The public must be correctly informed over Hunt's roadmap for a CBDC or face the prospect of 'SpyCoin'

Written as a City A.M. opinion column on 7 February 2023, the day the UK government was due to publish its roadmap for a central bank digital currency, the piece argues that few people understood what a CBDC was. It calls a digital pound programmable money, or “SpyCoin”, and warns that the term “Britcoin” would cause confusion with bitcoin. It says then Chancellor Jeremy Hunt failed to grasp the risks of government control over money and relied on laws to contain them.

The column warns that CBDCs would require large amounts of personal data, give central banks unprecedented control, create a single point of failure and leave the digitally excluded behind. Pointing to China, it asks whether a future UK government could lock people’s wallets, and cites criticism of government spending on projects such as track and trace. It calls for the public to be correctly informed rather than manipulated.