Topic: CBDC will make Bitcoin MORE valuable - page 4. (Read 748 times)

This is the beauty of democracy: they can't. Or better said, they cannot do at the levels China would do.
And for US, the agencies already have the control they need. In US the bank will do all you want if you have the warrant. And the agencies will also not move a finger without a warrant. So there are no real gains there.


Maybe, although VISA/MC are also advertised as safe, secure, fast, convenient. Then what would be the added benefit?


Of course. We're on the same page here.

Do you actually believe that any other government, especially like the U.S., don’t want total control over money? Plus, no, it won’t be advertised as something not to pay large fees to VISA/Mastercard. It would be advertised as “safe”, “secure”, and what everyone loves = “fast and convenient”. But what it actually is is total control over YOUR money by bypassing the current financial system.

I believe you are right about it. I was reading the Five Observations on Nigeria’s Central Bank Digital Currency some time ago and that quoted section cut my attention,

"Like coins or cash, the eNaira is a liability of the CBN. The eNaira uses the same blockchain technology as Bitcoin or Ethereum and, like them, the eNaira is stored in digital wallets and can be used for payment transactions; and it can be transferred digitally and at virtually no cost to anyone in the world with an eNaira wallet. There are, however, important differences. First, the eNaira features stringent access right controls by the central bank. Second, unlike these crypto-assets, the eNaira is not a financial asset in itself but a digital form of a national currency and draws its value from the physical naira, to which it is pegged at parity."

Even though they try to liken it to Bitcoin and Ethereum Blockchain, we can see what the bolded part is noting. Regardless of the country where CBDC has been implemented, I believe that will be the same, pegged to the countries currency which is not the thing with cryptocurrencies and of cause with AML/KYC requirements too.

Me neither.


Here the situation is imho more nuanced.
You say you don't need USD, and you're somehow right, you don't. But the middlemen do, hence, indirectly, you need it to. (Please don't argue with semantics, I think that I am pretty clear).
The same goes with Bitcoin: we won't need US dollar, or fiat, but we will need all payment processors handle bitcoin, not just very few (and, at least in my country, overly expensive).
And maybe CBDCs can help with that, by making the connection easier. Or maybe not. Maybe I'm wrong and I'm hoping too much. We'll see.


Fiat already does that now. And since it's the merchants who pays most of the fees, the consumer may even think that it's for free.
What bitcoin does better now is only 3 things:
* it can be used internationally, easily, without conversion
* it's a much better investment than any other currency
* it works well without banks, KYC, the need to have a certain age or live in a "better" country

Although the 3rd is the reason Bitcoin was made for, many don't care about it (they care only about 2).
I'd say that our aim is to see 1 work much better, i.e. have much more shops accepting bitcoin directly (and whatever the payment processor does internally is a more complicated story).



It depends on the country. China is most probably marching for CBDCs for multiple reasons.
The one that they can advertise is that they won't have to pay big fees to VISA/Mastercard.
The one they are interested in is total control. The control over everybody's money, everybody's wallets. How easy will the opponents made poor in minutes!

I believe the first demonstrations of a real CBDC in practice will be China’s CBDC during the Olympics next month.

Plus I also believe that many of the posters might have missed the main point of the topic. CBDC strengthens Bitcoin’s narrative/main value-proposition, which is as a censorship-resistant, decentralized digital currency, and therefore the mere fact that it exists, makes Bitcoin more valuable.

Paper-money might be centralized, but it is more private, and more censorship-resistant than a CBDC will ever be. What would stop the central issuer from censoring anyone in that system? Didn’t the Cypherpunks want to build a network for a decentralized currency that no central authority could control?

It'll work just like the stable coins that usually gets to help the pumping for bitcoin. We can't stop these CBDCs since it is the government that will push its use through their mandatory ruling. But OP is right that due to the censorship that it's going to provide and to make it easier to understand, the centralization that it will commit once they're already running. Not everyone is going to like it, there will be more people that would like to stay private and anonymous and with that choice, they'll be ending up still straight to bitcoin.

i dont see bitcoin as a take-over attempt of fiat.
i dont see bitcoin as something that needs 'dollar'

im in the UK and i can buy US products with my pounds. because yes there are middlemen that accept pounds and THEY convert it to dollar for the merchant.

im invested in bitcoin and i can buy US products with my bitcoin. because yes there are middlemen that accept bitcoin and THEY convert it to dollar for the merchant.

this DOES NOT mean my pounds need the american dollar to promote pounds.
thats what forex exchanges were made for to have them hedge the risks of exchanging. so that pounds can play in UK and dollars can play in america without them being dependant on each other.

i dont have to rely on US government. i can however use a private business that hedges the exchange risk where they make fee's/profits for hedging the exchange risk.

...
but now lets go back to the practicality of a CBDC vs bitcoin.
if a CBDC does everything faster, cheaper then bitcoin. people just wont see the point of bitcoin

I've added a little bit of extra, since fiat will not disappear yet, since far too many simply don't have internet nor care about it.


There are other possible reasons, from faster money transfers (especially international) to getting paid for your work without the need of KYC. And investment. People have been always using the stronger currencies as investment. Bitcoin fits that use case too.
(Of course, keeping money away from certain eyes can be also an use case, but not everybody is doing that.)


If the politics would have been different the price for a coin would probably have also been different. Of course, this may not help the unbanked much, although people were always resourceful.
I will avoid the topic you don't like. I will tell about those micro-payment websites some have been using for faucets, I will tell about off-chain "transactions" made by people using the same web wallet like service (eg Coinbase). Or some people can simply ask to get paid into the deposit address of a Bitcoin-card service and spend from that card. So the 5$/day people do have some options (they probably won't know nor care to use more complicated methods anyway).
I don't tell that those methods are good or bad, it's not the purpose here. The purpose is to show that people are resourceful. And I am confident that more ways to handle small transactions will be invented.
I know that you would have preferred bigger blocks. But even if that would have been fixing the fee problem, maybe, it wouldn't have made bitcoin suitable for paying at the supermarket - which is considered sometimes as a measure of success as a currency/coin - because of the block time.


I somehow agree that we should not rely on govt products for success, but on the other hand I don't think that we can otherwise and I tell you why.
You also wrote that the shop will accept govt money because of laws, taxes and such. Shops don't have much of a reason to accept bitcoin, because it means more paperwork and also more risks (sudden price fluctuation). So if we want to use Bitcoin-as-a-coin, we may not have much of a choice than provide a "connector" between bitcoin "world" and fiat/shops/banks world.
When shop owners will start seeing Bitcoin is indeed useful and used, maybe some will start accepting Bitcoin too. But I don't think that a "revolution" will just happen. Until then, we may need to connect with CBDCs. Not seeing them as a savior or such (by far!), still.. they may come handy.

As I said in the previous post. Govt launching CBDC can end up with govt rising more obstacles for bitcoin or can get to help bitcoin connect to the monetary system / the merchants. Not the best solution - imho never is - but one more step forward.

A few people in the topic already seem to be conflating CBDCs and stablecoins, but they're very different things:

Stablecoins are tokens which are supposedly backed by private capital.  A company claims they have a certain quantity of assets and issue tokens to represent those assets.

CBDCs are nation-state/government issued currencies.  No private assets involved.  The currency is only "backed" by the perceived strength of the nation's economy, much in the same way fiat is.

This is generally a controversial issue that needs to be tested in practice. CBDC is simply a more efficient financial means of non-cash payments of states in their currency. Therefore, CBDC cannot be similar to cryptocurrency. Any financial transactions with the currency of states require user identification. Therefore, for CBDCs, user identification is commonplace.
However, since CBDCs will be much faster and more efficient than conventional non-cash payments of states, it is quite possible that they will compete with decentralized cryptocurrencies to some extent. CBDC lose to cryptocurrency by complete centralization and complete lack of anonymity, but at the same time, their transactions will be not only controlled, but also protected by states. How CBDCs will affect the price of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, will be shown by practice after the mass appearance of CBDCs themselves.