It seems that Covid-19 and the unprecedented economic stimulus that followed created a mini-force towards programmable money. As mentioned above, programmable money is money with limitations. An analogy to this is the food voucher, where beneficiaries receive cash-equivalent coupons that can only be spent on food - not on alcohol, horse racing, lottery tickets or anything else. In modern form, these "meal stamps" are digitized tokens that are settled on a blockchain platform with smart contracts.
Programmable Money and CBDC, The SEACEN Centre, 7 December 2020.
CBDCs present multiple risks to consumers - financial, economic and human rights risks that can be potentially severe if a CBDC is poorly designed or with bad intentions.
Human rights risks
CBDCs can be used by governments as a tool of surveillance and control if they are not properly designed. All transactions can be recorded and any authority with access to the CBDC ledger can see all transactions. Through the ledger, they can also control individuals - for example, they can write an expiration date on their CBDC, limit the amount of their holdings, change interest rates and prices depending on who the person is, prevent purchases and automatically deduct fines.
The combination of digital identity and CBDC is also a big risk. Digital payments require access and addressability, but these are different from digital identity. In a world of programmable money, digital identity can go beyond simply providing access to funds. The use of funds can also be made dependent on the characteristics of the digital identity. If these funds are in the CBDC, the central bank and with it the government can directly control how you spend and receive the money.
Beware of anyone advocating linking digital identity to CBDC- although digital identity is needed to track down fraudsters, money launderers and other criminals, there is no monetary reason to link CBDC to digital identity.
Social Risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies, Finextra, 17 January 2022.
This digital identity determines what products, services and information we have access to - or, on the contrary, what is blocked from us.
Identity in the Digital World: Insight Report, World Economic Forum, September 2018, page 5.
An "agricultural world" in which the majority of people are peasants would be able to support 5-7 billion people... In contrast, a reasonable estimate for the society of the industrialized world would be one billion people at the current material standard of living in North America.
Global Biodiversity Assessment, UNEP, 1995, page 773.