Anyone who's been on Crypto Twitter for any length of time has noticed that CBDCs get talked about a lot... even though they don't exist (and probably never will). Dozens of people will read this and immediately be like, "Well what about China? Checkmate!" Uh, okay. Show me the CBDC. Where is it? How do I buy digital CNY? Oh what's that? I can't? Yeah, because it doesn't exist. It's vapor; a gigantic nothing-burger.
My most recent analysis of CBDC is that, if anything, it's madly bullish and can only help crypto. We'd be teaching the entire world how to use crypto. We'd be training thousands of devs to learn blockchain. Free Paid education is pretty valuable. The narrative that "crypto is bad" suddenly melts away and all the current propaganda against it would fail miserably. There's more to be said here but that's not what this post is about.
Japan said no, now USA says no.
The Fed has 'not decided to proceed' with a digital dollar, says Powell
What a shocking revelation... not.
We need to pay attention to this.
Why is everyone in crypto freaking out about CBDC...?
But then the government is like 'nah we're gonna pass'.
Does that make sense?
It absolutely does not if we're listening to Crypto Twitter.
The narrative within Crypto Twitter and other crypto circles is that CBDC is ultimate totalitarian control mechanism, and that governments are going to push them forward as hard and as fast as they possibly can. This logic is not based in reality, and no one seems to ask what is going on here.
When conspiracy theory fails
There are a lot of skeptics, pessimists, and anarchists in crypto. What is actually happening here is that they are parroting the worst case scenario at maximum volume even though such a scenario is not even possible or valuable to anyone. That's not how politics and the economy works. The only way the CBDC FUD makes any sense is if people are dumbing down reality and making simplistically wild assumptions about economic nuances they know nothing about. Authoritarianism is a threat >> and therefore CBDC will usher in a wave of unparalleled authoritarianism. Skip all the steps it takes to get there from here: the threat is real (not).
Powell did elaborate that, if adopted, a U.S. CBDC would have several key characteristics: intermediated, privacy-protected, identity-verified, and interoperable.
Kind of a funny statement to make.
Intermediated, privacy-protected, and identity-verified are basically the same thing. Notice the order he puts them in. It's significant. Saying 'privacy-protected' before 'identity-verified'? That's funny... because if it wasn't 'identity-verified' then it would be automatically private (exponentially moreso). But no even the language of these people inherently twists things around. Always a lovely politics game.
THE REAL VARIABLE: INTEROPERABLE.
100% of the value of CBDC is interoperability. This is what people in crypto don't seem to understand. CBDC only has value if it connects to the real cryptos where real value is being created. It has to leech from the greater network to have any value whatsoever, and thus we see how the CBDC narrative that gets espoused from these small-time conspiracy theorists is completely bogus.
Make it make sense.
The current logical fallacy in play:
Okay so they already have a digital dollar. It's called USD. But 'they' are going to create a CBDC... we'll call it FEDCOIN. FEDCOIN is very bad because it tracks everything and gives the government complete totalitarian control. They will put expiration dates on your money and force you to have liberal political views. What a nightmare!
"They"? Who is "They"?
Well... them... you know... the Deep State! Yeah! That's the ticket!
lol dude... no.
There is a MASSIVE conflict of interest here. 'THEY' don't exist. The entity that's going to create the CBDC doesn't exist. We are actually supposed to believe that private banks that control the money supply are going to just willingly hand over all their power to the politicians and the government? How do you think private banks got all their power in the first place? They're just going to piss it all away for no reason? That's absurd.
All of these wild theories are spawned from the idea that there is some homogenous elite group of people that control the world who always work together against the entire world's best interest in order to enrich themselves. This is a fantasy based on an embarrassingly simplistic view of the world. There is no deep state.
Is government the ultimate form of power in the world? Of course not. It's complicated as shit. But nobody got time for that, so must be a Deep State that controls everything, amirite? Kind of like saying, "God works in mysterious ways," or "Everything happens for a reason." It's a celebration of ignorance, and the acceptance of an overly simplistic worldview without any intention of trying to learn more. Not great.
THE REAL VARIABLE: INTEROPERABLE.
The problem with the current mainstream CBDC narrative is that it exists within an impossible paradox. A CBDC only has value if it connects to real crypto, but the CBDC narrative demands that all crypto be made illegal and the only currency citizens can use is the CBDC. Obviously, this is an absurd notion, but it just keeps getting parroted over and over regardless.
Explain how we get from where we are now... to this magical future where the only option is a CBDC. What happened to cash? What happened to USD? What happened to fiat? What happened to the entire commercial banking sector? Is bartering illegal? Are gold and silver illegal? How many years did it take for this to happen? Because everyone makes it sound like it could happen tomorrow. Ridiculous.
Again, people will say stupid shit like: "Well, look at North Korea". Are you serious? No, I will not look at the most extreme edge case that can only exist as an edge case. The exception proves the rule. People in America can not suddenly be lorded over like North Korea does things. A transition like that would take decades. The frog boils slowly. Try again.
There's also this implication that CBDC allows these things to happen whereas the old legacy technology doesn't. Really? People really believe that? They do. They actually believe that CBDC is a critical piece of technology for the implementation of fascism. Well guess what fellas. Fascism has been around a lot longer than the Internet. It was doing just fine before CBDC was invented.
To assume that CBDC is necessary to put expiration dates on money and track everything and force people to act a certain way... it's just absurd. It's just a database. It's just a ledger. It's just code and regulation and policy. CBDC has nothing to do with any of this stuff. And yet over and over everyone tries to put it in a vacuum and act like this dystopic reality is right around the corner. It's... so obviously not though.
CBDC can be programmed to work in any way
It's also just extremely presumptuous to assume that every CBDC is going to work exactly the same way. It's code. It will work in whatever way in which it is coded. The only thing that makes a CBDC a CBDC is the institution that issued the currency. If the government creates a crypto: It's a CBDC. If I create a crypto that uses the exact same codebase, it's not a CBDC.
See how that works?
The code is completely variable and could be anything. All the matters is who issues it. To assume we know how things work before they've been created is just the ultimate toddler game of speculation. There is no way to guess correctly in advance. The world is a bit more complex than that.
Here's a video from taskmaster4450 that comes to the exact same conclusion that I do about CBDC. It's a complete nothing-burger. It's enterprise blockchain. Remember enterprise blockchain? Billions of dollars were spent to create these things. They are worthless and no one uses them. CBDC is exactly the same thing. They can't force us to use them. If you think they can, you are wrong. Plain and simple. They will not get adoption. Period the end.
It's not even a discussion.
We already know what the value of crypto is. The value of crypto is that no one controls it. But then the CBDC narrative comes into the view of sub-par conspiracy theorists and they just throw everything they know about crypto right out the fucking window and try to say that CBDC has value because it imposes totalitarianism on the population and that's valuable to those who control the CBDC... like... really? REALLY? The value of crypto is that it's decentralized but the value of CBDC is that it's the most centralized hunk of shit the planet has ever seen? There's a word for this... it's called...
And so crypto conspiracy theorists are just going to continue carrying on thinking that CBDC is the greatest threat to humanity the world has ever seen. It truly blows my fucking mind. How could anyone possibly think such a thing. IT HAS NO VALUE. IT HAS ZERO VALUE. STOP TALKING ABOUT IT LIKE IT'S RELEVANT. EVEN THE BANKS DON'T WANT THEM. Jesus Christ.
And I think the reason why this becomes so frustrating is that most people just tend to focus on the wrong things, and this is one of those wrong things that really doesn't need any kind of thought put towards it whatsoever. Not one single person who talks about the 'threat' of CBDC has anything constructive or interesting to say about how we should fight against them. It's just parroting the same message over and over again: CBDC bad; we shouldn't use them. Yeah... no shit. Thank you Captain Obvious for that inspiring message.
Why are we worried that people are going to use them when it's obvious they lack any and all intrinsic value and there's absolutely no point to them because the only point of crypto is decentralization? And then the conspiracy theorists pop in to remind us that the government will FORCE us to use them so haha checkmate got ya now! Like, no, shut the fuck up. Thanks. You're dumb. Stop being dumb.
If the government can force us to use an experimental currency that is a blatantly obvious conflict of interest across the board... then that is probably the least of our concerns at that time. We're going to be more worried about our next meal than what kind of money we're transacting in at that point. But again, people like to put these thought-experiments inside their little theory-bubbles and act as though it can all happen within a vacuum where CBDC is implemented and everything is exactly the same as it is now... just with CBDC. No, that's not how life works. Cut the shit.
Conclusion
CBDC is not a threat. It has no value; we know for a fact it has no value and exactly why it has no value. The government can't force citizens to use it. STFU about China, they can't even ban Bitcoin after banning it over a dozen times. Even those who might want implement it know that its only value is interoperability with real cryptocurrency.
All of these factors add up to one simple conclusion: we allow the idea of a totalitarian Deep State dystopia ruled by CBDC to live in our brains rent free for absolutely no reason. Stop worrying about trifles. CBDC is vaporware.
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