Gross!
Lot's of crypto people still out there being extremely alarmist about CBDCs. Then all of a sudden CBDCs will magically stop being a problem because number go up. Trust me when I say they're not going to stop until the bull market is firmly in place. When will the bull market be firmly in place? Well by the end of the year the doubling trendline will be $100k BTC... so at this point a bull market basically means all time highs... for Bitcoin at least. I wouldn't expect Hive to be back around $3 at that time, unfortunately. After all we are talking about a x2-x3 on Bitcoin and an x10 for various alts like Hive. Shoulda stacked more BTC bruv. Happens every cycle.
In any case CBDCs are still dumb and the alarmism is completely wasted energy. Just look at how the information is being disseminated. It's an echo chamber. All the crypto people are just running around telling all the crypto people that CBDCs are coming and they're going to ruin everything. High-fives for everyone gentlemen. We did it. We are fighting the man with our slacktivism.
The general population doesn't know what a CBDC is. Hell they barely know what Bitcoin is, other than you can buy it and it's extremely volatile and risky and a bunch of people have been made rich. That is the ultimate extent of the mainstream narrative at this point. Think about how much the narrative would have to change and how educated the average person would have to be before they finally got to CBDCs. Not gonna happen, probably ever.
Who is the target audience of a CBDC?
See this is the truly ironic funny part of the story, because crypto people seem to think that the target audience for CBDC is everybody. The mean ol' gubment is going to come in and force everyone to use it. All other means of value transfer will be made illegal. The deep state will win and a New World Order will cover the Earth in a shadow of darkness for the next thousand years.
Of course no one goes into how this would actually happen within the current environment, and I've already explained multiple times why it's basically impossible in several other posts. The environmental change required for something like this to happen would be so wildly volatile that the real threat in this scenario is the metaphorical comet that crash landed and destroyed all the current infrastructure. So even if these people are right, they are still wrong, because CBDCs would be a significant improvement over the horrible thing that just happened and ruined everything. It would make for a much better premise to a movie than something that could actually occur.
Who is the target audience of a CBDC?
Okay yeah this is the funny part. The target audience of CBDCs... is crypto users. This is quite obvious. Look at how difficult onboarding is in crypto. No one wants to train a complete noob on how all this stuff works. It's so so so much easier to onboard someone if they already have experience using Metamask or whatever. If they already understand keys and how to secure them and all that stuff the barrier to entry is so much lower.
The idea that government... GOVERNMENT: is going to create some sleek streamlined product that's intuitive and everyone is going to use because they're legally forced to is... a complete fantasy not based in any possible reality. That has never and will never happen. They're going to force grandma to close her bank account and figure out this app? Really? Really? REALLY?!?
What about cash?
Well obviously cash doesn't even exist in this scenario. It's no longer being printed and it is in fact illegal to even use it at the business level. But also CBDC is right around the corner I'm sure it will only take a couple weeks to completely eliminate cash from the economy. lol. Seriously wtf is this logic?
It's not even the government's modus operandi.
When the government wants something like this they go to the corporations who are already balls deep in the tech and make them an offer they can't refuse. Take Facebook for example: either Facebook can give the government all their data and help them run dubious social experiments on the population, or the government will make Zuckerberg's life very difficult. It's not a hard decision, just take the deal. That's what happens 99.9% of the time. The government isn't going to make their own thing and then try to legally force everyone to use it despite the heinously obvious conflict of interest. That's not how narrative works or propaganda or politics or anything else.
It is so comically transparent that a CBDC, if it could even be implemented, would simply be a way to make other stable coins illegal and corner that expanding market (because again the target market is crypto users themselves). What would happen if a crypto gets built that has a stable value based on its own merit and economic policy without piggybacking off USD? That alone would ruin all these plans that don't exist (regardless of any laws passed).
FedNow
Here's a product that's been up and running for over a month. Everyone said it was a precursor to CBDCs. Notice how no one is talking about it anymore? People are waiting for any shred of evidence to suggest that FedNow will pave the way for CBDC like they've been spouting for the last year+. That evidence doesn't exist, nor will it ever exist. FedNow and CBDC are mutually excusive and completely incompatible. One is an master-account based system and the other is a wallet system with keys that services the public directly: something central banks have literally never done. A central bank is a bank for banks; this is their entire business model. CBDCs would force them to change every single policy they've been using for over a hundred years.
There's also another narrative circulating in crypto circles that retail banks are going to become hopelessly dependent on FedNow, and then the FED can change the rules to whatever they want and the banks will just have to go along with it no matter what. Not only is this an ridiculous narrative with absolutely no evidence to substantiate it (or even game-theory) but also it would take like a decade for that to even happen given that it was true. If crypto hasn't created a solution to that problem in ten years (allowing banks to settle in a decentralized way) then we kind of deserve what we get. It's legit the entire point of XRP's existence. In fact can't they already do this through the Eurodollar system? The people saying these things haven't the slightest clue as to how the banking sector operates.
You're projecting.
Sometimes when people feel powerless they project that powerlessness into their own conspiracy theories. In this case an all powerful centralized agent (maybe the DEEPSTATE or Satan or what-have-you) is going to just force everyone to do it their way. This is not how the world works. The idea that retail banks have no power and will just roll over and die is ludicrous. The Federal Reserve doesn't have as much power as people seem to think.
In fact it is always the MOB that has the most power. When people start doing things in mass and come to consensus on a certain issue, that thing becomes pretty much unstoppable. This is why so many billions of dollars are spent on trying to manipulate public opinion. The economy itself is a mob as well, and if people within the economy all start performing a certain action there is nothing anyone can do about it.
Like if all of a sudden the mob stops using a currency then that currency becomes worthless. Nothing else matters. These are all faith-based systems, and there is no reason to expect that a CBDC would ever gain any amount of faith in any scenario. Even if it did it would take years and we'd see it coming a mile away. No one seems to consider these factors. Time is the ultimate equalizer. None of these things happen overnight in a bubble. That's simply just not how it works. The legacy system is a predictable slow lumbering beast, not some sleek and agile magician with aces in the hole to play.
Conclusion
- The target audience of CBDCs is not the general population.
- The only difference between CBDC and Enterprise Blockchain is the entity issuing the token.
- Stablecoins will one day be made obsolete by a crypto solution.
- The most powerful force on this planet is the mob (consensus of the masses).
- The government has never created a technology and then made all competing technologies illegal, nor can they under the current legal system.
- The amount of time it takes for the economic environment to support this kind of technology would take over a decade to form.
But perception is reality, isn't it?
And the mob has all the power.
The crypto mob is telling you that CBDCs are the greatest threat humanity has ever known.
Do you believe them?