that based on?

[whatshisface]

It's been true for a very long time, and unless we see enormous amounts of growth, it will have to stay true. If you look at Fed plans to raise interest rates, you'll see that even in the highest estimates they're looking at fractions of a percent. Meanwhile, we're having months with 8% annualized inflation.

[wolverine876]

> It's been true for a very long time

Until this year, we've hardly had any inflation since before 2008, at least. Deflation was a bigger concern. The margin between inflation and interest rates was very small.

I see what you are asserting, but again, what is all this based on?