[mo_42]

I'd like to know more about the technical implementation.

For society, this is really important. Basically everyone needs a bank account. In some countries, the government even forces people implicitly to have one in order to pay taxes or fees.

In such a case, the government should provide a solution for this too.

Then, there are also economic implications of this. Society needs to run many banks, which uses a lot of resources (especially people). However, many people and companies only need one simple part of banking: cashless payment. Something that’s, from a technical perspective, just a database for transactions and accounts. So a default solution by the government makes sense to me.

Of course people will argue against this as the government would have full control over people’s money. But I think that’s the case anyway. Money is something inherently governmental as it’s produced by an governmental institution (central bank) and collected by the government in form of taxes.

[inbox-demon]

>Of course people will argue against this as the government would have full control over people’s money. But I think that’s the case anyway.

To an extent, but (speaking for the US primarily) there is significant added friction from the current distributed nature of the legacy banking system. If it were as easy as typing a person's ID number into a form and the system would take care of the rest, it would certainly be used more freely (freezing the accounts of thousands of people attending a protest with today's system would be a monumental task, even with full judicial endorsement).

[avidiax]

> freezing the accounts of thousands of people attending a protest with today's system would be a monumental task

We already have that system. They put your name on a list, and everyone with that name or similar has lots of paperwork to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Action_Task_Force_bl...

[mo_42]

That’s what I have in mind. Currently, customers are subject to obscure internal rules of banks.

Given a governmental approach, this would be subject to the Fifth Amendment and other laws.

Also, there’s always the freedom to not choose this system and stay with private banks.

So I guess this it would be a net positive.

[inbox-demon]

I take your point, a well designed centralized system by a competent, benevolent government would be better than having to rely exclusively on a set of private banks not beholden to a constitution. My concern there, given the track record of most governments, this will not be built without tools for control, even if they are not used right away. It also sets a precedent for government involvement in individual transactions. Today we'll have an optional cashless payment system, tomorrow banks will start shifting over to keeping accounts with the government directly, the next all financial services will be required to use the government system for transaction processing to simplify monitoring. Anything to stop money laundering for terrorism, you know.

[jfkimmes]

Fully agree. But instead of having "the government have full control over people's money", I think, setting this up as a federated cheap-to-run payment system would be even better. This would allow multiple existing banks to offer the service to their existing customers. This could reduce the risk of a fully decentralized solution a little bit.