How to Fix CBDCs (And Why They Won’t)
Central banks are building programmable currencies. The critical question is: who programs them?
If the state controls the code, they can embed expiration dates, restrict spending to approved vendors, and bar you from saving. This is the architecture of financial authoritarianism, sold to you as ‘innovation’.
But this future is not inevitable. We can fix CBDCs by inverting their core principle. The programmability must belong to you. Used correctly, a CBDC wallet can be designed to break the state’s currency monopoly and secure your financial privacy.
The blueprint requires five non-negotiable fixes. Their coordinated rejection will prove that control, not efficiency, was always the objective.
Part 1: Invert Programmability
The most dangerous feature of CBDCs is also the most misunderstood. The current model gives the programmability to the authorities. The fix is to mandate that programmability belongs to the user.
Imagine a CBDC wallet that acts as your intelligent financial agent. You could program it to automatically manage your store of value. For instance, the moment your salary arrives, your wallet could instantly convert the central bank currency into a synthetic equivalent of gold, a basket of assets, or a fund of major foreign currencies.
Then, when you go to buy coffee, the wallet would automatically and seamlessly reverse the process — converting the necessary amount of your chosen asset back into the central bank currency to complete the transaction, all in a fraction of a second.
In this model, the CBDC is demoted to its proper role: a neutral, efficient medium of exchange. You, the user, retain absolute sovereignty over your store of value. This breaks the state’s currency monopoly by introducing healthy competition. If the central bank pursues inflationary policy, citizens can easily exit the national currency without ever leaving the digital payment network.
Why They Will Reject It: Authorities will claim this enables tax evasion and money laundering. But this is a smokescreen. These acts are already illegal, and enforcement occurs through investigation and legal process, not pre-emptive control. Wallet programmability doesn’t change your tax obligations; it prevents the state from automatically deducting or restricting funds without due process. The real objection is that user-controlled wallets prevent silent, protocol-level restrictions — the kind that don’t require a public debate, a new law, or a judge’s signature.
Part 2: Mandate Functional Separation
User sovereignty is meaningless if every transaction is watched. The second fix ensures privacy is baked into the system’s architecture, not just promised in its policy.
Today’s CBDC designs point toward a centralised ledger, giving the central bank a real-time window into every financial life. The alternative is to mandate functional separation through a tiered clearing model.
This isn’t a new idea. It’s exactly how cross-border payments already work. When money moves between countries, the central banks of the US and UK don’t see every individual payment. They only see the net flows between them at the end of the day.
We must apply this same principle domestically:
Transaction Layer: Your local bank or wallet provider handles your payments. This data stays local.
Clearing Layer: Using modern cryptography like zero-knowledge proofs — which can verify the accuracy of net positions without revealing a single underlying transaction — institutions calculate what they owe each other. This technology is operational in systems already processing billions of transactions.
Settlement Layer: The central bank receives only these verified, anonymised net positions. It settles the balances, ensuring system-wide stability, without ever knowing who bought a book, donated to a cause, or paid a friend.
This architecture preserves every legitimate benefit. The central bank can manage liquidity and prevent systemic crises. What it cannot do is build a panopticon.
Why They Will Reject It: They will argue that ‘systemic risk monitoring’ and ‘fighting financial crime’ require seeing everything. This is false. Systemic risk is about concentrations and aggregate flows, visible at the net position level. Crime fighting happens at the transaction layer, where compliance is performed, and through lawful investigation. Their objection reveals the true goal: not safety, but surveillance of perfectly lawful behavior they could never observe through legal means.
Part 3: Preserve Cash
But architectural privacy alone isn’t sufficient. If the digital system is the only option, these protections can be gradually eroded. The entire control architecture requires one foundational condition: cash must be eliminated or rendered impractical. Without it, the digital system is optional. With it, it must compete on merit.
Therefore, the most important legislative fix is the permanent, legally enforced preservation of physical cash. This isn’t about nostalgia; it’s about maintaining a viable exit. We must mandate that all physical retailers accept cash, that essential services and government agencies do the same, and that banks maintain robust cash infrastructure.
Cash is the circuit-breaker. If the digital system becomes surveillant, restrictive, or simply fails, citizens must have a frictionless escape. The ability to convert digital money into physical cash at will is the ultimate check on digital overreach. It ensures that participation is a choice — not a compulsion.
Why They Will Reject It: They will cite the costs of cash and its use by criminals. But the cost of building a digital panopticon is far greater. And the vast majority of money laundering occurs through the banking system despite comprehensive surveillance, proving that visibility doesn’t prevent crime — investigation does. The real reason is that cash is the one form of money that operates outside any digital control loop. You can’t program it, track it in real-time, or score its users. Its existence makes every digital control mechanism optional.
Part 4: Make Failure Costly
For over a century, a predictable pattern has held: central banks fail to prevent a crisis, and that failure becomes the justification for granting them more power and more surveillance. This ‘crisis ratchet’ creates a perverse incentive where failure is rewarded.
The fix is automatic accountability for objective, measurable failure. If inflation breaches the central bank’s target by a significant margin (say, five percentage points for twelve months), automatic consequences should trigger: a loss of certain discretionary powers, a mandatory reduction of the balance sheet, and ineligibility for board reappointment.
The 2020-2023 inflation surge is a perfect case study. US inflation hit 9%, the UK hit 11%, and the Eurozone hit 10%. Under this framework, automatic consequences would have triggered. In reality, no accountability followed — instead, we saw expanded mandates and calls for new ‘climate’ tools.
Success in preventing crisis is invisible; failure is highly visible. The incentive structure must be reversed so that failure triggers contraction, not expansion.
Why They Will Reject It: They will claim this ‘removes flexibility in a crisis’. But their ‘flexibility’ has been a one-way ratchet for 130 years, and it has only led to crisis scenarios, the next worse than the current. True stability comes from credible constraints, not unlimited discretion. If a genuine, unprecedented emergency requires extraordinary measures, let Parliament grant them explicitly through temporary legislation, forcing democratic accountability rather than permanent technocratic expansion.
Part 5: Prohibit Monopoly
Even with these protections, if the CBDC becomes the only realistic digital payment option, it creates a functional monopoly. Technical safeguards can be eroded over time if there is no competition.
We must legally protect competing systems — commercial bank money, private payment apps, and cryptocurrencies. No government should be allowed to require CBDC for transactions, disadvantage alternatives through regulation, or force conversion.
Competitive pressure is the only force that will relentlessly drive the CBDC to be more efficient, more private, and more user-friendly. It ensures the digital public square has multiple gates, not just one controlled by the state.
Why They Will Reject It: They will invoke ‘interoperability’ and ‘international standards’, arguing that a unified system is more efficient. But this is how monopolies are built. True interoperability requires neutral protocols, not a CBDC-centric architecture that gradually forces competitors to adopt its surveillance features to remain connected. Their objection reveals a preference for monopoly over merit.
The Falsification Test
This five-part framework creates a perfect falsification test. It presents an impossible dilemma for CBDC advocates.
If efficiency, inclusion, and stability are the genuine goals, these five provisions achieve them. The technology exists. The models are proven. There is no technical or economic barrier — only a political one. Therefore, the test is binary:
Support CBDC deployment with these five fixes. If they are accepted, the public narrative is validated.
But they WILL be rejected.
They will be rejected with excuses about complexity, coordination, and operational necessity. This coordinated rejection, across jurisdictions and institutions, will be the evidence. It will prove, definitively, that the goal was never efficiency. It was always control.
The Window Is Closing
The consultations are theater. The pilot programs are deployment infrastructure. Project mBridge at the BIS is already moving real value between central banks. By the time national legislatures hold a final vote, the technical standards will be set, the network dependencies will be locked in, and reversal will be framed as impossible.
The time to act is not when the system is live, but now, before the code is finalised.
For Citizens: Demand your representatives support these five principles in any CBDC framework. Make them state their position on the record.
For Legislators: Introduce amendments that mandate user programmability, functional separation, and cash preservation. Force the opposition to explain, in public and on record, why these safeguards are ‘unnecessary’.
For Technologists: Build the proof-of-concept. Demonstrate that a private, user-controlled wallet is not just possible, but superior.
Perhaps the future of money is digital.
But it must remain free.
Quit trying to improve junk. Cash is king, not digital monstrosities.
Integral to and actually the core reason for globalist forced changes is to steal everything, from everyone everywhere including freedom, free speech, health and life itself.
Tokenization and CBD’s are tools to achieve their unfathomable needs at humanity’s expense.