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Comment on ‘I know about lying, I do it for a living’: Ben McKenzie as crypto criticparent

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I think it's considerably harder to construct an argument for why CBDCs controlled by a central bank should be a use case for database structures designed for decentralisation. Even the standard "it doesn't need to be a cryptoasset but it's a great marketing pitch" doesn't work because central banks don't worry about lack of adoption from the average member of the public, the average member of the public does worry about cryptocurrency, and the average cryptoenthusiast is not a fan of central banking

A CBDC split among e.g. several countries, institutions, banks, would still need some (simple) consensus algorithm.

It would also still benefit from all of the work done on the usage side, e.g. smart contracts, zero-knowledge proofs, state/payment channels (Lightning Network), etc. etc.

There is also a very wide spectrum between "single issuer has absolute power" and Bitcoin, e.g. it might still be anonymous, and there might be cryptographic proofs that coins aren't silently minted.

A CBDC by definition isn't "split between multiple institutions": it's emitted by a single central bank, which doesn't need or want a mechanism to obtain "consensus" of third party users of its currency (institutional or otherwise) for its operational decisions.

Similarly, it doesn't have any need to invent Lightning networks to overcome the crippling limitations some blockchains impose on transaction throughput (and it's not like you need blockchains to implement payment layers and eventual consistency of records where that's seen as preferable to instant settlement) and if central banks want people to be able to write 'contracts' to automate interactions with its money to a greater extent than is already possible through third party institutions, it's perfectly capable of providing a permissioned read/write API to its records without implementing itself on the Ethereum blockchain.

A CBDC split among e.g. several countries, institutions, banks, would still need some (simple) consensus algorithm.

Yes, but one of the core premise of crypto is "trustlessness". Once you drop that requirement far simpler distributed consensus algorithms dominate the field.

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