• hark@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    There are conspiracy theories about the federal reserve issuing their own digital currency, but having a neutral payment system would be extremely useful. Also, payment processors should pass these credit card fees onto the customer and show it on the receipt to drive up demand for lower fee cards, otherwise we’re all just subsidizing high fee cards.

    • Bacano@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I can’t imagine the fucked up shit that would happen if the central bankers ever got their hands on a centralized digital currency. No conspiracy or illuminati shit, just out of general enshitification it would end badly for the workers.

    • theneverfox@pawb.social
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      2 days ago

      Conspiracy theory? They’ve posted proposals for it on their website. They want to exclusively use for inter-Bank transactions, although you could read it to imply they want to replace fractional reserve banking with it, possibly even globally

      It’s deeply concerning, because they don’t need this at all for banking as it exists now, and if the global banks use the same system they’d have an insane amount of control over the global economy - they could use this system to more directly control the exchange rate of currencies, which they already use to force austerity and outside investment on resources

      The conspiracy really kicks in when you start to question if they’re trying to crash the USD and a global recession to do something like this… And for the last few years they’ve been giving very weird answers to questions like that

      • hark@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        It’s certainly a cause for concern, I’m just labeling it as a conspiracy theory because how the system would work in practice is still in the air and there’s been theorizing on what they could do, but what they could do is not necessarily what they will do. You’re right though, the potential amount of control they could exercise over the monetary system with this setup is terrifying. For example, I’ve heard of the idea floating around of having money that sits in an account for a certain amount of time expiring to force increased spending. Inflation is supposed to encourage the same behavior, but this is much more blatant and leaves no room for speculation.

        • theneverfox@pawb.social
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          2 days ago

          I’d only argue that conspiracy is the wrong word… It’s more like speculation

          But yeah… I’m sitting in horror right along with you