China Creates Its Own Digital Currency, a First for Major Economy

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-creates-its-own-digital-currency-a-first-for-major-economy-11617634118

by prostoalex • 5 years ago

35 25 5 years ago

All the currencies have already been digital for decades. The most interesting part of this was the expiration timer to get people to actually spend. Otherwise, what really does this do that alipay or wepay doesn't?

AnimalMuppet3• 5 years ago

It lets China claim to have a national digital currency, which nobody else has. It doesn't have to functionally add anything; it adds something in PR for China.

xyyzy• 5 years ago

I see it mainly of getting rid of physical money faster. Ofcourse people already use alipay, wechat pay and they spearheaded it. The expiration timer is most likely to incentive people to use this over wechat and alipay and get faster usage feedback.

Note that wechat and alipay are commercial companies. So having a national digital currency does have benefits

bingbong702• 5 years ago

The difference is that the largest trading nation on the planet just created a system for 0 fee transactions that can expand to global usage quite easily (I believe wepay/alipay were mostly intended for domestic use).

If a tiny country that produced nothing did this, it would be less relevant.

yorwba• 5 years ago

WeChat Pay and Alipay could expand to global usage even more easily, because they're actually in widespread use. Some stores in other countries already accept them as a payment solution for Chinese tourists: https://www.presseportal.de/en/pm/105224/3983905

The only reason they're not freely available for anyone to use is that it would make it easier for Chinese citizens to move their money out of the country, which the government doesn't want them to do. The "digital yuan" isn't going to be different in that aspect.

gruez• 5 years ago

Matt levine covered this yesterday: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-06/greens... (scroll down to the "Digital yuan" section)

His conclusion?

All of this stuff can be done conventionally, with the usual banking system. [...] I don’t really buy that central bank digital currencies will dramatically change the nature of money, and I’m not sure why China’s digital yuan would materially affect the global hegemony of the U.S. dollar. But surely central bank digital currencies can be convenient for central banks, and for governments.

jefftechentin2• 5 years ago

The money itself is programmable. Beijing has tested expiration dates to encourage users to spend it quickly, for times when the economy needs a jump start.

Yikes, that is a lot of power. Been an ideological Bitcoin holder/gold bug/physical cash fan for quite some time now. The sophisticated mechanisms that Central Banks have to control the economy/money seems dangerous in shortsighted democracies, and nightmarish in more authoritarian states.

No anonymity in financial transactions makes it easier to catch drug dealers and tax evaders. The ability to control the money supply will keep the economy healthy (theoretically). Only problem is the ability of communities/individuals to economically resist national governments is so thoroughly squashed that citizens are turned into subjects when the nations elites decide subjugation is a good idea.

Dirty secret of politics is that rights become inalienable in the same way boxers become champions. By winning a lot of fights.

AnimalMuppet3• 5 years ago

If I believed in crypto, a digital currency controlled by a government seems exactly like the wrong answer.

loceng4• 5 years ago

What about if the citizens of each democratic nation voted to join other nations using the same blockchain?

nuisance-bear• 5 years ago

How is this materially different from the system we already have?

US dollars are just rows in a distributed database. The database is distributed over a network of banking nodes. The network is highly concentrated [1], and its super-nodes are already very difficult to distinguish from government in anything but a formal legal sense.

Insofar as I can tell, a digital currency would be the same thing as government saying "banks need to provide unrestricted access to their networks" which has basically happened already.

[1] https://www.ffiec.gov/npw/Institution/TopHoldings

bwestergard2• 5 years ago

The idea of expiring money is more than a century old, and has been tried on a small scale in a few municipalities ("stamped money").

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/08/27/754323652/the-...

jefftechentin2• 5 years ago

I am not arguing that expiring currency is unprecedented. Further, I am aware governments have had control over the money supply for thousands of years.

Main thing that worries me is the sophistication of the control. What I do not want is all economical activity to be corralled into a financial system where states/bankers can see every transaction, take your assets at a key press, and destroy your savings.

State backed currencies seem like a good idea, so do legal alternatives and anonymous payment options like physical cash.

loceng4• 5 years ago

Reminded me of how, from my understanding, citizens of China don't own their property when they buy a 900 sqft condo for $900k minimum - they're just getting a 70 year lease on it; built in scarcity with no real chance for citizens to increase their own or their familial wealth - unless you're in the CCP hierarchy of course.

powerapple• 5 years ago

You do own the property after purchase, just not land. You lease the land. After 70 years, you will need to pay for the lease again, it automatically renews. I believe it is set to 2% (too lazy to do research now). About the price, it varies a lot depending on city and area.

Barrin92• 5 years ago

Same is true for Singapore, you buy effectively a 99 year lease that gradually returns to the government.

It's actually a pretty brilliant policy that strikes a good middle-ground between giving individuals stake in the country without losing sight of the public interest to maintain control of land ownership.

This sort of combination between state control and individual ownership is vastly preferable to the patrimonial wealth acquisition in the US, which gives private interest groups extraordinary power at expense of both individuals and society at large, and it's an effective mechanism against generational inequality and it avoids creating a society dominated by heritage.

hungryhobo2• 5 years ago

hmm if chinese citizens had no chance to increase their wealth, how did they drive up housing prices around the world? Isn't the narrative that hot money from China was the cause?

chriselles• 5 years ago

The concerns I have with a Digital Yuan are linked to China’s One Belt, One Road initiative with the adding of a digital layer to that effort.

IF China is able to successfully export its Super-platforms into the developing world it will provide the means thru which it could supplant the US Dollar with the Digital Yuan as the primary means of exchange with low friction switching costs.

At the moment, Zipf’s Law still applies with the US Dollar still the dominant currency used with the Euro a distant 2nd.

China’s Yuan is still low single digit %.

But this could change rapidly if China is able to successfully push their domestic super-platforms onto the developing world thru a strategy of One Belt, One Road debt trap diplomacy combined with offering their fellow authoritarians ‘moderator’ within the Chinese ‘administrator’ surveillance framework, and offering users purchasing power stability.

While the decision isn’t binary, if the CCP had to choose between investing in a counter to the US military’s trillion dollar super-carrier battle group sunk cost or adding a billion developing world users for Chinese super-platforms I think the choice is simple.

The latter is cheaper, and ultimately pays for the former.

My thinking is the threat today is low, but the vulnerability looking out a decade+ is extremely high.

China Creates Its Own Digital Currency, a First for Major Economy

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