His theory is that it’s folks like the WEF who are pushing for things like retail central bank digital currency to, essentially, cut out the commercial banks as part of the great reset. Powell being aligned with the likes of Dimon are fighting against that while much of the EU based banks (and a few big guys here) are on board.

He’s interesting if nothing else.

@midway @NBS @skells

I recently also came across the narrative that CBDCs are actually a means for countries to set up alternative payment systems outside of SWIFT and I guess the (euro)dollar system.

Which apparently is why the Chinese are on the forefront and pushing it hard.

Makes sense to me. Never heard of Tom Luongo though.

I see the utility for bank to bank transfers, especially if it represented a basket of currencies. I just draw the line at entirely replacing cash with it at the retail level.

@midway @NBS @skells

That, and programming the money to only be used for certain goods, within a time-limit or under certain circumstances.

Although I'm curious how enforceable such ideas are.

It’s absolutely possible. If you control the currency you can control how it’s spent. Im the credit card system, shops are categorized by a vendor code. It’s not too much more for an itemized list of what’s being purchased to be sent as part of the payment approval. They would sell it as a way to detect fraud and tax evasion.

The tech already exists. It just needs to be implemented and have laws to enforce it.

@midway @NBS @skells

Yeah but then they'd have to disallow transfers between individuals. Otherwise I can transfer to you some CBDC dollars in exchange for Bitcoin or something similar.

@jcbrand @midway @NBS i think the head of the BIC is on record saying that it's going to be a long time before CBDCs are really possible and that they're ~5 years (at least) behind bitcoin

seems to be why a lot of institutions are backing ethereum, because it's the most advanced compromised crypto

My guess is no later than 2030, probably earlier.

When you don’t care about decentralization and transparency, a lot of the work with coins like BTC go away. Most money is digital already, at least 80%, probably more. I don’t think it’s that difficult. Sure, it will need to be phased in but you can always do incentives like debt forgiveness to get people to move.

@midway @jcbrand @NBS
2030 doesn't sound unreasonable but earlier I don't buy.

bear in mind we're talking about government developing IT - banks still use COBOL ffs and you're trying to tell me they can roll out CBDC, across the SWIFT system, in less than 8 years, without major fuck ups?

don't buy it myself

Remember, at the current rate of spending the government goes broke around 2030. That will only accelerate as they justify more trillion dollar “emergency” spending. They will need tools to deal with this as well as the civil unrest that will happen when they go broke. I didn’t pick that date at random. They will need this stuff in place and moving at some level before then.

@midway @jcbrand @NBS agreed, motivation is no guarantee of success though

not to be complacent but the plandemic is starting to look more and more like peak globalism, CBDCs or no there are too many threads unravelling in too many directions to put the genie back in the bottle

not necceserilly (how the fuck do you spell neccesarilly) all good, probably a lot of bad will come of it, but I'm less worried about the WEF et al. than I was a year ago, for example