Privacy, Power, Fiscal Policy, the Poor: 4 Reasons to Worry About CBDCs

The Bitcoin Policy Institute’s report on CBDCs makes a strong case for why the US should reject a centrally issued version of the dollar. Bitcoinist covered that already. This time, we’ll focus on the reasons why The Bitcoin Policy Institute thinks CBDCs don’t make sense and are not practical for capitalist societies. The main argument […]

Privacy should be a key talking point from the beginning of CBDC development. Robert Bench, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s director of applied research, thinks privacy should be a focus during the creation of digital money, not an afterthought. “Privacy is a question that we have learned is critical from a technical perspective,” Bench said during a Chamber of Digital Commerce panel on Friday: “One of our learnings is that the questions of privacy and identity must be considered at the earliest stage of the architecture. Making privacy or identity an ad hoc process is suboptimal from....

No privacy. No property. No prosperity. If you follow the news, you’ve seen the trend — putting legal limits on cash transactions, the emergence of surveillance-oriented, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and more recently, crypto mixing platform Tornado Cash being sanctioned by the United States Treasury. There is a new wave of propaganda increasingly demonizing individual financial privacy and “private” cryptocurrencies and protocols. You’ve likely experienced the dystopian push in your own life, as banks and financial institutions demand more....

CBDCs won’t fundamentally be changing anything — central banks still want to control your wealth and your money. Mark my words: Governments and central banks will never care about your wealth and your privacy as much as you do. That reality is exactly why central bank digital currencies are dead in the water already.They say if you can’t beat them, join them. That’s exactly what CBDCs are attempting to do. They want to join the party that is cryptocurrency without actually giving their citizens the privacy and democratic freedom a truly decentralized digital currency provides.In a recent....

Governments in Asia are quickly researching or implementing CBDCs. What does this mean for the region’s overdependence on the U.S. dollar? The rapid growth of mainstream attention toward cryptocurrencies has forced the hands of numerous governments to create their digital alternatives. Over the past few years, interest from various jurisdictions has been pointed towards central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) — digital versions of government-issued fiat.Given their capacity to use blockchain technology to facilitate a simplified fiscal policy — not to mention calibrate privacy features and....