I just googled project redar cbdc and almost nothing came up. You seem to have some specific concerns about a certain project, I can’t speak to that. I was responding to the more general part of your question about whether an alternative to US dollars is being developed and whether there is some dystopian social credit system involved.

No, not as you’ve described it.

However there are many decentralized blockchain/distributed ledger technologies that are up and running that can handle the transaction volume that would be required if they were mass adopted and used as day to day currency, replacing government controlled currencies. Bitcoin can’t handle that kind of transaction volume, but Nano, BCH, XRP, HBAR, etc to name a few would all be capable of being used as currency to replace the US dollar.

Now please downvote me as is tradition.

This has been a proposed use case for public blockchain technology for a long time. If government agencies have to use crypto currencies that run on public blockchains, that means anyone with a computer and internet connection can audit that agency to see exactly what they are spending their money on. You can even program the money so that it’s impossible to spend it on things that aren’t approved for that agency. Essentially it’s extreme transparency with the aim of preventing fraud.

And yes I know implementation will be hard. And yes I know the people at the helm right now have no genuine interest in government accountability or fraud prevention. But I’ve been following the development of blockchain technology for over a decade and this is literally one of the first use cases that was proposed when bitcoin was invented.

It makes perfect sense if you don’t think about it.