Issue #1: Establishing a Format
testing testing testing
Welcome to Issue #1 of This Week in CBDC!
My other Substack,
, is prone to whimsical and erratic topic choices; sometimes a few words long, sometimes a 10,000-word essay; sometimes 0 emails in a week, sometimes 3 emails in a week.This newsletter is not going to operate that way. This Week in CBDC is one succinct email per week, every week, always in the same format. I am still working out the kinks on what exactly this format will look like.. so bear with me through the growing pains because it will evolve significantly over the first few issues. Today is a bare bones template; a starting point to build on for next week.
I currently have 4 repeatable weekly sections in this newsletter (Substack Spotlight, News Roundup, Tweet of the Week, Country Corner), and I am looking to add 1 or 2 more, maybe, if I can figure out what they should be. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment:
Substack Spotlight
I will tell you what a CBDC is NOT—it is NOT, as Wikipedia might tell you, a digital dollar. After all, most dollars are already digital, existing not as something folded in your wallet, but as an entry in a bank’s database, faithfully requested and rendered beneath the glass of your phone.
Neither is a Central Bank Digital Currency a State-level embrace of cryptocurrency—at least not of cryptocurrency as pretty much everyone in the world who uses it currently understands it.
Instead, a CBDC is something closer to being a perversion of cryptocurrency, or at least of the founding principles and protocols of cryptocurrency—a cryptofascist currency, an evil twin entered into the ledgers on Opposite Day, expressly designed to deny its users the basic ownership of their money and to install the State at the mediating center of every transaction.
— Edward Snowden
News Roundup
April 19: EU Lawmakers Skeptical on Digital Euro Plans (Coindesk)
April 22: US Presidential Hopefuls Rally Against a Digital Dollar Ahead of 2024 Elections (Bloomberg)
April 24: China to expand CBDC use case for Belt and Road Initiative (Coin Telegraph)
April 24: FedNow Real-Time Payments Are Here. What Should Banks Do Now? (Forbes)
FedNow is something that I don’t know much about… I hear lots of fearmongering about it, but then I also hear other people saying it is a nothingburger. Worth looking into. Maybe I will dedicate an issue to doing a deep dive into FedNow.
April 24: Zimbabwe to Introduce Gold-Backed Digital Currency: Report (Yahoo! Finance)
April 25: European Central Bank: Digital Euro to Offer 'Maximum Privacy,' Though Not as Much as Cash (Cryptonews)
April 26: Biden administration is quietly planning for a future where you don’t own money (Fox News)
April 26: Russian CBDC ‘Ready for Launch by Year’s End’ – What Effect Will Digital Ruble Have? (Cryptonews)
Tweet of the Week
It seems Elon Musk is still locked in a beef with Substack, and in a moment of pettiness, he's taken away our ability to embed tweets in our articles. So, we're left resorting to this janky screenshot.
Every week I will find one viral CBDC tweet and riff on it a bit... In this case I don’t really have anything to add to this poll, other than that it is a clear indication that CBDCs are being thrust upon the populace without their consent. Nobody is *asking* for CBDCs, yet they are somehow unstoppable? Who is pushing CBDCs onto an unwilling public? Who's responsible for this? That's precisely the kind of question I aim to answer in this ongoing series.
Country Corner
Almost every country in the world is in the middle of implementing CBDCs.
With so many central banks implementing their own version of this digital currency, the developments are moving at lightning speed, and we'll never run out of material to explore.
Discord
But that's not all, folks. Imagine building a community of thousands and thousands of CBDC professionals from all over the world, all chatting anonymously on Discord about the latest CBDC developments. That's the kind of watering hole we're creating here, and you're all invited to join the resistance.
Looking for Feedback
Now, issue #1 was a test run, so I'm open to feedback and suggestions on how to make this newsletter even better. I think we're on the right track, but let's keep iterating until we reach perfection. So, drop me a line at chrisbrunet@protonmail.com, or leave a comment below. Let's make this weekly anti-CBDC newsletter a force to be reckoned with!
I think this may be your most important post yet. CBDC, something I was totally unaware of, although I imagined such a thing and wrote about it in a book no one read, represents a clear and present danger to personal freedom.