[phphphphp]

The government already has high degrees of insight into and control over the money of most people in the UK. Most people in the UK (in my experience, at least) couldn't care less about the day to day privacy implications of banking, it's not on their radar. The suggestion that this would enable the government to monitor more might be strictly true because it enables new types of monitoring, but that is already practically true in every way for most people.

I find it difficult to understand why a digital pound is anything more than an incremental improvement (or worsening from your perspective). What does a digital pound enable the government to do that would interfere with the everyday person's life, that isn't already possible?

(Also, cigarette prohibitions and social credit scoring are hot button issues for people who believe in the sanctity of individual rights but they're not at all related in the context of this discussion. There's nothing terrifying about a cigarette prohibition to most people, especially in the UK, where we've literally had various cigarette restrictions imposed over the years to the point where a NZ style prohibition would probably not even register for almost everyone.)

[djfobbz]

You must not know anything about the Digital Yuan being tried out in China and the kind of restrictions it comes with...for example: expiring currency, spend it by mm/dd/yyyy or loose it! Oh dear govt, give it to me harder.

Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/digital-currency-yuan-c...

[walterbell]

UK, June 2021, https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/bank-of-england-tells-

> Tom Mutton, a director at the Bank of England, said during a conference on Monday that programming could become a key feature of any future central bank digital currency ... what happens if one of the participants in a transaction puts a restriction on [future use of the money]? ... Sir Jon Cunliffe, a deputy Governor at the Bank, said digital currencies could be programmed for commercial or social purposes ... “You could think of giving your children pocket money, but programming the money so that it couldn’t be used for sweets. There is a whole range of things that money could do, programmable money, which we cannot do with the current technology.”

[tomatocracy]

This is stupid in so many ways but the worst thing is the idea doesn't even work - barter economies have existed since the dawn of civilisation and children are pretty used to them too, with trading cards, collectibles etc. All the child has to do is buy something of value they are "allowed" and then barter that for sweets with a friend whose money isn't restricted in that way.

[akomtu]

"... children ... money ... sweets ..." that's some neuro-linguistic programming right here: the sir-jon skillfully inserts thin needles into the three spots and the patient becomes a willing veggie.

[walterbell]

> sir-jon [-athan]

Good catch. Need a browser plugin that converts text to phoenetically similar terms.

[akomtu]

It's from one movie where two knights fought for some high title: "I've been made a knight, but not a single time have you addressed me by Sir. I demand respect!" - "My apologies, Sir... Jon."

[CuriousSkeptic]

Look up the Wörgl Experiment for more background on why this could be desirable.

Basically it was used successfully to keep a local economy going during the great depression.

[hakfoo]

The concept of expiring currency has been experimented with even in the era of paper notes.

Alberta, for example, tried circulating banknote-analogues that required a stamp to be added every week to remain valid; the goal was to encourage people to spend them rather than having to pay for the stamp.

In the context of something like economic stimulus payments, where the goal is to force jumpstarting the economy NOW, how would prevent people who can afford it from just setting aside their payment for later use?

[realce]

So your opinion is that the UK gov't has plenty of terrifying control over people's bank accounts, so a little bit more is a-ok?

[phphphphp]

My point is that it's hyperbolic to describe a digital pound as terrifying. A person may take issue with modern day banking granting the ability for people to be surveilled, and they might take issue with the UK's PAYE system which requires employers report their employee's income to the tax authority in real(ish) time... but that's nothing to do with a digital pound. A digital pound is a small incremental change in the context of privacy, and so ranting and raving about a digital pound being terrifying is the wrong target. People could waste years of their lives ranting and raving about the horrors of a digital pound, and convince the government to abandon all plans... and nothing about the actual privacy of day to day people would change.

[jkepler]

Wouldn't a digital pound give the government direct view of people's financial transactions?

Right now they don't they at least need a court order (i.e. they'd have to prove probably cause) to compel a bank to give them people's data?

Sounds like a big change to me, and further erosion in the protection rule of law theoretically provides people against tyranny.

[phphphphp]

I disagree with the framing you’re using: if the only protection today is policy, then a new technology (the digital pound) is immaterial. The government doesn’t need new technology to be able to change policy. Anyway, to answer your question, the tax authority here does not need a court order.

[jackson1442]

Agreed. A better question- how can we build a government which we can trust with unprecedented levels of centralized information?

The centralization of information is going to happen one way or another (the powers that be wouldn't have it any other way), and we've already been on this trajectory. So how can we build a system that actually respects privacy and upholds the common good?

[version_five]

That's a dumb question, sorry. We can't. That's why government's powers and role are constitutionally limited, and why the explicit limitations (even though the government is not supposed to have any powers other than those explicitly given to it) need to be updated as technology changes. The idea that we could build a government we can trust is absurd. It's equivalent to suggesting we could build a police force that can monitor everything we do, but will have some kind of structure that makes it not abuse that power. It's not even wrong, it's too ridiculous to even give the time of day to

[artificialLimbs]

>> respects privacy and upholds the common good?

That's not how consolidation of power by a government works.

[int_19h]

You decentralize the government. The result might not be much better on average, but then at least people who believe that privacy is a common good can find a space for themselves and be left alone by the rest.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

>> The centralization of information is going to happen one way or another

This is not necessarily the case, thanks to encryption, which plays on the side of the weak. A weak can encrypt data that a strong can never decrypt.

[int_19h]

Encryption can be banned or otherwise regulated. While it wouldn't prevent people "with something to hide" from using encryption regardless, it would deter most regular people, which is good enough from the government perspective for the purposes of this exercise.

[walterbell]

> a strong can never decrypt

Is "a weak" using an encryption random number generator that was designed by "a weak" or "a strong"?

[jkepler]

One can generate one's private keys by physically rolling dice and choosing words, thus avoiding the problem of rigged random number generators. The government still doesn't control physics (or economic laws, come to think of it!).

[User23]

There's no nice way to say this, so I'm going to be blunt. You and people like you are part of the problem here. You are why this kind of overreach is even on the table.

[phphphphp]

I’m fine with that, because I’m responsible as part of the majority. The majority don’t care about any of this. There are far greater issues facing real people, and getting lathered up into a froth over something that has no material impact on the day to day lives of most people is not a productive use of time.

Any doom-mongering about a hypothetical future in which The Government is doing Bad Things because they know what you’re doing with your money is, well, ignoring the thousands of bad things that we don’t need to theorise about because they’re happening at this very moment.

For example, our government has starved our national health service over the last decade and there are very real threats to its long term survival: I care orders of magnitude more about that than I care about the hypothetical world in which the government make money expire or deduct from my social score because I exceeded my quota of beans at the grocery store this week.

[Spooky23]

Opposition to cigarette bans is usually just reactionary nonsense or grousing from people selling the cigarettes.

Gold standard advocates passionately debated about terrible problems with silver in the 19th century. Crypto demonstrated that digital cash has value - even when that is backed by various grifts.