CBDCs and stablecoins are not the same thing.
It is correct that neither embodies truly open and free monetary technology, but the distinction is still important because only CBDCs give the government direct access and control over your financial activity by default.
I explain at length in my latest article below.
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Very strongly disagree with this categorization for reasons you actually lay out very well in your article.
If we assume that BSA would be rolled back & not apply to stables this take would make sense to me, but i dont see that happening - esp after WH digital assets report.
Until then difference between stables and a CBDC is in name only imo.
The Bank Secrecy Act requires existing actors to file around 27.5 million reports a year. Even if requiring stablecoin issuers to do similar reporting doubled the number of reports, then that's still a fraction of the 200 billion digital transactions Americans make each year.
I don't like either scenario. But that's a big difference in terms of state surveillance.
At best it's just reducing number of private banks, isn't it?
less competition, easier to control.
backed by cbdc instead of $ in the future.
Yes, there is the risk of CBDCs speeding up bank consolidation. While not directly on CBDCs, I wrote about how the Federal Reserve has been contributing to bank consolidation since its inception in this article.
While there is a difference in how efficiently a government can commit acts of tyranny against users of CBDCs vs stablecoins, and I think this distinction is noteworthy under some circumstances, it's also important to make a judgement about how this affects the hard value of the asset.
I think if you're saying the soundness of a stablecoin's value is the same as that of a CBDC, you'd be absolutely correct. In both cases, 100% of the asset's value is ultimately in the hands of the state. Thus, both are only as valuable as the government in question is trustworthy. Compared to a permissionless system, this value will always be approximately zero.
In other words, it may be more accurate to say that stablecoins and CBDCs are clearly different things but ultimately have similar value because they share a common vulnerability.
