Snowden Stresses CBDCs ‘Are Expressly Designed to Deny Its Users the Basic Ownership of Their Money’
While politicians and the modern banking cartel have been all about central bank digital currencies, a great number of critics believe they are no different than centralized databases. On Saturday, the former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) subcontractor, Edward Snowden, published an article describing what he thinks CBDCs will bring to society. Snowden is a fan of decentralized crypto assets like bitcoin, ethereum, and zcash. However, when it comes to CBDCs the whistleblower is concerned about adopting the technology.
“I will tell you what a CBDC is NOT — it is NOT, as Wikipedia might tell you, a digital dollar,” Snowden emphasizes in his article. “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,” the whistleblower said. Snowden added:
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.
Snowden concludes by explaining that people earn a living via their labor and it could be enough to retire or “if not, can he ever hope to rely on the State’s benevolent, or even adequate, provision — for his welfare, his care, his healing?” Snowden says he’d like to ask members of the Fed, the Treasury, and the U.S. government whether or not money should be centralized by the state. ”Of all the things that might be centralized and nationalized in this poor man’s life, should it really be his money?” Snowden asks in his article’s conclusion.