China has announced a successful trial of the e-yuan which they call the Digital Currency Electronic Payments (DCEP) system.
It is being called a contender to bitcoin, but there is nothing crypto about this digital currency which can claim as innovation only that the commercial banks of China and their central bank have merged the money database.
This is a master and slave system with the central and commercial banks sharing one ledger, but the central bank is the master in as far as it can print however much yuan it wants in that ledger, while the commercial banks are the slaves in as far as they can only read what orders the central bank has given.
Then the commercial banks become the master and the public becomes the slave as the commercial banks can then write all they please, while the public can only read the orders.
The public has no ability whatever to verify what these banks are doing. There is no open source code and the public can not run nodes.
The public instead gets an e-wallet and there on the surface it looks like bitcoin. Some numbers, addresses, you send as you please and you receive.
This camouflage however hides the absolute totalitarian nature of this machinery for the surveillance is complete to the cent and to the billion.
The commercial and central banks know what every single person that uses this system had for lunch, where, at what time, and potentially even with who, as well as by what method they got there if they paid for train or gas on the way, and then where they are going depending on where and when they spend money.
Despite the much used ‘blockchain’ buzzword to advertise this system, it has no blockchain but a replicated database which facilitates the exchange of funds ostensibly without having to go through intermediaries, but practically most likely depending on what the bank orders.
This is not cash, even though they want it to be a replacement for cash. You can not delete cash, you can not reverse cash payments without physical efforts, you can not prevent cash payments without physical efforts and you can not multiply someone’s cash without dropping it from the helicopter.
In this e-yuan, the bankers can do what they please and you can’t see them doing it, but they can see everything about you, from the president, to the farming peasants.
That’s the whole point of this system of control which has an Identification Center, a Record Center, and a Big Data Analytics Center.
The accounts here therefore are not pseudo-anonymous. The data analytics thus can be all engulfing and total.
In short, this gives one man or one committee absolute power over 1.4 billion people from breakfast to dinner.
While bitcoin of course is the opposite of it and being the opposite of this system is the whole point of bitcoin.
You can’t just delete a bitcoin, you can’t just turn back time and reverse a payment, you can’t just print new bitcoins or erase them for all.
More importantly, there is not one man or group of men that control bitcoin. We all control bitcoin by deciding what code to run.
This is not therefore a digital currency in the way it is being advertised, but a monstrosity that only an authoritarian government could envision and actually build.
