Comment by c7b
9 hours ago
Visa/Mastercard are also 100% surveilled. The nightmare of your transactions being monitored and arbitrarily blocked that's peddled as an argument against CBDCs or public financial infrastructure like Pix is already a reality for all of traditional finance (with the exception of physical cash, which happens to also be a central bank product). Sometimes even balances get confiscated, read the horror stories by Stripe customers. Americans seem to believe that the same thing is necessarily worse if it's done in the public sector. Other countries tend to see it differently. Just let them be.
I'm not american. I'm commenting on my own country.
As I said, I'm not defending credit card companies here. Just pointing out the fact that there are problems with pix. It's not the silver bullet people think it is.
And yes, it is worse when the public sector does it. You can actually use the government to fight the private sector when it screws you over. When the government does it, then it's just the system working as intended.
You cannot "use the government". I'm not aware of any countries where it would work like that. You can use the judiciary, which is independent of the government, and you can use it to go against the government the same way you can go against corporations.