[Cryptography] Am I missing something about CBDC ?

[Christian Huitema]

On 12/28/2020 1:08 PM, Ray Dillinger wrote:

> The other drawback of credit card payments for anything is that you
> then get junk mail from every purveyor of any related or comparable
> thing in the world, forever.  It's not clear yet whether the same
> problem applies to these new digital tokens.

Isn't that a "misfeature" of any form of payment that is not anonymous? 
The logic of surveillance capitalism is that if some data is available 
and has value, it will be collected and resold. Does not matter much 
whether the identifier in the data is a customer ID, a credit card 
number, or some kind of cryptographic identifier. Today, the only way 
out of that are is to convince politicians to make such data collection 
illegal, or at a minimum to put limits on data reuse and resale. We may 
hope that some iteration of something like GDPR will work, but given the 
potential flow of money from surveillance capitalists to politicians I 
am not holding my breath.

-- Christian Huitema