Japan Rejects The Use Of A Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) – Zero Financial Privacy With No Benefits

Japanese citizens recently rejected a government plan to implement a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) which resulted in the plans for the program being scrapped. The interesting thing about the situation is that CBDCs were not unwanted because of privacy concerns (although they severely threaten financial privacy) but just the sheer lack of benefits for individuals with CBDCs cause the Bank of Japan to scrap its plans after several attempts to market the digital currency failed.

(NOTE: A Central Bank Digital Currency is not at all like Bitcoin as a CBDC would centralize power over your currency with the government, whereas Bitcoin decentralizes power over currency among users, and cannot be inflated)

It is important to note that outside of central bankers and politicians who see benefits in being able to consolidate financial power around the government, citizens have zero substantial incentives to use CBDCs, unless forced to or basically bribed to adopt them.

While it is true that Japan is still a very cash-based economy, which contributed to the decision to scrap the CBDC, most Japanese still have credit and debit cards which also undermines the “convenience” argument of those pushing CBDCs.

The Bank of Japan even bluntly admitted that the high accessibility of already-existing private digital payment methods makes a CBDC redundant. 

There is nothing CBDCs offer consumers that isn’t already being done by another product they already own, and most consumers also don’t want government bureaucrats with social agendas able to track and potentially manipulate how they spend their money.

Despite this governments all over the world are looking into or actively seeking to implement CBDCs in their country, and in places like Canada, explicitly stating that they want it for the “traceability” of their citizens’ spending

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has set aside $17.7 million in order to further study CBDCs, which effectively means they want to implement them as Canadian government corporations have already published glowing reports on CBDCs.

It should scare people that the same party that got banks to freeze hundreds of Canadians’ bank accounts for associating with the Freedom Convoy wants to now have direct oversight over everyone’s bank accounts. 

Hopefully, Canadians will vote accordingly on this issue, seeing as the likely next Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre has stated several times now that he would ban the use of Central Bank Digital Currencies.