Central Bank Digital Currency is Programmable Money

WE SEE IT COMING AND YOU NEED AN ALTERNATIVE - DO YOU NOT?

The sales pitch is always the same: “efficiency, convenience, inclusion, anti-fraud.” But the architecture is total visibility and total editability at the center. Once every transaction routes through a single programmable ledger, you don’t need overt tyranny. Silent throttling does the job: your card just “declines” for the wrong donation, the wrong bookshop, the wrong ticket. A sane person also thinks in terms of resilience. Cash and neutral payment rails work even when governments panic, systems fail, or politics turn ugly. CBDC programmable money assumes permanent benevolence and competence from institutions that have repeatedly shown neither. It takes the most dangerous power – the ability to turn a human being “off” economically – and centralizes it in a few dashboards.

If money becomes a permissioned script running on someone else’s server, you are no longer a citizen or even a customer. You are a variable. A sane mind doesn’t volunteer for that.

Programmable CBDC is not “modern money”; it’s a draconian rationing coupon dressed up as innovation.

First, Time Sensitivity: if every unit can be given an expiry date – “you have 30 days to spend this or it vanishes” – then your entire life becomes a treadmill. No saving for a rainy day, no building a war chest, no quiet preparation. The system can literally crank up or down your anxiety by tightening or loosening the timer. That’s not economics, that’s psychological warfare.

Second, No real savings: if the issuer can forbid hoarding, cap balances, or penalise “excess reserves,” then the classical idea of capital – stored human effort across time – is deleted. You become permanently dependent on the next state-issued top-up. A population that cannot store value is a population that cannot say “no.” It destroys sovereignty at the individual level.

Third, Geo-fencing: programmable money can be coded so it only works in a defined zone – a city, region, or even a single store chain. Congratulations, you’ve just been given an invisible ankle tag. Borders and checkpoints become obsolete when your wallet itself refuses to function outside the approved perimeter.

Combine these three and you don’t get “better policy tools”; you get total behavioural corralling. A sane mind, assuming even a modest understanding of history, does not hand such granular control over its lifeblood – value, time, and movement – to any central authority, no matter how pretty the app looks.