Nick Anthony is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a fellow at the Human Rights Foundation, and author of Digital Currency or Digital Control? He’s back for his quarterly appearance, and honestly, there’s no one I trust more to dissect CBDCs, financial privacy, and government overreach. Nick tracks the global CBDC landscape in real time through his CBDC tracker, doing the painstaking work of distilling hundreds of pages of central bank reports, legislation, and speeches into intelligence that the rest of us can actually use. Whether he’s working across the aisle in Washington, dissecting stablecoin bills for hidden surveillance hooks, or documenting the moment a sitting Treasury Secretary openly declared his belief in financial surveillance - Nick is on it.
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Takeaways:
When a system needs to be forced on people, that’s not a bug in the design, it’s the confession. The EU’s admission that the digital euro will fail if people can opt out isn’t an embarrassing slip. It’s the entire logic of the project stated plainly: they know people wouldn’t choose this. So choice has to go.
CBDCs and money are not the same category of thing, even though they both involve numbers on a screen. Money is a tool people use to coordinate their lives. CBDCs are a tool the state uses to coordinate people’s behavior. Calling one the “evolution” of the other is like calling a cage the evolution of a door..
Political promises to reject CBDCs are not the same as structural protection against them. Most countries that have “said no” are still researching, still piloting, still leaving the door cracked. The US is currently the only country that has passed legislation explicitly prohibiting government research, and even that coexists with a Treasury Secretary who went on record saying he believes in financial surveillance.
The people occupying the most powerful seats in global finance are often there because of compliance, not competence. The head of the Banque de France getting Bitcoin, gold, US banking history, and CBDCs wrong - all in one panel at the World Economic Forum - isn’t a personal failing. It’s a systemic one. Institutions that reward loyalty over understanding will keep producing exactly this.
Power built for benevolent hands doesn’t stay in benevolent hands. Christine Lagarde won’t lead the ECB forever. Jerome Powell’s replacement has already proposed introducing a CBDC. The danger isn’t any individual central banker, it’s the permanent expansion of state capacity that each of them builds and then leaves behind.
The Samourai Wallet case isn’t just about punishing two developers. It’s a signal to everyone else about what happens when you build outside the approved rails. When the administration that claims to support Bitcoin stays silent, that silence is itself a message. It’s the shape of the box they want you to stay inside.
Coercion scales through infrastructure, not just through law. China forced WeChat and Alipay to implement the digital yuan overnight, producing 800 million “users” who never chose anything. Europe is building the exact same playbook, forcing banks to embed a digital euro tab into every app, so adoption can be manufactured before consent is ever asked for.
Voluntariness is the thing they cannot replicate, and they know it. People use Bitcoin because they see value and choose it freely. Every CBDC pilot, every stablecoin mandate, every surveillance requirement is an admission that their version of money can’t make that case. Compulsion is what you reach for when the product fails the market test.
The most important financial policy decisions of our time are buried in 100-page central bank reports, legislative footnotes, and speeches at conferences most people have never heard of. The translation of that material into something the rest of us can understand is not a “nice-to-have”, it’s a form of resistance. You cannot fight what you cannot see.
Trying to fit genuinely new technology into old regulatory boxes doesn’t modernize the boxes, it destroys what made the technology new. Everything that makes Bitcoin matter comes from it not fitting. The moment it gets fully crammed into the KYC/AML/BSA framework, it becomes a slightly more efficient version of what already exists. That’s not innovation. That’s domestication.
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I was recently banned from Stripe, so I cannot have paid memberships on Substack… but there’s always another way!
