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Central bank Digital Currencies or CBDCs are coming to the Western world. Over 130 countries right now are basically either adopting or plan to adopt some form of cbdc. The digital euro just got greenlit. While maybe a sliver of hope here, the United States, the Senate just banned with an 85 to 5 vote any federal CBDC at least through 2030. So what's going to happen? Is America safe or are we going to get the same thing with a different package? It's time for a guy's take. So for anybody who's been living under a rock, what is a cbdc? So a central bank digital currency is essentially a digital money, a digital currency unit that has been directly issued by the central bank and can be directly accessed by the customer. It's a direct liability of the state. It's not a bank deposit and it's not a private stablecoin. So why do they say they want it? What's the reason for this? Well of course, financial inclusion. Right? We're going to bank the unbanked. Everybody who makes it difficult to be able to get access or to whitelist into the financial system, well they can get access by just receiving a cbdc. It's going to have faster and cheaper payments, easier settlement and cross border payments between all the different banks and institutions and corporations and everything. It's going to fight crime and fraud and money laundering. They're going to be able to stop bad actors just as soon as they are operating. And of course it will modernize money, it will stop the decline of cash by offering an a digital alternative. At least that's all what they say. But what's funny is that sometimes they accidentally say the quiet part out loud about why they really want it.
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We don't know for example who's using a $100 bill today. We don't know who is using a 1000 peso bill today. A key difference in with the CBDC is that central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability. And also we will have the technology to enforce that.
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And to anybody who anybody listens to this show should know they want it for surveillance, for control because they can immediately like how are you going to stop criminals and scammers immediately? That's because you can freeze any account and any balance instantly based on what? Some indicator or probably some AI model that they're going to run. So don't ever try to send $10 in a transaction five times really quick because something else was going wrong with your app. Because you'll probably get your account frozen because that looks suspicious. The key word or the key issue here. It is programmable because it is a digital currency, meaning it can have restrictions. It can be surveilled directly. You're not even having to subpoena someone, get information. You're just plugging straight into the system. That is the surveillance apparatus. It can come with instructions, it can come with limits. And anybody who knows anything about government should already be afraid of everything that I just said. We may be fine. We may be totally fine. We also may be totally. And all of the financial inclusion problems are caused by them anyway. It's their kyc. It's their anti money laundering. It's not going to help people. If they actually want to continue to enforce their rules. All of those restrictions will still be. They're not going to bank the unbanked with a cbdc. They're going to unbank the banked with a cbdc. They're going to be able to put limits in. They're going to be able to put credit, carbon credits and decide who and where you should spend your money. They've been fishing for this for years anyway. They've been trying to implement this in a weird roundabout way. The Canadian government, like look at the truckers protests and everything that happened with the vaccine. When they first rolled in 12 days
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ago they demanded an end to the vaccine mandate for truckers.
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They were literally without just just on mandatory, unvoted on emergency powers. They just went through and froze the accounts of hundreds of people.
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If your truck is being used in these protests, your corporate accounts will be frozen, the insurance on your vehicle will be suspended.
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Just because of their political opinions. Because they were protesting against a forced medical treatment which turned out to be the absolute right Pat. Because all of the data shows that it is ineffective against basically anything and there's a significant risk for taking it. So the idea that any of this there is nothing, there's nothing Venmo can't do that CBDCs can do. There's nothing that you can't do with Cash app. And where are all the frictions of those apps? It's in the KYC Anti money laundering report. All your crap to the government steps. You could have total financial inclusion very very easily by getting the government out of the way. Not put it by putting everything on the government computer. The CBDCs are there for control. That is exactly why our sponsor is a perfect example. You don't want to be in the middle of a protest, when you find out you don't know what your exit plan is. You want to have a hardware wallet, you want to know how to use Bitcoin, and you want to know what your setup is before you get there. Because in the middle of that protest, that's a painful problem. You might already have your bank account frozen before you realize you need to go ahead and buy Bitcoin to get it on your bitbox. So don't wait for the time when you need the plan to execute. Do it now. When you get a discount from me, get a 5% discount with my code. You could support my show. You could share this out with everybody that you know who doesn't know that this is coming, because it is. And learn how to hold your own keys and use Bitcoin and just have that exit ready. You don't even have to use it all the time. Just save a little bit, stick it on there and you will at least have yourself an exit. Go ahead and prepare for that because I think we're going to be there sooner or later. So there's been a lot of movement with CBDCs here for decades now. Finland was actually one of the very first ones that started in this direction, literally way back in the 1990s and early 2000s. And there was Ecuador that launched a voluntary CBDC, but it was abandoned in 2018. Then in 2019, we had Facebook's Libra during all the crypto craze and all the blockchain's gonna save us. And we'll have digital currency.
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Facebook announcing a new digital currency called Libra. And Facebook says this digital currency aims to make it as easy to send money around the world as it is to send a photo.
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And that turned into a disaster for a bunch of different regulatory restriction reasons, even though there was an enormous consortium of companies and institutions that tried to get behind it. But interestingly, Facebook's Libra is actually, you can think about it as the first iteration of open USD, which is something that happened more recently. We'll get to in a second. Then you have the bahamas with the sand dollar in October 2020 is also
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the hub for the historic launch of the Sand Dol digital currency. The project presented this week by the Central bank of the Bahamas is a cashless digital currency.
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This was actually the first live retail CBDC that was actually being used, but the usage, again, just like in Ecuador, was very, very low. China Yi Yuan is today the biggest program on earth, but still a huge flop. The average wallet balance is 47 cent worth of Euan Eastern Caribbean with dcash in 2021. It actually went dark for six weeks because a security certificate expired. Then there's Nigeria, and we talked about Nigeria on the show before. But they tried to enforce theirs very heavily, especially while there was a lot of bitcoin and crypto adoption in the country. They had one of the highest per capita bitcoin adoption actually in the world. And they used some really sneaky methods to try to get adoption for it. And it flopped like a total disaster again. It actually stalled under less, less than 1% of adoption. And then Jamaica again, even less uptake than the sand dollar in the Bahamas. Hopeful pattern has been that every single voluntary rollout for CBDCS has been a total flop. I would be curious whether or not the governments themselves see it as a failure because one thing that it did demonstrate is that it gives them all of the surveillance and the control that they actually want, despite the fact that they don't have good uptake. But governments usually don't really care if people want something voluntarily or not because they're not in that business. Probably no coincidence either that people in all of these systems and governments and the people building these systems keep getting arrested for corruption. There's a guy in China, there was another guy in Nigeria, Salome in Lebanon. They are already abusing their power and I think they're excited the idea of an opportunity to expand that power to be more abused. And who involved in all of this wouldn't want to keep doing this? This is such an opportunity to basically plug the tentacles into every damn thing in the economy. So the euro has greenlit their digital euro.
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We work very hard on making sure that we have a digital euro so that we have a European solution to what most people now want and aspire to, which is to move digital.
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So things are going to be moving forward. And the Euro has made a couple of pretty terrible moves when it comes to online privacy and chat protection and requiring cryptography back doors into systems. You know, euro's lost. I don't care. I don't live in the Euro. I live in the us. So I'm going to talk about what's going on in the us. I'm sorry for all my euro friends out there, you're all doomed. But the US has at least gone back and forth on this for a little while and this was referred to as like, there was pretty heavy anti CBDC talk at the time and they referred to it as like the ultimate surveillance tool, which is good, it's it's very important for the meme to get out there for people to understand that that is what this is. This is a tool for surveillance and control. The interesting development most recently has been open USD, which is kind of actually an extension and continuation of the attempt of Facebook's Libra. But the idea is to have an open standard. It's not an officially launched stablecoin which a bunch of people are saying it is an open, agreed upon standard for intercommunication between privately issued stablecoins. But the, the good thing that I see in this transition is that as bitcoiners, they will build our infrastructure for us. Because what they're building with Open USD is a cryptography system for currency. You will have private keys, you will have addresses. It will work like a stablecoin. Stablecoins will be both a backdoor for private CBDCs and public and government CBDCs, but they will also be a backdoor for the bitcoin exit. They will be a backdoor for you using a hardware wallet for your stable coins that you can also just send bitcoin to for using a wallet and a key and knowing what an address is and how to back up your stuff. You'll realize directly applies to Bitcoin so that you don't have to show somebody what a transaction ID is. The bank has already trained everybody on what a transaction ID is and what a hash is and what a signature is. And then when bitcoin ends up being shifted over, when we, when we start plugging into bitcoin, we, they won't have to be retrained, they'll understand it all, it will just be a different money. So the saving grace in this is that if we can have just enough competition with an open stablecoin Standard in the U.S. u.S. Based stablecoins will get more widely adopted than others. And internationally because stablecoins are so fluid and liquid and have far less genuine borders, despite the fact governments will try to re implement them, means that stablecoins will actually go further and wider than any of our permissioned banking system. And then at the end of the day, what we'll actually do is spread all of the infrastructure, all of the tools, all of the hardware, wallets, all of the knowledge, all of the, the familiarity with stablecoins. That will be everything that we need to have a stable bitcoin exit. And importantly, that's one of the biggest barriers that I think the fewer and fewer people realize or think about is how big the barrier to actually understanding and using Bitcoin. To actually knowing what bitcoin is outside of just a B next to your account in Charles Schwab. They don't know what it is. They don't know how it works. Nobody at the bank understands it. I've had conversations with people at the bank. They don't get it. I promise you, when all is said and done, I hope this is actually going to force a move or enable a move in the right direction because we're moving steps in the wrong direction, but with just enough friction to give us just enough time to start a real strong push into a global bitcoin infrastructure. And the more political volatility there is, the more breakdown in political and global dominance consensus there is. The bigger and bigger place a radically neutral, global, unstoppable money has in this world. And cbd. Nobody wants them. And they're not going to be voluntary because they're not going to work. Everybody's already said we don't want the voluntary version. And the more involuntary they make them, the more people are going to wake up and realize we should have had bitcoin the whole time. But I'm curious what you guys think, especially with the open USD because there's still a lot of unknowns. The post about it was literally just a blog post talking about how the fact they're trying to have an open standard for people, for companies and, and financial institutions to issue CBDCs. Excuse me, to issue stablecoins. They're called something different. They're totally different. It's not the same thing at all to issue stablecoins. And I'm curious how you guys think that's going to play out and what the major drawbacks are. Do you actually see this as a positive to bitcoin? How there is a place where we don't go in that direction. And so my thinking has always been how can we prevent the worst of the worst as we move toward a more digital and cryptography based infrastructure for all its potential negatives that will definitely come with it. This seems like a little glimmer of hope to me. But you know, it's the who's who of big giant corporations and financial institutions and banks. It's not like the list garners a whole lot of trust in me or pretty much anyone else. So I am very curious what you think. Leave any comments down below. Please don't forget to subscribe. This is a brand new YouTube channel and everything that we're starting to separate out this content. So it's hugely, hugely appreciated if you share this out with anybody you know and start to get this, this channel rolling. So thank you. Don't forget to check out the content. Don't forget to check out bitbox and get your exit plan ready. You get a 5% discount on it and bang. That's 5% discount on your. Your exit plan is, is something. And it supports my show, supports my work. Thank you guys for listening and I will catch you on the next one. Until then, guys, that's my two sats. Sat.