CBDCs: Planned Obsolescence on Steroids, Run by Power-Addicted Puppets
1924: Lightbulbs were engineered to die. 2030: Your money is next in line
Why Read This? (19 minutes that could save everything you’ve earned)
In 1924 a cartel in Geneva agreed to murder perfectly good lightbulbs so the cash registers would never stop ringing. One century later the same trick is being rehearsed on the one asset you cannot live without: money itself. Expiration dates, wealth ceilings, remote deletion—the machinery is already coded, already tested, already law in Beijing and half-written into Brussels legislation. I have spent the last three years crawling through BIS source code, ECB draft regulations, and the quiet failures of every live retail CBDC on earth. What follows is not theory. It is the instruction manual for the cage they plan to close by 2030. Read for nineteen minutes now, or discover the hard way that your savings just developed a factory-installed best-before date. No sponsors. No apologies. No second warning.
The Smell of Dust and Conspiracy
The sub-basement archive beneath the old Banque Nationale smelled like a chain-smoker’s coffin—paper rot, burnt coffee, and the metallic tang of overheating hard drives that had been running non-stop since 2019. A single tube light stuttered overhead, throwing jaundiced shadows across towers of BIS annual reports and dog-eared printouts of leaked ECB memos. The floor was a mosaic of shattered USB sticks and cigarette ash; my boots left prints in the grit like evidence at a crime scene I was still trying to solve. A dying box fan wheezed in the corner, pushing warm air across a desk buried under redacted Project Agora specifications and a half-empty bottle of something strong enough to sterilise bad ideas. Somewhere above, the December 2025 traffic on Rue de la Corraterie growled like an impatient creditor. I lit another cigarette—because rules are for people who still believe in them—and opened the newest file: the ECB’s just-released simplified bank-intermediation rules, dated yesterday. The trap had quietly grown another set of teeth.
The Core Idea, Sharpened to a Stiletto
Planned obsolescence is not a bug; it is the business model of empires in decay. The Phoebus cartel proved it in 1924 when they capped bulb life at 1,000 hours and fined any engineer who dared build eternity into glass. Profits tripled; the planet filled with landfills. Central bank digital currencies are Phoebus 2.0, except this time the product that is deliberately engineered to fail is your money. Because CBDCs are pure software, the kill switch is no longer a factory in Czechoslovakia—it is a Boolean flag in a database maintained by people who have never missed a mortgage payment in their lives.
The Evidence, Fresh off the Wire
China’s e-CNY closed November 2025 with 292 million personal wallets and 3.87 billion transactions totalling 14.9 trillion yuan—roughly $2.1 trillion USD—moved under state supervision. The latest stimulus batch issued in Shenzhen last week carried a 21-day expiry; spend-or-vanish clause. Citizens obeyed, because the alternative is a social-credit score that quietly forgets you exist.
Europe is more polite but no less lethal. On 10 December 2025—yesterday—the ECB published “simplified holding rules” for the future digital euro: offline wallets capped at €2,000, online at €8,000, excess automatically swept into commercial banks that pay whatever negative rate the Governing Council feels is therapeutic. The text still pretends expiration dates and demurrage fees are not on the table. The technical annex, however, contains a reserved field called EXPIRY_TIMESTAMP. Someone has already written “for future use” in the comments, the bureaucratic equivalent of a loaded gun left on the nightstand.
The pilots that were supposed to prove universal love for programmable money continue to deliver the opposite verdict. Bahamas Sand Dollar: 2.3 % of currency in circulation after five years. Nigeria eNaira: 82 % of wallets have never made a second transaction. Jamaica Jam-Dex: 0.07 %. The pattern is so consistent that the IMF now calls it “organic rejection.” Translation: when given a choice, human beings would rather carry chickens than state money that stares back.
The Timeline Just Accelerated
Yesterday’s ECB announcement quietly moved the digital euro from “preparation phase” to “solution-build phase,” inviting private providers to start coding in Q1 2026. Earliest retail pilot: late 2027. Full issuance: 2029, provided the European Parliament does not grow a spine in the meantime. Across the Atlantic the Fed is still pretending to study the issue, but the Treasury borrowed $400 billion last quarter at negative real yields; the political appetite for direct wallet taxation is growing faster than Bitcoin’s price.
The Sharpest Twist: Agora Is No Longer a Proposal
The Bank for International Settlements closed the Project Agora proof-of-concept in October 2025 and immediately opened “Agora Phase Two” with seven central banks live on a permissioned testnet. The goal, in their own dry words, is “tokenised commercial-bank money interoperating seamlessly with wholesale and retail CBDCs on a unified programmable platform.” Translation: one global ledger, one set of rules, one off-switch. The most delicious detail—buried in footnote 47 of the technical spec—is that the platform already supports “selective disclosure for compliance purposes.” In plain English: they can see whatever they decide they need to see, whenever they decide they need to see it.
History’s Quietly Devastating Post-Mortem
Every fiat currency run by politicians eventually discovers the joys of inflation. The median lifespan is indeed 27 years if you count only the corpses, but even the survivors are slow-motion suicides: the US dollar has lost 96.4 % of its purchasing power since 1971, the British pound 99.2 % since 1931. CBDCs do not fix the political addiction to spending tomorrow’s money today; they remove the last speed bump—physical cash—and replace it with an accelerator pedal labelled “programmable policy.”
The Counterweight That Terrifies Them
Bitcoin closed last night at $123,400, market cap $2.44 trillion. El Salvador now holds 5,987 BTC as treasury reserve—more foreign exchange than its eurobond holdings. Bhutan quietly mines with hydroelectric surplus. Game theory is doing what no G20 communiqué ever could: turning electricity into property rights that no committee can inflate, expire, or switch off without solving for 350 exahashes per second of honest work. The BIS knows it. That is why the CBDC sprint is now measured in months, not years.
The Next Twist Nobody Is Pricing In
On 10 December 2025—the same day the ECB published its “simplified rules”—Norges Bank issued a 41-page report recommending indefinite postponement of any Norwegian CBDC. Reason: “the risks to monetary sovereignty and individual privacy exceed any plausible benefit.” Norway is 73 % cashless already; if even the world’s most digitally compliant population says no, the dominoes may fall in the wrong direction for Basel. Meanwhile India’s e-rupee circulation grew 334 % year-on-year to ₹10.16 billion and is now being piloted for cross-border settlement with the UAE. The new monetary cold war has fault lines that do not respect the old East-West script.
Two Futures, Neither Comfortable
By 2030 we get either:
money that can be programmed to evaporate the moment a bureaucrat decides idle savings are socially harmful, or
money that no bureaucrat on earth can switch off, no matter how loudly they stamp their feet.
The ledger that wins will not be chosen by democratic vote or moral superiority. It will be chosen by cold capital flight the instant the next recession forces negative rates below the cash escape hatch. Norway just voted with its feet. Beijing votes with surveillance cameras. Washington is still pretending it has until 2028.
The trap is closing, but the hinges are beginning to squeal. Whether the door slams shut or flies off entirely now depends on how fast the crowd realises there is still an exit that runs on proof-of-work instead of proof-of-permission.
Notes
All figures and references in this article are current as of December 11, 2025, drawn from official and verifiable sources to ensure transparency and accuracy. Hyperlinks below lead directly to primary documents or trackers for further reading—click through for the full technical annexes, reports, and dashboards. I've structured this as a clean, scannable list for easy navigation, with acronyms expanded on first use and listed at the end for quick reference. No paywalls here; if a link requires login, search the document title on the issuing organization's site.
China e-CNY statistics: Sourced from the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) monthly update for November 2025, cross-verified via the Atlantic Council’s CBDC Tracker. Details include 292 million personal wallets, 3.87 billion transactions, and 14.9 trillion yuan in total value (~$2.1 trillion USD). PBoC Report | Atlantic Council Tracker
ECB simplified holding rules and timeline: From the European Central Bank (ECB) press release dated December 10, 2025, including the accompanying technical annex on wallet caps (€2,000 offline / €8,000 online) and the shift to solution-build phase. ECB Press Release
Project Agora Phase Two: Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub project page, with progress summary from UK Finance’s October 2025 analysis. Covers the live testnet with seven central banks and "selective disclosure" features in footnote 47 of the spec. BIS Project Page | UK Finance Summary
Bitcoin price and market cap: Live data from CoinGecko as of December 10, 2025 close ($123,400 price, $2.44 trillion cap). CoinGecko
Norges Bank recommendation: Full 41-page “Central Bank Digital Currency—Phase 4 Report” published December 10, 2025, citing risks to sovereignty and privacy. Norges Bank Report
India e-rupee circulation: Reserve Bank of India (RBI) dashboard, showing 334% year-on-year growth to ₹10.16 billion as of Q3 2025 baseline with cross-border pilots. RBI Dashboard
Bahamas, Nigeria, and Jamaica adoption rates: Latest from Atlantic Council CBDC Tracker (Sand Dollar: 2.3%; eNaira: 82% dormant; Jam-Dex: 0.07%) and IMF Fintech Note 2025/03 on "organic rejection." Atlantic Council Tracker | IMF Note
Historical purchasing-power losses: Calculated using US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI data (96.4% loss for USD since 1971) and Bank of England inflation tools (99.2% for GBP since 1931). BLS Calculator | BoE Tool
Acronym Guide (for clarity in a fast read):
BIS: Bank for International Settlements (the "central bank for central banks," based in Basel).
ECB: European Central Bank (oversees eurozone monetary policy).
CBDC: Central Bank Digital Currency (government-issued digital money, like a programmable e-cash).
e-CNY: Electronic Chinese Yuan (China's retail CBDC).
PBoC: People’s Bank of China (China's central bank).
If you're reading this on Substack, hit reply with questions—I'm here to unpack any of these deeper. Sources updated live; check back if timelines shift.
