Push-button digital tyranny: U.K. introduces 'Britcoin' CBDC project
Instead of separating money and state, the CBDC acts to create zero separation between money and state.
The U.K. government and the Central Bank of England have published a “consultation paper” that announced a coming digital pound called “Britcoin.”
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Britcoin, the current nickname for the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) project, is a product of the U.K.’s “CBDC Taskforce” that was announced in April 2021.
“At this stage, we judge it likely that the digital pound will be needed in the future. It is too early to decide whether to introduce the digital pound, but we are convinced preparatory work is justified,” the paper starts, estimating that the project will be fully implemented by the end of the decade.
The hype continues:
“The digital pound would maintain public access to retail central bank money and, as our lifestyles and the economy become ever more digital, it would also promote innovation, choice and efficiency in domestic payments.”
Here’s what they’re not telling you.
A CBDC gives enormous power to governments and grants them much more control over the population’s spending, saving, investing, and borrowing power. For Brits who experienced the tyrannical and restrictive policies of Covid hysteria, the implementation of Britcoin amounts to a permanent financial lockdown.
As the Chinese Communist Party has demonstrated, the CBDC is a valuable tool for financial censorship and manipulating behavior, as it is a key component of a social credit score system.
Under a CBDC-based monetary regime, the government or anyone high enough in the political hierarchy can ban a citizen from transacting in the currency at the push of a button, should their social credit score drop too low. Moreover, any random government bureaucrat who has access to the CBDC system could decide to wipe out anyone’s account balance entirely. On the other hand, they can reward “good behavior” by boosting a citizen’s social credit score and purchasing power through the use of the same tools.
Instead of separating money and state, the CBDC acts to create zero separation between money and state.
In its Consultation Paper, the U.K. takes several shots at Bitcoin, describing it as the antithesis to the “safer” Britcoin CBDC. Bitcoin is described as a “highly volatile unbacked cryptoasset” that does “not provide holders with a safe or stable store of value or a reliable unit of account.”
The British Pound will be much safer, clearly. Just look at its buying power over time!
But Bitcoin, which is up around 20x since 2017, “has fallen by 10% or more in a day around 25 times over the past five years,” the U.K. paper declares.
Unfortunately, the entire U.K. political establishment is moving in lockstep behind the measure, and it seems inevitable that the entire European continent will embrace CBDCs. For American readers of The Dossier, the Britcoin project can act as a Paul Revere moment for what’s potentially coming to our shores.
The people in charge of the soon to be digital money printer prefer that you have fun getting progressively poorer as the ruling class prints more money for itself.
The above chart highlights the overall problem with mattress stuffing and banking on Central Bank cash as a strategy to preserve wealth. If the money isn’t separated from the state, we will inevitably live in a World Economic Forum utopia in which “you will own nothing and you will be happy.”
Today, the Central Bank of England has over $1.5 trillion in assets at its disposal. They are certainly outmatched by the behemoth enterprises in the U.S., Japan, China, and elsewhere. Yet the U.K. is far from alone in its push-button digital tyranny aspirations, with the most ambitious project thus far being the Chinese Digital renminbi.
"Give me control of their money supply; I care not what laws govts make."
A few months ago the, New York Fed launched their CBDC Pilot Program that was supposed to last 12 weeks:
https://karlstack.substack.com/p/new-york-fed-launches-cbdc-pilot
Makes me wonder how this "pilot program" is going, the 12 weeks should be up right about now... I haven't been able to find any update on it. I wonder if they are quietly transitioning it to permanent?