This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 10th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown.

Americans broadly are only dimly aware of Central Bank digital currency, but the more they learn it seems the less they like.

Cato's Emily Eekins details results from a forthcoming Cato Institute poll on the still

nascent currency. We spoke last week. The implications for Central Bank

digital currencies could not be higher given especially how the people who are

promoting them what they talk about as features

and the people who support who are you know people who know a lot about this technology

and people who are working on behalf of governments to roll out this technology

refer people to my podcast with Nick Anthony on the Nigeria's experience so far with Central Bank digital currencies, but Americans

broadly, they don't know what they are.

They don't know anything about them, even though policy people who are looking at this understand that there are massive

implications to adopting this technology.

That's right. Yes, so we just at the Cato Institute conducted a new poll of 2,000 Americans with UGov,

and we asked people about Central Bank digital currency, knowing that they probably didn't

know a lot about it, but we wanted to find out more and sure enough only about

28% of Americans say that they are familiar with Central Bank digital currency.

Compare that to say about two-thirds are familiar with the Federal Reserve

which would you know facilitate the Central Bank digital currency if they if

the United States were to adopt it.

So what can we say with confidence about Americans' attitudes, you know, for the most part,

fresh, just becoming aware of Central Bank digital currencies by virtue of participating in a poll.

...