G20 leaders have agreed to a plan that will eventually impose digital currencies and digital IDs on the citizens of their respective nations.
Their agreement comes amid growing concern that governments might use this to monitor people’s spending and crush dissent.
During the summit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for digital ID systems similar to Covid-19 vaccine passports and for an international regulatory body for artificial intelligence.
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She said she wanted the United Nations to have a role in AI regulation and called the European Union’s Covid digital certificate a perfect model for digital public infrastructures (DPI), which would include digital IDs.
The Epoch Times reports: The G20, which is made up of the world’s leading rich and developing nations and is currently under India’s presidency, adopted a final declaration on the subject over the weekend in New Delhi.
The group announced last week that they had agreed to build the necessary infrastructure to implement digital currencies and IDs.
While the group said that discussions are already underway to create international regulations for cryptocurrencies, it claimed that there was “no talk of banning cryptocurrency” at the summit.
Many critics are concerned that governments and central banks will eventually regulate cryptocurrencies and then immediately replace them with central bank digital currencies (CBDC), which lack similar privacy and security.
Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that discussions are underway to build a global framework to regulate crypto assets because they believe that cryptocurrencies can’t be regulated efficiently without total international cooperation.
“India’s [G20] presidency has put on the table key issues related to regulating or understanding that there should be a framework for handling issues related to crypto assets,” Ms. Sitharaman said before the G20 gathering.
The top items discussed at the New Delhi summit included building digital public infrastructure, digital economy, cryptoassets, and CBDCs.
Gita Gopinath, the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) first deputy managing director, said in a video posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the G20 “helped shape a global perspective on how policymakers should deal with crypto assets.”
She also told Business Today that there was “no talk of banning cryptocurrencies, indicating a global consensus against such measures” in the discussions.
However, some of the suggestions call for additional policing of cryptocurrencies, which are decentralized and don’t operate under central banks’ control.
Critics say that these proposals might allow government authorities to impose a social credit score system and decide how their citizens can spend their money.
