Adam Back, the Blockstream CEO, believes CBDCs are worse than bank accounts, describing it as “systems of control”. He asserted for Bitcoin is an apolitical, bearer, and unseizable money.
Back said the digitized version of fiat will be worse than paper cash, worse than stablecoins, and much worse than Bitcoin. The CEO, back in 2019, had touted Diem – Facebook’s Libra – as competition for online banking but poses no threat to Bitcoin. Back’s latest statements come in the backdrop of Samson Mow’s discussion on CBDCs at the Asian Leadership Conference.
The former Blockchain chief strategy officer said the motivation around the CBDCs is not to facilitate transactions confidentially. Mow outlined the need to go back to apolitical money. He believes the best way would be to move forward by adopting Bitcoin as money, like what El Salvador has done. Mow said the central banks could do it correctly if they implemented a CBDC that was private and had a way to transact confidentially. But it’s not for CBDC. He cited Canada as an example and highlighted a job posting looking for engineers to build a system, a CBDC that is private, but not too private.
One country that has risen with its CBDC is China. Beijing has been working on its digital yuan project since 2014. The People’s Bank of China wants to digitalize banknotes and coins in circulation. It should be noted that the Chinese market is already very advanced in cashless payments and the digital yuan would just speed up the process. Yan Xiao, project lead for digital trade at the World Economic Forum, had said the use of cash is decreasing and cash would eventually be replaced by something in a digital format.
