I can’t envision a sound plan where a US CBDC can be rolled out, on any timeframe, and I’ve yet to find any analyst or monetary figure discussing the monumental hurdles before such an overwhelming campaign.

The US Dollar is unlike any other currency, in that it is comprehensively interwoven into literally countless financial, banking and asset-exchange businesses worldwide. Arguably, every country and business already has systems in place and established over decades for “dealing with the dollar”, whether they actively utilized them or not.

Expecting such a multitude of transactors on all levels to adhere to the adoption, training, integration, issue management, education amongst their customers, problem-solving, etc that is necessary to upgrade protocols to use an entriely brand new US currency system - while still running and building their day-to-day existing businesses - is a ludicrous dream.

And yet, absent such complete, near-immediate global adherence, the US Dollar will become split between the newly promoted CBDC and the trillions of traditional ‘dollars’ currently held in existing systems & networks for transacting in & between Eurodollars and generalized Foreign dollar-holdings. In other words, there can be no gradual or soft-rollout that I can envision, as this would split the fundamental value held within the global system. This split will threaten an impending collapse in these ‘external’ or foreign-holdings markets, because it will be clear that those ‘old dollars’ no longer have a future. The result of this, almost without doubt, is that global trade will threaten to grind to a halt, as many and varied foreign suppliers, partners, customers, etc will simply refuse to trade valuable resources, materials, services and support for a CBDC that their own banking, finance, trade-partners and customers are unable, unprepared and possibly unwilling to accept as fungible.

Multi-national firms, for instance, will find themselves forced to transact in CBDCs for their US interactions, say, while struggling to maintain supply logistics and support et al with various non-US interests who are simply not able (or not incentivized) to adopt entirely new software, custody infrastructures, and sets of transaction practices. And again, many or most of these foreign counter-parties won’t want to continue trade in the ‘old dollars’ which are clearly being phased-out and replaced. The value of these ‘old dollars’ will be on a fast-track to zero.

I suspect this impossibility of replacing the traditional US Dollar in an already decades-long ‘dollarized world’ is obvious to CEO’s managing global firms. Thus eventually they will balk at any real efforts to push this forward. And this doesn’t even address a world that has begun substantial moves toward ‘de-dollarization’.

And if such a fractured-transition of a new US digitized Dollar is truly certain, then there’s another potential aspect of this, which I wonder whether the Fed has thought through. The impossibility of rolling out systems, both technological and very IRL, to support the new US CBDC in a fast and seamless manner will - if such a path is pushed forward anyway - result in companies and industries being forced by necessity to conduct trade in other, established non-dollar assets in order just to keep orderly business continuity flowing.

In other words (and long-story short here), Bitcoin will yet again become a solution in search of a problem. Because I trust it should be abundantly obvious that no other ‘established non-dollar asset’ can realistically meet the needs of real-time global trade in still-Dollar-dominant economies.

So all this taken into account, I have to wonder if the Fed’s pursual of a CBDC Dollar is something they know will happen over a multi-decade timeline…or if there may be some plan for propping-up by other means than Dollar-denominated assets…or if they perhaps already accept that by rolling this out within America it will necessarily mean rug-pulling the Foreign Dollar markets worldwide, just as software companies do when they deem older software simply should no longer be supported?