yeah, it's a matter of degrees. All digital money is already traced, it's already controlled, it can be blocked.

The argument is always that CBDCs are "programmable money" in a way that digital money up to now is not, but that is also.. degrees. Traying to buy bitcoin with a credit card already gives us the experience of "you can't buy that with your money" or "you've exceeded your limit for buying X", but it's because of who the counterparty is. Of course, my credit card doesn't know if the bill at the supermarket is veggies or meat (yet) and could only block the market, not the items. Yet.

The fear is that CBDCs can, by having integrated programming with cash registers that gives my 50 magically appearing units if I choose to buy some officially certified save the whatever (facade show) item and limits my purchase of certified "bad" item X to 10 units a month or whatever, but there's no real reason this couldn't be implemented with cards.

I spend my time in two cash-heavy societies, so I can always just get bills and nobody bats an eye.

It never really used to be gems and shells, by the way. Anthropologists keep telling us that before physical money, there wasn't barter, there was a credit log or a mutual gift economy where small groups kept track of who gave what to whom and customs tended to balance it out.