🎙️ My guest today is
, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a fellow at HRF, and one of the clearest voices dissecting CBDCs, financial privacy, and government overreach. He authored the book “digital currency or digital control?” and advocates for freedom and privacy. In this episode, we explore how governments use propaganda to sell CBDCs as “digital cash,” despite public resistance, and how pilots in China and The Bahamas reveal low adoption and rising coercion. Nick explains why control is a universal temptation across democracies and autocracies, and how the Bank Secrecy Act created 55 years of normalized financial monitoring in the United States. We discuss the distinction between stablecoins and CBDCs, the slow global rollout of digital currencies, and why Bitcoin’s censorship resistance remains essential, alongside other freedom tech tools. He also shares insights from his work maintaining HRF’s CBDC Tracker, his visit to the European Parliament, and his warning that even if CBDCs fail, today’s financial system already operates as a surveillance regime.This episode is also on Twitter, Spotify, YouTube, Fountain, Rumble and more.
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We talked about:
00:00 - Coming Up…
01:39 - Meet Nick Anthony: Policy Analyst & CBDC Critic
03:03 - What Problems CBDC Pretends to Solve?
04:48 - CBDCs: Problems and Propaganda
08:03 - Real-World Examples: China & The Bahamas
13:59 - Ad Break: Trezor, BitVault & Abundant Mines
16:39 - Stablecoins vs. CBDCs: A Critical Comparison
21:56 - The Future of CBDCs, And Bitcoin’s Role
24:13 - Financial Privacy, Bitcoin and Cash
31:54 - Message to CBDC Legislators
33:08 - Nick’s Visit to the EU Parliament
35:08 - How To Explain Why We Need An Exit
36:53 - Wholesale vs. Retail CBDCs
My takeaways from this episode:
Nick explains how governments market CBDCs as tools for “financial inclusion” and “faster payments” while hiding their real function: direct surveillance and control over transactions
He shows how propaganda works—studies prove public skepticism flips to support after exposure to bright, positive marketing videos calling CBDCs “digital cash”
China’s e-CNY and The Bahamas’ Sand Dollar both demonstrate the same pattern: low real-world use followed by coercive measures like merchant mandates or salary payments in CBDC
He argues the impulse to control is not confined to autocracies—democracies exhibit the same tendencies when convenience and “safety” are used to justify overreach
Nick traces how the 1970 Bank Secrecy Act normalized mass financial surveillance in the U.S., making warrantless data collection routine for over 50 years
He distinguishes stablecoins from CBDCs: both enable monitoring, but stablecoins still insert a private-sector buffer between the state and the user
He views current U.S. policy as cautiously positive—legislative moves to ban retail CBDCs coexist with persistent surveillance expansion under the same legal framework
Globally, he expects the number of CBDC pilots to rise over the next few years but at a slowing pace, as public resistance mounts and some nations begin to reverse course
He argues Bitcoin’s censorship resistance is indispensable—unlike stablecoins, it cannot be banned or frozen and remains the essential exit from centralized finance
Nick stresses that privacy must be actively rebuilt: through tools like Cashu, Signal, and Proton, and through maintaining physical cash as a parallel anonymous medium
He warns that central banks’ promises to “preserve cash” are strategic illusions—true control comes from limiting denominations and usage until cash becomes impractical
He highlights the link between CBDCs and negative interest rates: to make them effective, governments must first eliminate all escape hatches such as Bitcoin, gold, and cash
His central question for policymakers: “Would you want your political opponents to hold this power of financial control?”—a test revealing CBDCs’ inherent danger
Nick recounts warning EU Parliament members that even without CBDCs, existing financial laws already create a surveillance web that enables de-banking and censorship
He concludes that stopping CBDCs is only step one; the deeper fight is dismantling the 55-year-old surveillance infrastructure that already governs modern money
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Twitter | Cato Institute Twitter | HRF’s CBDC Tracker
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I was recently banned from Stripe, so I cannot have paid memberships on Substack… but there’s always another way!
