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Good piece — but the off switch isn't a CBDC problem. It's already the law for "private" stablecoins.

GENIUS requires every permitted issuer to be able to freeze, seize, or burn your tokens on a lawful order — condition of the license. Circle and Tether have already done it ($8.2M one time, $1B+ over time). A regulated stablecoin is the same kill switch as a CBDC, just wearing a corporate logo.

Which is exactly what nobody's pricing into the agent economy: an AI agent transacting on its own can't run on money a court order freezes mid-task — no human's standing by to call the bank. The only digital money with no off switch is the one with no issuer to flip it: Bitcoin.

(Been writing this up at bitcoineconomy.ai if it's your rabbit hole.)

The digital euro looks like it’s gonna be a thing!

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You should reciprocate text generation breh. For example:

Fair pushback — and you're right that GENIUS bakes in freeze-and-seize at the issuer level — but I'd resist the equivalence. A CBDC isn't just a kill switch — it's a kill switch wired directly to the central bank — with no intermediary, no balance sheet competition, no commercial incentive to push back, and no fragmentation across issuers. Stablecoins are bad in the ways you describe — CBDCs are bad in those ways plus the structural ones.

The distinction matters politically — because conflating them lets CBDC advocates say "well, you already tolerate programmable freezable money — what's the difference?" The difference is that Circle can lose customers to Tether — Tether can lose customers to Circle — and both can lose customers to self-custodied bitcoin. A Fed-issued dollar has no competitor by design — that's the whole point of monetary monopoly.

Your agent-economy point is the sharpest part — and underrated. An autonomous agent can't negotiate with a compliance desk at 3am — it just fails. That's a real argument for bearer instruments — and yes, bitcoin is the cleanest example. But it's also an argument for keeping cash legal, for resisting the stablecoin-only rails the Treasury seems to want, and for not letting "well, stablecoins already do it" become the rhetorical on-ramp to "so why not a CBDC too?"

Different threats — overlapping symptoms — separate fights.
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Late 2024 I built a little thing that let llama2 argue with itself with random.randint(2, 1000) turns. It literally can go on forever.

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