The New World Order Has Already Begun: Simon Dixon on What’s Coming

Who Is Simon Dixon?

Simon Dixon is the CEO of BnkToTheFuture, a global online investment platform for fintech and blockchain companies. With over two decades of experience in banking, capital markets, and financial technology, Dixon has established himself as one of the most articulate analysts of systemic monetary transformation. His work focuses on the structural mechanics of how money, power, and technology intersect — and what that means for individuals, institutions, and nations navigating the current transition.

In this conversation with Peter McCormack — host of the “What Bitcoin Did” podcast — Dixon lays out the case that the “New World Order” is not a conspiracy theory or a distant possibility. It is an observable restructuring of global financial architecture that is happening in real time. And most people are not paying attention.

The End of the Unipolar Moment

For the past 80 years, the global financial system has operated under a framework established at Bretton Woods in 1944: the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, the IMF and World Bank as arbiters of international finance, and American military and economic power as the ultimate backstop. This system was never permanent — it was contingent on continued American dominance, continued willingness of other nations to hold dollar-denominated assets, and continued trust in US institutions.

All three of these conditions are eroding simultaneously.

“The question is not whether the dollar will lose its reserve currency status. The question is how fast, how chaotic, and what replaces it. Those are the variables that matter — and they are being determined right now.”

Dixon argues that the clearest signal of this transition is not rhetoric or policy papers — it is behaviour. Central banks globally are accumulating gold at the fastest pace since 1967. The BRICS bloc has expanded to include Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, Egypt, and Ethiopia — collectively representing 45% of the world’s population and growing share of global GDP. The mBridge project — a CBDC-based cross-border payment system involving China, Thailand, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia — completed its first live oil transaction in yuan, bypassing SWIFT entirely.

This is not preparation. This is execution. (See: The Yuan Toll — How Iran Turned the Strait of Hormuz into a Currency Gate)

CBDCs: The Digital Panopticon

Central Bank Digital Currencies are often presented as technological upgrades to existing money — faster, cheaper, more efficient. Dixon’s analysis is less sanguine. He identifies CBDCs as the most comprehensive expansion of state monetary control since the invention of central banking itself.

A CBDC is not just programmable money. It is conditional money. It can be designed to expire if not spent within a certain timeframe (eliminating savings). It can be restricted to certain categories of spending (no travel, no luxury goods, no unapproved merchants). It can be frozen or confiscated without judicial process. It can be distributed selectively (stimulus to compliant citizens, withheld from dissidents). And all of this can be executed algorithmically, at scale, with no human intervention required.

Dixon does not argue that CBDCs will necessarily be deployed in their most authoritarian form in every jurisdiction. He argues that the capability will exist, and that historical precedent suggests capabilities tend to be used when political or economic circumstances create sufficient pressure.

The Multipolar Alternative

The BRICS+ bloc is not attempting to replace the dollar with a single alternative reserve currency. That would simply recreate the same structural dependencies with a different hegemon. Instead, the strategy is diversification through infrastructure: parallel payment systems, bilateral trade agreements in local currencies, regional liquidity pools, and gold-backed settlement mechanisms.

The New Development Bank, BRICS Pay, the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, and the mBridge CBDC platform are not competing with the IMF, SWIFT, or the World Bank in the traditional sense. They are building alternatives so that compliance with Western-controlled institutions becomes optional rather than compulsory. (See: BRICS Explained — What It Is and Why It Matters)

Dixon emphasises that this is not ideological. It is pragmatic. When the US freezes $300 billion of Russian central bank reserves in response to the Ukraine invasion, every other nation with significant dollar holdings receives the same message: your reserves are hostages, not assets. The rational response is not protest — it is diversification.

Bitcoin’s Role in the Transition

Where does Bitcoin fit in this restructuring? Dixon’s framework is instructive: Bitcoin is not a participant in the geopolitical chess game. It is the board itself — neutral, permissionless, and incapable of being controlled by any single actor.

Both the Western and BRICS blocs are building systems that require trust in institutions: central banks, clearinghouses, regulatory bodies. Bitcoin requires trust in mathematics and distributed consensus. This makes it simultaneously irrelevant to state actors (who can print their own money) and critically important to individuals and entities that want optionality outside any state-controlled system.

The most likely scenario, Dixon suggests, is not “Bitcoin vs CBDCs” but “Bitcoin and CBDCs” — with Bitcoin serving as a non-sovereign settlement layer for international trade, a hedge against monetary instability, and a parallel financial rail that exists independently of whichever multipolar or unipolar system emerges.

“The question is not whether you believe in Bitcoin. The question is whether you believe that having an exit option — a financial system that no government can freeze, debase, or programme — has value. If the answer is yes, Bitcoin is the only functional implementation of that concept at scale.”

What This Means for Individuals

Dixon’s analysis leads to several concrete implications for anyone trying to navigate the next decade:

1. Currency diversification is not paranoia — it is risk management. Holding 100% of your wealth in any single fiat currency is an unhedged bet that the issuing government will maintain fiscal discipline, that the currency will retain purchasing power, and that you will retain access to it under all political circumstances. History suggests this is optimistic.

2. Programmable money is a double-edged technology. The same infrastructure that enables instant, cheap cross-border payments also enables surveillance, control, and selective enforcement. Understanding the technical architecture of the monetary systems you use is not optional — it is the difference between using a tool and being used by one.

3. The transition will be volatile. Periods of systemic restructuring — the collapse of Bretton Woods, the Asian Financial Crisis, the 2008 crash — are characterised by sharp dislocations, liquidity crunches, and opportunities for those positioned to take advantage. Volatility is not a bug of transition periods — it is the feature.

4. Optionality has asymmetric value. In stable systems, having multiple options (currencies, payment rails, jurisdictions) is mildly useful. In unstable systems, it can be the difference between preservation and confiscation. The cost of building optionality today is low; the cost of needing it and not having it could be catastrophic.

Is This a Conspiracy?

The term “New World Order” carries considerable cultural baggage — decades of conspiracy theories, shadowy cabals, and grand unified plots. Dixon’s argument has nothing to do with any of that. He is describing observable institutional behaviour: central banks publishing CBDC pilots, nations signing bilateral trade agreements, payment systems being constructed, reserves being reallocated.

There is no secret meeting required. The incentives are structural. The US weaponises the dollar through sanctions → other nations seek alternatives. Central banks want more control over monetary velocity → CBDCs provide the mechanism. Existing reserve currency arrangements concentrate risk → diversification becomes rational. These are not conspiracies. They are strategies.

The “order” being constructed is not monolithic. It is fragmented, multipolar, and contested. But it is being constructed — and pretending otherwise is a choice to be surprised when the transition accelerates.