by Arjun Walia, The Pulse:
Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) have been a big discussion for several years now.
On one hand, governments and elitists feel the need for greater control and surveillance over the money supply. On the other, many citizens don’t want the government to have more control than they already do. People are concerned about privacy. Further, CBDCs do not solve the core issue with the money supply: central banks and their systems of perpetual debt.
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It can feel unsettling to watch our world move toward greater amounts of authoritarian control, especially in areas where we have no control over what happens next.
That said, awareness can help organize movement toward non-support from the citizenry on these projects.
What is a CBDC?
I won’t get into an entire repeat on this as I’ve covered CBDCs extensively in this piece I wrote:
CBDC’s & Their Impact On Freedom
Instead, I will briefly use the words of the Atlantic Council, (an organization often tied with authoritarian ideas like censorship) to go over a few basics.
“A Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is the digital form of a country’s fiat currency that is also a claim on the central bank. Instead of printing money, the central bank issues electronic coins or accounts backed by the full faith and credit of the government.”
Why would governments want a CBDC? To…
“Promote financial inclusion by providing easy and safer access to money for unbanked and underbanked populations; introducing competition and resilience in the domestic payments market, which might need incentives to provide cheaper and better access to money; increasing efficiency in payments and lowering transaction costs; creating programmable money and improving transparency in money flows; and providing for the seamless and easy flow of monetary and fiscal policy.”
What Countries Are Implementing a CBDC?
To date 3 countries have launched a CBDC. 2 have cancelled their plans for one, 36 are piloting a project, 30 are developing a CBDC, and 43 are in the research phase.
Some notable mentions in the pilot and development phase include the United States, Canada, the UK, Mexico, and BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).
Needless to say, it’s coming, and many are concerned about the effects this will have on privacy amongst many other things we’re about to learn about.
7 Things You Need to Know About CBDCs
In the UK, the push for financial surveillance is increasing quickly. An article by the UnHerd points that out when it comes to allowing banks to spy on everyone’s account via AI:
“It is hard to see that the banks would be happy with their newly appointed responsibility as the state’s own financial spies and yet the Government presses on. Saddled with this new responsibility, banks will be forced to use automated systems to carry out a surveillance which brings problems of its own. If scanning over 20 million bank accounts, even a remarkably low error rate of 1% would lead to 200,000 people’s accounts being wrongly flagged to the Department for Work and Pensions.”
An organization called Big Brother Watch does a great job of providing clear and concise facts about all things surveillance. Although they are UK based and cover UK developments a lot, since much of the same stuff is happening around the world, their perspective here is relevant.
Check out their video below.
Whether it’s broken plumbing in your home or CBDCs, we can’t make good decisions about what to do if we don’t know what’s happening.
The way we talk about these subjects to one another matters. If we know what’s in the pipeline in our country and can speak respectfully and intelligently about it with people, there’s a much greater chance of getting on the same page and potentially stopping it.
Divide and conquer has always been the goal of rulers for a reason…
It’s also fair to say, and I know this doesn’t feel great, that in our current system of non-democracy, ‘the people’ don’t have much power. Even if they didn’t want CBDC’s, their countries would push it through anyway.
But that wakes people up, doesn’t it?
While there are still millions of people believing in the illusion of democracy in their country, that perception changes through reflecting on external events.
I see conversations happening all over about the COVID era and how it illustrated that the will of the people is not a consideration of governments.
What is it like to be able to talk to fellow citizens about such realities? Does it not cause them to question how their country truly runs? Doesn’t this lead to a place where we must become curious about what else is possible?
It can be easy to say “Nothing will ever change because ‘they’ are too powerful,” but the amount of change I’ve seen in 15 years doing this work is incredible.
In 2009 I used to imagine a time when hundreds of millions around the world were awake to the wool being pulled over our eyes. Today we have that. And back then, people said we’d never get to this place. While I have empathy and compassion for those folks losing a sense of hope and belief, their nihilistic outlook proved incorrect.
