The Treasury and the Bank of England are consulting on a potential digital pound, or central bank digital currency (CBDC). The consultation is being launched because both HM Treasury and the Bank want to ensure that, in the future, the public will have access to ‘safe money’ that is convenient to use. People’s everyday lives are becoming more digital, and the new digital coin could also support private sector innovation.

The digital pound would be issued by the Bank of England and could be used by households and businesses for everyday payments in-store and online and would be interchangeable with cash and bank deposits, complementing cash.

Alex comments –

“CBDCs are an affront to the proud tradition of individual liberty enshrined in the British constitution since the Magna Carta. The pound is already digital and as such the only purpose of a CBDC is to increase control and surveillance of the population. A CBDC, owing to its programmatic nature will inevitably be combined with a ‘social credit score’, CCP style, to ‘encourage’ behaviours the political regime of the day think desirable. When money is limited in how and on what it can be spent, it ceases to be money and is more akin to a coupon.

In stark contrast to a CBDC is the world’s only decentralised, fair and open monetary protocol – Bitcoin. If the British government is serious about innovating its way out of the debt ridden mess it currently and inescapably finds itself in, it should embrace innovation once more and embrace bitcoin. Bitcoin is an open and digital monetary protocol whose architecture is inherently more performant, adaptable and capable than any CBDC can ever be – by definition. Owing to its open source and permissionless nature, it is free for the private sector to innovate on – just like the internet. In fact, it is instructive to think of Bitcoin as the internet of value, a means of communicating value securely and at the speed of light just as the internet allows us to communicate information at the speed of light.

Bitcoin is inevitable. It will be and already is adopted by free peoples all over this planet. Those nations who adopt it will be at the forefront of prosperity in the 21st century, whilst those who look to restrict and curtail their populations via CBDC will fade into insignificance and despair. BTC, not CBDC.”

Full article