LONDON, March 25 (Reuters) - Global bank messaging network SWIFT is planning a new platform in the next one to two years to connect the wave of central bank digital currencies now in development to the existing finance system, it has told Reuters.
Around 90% of the world’s central banks are now exploring digital versions of their currencies. Most don’t want to be left behind by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but are grappling with technological complexities.
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The mainstream articles often fail to mention the differentiation between retail and wholesale CBDCs. Here is a World Economic Forum document that clarifies some of the dystopic potentials of this differentiation:
Digital Currency Governance Consortium White Paper Series - 19 November 2021
Note: click on Download PDF to view, and go to page 181 for more details.I thought of adding a couple of sentences to clarify things:
CBDCs benefit the 1% of the population by controlling all the rest of us. It’s a two-tier system (retail CBDCs and wholesale CBDCs) and this is something that is rarely mentioned in mainstream articles.
Retail CBDCs will be linked to your digital ID and your digital wallet, and even tho the implementation may differ from country to country (i.e. Sweden’s e-krona vs China’s digital Yuan), the thing that will be common is that a centralised entity, will have total control of your digital wallet, including your ID & money. We can think of it as a point system in which all your credit can be erased, or go bellow zero, and your digital ID, can be destroyed with a click of a button.
When the conversation is about wholesale CBDCs, the talk is about how to make things easier for bank interoperability as well as how to facilitate the super-rich.