An Open Letter to Agustín Carstens, Head of The Bank of International Settlements

Fiat Fails

February 22, 2023                                                                                         

Block 777,848

Dear Mr. Carstens,

I am writing to you a day after your public comments about a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) vs. Bitcoin, when you said “that battle has been won, a technology doesn’t make for trusted money.” I have so many fun thoughts swimming in my head because of your comments. First, you gave away the game right away, didn’t you? That’s the silliest thing about what you said. It shows that literally everyone who is even half aware of CBDC’s knows that the entire reason for their existence is because you yearn to kill Bitcoin.

It is said that every overreaching form of authoritarian control contains within it the seed of its own demise. Bitcoin was built specifically because the central banking systems of the world fail their people. Bitcoin was developed and deployed because fiat currencies failed, and continue to fail, as technologies. Central banks pump the overall money supply. You inflate and degrade your currencies, and you fail anyone and everyone trying to save in those currencies. You do it again and again, with every new war or emergency, regardless of who is in power. Sometimes it even feels like you manufacture wars and emergencies just so you can inflate currencies.

And now, as you develop CBDC’s, you integrate surveillance and currency manipulation technologies onto them in such a way that, to quote you from a speech you made last year “a key difference with a CBDC is that central banks will have absolute control on rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liabilities, and also we will have the technology to enforce that.”

Mister Carstens! What a dastardly goal to strive for! Absolute control? Isn’t the goal of a civil society to respect and exalt the freedoms of individuals, so they may live their lives in peace? No one wants to live with the fear of an all-seeing totalitarian eye watching their every act, whether those acts are economic or not.

On the one hand we have the Bank of International Settlements’ aspiration: Central Bank Digital Control money, a full integration of governmental domination; enforcement and surveillance technology all rolled into one, with a heavy dollop of degrading inflation on top. And then there’s Bitcoin, a rules-based network without rulers, with a fixed-issuance, uninflatable, globally distributed, controlled by no one, usable by anyone.  

At this point, I’ll indulge myself and quote to you from The Matrix, a truly prescient film:

“I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid... you’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up this phone, and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.”

Let’s be clear: Bitcoin is anti-inflation and anti-totalitarian technology. You saying it has lost does not make it so. And I’ll bet you one satoshi that you know that, and you already own some of your own, because in your mind of minds, you know that fiat is failing. If I’m wrong, download a Bitcoin Lightning Wallet, send me an invoice, and I’ll send you that satoshi, so you can start saving.

Sincerely,

Cosmo Crixter (Bitcoiner)