Typography

Reuters and Coindesk report that that the People's Bank of China's imminent central bank digital currency (CBDC) is going to have a feature called controllable anonymity . Perhaps some wires have been crossed in the translation, but it'd be hard to come up with a more Orwellian piece of double speak than this. Plenty of people on Twitter are sneering. But in this post I'm going to take China's side, if only tepidly. None of the news articles have made much of an effort to explain controllable anonymity . But we've actually known about this feature for quite some time. Back in 2018, the project's head, Yao Qian, provided a short description of it. It's not as Orwellian as it seems. China's new CBDC, otherwise known as the Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) platform, requires users to provide their real identities when they sign up. In the link above Yao calls this real-name at back-end . So the People's Bank of China will be privy to ...

Central bank digital currency, or CBDC, is a form of highly-liquid digital debt that most governments have, till now, held back from issuing. But there is a growing push to change this. Free market economists are generally not big fans of CBDC. They see it as government encroachment on the banking sector. In this post I'm going to push back on the free market consensus. (This post was inspired after reading posts by Tyler Cowen and Scott Sumner ). Look, we're always going to have a government. Right? And that government is going to have to raise funds somehow in order to keep the lights on. The question is, how? Should it issue 30-day Treasury bills? Fifty-year bonds? Perpetual debt? Paper currency? Why not issue currency-ish debt instruments in digital form? Let's start with a parable. Imagine a world in which the government has only ever issued 30-year bonds. But next month it wants to shift some of its borrowing from the 30-year bond range to the 10-year range. Governm...