You might want to think about a world with Central Bank Digital Currencies and start making plans to do something about it. From Mark E. Jeftovic at bombthrower.com:
In the future, it’ll be a lot more expensive to be free.
Roger and Reggie were identical twin brothers, born in Merrickville, Ontario around 1980.
They both had normal school trajectories, even sharing an apartment through college – Roger taking computer programming and Reggie electronics engineering. The brothers seemed well positioned to enjoy reasonably affluent lives, having secured high-tech vocations in an increasingly digitized world.
They’re in their early 50’s now and it’s hard to say exactly where their lives diverged – this is not a “separated at birth” story. They were separated by something else.
Here in 2033, both of them are married – or least got married. Reggie’s wife left him in the late 20’s. She gave numerous reasons why “she couldn’t take it any more”, but statistically, financial stress overtook infidelity as the number one cause of divorce around the time of the first climate lockdowns.
Reggie ekes out a life of quiet desperation: he works as a remote drone repair / recovery technician, which has him licensed to drive a vehicle and his employer is allowed to operate seven months per year.
That leaves him on Yubey (“UBI”) for five months, usually in stretches of three and two months at a time, during which he’s confined to his fifteen minute city (a.k.a “fifdom”). By the end of it, he’s usually pretty gaunt – the caloric quota assigned to his body type, he always thought was a tad meagre. “And probably racist”, he often fumed, privately (he would never post that on a socnet, not again, anyway – he found out the hard way the first and only time he voiced his objections to his carbon allotment and feels he’s never quite earned-back those demerits, and probably never will – he laments).
It was a fun read at first; I was immediately suspicious upon seeing “El Salvador”, suspicions confirmed when I saw the word “Bitcoin”.
Stopped reading. These people think bitcoin will continue to exist after CBDC fully implemented.
I’m buying precious metals.