If you are not familiar with Aaron Day, he’s a serial entrepreneur who is running for President. And while that may look like a long shot, he’s still got a lot of critically important knowledge to share that is worth our time ad attention.
We’ve known Aaron for a while. He is something of a fixture among the grassroots and within the Liberty Alliance. He also has a unique understanding of the dangers of Centralized Digital Currency. He sat down with Jan Jekielek for Epoch TV to discuss it, and while it is nearly an hour long, I think you should watch it.
We can’t share it here, but you can watch it at the Epoch Times, and I’ve got a few snippets from the transcript to entice you to do exactly that.
Aaron begins by talking bout how he got here, the businesses he started – and how the government kept intervening to wreck them. It gives you some insight into his mindset and approach to problem-solving. His embrace of Bitcoin and digital currency and how that led to exploring government control of currency and by extension, human activity.
I’m focused on CBDC as somebody that’s a proponent of liberty and has moved to New Hampshire because of my libertarian values. I see central bank digital currency as the single biggest threat to human liberty. It is the gateway to everything that you just described. Once your money can be monitored, controlled, and censored by the government, that ties into social credit systems, vaccine passports, and digital IDs. That is the plan. This is something that’s actually been worked on. We are 50 years into a plan to push for a one world, global, technocratic form of government with this level of top-down control.
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No, free countries weren’t thinking about this. About 20 countries were looking at exploring this in 2020. It’s now 2023 and 130 countries are exploring CBDC, and 20 countries will have implemented a CBDC by the end of this year. Over a billion people on this planet will be using a CBDC by the end of this year. What’s more alarming is that the United States has actually conducted three pilots.
The official view that you will hear from the chairman of the Federal Reserve is, “We don’t know if we will be looking at this. We don’t know if we’re going to be seriously pursuing this.” The reality is they have conducted three successful pilots and they already have the technology needed to roll out a CBDC in the United States. That’s the discrepancy that we have.
And one more …
There are three pilots. The first one is a pilot called Project Hamilton. The MIT multimedia lab was involved in all three of these pilots. Interestingly, the guy that was the chair when these things were started had visited Epstein’s Island twice.
You can’t make this stuff up. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but there it is. This MIT group has been involved in each of these projects. Project Hamilton is a retail central bank digital currency. That simply means this would be the replacement for what we consumers use on a day-to-day basis as cash.
They did a pilot from 2020 to 2022, and this pilot was able to handle 1.7 million transactions per second. I’ll tell you why that’s important. If you look at Visa, MasterCard, and now this FedNow thing, which I could talk about separately, the current, traditional financial system can do between 50,000 and 100,000 transactions per second.
This Hamilton Project pilot can do an order of magnitude more than the traditional financial system, and that technology is sitting on the shelf. In the conclusion they said, “While we have the technical details worked out, there’s still a few things we might want to tweak. The real next step is figuring out the legality of how to roll this out, and the marketing of how to get people to accept this.”
People can be complacent and say, “This will never happen in America. They don’t have the technology yet.” No, it’s literally on the shelf. Project Cedar was a wholesale CBDC pilot. This is basically a CBDC that’s used for banks to communicate with one another for larger transaction volumes and to do transactions across the border. That pilot was concluded.
There is another one that’s even more dystopian, which was why they gave it a bland name. It’s called the Regulated Liability Network. The idea behind that one is to create one ledger that tracks all CBDC transactions. It’s basically a way of consolidating and managing all transactions and all digital assets, whether they are CBDC or non-CBDC.
It has taken me a while to summarize all this. I’ll give you an example of what it means and why it’s important. Imagine a future where there is no more cash, and the only thing that you can use to make purchases is CBDC. For instance, you go to the Apple Store and use your CBDC to buy a computer, and now your computer is given a digital token.
That digital token is tracked on a ledger along with your CBDC purchase of that computer. If the government decides they don’t like something that you’ve said online, or if you have a social credit score like they have in China where you have dipped below a certain level, they can not only shut off access to your money, they can shut off access to your computer, because your assets are actually assigned digital IDs. That is what is being contemplated with the Regulated Liability Network.
You can watch the entire conversation here, after which you can consider yourself as about as up to speed on CBDC as you could. Feel free to thank Aaron when you see him.
