Much as CBDCs are the demon of the day the truth is they do give huge advantages as well as presenting potential risks. CBDCs massively lower monetary system friction and costs. Any economy that fails to adopt them out of concerns about how they could be misused would potentially suffer considerable loss of competitive advantage. To make this clear the cost of transacting on the legacy analogue fiat system where payments are made via multiple intermediaries taking days and costs up to 4% of transaction amount, and can take days or even weeks to finalise, on a CBDC system payments would be almost zero cost and instant in settlement. That's a huge advance in terms of payments speed and efficiency which will surely leave economies who refuse to adopt at a disadvantage.