The CBDC's Are Coming!

Originally published February 2023

“The man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, ‘Limit yourself’; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian.” – Murray Rothbard

History has a cruel way of repeating itself. In 1933, President Roosevelt assured Americans the gold standard was safe, then three days later prohibited gold payments by banks. Within a month, Executive Order 6102 outlawed private gold ownership above $100, forcing citizens to surrender their wealth at $20.67 per ounce. After confiscating the gold, Roosevelt devalued the dollar 60% overnight by raising gold’s price to $35.

The lesson? When governments face monetary crisis, individual rights become expendable. Today’s digital age offers far more efficient tools for such confiscation.

The Blueprint for Financial Tyranny

In 2013, the United States Department of Justice launched the sinister “Operation Choke Point” that ushered in a new level of financial censorship. The initiative pressured banks to sever ties with politically disfavored businesses like payday lenders and firearms dealers, weaponizing the financial system without due process.

The DOJ’s method was elegantly simple: send “administrative subpoenas” to financial institutions coupled with the FDIC’s list of “high-risk merchants.” No bank wanted endless audits and regulatory harassment, so they swiftly abandoned lawful businesses, even when their own risk assessments showed these clients posed no significant threat.

Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.) exposed the program’s brutal efficiency: “A bank terminated its relationship with a legal business after threats from the FDIC. When notified, they admitted that a risk assessment showed the business ‘posed no significant risk to the financial institution, including financial, reputation, and legal risk,’ yet they still terminated the banking relationship.”

Operation Choke Point established a dangerous precedent, the use of personal prejudice and political differences as regulatory enforcement. While officially shuttered in August 2017, its legacy lives on, having evolved into something far more sinister.

That was analog tyranny. What’s coming is digital domination.

Enter the Ultimate Control Grid

Imagine a financial control system that requires no subpoenas, no explicit regulations, no messy paperwork. A system demanding absolute compliance not just to existing laws, but to ever-shifting political orthodoxies. Step out of line, and you’re financially vaporized; instantly, algorithmically, automatically.

Welcome to the world of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).

“Give me control over a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes its laws.” – Mayer Amschel Rothschild

CBDCs are programmable virtual fiat currencies issued directly by central banks, bypassing traditional banking infrastructure entirely. Make no mistake: a digital dollar is still a dollar, a digital yuan still a yuan. But here’s the crucial difference; CBDCs never exist physically. They live exclusively in digital form, with ownership tracked on a single database controlled by the central bank.

This centralization marks the critical distinction. Instead of multiple databases across various banks, all monetary data flows through one central authority. As economist Milton Friedman observed, “I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. The one thing that’s missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash.” CBDCs represent the antithesis of Friedman’s vision—centralized e-cash designed to expand government control.

Banks, credit card companies, PayPal? Irrelevant. All transactions flow through the central bank via a single digital wallet. Think of CBDCs as electronic vouchers, but vouchers that can be programmed, monitored, and controlled in ways that would make Orwell blush.

Welcome to 1984: Features Included

CBDCs arrive pre-loaded with “features” that read like a dystopian nightmare:

Negative Interest Rates: Your savings decay automatically, forcing you to spend or lose your wealth. Monetary repression made effortless.

Instant Taxation and Fines: The state reaches directly into your wallet, extracting what it deems owed—no appeals, no delays.

Zero Financial Privacy: Every transaction monitored, tracked, and catalogued. For your safety, naturally.

Expiration Dates: Your money comes with a kill switch. Spend it by the state’s deadline, or watch it vanish.

Programmable Restrictions: Disapprove of government policy? Your money stops working. Purchase something deemed “inappropriate”? Transaction denied.

Remote Termination: Your financial existence can be erased with a keystroke—no courts, no due process, no recourse.

Real-Time Debasement: Helicopter money deployed instantly, your purchasing power diluted at digital speed.

As economist John Maynard Keynes warned:

“There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose.”

CBDCs accelerate this destruction exponentially. The European Central Bank’s own working paper reveals their blueprint: elimination of cash, zero privacy, negative interest rates on savings, expiration dates on money, and “easier provision of helicopter money.” When your money has an expiration date set by bureaucrats, is it really yours?

None of these “features” benefit you. CBDCs are control mechanisms designed to transform free citizens into obedient digital serfs. Combined with digital IDs, they form the backbone of a surveillance state that would make history’s most oppressive regimes weep with envy.

The Architects Speak

The masters of this system aren’t hiding their intentions. During an IMF conference in October 2020, Agustin Carstens, head of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), delivered this chilling revelation :

“For our analysis on CBDC in particular for general use, we tend to establish the equivalence with cash, and there is a huge difference there. For example in cash, we don’t know for example who is using a hundred dollar bill today; we don’t know who is using a one thousand peso bill today. A key difference with a CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that determine the use of that expression of central bank liability. And also, we will have the technology to enforce that. Those two issues are extremely important, and that makes a huge difference with respect to what cash is.”

The Bank of England echoed this sentiment in June 2021, celebrating CBDCs’ programmability as ensuring money gets spent only on goods the government or employers deem “sensible.”

Read that again: The state gets to control how you spend your money.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, after studying China’s digital yuan, warned that CBDCs create “the world’s largest centralised repository of financial transactions data” with “unprecedented opportunities for surveillance.” They noted that Chinese digital currency could be “exported overseas via the digital wallets of Chinese tourists, students and businesspeople,” potentially forcing foreigners to use China’s surveillance money as “a condition of accessing the Chinese marketplace.”

CBDCs make Operation Choke Point look like child’s play. No more intimidating banks or issuing subpoenas, just instant financial excommunication for anyone the state deems an “enemy.” And yes, they define who those enemies are.

This is Orwellian money, pure and simple.

The Race to Digital Serfdom

How close are we to this nightmare? Closer than most realize.

Investment sage Doug Casey predicted 2023 as “the year of the CBDC”, sentiments that were echoed by economist Jim Rickards and many others. The Atlantic Council CBDC tracker reports that over 20 countries launched CBDC pilots in 2023 alone. Japan, UAE, Australia, Thailand, Brazil, India, South Korea, and Russia all advanced their programs. Russia and Japan rolled out retail CBDC pilots on April 1st, 2023.

The Bank of England announced “Britcoin” would be ready by 2025, with holdings capped between £10,000-£20,000 and designed to be non-interest bearing. They dismissed Bitcoin as a “volatile unbacked crypto asset” while hailing their programmable pound as the “safer alternative.”

The chart below reveals the true story of the pound’s “safety” over the past century, a relentless erosion of purchasing power that makes Bitcoin’s volatility look like child’s play.

The BIS reports that over 90% of the world’s central banks are actively developing CBDCs. China and Nigeria have already launched theirs, desperately pushing adoption through increasingly coercive means. At least 87 central banks worldwide are seriously exploring CBDCs, with Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Africa completing cross-border CBDC pilots through “Project Dunbar.”

The New York Federal Reserve began a 12-week digital dollar pilot in November 2022, partnering with Citibank, HSBC, Mastercard, and Wells Fargo. While they claim this doesn’t signal “imminent decisions,” the writing on the wall is clear.

The IMF, in collaboration with MIT, published a blueprint for a global centralized ledger called the “X-C platform” for cross-border CBDC payments. As if on cue, Red Date Technology announced their “Universal Digital Payments Network” at the 2023 World Economic Forum, essentially SWIFT for CBDCs. Bitcoin, naturally, is banned.

The icing on the cake was the report that was released by Bank of America hailing CBDCs as “the future of money and payments” and “the most important technological advancement in the history of money.”

The infrastructure is being built. The pilots are running. The propaganda is deployed.

The Hidden Driver: System Collapse

Why the sudden CBDC urgency? The official narrative cites Bitcoin’s threat and payment efficiency. The reality is far more sinister.

“History shows that epidemics have been the great resetter of countries’ economy and social fabric. Why should it be different with COVID-19?” – Klaus Schwab

The World Gold Council reported 2022 as a record year for central bank gold purchases, 1136 tonnes, the highest on record. Fourth-quarter purchases were 12 times higher than 2021, with only 25% reported to the IMF. Central banks are quietly abandoning their own system, hoarding real money while preparing digital shackles for the masses.

With global debt exceeding $300 trillion, 349% of global GDP and rising, central bankers see the writing on the wall. The credit-driven global economy is a giant Ponzi scheme approaching collapse. CBDCs aren’t about innovation; they’re about control during the inevitable reset.

The warning signs were clear well before COVID-19. In September 2019, repo rates, the cost of short-term borrowing using government bonds as collateral, exploded from 2% to 10.5% overnight. This matters because repo markets are the financial system’s circulatory system; when they seize up, everything stops. The Fed quietly pumped $6 trillion into repo markets between September 2019 and January 2020, before any pandemic was declared.

The BIS had already sounded the alarm in June 2019, warning of “overheating in the leveraged loan market” where “credit standards have been deteriorating” and “collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) have surged—reminiscent of the steep rise in collateralized debt obligations [CDOs] that amplified the subprime crisis [in 2008].”

Then came BlackRock’s blueprint. In August 2019, the world’s largest asset manager published a paper recommending “going direct”, central banks bypassing commercial banks to inject money directly into public and private hands during the “next downturn.” They acknowledged this was “unprecedented” and “radically different” from traditional Fed responses, describing it as “explicit and permanent monetary financing of a fiscal expansion, or so-called helicopter money.”

That downturn arrived on schedule. The lockdowns didn’t cause market collapse, markets were already collapsing, and lockdowns provided cover for implementing BlackRock’s radical plan. The pandemic served as the perfect catalyst for monetary expansion while introducing digital infrastructure (vaccine passports) that became the prototype for social credit systems.

CBDCs represent the permanent institutionalization of this “going direct” approach; ultimate control over both population and economy through programmable money.

Many central banks believe they can replicate Bitcoin’s success by building “blockchain-based” CBDCs. This “blockchain not Bitcoin” narrative misses the fundamental point. As Parker Lewis explains: “Bitcoin needs its blockchain to function and there would not be a functioning blockchain without a native currency (Bitcoin) to properly incentivize resources to protect it.” A blockchain controlled by central authorities is simply “a slow, inefficient and distributed database.”

Bitcoin’s power comes from its complete decentralization, fixed supply of 21 million coins, and trustless operation. CBDCs have none of these properties, they’re centralized, infinitely inflatable, and require absolute trust in government.

Resistance is Not Futile

Nigeria’s CBDC launch in October 2021 offers a glimmer of hope into how the CBDC rollout could occur. Despite relentless promotion, less than 0.5% of Nigeria’s 225 million citizens adopted the eNaira after a full year. Bitcoin, meanwhile, trades at a 60% premium in the West African nation.

The Nigerian government’s response? Classic authoritarian playbook:

• Limited bank withdrawals to $225 per week

• Replaced all high-denomination notes

• Created artificial cash shortages

• Deployed riot police against protesters

Central Bank Governor Godwin Emefiele called this chaotic rollout a “success,” and Finance Minister Zainab Ahmed concurred saying “the pain it has caused to citizens” as merely a “sore point.”

CBDCs are so wonderful they must be forced on people at gunpoint.

“The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.” – Ludwig von Mises

The Battle Lines Are Drawn

BIS chief Agustin Carstens recently declared fiat the victor over crypto, citing FTX’s collapse as crypto’s death knell. He proposed a “unified blockchain” with one central bank (the BIS) underpinning trust in CBDCs.

One ledger to rule them all.

The battle for the future of money, and freedom, has begun. Central planners won’t voluntarily surrender their power to create liquidity from thin air. They’ll deploy every regulatory weapon to restrict Bitcoin adoption while their digital fascism infrastructure comes online.

Choose Your Future

The CBDC train has left the station and is gathering speed. That should motivate us to build harder, faster, and more decisively around Bitcoin. We must create circular economies, make exchanges obsolete, and prepare for Operation Choke Point 2.0.

From technological and economic standpoints, Bitcoin has already won and the central planners know it. This isn’t about competing monetary systems anymore. It’s about choosing between freedom and slavery.

CBDCs are coming. The question isn’t if, but when they arrive, will you be enslaved or will you be free?

The choice, for now, remains yours.

---