Congratulations to Richie Sunak on being appointed to run the king’s country. I hope he’ll lead the king’s ministers and subjects on behalf of and in the interests of the the crown, as this is the job he is now sworn to do.

A year ago he was at the G7 telling bankers how keen he was about exploring the ideas of a central bank digital currency. Otherwise known as a CBDC.

Confusion. Almost all my payments using government money are already digital: the Pound Sterling is already made of digital accounts. What percentage of the pounds you own are actually in coins and notes right now? It’s lower for pretty much every institution other than people. 95% of money isn’t money.

So how is a CBDC different?

A Central Bank Digital Currency is essentially equivalent to everyone having their own personal account at the central bank. In this case the bank of England.

No need to bother with Nat West, you can tell HSBC where to hang it, and Barclays’s to swing their hook. You already have a free bank account.

There’s no need to prove your ID because you have been assigned your account at birth or naturalization as is your right as a subject of the King / Citizen of a real country.

The central bank becomes a payment processor, VISA and the private banks can stop with that boring money-transmitter stuff and concentrate on gambling like the degenerates they are, without risking taking our entire payments system with them.

It is surprising to hear someone like Sunak (who is from the party of the capital which is doing all that degenerate gambling) would support a policy of basically nationalizing payment processing: Cut out all the private corporations currently doing it, and hand it to the crown.

But probably he’s just blinded by jargon and scammers and doesn’t really understand what he’s saying. Or perhaps he just intends to privatize it later, after it’s established it’s monopoly.

Pros and cons of CBDC

Whether that level of government, uh, insight into every private individual’s financial affairs is a good or bad thing I’m not entirely sure. It is coming anyway. Whether in government hands or corporate.

Pros

A free bank at the king’s tax office, for every subject of the king!

Yanis Varoufakis really likes the idea. Though I don’t think he calls it a CBDB. He does want every citizen to have a government bank account and pretty much all commerce conducted though those accounts.

Accounts for every citizen in the national bank: Cut out the private profiteering bankers, separate investment from speculation, and both from actual payment systems. Make measuring and collecting tax effortless. Makes it easy to redistribute wealth and give the people more control to benefit society from monetary policy.

If the people control the money they can inflate it to use it to pay people to make roads and schools and stuff, and then that money is backed by roads and stuff.

The owners of the money, the people, own the infrastructure. We can take control and finally be governed in the interests of the workers rather than king, or the corporations. It’s a utopian book I guess.

He wants to give everyone three accounts even! I forget why. They’re all on the same government database ID and all can receive payments from each other. One might be locked till retirement? Anyway: Read his book “Another now”. It’s great and radical and filled with other much better ideas too.

Cons

There also things to be terrified of: which I think he skips over by just assuming government will be benign.

I think using the crown’s computers is going to mean massive and invasive government surveillance of all finance. Whoever wears the crown. Richi or the banks or the king.

There will be payment-censorship for dissidents like Wikileaks. Money will become a social credit score, automatically awarded bonus for for pro-social behavior and fines taken automatically for disrespecting the crown and it’s subjects while enabling unprecedented levels of government financial surveillance and control such that they know you are pregnant before you do.

There is also the problem of centralized systems failing all at once when they fail for technical reasons. Of being a target for hackers, run by incompetent government mid-wage employees. And used by people with no choice in the matter.

Centralized control is always vulnerable to being taken by corrupt powers.

The new monetary policy is no different than now: The government prints however much it wants and pays interest to the holders. The crown decides how much interest. They can even change their mind.

Perhaps we can begin to see why Sunak might want to nationalize the bank’s payment systems and take control of them for his party and the crown.

Mitigation

I think you can mitigate some of the surveillance/social-credit-score stuff if you allow new accounts to be created completely anonymously, remove any permission for accounts so even robots and spammers and scammers and black market traders and terrorists can get them.

Explicitly allow privacy tools like coin-mixers, and other systems that those anon-robot accounts implicitly allow anyway. Maybe encrypt everything by default like Monero?

But that also stops it being at all useful for tax and surveillance, and makes it much less useful for benefits payments coz of the identity fraud issues.

There is no chance at all that any of the big political parties will deliberately create a system like that. Not even the Greens. It would be called ’enabling terrorists and pedophiles’. And indeed it would enable terrorists and pedophiles and even god damned spammers. It would enable *everyone*: even criminal robots.

Maybe if we somehow got a Pirate party government? Not a chance with any other government in this kingdom.

The new digital money with the king’s face on it is going to be actively worse than even the one with a cartoon dog on it: because the king’s eyes on the new digital tokens will actually work, they will watch you.

Who is your king?

Is it the person’s whose face is on your money? Who controls it? The currency you pay taxes in?

UK

In the UK we are “English”. Subjects of the king and we call our currency “pounds”. The interest rate is set for the king by his bank that is instructed by his ministers who are in control of the crown and appointed by a committee elected by amazingly non-proportional mechanisms.

We think the right to be king is descended by birth from when some of our ancestors shot another ancestor in the eye. After that is was like, no more killing to take the crown, right? It goes by birth now.

VISA

In the corporate world there is VISA, they call their subjects “Customers” and the interest rate is set by corporate head office on behalf of stake holders. It is very highly negative. You do not want to hold on to their coins for long. They charge you for keeping them. But they will front them you in advance for free. Their committees are assigned by appointment from when their parent company’s ancestors bought it’s competition and established a payment monopoly.

Hexico

In cyberspace there are “Hexicans”, subjects of the king and they call their currency “hex”. The interest rate is set by the king, through his control of the supply of staked units. They think he is appointed by being the biggest clown, but it’s really mostly by being smart and boosterish enough to convince their ancestors to to give him a billion dollars back in the internet pre-history of a few years ago, that he then spent on buying most of the money supply from himself.

He should really wear a top hat like any other city banker. In fact he used to.

It’s not obvious to me that any one of these is more legitimate than the other.

All money is transparently a stupid scam. You know it. It’s always just been play-money taken seriously. It’s just a magic spell that works as long as enough people believe in it.

The king’s government at least uses *some* of the profit to pay people to educate kids and pave streets and what have you. It doesn’t *all* go into their offshore accounts.

But It wasn’t the king’s idea to do that: we had to force it on them over centuries of revolt.

Future

Last last time we had a UK coronation, the money with the new queen’s face on it was mostly written in ledgers by human hands. Some printed on paper or minted in coin, but mostly in banks ledgers.

The money with the new king’s face on it will be mostly recorded in databases and tracked and analyzable by massively perceptive neural-network pattern-matching machines.

Money is just a number in a database earning interest by inflation of the money supply. That database can be programmed any way we want. The inflation rate can be anything we want. Positive like guilts, negative like VISA debt, more or less neutral like current accounts.

The inflation can go towards paying for anything we want.

We can allow however much privacy we want.

Other moneys include the one run by the US government in the interests of US business and oil cartels, the one with the cartoon dog that a billionaire likes, the one run by the aforementioned clown, the various ones run by the geeks and frauds and academics, or the various corporate ones in differing multi-national judicial frameworks.

The tracking and tracing is basically already here: Making a CBDB just nationalizes it. Gives it to the crown.

Should we?

There ares pros and cons, and we’re getting most of the cons anyway. In corporate hands that are so powerful they might as well be a king or a government.

The question of who controls the government/corporate ledgers, since you don’t control them yourself, is deathly important. But nobody can be trusted, however many committees appoint them.

It can’t be any of those fuckers. Just look at them.

It can’t be a king appointed by birth, it can’t be the prime minister appointed by committee, it can’t be *any* party leader appointed by committee, and it can’t be a banker appointed by a committee of bankers.

Because all of those just give power and control and the keys to the kingdom to human beings who if they aren’t corrupt already are corruptible. Start the clock.

God knows the public can’t be trusted to vote to do it right. Look at the political parties they make popular: The electorate is absolutely raving bonkers.

It needs some kind of anarchist global federation to somehow make an open permissionless global network in which in order to dilute the currency you have to do actual work rather than just give it free to those who already hold it.

Where would we find one of those?

Ideally there is a way to make the actual work be teaching the kids and paving the streets and building the buildings instead of just sitting on a pile of cash or calculating hashes. But that probably can’t exist.

If we could find a way to make a public/community money, where anarchists can reward each other permissionlessly for doing up the neighborhood or building roads and teaching kids or what have you, then that’d would be the one I would want to appoint as money if I were king.

But it’s not even decided by my king, let alone me.

What kind of CBDC will you get?

In the UK we think a king appointed by birth should tell a minister appointed by committee to tell a banker appointed by a committee of bankers to build a system so that it helps them spy on the kingdom’s subjects, efficiently collect taxes, and bestow some benevolence to their subjects to encourage good behavior.

I wonder if that will result in a good one? One that someone outside the UK might care bout?

Will the digital pound be permissionless and private and borderless? Or will it be made by the Conservative Party or the Labour party at the behest of the King?

Coz those people definitely won’t make it so that it is free. That is not what they are like. They are authoritarian controllers who seek to govern.

In the end neither governments nor kings decide. The invention of commodity markets and floating currency turns it into a game where we decide collectively by participation in an auction driven by speculators based primarily on memes and confidence.

Much of the last 15 years of decline in the pound is in fact a decline in all money since the global financial crisis exposed it all as a sham in 2008. That forced the King’s monetary system to take on the bad debts of the whole financial system.

It has obvious crisis points, and brief recoveries, the trend is clear.

The future will interesting, but it will remain mostly cashless, and become increasingly surveilled and so understood.

The king’s portrait on the new digital money has big ears, whether it’s a CBDC with government ears, or still just VISA and the bankers with their corporate ears.