by Josef Tetek at Bitcoin Magazine
Imagine this: It’s payday but before the money reaches your account, someone else has already decided what you’ll spend your money on — one third of your paycheck on housing, one third on food (only plant and insect protein allowed), 10% on transportation (with little allowance for gas), 10% on a mandatory pension plan (mostly allocated to government bonds) and the remaining 14% on clothing, alcohol and pharmaceuticals in state-licensed shops. Spending outside of these allocations comes with huge markups and, as if this isn’t bad enough, saving is impossible as this money comes with an expiration date: after three months, it simply disappears from your account.
This dystopian world is closer than you think. Central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, could make it a reality. CBDCs are an attempt to duct-tape the failing monetary system back together, and in the process provide the State with nearly unlimited control over the financial system, and thus our spending habits and the way we lead our lives.
In this article, I explain the motivation for governments pursuing the CBDC programs, why it is one of the greatest threats to our freedoms today and what steps you can take to limit its impact on you and your family.
ALL FIAT FAILS
Fiat currency is the only form of money most of us have known throughout our lives. It may seem natural and inevitable but when we look a bit farther into history, we find out that it’s anything but that; in fact, fiat currency seems more like a dead end in the context of monetary history.
For thousands of years, mankind has converged to gold and silver as the dominant form of money. Only for the past 100 or so years have we diverged from this historic trend. And the results have been disastrous. As Joakim Book noted in his recent article on hyperinflations, 61 out of the 62 documented cases of hyperinflation happened in the past 100 years — in the era of fiat money, when the ties to precious metals were cut…
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