CBDCs Are Worse Than Bank Accounts: Adam Back Of Blockstream

CBDCs are worse than bank accounts according to the CEO of Blockstream Adam Back since they are becoming a global fad with the regulators so let’s read more today in our latest cryptocurrency news.

Most industry experts believe the products will prove to be the right recipe for government control. One such is the BTC proponent and Blockstream CEO Adam Back who said that CBDCs are worse than Bank accounts and he vouched for BTC as an apolitical and unseizable money arguing that CBDCs are systems of control. Back added that the digitized version of fiat will be worse than paper cash and worse than stablecoin but also worse than Bitcoin. This is not the first time that the cypherpunk noted that the BTC features make it superior to current projects under development. In 2019, Back had said Diem can act as competition for online banking but poses no real threat to BTC.

The latest comment came in the backdrop of the former Blockstream chief strategy officer Samson Mow’s discussion on CBDC at the Asian Leadership Conference and Mow opined that the motivation with CBDCs is not to facilitate the transactions confidentially. He outlined the need to go back to apolitical money and the best way the exec thinking it will be a right move forward by adopting BTC as money similar to countries like El Salvador:

“Central banks could do it correctly if they implemented a CBDC that was private and had a way to transact confidentially. But that’s not the motivation for a CBDC. Even in Canada, the bank that (released) a job posting looking for engineers to build a system, and the summary was – we want a central bank digital currency that is private, but not too private. So I just can’t see it happening in a correct way.”

China has been in the center of the CBDC area and has about 250 million registered wallets using the Yuan digital version. Other countries like Japan, India, and South Korea are leading the pilot testings. The US and UK but also Mexico were dragging their feet behind and are stuck in the research stage. It is important to note that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine fueled the interest regards to the wholesale bank-to-bank CBDCS in countries that are not progressing. Banking sanction was also a catalyst however not everyone believes a CBDC can come from central banks. Philip Lowe as the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia vouched for these tokens issued by private companies because they are great at innovating and can offer more benefits than the ones by central banks.