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Nick Anthony
EconWithNick@verified-nostr.com
npub1n2m8...gflr
Research Fellow at the Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives and Fellow at the Human Rights Foundation. Covering CBDCs, financial privacy, and cryptocurrency. Opinions are my own.
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EconWithNick 2 months ago
Excited to finally attend BTC Prague, and as a speaker no less! image
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EconWithNick 2 months ago
Absolutely wild exchange. Rep Himes says, as lead Dem on intelligence oversight, that the NSA isn't surveilling Americans. Someone points out that Congress already confirmed the NSA is actively surveilling Americans. Rep. Himes says he didn't know.
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EconWithNick 2 months ago
How do central bankers consistently get history wrong? Is it ignorance or lying? Fed governor Michael Barr tries to say failures in free banking justify being skeptical of stablecoins. The problem? Those failures were caused by overly restrictive laws and regulations. image
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EconWithNick 2 months ago
I'm incredibly proud to announce the Activist Atlas. @Run with Bitcoin and I have noticed that connections between activists often fall apart in the chaos of this world. That means mistakes made get repeated and lessons learned go unheard. That Activist Atlas will change that. It will be a digital platform that allows changemakers to stay connected, discover one another’s work, and coordinate year-round while introducing freedom technologies like Bitcoin for donations and Nostr for censorship-resistant communication. A huge thank you goes to the @HRF for making this possible. Their grant will support the launch and help us grow a global network of activists using freedom tech. Stay tuned for more announcements soon. image
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EconWithNick 2 months ago
In other news that reads like an April Fool's joke but isn't... The Federal Reserve has a closet with $1.4 million worth of laptops that were unaccounted for. image
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EconWithNick 2 months ago
What should be done about stablecoins? The Reserve Bank of India says governments need to promote CBDCs. He says CBDCs are superior... as long as you assume every other country also has a CBDC.
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EconWithNick 3 months ago
"The moment you onboard a customer, the clock starts ticking---not just toward periodic review, but toward every transaction, every change in behavior, every event that shifts risk." image
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EconWithNick 3 months ago
I'm surprised no one has noticed this... but the ECB is openly touting that the newest use case for the digital euro is sanctions evasion. In an interview with the FT, Lagarde openly said the digital euro could be used to evade US sanctions. Considering central bankers often label bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as tools for criminals to evade sanctions, this is rich. In fact, Lagarde almost sounds like a bitcoiner when she talks about the need for _individuals_ to reclaim their financial sovereignty. So forget financial inclusion, monetary policy, or any of the other popular items officials have proclaimed about CBDCs. The digital euro is about sanctions evasion. https://www.cato.org/blog/digital-euro-sanctions-evasion
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EconWithNick 3 months ago
Allow me to translate this ECB paper from academic to plain English: 'We found that showing people government propaganda made them more likely to want the digital euro.' image
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EconWithNick 3 months ago
Forget financial inclusion, monetary policy, and modernization. Now, CBDCs are about preventing discrimination against central bank money. image
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EconWithNick 3 months ago
That's going to be a no from me. Ironically, in making the case for greater state involvement, the CD Howe authors completely overlook that it was state regulation that caused the problems during America's free banking era. image
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EconWithNick 3 months ago
You'd think someone previously convicted of misusing public funds would be more careful about this sort of thing... image