by Aaron Day, Brownstone:
Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) threaten to replace the cash we use with programmable, trackable, and censorable tokens controlled by governments. Your financial choices could be suppressed, and privacy eliminated. Based on what I’ve learned and experienced directly, this could happen before the 2024 election. The best way to stop it is through direct action, not through politics.
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In my 30 years as a serial entrepreneur and liberty activist, I have never encountered a more significant or urgent threat to human freedom and liberty than CBDCs. My direct experience with cryptocurrency, insights from researching my book about the threat of CBDCs called The Final Countdown, and an understanding of the political realities regarding CBDCs from my experience running in the 2024 Republican Presidential primary, have propelled me to dedicate 100% of my time and attention to sounding the alarm on this issue. We are at DEFCON 1.
How CBDCs Could Lead to Total Control: Your Spending, Your Identity, Your Life
CBDCs are a form of digital cash that can be programmed, monitored, and censored by the government. They can serve as a gateway to complete tyranny by enabling social credit scores, digital IDs, vaccine passports, and more. To see what life might be like under this type of digital tyranny, you can read the first chapter of my book at Brownstone Institute.
As I have traveled to 20 states and given presentations on my book, I realize that I need to do more to empower people to take the first step towards taking control of their own money. I am more concerned with empowering people than selling books. To ensure people understand the threats and available solutions, I am taking a hands-on approach by traveling across the country and hosting 4-hour workshops based on the content of the book. At the conclusion, every participant will possess self-custody crypto, gold, and silver, along with a detailed understanding of the threat.
My goal is to reach millions of people, and ultimately make an online version of this course available. However, I have learned that nothing beats face-to-face interaction. To minimize the costs of the in-person workshops, I am planning them as far in advance as possible. If you are interested in either hosting, participating in, or sponsoring a workshop, please visit my workshop page.
This article outlines my case for why CBDCs are an imminent threat that requires everyone’s immediate focus and attention and provides an overview of what will be covered in the workshop.
The Political Landscape for CBDCs in the United States
This is why I believe a CBDC might be rolled out in the United States before the 2024 Presidential election.
1/ President Biden has Authorized the Exploration of a CBDC, and There Isn’t any Real Resistance in Congress.
On March 9, 2022, President Biden signed Executive Order 14067. This EO places “the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options of a United States CBDC.” It also calls for a whole-of-government approach to regulating digital assets. As you will see in a further section below, the technology for a US CBDC has already been developed.
The crackdown on digital assets has been ongoing and aggressive, directly impacting people I know personally and respect for their activism in the furtherance of liberty. Ian Freeman, a longtime liberty activist, radio host, and early mover as part of the Free State Project was sentenced to federal prison for 8 years for simply selling Bitcoin (my wife and I attended the sentencing hearings). He operated a number of ATMs and would help people exchange their dollars for cryptocurrency. The Federal government wanted to make an example of Ian and have a chilling effect on person-to-person methods for people to get into crypto. Other services, like LocalBitcoins, have also been forced to close due to added government pressure.
Another liberty activist I know personally and who is also part of the Free State Project, Jeremy Kaufmann, created a company called LBRY (also known as Odyssey). Jeremy’s offering provided a decentralized and censorship resistant version of YouTube using blockchain technology (the underlying technology used in Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies). He was sued and harassed by the SEC. Despite many other cases that were clearly in violation of the SEC guidelines, Jeremy was targeted because his offering was a successful use of technology that also was in direct conflict with the federal government’s extensive efforts to censor America’s social media interactions. His business was forced to shut down in October 2023.
