In an insightful analysis of Central Bank Digital Currencies, “Shinobi” asks some important questions, including whether it’s even feasible to create one?
…just to replace the average volume of cash transactions alone a CBDC would need to process 246 times more transactions each month than Bitcoin.
This doesn’t even factor in debit/credit card transactions, or those occurring over apps like PayPal and CashApp. Furthermore, a CBDC system would need the kind of uptime that MasterCard or Visa has. Is the government capable of creating such a system? Absolutely not.
We should also ask ourselves whether financial services companies are willing to hand over a large part of their market share to a new CBDC system? Surely not.
… And cross-border payments? How, exactly, would this work using CBDCs?
If you are simply going to use SWIFT or other international transfer systems, how does a CBDC in any way improve the speed of cross-border payments? If you are going to directly facilitate the transfer of the CBDC itself internationally, how do you enforce KYC and AML?
The conclusion that Shinobi reaches is that there really is no such thing as a CBDC. Instead, there is just a shiny new wrapper for fintech apps like PayPal and tighter integration between them and systems like Fedwire.
A central bank digital currency is nothing but a meme at the heart of one of the biggest gaslighting campaigns that governments and financial institutions have ever tried to pull on the public at large.
