No, the CrowdStrike Debacle is Not a Warning of What Could Happen if we Introduce CBDCs
I was waiting for it and I wasn’t disappointed – the Daily Sceptic article linking the CrowdStrike debacle to CBDCs.
There are many arguments against CBDCs but “if it went offline all transactions would stop” isn’t one of them. Anyone making that argument does not understand how money works. It is wrong to say, as the DS article does, that:
“A country reliant on a CBDC instead of cash would see an end to all transactions as a consequence of a similar failure affecting a component within whatever software stack was being used to operate CBDC infrastructure.”
As an aside, you don’t hear this criticism levelled against Bitcoin. Perhaps Libertarians have access to computer architectures denied to Governments, or perhaps it’s just politics.
How do I justify my rebuttal of the usually excellent Dr. R P? We don’t know what the CBDC system architecture will be because it hasn’t been designed yet, but however it’s constituted it will only manage CBDC transactions.
CBDCs are proposed as an alternative to physical cash, particularly for online transactions where notes and coins don’t work. According to the British Retail Consortium, physical cash accounts for about 11% of consumer spend, with an average transaction value around £25.
And that’s just retail activity which is a subset of all transactions. The remaining 89% are cards, gift cards, bank transfers, asset transfers and so on. These are nothing to do with the Bank of England and therefore would go nowhere near any future CBDC system.
That’s just retail transactions. High value transactions are handled by CHAPS. Funnily enough, CHAPS was down on July 18th. It handles £360 billion per day, which is 90% of sterling payments by value. That was bad, but still not “all transactions” and the economy didn’t stop. Indeed, most people didn’t even realise it had happened.
Dear reader, if you take nothing else away from this article, remember that just because it has a pound sign in-front of it does not mean it would be controlled by any future CBDC system. This is why there is little to fear from CBDCs.
If you still oppose them if they ever come to fruition, just don’t use them, there are dozens of alternatives.
In some ways CBDCs would not be so different from all the other electronic money that we have all been using for decades and those systems do run into difficulties from time to time.
But if Visa, Mastercard, NatWest or literally thousands of other parts of the global money system go offline, it is not as Dr. R P says “an end to all transactions”.
This is partly because unlike airport check-in systems, financial transactions very often have alternative means of settlement. We know this because we have all experienced it: “Sorry that card isn’t working. Try another one.”
Don’t get me wrong. The CrowdStrike debacle is a catastrophe and an almost unbelievable single point of failure in otherwise disconnected corporate IT systems.
Who knew that simultaneously injecting files into Windows’ kernels in millions of machines around the globe with no canary testing would one day go wrong? The folly of corporate IT knows no bounds. Indeed, one of the objections to CBDCs is that it would be a government system (if we stretch government to include the Bank of England) which in this context should be seen as a benefit.
Yes, government has an appalling track record of IT system delivery, but that is not so much the case these days. If a CBDC system ever does gets built, it will be a government system classified as Critical National Infrastructure.
That puts it in the same category as things such as the Electricity System Operator’s grid balancing mechanism and therefore subject to extraordinary levels of resilience planning.
These are systems that you seldom hear of because they are extraordinarily reliable, and yes, expensive in a way that only governments can afford.
The people running them do have a clue what they are doing, unlike your typical globalist CIO diversity hire who is in the seat for the kudos, the salary and the ability to manage suppliers and keep costs down. There is plenty to debate about CBDCs but let’s get over this idea that they will take down the economy.
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Greg Spinolae
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The CrowdStrike debacle certainly IS a warning about trusting a closed source computer operating system that was DESIGNED from its earliest beginnings to provide gateways and, therefore, possible external control of user devices. By extension, the ability to control or block digital processes (including financial) rest with those who coltrol such an operating system.
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Tom
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There are millions of daily cash transactions these clowns never know about. Cash is hardly dead; they just want it to be so that they can control everything digitally and that includes when they murder you because you are a useless human to them.
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Wisenox
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Saying there’s a warning implies there’s a debate; there isn’t. One side wants it, one sees it for what it is:
If they create the currency, they control you. Countries need to issue their own currencies, tangible to reduce reliance on the obvious and purposeful fragility of private banking, and zero interest applied. People already pay taxes, we aren’t supposed to pay for the currency too.
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Tony
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http://www.paulstramer.net/2024/07/international-public-notice-regarding.html
International Public Notice: Regarding “Gold Revaluation Accounts”
By Anna Von Reitz
Also called “off ledger accounts” the “gold revaluation accounts” being held by banks are their hedge funds against the day when the delusion of the Federal Reserve Notes and EUROs can no longer be maintained.
This is the “back end” of the Federal Reserve scheme, the means they intended to ultimately profit from, ever since their first meeting at Jekyll Island.
The idea, part of a “Hundred Year Plan” that included multiple government corporation bankruptcies, is simple.
Take everyone off the gold standard and the silver standard, hoard the bullion and coinage in “off ledger accounts” that the banks can see as “private holdings” —pretend that these “holdings” belong to unknown depositors, claim them via claims on abandonment benefiting the banks, wait for deflation and inflation to eat away the fiat currencies and run up the “value” of gold, then cash in.
That is, they used a simple hedge-fund approach on a macro-economic scale, and are counting on the increase in the perceived value of “their” gold and silver hedge fund holdings, to more than compensate for the loss of value of the fiat currencies.
Only it’s not their gold and not their silver in these “revaluation accounts”. A good portion of it belongs to the actual land and soil jurisdiction governments, and far more belongs to private trusts and mining companies and others who have been bypassed, conveniently side-stepped, and attacked by turns.
The bankers anticipate being able to sell the gold and silver back to the grandsons and granddaughters of the people they stole it from, at anywhere between $2500 and $10,000 “dollars” per ounce of gold, and eventually anywhere between $1800 and $6500 per ounce of silver, once the gold market plays out.
We are just now entering the “target range” for the “collapse” of these investments and the beginning sell-offs of profit-taking related to these plans put in place over 100 years ago.
This early profit-taking is what makes the “prime indicators” like the M1 and M2 go up and down like a yo-yo. Both the banks and the “undetermined private investors” are darting back and forth into the cash pool and selling gold for cash of various kinds to improve their short term liquidity.
This is leading to cash crunches of various severity on a temporary but gathering long-term basis, which is exactly what the banks ultimately want — the cash being drained out of the economy and gold stores increasing prior to the Big Crash.
They will milk this along as long as they reasonably can, luring more gold out of the hidden private investment pools, “ingesting” each spike in the gold supply before each new spike in cash value inflation.
Remember that they are still operating on non-negotiable I.O.U.s (FEDERAL RESERVE NOTES) and getting away with it; so they are selling nothing for something and have no motive to stop.
Because these gold accounts have been managed and traded on an off-ledger basis, nobody knows for sure how much gold and silver is held outside the banking system worldwide, but extensive efforts have been made by the pirates to identify and cashier over 5,000 private family trusts and their assets which have been cashiered in the banking system for the benefit of the dishonest bankers and their scheming corporations “functioning as” governments.
The banks, if they are allowed to get away with it, will sing the public a song and dance and avoid the truth about all the precious metals accounts they have been collecting and cashiering and trading upon on an off-ledger basis for all these many years.
The identities of the actual owners of all this wealth, unincorporated governments, private family trusts, unincorporated mining operations, and so on, will be avoided and ignored if at all possible — because otherwise the banks would have to explain to the world why these nice people with
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solarsmurph
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What the heck are “CBDCs”… Articles that use TLAs (three letter acronyms) without explaining what they stand for is just poor practice and lazy reporting.
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Barry
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Is this reporter 12 or 14? What could go wrong with the internet well duh. Why does this generation believe that the govt somehow will get it right? Anyone who thinks that the block chain thermo is going to save their bank account cause the internet says so is delusional.
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