The leaders of the Group of 20 nations have agreed to a plan to eventually impose digital currencies and digital IDs on their respective populations, amid concern that governments might use them to monitor their people’s spending and crush dissent.

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. …

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.

At 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 (AI).

She called for the United Nations to have a role in AI regulation and called the European Union’s COVID-19 digital certificate a perfect model for digital public infrastructures (DPI), which would include digital IDs.

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