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by Efrat Fenigson
Mar 27, 2024
from
BitcoinMagazine Website
This
editor has been forecasting for at least twenty years
that the dollar is not the issue:
It is the entire
worldwide fiat system of all currencies.
The
dollar will not "crash and burn," as others have
claimed.
The CBCD system is poised to destroy all fiat
paper systems in one fell swoop, and it will be sudden.
Look
for a financial shock to start the avalanche, and then
look for a global bank holiday (i.e., Black Monday)
lasting for a week or two, after which the new system
will magically appear.
Source
On the Brink of a Dramatic Change:
The Digitalization of Money...
The current state of
Central Bank Digital Currency Projects
globally
summarized by Efrat Fenigson,
independent journalist and host
of the
"You're The Voice" podcast...
"What underpins a world order is always the
financial system.
We are on the brink of a dramatic change where we are about to,
and I'll say this boldly,
abandon the traditional system of
money and accounting and introduce a new one...!
And the new one is
what we call
blockchain...
It means digital.
It means having an almost perfect record of
every single transaction that happens in the economy, which will
give us far greater clarity over what's going on.
It also raises huge dangers in terms of the
balance of power between states and citizens. In my opinion,
we're going to need a digital constitution of human rights if
we're going to have digital money.
Most people think that digital money is crypto and private, but
what I see are superpowers introducing digital currency.
The
Chinese were the first.
The US is on the brink of moving in the same
direction.
The Europeans have committed to that as
well."
This revolutionary speech about a new financial
system, was delivered at the World Government Summit in March 2022
in Dubai, by Philippa "Pippa" Malmgren, a member of
the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Chatham House; her
father, Harald Malmgren served as a senior advisor to US Presidents
Kennedy, Nixon, Ford and others.
She's a technology entrepreneur and economist,
who served as Special Assistant to President George W. Bush, for
Economic Policy on the National Economic Council and is a former
member of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets and
Corporate Governance.
Her words about the transition to a
New World Order that requires a
new financial structure correspond well with the words of French
President Emmanuel Macron in June 2023 at the Global Finance Summit
in Paris:
"The world needs a public financial shock to
fight
global warming, and the current system is not suitable for
dealing with the world's challenges."
The president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, also
called for,
"a clean slate" and said the Bretton Woods organizations
(World Bank, International Monetary Fund) do not serve their goals
nor respond to society's needs...
The Summit for a
New Global
Financing Pact.
Photo:
Ricardo Stuckert/PR
"The New Bretton Woods Moment"
"A new international monetary system is
taking shape, some call it the new Bretton Woods moment that
needs to be seized to create a new global financial governance",
...says the investigative journalist Whitney
Webb in a recent
sitdown interview, where she mention that
according to Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of
England & Bank of Canada and the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action
and Finance, the three pillars of the new multi-polar world are,
...through a global carbon market.
All world governments are pushing this agenda,
that in order for it to succeed, all monetary systems and supporting
systems must become digital and rely on digital data.
A good example of this was revealed at an event of the Central Bank
of Israel with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) - which
I attended - in September 2023 in Tel Aviv, where the "Genesis
Project" was presented.
As part of this project, "green" bonds are
issued, based on carbon quotas in
the CBDC infrastructure.
This is how the climate agenda is linked to
financial markets.
"Debt Serfdom"
"Stablecoins could be the way in which the US
is further globalizing the dollar, spreading its adoption
directly to the world's general public in order to continue
increasing its debt and encourage uptake and usage of the
dollar", says Mark Goodwin, Editor in Chief of Bitcoin Magazine,
in this interview with Whitney Webb.
He suggests that the politician's outcry of
de-dollarization and the weakening of the dollar are a distraction
from perpetuating the dollar as the world's reserve currency.
"While CBDCs are what people are becoming
fearful and aware of, it may just be the red herring, and the
real strategy of the US dollar's survival is highly regulated
stablecoins (such as Tether), which can easily be programmable,
even more than CBDCs, as well as seized, regulated and
controlled indirectly by governments.
100 billion dollars in treasuries were
already purchased by Tether, its subsidiaries and owners.
Tether is positioned alongside the top 20
nation states buying debt from the US, with around one tenth of
China or Japan that have a trillion dollars debt to the US".
Whitney Webb & Mark
Goodwin.
Source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC9dJYqDZ9c
This theory, together with the words of,
-
Mark Carney
-
Pippa Malmgren
-
Emmanuel Macron
-
Lula Da Silva,
...join the calls of global leaders
and heads of states, pointing to the replacement of the monetary and
financial world order, to introduce a new monetary system.
Many
experts say that we are reaching the end of the current fiat
monetary system experiment, which is destined to collapse.
Since
world leaders are aware of this, they prefer to engineer a
controlled demolition, to maintain control and steer the course, and
enter the new era with power firmly within their grasp.
Central Bank Digital Currency
System (CBDC)
Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), tie the financial freedom of
citizens to the government and the banking establishment.
The
central bank issues its centralized digital currencies, and
essentially creates a new monetary system, "fiat on steroids", a
system that takes everything that is bad in the fiat system, and
adds more of it:
surveillance, control, censorship, and enforcement
capabilities...
A modern prison...?
Indeed..., the CBDC is the ultimate
prototype of a prison without physical chains.
By connecting CBDCs
to digital identity cards, and to government systems such as
universal basic income, social credits and more,
we get the ultimate
control apparatus...
This apparatus will dictate to citizens,
what they're allowed to purchase, what the
permitted quotas are while limiting consumption according to
rules and use cases, at programmed
times, places and cadences...
The system is able to determine the use
of a geographic radius (geo-fencing), and to determine expiration
dates on the money.
Each remote controlled digital wallet can also
be switched on and off by its operators.
More than 130 countries are
in the initial stages of piloting CBDC systems, of which 36
countries are in advanced pilots, and 3 countries have already
launched systems:
-
Nigeria
-
Jamaica
-
the Bahamas
Will Ripple (XRP) Be The Chosen
Platform for CBDC?
Ripple, a digital payment network and transaction protocol that owns
the cryptocurrency XRP, is considered one of the most popular
cryptocurrencies, and is strategically positioning itself at the
heart of government financial innovation, aiming to be the
cornerstone of future CBDCs.
The company is in talks with about twenty governments around the
world to develop their CBDCs using Ripple's technology.
In May 2023,
Ripple launched a dedicated CBDC platform to assist central banks,
governments and financial institutions around the world in issuing
CBDCs and stablecoins.
To date, Ripple has partnered with six
governments for CBDC pilot projects:
The National Bank of
Georgia, for example, has chosen
Ripple as its
technology partner for its CBDC pilot last year, citing Ripple's
technical expertise and team capabilities.
Its interest in CBDCs is
in leveraging modern technologies, such as the programmability
aspect of CBDCs, aiming to create a platform with smart contract and
programmable token capabilities to stimulate innovation in the
financial sector.
In the case of
Bhutan, Ripple's technology was chosen in 2021 for
the country's CBDC project to enable advanced cross-border payments,
and assist in "financial inclusion" - in line with Bhutan's mission
to increase financial inclusion in Bhutan to 85% by 2023.
In 2022, Ripple reached the final stage of the
G20 Techsprint CBDC
Hackathon, hosted by Indonesia and the Bank of International
Settlements (BIS), and in August 2023, the Republic of Palau
launched a USD-backed digital currency, developed by Ripple.
Promoting its platform as an infrastructure for a CBDC, Ripple
advocates for government regulation of cryptocurrencies, and tries
to position itself as the preferred solution for CBDC projects.
Its
claim to fame of being the ideal CBDC partner for governments is the
combination of speed, efficiency, a sustainable and "green"
blockchain network that uses little energy (compared to the Bitcoin
network), and interoperability - the ability to communicate and work
with CBDC solutions in other countries on the Ripple infrastructure.
The company warns that there is a risk for CBDC adoption by the
public, caused mainly by a lack of market education, and it
encourages the programming and expiration dates capabilities, which
are perceived by most of the public as particularly Orwellian
features of CBDCs.
Ripple encourages the abolition of cash (and a move to
a cashless
society), and unsurprisingly, it promotes the climate agenda.
The
company's website presents its commitment to a clean, prosperous and
secure low-carbon future, with a plan to reach
carbon net-zero by
2030.
Apparently, in line with Ripple's expansion strategy vis-a-vis
governments, the company makes sure to recruit employees who came
from central and commercial banks.
One of the company's top
executives is Andrew Whitworth, policy director at Ripple, who
previously worked at the Bank of England.
At the same time as his
role in Ripple, Whitworth also serves as a
Director of the "Digital
Pound Foundation", an organization that has declared itself the
authority on the Digital Pound:
it advises and influences the
government's decisions regarding CBDC projects and deployments.
Clearly an inside connection such as this might give Ripple an
advantage in shaping digital currency policies to fit their platform
and solutions.
Does this hint a conflict of interests, or at least
an unfair play?
Another avenue through which institutional influence and implicit
control over Ripple could manifest is via a
legal battle with the
SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) concerning the XRP
cryptocurrency.
Engaging in such legal disputes inevitably positions
Ripple in a scenario where maintaining a positive relationship with
institutions becomes crucial.
Consequently, it's no surprise that
Ripple prioritizes governments, central banks, and financial
institutions as its primary target audience in its market strategy.
Photo: Lord XRP
Twitter account
Interesting Developments in CBDC
China spent a couple of years rolling out relatively failed CBDC
projects without widespread adoption, while injecting 30 million
yuan as free money to encourage user adoption.
Transactions using
the digital yuan hit 1.8 trillion yuan (US$249 billion) in June
2023.
Recently, significant progress has been made:
the two main payment
services and applications in China - WeChat and Alipay - which have
a traffic of about 3-4 trillion dollars per year, integrated the
Chinese CBDC service into their applications.
The central bank
regulator made it clear that digital yuan isn't meant to compete
with the two payments giants.
Rather, it's supposed to play a
complementary role.
Elon Musk, who owns, among other things, the Twitter/X platform, has
stated that he wants to make the platform an "everything app" like
the Chinese WeChat, including payment management.
Will X also follow
the Chinese route and integrate the CBDC solution into it, or will
it try to become a CBDC infrastructure itself with the help of
Musk's favorite cryptocurrency, the Dogecoin...?
The CBDC pilot in Nigeria didn't exactly take off either, after the
citizens took to the streets to protest the abolition of cash in the
country, and resented the introduction of an unneeded digital
solution, while demanding the return of cash.
After a long and
painful protest, the cash was returned alongside the new digital
currency, which was not canceled and became part of reality.
Furthermore, a new stablecoin is in preparation in Sandbox mode in
Nigeria.
The
cNGN is a Naira stablecoin which some claim has more
potential than the e-Naira to be widely adopted.
"The stablecoin
will be more broadly interoperable than the CBDC, which is only
available in the central bank's wallet.
At launch, the central
bank's wallet usability was weak, although it is now quite good",
said Bolu Abiodun, a reporter at Techpoint Africa.
Source
The UK saw a strong public backlash to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak
last year, with more than 50,000 responses sent to the Bank of
England following a public hearing on the Digital Pound, aka the
UK's national CBDC.
Germany -
Awareness of "Excessive Surveillance"
In Germany, the technical guidelines
document for a digital
currency of a central bank was published in January 2024.
Below
are several quotes from the document, reflecting the tyrannical
nature of the new currency, and the awareness of the central
bank for trust issues it can create:
Programmability is the institution's authority to dedicate your
money for certain uses, and to prohibit the use of your wallet
when it is "outside the permitted scope".
"The central bank can revoke CBDC notes, e. g. as an instrument
of monetary control.
Revocation of CBDC notes is performed by an
authorized entity, the revocation authority, controlled and
operated by the central bank."
This sounds like a technique to
confiscate and apply a shelf life to money.
"Payments permitted under certain restrictions... if the central
bank sees fit to impose them",
...the document lists restrictions
that can be applied to wallets, depending on the amount of
personal information that will be provided.
For example, the
amount of money in the wallet, the number of payments per day,
the amount of money per transaction or per day.
The good news:
The German central bank is aware of the
possibility of public opposition to a surveillance system:
"Many
of these design choices are general decisions on the trade-off
between excessive surveillance and legitimate monitoring
functions for AML and KYC purposes in conjunction with measures
for mitigating fraud and misconduct.
These decisions are
extremely sensitive in nature and can strongly influence the
level of trust that users place into the CBDC".
Israel - The Digital Shekel
Will Be Distributed Through Commercial Banks
Israel takes an extensive and active part in various CBDC
pilots, such as the Sela project, Eden, Icebreaker and more,
which I have
reported on extensively in the past.
The Deputy
Governor of the Bank of Israel announced that in December 2024 a
technical design document for the Digital Shekel will be
published, and its implementation will then begin in partnership
with the private sector.
The Bank of Israel's latest
document from last week covers the
proposed architecture of the Digital Shekel. Here are some
interesting points from the document:
instead of direct contact between consumers and the central bank
for funding and defunding, an indirect method similar to the
distribution of cash today will be used.
-
The banks will purchase
digital shekels from the central bank in large quantities and
transfer them to customers upon wallet charging.
-
The system will be able to apply and enforce limits, for example
limits on the balance that users are allowed to hold in the
Digital Shekel.
-
The system will support the possibility of applying interest on
the Digital Shekel.
-
Users will be able to access the Digital Shekel through several
payment providers, including credit cards, Google/Apple Pay,
wearables, payment apps and more.
-
Unlike most retail CBDC solutions, Israel's model allows users
to open a wallet with a payment service provider (PSP) and
connect to multiple third-party banks to fund and defund
balances.
Another interesting development in Israel is the announcement of
a plan to launch a new stablecoin pegged to the shekel, called
BILS, by the exchange platform, Bits Of Gold.
Crypto Jungle
website reports that the Israeli Capital Market Authority
approved the pilot, according to the draft principles published
by the Central Bank of Israel.
Interesting to note that the
company providing the infrastructure for the issuance and
custody of the currency is the Israeli technology giant "FireBlocks",
which took part in the "Eden" pilot project of the Tel Aviv
Stock Exchange for the issuance of digital bonds, built to adapt
in the future to a potential CBDC infrastructure.
No Internet? Don't Worry,
Governments Will Take Care Of Connectivity Anyway
A number of CBDC pilots, like in India, the European Union and
more, focus on the adoption of the system by everyone, even
amongst people without internet access.
The washed-up name
"financial inclusion" implies that the system will not skip
anyone, not even citizens without Internet connectivity in
remote areas, or without reception.
In
India for example, there
are 683 million people living without an internet connection and
largely outside the control of the state.
The Reserve Bank of
India (RBI) plans to bring these remote areas into a new
surveillance network through various technological means.
A
successful launch of CBDC in India also corresponds with the
government's overarching goal of reducing cash usage and
improving financial monitoring.
Thailand -
Free Money for the Masses
In September 2023, the Thai government announced that any Thai
citizen over the age of 16 who chooses to participate in the
CBDC pilot, will receive free CBDC worth $280 (10,000 baht) -
quite a lot of money in Thai terms.
This digital money will be
loaded into the digital wallet application and will be available
for use within 6 months, and within a radius of 4 km from the
residence of the registered citizens.
The pilot targets
low-income citizens as a first stage, and later expands to
entrepreneurs and small business operators - provided they are
registered in the tax system.
In Thailand many citizens are not
registered in the government systems and not everyone has a bank
account.
It seems that air-dropping "free money" is another
tactic to lure citizens into government systems, with the bait
of "free" controlled government money.
But is there such a thing
as "free lunch"?
The European Union - a Positive
Marketing Campaign in High Gear
The European Union launched a marketing campaign to promote the
digital euro about six months ago, to start educating the European
public about a reality where that they will be obliged to use a
supervised digital euro, led by Christine Lagarde, who was
previously
convicted of crimes and was promoted to serve as the
governor of the European Central Bank, the ECB.
The Digital Euro new marketing campaign.
Source: Christine Lagarde's
Twitter account
At the same time, a charade is going on in the European Union
Parliament where the dangers of CBDCs are being discussed, only
thanks to the public awareness and discourse, while Lagarde rushes
forward and kicks off the marketing campaign to instill in the
public the following messages:
the digital euro is easy, safe, fast
and reliable.
Not a word about its
Orwellian capabilities to track,
program, limit and condition activity through expiration dates,
geo-fencing, and remote on and off switching.
Another ECB campaign video
for the Digital Euro...
The Digital Euro Will Not Be
Anonymous
In a discussion at the European Union Council in 2023, Lagarde
emphasizes a point:
the digital euro will not be anonymous.
Privacy
will exist in the system, but not anonymity.
Let's break this up in
a different way:
for the banks, the key to surveillance and control
is identification.
The bank must know who the citizen is and verify
their identity, in order to exercise law enforcement or regulations,
through technological restrictions.
Lagarde's claim that the
technology will allow privacy but not anonymity is unfounded:
apparently the central bank considers itself and the financial
service providers some kind of God, since in front of them the
citizen will be identified, and therefore it is not clear what kind
of privacy can exist, without anonymity.
Source: Christine Lagarde's
Twitter account
In a
presentation from March 2024, the ECB presents a timetable for
the Digital Euro.
In November 2025, the development and
implementation phase will begin, with the completion of the
"democratic" legislative process.
The timing of the launch of the Digital Euro corresponds well with
the European Union's initiative to issue digital identity cards to
all EU residents between now and 2030, to enable the necessary
government identification and tracking of its citizens.
Identical
initiatives are enacted and promoted in many other countries around
the world at the same time.
Where I live, in Israel, ID cards and
passports have been mandatory and digital for many years, and also
biometric since 2013 - therefore there is no need to start the
marketing campaign for the Digital Shekel yet, as the digital
infrastructure exists hence the first step of digitalization is
already done.
The timetable
of the Digital Euro by the ECB
This phase of the project is the "preparation phase", the ECB
reveals, in which they are preparing for the launch phase of the
Digital Euro.
Of course, we are reassured that no final decision has
yet been made regarding the launch of the CBDC, and this will only
happen with the approval of the "Government Council" after the
completion of the democratic legislative process of the European
Union.
Therefore, in parallel with the democratic debate for or
against the Digital Euro, the development of the technology will
continue, in order to be prepared for the launch.
Central bank governors such as Lagarde and Bank of Israel Governor
Amir Yaron insist that the CBDC is digital cash, and also insist
that physical cash will not be abolished.
It is possible that these
central bankers feel the need to make a U-turn from the
incriminating speech of the head of the Bank for International
Settlements (BIS),
Augustin Carstens, who caused a public outcry
when,
he stated in 2020 that the CBDC technology, unlike cash, will
allow monitoring of financial transactions and will be a means of
enforcement by the establishment:
"The key difference with the CBDC is the central bank will have
absolute control of the rules and regulations that will determine
the use of that
expression (money) of central bank liability, and also we will have
the technology to enforce that."
Agustín Carstens
BIS General Manager
The Future: Centralized and
Controlled, or Free, Decentralized and Secure?
Ayn Rand, author and philosopher, said that,
"We can ignore reality,
but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality."
Are we
taking giant steps towards a new monetary reality, where the fiat
currencies we know become fiat on steroids, aka CBDCs?
Or into the
reality of "stable" and closely regulated cryptocurrencies, tethered
to fiat?
Either way, the feeling is that the establishment is doing
everything to preserve the debt economy, and its inherent modern
slavery...
The only way to break these fiat-matrix boundaries is to
opt out and enter into a new system, which seems to run in a
parallel reality, the Bitcoin system...
On the Bitcoin standard, under
self-custody, no third party has the ability to confiscate, program
or take over private assets. Not even the government or the state.
Bitcoin uses a lot of energy for its mining, but this proof-of-work
mechanism makes the blockchain network extremely secure and the
Bitcoin currency very valuable.
Bitcoin is "safe money", which is
out of reach for the establishment.
Unlike most other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is a digital currency without
intermediaries or third parties (peer-to-peer) in a decentralized
and secure network, which allows everyone to be their own bank,
instead of relying on banks and external parties.
With a fixed and
known supply, it represents the most powerful digital asset on the
market as a
store of value and as a unit of account, and in the
future will also be used as a medium of exchange.
In my recent
interview with the media and finance expert, and one of
the most famous Bitcoiners, Max Keiser, he compared the CBDC to
a
parasitic and centralized cancer...:
"If you were to look at the amount
of energy that Bitcoin uses and the rate at which it's increasing,
you would say good is triumphing over evil.
So this gives me a lot
of hope.
And I don't think centralization in anything works at all,
except cancer. Cancer is the only thing that seems to work to be
overly centralized and parasitic.
That's the cancer model, but I
think we're going to win against the cancer of CBDCs..."
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