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http://www.news.com.au/finance/money/wealth/the-warning-signs-for-the-future-of-cash/news-story/2a5607982ba7bbbb679cf058135bbc0e (http://www.news.com.au/finance/money/wealth/the-warning-signs-for-the-future-of-cash/news-story/2a5607982ba7bbbb679cf058135bbc0e)

Govts want to do away with cash BUT only for a crypto-coin they can control!

Article in Australia today!

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Cranky4u

Nice article, thanks for posting.  In my case, I find that I can spend CA$H quickly, especially if I want to buy gold.  Paying with cash helps keep buying Au a tad more private.

I'm going to guess that part of your inspiration in posting was the FBI-Apple iPhone imbroglio, where (if I understand correctly, and, ahh, well...) Apple has an excellent essentially unbreakable encryption system for keeping out anyone but the owner (via limiting password attempts).  The FBI wants to break into the California terr's phone to see whom he called...

But we all know what is going to happen if Apple gives in.  Every little drug investigation, every little everything then becomes fair game, and we have even less privacy than before.

.gov has proven many times that they abuse the kinds of powers they now seek.  I'm with Apple here.

By looking at the case alone, it seems like Apple should help to unlock the phone to extract whatever information within. Many people feel that Apple is wrong for not doing this- I feel the same too!

However, when you look at the broader picture, if Apple decided to help this time round, it will set the "first example" and in future the government can make use of this "example" to request phone makers for whatever they want...

I inclined to agree with you.

To be honest the governments could not control cash, how would Crypto currencies give them more control? There are two types of control, namely :

a. Manipulating the value of the currency < Printing it like toilet paper, like they are doing now >
b. Tracking the money flow to catch criminals < Marking notes and surveillance systems in ATM's when you withdraw it >

First of all, the article was good and agreed on most points. The thing with governments is that, they never do their job and would always like to jump from level 1 straight to level 10 difficulty, without knowing the basics and that's were all the complications arises. They never seem to correct whats wrong from the base and expect to take control of something far more than they could handle. Not sure if their only worried about control or their worried about losing the battle among cash vs digital currencies. There's a reason that there is already a cashless country (Sweden IIRC) and more will surely follow. They could try to take control of crypto currencies but they would never be able to control it in full terms.

Agreed fully here. Governments always seem to put themselves in posititions where their strengths are not used and they always end up needing to patch things.

If a fully controlled crypto was out, what would prevent the users from creating side chains / co existing chains that most people will use only to change them to the government controlled unit when a purchase needs to be done? Let's say the payment processors we have now could take the role but instead of changing directly to fiat, they change to the controlled crypto.

sadly for them any crypto coin was especially designed to not be contorlled, contorlling a cryptocoin, goes against the fundamental rule about what crypto is in comparison to fiat

aside from this there is no real 100% decentralization, in fact bitcoin is a bit controlled by the most powerful entity that are mienrs and merchants especially, or at least they have a better position than a simple node

I am no Alts expert, but Ripple, Nxt and ETH are all centralized, along with I am sure many others.  Ripple especially could be easily controlled by someone who chooses too.
The question is, if a controlled/controllable cryptocurrency starts to take off, as ETH has been doing recently, will the bitcoin community buy into it and abandon bitcoin?

I expect most would use both, but greed would move many into the newly expanding currency, so that would fluorish, just as the government want.

Nice article. Similar has been discussed previously on the forums... Government and banks want to issue their own cryptocurrency and then control pretty much everything you make...

This sentence really made me think:


I know "dump" here is in the sense of leave cash behind, but maybe a government's cryptocurrency may have a hidden premine for them to spend however they please ;D

It makes sense, they just want to substitute one thing for another they would have a greater control of.

I'm not a conspiracy guy but having a read I can only think of a gov dictatorship that will get only stronger if they could use a cryptocoin. Credit cards already give this chance of greater control over our money and the more tech goes on the lesser privacy we will have

eth is not centralized afaik, ripple yes, in fact i don't consider it an altcoin at all, and its value is always the same

Right!
You can not control cash.To get control over the whole money supply cash has to be banned and a digital government coin be released.
Or just juse the actual fiat money only in pure digital shape.
But people are not dumb.They will look for other payment methods to circumvent that control and suveillance.An underground and backyard economie will develop and government has achieved absolutely nothing.

Both Ethereum and Ripple are premined, and this premining or giving coins to itselves is the control Goverment is looking as well. Actually I think some Ripple clon is best for government as this is not even blockchain based crypto, which can be run at few authorized servers under Goverment control.

What's the point of a cryptocurrency that is centralized and controlled by the government? If they want to do that, visa and mastercard are already doing the job for them. No point integrating crypto into it.

Maybe there is a future where centralized (government) and decentralized crypto-currencies exist. However, one of the fundamental points is being lost if the crypto-currency is centralized. People need to wake up from the delusion that they're living in.

Well if the blockchain that the government would use was centralized, then it would not be resistant as Bitcoin. The government might want to take advantage of cryptocoins, but we've yet to see examples of their work. A lot of them don't understand the technology at all.

every coins has a form of premining even bitcoin(not exactly a premine, but instamine because of very low diff), if it is fair in some way, not dumped by the dev and not too big, and used for example for the project itself, then i don't have anything against it

Yes thats the reality once they figure out something getting boomed. They try to be within that without any further study. This leads to great collapse of systems running properly. I have seen various technologies undertaken by government when they found systems with much advancement. The bad part is after taking over the control they won't maintain properly. This is what happening in most governments.

there is no difference between current digital cash system and centralized cryptocurrency if they are planning to open one.

Actually centralized cryptocurrency is bit better than visa and mastercard. You still use Crypto so you can sign pubkey and thus prove ownership. With visa and mastercard you send card ID and pin and they tell you if it match database entry.

But Centralized cryptocurrency does not need blockchain because it can be run on one or few centerally controlled servers, so all it needs is SQL database so in this respect similar to visa and mastercard.

Yes, this is what the Government wants. They want to control the Crpto currencies so that they can generate their profits
from it. Bitcoins is build on the idea that no Govt. controls it and it is only controlled by the people who uses them.
That's the best part of bitcoins.

Lauda I would not be so sure about it. I think they have some task force to study and analyze how a bitcoin-like cryptocurrency can be implented to be at their absolute disposal. I mean the code is out there: even a kid could create a coin(and that happens quite often).

Not surprised that the government would basically want to do this. The governments know they are "late" to the game. They have the recognition lag of realizing they are late to the crypto-currency system. Now, they face implementation lag with distributing and thoroughly getting a large majority of individuals to start using this. Finally, impact lag would take quite a while to realize the full potential of how this works out over time.

I dont think so Government will be able to do so. The digital currency like bitcoin would presumably circulate in parallel (and at par) with banknotes and other existing forms of the national currency. Bitcoin is totally out of reach for any Government.

But you have to realize that what the government is asking Apple to do, or the warrant they are trying to use is the most ludicrous thing ever. They are expecting Apple to reveal information that they have no way of giving, because that phone doesn't have any "back doors" and they don't have a way of retrieving the info they want... What the government is then asking, is to force Apple start producing phones with back doors from here on out, which is even more ludicrous. Anything you search on your smart phone which is deemed "suspicious" allows them to stalk you for as long as they please.

Keeping phones private without allowing back doors is way better for the innocent than the guilty for actual "terrorism" because "terrorist" with knowledge of hacking could then find these back doors themselves to retrieve personal info on anyone with that phone and can be even more of a threat to your average joe.

Allowing the government to force Apple into this is definitely not the way to go.

Again, you didn't see the point behind my post. If they create a centralized blockchain then it loses out once of the important 'features' of this technology (decentralization). Centralized means it will be more susceptible to attacks. Just because they have resources, that does not mean that they know how to use them properly (and we've seen that they usually don't).

Creating a random coin is one thing, adding new features and improving the infrastructure is another.