Here's the link
In my rather poorly informed opinion, these developments are something exciting to look forward to. While some may make a substantial claim that the DCEP may be misused (but in reality, what isn't), it will be fun to observe how the world responds :)
anyhow did u exercise today, lib?
- Commercial real estate development banned.
- Property speculation banned.
- Public housing and cheap rental housing will be the mainstay.
xi jinping's a thot. he's a freaking nasty hoe. he looks good. i'd love xi jinping to bust my pussy open and tell me about the transition to communism. if a guy shows up with a fucking class analysis and a good five-year plan he can hit my backwalls any fucking time of day dude. if a guy's like 'we're going to eliminate the value form entirely' im like 'take a fucking people's army to my pussy like it's a neighboring feudal theocracy being used as a base for capital reaction, dude'.
Digitizing the entire economy and transitioning economic policy to AIs is very scary - but it's scary in the way that taking your hands off the wheel so your car can drive automatically is. People (and the market) are shit at managing economic policy, and even if the AI has big problems it really doesn't have to be that great to be better than all of the experts currently making those decisions. Naysayers be like
Prediction: the largest companies and banks in the US will adopt the exact same system (but without the central authority of the state so theirs will always be making decisions on incomplete data) and it will be portrayed on the news as the greatest thing to ever happen to the economy, while the Chinese version will be portrayed as evidence of how horrible and unfree their country is.
Sounds pretty crazy and also promising. I would just worry about the potential of cyber attacks from the US shutting the entire economy down, or power outages (caused by the US or not) but I'm sure they have a contingency for that.
It's called "stopping trade with the US" and "Dumping their US treasury bonds". Which would cause the US to immediately implode.
cause the US to immediately implode
I would argue that the US would just outsource their economic woes to other countries. Always the way out is war
A collapse in the US dollar as a reserve currency would significantly harm their ability to do that, much as it did for the French and British Empires.
Yeah I read about how the US was able to hack Iranian centrifuges and break them, and ever since the threat of US cyber attacks has been on my mind. Same with the alleged assassinations carried out by hacking self driving cars.
disabled a whole nuclear power plant
can we get a source? sounds crazy wild
They're talking about Stuxnet I believe. The even crazier part of this is that re-engineered forms of Stuxnet have been found in the wild. I used to have a RSS feed of the cybersecurity blogs from a whole bunch of malware / cybersecurity companies, but all that was lost to a dead HDD, I'll see if I can dig anything up
I just cant remember who I used to follow, but you could probably put together a pretty interesting feed from the sources curated in this list: https://blog.feedspot.com/cyber_security_rss_feeds/
IIRC Stuxnet was actually so pervasive that all nuclear facilities have to be air-gapped now.
Source: A guy I know who worked at a nuclear facility in a US-allied country said that one day a bunch of American government types (he thinks DHS) showed up and told them that they could no longer use unsanitized USBs on any computers, because of a chance they'd be infected.
I can definitely believe that. I believe the US gov or one of the 3 letter agencies holds at lest one patent for a claw-like device that physically rips USB slots from new computers (lol). I remember from maybe 6 years or so ago there was this "BadUSB" attack that was proof-of-concept[ed] by researchers that could like gain root access thru the USB firmware
sounds dope but i'll believe it when i see it, institutional inertia is just as real in PRC as it is anywhere else
My one fear is the crypto creeps start using it, now the system is being controlled by the CPC, but those creepto people are really gross and would love an online currency that isn't funny money.
It's not decentralized, I'm not sure there's much chance of it falling out of CCP control.
DCEP
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Why is it a cryptocurrency? This is very silly. It won't hurt the project in any substantial way, but it won't help in any way either.
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Full economic transparency is neat. I can certainly think of policies I'd like to implement that would be easier with such a thing.
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The reddit thread saying this prevents money laundering makes me laugh. But you'll have to launder your money way more often, which means petty crimes either don't happen (not worth it now that you have to launder) or are way easier to catch (didn't launder, just figure out who paid).
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Potential for abuse is a little concerning. It's not about whether you trust the CCP as a whole, it's about whether you trust every single person with access to the data.
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The US currency system is already effectively digital with a similar two tier distribution system to the DCEP one, but in the US the second tier is for-profit and charges transaction fees. It'll be interesting to see just how much the lack of transaction fees helps the Chinese economy.
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Whether it's a challenge to the USD or whatever depends on economic policies, not the fact that they went all-digital.
Xiong'An New Zone
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I'm having a hard time finding much information on this
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The stuff cited in the reddit thread, if accurate, is hella cool
Why is it a cryptocurrency?
If you normalise cryptocurrency in your own country then all the tools necessary to serve a cryptocurrency must be created for it. Every single issue with cryptocurrencies for the average person will be solved from top to bottom by Chinese tech innovation.
If you think crypto currencies are going to stick around and continue to grow into the future then it seems like a smart play. It will put them ahead of capitalist countries because they all rely on startup companies. Chinese technology will be able to be ported abroad quickly and easily.
And perhaps their centralised blockchain technology itself might be something other countries want? What if you wanted to install a digital currency into African nations? They might highly value it on this technology. If they build their own based on it then they may be able to use it in deals with other governments that also want it.
Are there safety benefits to a cryptocurrency? What if your centralised non-blockchain system gets attacked and blown up? What failsafes do you have in place? Blockchain at least has the wonderful ability to operate by itself if something occurs to separate it from the intended centralisation the CPC will be using right? If your intention is to eliminate cash entirely and move to digital you also need to question how that will be attacked in a war. I think blockchain offers some element of autonomy that can be given in the event of a decoupling... They can then solve aby discrepancies manually later when they bring it all back together due to centralisation. Obviously I'm just guessing wildly on this last one I really don't know if you couldn't do the same thing with a standard digital currency that isn't built on blockchain.
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and what does your gosplan involve, exactly? :soviet-hmm: :soviet-hmm: :soviet-hmm: :soviet-hmm: :soviet-hmm:
Lets just say that with Xi doing his thing I'm not gonna last 5 years.
So the biggest energy drain in crypto is mining, which involves a huge number of computers processing at maximum draw 24/7 to spit out tiny amounts of value. If DCEP is a national currency, then presumably that means that the Chinese government will issue it in discrete amounts without needing to do the mining part, which should take less energy than is currently spent in the printing process for new paper currency.
It's just used to limit the supply, otherwise you could type "1 billion bitcoins" into notepad and devalue the currency instantly.
Governments limit the currency supply by collecting taxes.
Is it crypto though?
Or just digital like debit cards or apple pay?
It's digitization of RMB currency, but not just a payment method, which makes it different from Alipay, Wechat pay, etc. It's centralized, which makes it different from other cryptocurrencies. Basically it's still RMB, just not in paper. But what really makes it interesting is the following point:
it's going to replace paper RMB completely, which is a great monetary revolution never happened in human history. ALL currency circulation is going to be digitized under DCEP, and paper currency will be explicitly phased out.
It sounds... different, but as described it doesnt really seem much more than that. A centralized online-only currency is still currency.
Less privacy for massive corporations and billionaires who make a living out of hiding their wealth is good, less privacy for normal people who dont want people to know everything about them is not good.
More hellworld online-only AI algorithm cancer is not a future I look forward to.
I mean I'm petty boug as fuck so I can't tell you the last time I used cash for a payment (except for my rent. I think my landlord is money laundering but my rent is low enough for me not to care), though I feel like if you don't have this alongside some kind of backup system then you're screwed during an inevitable system outage. The backup doesn't have to be cash though, it could just be receipts that get stored by vendors and then punched into the system when it comes back up.
Maybe I'm reading it wrong but it seems like it only effects currency and monetary policy, which are already exclusively the realm of the state. I will say that I think people saying that this will wipe out illegal activity by giving total economic control to the government are getting pretty far ahead of themselves - not only will foreign currencies continue to exist even if China makes its own currency totally digital, but people are totally capable of operating on systems of informal credit without currency and in fact did so for the majority of human history.
It raises a privacy concern for me too. How do you combat people with access to the algorithm from abusing it? I guess it has to be the same way you prevent any other abuse of office - constant, vigilant anti-corruption measures. There's no reason that the data can't be kept anonymised though, allowing people to continue purchasing their sex toys and onlyfans subscriptions discretely.
The way I see it, either China is a DOTP and problems that arise with the system will be ironed out with the will of the people in mind, or it's an authoritarian hellscape where the only concern will be the needs of the state oppression apparatus. I feel like they're a DOTP and they'll cross those bridges as they come to them - and I can say with full confidence that any capitalist government or corporation that put together a system like this would build it to maximize extraction of surplus value and nothing else.
