State digital currencies and private property

“We tend to create an equivalent to cash but there is a huge difference.  Thus, we have no clue who are now using 100 USD or 100 Mexican pesos.

The main difference between cash and CBDC is that central banks will get absolute control over rules and standards that would define the use of CBDCs; and we`ll also get the technology for ensuring its compliance.

These two aspects are extremely important and they constitute a great difference with what cash is”.

These are words of Augustin Karstens, CEO of BIS in his report dated by October, 2020, on “Cross-border payments. Vision for the future” And if you listen to the whole report, then all illusions about CBDC will disappear.

But let us start from the assumption that we are now talking about digital currencies issued by states, as most of other currencies are not centralized. In order to start talking about digital currencies, we should remember BTC – the first one to reach the status of a decentralized digital coin because of combination of many technologies.

In other words, we should not ignore this prospective in any CBDC analysis as this distracts us from the issue that was perfectly considered and solved by Satoshi Nakamoto. And this, according to coinmarketrate.com, was nothing but the creation of a decentralized currency that would not depend on some third party (p2p).

This fact should become the fist wake-up call for all those who want to get what CBDCs really are. At fisrt sight, it is a copy of the original but a bad copy, just a surrogate, as it has inherited none pf the features that make BTC a boy wonder in human history.

This is not an essential evolution of money but the total control over private property.  The introduction of state digital currencies will make it possible to implemets one of the possibilities that digital currencies carry, namely the programmability of money.

Programmable money allows you to endow money with special characteristics, depending on its recipient, space or time. For example, this will allow you to stimulate behavior based on monetary rewards (if you use green energy, your money is worth 0.01% more) or, if necessary, by directly purchasing behavior (we give you money if you buy recycled items), since money changes depending on these variables defined by the system administrator.

Public digital currencies will encourage all kinds of social engineering measures under political pretext. Therefore, the analysis of the digital euro, which is not considered from a commercial point of view or even from the point of view of the financial system, should be analyzed from a cultural point of view, from the point of view of the principles and values on which society is based.

The introduction of a state-owned digital currency means the normalization of society, when the elite, understood as a group of people managing the managed, dictates the rules that will govern society as a whole. And not from the point of view of the legal framework, but from the point of view of micromanaging the final behavior, relying more and more on artificial intelligence tools.

Whose wealth does one person ultimately own?

But the question that everyone should answer before talking about the digital euro, dollar, etc., lies in our culture and values that society has endowed itself with since time immemorial.

What is in the first place – an individual right, or a collective right to their private property?

Let’s put it more clearly: what a family has saved by saving all its members without going on vacation, always buying a lower-quality product, and not a higher one, in order to postpone for tomorrow, is this effort something that, say, officials of the European Central Bank decide in accordance with their economic calculations?

Public digital currencies will have tools for micro-segmentation of the population and redistribution of wealth, in accordance with their beliefs and understanding.

The problem is that digital currencies can be easily managed with the help of tools that, thanks to their traceability, allow using all kinds of social engineering measures under political pretext at the moment.

CBDC as a new tax tool

Today, as producers and generators of wealth in the private sector, we are constantly being held back in creating wealth due to the presence of more and more new taxes.

Any company, the ultimate generator of wealth in the capitalist system, faces an increasing number of direct and indirect costs that have nothing to do with its ability to negotiate or business calculation, but are imposed by external agents, in this case the state.

VAT or taxes on electricity or labor are in themselves obstacles to wealth creation. When the government realizes that it needs to increase tax collection, it usually raises the tax brackets as a way to increase government tax revenue.

When taxes are raised, the wealth producer must generate more revenue, cut costs, or take on less profit, if not loss, for external costs that have nothing to do with his management.

The introduction of CBDC will give system administrators a new taxation tool, as they will have the means to micro-segment the population and redistribute wealth, in accordance with their beliefs and understanding.

If we already have tax inspectors promoting measures to prevent the freedom of movement of YouTubers and their trips wherever they want, then what policy, in our opinion, will they consider, having the opportunity to program money depending on a variety of variables? Will they offer to make it mandatory to pay taxes not to a YouTuber whom they cannot hold accountable, but to a user whom they can identify?

They will do it with the help of artificial intelligence.

The onset of cold weather in Europe leads to a five-fold increase in electricity prices. The European Commission declares a regional emergency and decides that all European citizens should make an individual contribution to help those with fewer resources.

This contribution is determined in accordance with variables such as the % of purchases made locally or the use of pollutants in everyday life, since they, as the still existing mass media constantly repeat, contributed to the increase in energy prices.

The presence of an increasing amount of data in the digital eurocontext makes it possible to track people’s behavior in an unprecedented way, and at the same time extract information everywhere about how we economically relate to each other.

These transactions will be analyzed by various artificial intelligence systems that will offer forecasts based on the analyzed data, and in response to the politician’s question about how to reduce inequality between companies, the system will suggest “that with a probability of %, offering an additional payment for consumption in spaces other than these, the difference between companies will be reduced by 1%.”

In other words, there are more and more artificial intelligence agents in society who provide answers to emerging questions based on accumulated data, extracted information and generated knowledge.

The decision-maker can always know what questions to ask so that the artificial intelligence system can give the right answer, and thereby delegate the decision to an artificial agent: “I didn’t make the decision.”

They don’t joke about state digital currencies

If the pandemic is something taught us, it’s that if each home was equipped with electronic locks, the relevant fee for a single minute would not hesitate making a decision about the mandatory closure on the basis of multiple variables (area of health, the number of infected per capita, the frequency of cases of COVID in the ICU, etc.).

If we know that this would be plausible in the conditions of our life, then what can we expect from a world in which the ruling class has received tools to microcontrol any operations that we conduct?

Some of these reflections are reflections that any ordinary citizen, and especially political parties, should make before delving into any aspect of the digitalization of money. The point is not in technology, but in the fact that all the wealth created by the joint efforts of thousands of economic agents in the market making decisions is controlled and can be canceled by the ruling elite.

It’s not about efficiency, but about the freedom of a person to accumulate his efforts and labor into capital that allows him to grow through investment. This is not about fighting those who have less, but about social engineering in the service of the ruling elite to fulfill its desires at the cost of our small daily efforts.

The digital euro, like any other state-owned digital currency, means the end of private property as such. It offers tools to disable people’s property as simply as programming a group of individuals’ money, and always with the justification of artificial intelligence tools that will prompt such behavior.

They will pass it off as the common good, the redistribution of wealth, the fight against fraud, if not for efficiency, when in fact it hides an instrument of absolute control over the rules and regulations that will determine its use.

That is why, as Agustin Carstens, CEO of BIS, rightly said, with whose words we started our conversation, and which is now worth remembering:

“The key difference between today’s money is that it is an instrument of absolute control over the rules and regulations that will determine its use.”