Trump’s Justification for Banning CBDCs: A Trend Other Countries Are Likely to Follow Opinion

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Banning digital assets makes about as much sense as regulating against gravity. How many times did the market dip, back in 2017, on the news that China was banning Bitcoin (BTC), only to promptly recover at the realization of the notion’s absurdity?
But while Bitcoin is, to all intents and purposes, unbannable, the same can’t be said of central bank digital currencies—digital forms of national currencies issued and regulated by their central banks. In fact, that’s one of their core properties. Otherwise, governments couldn’t put their citizens in the naughty chair when they fall out of line by prohibiting their right to buy groceries.
To be fair, most governments aren’t as heavy-handed as China, with its notorious social credit scoring and rampant surveillance. Instead, they are seeking to develop digital currencies for boring bureaucratic purposes, such as greater administrative efficiency and economic data gathering.
Still, it’s no coincidence that China has been one of the biggest proponents of CBDCs and is racing ahead with its own implementation. And it should, therefore, come as no surprise that the United States, which instinctively inverts every Chinese position, should have canceled its own digital dollar after President Trump laid the banhammer.
There’s a beautiful yin and yang-ness to China banning Bitcoin and the US banning CBDCs. The self-perpetuating cycle is complete. Trump’s decision, like many that emulate from his “shoot first and ask questions later” government, is somewhat reactionary. However, sometimes, shooting first is the smartest thing you can do, and in this case, Trump has hit the target.
America’s digital dollar deserves to be shot down—as do those of every other Western nation. Not because the concept is wrong but because the implementation certainly is. If billions of citizens are going to have their data and financial assets placed on a global database, it’s going to need much better privacy protections than the current proposals offer.
The first domino falls
There are all kinds of ironies wrapped up in Trump’s decision to ban the digital dollar. Like his willingness to countenance a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve or endorse a $TRUMP memecoin while simultaneously shunning a digital currency with a potential real-world use case. But even his most vocal critics have had