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Bitcoin's core value lies in its decentralized governance design being divorced from the political system, a feature no other asset of its size and liquidity can claim, perhaps with the exception of gold. If people lose confidence in their government's capacity to sustain the trusted, social covenant on which fiat money is founded, the value of that money collapses, resulting in hyperinflation. Because of its depoliticized status, bitcoin gains in value in that environment. So if you're long bitcoin, you are positioned to benefit if the system of governance on which the entire world depends for security and well-being collapses.

"Since Emefiele's arrest, the specter of a CBDC monopoly has disappeared. Those who find electronic money more convenient use it. When that convenience is lost, they will switch to cash or its digital alternative. People now know that there wouldn't have been such chaos if the currency digitalization was voluntary and not accompanied by cash delegalization. Will Nigeria's case help other global central bankers and citizens arrive at a similar conclusion? Probably not, so we await the next economic disaster.

R3's Jack Fletcher does a nice dismantling of the dystopian case against central bank digital currency (CBDC). First he points out that there are technical solutions to privacy available through distributed ledger technology (DLT) infrastructure that far surpass anything that is available in existing digital solutions, so a CBDC could be as private as cash. Secondly, in a world of payment options, why would anyone use a surveillance CBDC when they could simply use Visa or Mastercard or cash instead? And access to cash is something that no government or central bank is keen to remove. Indeed, they must now step in as consumer preferences drive it to redundancy. But with cash use declining as a global trend, Jack does acknowledge that society must consider a future world whereby it no longer exists and our privacy and our freedom to disobey is removed with it.

I've looked for cross-country comparisons of residents' trust in government, and so far this OECD metric is the best I've found, and the range is quite significant from Switzerland at the very trusting end (84% responding "yes" to the question of confidence in the government) to 31% from Americans, which could explain their tendency to be anti-CBDC.

For what it's worth, likely U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump has jumped on the anti-CBDC clown show: "As your president, I will never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency. Such a currency would give our federal government absolute control over your money."

U.S. Republican Party Senators Ted Cruz, Bill Hagerty, Rick Scott, Ted Budd, and Mike Braun, re-introduced the CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act, that would prohibit the Federal Reserve from issuing a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC). The original version was filed by Republican House Representative Tom Emmer in September 2023. Former President Donald Trump, the front-runner in the Republican leadership race, has also promised to ban the creation of a CBDC if elected President.

A Florida man has chosen the next cultural wars flashpoint he will rally behind in an effort to mobilize the 2024 US presidential electorate: central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). "Such a currency would give a federal government, our federal government, the absolute control over your money," the former Wrestlemania star declared of CBDCs from a rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Wednesday. "They could take your money - you wouldn't even know it was gone. This would be a dangerous threat to freedom." The busy former reality television host and American president took a moment away from his E. Jean Carroll defamation damages trial to attend the rally where he promised his CBDC blocking actions would "protect Americans from government tyranny."

Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin has warned much the same, saying that he once had "somewhat more hope, probably naively" that CBDCs could incorporate the transparency, verifiability, and privacy of cryptocurrencies. However, he noted that after CBDC systems are developed, the protections "all sort of fall away." "We get systems that are not actually much better than existing payment systems, because they just basically end up being different front ends for the existing banking system," Buterin said. "They end up being even less private and basically break down all of the existing barriers against both corporations and the government at the same time."