back to article China's digital currency comes to WeChat. Next stop: over a billion users

China's central bank digital currency, the Digital Yuan, has been integrated with Tencent's flagship messaging app WeChat, and appears as a payment option when users employ the super-app shop. WeChat boasts over 1.2 billion monthly active users, is ubiquitous in China, and is popular outside the Middle Kingdom too. For now, …

  1. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    Something else being conjured up for the FUD Continuity Show?

    However, US senators have warned the Digital Yuan allows Beijing to surveil users – an allegation that, if true, makes the currency rather less appealing.

    How very odd? That is not a warning to be heard from US senators whenever considering Bitcoin or others of a similar ilk. Indeed, in such cases, is the exact opposite of great concern to them because of their fear of its attraction in bypassing their own fiat dollar remote command and control levers.

    What on Earth are they playing at? What’s their End Game? Anything attractive and universally appealing? Something right dodgy and designedly demeaning?

    So many questions for hypocrites and liars . So few honest answers. Question more delivers much more for future solutions /proposals.

  2. vtcodger Silver badge

    Meh?

    After thinking about it for a while, I concluded that a digital currency needs either to keep track of all transactions or to somehow move itself from one user to another then wipe itself out on the first user's device. Not easy to do. Maybe there's another alternative. If so, I'd like to hear about it.

    So we're left with ledgers recording transactions. Those can either be public, distributed (and probably encrypted) e.g cryptocurrency. The problems with cryptocurrencies are well know. It's really hard to envision them being usable for every purchase of a pack of cigarettes or bottle of cola for a human population of 7 billion plus. Or they can be managed by a trusted authority -- e.g. Mastercard, Visa, AliPay, WeChatPay, PayPal (Why on Earth would anyone trust PayPal?). e-CNY appears to be the latter with the People's Bank of China serving as the trusted authority.

    I went searching for some meaningful information on e-CNY. I found next to nothing. The best I could find is this https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/lets-start-with-what-chinas-digital-currency-is-not/ which isn't very deep, but at least seems to have some actual content. It's points I think are:

    1. China is taking digital currency (but not cryptocurrency which they have banned) seriously. It's in their long term plans.

    2. It is still in its very early stages with a pilot project running in (as of March 2022) ten cities.

    3. There is no current mechanism for internationalization of the e-CNY. And probably the only places you can spend any you somehow come by are in China.

    1. katrinab Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: Meh?

      WeChat Pay is basically the Chinese version of PayPal with better support for point of sale transactions, we use Apple & Google Pay for that.

      I'm not really sure what Digital Yuan offers that Chinese people aren't doing already.

      They can do online transactions in much the same we that we do Paypal. They can do person to person transactions by sending the money as a WeChat Message. They can do point of sale transactions by displaying a QR code on their phone from the checkout person to scan.

  3. Captain_Cretin

    God is on the side with the biggest guns.

    If this later implodes, the CCP wont be worried, they have been the authors of similar Ponzi schemes in the past - and are trying to fend off their housing market Ponzi scheme implosion right now.

    If the masses get irked, the CCP has at least 4* military divisions trained in riot control and urban conflict, and hasnt hesitated to use them in the past.

    *4 divisions of "Riot Control Militia" were deployed around 10-12 years ago to put down unrest in a number of southern cities, after a local government Ponzi Scheme cost millions their life savings; I doubt that was anywhere near the full number the CCP has.

    1. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

      Re: God is on the side with the biggest guns.

      If this later implodes, the CCP wont be worried, they have been the authors of similar Ponzi schemes in the past - and are trying to fend off their housing market Ponzi scheme implosion right now. ..... Captain_Cretin

      An alternate view, Cap’n, is that were earlier unwitting victims of Ponzis whilst eagerly embracing and engaging and experiencing Western style capitalism in one of their more recent Long Marches.

      PS ..... God doesn’t take sides, they provide them.

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