Digital Currency or Digital Control? - Nick Anthony | Ep. 103

Nov 3, 2025

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My guest today is Nick Anthony, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a fellow at HRF, and one of the clearest voices dissecting CBDCs, financial privacy, and government overreach. He authored the book “digital currency or digital control?” and advocates for freedom and privacy. In this episode, we explore how governments use propaganda to sell CBDCs as “digital cash,” despite public resistance, and how pilots in China and The Bahamas reveal low adoption and rising coercion. Nick explains why control is a universal temptation across democracies and autocracies, and how the Bank Secrecy Act created 55 years of normalized financial monitoring in the United States. We discuss the distinction between stablecoins and CBDCs, the slow global rollout of digital currencies, and why Bitcoin’s censorship resistance remains essential, alongside other freedom tech tools. He also shares insights from his work maintaining HRF’s CBDC Tracker, his visit to the European Parliament, and his warning that even if CBDCs fail, today’s financial system already operates as a surveillance regime.

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HRF’s CBDC Tracker: https://cbdctracker.hrf.org/home

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-- CHAPTERS –

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