I was impressed by what the inventor of Bitcoin, Dr. Craig Wright, recently said about CBDC's.
How Dr. Craig Wright envisions CBDCs running on Bitcoin
I'd already figured they would be more expensive in any way than using pure satoshi's(Bitcoin's token unit). At least, because the CBDC's layer 2 activity will add to the transaction size, and transactions fees are based on size.
The net effect of this of course is that no one will use CBDC's, all else being equal.
With the important exception of paying taxes, which has always been forced onto people on pain of serious punishment.
I'm OK with this still, as it would be more efficient in the economic sense. Thus making the economy more productive to that extent.
The net, net effect of this higher productivity is to increase the demand for locations on which all the wealth in that economy is produced, in general.
So rents (and selling prices) of locations will rise concomitantly, thanks to the increased demand for the fixed supply, now that much more sought after, particularly by the more successful businesses.
The sole beneficiary of CBDC's therefore will be property owners. Anyone who owns property, especially freehold, will receive all the gains... in the end. Only a feckless property owner leaves rent on the table as the profits of free enterprise.
But who will pay? Tenants, highly leveraged mortgagors, small business and savers will be paying these beneficiaries in higher rents.
This is all relative - A household usually collects some of its income in economic rent and the rest as earned income. The trick for the successful household is to maximise the income stream from rents. And minimise the spending of its precious labour and capital through work and business formation.
There is relatively little profit in the earnings from work and enterprise. It's heavily taxed, so has huge costly inputs and small highly risky outputs.
Whereas collecting economic rent has no additional inputs once the asset has been acquired legally. Yet has enormous tax free outputs, which are always bailed out first by government of all party's.
As always, CBDC's are yet another example of a labour saving device, which sit on top of Bitcoin which is yet still another. And so too are all other tech inventions like AI. All of them, if they improve productivity, will ultimately increase the value of locations to the extent that productivity is increased.
This is inevitable because the fecund property owner always charges the maximum rent the tenant or mortgagor can afford. Which is always everything beyond what they need to startup. And now, thanks to the new technology, they can afford that much more.
As you know, I am a rentier. I'm driven by rent seeking because it's so profitable. And avoid as much work and capital investment as I can, because that is hard and risky.
I'm very pleased indeed, about the prospect of CBDC's.