In the best future I can imagine, any form of money could be instantly and affordably traded for any other, at any time, on massive decentralized exchanges. National currencies, cryptocurrencies, and digitized commodities would all be listed and traded on markets that any individual or business could easily access and participate in. Exotic products like data packages and carbon contracts might have a place in these markets, but the market itself, not any government or company, would ultimately determine things like buyer appetite and valuation. Ultimately, financial markets would become fully disintermediated. Assuming governments still required national currencies for the payment of taxes, currencies like the dollar would still play an important role. But more specialized crypto tokens would come to be used in an increasingly large number of situations.
This monetary future is the opposite of the future promised by the nascent introduction of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). If crypto is about freedom, CBDCs are about totalitarian control. Here's a quote from a Forbes editorial about that:
The problem is that there is no limit to the level of control that the government could exert over people if money is purely electronic and provided directly by the government. A CBDC would give federal officials full control over the money going into–and coming out of–every person’s account. This level of government control is not compatible with economic or political freedom.
Some are connecting CBDCs to a global agenda of technological slavery, wherein every aspect of our lives will become tightly controlled by centralized entities. An example of this can be found in this article in The Defender. Here's a quote:
CBDCs are programmable money. The Central Bank will decide when, where and on what you’re allowed to spend your money. You also cannot save when and however much you want, because some of the CBDCs have expiration dates. ... CBDCs can also be programmed to only work for certain types of items, including certain types of food. If your health records indicate you have a health problem, your CBDCs can be programmed such that you cannot buy foods deemed unhealthy for you. Purchases can also be blocked based on your carbon footprint score, and they can be blocked based on geofencing parameters. "If they declare a lockdown, for example, and you’re not allowed to go five miles beyond your home, your money won’t work five miles beyond your home," [said researcher Whitney Webb]. "That’s basically why CBDCs are attractive to the powers that be. But they’re going to frame it as voluntary first, before it moves into involuntary."
Governments and central bankers are advancing this agenda of total control on many fronts. At the same time, articles like the Defender piece quoted above are suggesting that this agenda has a transhumanist dimension. Maybe it does. But I feel like transhumanist aspirations are more mythic than practical at this point.
The great promises of transhumanism are largely impossible. The promise of eternal life through biotech is one example of this. The idea that human consciousness could someday become transferable is another. And then there is the singularity, which is pure magical thinking hidden behind a thin veneer of technology worship. I know that there are people who take these ideas seriously, but to me none of them amount to more than empty fantasies.
Having said that, there is clearly an effort underway, driven by small groups of elites, to put computers in everything, affix sensors to our persons, and implant digital devices into our bodies. And there does seem to be strong overlap between this effort and the push towards CBDCs. Is the sum of these efforts a transhumanist agenda? Perhaps, but I think calling it that is a little confusing.
The goal seems to be making commoners more like a herd of sickly cattle, penned up in digital cages as our energies are harvested by a variety of means, while centralized AI systems administer the farm. Along with a basket of other emerging technologies, CBDCs appear perfectly designed to move us in that direction. This probably isn't accidental. The tech that gets funded gets developed, and those providing the funding may be parties with an interest in increasing their power in society.
It's important to note that such a totalitarian scheme can only work if most of us play along. And while fighting this dark future on a political level is probably futile, we are perfectly capable of designing and adopting tech that provides a more egalitarian alternative to cattle farm technologies. Even in their present newborn state, global token markets already serve as an alternative to the legacy economic system in some important respects. My great hope is that the blockchain economy will soon grow large enough to be unstoppable.
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