CBDC, like, e.g., ETH, is designed to be programmable, trackable, and non-fungible.
Fungibility is not a neologism or some kind of debatable topic. It is an economic principle that as well understood, along with its affects on privacy and freedom.
US dollars have serial numbers on them, making them, in theory, nonfungible. However, in practice, they are fungible, because it is practically infeasible to get everybody to scan those serial numbers during every transaction. Even if such a scheme was put into place, criminals could simply meet in the town square and exchange random bills from their wallets and ruin any semblance of accurate transactional reconstruction.
I mentioned a $10,000 withdraw, because that is a realistic amount of money that many many ordinary people could potentially withdraw (how many people do you know that have hundreds of thousands of US dollars in their checking account - that answer is 'not many', given that the average American has just over $1000 in SAVINGS). So, would the currency only be good/legit if you could withdraw 8 million dollars? How about a novemdecillion dollars? Is there a specific number that makes it a real currency, or is it a continuum? If it's a continuum, I'd much rather have some degree of freedom and privacy and ability to take my money out of the system than have zero ability.
By your logic, even though the second amendment protects American citizens' rights to keep and bear arms, since we aren't allowed to have nuclear ICBMs, we might as well give up the second amendment, entirely. It's all just binary, no continuums, no nuance, etc.?
If the government says, "if you want to sell gold, you need to fill out this form so that we can make sure we track it", then somebody can make a decision about their risk exposure by sneaking and selling their gold without filling that form out. That person will receive cash in return, and the risk remains in their hands. The most freedom would be not having to do this process at all, but the least freedom would be a scenario where it wasn't even possible to do the transaction without filling the form out, because the currency was programmed to disallow it.
What I'm describing now is another well known concept, called "perfect enforcement". Perfect enforcement is a concept that is considered to be one of the most tyrannical mechanisms imaginable. Another example that's easier to reason about (compared to CBDC) is speeding in your car. Currently you have the freedom to speed, but if you are seen by a police officer, depending on speed you are going in the circumstances on the road, you might get a ticket, because the roads are publicly owned and there are rules. Would you rather have that scenario or a scenario where your car prevents you from going 1 mph over the speed limit, regardless of your tolerance for risk? How about your car let you go over the speed limit and then automatically deducts a $100 ticket from your bank account, every time you go above the speed limit.
So yes, the bullshit inflationary currency that we have right now is not ideal, but it can (and will) get a lot worse.
So, the big discrepancy between why people are concerned and your questions has to do with the use of CBDC, rather than the technology. The technology is perfectly fine, the idea of a distributed ledger is interesting and can solve some problems, while creating some others, etc.
The issue is that what you're describing is a credit card, rather than a currency. So, for example, I could charge things on my credit card if I am doing things that I am OK with corporations knowing about. If not, I can pay somebody in cash. For example, if I didn't want somebody to know I went to the strip club, I could just pay cash, or liquor, cigarettes, you name it. Or if I am just very privacy minded and I don't want people to know about any of my transactions, I can just pay cash for everything. I can also write checks if I trust my bank to a certain degree and the bank of the person that I am writing them to. This might provide a higher degree of privacy from certain corporations when compared to credit cards, etc. basically I'm in control over my level of privacy and over my money (if I don't trust the bank to keep my money safe, I can withdraw it and if I don't trust that my paper currency is going to be safe, then I can convert it to physical gold or silver without anybody knowing, etc.).
Once a CBDC replaces a currency, The economic system using that currency becomes something of a panopticon. Worse than that, if the government or other controllers of this currency decide to take your money, there's nothing you can do to preempt that risk or prepare for it. They will just take it. Right now, you can go to the bank and withdraw an extra $10,000 and keep it in a safe, if you're worried about some "digital covid" hack or other systemic risks. Once everybody is using a centrally controlled digital currency like this, there will be no privacy ever again. Everything you do that is done with the money and will be known directly by the government. It's no longer that you'll have to worry about Amazon reporting you as a prepper to the government; the government will see everything you do and when they decide that "wypeepo is systemically racising blax", then they'll just take 10% of your money and give it to black people, or gays, or whatever other group of people suits their needs.
More importantly, regardless of whether or not you believe that the government or any other entity would ever do any of these things, simply giving them the ability to is no different than turning all your guns in and trusting the government will never do anything to hurt you.
9/11, for me. I remembered watching the footage of the Pentagon and thinking "where the hell is the plan and why does it look like a missile hole in the building", and then seeing somebody put together basically a compilation of the videos specifically about exactly that, which I found on albino black sheep (website back in the day), and then they talked about it on coast to coast a.m. with art bell, and I was like "holy shit what the fuck is going on", because it was weird having the feeling of "why doesn't somebody just tell them that it wasn't a plain", like some kind of pre-red pill retardation where are you assume that they just don't know.
The thing that made me start looking at basically everything as fake and retarded, though, was Sandy Hook. The shit that went on there was so fucking ridiculous that you watch it and think, "how the fuck are they gonna pass this as real?", with that crazy coroner, the guy who took in the kids in his house and told totally unrealistic and inconsistent stories about the situation, all the charades going on that you could see from the helicopter view, the military camo guys running through the woods, the fact that Adam Lanza's brother is basically a picture of Adam, etc., the fact that they didn't ever release any photos of the aftermath and all the records were sealed (minors), so nobody could verify anything, the coroner said that he was worried about the town having a big crash and he was concerned about being in trouble just previous to all this, the state passed the law sealing the records just before that incident happened, they demolished the school almost immediately after, there was a 100% kill rate, which has never been seen with a > 10 victims shooting, that one kid's father was on video laughing and doing what appeared to be preparing to fake cry by doing those super deep hyperventilation breaths right as he was about to go on camera, not realizing he was already being filmed, the fact that people have spotted multiple of those kids doppelgängers that are way too close to ignore, etc. The list of anomalies is so ridiculous that you can't possibly look at the situation and not be suspicious.
This is all just my personal opinion.
Well, inflation is simply expansion of the money supply; the rising prices we see are really just a symptom of that inflation.
Energy prices have a complicated relationship with the prices of other things, so they aren't really a blanket control mechanism for prices. Industries that are super dependent on energy prices (food, airlines, etc.) will benefit from a reduction in the prices that they need to charge their customers. Other industries might increase their prices, because of the money that is left on the table by the energy dependent industries' lower prices, etc.
The mechanism I am describing is a little bit simpler than that. Creating a dollar shortage, internationally, will help to prop up USD at a time when the currency is under attack, but the mechanism for creating this dollar shortage (rate hikes and quantitative tightening) will, incidentally, hurt our economy. Because our economy is so much more dependent on cheap oil than most other economies are, dumping oil to keep the price depressed will have an inordinate effect on our economy, helping to keep it from falling apart during the rough times caused by the rate hikes and quantitative tightening.
However, I do have a much more black pill theory surrounding this mechanism and the effects that I'm describing above, which I will get around to writing a post on, soon.
Yeah exactly, I knew exactly where you were going when you mentioned it, I remember the first time I watched that, I was at a party as a teenager with my best friend and our girlfriends and some of their friends, and everybody else had already fallen asleep and I laid there watching that by myself, and afterwards I was like "holy fuck this shit is scary".
I still had this open from yesterday, finally read it. With all the woke stuff that's gone on in the military, which is clearly sabotage, I think sabotage is the likely explanation, but I think there is another possible explanation:
It's possible they wanted to create an international dollar shortage via rate hikes and tightening, in order to consolidate power through sovereign debt, and, to prevent our economy from failing during this, since we are the most oil driven economy, they've been dumping oil to keep the price from reflecting reality.
There is literally zero chance that this entire communication thread (in the screenshots) was not staged. What this means, I don't know. It feels a lot like the "rug pull" theories that everybody talked about in late 2020.
Acktchully...
This is a pretty decent ingredients list, despite the hilarious "grapefruit compound" label with no actual grapefruit. For example, they didn't use brominated vegetable oil, which many "citrus" drinks use, and which is basically toxic waste. Also, they used sucrose, instead of pure fructose or high fructose corn syrup. Gum Arabic is basically a health supplement "super food", etc.
Speaking of, I was picking up some Chinese food last night and there was some half-Guacamolean Uber Eats girl waiting in front of me, so I asked her how many orders she picks up every day, but because she didn't understand English very well she thought I was asking how much money she makes, and she told me $180-$220 depending on the day, with Saturday being the highest. I'm just gonna go out on a limb and assume she's not working more than eight hours a day, because nobody who is younger than 35 works more than eight hours a day, these days. When you've got food delivery drivers making more than $20 an hour, then six figures is the new baseline for having any semblance of a decent life.
The communists in charge have really done a number on our economy, so that they can flatten the curve. They've mostly destroyed the livelihoods of everybody who worked hard for decades in order to get to where they are now. I traded my expensive car for a cheap car last fall, and I hate my new car so I was thinking about going back to buy a new version of my old car. Despite my income level, I cannot convince myself that it's OK to upgrade, because everything else is so expensive that we are constantly spending a super majority of our income every month, whereas, 2 years ago, we had the kind of savings rate that makes you consider buying a second house. Good thing we didn't. I also think it's foolish to assume that they are even close to done. They've just begun.
I know I've mentioned to you previously about how we bought a house despite my misgivings on the market conditions; from purely investment perspective, I don't have regrets about it, because, if the price goes down, we can sell it and buy something else for just as cheap, so it's always just kind of a wash. But from an operating expense standpoint, it's terrifying having any kind of mortgage at all, let alone one that feels expensive.
I came back and reread your comment 10 hours later and it's still the best comment.