If he asked a cypherpunk in the 1990s about his worst scenario for the future of money, something very close to the digital currencies of the Central Bank (CBDC) would probably have described. The fight against financial surveillance was fundamental for Bitcoin’s first instigators, and the CBDCs go against everything they represent: privacy, decentralization and individual sovereignty.
In “The Cypherpunk manifesto” (1993), Eric Hughes argued that cryptography should protect individual freedoms, not to be a tool for centralized control. Bitcoin, born of concerns about financial censorship and systemic instability, represents an alternative to traditional monetary systems. While central banks generally operate with a certain degree of independence of governments, CBDC raises questions about financial privacy and the potential of greater state supervision about transactions. As such, CBDC are Bitcoin’s antithesis.
CBDC, which are adopted and tested throughout the world, have been marketed as a tool for financial inclusion. But, for most bitcoiners, they are a Trojan horse to reinforce state control instead of granting people a true financial property. They represent the exact type of Big Brother system that Cypherpunks fought to prevent.
That is why Adam Back, one of the most influential figures of all time in Bitcoin, the inventor of HashCash and the founder of Blockstream, has expressed the dangers of the CBDC and the role of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the promotion in the promotion them. He sees this for what it is: a power game of global elites, many of which are badly opposed, or actively oppose Bitcoin. If Bitcoin was designed to remove control from the state, CBDC are designed to return it.
According to Back, a speaker in Consensus Hong Kong, CBDCS did not arise as a natural evolution of money; They were a reactionary movement by the regulators, a panic response to the threat of the digital currency of the private sector. He pointed to Libra from Facebook as the moment that scared the central banks, when we updated to talk on Google Meets.
“The regulators saw that a company with more than one billion users could launch corporate electronic effective, and realized that they could lose control. Therefore, they tried to advance their own electronic effective government,” he said. “But the problem is that the problem is, it is systemically impossible for them to create something that the average person would like to use because they have ideas so oriented to control.”
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Back is not just criticizing the CBDC in theory; He is actively building an alternative. In the last year, Blockstream has launched the Jade Plus hardware wallet, a Bitcoin only hardware wallet designed for users aware of privacy, which offers an open source alternative to Ledger and Trezor, and Greenlight, a lightning lightning AAA -The service that simplifies Bitcoin payments for developers.
Blockstream has also expanded Bitcoin’s financial infrastructure with new institutional degree investment funds, which offers Bitcoin regulated financial products for high -level network investors. Layer 2 scale solutions are also advanced through the liquid network, a bitcoin side chain that allows faster and more confidential transactions. These initiatives are based on the Blockstream long -standing satellite network, which allows Bitcoin transactions without internet access, and their mining operations, which strengthen decentralization.
Together, they reflect a clear vision: a financial system based on Bitcoin independent of traditional banks and centralized authorities.
Some could argue that state participation in Bitcoin is a growing concern. With Bitcoin ETF winning traction, discussions around a strategic bitcoin reserve of the US ? Isn’t it individual self-opposition and self-obeying all the point?
Back, a 54 -year -old British cryptographer, who speaks with a quiet humility that denies his influence, remains without problems. Hydrous. Happy. In his lane. Focused. Flourishing.
“The ETFs and other investment products built around Bitcoin only give people a simpler way to start,” he said, with the great resolution of a man on a mission.
“Hopefully, they take some physical bitcoin later and learn to store it. What matters is that a good number of people keep Bitcoin in their carrier electronic cash format, so it does not concentrate too much on ETF or institutions , and that is still the case today: most are in individual property, some in cold storage, some in exchanges and things like that. “
While it is difficult to predict exactly how the balance between Autocustody and institutional holdings will change over time, Back believes that the broader trend is clear.
He has been involved in Bitcoin enough time to see how adoption develops. His well -documented email exchanges with Satoshi Nakamoto suggest that he could understand Bitcoin’s trajectory better than anyone. The way he sees it has expanded the best Bitcoin fúnel. Of course, ETFs and institutional funds lead Bitcoin to the mainstream, but ultimately, this only means that more people will be attracted to the Bitcoin network. In essence, Bitcoin is still opting, resistant to the government’s censorship and interference free. CBDC are exactly the opposite.
Currently, 44 countries are in the pilot stage of CBDC, according to a tracker of the Atlantic Council. Some claim to preserve privacy, but the reality is that these are poorly veiled efforts to maintain centralized power over money. For a while, the impulse of digital currencies backed by the State seemed inevitable, until the political opposition in the United States made it a battlefield problem. Reflecting the strong republican turn against CBDC in the last 18 months, Trump recently announced that it would prohibit the development of CBDC in the United States.
Back points out this as a sign that the tide is changing in favor of Bitcoin. “Several people in the Trump cabinet are among Bitcoin’s experience with relevant experience, so we will perhaps see an improvement because the participants are partly to date those who would probably have preferred that Bitcoin did not exist,” he said.
He referred to the former president of the SEC, Gary Gensler, who, despite his background teaching blockchain at MIT, adopted an aggressive position against the industry. “Hopefully there is a more common sense and regulations with a vision of the future and the recognition of individual rights to self-obey,” Back said.
Financial surveillance
In the back, not only wants Bitcoin to win, but he wants CBDC to die. And he believes that CBDC are not just a monetary problem: they are part of a broader agenda of financial surveillance, social credit systems and state control. “The interference of social networks in the elections in the United States and the expression of interest in CBDC in Europe, where they are clearly envious for Chinese social credit scores and things like those that are very dystopic, some of the things with those that the Wef has been coming out. . They really don’t sound good. “
The Wef, in particular, has led the load on CBDC and other centralized control mechanisms. “I mean, they have generally been in favor of all kinds of illiberal things such as CBDC and the loss of individual men in power. I mean, they will go out with trial balloons that sound horrendous and then eliminate their own tweets.”
It is not wrong. The Wef has a story of floating controversial ideas and scrubbing them when it hits the reaction. As just an example, in 2021, they tweet that pandemic was “silently improving cities” by reducing air pollution. The suggestion that the blockades were positive net for the environment found outrage, so Wef eliminated the tweet.
Blockstream is betting that people and high value institutions do not want their assets to catch in a CBDC system sent by Wef controlled by centralized entities. That is why they have launched a set of institutional degree bitcoin funds designed for those who seek to preserve their wealth in a system that cannot be arbitrarily manipulated. Recent events have only reinforced why this matters so much. The collapse of FTX, Celsius and other cryptographic companies in 2022, has further eroded confidence in centralized institutions, either in traditional finances or cryptography.
However, Sam Bankman, FTX founder who worried little about individual privacy and was proudly anti-decantalization, is not similar to Sam Bankman. Nor does Alex Mashinsky look like anything, Ceo de Celsius who plays recklessly with user funds. Back is a cypherpunk that continues to execute in the master plan to ensure that Bitcoin unfolds exactly as Satoshi intended: as a decentralized monetary network, without censorship and resistant to censorship.
For him, this is more than a battle between Bitcoin and CBDC. It’s about freedom. “It is a rebirth for Cypherpunk’s thinking,” Back told me, explaining that once people are attracted to Bitcoin, they begin to understand their deepest implications, and see what it means for privacy, sovereignty and control . He added that when the Original Cypherpunk manifesto was written in the 1990s, its authors may not have completely anticipated how deeply digital technology eventually permeates all aspects of our lives.
“Then, in a way, the [Manifesto’s] Concerns are even more pressing now because everything is online, “he said, the laser eyes sparkling.
