Coming from a John Perkins "Confessions of An Economic Hitman" point of view would it be outlandish to consider the CBDC to be the elephant in the room?
It seems to be the antithesis of bitcoin and the most imminent threat moving forward. "Programmable money with identity embedded in it" as someone recently described it. With the allure of not only becoming the reserve currency but also having the ability to socially engineer down to the individual. Why would they let you buy bitcoin, or for that matter accept it in trade without going through fiat first? They gave El Salvador the middle finger. I'm not talking 120 years from now. Mainstream fud about the dollar no longer being the reserve currency within the next 20 years. What happens when the spending power of fiat continues to decline and CBDCs disallow direct trade? As people flee fiat they'll have to make a decision. I have always believed that if given the chance people would choose self sovereignty over centralization. But watching this play out I have to question that. The majority of users don't possess their own keys, less than 10k run nodes, even less coinjoin when it should be the norm right from mining forward.
Let me use some quotes from another thread from earlier this year to help me get to my point:
philipma1957
right now the market cap for btc is around 730 billion. There is enough wealth to push it to 1.8 trillion or 100k a coin. the top ten stocks are worth more then 9 trillion so pulling 1 trillion away from them could happen this year.
I do not see enough wealth to push it to 18 trillion or 1 million a coin any time soon.
mickeywith
When rewards are 3.125BTC mining would still be somehow okay to many miners, even if the price was below 100-200k, but when the rewards are at 1.5625 BTC price needs to be beyond those levels for mining to stay as decentralized, if not, then only those with free power will be able to mine at a profit.
With the being said, there might come times when bitcoin holders will need to mine for no profit just to keep the blockchain running the way it is, sort of like how many people run full nodes now without any financial benefits, but I guess it's too early to judge since we don't know how will the mining fees become like since they will be more important than the block reward soon.
The issue regarding the financial viability of running miners seems like it has the potential to become a security threat sooner than later. Nations are building out infrastructure. If the central bank gives them an ultimatum down the line because they view bitcoin as a genuine threat to the hegemony that seems problematic from a security standpoint. Introduce the CBDC with tons of carrots, and disallow all crypto related transactions. Could the network sustain that in a scenario with fiat continuing to lose buying power and hodlers have to run machines at a loss to keep the system honest? It seems like it would continue to centralize which would either lead to an attack from within to game the system, or they send in the jackals to utilize the infrastructure built out on CBDC friendly Nations if the threat persists.
I know it's a shorter time span but it seems on topic, and the question of which actors with what incentives could pull off an attack keeps coming up. I realize this is way more fud than should come from a first post. I'm actually quite bullish. I think many of the issues we face can be addressed. I'm here to attempt to better understand how.
*edited to add names to quotes