原文标题：《'Privacy-minded' CBDCs are a wolf in sheep’s clothing》
By Nicholas Anthony
Compiled by: Chris, Techub News

Nicholas Anthony is an analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center on Monetary and Financial Alternatives. He is the author of The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s Attack on Crypto: Questioning the Rationale for the Cryptocurrency Provisions and The Right to Financial Privacy: Crafting a Better Framework for Financial Privacy in the Digital Age.

Nicholas Anthony believes that CBDC claims to focus on privacy, but it is difficult to achieve in reality. History has shown that even very well-designed systems can quickly evolve into tools for large-scale surveillance. Given the indifference of governments and technology companies to privacy, CBDC may lead to more serious financial surveillance rather than protecting user privacy:

Some people are concerned about the recently proposed “privacy-focused” CBDCs. CBDC supporters have countered concerns that CBDCs will lead to tighter surveillance by saying, “it just needs to be designed correctly” or “all we need is a CBDC bill of rights.”

A “privacy-focused” CBDC is a good idea, but it may be too good to be true. To put it bluntly, there is little reason to believe that the U.S. government will enact a “CBDC Bill of Rights” because it has already done so much to undermine the existing Bill of Rights. From the enactment of the third-party principle to the failure to adjust reporting thresholds for inflation, the government has done much to weaken financial privacy protections.

Another historical example may make the risks of proposing a privacy-focused CBDC more concrete. When NSA advisor Edward Snowden leaked classified information in 2013, it revealed how extensive the domestic surveillance system had become after the 9/11 attacks. One example has some inspiration for CBDC proposals. Former NSA official Thomas A. Drake shared a system he proposed at the NSA that would better protect Americans’ privacy at home.

It was a sophisticated surveillance system where any identifying information was anonymized by default. However, if necessary, a search warrant could be used to de-anonymize and identify the person. Drake took the proposal to NSA leadership, but he was told the agency wasn’t interested in the idea.

It was later discovered that the plan Drake proposed was used, but the part about protecting Americans’ privacy was removed. In other words, the team that was trying to create a limited surveillance system that respected Americans’ privacy inadvertently created one of the largest surveillance systems in U.S. history.

For those who support CBDCs, this incident should serve as a cautionary tale. The history of financial surveillance has shown, as Drake’s experience with the NSA showed, that even a well-intentioned design can quickly turn into something completely different.

Chris Meserole, director of the Brookings Institution’s AI and Emerging Technologies Program, said it well in response to a question about the risks of CBDCs being used for surveillance and control in the United States: “I’m not concerned that the United States will immediately go down that path, but I do worry very much that once a CBDC is created, it would only take one terrible event, such as a terrorist attack, for there to suddenly be massive pressure to use the system for different security or criminal justice activities.”

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin had a similar warning, saying he had naively held out some hope that CBDCs would be able to combine the transparency, verifiability, and privacy of cryptocurrencies. However, he noted that these protections “all started to disappear” after the CBDC system was developed.

Vitalik Buterin said, "The system we get (referring to CBDC) is actually not much better than the existing payment system, because they are basically just different front ends of the existing banking system, and they end up becoming less private, basically breaking existing barriers to businesses and governments at the same time."

These concerns are not shocking. Central bankers, including Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, Bank for International Settlements General Manager Agustín Carstens, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey, have publicly and repeatedly stated that anonymity and full privacy are not possible in CBDCs.

With the risks so great and the benefits so few, this path is probably best not taken. CBDCs are ill-suited to help finance, too late to improve payment speeds, unlikely to advance monetary policy, and will not help maintain the dollar’s ​​status as the world’s reserve currency. With this in mind, there is no doubt that governments are likely to want CBDCs to consolidate their control over their currencies in response to the rise of cryptocurrencies.

There is little doubt that the organizations promoting CBDCs and the technology companies developing them are motivated by profit to push for CBDC adoption regardless of the consequences. Unfortunately, the “privacy-focused CBDC” proposal may be nothing more than a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

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