Bitcoin vs. CBDCs

The advent of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) has aroused a great deal of attention, igniting a fervour among central bankers, apprehension in the financial media, and vigorous discussions within the Bitcoin community. Views on CBDCs among bitcoin aficionados are very diverse; some consider them as effective instruments for government monitoring and control, while others regard them as a last-ditch effort by established fiat systems to stay relevant. This essay will examine the claim that bitcoin is set to become the most popular digital currency and that CBDCs are unlikely to be widely adopted. This thesis is supported by three key factors: the first-mover advantage, the open and permissionless character of Bitcoin, and its user-centric monetary policy.

Permissionless and open architecture

Because of its open and permissionless architecture, anyone can join the network and help it grow. This is how Bitcoin works. This transparency encourages a thriving community of users, miners, and developers and accelerates innovation. CBDCs, in sharp contrast, are centralised, closed systems. CBDCs are similar to government intranets, such those used by organisations like the US Department of Veterans Affairs or the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), but they lack the open-source component that encourages community-driven development. These intranets are made for specific user groups and objectives. The CBDC intranet’s centralised and restricted structure makes it difficult for them to innovate as quickly as an open system like Bitcoin.

Early-mover privilege

In addition to being the first digital money, Bitcoin has experienced significant growth and adoption in the real world. Bitcoin has accomplished major milestones in terms of financialization, one of which being the recent acceptance of the cryptocurrency as legal cash in El Salvador. It has a robust organic economy, extensive and extremely liquid trading markets, and the global maturation of derivative markets. Technically speaking, Bitcoin relies on tens of thousands of dispersed nodes to maintain the ledger, which is backed by a worldwide distributed network of miners and mining equipment that operates in almost every country on Earth. On the other hand, the majority of CBDC initiatives are still in the early stages of research and development, with many of them being in the alpha stage.

The head of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, stated on September 25 of this year that the Digital Euro will not be implemented for at least another two years. China, which was once seen to be at the forefront of Central Bank Digital Currency technology, was still in the trial stage and was mainly concerned with developing simple use cases with close allies. By contrast, Bitcoin and the entire open cryptocurrency ecosystem have accumulated almost 14 years of development and expansion on their own. If one hasn’t followed the development of Bitcoin closely, CBDCs can seem sensible at first. But a closer look reveals that Bitcoin has a significant lead over other cryptocurrencies in terms of network effects, adoption, and technological development due to its first-mover advantage.

User-focused financial strategy

The monetary policy of Bitcoin is specially created with the user in mind. It uses bitcoin mining, a merit-based procedure for minting currencies, and imposes a hard cap of 21 million coins. This strategy is novel because it establishes a fixed supply, something that monetary policies set by the government have never done before. Since the ability to regulate the money supply is extremely valuable from both a political and economic standpoint, central banks are unlikely to embrace such a user-centric approach. As such, bitcoin is not only a desirable substitute, similar to gold in the past, but it also constitutes a scientific breakthrough over earlier monetary systems.

In the end

Finally, given that Bitcoin is currently the most prominent open-source, permissionless value network, it is quite conceivable that it will outperform government-run technological trials. The key premise that drove the World Wide Web’s success in surpassing government-based intranets—its capacity to innovate continuously, move quickly, and function globally—also propels bitcoin’s potential to establish itself as the global standard for digital value. Bitcoin is a strong challenger because of its extraordinary agility, inventive energy, worldwide reach, and substantial head start. A more reasonable stance would be to be sceptical about the practical viability of CBDCs in general, as opposed to the government authorities’ widespread view that CBDCs are inevitable.