While a digital national currency does have the potential to mitigate key financial issues, we cannot ignore the democratic risks such a currency could introduce without safeguards.
What is a digital Canadian dollar?
Simply put, a digital Canadian dollar would be a digital form of the cash in your wallet. Like cash, it could buy the things you need. But the advantage is that you could also use it for online purchases and to transfer money between family and friends. And businesses could use it to pay each other.
Digital form of cash in your wallet? Like a debit card linked checking account or a prepaid credit card (i.e. Koho)? Everything described seems to be exactly what we can already do since forever. LOL
I think the difference is you could use it somehow outside of a bank account, like with just a digital wallet? I’m no economist, but I don’t see any tangible benefits to this either. Having a frictionless alternative to etransfers would be nice I guess, but not worth making major changes to our monetary structure.
It looks the same on the surface, however underneath the existing system has a lot of layers that were created over the history of the banking system that don’t need to exist in a digital ledger system like this.
From the sounds of it your digital cash would not need to be stored in a bank account or anything like that, so banks won’t have access to your money to invest in other things that make the bank money and potentially lose it all.
Wouldn’t that mean there would be added fees, no insurance for loss, etc.?
Whatever it ends up being, they really need to make a very clear definition of what exactly this is, and how it differs from traditional banking.
There’s no way the majority of the population, especially first generation immigrants to this country, would understand what the hell a “digital Canadian dollar” is.
I see a lot of opportunities for abusing people’s naivety on this one.
Digital form of cash in your wallet? Like a debit card linked checking account or a prepaid credit card (i.e. Koho)? Everything described seems to be exactly what we can already do since forever. LOL
I think the difference is you could use it somehow outside of a bank account, like with just a digital wallet? I’m no economist, but I don’t see any tangible benefits to this either. Having a frictionless alternative to etransfers would be nice I guess, but not worth making major changes to our monetary structure.
It looks the same on the surface, however underneath the existing system has a lot of layers that were created over the history of the banking system that don’t need to exist in a digital ledger system like this.
Yeah; this would replace the onion that is EMV with a straightforward digital ledger standard backed by the Bank of Canada.
Under such a system, physical cash could become NFTs of the digital equivalent (and not NFTs in the cryptobro sense).
This could make currency management much less expensive.
From the sounds of it your digital cash would not need to be stored in a bank account or anything like that, so banks won’t have access to your money to invest in other things that make the bank money and potentially lose it all.
Wouldn’t that mean there would be added fees, no insurance for loss, etc.?
Whatever it ends up being, they really need to make a very clear definition of what exactly this is, and how it differs from traditional banking.
There’s no way the majority of the population, especially first generation immigrants to this country, would understand what the hell a “digital Canadian dollar” is.
I see a lot of opportunities for abusing people’s naivety on this one.