Since 2019, the Bank for International Settlements — the world’s central bank of central banks — has been running dozens of technology projects through its Innovation Hub.
The complexity of this, at scale, remains mind boggling. The original internet development and implementation pales by comparison. And anyone who remembers will recall years of debugging and performance issues with the internet, especially during the 1990s. A key difference here is the control aspect of a system that seeks to “clear” everything based on a complex and evolving set of criteria. The internet never attempted to do this. It was/is an information highway, mainly concerned with connectivity and speed and throughput and not with algorithmic restrictions and unlimited reach. The question is not about what the technology can do. The question is the development horizon for something so massive. The Achilles heel of every large IT project ever attempted has been twofold: 1) Incomplete documentation(and understanding!) of system requirements at the outset on the part of the coders and 2) the inability to maintain project schedules due to the disruptive nature of changing and evolving requirements and project scope(obviously related to problem # 1). The result of these issues has caused very many IT projects to either fail or be significantly descoped. I was very close to many such projects in a 32 year career in aerospace. These problems were endemic to all such endeavors, regardless of industry or technology. The time factor cannot be understated, and is the reason for the old maxim of complex program and project management: “Everything is overcome by events”. This refers to the fact that any project that necessarily resembles “laying the track in front of the train” ends up, in the end, having little or no resemblance to the original vision. The destination becomes unknown and unknowable.
I believe the visionary billionaires and power apparatchiks that have envisioned this evil scheme have little to no understanding of the above. They are accustomed to a world where money seems to move mountains. This is not like building a data center. Replacing the entire global financial system with something that actually works by 2030 is simply unachievable on the time scale. What may be achievable is destroying the existing system.
Oh man, did you nail it. At the end of the day, it's a bunch of guys and a few gals in an office with a lot of cables. It's NOT a neat process. We used to gauge our contract life by the quality of the cubicle phone wiring...:))LOL!!
I worked on more than one project. Your two points were the two things I saw repeatedly. I discussed them with the programmers and system engineers I'd gotten to know. No one could ever stop the train or change the direction even slightly. Bureaucratic drag was amazing. It was like watching people spinning around the cube farm with no where to land cognitively. War Rooms and program descriptions did not help. Milestone charts substituted for real process diagrams with real outputs.
"These problems were endemic to all such endeavors, regardless of industry or technology. The time factor cannot be understated, and is the reason for the old maxim of complex program and project management: “Everything is overcome by events.” Fucking brilliant.
I will save your post forever. I saw it SO MANY TIMES and you have 100% validated my thinking of the last 30 insulting years. So many would-be IT project managers think they know everything... until the taxpayer has forked over MILLIONS for nothing.
I remember when training was available in DC for us to learn to program enough to send an e-mail... and when we clicked on the link to the WWW - there were like 2 lines of something not recognizable there. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test was all the rage back then too... what a bio-robot I was to keep my various jobs, but I couldn't hold the facade well enough to have a real "career."
And IBM almost died over it's addction to mainframe supporting government POs steadily arriving on their fax machines.. and then less and less. I was there when they finally embraced distributed processing and the AS400. What a shit hole of a company that was and still is. Too bad Jack Welch didn't drink that PolyChlorinatedBiphenol cocktail at that Hudson River rally that he swore was so safe. Meow.
"I believe the visionary billionaires and power apparatchiks that have envisioned this evil scheme have little to no understanding of the above."
Of course they have no understanding in this regard. They want a global centralised clearing house with instant settlement to bring forward the day when a series sequenttial cascading instantaneous settlements will result in "You will own nothing and be (allegedly) happy" being true for 99 percent of the population and the other 0.99 percent will supposedly be easily bribed into cooperation and submission - The Great Taking AKA The Great Reset.
They are so focussed on their desired outcome - i.e. that their globalised debt/fiat ponzi scheme must never come to an end - that they cannot see the end point being one of horrifying unforseen consequences where their high level technocratic slaves will answer their requests for a software patch up solution with a shrug of the shoulders -and a "Fucked if I know!"
Some imagine this trajectory continuing indefinitely — a world of total platform control over human economic behaviour, every transaction monitored, every contribution priced, every exchange mediated by a handful of centralised systems. It is a vision that should be taken seriously as an intention. It should not be taken seriously as a possibility.
It fails on three independent grounds:
The Social Logic Distributed systems generate workarounds. People route around control when control becomes intolerable. The history of the internet — and of every attempt to enclose a commons — demonstrates this consistently. You cannot enclose what is already everywhere.
The Technical Reality Large-scale centralised IT projects fail. Not occasionally, not exceptionally — structurally, repeatedly, at cost. The complexity required for total coordination exceeds what centralised systems can reliably manage. The brittleness is intrinsic, not incidental.
The Physics The energy required to run centralised data processing at the scale envisaged for total economic surveillance and control does not exist — and will not exist. The projections for AI infrastructure alone are already straining power grids. Distributed, localised processing is not merely ideologically preferable. It is thermodynamically inevitable. The physics points in the same direction as the social logic.
Well done! It proves that the only hope we have is to take down the belief in the climate scare and fight against the (superbly delusional) sustainability goals; show the absurdity in this - and convince responsible persons about it - which is probably impossible. So what will happen is that the Western civilisation will tumble into rubble in the course of a few years, because this system is not sustainable at all. In control theory there is a time constant, and in this case, the time constant is unfortunately so large that the catastrophe has arrived before the tide turns.
You are right. This is not sustainable in the short-term or even medium-term.
But the Global Financial Elites aren't really concerned about sustainability in a strict sense. They sure don't care if they fuck us up in the now, if brings them closer to their greened planet with absolute freedom for the wealthy satanists. No more cowering in their castles and on their orgy islands.
What they are counting on, is a global population of 1 billion by 2050, or sooner if they can figure out a way to do it.
Then all the vast transaction volumes that exist now, go way down... And the survivors will all be cyborgs with only tokenized wealth that can be erased or moved with a few clicks on a keyboard, or at the whim of an AI personality.
“The power is vested with he who translates the abstract ethic into a standard.” That sentence is the entire argument, and it deserves to be read slowly.
What this piece maps architecturally, I study behaviorally. The unified ledger isn’t just a financial infrastructure story — it’s a cognitive authority story. Every layer described here (classification, compliance, actuation) is also a layer of what psychologists call choice architecture: the deliberate structuring of an environment so that certain behaviors become frictionless and others become impossible. The difference from traditional regulation is decisive. Law can be contested. A payment that simply doesn’t clear cannot.
The Epstein-Ito connection is the most unsettling thread in this piece. Not because of what it proves, but because of what it reveals about where the idea of locality of money — currency restricted to designated uses — has been sitting quietly, waiting for the infrastructure to catch up. That’s not a feature being added to the system. That’s the system’s original design intent finally becoming technically executable.
The question I keep returning to: at what point does the individual internalize the ledger’s standards as their own values? That’s the final layer the architecture doesn’t need to build — because behavioral compliance eventually becomes cognitive compliance. The surveillance doesn’t need to be eternal if the conditioning is thorough enough.
This is why the counter-architecture matters as much as the critique. Public blockchains — originally built for the individual — remain the only programmable infrastructure where the standard-setter is not a single actor with a compliance agenda. That distinction is worth defending, and worth building on.
The BIS unified ledger vision and x402 are coming from opposite directions toward a similar destination. The BIS approach is top-down, central bank coordinated, permissioned, and built around sovereign control of the settlement layer. x402 is bottom-up, open source, permissionless, and built around stablecoin settlement on public blockchains.
The interesting question is whether they converge or compete. If CBDC infrastructure and x402-style machine payment protocols end up coexisting, we'll likely see fragmentation based on use case: central bank ledgers for regulated finance and cross-border sovereign flows, x402 for the autonomous agent economy. That fragmentation might actually be stable, since neither system is well-suited to the other's primary use case.
It’s not really destroying the system so much as extending it. Fiat currency should die as it hyper inflates out. But a CBDC allows them to kick the can down long enough to imprison all biological humanity as well as its animals and plants. Once we’re trapped in, we’ll never get out.
An excerpt from my first report I wrote for family and friends to read in September 2020 - Antony P. Mueller who is a German economist living in Brazil, and who wrote the article ‘from lockdowns to the great reset’ feels anarcho-capitalism is the way America and the world should go. He says that in the face of the possibilities that come with the new technologies of surveillance and control by governments, the choice in favour of anarcho-capitalism is a moral duty. Property, freedom and non-aggression are its first principles. Taking away power from the state is a moral necessity
The complexity of this, at scale, remains mind boggling. The original internet development and implementation pales by comparison. And anyone who remembers will recall years of debugging and performance issues with the internet, especially during the 1990s. A key difference here is the control aspect of a system that seeks to “clear” everything based on a complex and evolving set of criteria. The internet never attempted to do this. It was/is an information highway, mainly concerned with connectivity and speed and throughput and not with algorithmic restrictions and unlimited reach. The question is not about what the technology can do. The question is the development horizon for something so massive. The Achilles heel of every large IT project ever attempted has been twofold: 1) Incomplete documentation(and understanding!) of system requirements at the outset on the part of the coders and 2) the inability to maintain project schedules due to the disruptive nature of changing and evolving requirements and project scope(obviously related to problem # 1). The result of these issues has caused very many IT projects to either fail or be significantly descoped. I was very close to many such projects in a 32 year career in aerospace. These problems were endemic to all such endeavors, regardless of industry or technology. The time factor cannot be understated, and is the reason for the old maxim of complex program and project management: “Everything is overcome by events”. This refers to the fact that any project that necessarily resembles “laying the track in front of the train” ends up, in the end, having little or no resemblance to the original vision. The destination becomes unknown and unknowable.
I believe the visionary billionaires and power apparatchiks that have envisioned this evil scheme have little to no understanding of the above. They are accustomed to a world where money seems to move mountains. This is not like building a data center. Replacing the entire global financial system with something that actually works by 2030 is simply unachievable on the time scale. What may be achievable is destroying the existing system.
Oh man, did you nail it. At the end of the day, it's a bunch of guys and a few gals in an office with a lot of cables. It's NOT a neat process. We used to gauge our contract life by the quality of the cubicle phone wiring...:))LOL!!
I worked on more than one project. Your two points were the two things I saw repeatedly. I discussed them with the programmers and system engineers I'd gotten to know. No one could ever stop the train or change the direction even slightly. Bureaucratic drag was amazing. It was like watching people spinning around the cube farm with no where to land cognitively. War Rooms and program descriptions did not help. Milestone charts substituted for real process diagrams with real outputs.
"These problems were endemic to all such endeavors, regardless of industry or technology. The time factor cannot be understated, and is the reason for the old maxim of complex program and project management: “Everything is overcome by events.” Fucking brilliant.
I will save your post forever. I saw it SO MANY TIMES and you have 100% validated my thinking of the last 30 insulting years. So many would-be IT project managers think they know everything... until the taxpayer has forked over MILLIONS for nothing.
I remember when training was available in DC for us to learn to program enough to send an e-mail... and when we clicked on the link to the WWW - there were like 2 lines of something not recognizable there. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test was all the rage back then too... what a bio-robot I was to keep my various jobs, but I couldn't hold the facade well enough to have a real "career."
And IBM almost died over it's addction to mainframe supporting government POs steadily arriving on their fax machines.. and then less and less. I was there when they finally embraced distributed processing and the AS400. What a shit hole of a company that was and still is. Too bad Jack Welch didn't drink that PolyChlorinatedBiphenol cocktail at that Hudson River rally that he swore was so safe. Meow.
"I believe the visionary billionaires and power apparatchiks that have envisioned this evil scheme have little to no understanding of the above."
Of course they have no understanding in this regard. They want a global centralised clearing house with instant settlement to bring forward the day when a series sequenttial cascading instantaneous settlements will result in "You will own nothing and be (allegedly) happy" being true for 99 percent of the population and the other 0.99 percent will supposedly be easily bribed into cooperation and submission - The Great Taking AKA The Great Reset.
They are so focussed on their desired outcome - i.e. that their globalised debt/fiat ponzi scheme must never come to an end - that they cannot see the end point being one of horrifying unforseen consequences where their high level technocratic slaves will answer their requests for a software patch up solution with a shrug of the shoulders -and a "Fucked if I know!"
Some imagine this trajectory continuing indefinitely — a world of total platform control over human economic behaviour, every transaction monitored, every contribution priced, every exchange mediated by a handful of centralised systems. It is a vision that should be taken seriously as an intention. It should not be taken seriously as a possibility.
It fails on three independent grounds:
The Social Logic Distributed systems generate workarounds. People route around control when control becomes intolerable. The history of the internet — and of every attempt to enclose a commons — demonstrates this consistently. You cannot enclose what is already everywhere.
The Technical Reality Large-scale centralised IT projects fail. Not occasionally, not exceptionally — structurally, repeatedly, at cost. The complexity required for total coordination exceeds what centralised systems can reliably manage. The brittleness is intrinsic, not incidental.
The Physics The energy required to run centralised data processing at the scale envisaged for total economic surveillance and control does not exist — and will not exist. The projections for AI infrastructure alone are already straining power grids. Distributed, localised processing is not merely ideologically preferable. It is thermodynamically inevitable. The physics points in the same direction as the social logic.
https://www.outersite.org/the-exit-is-already-here/
I agree with everything you are saying at 8 billion people. Would it still be true for 1 billion people?
Well done! It proves that the only hope we have is to take down the belief in the climate scare and fight against the (superbly delusional) sustainability goals; show the absurdity in this - and convince responsible persons about it - which is probably impossible. So what will happen is that the Western civilisation will tumble into rubble in the course of a few years, because this system is not sustainable at all. In control theory there is a time constant, and in this case, the time constant is unfortunately so large that the catastrophe has arrived before the tide turns.
You are right. This is not sustainable in the short-term or even medium-term.
But the Global Financial Elites aren't really concerned about sustainability in a strict sense. They sure don't care if they fuck us up in the now, if brings them closer to their greened planet with absolute freedom for the wealthy satanists. No more cowering in their castles and on their orgy islands.
What they are counting on, is a global population of 1 billion by 2050, or sooner if they can figure out a way to do it.
Then all the vast transaction volumes that exist now, go way down... And the survivors will all be cyborgs with only tokenized wealth that can be erased or moved with a few clicks on a keyboard, or at the whim of an AI personality.
Here is my acronymic challenge to Carstens: If you can achieve a healthy BMI, I will give serious thought to your CBDCs.
No shit. That was bariatric patient for sure there...
https://x.com/MarkKaposvari/status/1594748813188677635
“The power is vested with he who translates the abstract ethic into a standard.” That sentence is the entire argument, and it deserves to be read slowly.
What this piece maps architecturally, I study behaviorally. The unified ledger isn’t just a financial infrastructure story — it’s a cognitive authority story. Every layer described here (classification, compliance, actuation) is also a layer of what psychologists call choice architecture: the deliberate structuring of an environment so that certain behaviors become frictionless and others become impossible. The difference from traditional regulation is decisive. Law can be contested. A payment that simply doesn’t clear cannot.
The Epstein-Ito connection is the most unsettling thread in this piece. Not because of what it proves, but because of what it reveals about where the idea of locality of money — currency restricted to designated uses — has been sitting quietly, waiting for the infrastructure to catch up. That’s not a feature being added to the system. That’s the system’s original design intent finally becoming technically executable.
The question I keep returning to: at what point does the individual internalize the ledger’s standards as their own values? That’s the final layer the architecture doesn’t need to build — because behavioral compliance eventually becomes cognitive compliance. The surveillance doesn’t need to be eternal if the conditioning is thorough enough.
This is why the counter-architecture matters as much as the critique. Public blockchains — originally built for the individual — remain the only programmable infrastructure where the standard-setter is not a single actor with a compliance agenda. That distinction is worth defending, and worth building on.
— CJ Carswell | Blockchain Psychology
The BIS unified ledger vision and x402 are coming from opposite directions toward a similar destination. The BIS approach is top-down, central bank coordinated, permissioned, and built around sovereign control of the settlement layer. x402 is bottom-up, open source, permissionless, and built around stablecoin settlement on public blockchains.
The interesting question is whether they converge or compete. If CBDC infrastructure and x402-style machine payment protocols end up coexisting, we'll likely see fragmentation based on use case: central bank ledgers for regulated finance and cross-border sovereign flows, x402 for the autonomous agent economy. That fragmentation might actually be stable, since neither system is well-suited to the other's primary use case.
It’s not really destroying the system so much as extending it. Fiat currency should die as it hyper inflates out. But a CBDC allows them to kick the can down long enough to imprison all biological humanity as well as its animals and plants. Once we’re trapped in, we’ll never get out.
Did he describe how to go about doing that little trick?
I know it's not lost on you but by deciding the ethic and gating behaviour they consider themselves God.
The Rothschilds are very very far from God. Just people with shitty ideas.
An excerpt from my first report I wrote for family and friends to read in September 2020 - Antony P. Mueller who is a German economist living in Brazil, and who wrote the article ‘from lockdowns to the great reset’ feels anarcho-capitalism is the way America and the world should go. He says that in the face of the possibilities that come with the new technologies of surveillance and control by governments, the choice in favour of anarcho-capitalism is a moral duty. Property, freedom and non-aggression are its first principles. Taking away power from the state is a moral necessity