Balaji Srinivasan Says Millions of Worried Depositors Could Wire Money to Bitcoin As Banks Get Too Big To Escape

Former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan thinks Bitcoin (BTC) is the way US citizens can exit the monetary system to escape government control.

Srinivasan says in a new interview with Bitcoin bull Anthony Pompliano that he’s specifically concerned about the Federal Reserve’s plan to launch its new digital payment and settlement service, FedNow, in July.

The former Coinbase CTO refers to the service as a central bank digital currency (CBDC). According to Srinivasan, FedNow could give the government more control over people’s finances.

“It’s really going to be one of two things. First, there are all kinds of chaotic printing and bank runs in the weeks to come, as worried depositors check on their funds, and the big branch point is whether they wire it to big banks or they turn it into Bitcoin. And that determines literally whether freedom lives, as funny as that sounds.

Because if everybody wires to big banks, and they think, ‘Oh my God, the Fed saved us, the big banks saved us,’ and all the small banks and all the tech banks and so on die, well the FedNow CBDC, which they chose to announce even in the middle of this crisis… then all the money is trapped in all the big banks, and then in July you only have like four banks left or whatever it is, the CBDC is rolled out, and ‘too big to fail’ becomes ‘too big to escape.’ You literally can’t spend your money without government approval on anything.”

According to the Federal Reserve, the FedNow Service aims to enable businesses and individuals to send and receive instant payments anytime. However, the Fed did not say that they plan to use CBDCs to process payments.

The Biden Administration is currently exploring the possibility of using CBDCs to issue digital dollars.

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