Edward Snowden, a former NSA employee, recently expressed his views about the concept of the central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Snowden mentioned that a CBDC is entirely different from privately owned cryptocurrency assets.
In a recent statement, Snowden called CBDC a ‘perversion’ of cryptocurrency. “A CBDC is a perversion of cryptocurrency, or at least the founding principles and protocols of it—a crypto-fascist currency, expressly designed to deny you the basic ownership of your money by installing the State at the center of every transaction,” Snowden mentioned on Twitter.
The latest statement from the former NSA employee came nearly one week after he highlighted Bitcoin ’s significant growth. Snowden mentioned that the recent cryptocurrency ban from China made Bitcoin stronger. BTC is up by more than 1,000% since the correction of March 2020.
In the latest statement, Snowden said that a central bank digital currency is not a digital dollar. He criticized the centralized nature of a CBDC and mentioned that the concept of CBDC is not a state-level embrace of cryptocurrency assets.
CBDCs
Central banks around the world have accelerated their efforts for the development and issuance of CBDCs in 2021. India is planning to launch a CBDC pilot by the end of 2021. In July 2021, the European Central Bank (ECB) launched the investigation phase of the digital euro project.
Commenting on the latest statement from Snowden, Freddie Evans, Sales Trader at GlobalBlock, said: “Edward Snowden has added his views on the discussion of Central Bank Digital Currencies. He had some severe criticisms of the hypothetical CBDCs.” He argued that “the Fed could impose a negative interest rate by gradually shrinking the electronic balances in everyone’s digital currency accounts, creating an incentive for consumers to spend and companies to invest. However, many Central banks are looking into creating digital currencies with the European Central Bank (ECB) exploring the potential of a digital Euro.”
