Britcoin: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come feat. Dan Davies
Former BoE economist and author Dan Davies joins us to talk about Central Bank Digital Currencies, programmable money, and the ongoing quest of central banks to hoard more power. Also, we unlock the details of Starmer’s pledge to make the U.K. the fastest growing economy in the G7 by luck or possibly magic, but without significant investment in state capacity building.
Comments (17)
This is a good beginning to explore the CBDC trend. This is going to be the trend of this decade as it's the natural consequence of the massive role which Central Banks are taking in the worlds economies. What commercial banks don't like is that it effectively disintermediated them entirely. One of the countries which is leading on CBDC is Nigeria, and you can see the consequences there of what is happening from the removing "cash" from their economy. You should do something about Nigeria with a Nigerian political scientist or someone involved in the Nigerian left as it exists.
first they put the money on the computer ... now they're telling us they want to put the computer ... in the money
Putting loads of restrictions on the money you send as rent is very funny to me.
Programmable money sounds a lot like Australia’s “cashless welfare” system.
"the first Italian-american brit" you forget bob hoskins
Corporations were the first AIs.
Nate???
Burst out laughing at the idea that Biden has somehow been an effective reformist in any way, much less the idea that the relationship between "Biden Democracts" (which, at this point, is a set containing the Bidens and no one else) and their left is healthy. Do people in the UK actually think that is the case? The left isn't chill with Biden, they've just been utterly broken of any belief they can do anything about him.
I think the guy was specifically referring to the spending bills, which to be fair, does represent a lot of money
An interesting project to achieve kind of cash-like electronic money is GNU Taler, which does fancy crypto shit to basically make it possible to track all _incoming_ payments but no or few _outgoing_ ones. So the state can track and tax e.g. salaries and tax and business incomes and match that against invoices and receits and whatnot, but not see that You Have Now Bought X Thing From Business Y at time Z. And of course this isn't ever going to be implemented by an actual central bank. But it COULD be. If it was run by NERDS.
Hearing them talk about programmable money just made me think "oh, like how different welfare programs work in the state where we have found new ways to punish people for being poor by letting them know they cannot be trusted with money."
EBT/SNAP here in the states is a good indication of what "programmable" money might look like.
I didn't think a discussion of central bank cryptocurrency with a boe economist could run a genuine chill down my spine but fuck me you managed it
Love to introduce the concept of VBucks into real life.
A classic of the "serious expert guest wonders what the fuck they signed up for" genre
I think he fit right in tbh. Knowing things does not stop you from Being Silly
I was feeling very normal, und zen I got zis programmable euro.