China’s Digital Currency Will Be a Weapon for Authoritarianism
As Beijing introduces a centralized digital yuan, Chinese citizens will lose one of the last untrackable domains: paper cash
For many in the cryptocurrency world, the separation of money from government control is a central ideology. Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the creator of the bitcoin concept, argued that centrally controlled banks abused the trust citizens placed in them. “The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust,” he wrote when first announcing his peer-to-peer currency. “Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.”
So crypto enthusiasts are naturally concerned about China’s plans to create a digital currency that would not be independent from the state, like bitcoin, but run by it. The digital yuan is expected to launch in 2020 and will be the world’s first digital currency controlled by a central bank. A digital version of China’s currency will, the government hopes, allow more visibility of international transactions…
