Let’s talk about digital payments systems.
There are pros and cons of moving away from physical cash. But the fact remains that even in 2000, in the early stages of payment digitisation, 98% of money in NZ had been issued as bank credit, not as notes and coins.
So if the majority of monetary transactions are taking place using digital systems, the software and standards used for all this need some serious scrutiny. Arguably it’s impossible to properly audit an organisation’s accounts without being able to audit the source code and protocols in the banking and payments software they use.
When Utunga introduced me to his Cashless project, I thought both the goal and the tech were cool, but I was a little concerned about the name. The push for a cashless society has been a bugbear of the conspiracy underground since Nixon moved the US dollar away from the gold standard in 1971. Calling it “Cashless” seemed likely to distract from his actual goal - an innovative P2P mutual credit system based on Secure Scuttlebutt - and sure enough it did. Which I suspect is partly why he pivoted to the Together Project, and let the cashless.social domain expire.
Similarly when the NZ Reserve Bank released a discussion paper exploring the mere possibility of issuing a digital form of cash, or CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency), a lot of people interpreted this as a dark omen of an impending cashless society. Even though it was made very clear in the discussion documents that any CBDC would be issued to complement physical cash, not to replace it.
So what kinds of digital payment systems would respect our software freedoms, and our broader human rights and civil liberties? How do the various existing systems stack up against this ideal? What projects are on the horizon that might move us in the right direction, like GNU Taler, or Web Monetization/ InterLedger?
