https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/05/23/the-house-bans-the-fed-from-building-a-cbdc-like-the-digital-yuan/
The House Bans The Fed From Building A CBDC Like The Digital Yuan
Roger Huang
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I write about Bitcoin and its wider impact on society
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May 23, 2024,04:49pm EDT
Fed Chair Jerome Powell Delivers Semiannual Monetary Report At Senate Hearing
WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 22: Jerome Powell, Chairman, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System … [+]GETTY IMAGES
The House of Representatives has made a significant move by banning the Federal Reserve from creating the "digital dollar," a central bank digital currency. This decision, proposed by the House Majority Whip, Rep. Tom Emmer, as the "CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act," is a crucial amendment to the Federal Reserve Act, which governs the US central banking system. The amendment states, "The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee may not use any central bank digital currency to implement monetary policy."
The vote on the ban was almost a party-line vote, with three Democrats joining all Republicans in voting yes. However, the Bill still has a long way to go before becoming law - it needs to pass a vote in the Senate and potentially stand a presidential veto. The fact that Ex-President Trump has repeatedly mentioned that he would not allow a "digital dollar" to be built and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, had also said that the Federal Reserve would not start implementing a digital dollar without congressional approval, adds to the potential implications of this ban passing the House. The Senate likely has allies on a CBDC ban, though whether there is a majority and/or a veto-proof majority would be an open question.
Still, as one of the chief opponents of the Bill, Rep. Maxine Waters, put it, "In fact, if this bill becomes law, we would be the only country in the world to ban a CBDC." Prohibiting "innovation" on the central bank digital currency front seems like a policy miss at first sight. However, as I detail in my book on Bitcoin + China, the Chinese party-state hasn't gotten that far with its CBDC, the e-CNY, or "digital Yuan." Adoption is lagging, and people prefer private options like WeChat Pay and Alipay - though the state has put a lot of muscle into it with pilot programs that offer essentially free money and ample state media support. Even though it's banned, people still use and sell Tether and Bitcoin, and people go to jail for selling Tether. China wants to expand the central bank digital currency model and has already piloted it in the M-Bridge with other central banks and in Hong Kong, but adoption has been lagging for now.
Part of this is that central bank digital currencies do two things that put central banks off-guard: they put central banks, which are used to be banking regulators, in the hot seat when it comes to technology choices and, by definition, only provide closed-source vendors chosen by the central bank - and not open source builds or game-theory proven approaches to mitigate attacks. The Chinese party-state has been the victim of cyberattacks before and is taking an approach potentially vulnerable to more.
Central banks are used to governing by edict, not by product metrics. In China, this has led to Alipay and WeChat Pay maintaining their advantages through sheer user engagement/retention - their app ecosystems and services providing more than enough staying power. And if there were transaction throughput (the e-CNY has done a fraction of what Bitcoin does, though it's hard to verify/audit figures as there are few public ones), the central bank would have to deal with ledgers with millions of transactions rather than the engineering and data teams that usually do.
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