I may be wrong but I don't see calling out cbdcs and terrorism as comparable, i.e, as a Trojan horse or pretext to strip freedoms, but I question the motive, as politics is politics. IMO, a better comparison might be the use of the term 'pro-crypto' given to this US administration. I don't think I'd have much difficulty selling the idea here that shoe-horning the public into digital payments and away from cash is concerning for a host of reasons, my concern is nothing particular to the implementation of digitization, it's more how it evolves when smartphone payments become a prerequisite to functioning in daily life.

While we now have tech firms bridging the gap of facilitating digital payments via domestic commercial bank and e-commerce payments, using interoperable QR-based specs, I see the problem is more the lean towards the everything apps that ensues. Not only some of the security concerns mentioned in #458011 but also where everything apps have been introduced, and usage probably borders on the 90-100%, social apps vie for the same broad spectrum of social media, payments, credit, ID verification, resulting in emergent dominant everything apps, perhaps two, but usually one that captures the guts and feathers of the entire market.

I realize this is not a central bank-based, but ties to state regulation and control are already bound to these platforms, and central bank or government policy becomes much easier to enforce (like it or not.) I've not heard of Zelle nor Pix before this post, but I see the same dynamic in other regions. What's interesting to me is that some countries sill have strong physical cash usage side-by-side with digital payments, others are making huge steps to migrate away from (privacy preserving) physical cash.

I don't understand if Krug was being genuine (doubt it) by saying republicans fear people would prefer cbdcs to private banks. Where in the world has rolled out cbdcs and actually use them to a meaningful extent today? I don't think the average person can really visualize what the advantages and disadvantages would be in bypassing commercial banks and lenders, and I do wonder whether the whole argument on cbdcs is a kind of red-herring. I still remember when the term cbdc was coined (shortly after Bitcoin came into public consciousness) digital cash was being airdropped to early adopters. I question ethics of central banks for that reason alone.

The only applications of building a state banking app seems to be the potential to airdrop freshly minted fiat, the potential to restrict access to usage of any digital payment system, and to debit taxes automatically, most of which is now controlled effectively with a 90% adoption rate of payment platforms that are plugged into commercial banks, and regulated by states. All of Krugs petitions to some kind of base logic is laughable and fail to take into account incentives of stake-holders in the real world, which we all know and experience.

.. because they are all state regulated anyway. Agree.