Comment by EGreg
3 years ago
Here we go. CBDCs are next, and also national Digital IDs. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uwRSzNTp2ko
Real ID + needing it to browse anything on the Internet: https://community.qbix.com/t/the-coming-war-on-end-to-end-en...
From what I see people on HN writing, by and large they downplay the risks of these as well as AI. Or alternately seem to suggest that CBDCs and national IDs are not coming, and that it’s a conspiracy theory. However, the “enshittification of Big Tech platforms” is already a fact, so they simply complain about it, but anytime solutions involving open source, decentralization, and utility tokens are introduced, they are violently voted down. So — since no solutions are welcomed, I guess many denizens of HN support hurtling toward extreme centralized control. After all, we’ll be able to complain about it once it’s in place, and that’s enough!
Edit: literally 5 seconds after I posted it, I received downvotes. Not fast enough for a human to read the message let alone explore the links. I wonder if it’s even automated by keyword now.
I would love to see government IDs be available as a form of auth on the internet. It would open up the possibility of real-person communities with fewer bots and trolls.
Similarly with digital payments, I'd much rather trust the government with that than some rando cryptobro of the week.
There is nothing extreme about this. The government already does both functions in the analog world. It's about time they caught up digitally.
Meanwhile some YouTuber screeching about some Bible quote... not a convincing start
Edit: didn't downvote you btw, just don't agree that this is a bad thing
> I would love to see government IDs be available as a form of auth on the internet. It would open up the possibility of real-person communities with fewer bots and trolls.
And reintroduce all the chilling effects of knowing everything you say is on a permanent record linked to your name. I know the government wouldn't be running the sites, but they'd have activity metadata, and data breaches could be correlated to work out who the "opaque" ID refers to (perhaps it would be possible to mitigate that by having the IdP identify users to the site as a hash combining the site and the user. Not sure). There are a few types of companies that may have a genuine reason for requiring government auth, but generally we should not make it easy for Facebook or Google to require it
A community with fewer bots and trolls should be accomplished with moderation, and not just allowing a firehose of signups
Can't we have both?
Ideally, the government login/auth would be an opt-in for sites where anonymity isn't important. Facebook, for example, already has a real-name policy but still has fake accounts. Moderation alone isn't sufficient; it's hard to keep up with the number of bad actors. Limiting signups to verified humans, and possibly validating their nationality, can help with that IRT to bots and foreign agents.
It's important that the mechanism be opt-in, though, and yeah, metadata would be a problem. But realistically it's just a matter of degree... they already have access to all of that metadata today with just a subpoena or national security letter. Centralizing the login would make it easier for them to collect it, but also make it easier to audit via government mechanisms (FOIAs, etc.) compared to the opacity of private companies (which are under zero obligation to reveal how things are stored).
My concern with digital payments is the elimination of cash. Having the ability to transfer value without it being monitored or blocked is an exceptionally useful property of paper money.
As long as the US continues to have large numbers of unbanked/underbanked, that isn't a possibility.
Well, it's still possible with barter goods, just a lot harder. Isn't there a cryptocurrency that's actually private too? (I know Bitcoin is not)
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But you might buy things the government doesn’t want you to have. Real meat? Nope. Religious texts? Nope.
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I don't trust the govt quite as much as you, but could see this being a useful govt function if the issuing body didn't maintain any record of when, where, or why an ID was used--and only acted to verify the authenticity of an ID.
I don't know if it's really a matter of "trusting" the government, but of accepting that they already have access to most of my data anyway. Between credit cards, IP logs, subpoenas, national security letters, warrantless wiretapping, etc., they already know everything there is to know about me.
What makes this tradeoff (of convenience vs privacy) acceptable to me is not that I trust the government, but that I already accept I have near-zero privacy right now, as it is. Making it slightly easier for them isn't a big deal. I'm not a very exciting person to begin with.
And frankly I suspect that outside of techno-libertarian echo chambers, this is the case for most regular people. They just don't really care if the government knows about them. Not everyone has the same degree of desire/need for privacy.
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> It would open up the possibility of real-person communities with fewer bots and trolls.
I would be 100% unwilling to engage with public online communities if I had to reveal my real-world identity to do so.
And that's OK. I'm sure there would still be anonymous forums, the 4chans and reddits of the world and such. But this would enable real-identity communities that we don't currently have, useful for things like public comments and discussions for local news (god, those newspaper comment sections are horrible right now), government requests for comments (like when they're starting a new development or changing land use or whatever), things like a public version of Nextdoor/Yelp/etc.
The hope is not that it would kill anonymity altogether, but that it would create some alternative communities linked to real-world identities, and maybe that would help people behave better, with real-world decorum, in those specific identities. Yeah, some people would never sign up for those... and maybe that's OK, as long as the remaining community is more civil and thoughtful?
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> I would love to see government IDs be available as a form of auth on the internet
This kind of already exists: https://login.gov
I have to use this to login to the VA.
It'd certainly be interesting if they opened it up so third-parties could use it for authentication.
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I agree I'm more concerned about Silicon valley tech bros than my own government.
I can vote for Parliament I can't vote for PayPal's board of directors.
Governments are far harder to remove than tech firms. You may be able to ditch Google, but there's only one government in your country. And "democracy" doesn't prevent state surveillance.
Most politicians back it, so voting differently makes little difference. Labour and the Conservatives support the Online Safety Bill, the Patriot Act was bipartisan, and voters have very little control over the EU and can’t stop Chat Control. And most of “government” isn’t directly elected: you can’t vote out the NSA, and Congress has little power over them either. The government blunts corporate abuses but doesn’t stop them: revolving doors ensure authorities target small fry while big companies like Visa keep going unimpeded. And finally, most voters don’t mind surveillance that much, since government and media manufacture consent for it. Don’t count on ordinary people to “vote it out” until it’s too late.
Lobbying against government surveillance helps marginally, but it's an eternal struggle. Governments take as much power as they can get, while abuses are exponentially harder to detect and stop than refusing to grant that power in the first place. The “slippery slope” isn’t a fallacy, it’s the record of the last twenty years. Don’t let them track speech and money with a central ID and digital currency, just because you don’t like a few tech bros or online trolls.
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PayPal doesn’t have a military and doesn’t extract taxes from you though.
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It’s not even been 100 years and people already forgot.
US history isn't my forte. Can you elaborate?
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> Meanwhile some YouTuber screeching about some Bible quote
Why do you lie when it takes 1 second to verify the facts? I wasn't interested, but clicked on the video and the man is talking in a calm and collected manner, not even close to "screeching". Or is it always "screeching" when somebody says something you disagree with?
> CBDCs are next
Nobody has seriously discussed a CBDC for months in the U.S. FedNow is the American financial system catching up to the 1990s. It has nothing to do with crypto beyond the cursory.
Powell seriously discussed CBDC in his recent testimony to congress. He mentioned it was far off.
> Powell seriously discussed CBDC in his recent testimony to congress. He mentioned it was far off
It isn't being seriously discussed for implementation. The working groups are disbanded. The Fed won't write it off--they shouldn't. But CBDCs are as proximate as postal banking.
FedNow is the system that will give the USD some or all of the troublesome properties of a CBDC.
I can't begin to parse your comment.
Right now, you hold your money digitally with a bank. The bank holds its money digitally with the Fed. If your bank caught fire, the bank and its insurers would be responsible for getting you your money back.
A CBDC would mean cutting out the bank - you would hold your money digitally with the Fed, and the Fed would be liable for it.
FedNow creates a ledger that allows two banks holding their money digitally with the Fed make an instant transfer. You never become a direct customer of the Fed, but your bank and the bank of the person you're exchanging money with - both already Fed customers - have a quicker way to record the transfer.
The only relation between FedNow and a CBDC is that the Fed is involved, and, like, computers, I guess? Other than that, their mechanisms and effects have very little in common.
It was obvious from the first line that your post was going to be axe-grindey conspiracy fodder. It's not us, it's you and your and tightly closed epistemological loops.
In this case CBDCs (the interest bearing kind) actually have the potential of disintermediating banks. Or atleast reducing credit/liquidity risk. Grandma's savings/deposits arent going to evaporate the next time a bank collapses. Cause her CBDCs are going to be sitting in her wallet.
> Grandma's savings/deposits arent going to evaporate the next time a bank collapses.
That's already the case.
if they are interest bearing, there will always be some risk involved by definition....
I've already read this comment before, just written a different way. I promise you I'm not a robot, I just disagree.
US attitude towards national IDs is amusing, lol
[Lightly] amusing is thinking there is a singular attitude in the US towards national IDs. And we already have several forms of national ID anyway.
Comically, the primary national ID we use is one specifically designed not to be a national ID.
The secondary "national" IDs most of us use are simply state IDs or driver's licenses. They're not in a federal database, but I don't understand how that's meaningfully different. It's still a big government tracking system.
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Well yeah, generalisation is awful, but it has it gist here :-)
It's also wildly inconsistent. The same political factions (vs individuals) that complain about Real ID also complain endlessly about fake ID. They complain about illegal voting, but also support the drive to withdraw their states from ERIC, which has done a good job in detecting illegal voting. Basically they're sometimes against solutions because their complaints infrastructure generates a reliable stream of political and financial capital from the credulous.
It's kind of strange that in other threads HNers will lament the end of the nerd internet and how everything is corporatized and 1984 wasn't a manual, and then here they downvote you.
National IDs in the US are never coming because the evangelical base of the GOP literally oppose it for being the "mark of the beast".
>Here we go. CBDCs are next, and also national Digital IDs
No, this is a long term replacement for ACH, a function that the Federal Reserve was already carrying out.
I see it as an almost total impracticality to transition from our current system to a centralized national identity document.
There is no central database of:
* Citizenship
* Births
* Drivers Licenses
* Marriages
* Deaths (SSA death reporting is voluntary and customary by funeral homes -not required)
* Education history
* Criminal Records
* Firearm Ownership
* Property Ownership
* Vehicle Ownership
The only thing the feds or even the state government has a certain idea of is, how much you made in a given reporting period - not that reporting periods always overlap in any meaningful way. There is no requirement (as far as I can tell) to even request a social security number - most parents do, because they want to claim their children on their taxes.
Now, many of those records do exist - they exist at the county, state or local level in some manner or fashion - and of course, its not standardized either, sometimes its at the county, sometimes the state, sometimes at the county or state for the same record type based on year. (e.g. Marriages from 1902-1962 are in county records, and 1962 to current in state, or the other way around.)
Trying to link all of this data in a meaningful way, would be a monumental task that would likely require a vast amount of manual data matching - and it would still be wrong 40% of the time.
They could do an audit and census approach as a one off to get all this started. For a national ID though wouldn't you only need drivers license / property data / marriage data / criminal data / citizenship / births?
Not sure you need firearm / vehicle / education history for an ID system
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We already use social security numbers for everything (insurance, credit, etc.). It's pretty much a national ID, just a shitty one.
The way they got SSNs through is by promising that it would be illegal to use them for identification. The only remnant of that is that it (still?) remains illegal to refuse services to people who refuse to give their social security numbers, although if you do it you'll break customer service.
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USG has issued national ID documents for more than 200 years. They're called passports.
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nothing about singling out people for various reasons and depriving them of basic services? read history much?
The government already has the power to do this — just ask any trans person in the South
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They don't need a national id to do that. Lmao
Case in point, the no fly lists, they literally don't care if they just ban all the John Smiths.