A centralized bank unironically using blockchain technology that was designed to decentralize banking. Hmm.
Naah, this is the Bank of England, Big Brother before it was Big Brother. They want to do a Digital Pound the way China did a Digital Yuan. The goal is not decentralization, it's centralization and surveillance. This is India's approach too - they want to ban cryptocurrency and make everybody use Big Brother Coin.
This makes me think of those stories like the movie 20 Bucks that were popular for a while... someone takes a $20 out of an ATM machine (which were new and exotic at the time) and the story unfolds as the camera follows the money. With a central bank holding the keys to the crypto chain, they also get to see how money moves in both legitimate and illegal ways... and then get to make judgments on the entire chain of custody. What do they do with the information that the $20 bill was used by a hooker to snort coke, before being given to a convenience store clerk, who then gives it as change to a soccer mom? These links are ripe for misuse by any government agency. An auditable record of every transaction makes me a little nervous (probably in an "old man yells at cloud" kind of way, honestly), but it'd be nice for the BoE to just adopt a useful tech like ETH and move on. We can dream...
"What gets measured gets managed" - Peter Drucker The whole point of issuing your own digital currency is you have total control over that currency. A $20 bill used by a hooker to snort coke? You know that if it were a digital $20 bill, Charles Grassley and Lindsay Graham would introduce the "Accountability in Spending Somehow Happens to Overwhelm Liberties for Everyone Act" whereby any use of digital currency to purchase controlled substances compels the DEA to seize all of the indicted individual's currency in all banks and stores of measure to compensate for the expense of policing. So now the coke dealer is penniless, the hooker is penniless, the convenience store clerk is penniless and the soccer mom is penniless and Fox News either decries the downfall of humanity or trumpets the era of personal responsibility depending on who's in the White House that year. India went "hey guess what your old cash is worthless come exchange it by Monday" because they basically wanted to shake down and control the gray economy. If it had worked they wouldn't be busily looking into shutting down crypto. This is why Morocco outlawed crypto in 2017 - so they'd have currency controls. Obviously it crippled Bitcoin. Meanwhile in Russia, which banned Bitcoin: So the British could pursue a public, privacy-minded fork of a public blockchain but they won't. Because they do dumb shit like say cancer is covered by the NHS but dementia gets to bankrupt you.Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov, said of the meeting “Putin and Buterin discussed the application of technologies in the country. And that Putin supported the idea of establishing new business relationships following the road paved by Blockchain technology.” Time quoted a Russian state owned bank executive, who was at the event, saying “This is how the whole thing started”, regarding the Petro project.
I never thought I'd be defending a UK government, but that dementia tax idea was political poison and so got ditched. However... social care was still awful last I heard about it. Like if someone became invalid the amount of care people would get per week was so pitiful (something like an hour per week) family members would sometimes have to quit their job to take care of them. In short, I'm glad I left.
Right - my point being they floated it not because it was a good idea but because they thought they had the political capital to get away with it. The Tories were too stupid to recognize political poison when it was staring them in the face. "Let's eliminate all banking privacy forever in the name of convenience" is a quintessentially Tory idea.
If your point is that the Tories will stoop to any low they can get away with, I couldn't agree more. I'm not sure if it's stupidity, though, because somehow they seem to get away with almost anything. Like the billions in public contracts they handed off to their unqualified pals during the pandemic; for instance somehow they declined to have medical manufacturers produce PPE, and instead hired companies with no experience in the field whatsoever (for details). Is that stupid, or just blatantly corrupt? If they win the next election (spoiler: they probably will), they not only enriched their friends and themselves, they maintained power. I don't really think they're stupid; they're cunts.
I'm firmly of the opinion that the Tories can be both stupid and evil. Evil enough to double down on the surveillance state, stupid enough to think it won't just swell the black market. I mean fundamentally, if you grip the economy too tightly it'll slip through your fingers. See: India.