Why Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) Are So Dangerous

There is a new push in Canada, as well as other countries under the direction of organizations like the IMF and WEF, to implement Central Bank Digital Currencies(CBDCs). CBDCs are a digital dollar that would be fully under the control of central banks and governments.

There are some very obvious dangers of a CBDC system and some not so obvious ones. If Canada were to implement CBDCs it would eventually put an end to cash transactions, and along with it the ability to perform any transaction anonymously. Think of a woman inside an abusive marriage, she would have no way to store money to use that her husband would not be able to track in some way, so escaping him would be made exponentially more difficult.

More dangerous than an abusive husband is an abusive government. We have already seen the willingness of the Canadian government under Justin Trudeau to seize citizens’ bank accounts, without a court order or even a criminal charge being laid against them, during the Freedom convoy under the Emergencies act. It was not just Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland who acted as authoritarian dictators, the major banks provided no push back to their unlawful asset seizures. Instituting a system where these very same people can monitor all your purchases and take all your life savings with the click of a button is fundamentally insane.

A lot of the danger of the CBDC is linked to its sister technology; The Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria score (ESG). ESG is a way to measure a company’s compliance with the ethical standards set out by governments, central banks, and global NGOs. This brings up the obvious philosophical problem of who gets to set the ethical standards and if they have possible ulterior motives. For now, ESG seems to be a metric measuring people’s adherence to mainstream left-wing political ideology. 

A great way to think of this new system is by comparing Canada and China. In China they have a Digital Yuan tied to a social credit system, in Canada, it could very well be a CBDC tied to your ESG score.

In a CBDC system, the government and banks could easily manipulate your purchases if Canada implements this new system to be able to track your purchases at the grocery store.

For an example of how this could play out: If there is a big environmental scare around red meat, while they might not prevent you from buying what you want, it is not that hard for them to set a soft cap on beef. If the government decided that your consumption of red meat should be 2 lbs a week, maybe you could buy more, but each additional lbs would be additionally taxed at a certain rate to make meat harder to afford for the average person. Of course, the upper-middle-class Liberals will be able to afford to eat whatever they want but will get to feel a sense of moral accomplishment for supporting a system that pressures others into making “better choices.”

Recently, there has been a shift in Canadian politics led by Conservative Party leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre in the fight against inflation, central bank money printing, and CBDCs. Poilievre said he would seek to ban CBDCs and has championed the freedom for people and businesses who want to use Bitcoin.

Bitcoin as a currency functions as an anti-CBDC in a lot of ways. Where CBDCs are completely controlled by a central authority, Bitcoin is 100 percent decentralized, no one can mess with the system.

CBDCs can have built-in controls so they can discriminate based on age, sex, wealth, race, or whatever other categories the government wanted, Bitcoin, on the other hand, has no control built-in so discrimination is impossible. While every CBDC transaction can be tracked and recorded Bitcoin transactions can be done pier to pier and are untraceable to a specific person. CBDCs are a windfall for bankers who love to print money and run up inflation, Bitcoin is a deflationary asset that less and less of can be mined every four years.

This is why there has seemed to be a coordinated attack on Poilievre and Bitcoin from establishment sources, Recently the Globe and Mail went viral for their article saying Bitcoiners have “low financial illiteracy”, the article is behind a paywall so for those who don’t have access the thesis is that ‘Bitcoin is dangerous and CBDCs are good.’

The article ironically is targeted at people with very low literacy of Bitcoin and finance. First of all, the source of the research is the Bank of Canada, which would be like my grandmother heading up an “independent” commission to determine the best columnist at The National Telegraph. 

The article then proceeds to attack Bitcoin by conflating Bitcoin with other cryptocurrencies, there are many differences between Bitcoin and “Crypto” but the most important is that Bitcoin is the only truly decentralized currency, there is no board of directors or CEO that a government could pressure into altering the system. It is important to note this because one of the assumptions the Globe and Mail and Bank of Canada use to call Bitcoiners financially illiterate is that they invested in crypto scams. Spend any amount of time around Bitcoiners and you will know that they are not generally fans of other cryptocurrencies. The case against Bitcoin is that people lost money by putting their money into coins that were not Bitcoin.

This all relates back to the general scare tactic that they will use to push CBDCs. CBDCs will be billed as safe and efficient. “Bitcoin is scary, just look at this guy who lost all his money by investing in Garlicoin” or “think of how easy taxes will be when everything can be put on the same government system.” While it is true that taxes would be easier to do on a CBDC-based system, new ESG taxes could be instituted just as easily on meat, gas, trucks, or anything else the next Justin Trudeau gets fixated on.

In a world with increasing government controls in the wake of the pandemic, Central Bank Digital Currency should be a line in the sand for all people Left and Right concerned about freedom and equality. With the Canadian government currently conducting a study on CBDC implementation, the time is now to make your voice heard and stand up to this potentially tyraical technology. Because as we know, a government study always concludes the result it sets out to find.