12
Governments began looking at crypto in a significant way about seven or eight years ago. And they mostly ignored it.
The crypto market was still small, and they didn't understand it. They didn't even try. They assumed it would go away.
When it didn't go away, they changed their strategy and they started demonizing crypto. That's easy to do and it is an effective tactic in the short run. Mostly because a lot of people still believe whatever their government tells them.
However, this doesn't really work long term because, for the most part, crypto is a black-and-white thing.
Something is either true or false, and propaganda never resists contact with reality because you can't escape blockchain technology.
Governments can very easily single out exceptions and pass them as the rule or selectively cherrypick stats and pass them as the norm.
But it takes two seconds to debunk them, and then it doesn't work anymore.
So ignoring it didn't work, demonizing it isn't working, and that's when governments realized they needed to stop looking AT crypto and needed to start looking INTO it.
Imagine you're the leader of country A and want to figure out a way to kill crypto. You hire somebody and ask them to tell you how to do it. It will go one of two ways.
Scenario one, you hire somebody who knows what they're doing, somebody with no bias, and they'll tell you, "this won't go away, and you can't kill it."
Scenario two, you hire somebody incompetent, who simply tells you what you want to hear, but you still won't be able to kill crypto. And sooner or later, after wasting a considerable amount of time, you'll still end up with somebody who'll just tell you, "this will not go away."
Some countries are still processing scenario two, but others are already past that and are beginning to use crypto as free marketing for their own version of it, Central Bank Digital Currencies - or CBDCs.
Now it will take time, and there are countries where this may never happen, but slowly, and gradually, and painfully, more and more people will realize and/or accept that CBDCs are NOT cryptocurrencies. And they have nothing to do with Bitcoin.
In fact, they're exactly the opposite of what Bitcoin stands for.
A CBDC based on the Euro, for example, is just a digital Euro. Nothing more.
Will it work? People seem to be afraid of that, understandably so, but the truth is, you only have to worry about CBDCs if you live in certain areas.
All Central Banks will try and implement it at some point, but only some will manage to completely kill off the alternative, ie cash.
If you live in China, or the UK, for example. Then yes, you probably have reason to worry.
If you live in the EU zone or the US. Then nah, not really.
We need to remember that nothing ever happens without people's consent.
Consent doesn't mean loving what your government is doing, but doing nothing is a form of consent.
We've seen that with Covid policies.
There are countries where the government got away with abysmal policies, and that's because people were okay with it.
Italy, for example, arrested people for leaving their home and mandated that everybody without a triple-shot vaccine should be fired. And this happened because people were broadly okay with that.
They either actively, genuinely thought it was a good idea, or they didn't like it but did nothing about it.
Remember, liking it or doing nothing about it produces the same result.
However, there were other countries where this didn't happen. And it didn't happen because people didn't want it.
The same applies to CBDCs.
You can probably get rid of cash and implement a USD-based CBDC in the Bay Area, but you won't be able to do that just a few hundred miles away in, say, Texas. Because people simply won't comply.
It's the same in the Eurozone.
People in, say, Finland, are probably happy enough to get rid of cash and start using a Euro-based CBDC. But what about Greece? Or Italy? What about EU countries that don't use the Euro? You think Bulgaria or Romania will go for that? Cash is still king around those parts.
Oh and I'd love to see the Serbian government impose an RSD-based on CDBC on the Serbian people. Try that, see how it goes. See what happens.
I'm not worried about CBDCs. Because I'm from a country that hates digital payments, and I now live in a country that, with the exception of the capital, hates digital payments just as much.
Also, we go back to square one, Bitcoin cannot be killed. It will not go away. No matter how hard anyone tries.
