22nd November 2025 > > I am going to be in trouble with the Lanyardistas.

tl;dr

Remarkably I have found a use case for CBDCs, in a very limited sense of course, which is going to make me very, very unpopular with the Lanyardistas. Cancelled, by those who do not count, is my immediate future.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

Lovely to see perp futures open interest continuing to decline. Perhaps this activity designed solely to take hard-earned cash off gullible retail investors is finally having its come-uppance.

The drawdown from the recent ATH at $126k is now at 33%. This is normal within any secular bull market unless the four-year cycle remains intact, in which case we will likely see BTC as low as $40k. I don’t subscribe to that latter view of the world, but we shall see soon who is right. Regardless, I will continue to DCA in advance of the next ATH.

Curious Cryptos’ meme corner – HODL

I have been HODLing since 2015 with BTC at less than 400 bucks. For long-term investors who zoom out and who do not get sucked into trying to time the market, the ride can get exciting.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Oh boy, I am going to be in so much trouble for this one

CBDCs do have a purpose.

I realised this whilst walking up Stoke Newington High Street just yesterday, having to navigate the forest of motability scooters clogging up the pavement outside the bookies and the local Wetherspoons. The pavement in front of the greengrocer was clear of mechanical obstacles, as was the vegan supermarket, the bank, and the Post Office. Less so outside of Iceland.

But before I lay out my plans for incurring the opprobrium of the Lanyardistas, let me share a little of my personal value and beliefs system with you, before too quickly you judge me too harshly.

You have my permission to do so once you have listened to what I have to say.

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Work, demanding work, challenging work, hard work, long hours of work, that’s what defines us as individuals.

I get it – family, friends, all your loved ones. They are the most important thing in our lives. But you only gain their real respect, and their true love, by working. By working hard for them and showing them that is what you are doing for them.

Working is a very broad term.

It doesn’t necessarily mean earning a shedload of cash, though of course that always helps. It does require putting effort in to get some reward back. It does require a thought process that mulls over how to do the work better. It does require a commitment to see the job through, whatever form that takes. It means that to the best of your abilities, you do the best job you can, in the time you are given to do it. And that allows for mistakes, that allows us to get it wrong, so long as we then use those mistakes to make the work better, and ourselves better, next time around.

Above all else, work requires a recognition and a respect for everyone else who is working with you, and everyone else who also works, regardless of the perceived status of their work.

Once you lose that, you aint working, mate.

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We have a generous safety net in the UK for those who are struggling, and that is the right thing to do.

Not everyone can work enough to support themselves because of disabilities, physical or mental. If our society is to be caring one, we need to look after those people. To do that, there must be a social contract, one that means that the welfare state is not abused except at the very margins, for the world can never be a perfect place.

When someone who is working forty hours a week for the minimum wage in often dirty, and sometimes dangerous conditions, sees what might be evidence of those benefitting from the welfare state spending their days in the bookies or the pub, he or she is going to find that galling. Most people are decent and honest, but if there is little difference in the outcome if you claim welfare compared to working your nuts off then one can easily understand the temptation to take the former route.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the level of fraud within the welfare state is large and ever-increasing. I have personal experience of it, though it was not me committing the fraud. As this narrative grows, it will cause social tensions, it will encourage ever greater fraud (“if they can get away with it so blatantly, so can I”), and is frankly unsustainable given the government’s fiscal incontinence in every other area.

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Let’s talk about another difficult subject, that of immigration.

There are those who believe that no country should have borders, and that anyone has the right to move to anywhere they wish. It is a valid, if desperately naïve, point of view that would be economically and socially ruinous. Those who support this idea have the right to prosecute their case and put it to the electorate which will overwhelmingly reject the concept. Famously, Angela Merkel tried to implement such a policy without democratic consent (“Let them come”), an experiment which proved a spectacular failure which will forever taint her legacy, such that it is.

As for legal migration, despite the histrionics from some of those who do know better, there are established legal routes for immigration. That is undeniable given that under the last government annual immigration rose to nearly 1mm people. I am not going to debate or even proffer a view on what the level should be, or could be, but note only this, that those routes do exist. Whether there is the infrastructure (houses, hospitals, schools, transport etc.) to support any given level of immigration must surely be an important part of the discussion. Failure to provide the required infrastructure is a breach of the social contract that binds the acceptance of newcomers by the current inhabitants.

Without an open borders policy, there will always be illegal immigration. That is just a fact. No smashing of the gangs will stop it. No increase in the level of legal immigration will stop it.

When someone who is working forty hours a week for the minimum wage in often dirty, and sometimes dangerous conditions, sees those who have arrived illegally given accommodation, cash, and the freedom to do as they will, he or she is going to be miffed, and rightly so. When photos are circulated suggesting that some of those who arrived illegally are drinking beer, smoking weed, and playing video games at our expense, the miffiness level is elevated.

The problem becomes one of social tension, and a breakdown in the social contract with legal immigrants. None of this is good.

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The solution – remarkably – lies in a very narrow and extremely clearly defined application of a sterling CBDC.

I know, CBDC’s can be used as a tool of oppression, and once a government gets its dirty hands on such a tool, the temptation to oppress becomes almost overwhelming. That is a real risk within my proposal, and I grant it needs some careful thinking about how to prevent a future government from using it for nefarious purposes.

Putting that admittedly major problem to one side for now, we could use a CBDC to remove all those sources of social tension I have referred to above.

If welfare benefits were paid using a CBDC, and the recipient could only have a bank account funded by the benefits paid as a CBDC, then spending that cash on gambling and booze is easily prevented. Sky sports subscriptions would be banned. The general population would be assured that taxpayers’ money paid as benefits goes on food, housing, clothes, health, and education only, as it should be.

Ditto for payments to illegal immigrants, with the added benefit that with no access to a bank account apart from the assigned one funded by the CBDC, many of the jobs in the gig economy become off-limits, jobs for which illegal immigrants are legally not allowed to fulfil but seemingly do.

The advantages of such an approach are manifest. Those who work will be comfortable that even if there are fraudsters within the benefits system, they don’t get to spend their ill-gotten gains on inappropriate leisure activities. More importantly, it makes the prospect of defrauding the taxpayer via the benefits system a whole lot less appealing if it means you are prevented from spending your days down the pub.

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If one was to draw a Venn diagram of those most upset by this missive, and those who are most supportive of CBDCs, it would contain but one circle.

Cancel me if you wish but let me ask one final question. If your objection to my proposal is that these measures are overly draconian, what do you think that looks like if applied to the whole population of the country?