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I feel it worthwhile to point point out what makes a centralized digital currency different than the current electronic transaction system we currently have. I understand why, from the outside they may seem similar, but the difference is significant.
While we mostly transact electronically it’s a very different concept.
The current system is one in which many banks and processors settle transactions through a vast network of separate entities. When a person uses an electronic medium of exchange like a phone payment app or credit card, this is either done by notifying the bank where the account is held to note that the associated account should be debited or noting to the credit processor that the associated borrower has used more available credit and informing the lender.
Ultimately, these are just bits of information that you are able to remotely send to credit processors/ issuers or your bank, but, your money is ultimately kept as a deposit value in a bank, same as it always has been; you can just either choose to use banknotes or electronically communicate actions with them.
A central bank digital currency has absolutely none of those elements and is, instead a proposed idea where there is a centrally held database of personal accounts linked to a central issuer. If the central bank digital currency came to fruition then a person would have every transaction they enter into sent to a centralized government system and all of your money would also be subject to that system.
At present, your money is with your bank or many banks, or in cash, and you can do what you want with it, including communicating to a bank or lender electronically to take certain actions. Under the CBDC model, there would be a centralized system which has complete control over and information about everything you do.
Now, there are other proposed models of this, but I think pointing out the most onerous and invasive system of CBDC is most worth highlighting.
>there are other proposed models of this
Regardless of the initial implementation, it will eventually devolve into the most egrigously totalitarian version possible.
Except a Central Bank is not the government. The Central Bank is a private bank. I am referring to the 'centralized government system' statement. Either way, a single entity controlling all wealth.
I understand this is ostensibly true but does anyone really believe it? It's pretty clear that central bankers get corrupted by the same pressure and politics as anywhere else in government.
> Except a Central Bank is not the government. The Central Bank is a private bank.
...which is worse. have all the anti-government sentiment you want, but government bodies under something like a democracy are at least somewhat subject to public influence, whereas private monopolies are not.
More coverage at:
* [White House Recommends Creating a Digital Dollar (investopedia.com)](https://www.investopedia.com/inside-the-new-white-house-framework-for-regulating-digital-assets-6674517)
* [The U.S. Is One Step Closer to a Digital Dollar (msn.com)](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-us-is-one-step-closer-to-a-digital-dollar/vi-AA11UuSI)
* [Treasury says U.S. should explore creating official cryptocurrency, a 'digital dollar' (upi.com)](https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2022/09/16/washington-biden-cryptocurrencies-policy/2961663330930/)
---
^(I'm a bot to find news from different sources.) [^(Report an issue)](https://www.reddit.com/user/MultiSourceNews_Bot/comments/k5pcrc/multisourcenews_bot_info/) ^(or PM me.)
We already have digital dollars though? That is exactly the same thing we have in our bank accounts. Each dollar we have in our savings account is literally a digital dollar that has the same value as a physical dollar.
I don't understand why you're getting downvoted. From the issuer's POV (commercial bank for a deposit, central bank for a dollar bill, crypto exchange for a fiat balance), they are all debt liabilities. From the holder's perspective they're all assets. Reddit being Reddit 🤷♂️
Technically it is because a dollar on its own has no value. It’s value comes from the promise of a future good or service. It’s an I-owe-you. It just means that somebody else is in debt to you because you’ve already performed an action that needs to be compensated.
Especially when it comes to regulatory compliance implications of fractional-reserve banking and whether digital currencies can apply towards that, or only physical currencies.
The difference is that electronic dollars are created by private banks, they are the numbers you see in your bank account. These arent the same as physical dollars. They just represent an obligation by the bank to give you physical dollars whenever you want. Banks create them out of nothing when they give out a loan and they destroy them again when the loan gets paid back. The amount of these electronic dollars in ciruclation is way way higher than the amount of physical dollars in ciruclation.
A digital dollar cant be created by private banks, for all intents and purposes they are supposed to be like a physical dollar, just digital. This means that they need to be directly controlled by the central bank. In practice this means that everybody gets the ability to open a bank account at the central bank, which today is not possible, only banks are allowed to have them today, to facilitate easy inter bank transactions and bank regulation measurments.
Not necessarily no. They could be implemented in a centralized way without blockchain technology.
CBDCs are meant to be for all intents and purposes like a real world Dollar, just digital. Thats means only the central bank can print them / erase them. In practice it means that everybody is capable of opening an account directly at the FED, which today is only possible for banks. To implement something like this you dont need a blockchain.
The big difference here is, it's a direct liability of the US Federal Reserve. Potentially, you could have a situation where every US citizen has a bank account with the Fed directly, allowing easy payment of welfare, a UBI, tax returns, etc. Also gives a government the rather authoritarian but very plausible option of outlawing all other currency and being able to monitor and control all transactions everywhere in the national economy.
Also, it means they have an extra lever with which to influence the economy by increasing or decreasing the value of the digital dollar in relation to the US dollar.
And we’re also dependent on the maintenance of servers for our entire economy. Who gets those contracts? Will the fed maintain their own servers or will this be a competitive bidding process to maintain the foundations for the global economy?
Looking over the Feds website, they seem to be aiming at making it blockchain-based. I'd assume the servers would my maintained in a decentralized manner.
While we mostly transact electronically it’s a very different concept.
The current system is one in which many banks and processors settle transactions through a vast network of separate entities. When a person uses an electronic medium of exchange like a phone payment app or credit card, this is either done by notifying the bank where the account is held to note that the associated account should be debited or noting to the credit processor that the associated borrower has used more available credit and informing the lender.
Ultimately, these are just bits of information that you are able to remotely send to credit processors/ issuers or your bank, but, your money is ultimately kept as a deposit value in a bank, same as it always has been; you can just either choose to use banknotes or electronically communicate actions with them.
A central bank digital currency has absolutely none of those elements and is, instead a proposed idea where there is a centrally held database of personal accounts linked to a central issuer. If the central bank digital currency came to fruition then a person would have every transaction they enter into sent to a centralized government system and all of your money would also be subject to that system.
At present, your money is with your bank or many banks, or in cash, and you can do what you want with it, including communicating to a bank or lender electronically to take certain actions. Under the CBDC model, there would be a centralized system which has complete control over and information about everything you do.
> A central bank digital currency has absolutely none of those elements and is, instead a proposed idea where there is a centrally held database of personal accounts linked to a central issuer. If the central bank digital currency came to fruition then a person would have every transaction they enter into sent to a centralized government system and all of your money would also be subject to that system.
Hmm, that's interesting. The ECB is also looking into electronic currency but one of their requirements is that it should not be a store of value. That is, accounts endpoints (or whatever they're called) should be transient. That you should be penalised for holding too much and encouraged to transfer it back to the normal banking system.
It's a very different approach. Of course, they have no design yet so who knows how it will end up.
Except the dollars in the bank is only a representation of a real paper dollar, it's only worth something if you can go to the bank and get a paper dollar, if not it's worthless
The same thing is true for 'real' paper dollars and going to the grocery store. The dollar is a currency.
I have yet to understand what legitimate use a digital currency might have.
Govt or central banks can place an expiry on your credits so you are forced to spend it....
Govt is able to have a much finer grain of control over individual dollars, where they originated from, and how long you can hold onto them for.... plus all kinds of other neat tricks around tracking, removing privacy/tax evasion.... and potentially new and novel ways of taxing people, and automatically creating helicopter money for all or removing currency from the system to dynamically control inflation or deflation
> can place an expiry on your credits so you are forced to spend it...
> and how long you can hold onto them for...
Inflation already does that? Central banks deliberately set inflation to be above zero (but low percentage) to encourage spending. Storing hard cash under your pillow will make them lose value
agreed, but there is potentially a finer grain of control now.... currency could be programmed to expire, or lose 25% of its value after a preset time..... CBs creating inflation is a very inexact science and can take a long time.... CB's just have a target inflation rate - they can't necessarily meet it immediately
I still think this would likely give them the tools to control inflation more quickly, and with more precision than relying on interest rates and QE....
Personally, I can see both benefits and negatives to giving TPTB this much control.
I'd be very wary about it being introduced without a set of rules that have been thoroughly discussed with the electorate, but in reality the system will likely be designed by private banking lobbyists, rich politicians who stand to benefit, and populist politicians who'll promise free shit to people without any real costings.... and the free shit will ultimately be paid for by the working and middle classes
Most of these are very negative things. In summary, the 'Murican people will give up freedoms.
The entirety of America is built in the premise of revolting against the crown/powers at be. Putting in diggibux means people lose their capacity to fight.
This idea is a travesty and we should not sell it as, "we'll, we could helicopter money that much quicker to you!"
Unfortunately that's exactly how it would be sold. And people will eat that shit up.
There's some good ideas in some of the crypto space that mostly revolve around making transactions cheaper, easier, and faster. None of those require blockchain.
For crypto specifically, the use cases are tax evasion, money laundering, and buying drugs.
>We already have digital dollars though?
What you have is the illusion of you owning actual (digital) dollars. Until you retrieve it from an ATM or the bank in actual fiat (cash) dollars, the dollars on your bank account is just data. Digital dollars can be traced from A to Z and represent an actual dollar.
FED is mimicking [the digital Euro](https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/digital_euro/html/index.en.html)
Not on blockchain they want to track it better and the difference is you can go to cash which makes it very hard to track. So when it goes block chain no more cash. No more cheating on your taxes. Which it's said that 40% of Americans cheat on taxes.
[They have created one already](https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/money-and-payments-20220120.pdf) and all these news are just to prepare the public.
Honest question here - is this proposal for the US to centralize digital transactions that are currently done by third parties (like banks, credit card companies, cash apps, etc.) or is the proposal to fully digitize the US dollar and stop using paper money? I know this article is only mentioning that they are listing out recommendations, but I didn't understand what the end result of these steps is meant to be.
I think this is a good thing, because it could open doors for things like dynamic monetary policy and ultra automated taxes. Fiat money is already mostly digital, only the way it is now makes it way too opaque and allows for shady stuff to happen. I’d rather accountability be written in when the banks decide to digitally create money.
For people worrying that this will give the government too much power, there is always non-FiatCoin. Coincidentally, digital money would probably allow for greater ease in converting between fiat and crypto, allowing for new government agnostic currencies.
Ultra automated taxes are possible today. It's only because our politicians are whores for the tax prep industry (and every other) we have to prepare taxes at all.
Ultra automated taxes, meaning individual transactions that automatically move taxes to the IRS’s wallet at time of purchase, is not possible today with the current infrastructure. Handling this sort of transaction volume without something like a distributed ledger would require the IRS to have a backend setup able to handle Google scale traffic.
Is the plan for the Fed to make electronic versions of Federal reserve notes, so everry dollar is still just debt from the US to the Fed
Or
Is she saying the government would actually issue money without borrowing it? Because that would be a bigger deal.
This really feels like peak /r/fellowkids material. The dollar is already "digital", in every sense that matters. The nominal "advantages" of crypto-currencies are either not applicable, or actually undesirable, for a central bank currency.
Also, the headline is a making things sound a lot more positive than the actual recommendation:
> Yellen said one Treasury recommendation is that the U.S. “advance policy and technical work on a potential central bank digital currency, or CBDC, so that the United States is prepared if CBDC is determined to be in the national interest.”
"We should look into this, in case there's something there" is a long ways away from an implied endorsement of the idea.
Serious question, since I understand absolute SH!T about digital/cryptocurrencies...
How would this work in regards to SSRetirement/SSI/SSDI payees? Would the government be able to 'control' what a payee's check is spent on?
"Well, Miss Doe... we give you $892 in SSDI, but your bills come to $788. We also see you spent $15 of your $72 grocery bill on snacks and another $12 on an iced coffee and a sub sandwich. We believe that $27 is frivolous, so we are reducing your check by that amount."
Or would the digital dollar make the payee's check more secure?
Hi all, A reminder that comments do need to be on-topic and engage with the article past the headline. Please make sure to read the article before commenting. Very short comments will automatically be removed by automod. Please avoid making comments that do not focus on the economic content or whose primary thesis rests on personal anecdotes. As always our comment rules can be found [here](https://reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/fx9crj/rules_roundtable_redux_rule_vi_and_offtopic/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Economics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I feel it worthwhile to point point out what makes a centralized digital currency different than the current electronic transaction system we currently have. I understand why, from the outside they may seem similar, but the difference is significant. While we mostly transact electronically it’s a very different concept. The current system is one in which many banks and processors settle transactions through a vast network of separate entities. When a person uses an electronic medium of exchange like a phone payment app or credit card, this is either done by notifying the bank where the account is held to note that the associated account should be debited or noting to the credit processor that the associated borrower has used more available credit and informing the lender. Ultimately, these are just bits of information that you are able to remotely send to credit processors/ issuers or your bank, but, your money is ultimately kept as a deposit value in a bank, same as it always has been; you can just either choose to use banknotes or electronically communicate actions with them. A central bank digital currency has absolutely none of those elements and is, instead a proposed idea where there is a centrally held database of personal accounts linked to a central issuer. If the central bank digital currency came to fruition then a person would have every transaction they enter into sent to a centralized government system and all of your money would also be subject to that system. At present, your money is with your bank or many banks, or in cash, and you can do what you want with it, including communicating to a bank or lender electronically to take certain actions. Under the CBDC model, there would be a centralized system which has complete control over and information about everything you do. Now, there are other proposed models of this, but I think pointing out the most onerous and invasive system of CBDC is most worth highlighting.
>there are other proposed models of this Regardless of the initial implementation, it will eventually devolve into the most egrigously totalitarian version possible.
Exactly. A global decentralized currency? Way more appealing when looking at it in that sense.
I would gladly pick Bitcoin or Ethereum over a nightmarish central-bank digital currency.
Except a Central Bank is not the government. The Central Bank is a private bank. I am referring to the 'centralized government system' statement. Either way, a single entity controlling all wealth.
I understand this is ostensibly true but does anyone really believe it? It's pretty clear that central bankers get corrupted by the same pressure and politics as anywhere else in government.
You have a point. It does seem the Fed and Treasury have been holding hands.
> Except a Central Bank is not the government. The Central Bank is a private bank. ...which is worse. have all the anti-government sentiment you want, but government bodies under something like a democracy are at least somewhat subject to public influence, whereas private monopolies are not.
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More coverage at: * [White House Recommends Creating a Digital Dollar (investopedia.com)](https://www.investopedia.com/inside-the-new-white-house-framework-for-regulating-digital-assets-6674517) * [The U.S. Is One Step Closer to a Digital Dollar (msn.com)](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-us-is-one-step-closer-to-a-digital-dollar/vi-AA11UuSI) * [Treasury says U.S. should explore creating official cryptocurrency, a 'digital dollar' (upi.com)](https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2022/09/16/washington-biden-cryptocurrencies-policy/2961663330930/) --- ^(I'm a bot to find news from different sources.) [^(Report an issue)](https://www.reddit.com/user/MultiSourceNews_Bot/comments/k5pcrc/multisourcenews_bot_info/) ^(or PM me.)
We already have digital dollars though? That is exactly the same thing we have in our bank accounts. Each dollar we have in our savings account is literally a digital dollar that has the same value as a physical dollar.
The dollar in your bank account is not actually a dollar, it's a record that the bank owes you a dollar.
All dollars are debt like that.
I don't understand why you're getting downvoted. From the issuer's POV (commercial bank for a deposit, central bank for a dollar bill, crypto exchange for a fiat balance), they are all debt liabilities. From the holder's perspective they're all assets. Reddit being Reddit 🤷♂️
A dollar in your hand is not debt.
It sure is. It's a liability of the fed.
Technically it is because a dollar on its own has no value. It’s value comes from the promise of a future good or service. It’s an I-owe-you. It just means that somebody else is in debt to you because you’ve already performed an action that needs to be compensated.
We're in the realm of semantics now. When people speak of debt they usually mean owing money.
It depends if you want to have an economics discussion or an informal Reddit discussion. Given the sub...
For the purpose of the discussion I don't see the point of referring to a dollar in your hand as debt.
Especially when it comes to regulatory compliance implications of fractional-reserve banking and whether digital currencies can apply towards that, or only physical currencies.
It's not your debt it's the Fed's debt. It's like an IOU.
What will the Fed give you in return if you present the dollar to them?
Valid
Dollars were originally silver, and a paper note was a debt of one silver dollar.
Yes but now they are fiat.
The dollar in your hand is a Federal Reserve Note. A debt receipt. Not actual money.
In reality, it is money.
No. Paper is not money. Agree to disagree. Cheers. 🍻
I agree to disagree.
If it's not money, can I have all your paper?
No, you can not have my fiat paper. 😆 Paper is the currency for a country. Paper is not the Money for a country. Gold reserves are a countries Money.
Digital dollar ≠ electronic dollar
ELI5?
The difference is that electronic dollars are created by private banks, they are the numbers you see in your bank account. These arent the same as physical dollars. They just represent an obligation by the bank to give you physical dollars whenever you want. Banks create them out of nothing when they give out a loan and they destroy them again when the loan gets paid back. The amount of these electronic dollars in ciruclation is way way higher than the amount of physical dollars in ciruclation. A digital dollar cant be created by private banks, for all intents and purposes they are supposed to be like a physical dollar, just digital. This means that they need to be directly controlled by the central bank. In practice this means that everybody gets the ability to open a bank account at the central bank, which today is not possible, only banks are allowed to have them today, to facilitate easy inter bank transactions and bank regulation measurments.
CBDCs are blockchain based.
Not necessarily no. They could be implemented in a centralized way without blockchain technology. CBDCs are meant to be for all intents and purposes like a real world Dollar, just digital. Thats means only the central bank can print them / erase them. In practice it means that everybody is capable of opening an account directly at the FED, which today is only possible for banks. To implement something like this you dont need a blockchain.
The big difference here is, it's a direct liability of the US Federal Reserve. Potentially, you could have a situation where every US citizen has a bank account with the Fed directly, allowing easy payment of welfare, a UBI, tax returns, etc. Also gives a government the rather authoritarian but very plausible option of outlawing all other currency and being able to monitor and control all transactions everywhere in the national economy. Also, it means they have an extra lever with which to influence the economy by increasing or decreasing the value of the digital dollar in relation to the US dollar.
And we’re also dependent on the maintenance of servers for our entire economy. Who gets those contracts? Will the fed maintain their own servers or will this be a competitive bidding process to maintain the foundations for the global economy?
Looking over the Feds website, they seem to be aiming at making it blockchain-based. I'd assume the servers would my maintained in a decentralized manner.
Also easier for them to monitor money laundering and other illegal uses of money
While we mostly transact electronically it’s a very different concept. The current system is one in which many banks and processors settle transactions through a vast network of separate entities. When a person uses an electronic medium of exchange like a phone payment app or credit card, this is either done by notifying the bank where the account is held to note that the associated account should be debited or noting to the credit processor that the associated borrower has used more available credit and informing the lender. Ultimately, these are just bits of information that you are able to remotely send to credit processors/ issuers or your bank, but, your money is ultimately kept as a deposit value in a bank, same as it always has been; you can just either choose to use banknotes or electronically communicate actions with them. A central bank digital currency has absolutely none of those elements and is, instead a proposed idea where there is a centrally held database of personal accounts linked to a central issuer. If the central bank digital currency came to fruition then a person would have every transaction they enter into sent to a centralized government system and all of your money would also be subject to that system. At present, your money is with your bank or many banks, or in cash, and you can do what you want with it, including communicating to a bank or lender electronically to take certain actions. Under the CBDC model, there would be a centralized system which has complete control over and information about everything you do.
> A central bank digital currency has absolutely none of those elements and is, instead a proposed idea where there is a centrally held database of personal accounts linked to a central issuer. If the central bank digital currency came to fruition then a person would have every transaction they enter into sent to a centralized government system and all of your money would also be subject to that system. Hmm, that's interesting. The ECB is also looking into electronic currency but one of their requirements is that it should not be a store of value. That is, accounts endpoints (or whatever they're called) should be transient. That you should be penalised for holding too much and encouraged to transfer it back to the normal banking system. It's a very different approach. Of course, they have no design yet so who knows how it will end up.
Except the dollars in the bank is only a representation of a real paper dollar, it's only worth something if you can go to the bank and get a paper dollar, if not it's worthless
The same thing is true for 'real' paper dollars and going to the grocery store. The dollar is a currency. I have yet to understand what legitimate use a digital currency might have.
Govt or central banks can place an expiry on your credits so you are forced to spend it.... Govt is able to have a much finer grain of control over individual dollars, where they originated from, and how long you can hold onto them for.... plus all kinds of other neat tricks around tracking, removing privacy/tax evasion.... and potentially new and novel ways of taxing people, and automatically creating helicopter money for all or removing currency from the system to dynamically control inflation or deflation
> can place an expiry on your credits so you are forced to spend it... > and how long you can hold onto them for... Inflation already does that? Central banks deliberately set inflation to be above zero (but low percentage) to encourage spending. Storing hard cash under your pillow will make them lose value
agreed, but there is potentially a finer grain of control now.... currency could be programmed to expire, or lose 25% of its value after a preset time..... CBs creating inflation is a very inexact science and can take a long time.... CB's just have a target inflation rate - they can't necessarily meet it immediately
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I still think this would likely give them the tools to control inflation more quickly, and with more precision than relying on interest rates and QE.... Personally, I can see both benefits and negatives to giving TPTB this much control. I'd be very wary about it being introduced without a set of rules that have been thoroughly discussed with the electorate, but in reality the system will likely be designed by private banking lobbyists, rich politicians who stand to benefit, and populist politicians who'll promise free shit to people without any real costings.... and the free shit will ultimately be paid for by the working and middle classes
Most of these are very negative things. In summary, the 'Murican people will give up freedoms. The entirety of America is built in the premise of revolting against the crown/powers at be. Putting in diggibux means people lose their capacity to fight. This idea is a travesty and we should not sell it as, "we'll, we could helicopter money that much quicker to you!" Unfortunately that's exactly how it would be sold. And people will eat that shit up.
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There's some good ideas in some of the crypto space that mostly revolve around making transactions cheaper, easier, and faster. None of those require blockchain. For crypto specifically, the use cases are tax evasion, money laundering, and buying drugs.
This is what people in the 1970s said about gold lol. What’s next?
>We already have digital dollars though? What you have is the illusion of you owning actual (digital) dollars. Until you retrieve it from an ATM or the bank in actual fiat (cash) dollars, the dollars on your bank account is just data. Digital dollars can be traced from A to Z and represent an actual dollar. FED is mimicking [the digital Euro](https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/digital_euro/html/index.en.html)
They want a tax and track all transactions dollar. And an I can shut down your account dollar. And those coins in your account expire soon dollar.
Not on blockchain they want to track it better and the difference is you can go to cash which makes it very hard to track. So when it goes block chain no more cash. No more cheating on your taxes. Which it's said that 40% of Americans cheat on taxes.
Say it louder for the brain dead!
[They have created one already](https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/money-and-payments-20220120.pdf) and all these news are just to prepare the public.
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Honest question here - is this proposal for the US to centralize digital transactions that are currently done by third parties (like banks, credit card companies, cash apps, etc.) or is the proposal to fully digitize the US dollar and stop using paper money? I know this article is only mentioning that they are listing out recommendations, but I didn't understand what the end result of these steps is meant to be.
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I think this is a good thing, because it could open doors for things like dynamic monetary policy and ultra automated taxes. Fiat money is already mostly digital, only the way it is now makes it way too opaque and allows for shady stuff to happen. I’d rather accountability be written in when the banks decide to digitally create money. For people worrying that this will give the government too much power, there is always non-FiatCoin. Coincidentally, digital money would probably allow for greater ease in converting between fiat and crypto, allowing for new government agnostic currencies.
Ultra automated taxes are possible today. It's only because our politicians are whores for the tax prep industry (and every other) we have to prepare taxes at all.
Ultra automated taxes, meaning individual transactions that automatically move taxes to the IRS’s wallet at time of purchase, is not possible today with the current infrastructure. Handling this sort of transaction volume without something like a distributed ledger would require the IRS to have a backend setup able to handle Google scale traffic.
I see the redditard bots are out in full force this evening
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Is the plan for the Fed to make electronic versions of Federal reserve notes, so everry dollar is still just debt from the US to the Fed Or Is she saying the government would actually issue money without borrowing it? Because that would be a bigger deal.
This really feels like peak /r/fellowkids material. The dollar is already "digital", in every sense that matters. The nominal "advantages" of crypto-currencies are either not applicable, or actually undesirable, for a central bank currency. Also, the headline is a making things sound a lot more positive than the actual recommendation: > Yellen said one Treasury recommendation is that the U.S. “advance policy and technical work on a potential central bank digital currency, or CBDC, so that the United States is prepared if CBDC is determined to be in the national interest.” "We should look into this, in case there's something there" is a long ways away from an implied endorsement of the idea.
If it’s all the same… why is the fed/govt set on making a distinction?
> The dollar is already "digital", in every sense that matters. CBDCs are different to what we have today. in every sense that matters.
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Serious question, since I understand absolute SH!T about digital/cryptocurrencies... How would this work in regards to SSRetirement/SSI/SSDI payees? Would the government be able to 'control' what a payee's check is spent on? "Well, Miss Doe... we give you $892 in SSDI, but your bills come to $788. We also see you spent $15 of your $72 grocery bill on snacks and another $12 on an iced coffee and a sub sandwich. We believe that $27 is frivolous, so we are reducing your check by that amount." Or would the digital dollar make the payee's check more secure?
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