Thread by @rohangrey

Extremely excited to see this piece on "Paths Toward an Acceptable Public Digital Currency" by Jay Stanley at the @ACLU:

aclu.org/paths-toward-a…

Some key highlights/personal favs:

1) Acknowledging from the outset that while a public digital dollar and CBDC are often conflated, the former could also be issued by the Treasury Department

(For more on this, see my Congressional testimony here: rohangrey.net/files/testimon…).

2) Pointing out that all the major forms of privately intermediated digital payments - that the Fed is using as the baseline/status quo from which a CBDC is ostensibly building on top of - have huge privacy & censorship & inclusion/access issues relative to publicly issued cash

3) Recognizing that while some of the underlying values espoused by the crypto movement are admirable, in practice, it is both "centralized and institutionalized" and relies on a vision of permanently connected and complex tech products that are inherently exclusionary/elitist

4) Recognizing that a poorly designed CBDC - ie one that further reinforces surveillance/control against individuals - is a major net negative even as a well-designed one is a major net positive, and that this position cuts across ideological and political lines.

5) Identifying the inherent tension in the administration's current position between an ostensible commitment to cash, privacy, and inclusion on one hand, and 'national security' and 'combating crime' on the other, which remains unresolved and underconsidered by policymakers.

6) Distinguishing between the legitimate interests of the government in regulating flows of large sums of money on one hand, and the importance of protecting the liberties and privacy of individuals engaging in day-to-day, small dollar transactions on the other.

7) Emphasizing that "privacy protections based on policy are not enough", and that the real political struggle at this point concerns the architectural design of the system itself, and the limitations/capacities baked in at that level, long before we get to the policy of it all

8) Recognizing that the ideal architecture would be a offline-capable, device-centric, bearer-instrument model of the kind proposed by the #ECASHAct, and that the technical standard necessary to achieve there is 'good enough', not 'perfect', contrary to some engineering voices

9) Acknowledging that some of these technologies remain under-tested, while insisting that it is, in fact, the US Government who is best positioned to engage in such testing and piloting, with a specific, mission-oriented vision of preserving transactional liberties in mind.

10) Insisting that it is not in the public interest to re-center private, for-profit intermediaries in new digital public dollar infrastructure, in part because doing so "risks replicating the terrible privacy regime that we have now"

11) Recognizing that in addition to anonymity, other key features include offline-capacity and fungibility, to avoid creating additional points of possible control and censorship beyond identification of the user/payee, as well as transparency via open-source software/hardware.

12) Advocating for an equivalent regulatory threshold of $10,000, minimum, to be applied to digital public currency as is presently applied to physical cash, to prevent further backsliding of existing standards in the digital transition.

Overall, a fantastic paper. Bravo @ACLU