Programmable central bank digital currency

Legacy incumbent Game position: Accept

Accumulation: Variable

Ethical frame: Hobbesian

Divisibility: Fine

Uniformity: Fungible

Prototype: Digital yuan (e-CNY), Riksbank e-krona

A sovereign digital currency where the central bank programs rules into the money itself — expiry, spending limits, transfer conditions.

Structural profile

Game position: Accepts the existing game; digitizes sovereign issuance and adds a programmable constraint layer
Value-signal richness: Single rational unit; programmable rules govern transfer, expiry, and conditional spending
Accumulation regime: Variable by design; can be programmed to enable, penalize, or conditionally restrict accumulation

Divisibility: Divisible to the smallest programmable unit, same as the fiat it digitizes.
Uniformity (Fungibility): Nominally fungible, though programmable rules (expiry, use-restrictions) can make specific units behave differently in practice.
Durability: Same institutional durability as fiat, though the digital infrastructure itself is a new failure surface.
Portability: Highly portable digitally, though transfers may be programmatically restricted (expiry, geofencing) by design.
Acceptability: Legal-tender status in principle, though real rollouts (e.g. e-CNY) show adoption lagging behind the mandate.

Coordination / discovery: Price-aggregation plus algorithmic-mechanism-design; the sovereign encodes behavioral rules directly into the currency
Governance & issuance: Central bank issues; state programs and enforces behavioral constraints on balances
Scale & federation: National typically; cross-border through bilateral or multilateral CBDC bridge protocols

Default ethical orientation: Hobbesian; assumes citizens require sovereign oversight and discipline to coordinate exchange safely
Accumulative drive: Variable; programmable expiry, spending caps, or conditional-use restrictions at sovereign discretion
Status / recognition: Encoded in monetary signal; full transaction visibility extends the state's disciplinary reach
Time preference: Short — programmable expiry actively enforces short-term spending at the sovereign’s discretion.

Track record: Live pilots are underway in multiple jurisdictions — China's e-CNY and Sweden's e-krona are the best-documented — but no major economy has fully replaced cash with a CBDC yet .
Governance requirements: None for an individual user; governance sits entirely with the issuing central bank, which also sets the programmable rules.
Resource requirements: A digital wallet compatible with the issuing central bank's system; issuing one requires substantial state-level digital infrastructure.