That’s why only Central Banks can create digital currencies

The Fed recently put out a white paper, Data Privacy for Digital Asset Systems, which contends that the expectation of privacy in digital currencies (read: CBDCs) stems from misunderstanding how digital systems work.

“Concepts such as the desire for ‘cash-like anonymity’ are based on false underlying assumptions.”, is the crux of it (quick, somebody tell the Monero team, and everybody else already deploying anonymizing protocols and applications for digital assets).

The subtext is that there can be some privacy and confidentiality safeguards built into CBDCs, but at the end of the day those would still be subject to being overridden or dispensed with. The paper doesn’t come out and say that, but it does make oblique references:

“confidentiality implies that collected and stored data is protected from view in some manner, such as obfuscation or access restriction, and available only to authorized actors.”

Which of course makes you wonder who exactly will be authorized and what will their capabilities be? It truly is the trillion dollar question.

WEF: “Hold my beer”

If we keep this paper in mind while we consider the World Economic Forum’s recent article on digital currencies, privacy and freedom, which put a finer point on it, while paying lip service to the desire for privacy in those characteristic WEF-speak euphemisms:

“A digital cash replacement should not enable criminality, but there should be some freedom to transact with complete privacy.”

“Some freedom” implies that any freedom will be subject to approval, because either you have complete freedom, or you don’t.

“Some freedom” coming from the WEF especially, sounds a lot like their “Life in 2030” vision, which is mostly known for point #1: “You’ll own nothing and be happy”.

Point #4 is “You’ll eat much less meat. An occasional treat, not a staple. For the environment, and for your health”.

In other words, according to the WEF, digital currencies will afford some privacy and some freedom. Just like how in 2030 you’ll be able to eat some meat. (As long as you behave.)

Throughout the piece the impetus toward digital currencies is ascribed to consumer preferences for convenience – that nation states and NGOs (including the WEF) are relentlessly pushing us there, along with digital IDs and health passports, is never mentioned.

Through their preference for the convenience of electronic payments, we will inadvertently lose the historic freedom that only cash provides: to spend our money on what we want, with whom we choose.

It’s always amusing to watch the Davos-darlings pretend to grapple with thorny ethical issues:

As governments and central banks consider introducing retail central bank digital currencies (CBDC), they must therefore answer the following: Once the last cash payment is made, does this mean our historic right to make payments that are not observable or censorable by the state will end on the same day? Is that what we want?

The answer, of course, is a resounding “yes” if we’re to remember some of the more breathless pronouncements from their conclaves:

Alibaba Group president J. Michael Evans boasts at the World Economic Forum about the development of an “individual carbon footprint tracker” to monitor what you buy, what you eat, and where/how you travel. pic.twitter.com/sisSrUngDI

— Andrew Lawton (@AndrewLawton) May 24, 2022

“We are developing, through technology, an ability for consumers to measure their own carbon footprint. What does that mean? That’s where are they travelling, how are they traveling? What are they eating? What are they consuming on the platform? So, individual – carbon – footprint – tracker. Stay tuned, we don’t have it operational yet, but it’s something we’re working on”.

The WEF article tackles the conundrum:

any system that allows people to make payments that cannot be traced or blocked is bound to attract criminals as well as facilitate personal liberty… A digital currency system should not mimic the “wild west”, but there should be some freedom to transact with complete privacy.

And while the article acknowledges that,

“if a CBDC doesn’t have some element of this capability, my prediction is it will fail in some major developed economies.”,

the entire framing is that Central Banks are the only game in town, and they need to get it right:

If the private sector could deliver a truly cash-like product itself, then we wouldn’t need this debate, but even a limited degree of cash-like behaviour would be incompatible with electronic payments laws. The reality is that only a central bank could deliver this type of product, thanks to the precedent set by their monopoly on the issuance of cash.

This paragraph would be the so-called “money-shot”. There is no mention of Bitcoin, or that crypto-currencies and stablecoins are already becoming ceded territory within the regulatory frameworks of nation states. There is no acknowledgement that many holders of wealth and capital will simply end-run CBDCs for the very reasons they articulate.

One of the WEF’s core tenets is that nation states are losing their position as the sole arbiters of power in this Fourth Industrial Revolution. That means they will have to coexist within a rubric of “Stakeholder Capitalism”, but what the WEF sending mixed messages:

On the one hand, governments are losing their primacy (and thus, monopoly on money issuance and supra-national initiatives like digital id’s and health passports), while on the other, only they have the authority to bless ascendent monetary systems. Which is it?

And how could you possibly publish an article like this without observing the elephant in the room: Bitcoin (and crypto-currencies, including stablecoins) have already entered the monetary landscape and have changed it in irreversible ways.

As expected when it comes to the World Economic Forum, it’s a display of truly breathtaking hubris and nescience.

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Today’s post was an excerpt from the CBDC coverage section of the latest The Bitcoin Capitalist. TBC provides actionable intelligence on the macro forces shaping Late Stage Globalism and a tactical toolkit for preserving and growing your wealth as it plays out. Try it today here.

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This is what CBDC’s are being built for

Anybody who seriously thinks that Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs of the future won’t be full blown social credit systems need look no further than Brazil, where newly selected socialist / globalist Lula da Silva just decreed that the Bolsa Familia program will require family members to be vaccinated in order to continue receiving benefits.

“we can’t play around. It is a question of science. If there are ten covid vaccines, 50 to take, I will take as many as necessary because I like my life. I think everyone has a duty to their children’s life, take them [to vaccinate] at the right age ”.

The news comes via The Rio Times, which describes the Bolsa program as “a social welfare program for the poorest families in Brazil” and “a kind of Universal Basic Income”.

Lula says Brazilians can receive financial aid only if they have taken the vax. Bolsa Família will require vax certificates from participants & their children: We can’t play, it’s a question of science. If I have 10 covid vaccines to take, I will take all that is necessary. pic.twitter.com/hqrYq4jO6r

— Geopolitics & Empire (@Geopolitics_Emp) February 7, 2023

UBI is considered by many to be beneficent and inevitable. I personally believe the latter but not the former.

However it shouldn’t surprise anyone that if you’re dependent on The Saviour State for your sustenance (as Charles Hugh Smith calls it),  you are, in effect, their chattel.

CBDCs will be the rails for UBI programs

The emergence of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) initiatives in nearly every nation on earth clearly signals the direction this is going. Nearly every CBDC white paper or proposal I’ve come across have the following three characteristics spelled out in plain text, and I expect every CBDC to have these five capabilities baked-in, whether or not they are initially enabled (or  documented).

#1) Expiry dates / use-by dates

CBDCs will have expiry dates after which their value will evaporate or erode. What I’ve noticed is white papers coming out of central banks started framing it as a feature, not a bug, to facilitate “recovery of lost funds”.

Abstract
An important feature of physical cash payments is resilience, which is due to their indifference to power outages or network coverage. Many central banks are exploring issuing digital cash substitutes with similar online payment functionality. Such substitutes could incorporate novel features, making them more desirable than physical cash. This paper considers introducing an expiry date for online digital currency balances to automate personal loss recovery. We show that this functionality could substantially increase consumer demand for digital cash, with the time to expiration playing an important role. Having more information available to the central bank improves accuracy of loss recovery but may decrease welfare.
— Best Before Expiry? Expiring Digital Currency and Loss Recovery, Bank of Canada Staff Paper, December 24, 2021

However the real reason CBDCs will have expiry dates is to stimulate money velocity and keep recipients dependent.

#2) “Anti-hoarding” features

Saving for the future is being rebranded as “hoarding” and it is becoming officially unfashionable because personal savings reduces dependancy on the state. The easiest mechanism for achieving this will be through negative interest rates on savings accounts, as per this IMF white paper,

…which goes on to outline the challenges there would be in eliminating the “arbitrage” between digital and physical cash:

A zero lower bound can be broken through a combination of (1) adopting or strengthening an electronic money standard in which electronic money is the unit of account and (2) implementing a time-varying interest rate (or more generally, rate of return) on paper currency (cash). Then, as the interest rate on cash moves in line with the official policy rates, there is no arbitrage between cash and money in the bank. Operationally this can be done while remaining quite close to the current monetary system, but there are several legal, communication, and political challenges to a transition to such an electronic money standard (Agarwal, and Kimball 2019).

(Despite the current rise in rates, once the money printers fire back up, this is where we’re headed).

#3) Total Information Awareness

Once it’s digitized in a centralized database (central banks) as opposed to being cryptographically secured on a decentralized blockchain (Bitcoin) – everything becomes known to central authorities instantly. Taxation can be applied per-transaction, but more interestingly – prices can also be modified on the fly.

If you’re behind on your property or income taxes – or have an unpaid fine (maybe because you’re fighting it), for example, they could simply enable a rolling garnishee on your wallet until it’s paid off.

While all transaction signatures are public on Bitcoin – they are pseudonymous and more importantly, unalterable. It’s true it may be known or discoverable that A sent sats to B, but there’s nothing any third-party can do about it. With Lightning on the ascent, combined with  various privacy enhancements there – Bitcoin development is moving in the direction of more freedom and more privacy – which is the opposite direction of most CBDC initiatives.

Finally, whether CBDCs are launched with the noblest of intentions, there will at some point arise “an emergency” which will make it necessary for The People in Charge to “flip the switch” and turn them into:

#4) Social Credit Systems

Imagine if “LoonCoin” was a thing last year when the #FreedomConvoy hit Ottawa (and signalled the beginning of a worldwide revolt against Covid tyranny). Instead of emailing a list of bank accounts to be frozen that were cribbed from a (hacked) spreadsheet, they could simply direct the Bank of Canada to turn off everybody’s digital wallets who were in the vicinity of the protest, or who contributed to their crowdfund, or who retweeted the #HonkHonk hashtag.

Do you think they wouldn’t have done it?

Covid vaxports have already been weaponized in China, Brazil is doing it with their UBI program and when this is all formaized into a CBDC, they will probably not launch it without the framework for widespread social credit and control systems being part of the plumbing.

We all know from our experience with the pandemic, emergencies tend to drag on in perpetuity. The “War on Terror” is still in effect, and there are still legions of collectivist automatons tweeting #CovidIsntOver.

So when “The Long Emergency” (to use James Kunstler’s term) becomes a never ending, rolling climate crisis, the social credit systems built into CBDCs will be used to enforce:

#5) Carbon footprint tracking

Back in Carbon Rationing, CBDCs and Sound Money I wrote how this trajectory is more or less baked-in now, and that the state-run financial system is undergoing a shift from a debt-backed monetary system to one based on carbon quotas.

This is the ultimate end-game of CBDCs. There is no hidden agenda or conspiracy around this (there’s already a Mastercard that cuts off your spending when you exceed your carbon quota), and globalist elites are quite up front about it….

Notice how he pitched it as “track your own footprint” then described it as “track their”, “what they’re eating”, “where they’re travelling” https://t.co/omHLzwqJAZ

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) February 9, 2023

Why CBDCs will ultimately fail

The developments of CBDCs is something we monitor in The Bitcoin Capitalist (formerly The Crypto Capitalist). Every month we put out our coverage of CBDCs  in the “Eye On Evilcoin” section and it’s not always bad news:

There is still  some time to stop CBDCs

Despite all the jawboning about CBDCs, nobody has really deployed anything viable. It’s all still design and planning – with some test beds going on. The few projects that have launched formal, actual CBDC’s have largely stiffed: Nigeria’s Enaira, Venezuela (lol). Even China’s much vaunted Digital Yuan had an underwhelming reception at last year’s Olympics (my suspicion is that the global financial system is unraveling faster than CBDCs can be developed, so they may have to go with something already out there, like Ethereum).

Worth noting, is that Brazil plans to deploy its CBDC next year.

I should note one exception to all the proposals out there in former CFTC Commissioner Chris Giancarlo (a.k.a “CryptoDad”) and the Digital Dollar Project. So far it’s the one proposal I’ve seen bucking the trend among all CBDC specifications in that there is no talk of expiry dates, and an actual emphasis on tokenization, custody and privacy.

CBDCs will not be permanent

It amuses me that when I read these plans around social credit flavoured CBDC’s, policy makers still continue to believe that by hobbling “cash”, making it impossible to save, eliminating privacy and layering on Orwellian levels of social control, they still get something that the public will prefer to cash, crypto or Bitcoin.

Only a central banker would be worried that people are going to want to hoard a statist shitcoin. (Especially after they put expiry dates on it).

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) February 8, 2023

It’s delusional.

Incentives matter, and that’s why nobody in their right might isn’t going to hold any wealth in CBDCs and keep their transactions within it to the lowest practical level.

The overall global system of governance is in a Fourth Turning style restructuring. With institutional legitimacy in tatters and public trust plummeting, CBDCs are typical and symbolic of the last gasp of industrial era, centrally planned economies.

The transition period between where we are now (Late Stage Globalism) and where we are headed – decentralized Network States, is going to be rough, so I advise battening down the hatches and reducing one’s reliance on government entitlements as much as possible…

Pro Tip: Don’t be poor

This is where we’re headed folks, so at the risk of sounding flippant, the solution is not to need financial aid.

Anybody depending on state entitlements or financial support will be CBDCerfs, their affairs fully regulated by the state, their carbon footprints metered, and rationed, while their lives are gamified through their smartphones.

Among the affluent G20 nations where woke-ism reigns supreme and neo-Marxism is still fashionable,  a lot of them may even like it.

But for the rest of us, who would prefer not to “own nothing and be happy”, it’s imperative that you have zero reliance on government subsidies, entitlements or support payments.

If you haven’t already:

1. Start a business. (Even a kitchen table business or an online venture)
2. Start stacking sats (Bitcoin) – get off zero, today.
3. Start taking sats at your business.

If you already own or run a business, buy, start or invest in another one.

It’s going to get a lot more expensive to be free. It’s not right or fair, but that doesn’t matter.

The good news is there’s never been a better time in history to learn, create, innovate and grow and these are the dynamics and incentives that will ultimately prevail. We’re in a period of Peak Collectivism and Peak Centralization now (for the next few years). This dominating ideology is ultimately an anti-human philosophy and this too shall pass.

Be ready for it, either way.

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Outside of China, no major nation has anything else ready

Imagine if you will, persistent double-digit inflation, energy costs soaring, shortages causing blackouts across Europe, bond yields spiking uncontrollably, supply chains grinding to a halt while sovereign debt crises erupt the world over…

Then one Friday after the markets close, heading into a long weekend, an emergency broadcast occurs in which the President, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and the Speaker of the House appear on national TV to announce  that pursuant to the Statutory Bail-Ins provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Bill, a banking holiday would take place over the following week. During that holiday, certain bank liabilities would be converted into FedCoin (FED), an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, at the rate of 10 FED per $1.

Every depositor would have an NFT issued to their Social Security Number – and that would give them access to their FedCoin via the Sign-On-With-Ethereum protocol. Depositors would have to “stake” their Ethereum to access the “full benefits” of FedCoin, however any sub-optimal social behaviours, (such as being behind on current vaccinations, or running your air conditioner too cool) could result in “slashing” – having a portion of their staked assets “burned”.

Similar announcements are being made elsewhere: in Canada Prime Minister Freeland and her Finance Minister Steven Guilbeault announce the creation of LOONCoin, invoking the The Bank Recapitalization (Bail-in) Conversion Regulations from 2018 while in Australia they refer to Financial Sector Legislation Amendment (Crisis Resolution Powers and Other Measures) Bill of 2017.

Across the G-20, each leader is calling their national initiative part of The Great Restructuring…

We’re into the Endgame for Late Stage Globalism and things are moving fast. Decades of increasingly centralized, fiat-based plunder are now coming to a head and the system is unraveling quickly:

• Energy costs are skyrocketing thanks to ESG-inspired shortages.
• Inflation rates exceeding the stagflationary 70’s are hitting across the board and in some areas (Turkey, Argentina, Sri Lanka, Lebanon) verge on hyper-inflation .
• The global bond markets could come unglued at any moment as trapped Central Banks are trying to hike into a global recession.
• Geo-political tensions (even amongst NATO allies) eerily reminiscent of the months leading up to 1914, when the world “sleepwalked” into the first industrial scale global war.
• Political and cultural elites the world over have never been more unhinged and detached from reality.

Many commentators are positing a monetary end-game scenario in which the Fed and other central banks really do lose control of the bond market, the 150 to 300 trillion (depending on what you include) global debt implodes, and the financial system itself enters the collapse that has been serially postponed since the dotCom bust….

The mini-parable in the opening paragraphs outlines the situation many of us who are skeptical of the current system anticipate: that there will be an inevitable move toward Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). It will be seen as a way to extend the lifespan of fiat-based financial system by a few critical decades while presenting an irresistible mechanism for asserting China-style social control in a way previous authoritarians could only dream of.

There have been plenty of government white papers issued (which we diligently cover in The Crypto Capitalist Letter), which uniformly outline the aspirations of CBDCs, namely:

• Expiry dates on “cash”.
• Negative interest rates on savings.
• Programmability over where, when, who and why money gets spent
• Transaction level reporting, tracking and taxation
• Quotas, limits and restrictions
• Ability to add or remove funds remotely by central authorities

There’s only one problem…

No nation or central bank outside of China is anywhere close to actually deploying a national Central Bank Digital Currency that is capable of doing these things.

For awhile it looked like maybe Facebook’s Diem would be at least a temporary FedCoin, until Facebook scrapped the project (they’ve since sold the intellectual property to Silvergate Bank).

But in practical terms, nobody is ready. The countries that have deployed a home-rolled CBDC have flopped (i.e, Nigeria, Venezuela,) even China’s Digital Yuan debuted during the Olympics to ho-hum reviews.

A national CBDC would be impossible to develop in secret and then spring on a population out of nowhere. Whatever gets adapted to be the rails for globally inter-connected CBDCs will leave footprints, big ones. People who pay close attention to Bitcoin, crypto-currencies, digital assets and blockchain would hear about it and see it coming from a long way off, and nothing that’s known to be in development (like Canada’s Project Jasper) is ready (or stalled).

However, the financial system is now coming unglued so quickly that there probably isn’t time to develop national CBDCs from scratch anyway, at least not for an advanced G-20 economy.

The solution may be to co-opt an existing crypto-currency that is already deployed, already has market share and a brand, and is more or less signalling an amenability to the notion.

Enter Ethereum: The Preferred Crypto-Currency of Central Banks (and The WEF)

The advent of Bitcoin was a shot across the bow of all central banks and fiat money.  We see, for example, a near visceral reactions toward the threat posed in various Bank of Canada documents (obtained via an ATIA request):

At the supra-national and NGO level, everybody from the World Bank, to the IMF to the World Economic Forum is somewhat hostile toward Bitcoin. WEF articles about Bitcoin typically end with “problems” associated with it and what the alternatives are , going so far to declare in 2017 that by 2020 “Bitcoin would consume more power than the entire world does”.)

Fact check: #Bitcoin did not consume more power in 2020 than the entire world did in 2017. @wef pic.twitter.com/1nTwi99Xgp

— Mark Jeftovic, The C̶r̶y̶p̶t̶o̶ ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) September 5, 2022

So it is interesting to notice a crypto-currency that these international bodies and central banks are not openly hostile to, and that has always been Ethereum.

The main thrust of Canada’s CBDC development has been (thus far) “Project Jasper”, a partnership between the Bank of Canada, Payments Canada, R3 and the big banks, and note that Phase 1 was built atop Ethereum:

(Phase 2 was to be built on Corda “a leading Distributed Ledger System for regulated industries”).

So far Norway and Israel have started their CBDC development using Ethereum. In 2021 a Chinese banking official made the case for deploying a CBDC on Ethereum, and in at the WEF meeting in 2020, one of the Ethereum co-founders and Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin presented a white paper making the case for Ethereum to be the rails for CBDCs.

“As the World Economic Forum meets in Davos for the 50th time, it does so against the backdrop of a sea change in the mechanics of money

Below we provide both an overview of CBDC and a concrete example of how a CBDC might be implemented on the Ethereum blockchain. We believe that Ethereum is the best-suited blockchain network for the kind of maximally secure, global-scale, interoperable settlement platforms that CBDCs require. But we are well aware that there are many other possibilities”

To be clear, I am not one of those people who thinks the WEF is some all-powerful cabal that Controls Everything, because the reality is that the world is inherently uncontrollable at a macro level (we live in an out-of-control world, and for many, the prospect of that is more terrifying than dystopia).

But what happens in Davos doesn’t stay in Davos. The WEF agenda truly does exert outsized influence (at least for now), and they do set tone for what is fashionable among technocrats, authoritarians and the sundry Malthusians that permeate elite circles.

Ethereum (or maybe “CBDETH”) is well suited for the use case of global CBDCs:  different ERC-20 tokens can be issued for multiple uses:  stablecoins, UBI, food stamps, carbon quotas, social credit – all underpinned by Ethereum on the base layer. One that has a proven track record of being willing to switch monetary policy on-the-fly, and isn’t afraid to hard-fork itself out of a jam.

For the push into Digital-IDs, ERC-721 style NFTs are well suited. Your Bored Ape not only telegraphs how cool you are, it can signal if your COVID boosters are up-to-date, for all to see, on the blockchain.

At first glance this runs counter to what I’ve been saying in The Crypto Capitalist (our premium letter) for over a year. My theory was that in the future, the way you would be able to differentiate between a decentralized, digital bearer asset and a CBDC would be whether it would be possible to self-custody your private keys or not.

Maybe I was wrong about that, since anybody can hold their own wallets for Ethereum.

However, we should expect that the plebes would be incentivized to custody their private keys with banking partners of the CBDETH system (“safely and effectively”). There might even be incentives for doing that, like extra meat allowances, or permission to take an additional flight each year.

The Ethereum ecosystem is already telegraphing a willingness to comply with central state dictums: embracing OFAC compliance with a hamfisted stab at protocol level transaction censorship, rather than arguing about it too much. The coming move to PoS is flat out ESG-inspired (this is not the place to argue the energy policy of PoW other than to say that the alarmism around it is based on pure ignorance and FUD; but at a minimum I would recommend Alex Gladstein’s “Hidden Costs of the Petrodollar” and Nic Carter’s “Last Word on Bitcoin’s Energy Consumption“)

After The Merge (a.k.a Ethereum’s Great Leap Forward), if we can envision a scenario where most of the ETH is locked up in centrally operated validators, and a huge chunk of the system having already enacted protocol level transaction censorship, it would be perfect. Outwardly it could be the branded as a decentralized, inclusive digital money while in reality being highly concentrated and censored at the transaction level.

Similar to how the WEF brags they’ve “penetrated the cabinets” of many world governments, the Venn diagram of WEF and upper echelons of the Ethereum Foundation already intersect in a few places. In addition to the aforementioned pitch by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin, the Ethereum Foundation’s Executive Director is “an agenda contributor” to the WEF.

The there’s the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance is a who’s who of big tech, Wall St and corporate big wigs, including JP Morgan, Microsoft, Accenture, Bank of New York Mellon, Ernst & Young and even Fedex Corporate Services Inc.

Contrasting Ethereum with Bitcoin

With EIP 1559, Ethereum ostensibly adopted a “ultra-sound” monetary policy where the supply of ETH would actually plateau and then begin to decline as more ETH gets “burned” than minted. However even this update, combined with the looming switch from Proof-of-Work to PoS shows: The Ethereum core devs have no issues radically restructuring its underlying fundamentals to suit the winds and the whims of it’s circumstances.

From its initial ICO to insiders, launching with an unlimited supply, to bailing themselves out after their DAO was hacked, Ethereum has a “whatever it takes” approach that is the opposite of an immutable, hard asset with a finite supply like Bitcoin.

If circumstances arise where an infinitely expandable money supply is desired or required, they can just change the system again. And again.

Contrast with Bitcoin, which is truly decentralized, with an immutable hard cap that cannot be changed. If there are dissident factions, like during the  Blocksize Wars, for example, it gets settled with a hard fork where users choose which way to go and market forces settle the rest.

On that note there is even already  a Proof-of-Stake version of Bitcoin.

So if we truly value democracy over coercion, and if Proof-of-Stake is demonstrably better than Bitcoin core’s Proof-of-Work, then we should see “Bitcoin-2” flippen Bitcoin in due course (similarly, and this is my main beef with The Merge, the more democratic way to undertake it would be with a user-selected hard fork, leaving both chains and options available afterward).

Of course, nobody seriously expects Bitcoin2 to do that. Nor does anybody expect Ethereum to postpone the merge or do it in a more democratic manner . But we can expect Bitcoin to be the one, immutable digital bearer asset in the coming era of Central Bank Digital Currencies.

Conclusion

In The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto, I built on my previous work around The Great Bifurcation and theorized a coming two-tier society. I posited that UBI would be inevitable and the rails would be a CBDC that doubled as a China-style social credit system. Everything that’s unfolded since then has reinforced that belief.

What I may have not foreseen was what the rails for CBDCs could very well be Ethereum, or a co-opted version of it. Beacon Chain (the post-merge chain) may be that version.

It’s too early to say how to feel about that. I’ve always had a soft spot for Ethereum, and admired what they’ve done in decentralized naming with ENS. My main business has been involved with that effort for some time. I guess watching it position for mainstream / corporate / government  acceptance is somewhat disorienting.

(Maybe it’s a good thing that the fiat-era’s last ditch iteration of state-sponsored money will have to be, out of necessity, built on something beyond their absolute control… another marker of the decentralized revolution?)

However, where Bitcoin reached escape velocity and broke the “here to stay” barrier through sheer honey-badger belligerence, Ethereum seems to be getting there by “playing the game”.

That’s also not to say that with our investor hats on, there aren’t going to be huge gains to be made within the Ethereum ecosystem even if it goes that way. If Ethereum becomes the rails for global CBDCs (CBDETH), owning the infrastructure components of it (oracles, validators, exchanges, dapps, naming platforms) would be the analogous to owning a small slice of the Federal Reserve, or the global ACH payments system.

But I stopped thinking of Ethereum as immutable some time ago, and certainly not as a digital hard asset, the way I do Bitcoin.

This is the second part of my look at the age old “Gold vs Bitcoin” debate, which I outlined in Part 1: “Gold vs Bitcoin is Fscking Stupid” as being faith-based and pointless.

While it is thoroughly enjoyable to watch it play out between the symbolic archetypes of  near-boomer Peter Schiff and his millennial son, Spencer, I sometimes suspect that to  be a staged, WWE style confrontation….

Future tweet: “Now that Bitcoin has hit $500,000 I must admit that a move up to $1,000,000 can’t be ruled out. However…”

— Spencer Schiff (@SpencerKSchiff) February 16, 2021

However I bring up the elder Schiff for a reason, because part of his core thesis is that after the coming global monetary reset, the world will move back to a gold backed currency.

A return to a gold-backed standard would be a disaster

This I find not only unlikely, but undesirable. Anybody paying attention to the way the world works now absolutely shouldn’t want a return to a gold-backed currency, especially people holding their wealth in gold.

The reason is very simple: if that were to happen, there would occur with that a corresponding global ban on private gold ownership. Anybody who thinks this through can see that is the most likely way it would play out.

The religious goldbugs think the USD will implode (probably correct), lose it’s global reserve currency status (correct) and then… government will admit defeat, remonetize the world with a gold backed currency. Doing that would instantly make the goldbugs who were outside the system, who were highly critical of it and who reject the legitimacy of much of it, the most wealthy and powerful participants in the new monetary regime.

Do you really think it would play out like that? Do you really think that governments who double-down on incompetence, who think nothing of changing the rules and moving the goalposts, who stop at nothing to preserve their own position and serve their own interests are going to throw their hands up in the air, shrug their shoulders and walk offstage to clear a path for a next generation of goldbug power elites?

I don’t think so.

This is what happens instead:

1. A new narrative begins to emerge:  gold bugs are damaging the stability of the banking system
2. Sudden focus on how gold mining accelerates climate change and exacerbates systemic racism
3. Gold jewelry = white privilege (even in India,  remember, by this point 2 + 2 = 5)
4.  Private gold hoards are exacerbating wealth inequality

After a few months of this and then the time is right, a coordinated set of policy initiatives will emanate from some elitist circle jerk like Davos or Jackson Hole:

• all gold mines nationalized globally, possibly structured into an International Gold Pool.
• mandatory buybacks of private holdings at capped prices
• criminalization of unlicensed private gold ownership

…and gold jewelry will be the MAGA hats of the future. It’ll end your career.

I may be off on the details, but that is in essence what I would expect happens if the global monetary reset heralds a return to the gold standard.

The powers that be will never admit causing the monetary crisis, will never concede that it was their policies over successive decades caused it, and they will never voluntarily allow a tectonic shift to move power and wealth to anybody other than themselves.

So if you’re a big believer in preserving your wealth through holding gold (as I am), then this is definitely what you don’t want to be wishing for. This is what the Bitcoiners should be hoping happens to the goldbugs.

As for the Bitcoiners….

Bitcoin as world reserve currency will never happen

Some Bitcoin maximalists think that it is destined to become the global world reserve currency because (wait for it)….

It would essentially force governments to be honest.

I should be able to rest my case here. Governments are congenitally incapable of honesty. Perhaps there was a point in time when that wasn’t the case, but it certainly isn’t today, and the governments we have today will not voluntarily move to a system that forces them to be honest.

The only way Bitcoin gets made the world reserve currency is if it’s done in a way that removes any and all advantages from those who own it today. This is how the system works: the elites are in charge, and anything that comes along to challenge their authority is either co-opted or criminalized.

The system is hardwired to preserve the power and privilege of the people running it, and as I’ve said in the past, the privilege isn’t race based, it’s based on the structure of the monetary system. 

Both goldbugs and Bitcoiners think government bans are unlikely or unworkable. Just last week on Coindesk’s The Breakdown, NLW’s Long Reads Sunday was Alex Gladstein’s Can The Government Ban Bitcoin?, who wrote about the mechanics of implementing a ban on bitcoin…

“a military home-by-home raid couldn’t work very well and would constitute a mass set of human rights violations.”

…possibly overlooking that we are one year into a New Normal where that which is not expressly permitted is forbidden.

Anybody under-estimating the level of overreach and oppression that all governments globally can undertake, in concert, has to either have been asleep for the last year or is so comfortably cocooned  in one of those “post-physical” lifestyles that they didn’t care.

To be clear however, I mostly agree with Gladstein’s reasoning on why Bitcoin can’t be banned effectively. Which is also why I think that precludes it from being part of any kind of government sponsored monetary restructuring (that said, some central banks may start buying Bitcoin as a part of their own reserves, the first national central bank to ponder it that I know of was Barbados, back in 2015)

If Bitcoin were to become the rails of the global monetary system, it would happen in a way where the governments can completely regulate every single aspect of it, including where and how you HODL, whether it’s legal to mine (or stake for other or future cryptos) and whether or not you’re permitted to self-custody.

So if you’re a big believer in preserving your wealth through migrating into the crypto-currency economy (as I am), then this is definitely what you shouldn’t be betting on. This is what the goldbugs should be hoping happens to the Bitcoiners.

The true enemy is EvilCoin

If I can see horrible outcomes as a result of what either camp thinks would be “victory”, what am I doing about it? This is what I said in Part 1,

“the entire debate pointless because people who invest in either asset class are doing so for the same reasons…If the job at hand is to protect one’s wealth from systemically rigged and disintegrating monetary regime, arguing for one over the other feels like trying to defend against it with only half the available toolkit….The entire gold vs crypto argument goes away when one realizes that there is more overlap in the objectives of each asset than there are differences”

I’ve never been a Gold vs Bitcoin guy, I’ve always been a Gold and Bitcoin guy. And by “gold” I mean precious metals, and by Bitcoin I mean crypto currencies in general (I also like Ethereum, as described in part 1).

Personally I don’t see any danger that either camp will ever see that their preferred monetary asset becomes the global reserve asset. Gold doesn’t allow governments to embezzle wealth from its subject and Bitcoin is off the table. They would never go with an open source project pioneered by an anonymous cypherpunk. They just won’t.

What is more likely and what I personally am betting on is this:

There will be some form of global monetary reset involving Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). China is already a fair way down the runway with their Digital Currency Electronic Payments (DCEP) system and the use of digital cash is far more pervasive there already.

China is dictatorship. There is zero personal freedom and there are no sovereign individuals. Their social credit system will increasingly regulate every aspect of every citizen’s most minute activities and it will be the envy of technocrats the world over.

I am betting on The Great Bifurcation playing out in the classical liberal world as follows:

Erstwhile democratic nations will implement CBDCs which will be the rails of MMT, UBI and eventually full social credit systems “with Western characteristics”.  As the middle class gets hollowed out, most people will fall below an impermeable membrane into the new serfdom. The defining characteristic of the underclass:

• no assets (“The year is 2030, you will own nothing and be happy…”)
• no income as we understand it today, it’ll be UBI which is more of a digital “scrip” than actual money
• no job, no career no profession other than side-hustles, gigs and the odd outlier shot at being in influencer

The people who owe more than they own will basically be screwed and if there is another financial crisis before all this happens, say one in which equities, property values get smashed down while the cost of living skyrockets, then what’s left of the middle class will be quickly sorted into either category.

I am always surprised at how few people I talk to have ever watched Mr. Robot.  However its explanatory allegory around the two-tiers of digital money after a global financial crash is a compelling one.

So called “Evilcoin” is the CBDC, run by the establishment and is more like company scrip of yore, redeemable across the company platform. Alongside EvilCoin is Bitcoin, which people prefer and what actually holds value and confers a greater amount of economic freedom.

In short: we’re headed into two-tier society, one where the tier you’re in relies on which form of digital currency economy you’re participating in the most. That’s what we look at specifically in my premium letter The Crypto Capitalist (including which publicly traded companies will be the best ones to own here in the New Normal).

If there is any single take-away from all this, it is this, as long as “the system” as we know it, stays on the rails, then:

“Gold vs Bitcoin” is the wrong question.

“What are the alternatives to EvilCoin?” is the only question.

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