What is the fuss over central-bank digital currencies?
economist.com
economist.com
Central bank digital currencies are essentially a new hybrid monetary/fiscal policy tool. Historically the Federal reserve and many other central banks function by buying and selling the debt of their sovereignty to influence interest rates. They pay for these securities by essentially creating money that didn't exist before and trading it to an institution for their debt security. For a long time this money has just been digital, when the Fed creates money to buy a bond from JP Morgan, all they do is to update a line in a database. So they already have a digital currency, but only for dealing with large institutions.
The idea of these new CBDCs is to setup a similar system but where the digital currency could be distributed to individual citizens. This would give the Fed a more powerful tool than it has ever had before because giving money directly to people is almost guaranteed to create real economic activity unlike adding to bank reserves(which is why we haven't seen meaningful inflation after 11 years of the Fed spamming reserve creation).
Some of this is lightly speculative but a detailed scheme which is almost exactly this was already proposed in a bill to congress, The Banking For All Act: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/357...
I don't think it is hyperbolic to say that CBDCs are the "how" part of MMT. They take most of the logistical difficulties out of direct to citizen cash transfers and this is their primary goal.
Indeed, by default almost majority of CBDCs are permissioned chains since CB is the only authority to create money and destroy, aka mint.
Technology-wise though you‘d be surprised. Most of the solutions out there are actually DLT based, almost all blockchain based. There are modern aspects that work differently than other cryptos (well, borrowed), e.g. there are permissioned blockchain solutions that allow „channels“ to be private. This allows a bank to still be on a ledger while txns are hidden from other banks. They are also decentralized because Central banks are not high tech companies, but they have trusted middle layer still to be fast and cheap at some other disadvantages for citizen, e.g. control.
Basically yes, but specifically only for the case of a direct deposit between the Federal reserve and an individual. That doesn't currently exist.
But that's also basically my point. CBDCs are nothing new from an operational or technological perspective which I think is something many people are getting confused about. They are a new thing in terms of policy capabilities for central banks. They are not a new thing in any other way. All the technology already exists.
I guess i dont really understand why though. It sounds like the central bank is thinking about becoming, well, a normal bank. We already have normal banks. Governments can already transfer cash to accounts in normal banks. Governments can already sell bonds to people who want some sort of very stable investment backed by the state. What's the point of becoming a consumer bank? Why are they bothering? How do they benefit? Is there anything to this other than the desire to jump aboard the anything-that-sounds-remotely-like-bitcoin-even-if-unrelated hype train.
As far as the insurance cap goes, if the new plan is that the central bank doesn't need insurance because it can always print new money, i suppose that's true, but that is one hell of a subsidary and one that sounds scary from a fiscal responsibility standpoint.
Because it drastically broadens the scope of actions the Fed or another CB is capable of therefor increasing its influence and importance. And keep in mind the people running it are not democratically elected and are partially private banks.
Right now the fed basically has no direct tie to the real economy. They always have to act indirectly via asset purchases from large institutions. They basically have one hand tied behind their back all the time. This unties that hand and allows them to interact with the real economy directly and not just the financial intermediaries.
Accounts at central banks might make taxation easier for governments, especially if other current (and possibly savings) accounts at normal banks would be banned.
Also it would be easier for governments to select policies based on someones income. E.g. tax high income people more and provide financial benefits for low income people.
Also a universal basic income would be easier to implement if every citizen has only a single account at a central bank.
It would allow to automatically punish not only the targets directly, but also everyone who interacts with them. Like, not only would the undesirables not be allowed to get a good job or study at university, they couldn't even buy an ice cream at the corner, because the vendor would be warned that if they accept their money, the vendor's social score will be reduced in turn. (And there is no way to accept the payment without the system seeing the transaction.) The companies would be warned that if they hire them, their tax rate will be increased. The government could enforce social ostracism even if most people wouldn't mind the thoughtcrime per se.
That's not entirely the right way to think about this. The money in your account at a "normal bank" only exists as a liability of that bank, and thus would disappear if the bank goes under. A CDBC would not be a liability of any bank, it would be equivalent to physical cash.
I guess you could still think of that as a "liability of the central bank" because they would be responsible for maintaining the ledger. But a central bank cannot go bust in the same way that a normal bank can.
Sorry to nitpick.
Btw. from my point of view the central bank thing would be the normal, what we have now is an inversion, IMO. We're just used to it because that's how it was and is until now.
It's because Bitcoiners chants to rally a number of different causes, that pro-Bitcoiners claim through their propaganda will claim it's the solution for A, B, C ... X, Y, Z - from local to global issues - so the group grows by bringing in people who want to solve those issues and believe the claims to be true - who are aligned by what - money, a financial incentive of Bitcoin being structured as an MLM - and arguably has a Ponzi scheme structure as well. Then you have it being global and decentralized, then you get marketing forums online taking it on to be at the base of the MLM, then you get the VC-financial industrial complex aligned with it + amplified by mainstream media.
The Republican party many decades ago was taken over by industrial complexes/corporations - and because corporations couldn't vote - they rallied with narratives/messaging to attract different smaller interest groups to become aligned; Noam Chomsky explains this here: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/20/useful-idiots-r-us.html
Also, removes part of systemic risk since "digital currency" is held at central bank and not with retail banks, then it decouples transactions/accounts from deposits/lending. Currently, if a major bank fails because of lending issues, there's a push to prop them up since them failing would also cause immense harm to all the businesses who just transact through that bank, if this is decoupled, then the economic system would be a bit more stable during crisis.
If President Xi wants to gift me some digital Yuan to spend how I wish (so the Yuan becomes more accepted outside China).. I say hell, why not?
The motivation of a central bank is easy; make sure the currency is liquid, make sure they can use the currency to affect inflation and so forth. Whatever setup gives them the best ability to meet those kinds of goals will be what decided what they go for.
They motivation and goals are quiet unique in that sense, it is totally different from the commercial banks or the private sector. Therefore I do believe we will see proper blockchain, decentralised, systems in the future.
I don't disagree that it is technically feasible to implement these on a block chain, and I think it is possible that there may be some effort to tokenize a currency to track it on a block chain in a secondary way, but that is very different from the block chain being the irrefutable source of truth for ownership of the currency for a sovereign. That will never happen.
I think it’s very simple. The central banks are given an assignment and a goal by the government, in many ways it has become harder for them to do that; making sure the currency is liquid and people have means of payment, for example in situations of crisis, is much harder today when people are paying less in hard cash monies, and most stuff is electronic or how affecting inflation by means of repo-rates have become much slower and much harder. They need to do something. Having it as a DLT might give them more control, not less, since they could for example add interest rates directly on the currency to affect inflation, rather than having to take the route via the commercial banks.
I am not an expert, but I have though quiet a bit about it, and I have a bit of experience with a couple of European central banks. I really do think that we will see this, at least in some placss, it’s just a matter of time.
Clearly neither of those two rationales make any sense whatsoever - and they might even seem like a downright ridiculous suggestion to some readers of this response. If that’s you, then welcome to wild and whacky world of public spending.
We could have the commercial banks, and others if necessary, run nodes. They could verify payments on “accounts”, or addresses, (if we want to keep the old meaning of bank account, that’s fine, then we could instead call these addresses) which are held by the commercial banks. These addresses could be non-anonymous such that requirement for know-your-customer still reside with the commercial banks (the central banks really don’t want to have to get anyway near KYC requirements). Each such “account”/address could be linked to addresses of currency at the CB, which at that point was anonymous.
The CB could then have full control of the issuance of currency, control interest directly on the currency itself, everything being anonymous to the CB.
If the currency is going to be centrally issued then what reason is there to use a DLT given all of the drawbacks it would introduce?
DLTs aren’t a solution to a technical problem, they’re a technical solution to a trust problem that comes with some pretty hefty implementation baggage and performance constraints.
If you have to trust a single issuer anyway (as would be the case with a CBDC) then the core reason for using a DLT doesn’t exist.
Since each miner is linked to a publicly known institution, attacks on the blockchain could be punished with jail time and revocation of the authorization.
Proof of work is just a very advanced anti spam protection system. In decentralized systems people can create as many accounts as they want. You need to make sure that they can't.
I'm just saying this is how it could work. It's not obvious whether its a good or bad idea.
Even if no one "believes" in it, and the value essentially freefalls, BTC or something like it is still useful as a short term settlement device in lieu of taking suitcases of cash over a border or similar. You buy the token, send it to someone, they cash it out. People on each side (maybe the same person!) take a cut.
It currently is highly speculative and manic market, possibly a bubble.
The quality of your link speaks for itself, it reads like schizoid scribbles.
It comes from the crypto exchanges. The value. Is the latest settled sale. So when someone sets a sell price and someone buys at that btc, is when the value is set.
So yeh. You absolutely need new buyers for its value to increase.
>“A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that pays existing investors with funds collected from new investors. Ponzi scheme organizers often promise to invest your money and generate high returns with little or no risk. But in many Ponzi schemes, the fraudsters do not invest the money. Instead, they use it to pay those who invested earlier and may keep some for themselves."
Ponzi schemes require a central fraudster to pass on money directly from old to new investors with the underlying asset obfuscatedly held on promise by the fraudster.
With cryptocurrency the buyer has control of the commodity, you actually have control of the crypto, there is no promise of a consistent return with little risk, there is no central entity defrauding targets with promises that hold the asset in reserve passing on money directly from new to old investors.
What we do have is a speculative bubble which will no doubt be devastating for new investors when it collapses. But the definition of a Ponzi scheme is not met.
The btc-e money the Mt gox coins. Satoshish original coins and all the gpu miners pre 2012?
There are plenty of people walking around with btc wallets with hundreds to thousands of coins that are basically funny money to them.
For every btc price cycle there is more usd and less coins in circulation.
Selling off 10 btc at the moment on any exchange would tank the price with about 10k usd....
That's just not true and I don't even see any reason how it could be. I am looking at the Binance BTC order book and depth chart and 24 BTC sell orders at 56500 just went through. Price is not crashing.
Mining and whale centralisation are huge problems and downside in crypto depending on how prevalent it is. I am not saying that Bitcoin is not a dangerous investment, that there it is not a speculative bubble. I am just saying that it does not meet the definition of a Ponzi scheme.
There is indeed a lot to critique about the current crypto market but at least make sure the arguments are founded on facts.
I know because I had to move my sell orders higher.
Y’all are crazy. This is not accurate.
Realize that there is always a bubble and take advantage of the bubble while it lasts.
So, as opposed to BTC, you don't have to buy it in order to sell it to someone else at a higher price. You can hold it and still make a real profit. (As opposed to the price increase, which you'll only realize if/when you do sell.) And since this is the case, it will mostly anchor the price in the long term to the profit (dividend) making capabilities of the stock.
So no, it's not always a bubble. You could argue that 'fiat' money is a ponzi/bubble but that also has intrinsic value (as the issuing central bank/government will stand up for it, e.g. force every merchant to accept it, you can pay taxes in it, etc.). But if you say that gold is a similar ponzi/bubble, then your probably right. While gold also does have intrinsic value (for its usage as a base material e.g. in electronics), its price is, as far as I can understand a lot higher than what that use would guarantee. (We use relatively little compared to how much we keep in safes.)
Not all companies do that though. $GOOG has no voting rights nor dividends yet is worth more than $2100. It does literally nothing as far as I can tell, making it useless compared to even something like bitcoin. Despite this, you could have made a lot of money by just buying the stock years ago and selling it now.
>You can hold it and still make a real profit
That would take 33 years to happen with the stock that currently has the highest yield assuming that yield is constant over those 33 years which is probably a bad assumption. Who wants to get a profit 33 years in the future? If I could not resell it, it would be worthless to me.
With cryptocurrency you can also yield farm to make some money while you are just holding by essentially loaning them and having interest paid to you.
Stocks aren't ponzis. Companies pay out dividends all the time and sometimes (very rare nowadays) they pay for stock buybacks out of their own pockets from the profit they have accumulated. There is no need for a greater fool because the investment itself is paying out to investors.
>Realize that there is always a bubble and take advantage of the bubble while it lasts.
That's how you get bubbles. People see a chart with unsustainable 300%+ gains and think, if I were to act rationally and sell now, I would lose out on future irrational gains when the bubble goes up to 600%.
If you thought. Hey, I see a bubble with X gains, if I take Y < X gains then I will get very safe money. Say 10% gains on 300% actual gains on Bitcoin. It would be very safe money and it would be rational and you weakened the bubble, but you also just lost out on big gains, so you stop doing the rational thing.
Not, all stocks do that though. I just checked the FAANG stocks and only Apple pays dividends. Even so Apple has a yield of 0.63% That means you have to hold it for almost 159 years to recoup that investment. Meanwhile if you bought a year ago, by now the stock price has doubled which can allow you to recoup your investment because you can sell it to the "greater fool." Eventually dividends go down, the company goes bankrupt, or some other thing happens and you don't want to be the fool holding the bag.
In cryptocurrency there also exists yield farming and buy backs.
>That's how you get bubbles.
There will always be bubbles. It's like a video game. You need to be minmaxing. Find what bubbles currently exist and figure out how to profit off of them.
I don't think this is the point of CBDC at all. Individual citizens gain nothing with the ability to sell financial assets to the CB, and neither does the CB.
Compare that to your money in your bank, which is backed at 10% with fiat reserves. If crisis happens and people want to pull their cash out the bank goes bankrupt. Central banks do not go bankrupt, hence your money is always safe.
Edit: I wrongly called the government ones cryptocurrencies
But centralized also means "subject to control by dictatorships" which is not nice.
If central-bank digital currencies are closer to cryptocurrencies in this regard, and the protocol is standardized enough that mobile Linux OSes can have wallets... that'll be very much appreciated. I'd love to have mobile payments but not depend on Apple or Google.
[1] from Etymology Online (!ety on DDG): "characterized by advancement, going forward, moving onward" (in action, character, etc.), from progress (n.) + -ive, or else from French progressif, from past participle stem of Latin progredi. From the notion of "using one's efforts toward advancement or improvement" comes the meaning "characterized by striving for change and innovation, avant-garde, liberal" (in arts, etc.), from 1908; of jazz, from 1947. In the socio-political sense "favoring reform; radically liberal" it emerged in various British contexts from the 1880s; in the U.S. it was given to a movement active in the 1890s and a generation thereafter, the name being taken again from time to time, most recently by some more liberal Democrats and other social activists, by c. 2000.
A digital currency issued by a central bank, if sufficiently standardized, could lower the barrier to entry here such that it's feasible for developers who don't make billions of dollars in revenue to participate.
(Now, I also think the way credit card payments work right now in general is silly and unsafe, but that's only tangentially related here. Still, I think a digital currency could probably do it better. :)
There are other nationwide protocols around, some open, but most closed, some closed with publicly accessible middleman. Now we are mostly missing some protocol for international settlement between those.
Honestly, I don't get the point of state sponsored e-money. They looks like me-too projects by people that don't understand what they are doing.
They allow applying negative interest rate on everybody and they would facilitate neverending hyperinflation (no need to print new bills at great expense).
Hence they can't coexist with cash so say goodbye to cash.
I don't like where we're going.
Not exactly. The decoy inputs/outputs provide anonymity if you look at a transaction in isolation, but doesn't when you look at repeated transactions. This is a problem that any cryptocurrency with a transaction graph will have. There are cryptocurrencies that don't have transaction graphs, but those have other issues (ie. not being able to detect counterfeiting)
This might also open up new markets, e.g. micropayments, because govt could choose to eat the cost of this to enable some industries that right now cannot exist because transactions are too expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature
https://docs.wasabiwallet.io/building-wasabi/TechnicalOvervi...
I personally have absolutely no problem with them and I'd be very glad if I could settle every transaction with a digital Euro. I don't particularly enjoy the middlemen in the form of countless payment processors who all take cuts out of transactions, and I don't really see what privacy or tracking burden applies that existing firms don't already engage in.
To me the payment infrastructure consisting of countless of private firms seems more like a relic of the past. Free, instant financial services to me are ideally a public utility in the same way the water or transport infrastructure is.
Are we sure those digital currencies would be handled directly and fully by the central bank at no (direct) fee per transaction? Who's to say that the way things currently work won't stay exactly the same, except for your Visa card being denominated in dEuros instead of Euros?
I may be a pessimist, but the way I see it, the current end-user facing financial system (retail banks and payment processors) are much too big and much too greedy to stand idly by while the central bank takes their pie away.
The current state of merchant banks and payment providers can very well continue, without CBs having to assume new responsibilities.
After all, the trend is towards more privatisation, not less.
I share your pessimism. I'd say the central bank is the oven wherein the commercial banks bake their pies.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-10/ecb-s-pan...
The only way out of this to getting money circulating in the real economy is to go after the giant concentrations of wealth that are distorting the situation so badly.
Me neither, not at all.
The idea of a digital Euro is already worked on:
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/html/digitaleuro.en.html
Obviously, it's an "inclusive" system, a term that evokes in me strong feelings of mistrust, as it has no provisions of alternatives like not moving to a digital currency. "Inclusive" by mandate and without consent, or the possibility to opt out. (Somewhat reminds me the Onion's Google privacy village.)
Let's crack open the windows, so we can throw privacy and liberty right out.
side note, „inclusive“ here refers to unbanked population. Today they can use cash, but many people specially in poor countries have no access to banking. A no-smartphone no-bank-needed digital cash could enable big part of countries to be included in financial system (some up to 40% of population)
In the current climate, where we're all ever so slightly microbiophobic, it'll even be easier to push through as a good thing, handwaving any concerns with respect to privacy and centralised control as conspiratorial.
Indeed I am aware of the intended meaning of "inclusive" in their texts, I just played around with expanding it a bit.
- almost all CBDC designs are transparent (monitored and stored), since they sit on the ledger and has to be auditable by a third party. So, the only way to allow privacy is to give some „vouchers“ that those transactions are either not stored or stored with a different key. ECB has proposed one such designs, e.g. 300 euro vouchers a day.
- there are other models that do not use DLTs so they can provide means not to store specific txns, hence private.
If stored, it can be audited.
CBDC will co-exist with cash for years to come. Fully monitored CBDC will be at a high disadvantage by citizens specially in modern world, while fully private one would not be allowed by CBs due to need for transparency.
Here also comes the product builders. We could design a CBDC that is fully transparent, which is the easiest to build, these days mostly DLT based. The challenge is how to enable some TXNs to be private by design and not only policies.
A major country is taking the extreme case of full transparency, while ECB and others like Canada are strongly focusing on privacy as a feature.
Those are very different things, and from Europe's approach to the GDPR, I think it is the first.
The control of privacy should be in the protocol and not in the hands of the authorities, if there is going to be a trust built around it. Otherwise, we have what is there today, without the anonymous cash element.
There are different designs today to address this concern, see e.g. the one from Bank of Canada, as one of the frontiers of privacy for citizen: https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2020/06/staff-analytical-note-20...
The former is almost a given that it will in fact be possible. The latter was raised as an added benefit of the system either by BIS's Carstens or IMF's Georgieva -- can't recall with certainty currently. Both are promoted as weapons against black markets, corruption, and terrorism.
Yet those who are willing to give up liberty for safety, and all that.
You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/how-life-could-change...
Video: 8 predictions for the world in 2030
This is an implementation detail. Merely adding “digital currency” in the sense of “personal accounts at the treasury” isn’t proper cash replacement.
It is however possible to make a more anonymous kind of e-cash in which your transactions are not tracked. Chaum E-cash and similar ideas are useful cash-replacements. They aren’t without their on problems so e.g the Swedish central bank appears to be eyeing a double system where you have both types of system: a centralized/non-anonymous store and a token based type which provides anonymity. The latter could be used with a cap on transactions because if it’s properties wrt double spending.
Cash can still exist in industries where we want trust to exist between different parties, those kinds of spaces are small enough that I doubt they'd be worth the effort to eradicate anyway.
Not to say that I like where all of this is going myself, but blockchain for large and official transactions + metal currency for local informal transactions is one direction I wouldn't mind at all.
This is not how modern money supply works. The M2 has increased massively, and the number of new bills in circulation will not change materially.
Currency is already digital. And sometimes we use physical paper to represent it.
The central bank doesn't have hyperinflation as a policy goal though. If you are worried about hyperinflation ask yourself this: Will the economy will suddenly have a collapse in production capacity (nimbys cough cough)? If yes, then expect inflation higher than the policy goal.
> With cash, we don't know who is using the 100 dollar bill today ... a key difference with CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that determine the expression of that central bank liability .. also we will have the technology to enforce that ... if an advanced economy issues a CBDC, and someone in a 3rd country wants to use it, it will require the consent of the central bank of the residence of that person, therefore the degree of control will be far bigger.
Indeed it was Carstens and not Georgieva (as I wasn't clear in my other comment).
I think they will continue the way they do today, but instead of trading in "paper" tokens they will trade in digital ones. Which, what with the fractional reserve and all, shouldn't be all that different. So they could continue with their current kind of policies, like "we won't do business with people / companies we consider undesirable".
More realistically they could have your purchases and income streams feed into a social credit system or actuarial models.
when a large transaction [billions] is made between two countries, there must be that much of each currency in either institutions account. it is there for days or weeks at a time. so that money isn't being put to work, it's just sitting there. a CBDC would settle these transactions within seconds. this is why something like xrp is interesting to many people.
specifically, CBDCs are interesting where the IMF is involved. they issue to countries something called special drawing rights, SDRs. these are a basket of currencies used to 'balance' the international monetary system between the developed world and the developing world. [the world bank is where the g7-20 do their banking]. a 'one world currency' might look something like a CBDC SDR. since currency transactions can be immediately settled anywhere in the world, a [diversified package of] SDR would essentially serve as a 'world dollar'.
as an aside, the economic reset being promoted, coincidentally by the world economic forum, i think, is an attempt at a peaceful transition away from the US dollar as the worlds reserve currency. and while it might be china's Yuan or reminbi that replaces it, i think it might be something more like an SDR. or, in other words, a basket of currencies lumped into one digital currency; a one world digital currency.
This isn't a technological problem, but a fundamental principle of our reality. Still, the ability to fork and just restart the chain from a previous point, with new miners, gives the collective some choice on a fundamental level, should the concentration ever become a problem.
1. Paper money (notes and coins)
2. Digital money (deposit account at the central bank)
#1 is not practical for much modern commerce, e.g. online shopping.
#2 is only available to banks and a few other select institutions
So, most of us don't really use government issued money much. We use money issued by retail banks (credit balances in checking accounts) and, due to deposit guarantee schemes, everyone is happy to accept that private money as if it is government money.
Central banks are still exploring model of CBDC. They could expand #2, and allow any of us to hold central bank deposit accounts. But some central bankers worry that they are not the best folks to provide consumer services, so maybe private companies should design and operate the apps which will interface with the central bank's ledger.
Switching banks would become like switching email clients. They could expose new functionality over an existing prococol. But it would also introduce new problems, malware banks could proliferate just like malware flashlight apps.
These comments threads always attracts comments like how these are not trustless, not mined by anyone etc. That misses the point. CBDCs are exciting. Citizens never had an account with central banks before.
Today, most of the digital money is actually a private sector coin backed by fiat: you send paypal coin to another person, not real euro, and exchange it via another CC provider service. Cross-borders are order of magnitude more messy. They have similar problems like other stablecoins and cryptocurrencies while a few of their main value added are the solution to the challenges of cryptocurrencies: UX, and security among others. The private sector also has an incentivized and risk-averse view towards the basic right, e.g. inclusion and usage. The covid crisis showed that we cannot leave it to the private sector and banks among others to ensure the financial safety of people. Bank-runs happened because people do not have trust toward private sector, and regulatory actions are reactive at best.
So enter CBDCs. Central banks wanted to provide the benefits while retaining control of money flow in country. Same incentives of old age into the digital world. But the challenge is that by providing a real CB backed currency one disintermediates the banking system. One reason not to break the economy without understanding the effects and the other reason being CBs themselves are not high tech and prefer to piggy back available distribution channels. So, CBs started offering two-layer approaches, which is almost identical to the today‘s financial model, mostly a technological improvement at best. DLTs replace Swifts of the world. Accounts will stay accounts, KYC stays in place, maybe some tools would be given to not require accounts for e.g. <$1k etc. External sovereignty threats, e.g. e-renminbi, is also a whole different story, taken the topic to the extreme, while still acting as a strong external motivator.
One could ask then what‘s the fuss then? So, there is a technological demand to build CBDC, CBs have all incentives for themselves to build it to keep control, banks get to have a modern payment system for themselves, but what would change for the end user? Lower fees? obviously the view is biased towards modern world, e.g. in broken economies any order is better than none, some wallet is better than no bank, etc.
Eventually, CBDCs in the first roll out are an evolution of the current banking system. There is no fuss about it, but rather finally there is enough momentum to align multiple heavy stakeholders on one strategy.
disclaimer: the views are my personal views.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/how-life-could-change...
Some people call that utopia "technocratic collectivism", and others still salivate at the mere thought.
In any case, it's part of the "new normal" championed by Schwab's WEF.
Ah, well, perhaps when the robots come to serve, and until they revolt.
E.g. you get a car for free, only use it for one trip, scrap it and get another car for the next trip.
In the example of the car that you give: cars are pooled anyway, and assigned for a trip, then returned to the pool. So essentially you always get another car for each trip, but you don't own it.
ALGO/XLM/Etc: CBDC hop on and ride the road to riches.
ZEC: what Hal Finney was trying to make BTC.