The Pomp: Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) Will Cause Human Rights Violations

On a recent episode of The Pomp Podcast, accredited investor and Bitcoin community influencer Anthony Pompliano created a stir by saying “… central bank digital currencies [CBDCs] will likely be one of the greatest violations of human rights in history.”

While the issue of encroaching governmental/central banking power into everyday life is often discussed in political commentator circles, it’s somewhat rare to hear this blunt of a statement made in the financial/Bitcoin world, and the reason why is obvious, considering the recent Canadian banking crackdown on supporters and organizers of the Freedom Convoy.

Just because Canada hasn’t rolled out their CBDC yet, it’s totally obvious this move against the truckers is a weather balloon for public opinion of similar policies in the future, i.e. the coming CBDC.

You can listen to Pomp’s podcast here, but it’s one thing to know what the acronym for CBDCs means, but aside from barbaric outcomes ‘Pomp’ listed in his podcast, there are more reasons these currencies are terrible, including: 

• Centralized point of failure.

• Disrupting/manipulation of free markets.

• Complex points of failure are not yet apparent. 

This article does a good job of breaking down why CBDCs are bad mostly from a business/economic point of view, however, the main concerns discussed in Pomp’s show are issues of human rights abuses due to CBDCs.

It’s important to note, as Pomp does, that not all CBDCs are created equal. For example, the Chinese Digital Yuan CBDC currently being piloted is nothing better than a digital fiat, thus representing the worst of both the fiat and CBDC worlds. 

In comparison, back in early 2021, it was announced the upcoming Ukrainian CBDCs would be built on the Stellar blockchain. While this project’s future is unclear given that the country is engaged in open warfare, in theory, this may not be the worst outcome for a potential CBDC future. If we have to accept CBDCs a partnership between governments, central banks, and upstanding crypto organizations might be a good outcome compared to the Chinese Digital Yuan. 

While Stellar (ticker symbol XLM) has been criticized in the past as being too friendly with governments and being more opaque than is desirable in the Bitcoin world, lately Stellar has been given praise for making improvements in these areas.

Again while it’s not clear whatsoever what’s going to happen now with the Ukrainian currency, the general theory is if a CBDC actually does its best to mimic the characteristics of cash, (i.e. guarantees the ability of citizens to use the system, no freezing of accounts, ensures privacy of users, etc) a well-meaning CBDC might actually see genuine adoption by the public the CBDC is intended to be used by. 

Whatever the case, and if we get to the stage where economic powerhouses such as Canada and the U.S. successfully roll out CBDCs, one thing most commentators in the space agree on and ‘Pomp’ clearly agrees with is whatever specific CBDC we’re talking about, the technology probably represents too much-concentrated power and is begging to be taken advantage of by unscrupulous and nefarious actors. 

That ‘if,’ though, I used in the last paragraph wasn’t a mistake as I think the ‘elite’ may have tipped their hand to the public too early, and their ultimate plans for CBDCs may fail almost right out of the starting gate. While it’s too early to say yet, specifically, history may reveal the ham-handed banking crackdown by the Trudeau regime on the truckers as the moment when the wheels completely fell off the CBDC wagon 

For one thing, although it was completely ignored in Canadian media, news of the banking crackdown by the Trudeau regime actually caused a bank run in Canada (it wasn’t ignored by our outlet). 

Reporting of this bank run was extremely sketchy, although most likely it was the reason the Trudeau regime decided to back down on most of their emergency powers related to the banking sector only a few days after implementing them. 

Another outcome of the Trudeau regime’s financial crackdown on the trucking protestors was a rapid growth of interest amongst Canadians in cryptocurrencies, especially in Bitcoin. This is because contrary to what the government had threatened, they actually don’t have the capability to seize Bitcoin once it’s taken off of exchanges, and although not everyone understands this on a technical level, most people understand that Bitcoin exists outside the legacy banking systems as an alternative.

The kind of financial tyranny recently demonstrated by the Trudeau regime is exactly what Bitcoin was built to combat. 

If you go back to the earliest days of Bitcoin, the cypherpunks knew exactly what they were doing: building a powerful tool to attack the corrupt financial establishment. They understood decades before most of us, that the central bankers were going to try and force CBDCs onto the people, and so they set up an alternate financial system in the form of Bitcoin. 

It’s also clear the central bankers, while they laughed at it for more than a decade, have since about 2020 finally recognized the threat Bitcoin poses to their CBDCs plans and are probably panicking behind the scenes. Now they’re rushing to bring an offering to market. 

While I don’t have a ton of evidence to back up that claim, just examine the panicked, unorganized way the Trudeau regime rolled out their proto-CBDC policy. None of the outcomes from that policy rollout could’ve been what they wanted: it looked weak for one thing. The move was obviously forced from them, and on top of that at the core, their ‘emergency powers’ were recognized as terrible economics.

What the government and central bankers really needed here was a well-coordinated campaign with the media and commercial banks to confirm that the CBDC rollout was a success and ram it down everyone’s throat like what they did with COVID-19 restrictions. They needed this because there were so many problems that exist with CBDCs, if people were allowed to think for themselves they would recognize it right away and because an alternative system already exists in the form of Bitcoin and perhaps other cryptocurrency networks, citizens would rush to put their money there instead of the central bank-controlled economy. 

The government and central banks in this situation in Canada, however, didn’t receive this really smooth, polished marketing campaign for their proto-CBDCs, and because they didn’t have that whatever moves they make in this area will be expected and not accepted by the public.

But we can’t just apply this idea to Canada: the spotlight was on Canada and Ottawa recently due to the freedom convoy, and so many people caught Trudeau’s barbaric response to the protests and the unnecessary banking crackdown. As a result of that, many millions of people are now more closely watching moves being made by their respective governments and central banks for what they will do. 

So it’s important to highlight and double underline what a blunder the Canadian banking crackdown was. Canada was seen as a safe haven and a stable environment for investors almost from the nation’s founding until two minutes ago essentially. Canada’s image in this area has been shattered and more-or-less cannot recover until the Trudeau regime is removed, and most likely a Conservative government is brought. 

And so while Pomp is correct to be concerned about the potential threats of CBDCs, there’s a real possibility the governments, central banks, and international organizations that wanted to force the world’s population onto their garbage CBDCs, have run out of time to push these programs successfully.