A proposed digital dollar where the central bank (Federal Reserve Bank in the USA) would issue its own cryptocurrency and/or protocol. This would allow the international bankers, perhaps the major conspirators in the new world order conspiracy, to track many of your purchases in real time and share that information with government agencies. It was initially included in the first coronavirus spending bill. While the proposal was dropped from the final version of the bill, there is still great interest in fedcoin on Capitol Hill. Some progressives have embraced fedcoin as a way to provide Americans with a “universal basic income.”
Both the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee held hearings on fedcoin in June 2020. This was the first step toward making fedcoin a reality.
The U.S. Federal Reserve will not only issue its own cryptocurrency but will also make sure Americans use it. That’s the prediction of currency guru Doug Casey who has an uncanny record of being correct about economic and political trends. His latest book, Surviving Fedcoin: How to Protect Yourself (and Profit) from America’s Coming Currency Change, is a public bet that the U.S. government will issue its own bitcoin which Casey views as “the last arrow” in its money quiver.
How will the dynamic play out? He speculates,
“To start with, I suspect it’s going to be a parallel currency. Perhaps usable just within the U.S. which, in effect, would be a form of foreign exchange controls even more effective than the inability of Americans to open up foreign bank and brokerage accounts today [due to monetary control through FATCA]…I think it’s a near certainty that they’re going to do something like this and soon.”
Fedcoin would not be an actual coin. Instead, it would be a special account created and maintained for each American by the Federal Reserve. Each month, Fed employees could tap a few keys on a computer and — voila — each American would have dollars added to his Federal Reserve account. This is the 21st century equivalent of throwing money from helicopters.
Fedcoin could “crowd out” private cryptocurrencies. Also, it would limit the ability of private citizens to protect themselves from the Federal Reserve-caused decline in the dollar’s value.
A key argument for Fedcoin is the perceived need to stabilize a cryptocurrency by pegging it to traditionally-issued money. The pegging would not necessarily be voluntary. Mathematician and economist Sina Motamedi explains, “just like what happened with paper currencies, central banks will eventually step in to create their own crypto-currency protocols and forbid the use of any others. For simplicity, let’s call the central bank crypto-currency protocol BitDollar. Of course, these BitDollars would always be redeemable in regular dollars by the central bank, at least at first.”
JP Koning is more blunt. “Now is the time for the rebels to figure out how to create a stable-price version of bitcoin, before Darth Vader does it himself. Otherwise they may someday find themselves closing down their bitcoin startups in order to write code for the Empire.”
Fedcoin would not magically increase the number of available goods and services. What it would do is drive up prices. The damage this would do to middle- and lower-income Americans would dwarf any benefit they receive from their monthly “gift” from the Fed. The rise in prices could lead to Congress regularly increasing fedcoin payments to Americans. These increases would cause prices to keep rising even more until we face hyperinflation and a dollar crisis. Of course, we are already on the path to an economic crisis thanks to the Fed. Fedcoin will hasten and worsen the crisis.
Fedcoin poses a great threat to privacy. The Federal Reserve could know when fedcoin is used, who is using it, and what they use it for. This information could be shared with government agencies, such as the FBI or IRS.
The government could use the ability to know how Americans are spending fedcoin to limit our ability to purchase goods and services disfavored by politicians and bureaucrats. Anyone who doubts this should recall the Obama administration’s Operation Choke Point. Operation Choke Point involved financial regulators “alerting” banks that dealing with certain businesses, such as gun stores, would put the banks at “reputational risk” and could subject them to greater regulation.
Is it so hard to believe that the ability to track purchases would be used in the future to “discourage” individuals from buying guns, fatty foods, or tobacco, or from being customers of corporations whose CEOs are not considered “woke” by the thought police? Fedcoin could also be used to “encourage” individuals to patronize “green” business, thus fulfilling Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s goal of involving the Fed in the fight against climate change.
Fedcoin will threaten private cryptocurrencies, increase inflation, and give government new powers over our financial transactions. Fedcoin will also speed up destruction of the fiat money system. Whatever gain fedcoin may bring to average Americans will come at terrible cost to liberty and prosperity.
Doug Casey addresses America’s central banking system but the circumstances favoring a U.S. Fedcoin are mirrored throughout the Western world. He doesn’t buy the stability theory. The U.S. government is bankrupt with liabilities far exceeding assets. Casey explains,
Social Security is bankrupt… Forty-seven percent of the people in this country are net recipients of money from the government… Officially, one-third of all the US government’s assets are student loans; little-known fact. About $1 trillion worth of them.
The greenback is semi-stabilized by being “the world’s money” but its privileged status is being shaken by nations such as China and Russia who aggressively seek alternative mediums for global commerce. Casey believes that yesterday’s monetary controls – quantitative easing and interest rates at near zero or below – cannot sustain a bankrupt dollar with waning global relevance. Yesterday’s methods are “going to come to an end….What can they [the feds] do?”
What the feds can do is cryptocurrency; Fedcoin is what’s coming to a start. And, according to Casey, the primary benefit to government would be a centralization of supply and a transparency of demand (or transactions), which could centralize control of the economy to an unprecedented extent.
Why would people use the cryptocurrency? Fedcoin would almost certainly emerge as a parallel currency which would be adopted due to government requirements for its use in paying taxes or accessing entitlements such as Social Security. Increasingly, however, Fedcoin would become a tool to push toward a cashless society because physical money provides a privacy that prevents government control.
Casey focuses on the harm inflicted on the prosperity and freedom of average people. “[P]eople that are dealing in what’s called the underground economy are actually providing useful goods and services,” he observes. “[I]f the government extracts its 30 or 40 percent in taxes, which they will be able to do now with Fedcoin, [that] is going to hurt the economy, not help it. It will help the U.S. government, but that’s different from the economy in America.” The government would grow richer.
It would also become a more powerful engine of social control. In terms of privacy, Fedcoin could become the anti-cash. “If I’ve got a $100 bill in my wallet or a bunch of 10s and 20s,” Casey explains, “I can spend them on anything I want with anybody I want and nobody knows. With blockchain….[the feds] know exactly who’s getting the money and what it’s being spent for. It can be programmed [perhaps through a mechanism simiar to smart contracts] so that certain transactions can’t take place….So you are pretty well blocked in.”
Fat people could be prevented from buying sugar; gun owners could be cut off from ammunition; teenagers could be banned from buying beer, cigarettes or video games. The possibilities seem almost infinite. In doing so, Fedcoin would merely extend existing policies under food stamp programs that prohibit spending on alcohol, casinos or strip clubs. The efficiency would be so much greater, however, that the difference of degree would become one of kind. The government could “prohibit anything without even passing a law….If your Fedcoin smartphone or chip isn’t programmed to let you buy that, how are you going to get it?” Politically controversial items, like a gun registry, could become irrelevant.
Bitcoin and blockchain are equally liberating to the individual but revolutionary technologies also challenge the status quo. And, so, entrenched powers attempt to co-opt their use. Whether governments will succeed is not clear; they may be thwarted by their own incompetence or by the intrinsic decentralization of cryptocurrencies. It seems clear, however, that governments will make the attempt. And when they do, the best response is a better technology that sprints forward and leaves those who wish to ‘tame’ it coughing on its dust.
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