Bitcoin prompted a discussion about the future of money and what it should look like, and whether or not governments and central banks needed to upgrade money. Garrick Hileman: The short answer is Bitcoin. Please delete all tweets that violate your bank’s hate speech policies to process payment.”ĭo CBCDs actually pose a threat to our freedom, though, or is the current wave of panic just another case of conspiracy theorists fearmongering about any new technology that comes along? We spoke to Garrick Hileman, research associate at the University of Cambridge and London School of Economics, about what they could mean for us. A popular meme, meanwhile, shows a card reader displaying the message: “Card declined. “Because the government would now have the power to track, delete and create money instantly, people are worried could implement monetary policy that’s ‘good for the economy’ but terrible for you,” says one TikToker, in a video that’s been watched over two million times. Over the last month, TikTok explainers and Twitter threads have popped up warning that CBDCs will be used by governments to usher in social credit systems, exert control over the population, and basically turn life into an episode of Black Mirror. Turns out, some people aren’t particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of a digital currency controlled by central banks, though – and their fears aren’t unfounded. These currencies are known as CBDCs (which, despite sounding like a famed NYC punk venue, stands for the much more boring term “c entral bank digital currencies”) and would allow transactions to be made near-instantaneously, and at negligible cost, across the world. One of the biggest signs that physical cash could die out in our lifetimes, though, is that more than half of the world’s central banks – national banks that manage countries’ currency and monetary policy – are working on their own digital currency, according to the International Monetary Fund. A few months before he was elected the UK’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak even got the Royal Mint to make an NFT, signalling “the forward-looking approach we are determined to take towards crypto-assets”. On the other hand, cryptocurrencies continue to become increasingly legitimised: in El Salvador you can buy a Big Mac with Bitcoin, and increasing calls for regulation in the US and Europe reflect a begrudging acceptance that crypto is here to stay. In case you need a refresher: last year saw the Bitcoin market lose more than $2 trillion since the world’s most famous cryptocurrency peaked in value 12 months earlier, and FTX (the world’s second biggest crypto exchange) underwent a highly public crisis that exposed the wobbly foundations of even the industry’s biggest players. ![]() Digital money is at a turning point at the start of 2023, after a shaky 2022.
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