Kit Knightly
Structure on the bitcoin design, central banks are planning to produce their own “digital currencies”. Removing any and all remaining personal privacy, granting total control over every deal, even restricting what ordinary people are permitted to spend their money on.
From the moment bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies first emerged, sold as an independent and alternative cash outside the monetary status quo, it was only a matter of time before the brand-new alternative would be taken in, modified and redeployed in service of the state.
Get in “Reserve Bank Digital Currencies”: the mainstream answer to bitcoin.
For those who have actually never ever heard of them, “Reserve Bank Digital Currencies” (CBDCs) are exactly what they seem like, digitized versions of the pound/dollar/euro etc provided by central banks.
Like bitcoin (and other crypto), the CBDC would be completely digital, therefore enhancing the ongoing war on cash. However, unlike crypto, it would not have any encryption preserving privacy. In truth, it would be absolutely the reverse, possibly ending the extremely idea of financial personal privacy.
Now, you might not have heard much about the CBDC strategies, lost as they are in the tangle of the ongoing “pandemic”, however the campaign exists, chugging along on the back pages for months now. There are stories about it from both Reuters and the Financial Times just today. It’s a long, sluggish con, but a con however.
The nations where the concept advanced the outermost are China and the UK. The Chinese Digital Yuan has been in advancement because 2014, and is subject to continuous and widespread screening. The UK is no place near that stage yet, however Chancellor Rishi Sunak is acutely pushing forward a digital pound that the press are calling “Britcoin”.
Other nations, consisting of New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Malaysia, are not far behind.
The US is also researching the idea, with Jerome Powell, head of Federal Reserve, revealing the release of a detailed report on the “digital dollar” in the near future.
The propositions for how these CBDCs might work must be enough to raise red flags in even the most trusting of minds.
Most people would not like the concept of the federal government tracking “all spending in real-time”, however that’s not the worst it.
Without a doubt the most unsafe concept is that any future digital currency needs to be “programmable”. Indicating the people issuing the cash would have the power to control how it is invested.
That’s not an interpretation or a “conspiracy theory”, just listen to Agustin Carstens, head of the International Settlement Bank, speaking earlier this year:
Here’s that quote again, with some focus added:
The key distinction [with a CBDC] is that the central bank would have outright control on the rules and guidelines that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and the have the technology to enforce that.”
… which informs you not just that they desire and are seeking this power, however how they justify it to themselves. They change other individuals’s cash into an “expression of their liability”, and so consider it’s only best that they manage it.
A post in the Telegraph, back in June, was just as honest [our emphasis]:
Digital money might be programmed to ensure it is only spent on essentials, or products which an employer or Federal government deems to be sensible
The article goes on to quote Tom Mutton, a director at the BoE:
You might introduce programmability […] There might be some socially beneficial results from that, avoiding activity which is seen to be socially harmful in some method.
Governments and companies making sure the money they issue can just be utilized on “practical” things, and not be used in “socially damaging” methods? It doesn’t take much creativity to see just how this system might evolve and re-shape society into a genuinely dystopian nightmare.
In China the procedure is currently beginning, with a trademarked lack of subtlety. As they advance towards the release of their digital currency, they are prohibiting all cryptocurrencies to remove competitors and it’s already known the digital yuan will be programmable.
The West’s method will most likely be less direct, but no less controlling for that.
Britcoin will likely be set in just “unique scenarios”. Beginning, as the Telegraph states, with state benefits. They will be flagged to be spent just on “basics”. (Of course, if Universal Basic Income is put in place, then it’s possible most of individuals might wind up on “state advantages”.)
It’s likewise not hard to see programmable cash feeding into the “protect the NHS story”, where individuals aren’t enabled to spend state money on sugar, cigarettes or alcohol. Or individuals on organ waiting lists, or diagnosed with particular conditions, have their incomes and costs controlled.
By and big, however, it is the nature of British tyranny to be unofficial. So the UK federal government will make a big show of renouncing their own power to configure the cash, thus positively contrasting themselves with China … but at the time will take no actions to avoid big companies “programming” the earnings they release.
So, while the state controls the digital yuan in China, the digital pound will be subject to corporate control and used to enforce the unmentioned state-corporate collaboration that defines real fascism.
It will likely start in little, predictable methods designed to “restrict competition”. McDonald’s, for instance, will make it impossible to invest their salaries at Hamburger King, and vice versa. Coke and Pepsi. Starbucks and Costa. You understand.
We have actually seen the increase of cancel culture, the cultivated age of identity politics, and virtue signalling. Well, picture how programmable currency suits that. Business could dedicate to “combatting hate”, and stop their employees from contributing cash to black-listed political celebrations, religious groups, charities or individuals.
In the age of Covid we have actually seen how authors/actors/singers who step out of line are subject to harmful witch hunts, however think of a world where business could “renounce those who spread out false information”, by making it impossible to spend earnings they provide on art/films/music/ books by outspoken critics of the federal government.
Perhaps companies will make it so that employees who aren’t vaccinated have more constraints placed on their earnings than immunized ones. Maybe an unvaxxed paycheck can’t be invested at cinemas or bars, to “stop the spread of the infection”.
John Cunliffe, deputy director of the Bank of England, informed the Telegraph:
You could think about clever agreements in which the money would be programmed to be launched just if something occurred.
So possibly companies will remove choice entirely, and make an unfavorable test and/or a vaccine booster a requirement for opening your incomes. That might be used to all sort of behaviours progressing.
The World Economic Forum has a clear vision of the future where individuals “own nothing and enjoy”, integrate that with a extended war on homeownership, and you can see employers and federal governments issuing money which can be spent on rent, but not on a home loan.
Now envision the nascent “Green New Offer”. Difficult limits on how much money you can spend on fuel, plastic, or meat.
Only X dollars on flights each year. Only Y pounds on beef. All for the good of the world.
Money will turn from an expression of independence into nothing however a voucher system operated totally at the whim of business monoliths.
The year is 2030.
To lower your CO2 footprint, your food purchase with digital cash been decreased since you went over your car mileage limitation.
Its all tracked with your digital ID.
15 social credit rating points have actually been subtracted from your environment modification passport.
— PeterSweden (@PeterSweden7) September 29, 2021
All of this would have seemed like widespread paranoia simply 2 years earlier, but would you truthfully be amazed to see that idea in the Guardian, nowadays?
A programmable digital currency would have, coded into it, the ability to manage our entire society. And it appears like that’s where The New Typical is heading next.