A Federal Reserve-Issued CBDC Is Coming
The Federal Reserve will absolutely issue a Central Bank Digital Currency (“CBDC”), sometime in the next decade. It will be terrible for privacy and civil liberties.
A CBDC will give the Federal Government more control over the economy, especially as it relates to “entitlements” - not dissimilar to my experience traveling to China for business for several years more than a decade ago. There, I learned that it is quite easy to control a population when you attach utilities and the like (all of which are under Beijing’s control), to national ID cards. CBDCs will offer the same control opportunity to our Federal Government should it decide to force CBDC adoption in exchange for entitlement payments.
The Fed has been building CBDC plumbing for the past 5-6 years, it just doesn’t talk about it. Foolish moves like David Sacks’ and Donald Trump’s Bitcoin reserve help grease the skids for a CBDC into the public’s consciousness. It’s coming.
While I like the idea of tokenization and Web3 in the private sector, I do not like it in the hands of Central Governments.
AI will become exceptionally powerful in a tokenized world, as it will have the ability to track and analyze transactions of every kind at the atomic level. Great insights will be gleaned by investors, but on the negative side, our last vestiges of privacy will go out the window.
I can imagine all sorts of predictive analytic / AI use cases around crime, AML, terrorism and the like which will 100% further erode civil liberties.
Here is a link to the Federal Reserve Bank of NY and Bank of Boston’s conference on the subject: HERE
We wrote extensively on CBDCs in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. You may find most if not all of that content here on our Substack page.
May I introduce you to the Department of PreCrime?
