Dear President Biden,

As your administration considers creating a Digital Currency issued by the government rather than a commercial bank, we write to you gravely concerned about the financial privacy and rights of everyday people. Creating a new form of money is a big step. If US government-backed digital cash is to be created at all, it must be a trustworthy public good that mirrors the advantages of physical cash—especially anonymity, privacy, permissionlessness, and accessibility for all:

1. Anonymity is essential to building a more just and safe financial system. US-issued digital cash must offer anonymity similar to paper cash—or as close as technology makes possible. Although physical cash can be used in committing crimes, we collectively accept that the enormous benefits of physical cash outweigh its costs. The benefits of properly designed digital cash are worth these same proportional costs.

2. Digital cash technology must be designed to shield our privacy. That means strong encryption to ensure the safety of ourselves, our small businesses, and our loved ones in the digital world. Placing surveillance backdoors in every American’s wallet in pursuit of incremental progress on reducing crime will do more harm than good. People deserve to be confident that their privacy rights are protected by technology itself, not just easily-altered laws dictating who has access to vast troves of our most private information.

3. Digital cash should be not only private, but permissionless—meaning that just as with physical cash, there should be no middleman tracking use or blocking transactions it does not like. Expanding government surveillance or censorship in the financial transactions of everyday people, small businesses, and nonprofit organizations broadly threatens privacy and equity.

4. Like paper cash, digital cash must be universally accessible and exchangeable for goods and services without transaction fees. It’s important for people to use digital cash without being charged fees, being tracked, having a centralized ledger record every transaction, or needing to have access to a smart phone or internet connection.

5. Further, the government should not impede the right to code or criminalize small businesses that build digital cash services. Regulations that make it too expensive for startups to compete in such an industry could cement big bank and big tech monopolies into the next generation of money. Our laws should be designed both to encourage competition and to accommodate future, novel uses of digital cash.

If you move forward with creating a US government backed digital dollar, we urge your administration to consult with and listen to technologists and human rights experts—particularly those from marginalized communities who have been most harmed by surveillance, financial deplatforming and censorship, and our discriminatory traditional banking system.