CBDCs, The Poop of Cash Eating ATMs

over 3 years ago

Cash is definitely on its fast sliding slope towards extinction. You can look at it as such from a new world order universal currency point of view, which kind of makes sense in the midst of this world crisis/great reset, or from an evolutionary perspective where the digitization of everything will ultimately swallow cash along with many other everyday activities and requirements.

Wire transfers, NFC payments, cross border transfers and many other banking products are a clear evolution step from where cash was standing a few decades ago. I bet some of the elderly in my country don't even understand electronic payment systems and honestly they don't even need to.

China has claimed for a few years that it's aiming at becoming the first country to permanently ditch cash and become a full cashless society and Sweden is falling to the same pattern, with less than 10% of purchases being conducted through cash in the Nordic country. Both countries have a communist flavor if you ask me and they have the same incentive to rush ditching cash.

The Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), one of the largest banks in the world by assets, launched a pilot program that allows users to move their cash to digital renminbi (RMB), according to the Shenzhen News Network. The bank rolled out several ATMs across the province to facilitate the adoption of the digital currency, says Zou Hua, the manager of ABC’s digital RMB innovation lab.
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Machines are gradually eating cash from citizens and issue the new digital cash, or the cash poop, and that's probably part of the evolution of money, but as I've stated several times on my blog, cashless societies will ultimately kill every last dime of financial freedom and privacy that paper money has ever granted. One could say that we have XMR and ZEC for that, but banks and governments won't use those.

They're rushing towards issuing their own CBDCs that will mostly benefit the issuers and the governments under which protective umbrellas such digital currencies are being created. It seems however that "IMF Says Only 40 Countries Allowed To Issue Digital Currencies" and that's a mere 20% of the world countries. The reasoning being that while the tech is here the consumers aren't fully equipped to consume it.

…Legal tender status is usually only given to means of payment that can be easily received and used by the majority of the population… To use digital currencies, digital infrastructure – laptops, smartphones, connectivity – must first be in place. But governments cannot impose on their citizens to have it, so granting legal tender status to a central bank digital instrument might be challenging.”
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Putting aside news that one can find over the internet regarding CBDCs we have to also think of how many countries are actually prepared and have the means to make those a working reality. Is the population ready for that, do they have the gadgets and education to operate this new digital money...? Well, I agree with the IMF on this one and I'd say most aren't.

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I can clearly see Norway for example adopting CBDCs and totally ditching cash in a few years from now, as these people are decades ahead of my native ones, but in regards of my country, some few other Eastern European ones and others around the world, don't really have the means nor the general public to do that. I get why they're rushing to launch CBDCs... First of all they're actually afraid of crypto and what crypto can do.

No government will ever allow businesses being developed in accepting XMR payments for example, or almost any other crypto, they need to be in control of the circulating currency of each country, and also act as the issuers, otherwise they would loose the control over the population and its freedom. They would not allow crypto payments wide spread even as an alternative currency.

Central banks and governments are actually on a countdown race against crypto and instead of keeping on fighting it, they've switched lanes towards regulating the existence and trading of those cryptocurrencies and based on the concepts of crypto they're actually rushing now to developing their own versions, which will further represent their own money and not the people's money.

The way I see it, cryptos are people's money as they're designed, mined, distributed, valued, transferred and spent by the people while cash, whether digital or not, is banks and implicitly governments money. It's central banks or FED issued, it's distributed by central banks, using the easily controllable streams of those entities and totally under the control of its creators.

Hence it seems that the digitization of money, stores of value, wealth concepts and distribution of wealth is not heading towards a one lane road. Two separate worlds might open in the near future and it weighs quite heavy on us on how these worlds will look like and which one are we building upon the most.

Thanks for attention,
Adrian