Some talk about the privacy of the digital euro has been made. Some people said that your transactions are going to be tracked. Should an european worry about it? Would GNU Taler be a possible solution?
And it’s not like the digital euro is some dream, it will become reality soon.
Not too knowledged about digial euro, but here’s my two cents.
We are already using digital currency. Your card and bank transfer are being monitored(AML), looked at(IRS & credit agencies), and data mined(data brokers) every second. It stared when banks started using electronic records and government ditched the gold standard. Today’s currency is mere a certificate that both sides trust there is value in it. IMO I can’t see it enables new innovative use cases but a pure gmmick. Just a solution in serach of a problem. There are necessity and usability issues before privacy issue.
And no, I don’t think it can replaces physical cash any time soon. If they really want to deprecate physical cash, they need to ensure everyone have a digital wallet, and everyone knows how to use it, including your blinded friend and granny.
They explicitly state that the digital euro is not here to replace cash:
Q3. Would a digital euro replace cash?
No. A digital euro would complement cash, not replace it. A digital euro would exist alongside cash in response to people’s growing preference to pay digitally, in a fast and secure way. Cash would continue to be available in the euro area, as would the other private electronic means of payment currently being used.
And even less a reason for the digital euro to exist.
I think deprecating physical cash must be highly illegal because everyone has the right not to own a phone.
it’s more like the bits are representing physical cash, but in the future the physical cash will represent the bits. Most money is digital even now and even the physical cash is mostly just paper money, not precious metals, not even the coins probably have their worth in metals, so it makes sense.
Of course money is not a real valuable resource but I will fight for the right of not owning digital devices. Forcing it makes no good sense to me and it will pronounce the death of privacy as a word. They will find some proprietary system like Play Integrity (but worse) to lock it in for “security”.
There are a lot of issues with your post imo.
First, cash is going away, soon. Sweden has done it years ago. Europe is now playing catch up.
Second, a universal digital currency will remove all system heterogeneity. Yes money is already digitalised, but across several proprietary environments. I can and have set up several accounts across several banks so my spending cannot be fully tracked by a single corporate entity. This will be moot once everyone has to use the same harmonized system.
Third, one of the sponsors of the universal European currency has been caught talking about time limited digital currency. As in, spend your money or it just disintegrates after a set amount of time. Which really destroyed a lot of trust in the endeavour
I don’t even know if you know what you’re talking.
First, cash is going away, soon. Sweden has done it years ago. Europe is now playing catch up.
Please refer the OP’s post in this thread.
Second, a universal digital currency will remove all system heterogeneity. Yes money is already digitalised, but across several proprietary environments. I can and have set up several accounts across several banks so my spending cannot be fully tracked by a single corporate entity. This will be moot once everyone has to use the same harmonized system.
That’s the privacy problem the OP’s saying.
Third, one of the sponsors of the universal European currency has been caught talking about time limited digital currency. As in, spend your money or it just disintegrates after a set amount of time. Which really destroyed a lot of trust in the endeavour
How’s that related to my post?
My biggest problem is that everything goes under the ECB, not to the national level central banks. The “they can see where and how much did you buy” is mute point, since they alredy could do that. And it’s even worse when there are private companies that sell your info for profit.
It could be private or could be not. But in a world of total financial surveillance and initiatives like ChatControl, I doubt it will be really private.
It still seems to be under heavy discussion. see this recent article: https://netzpolitik.org/2024/eu-council-discusses-digital-euro-and-how-much-privacy-should-it-be/
I assume the end result will be more privacy preserving than current commercial offers like Visa or Mastercard, but it will be a trade-off between what commercial data-brokers will be able to see and what the central bank will be able to see. Pick your poison I guess 😒
Realistically it might also become so bureaucratic that it will see limited uptake, but specifically for GNU Taler it might make it possible for a Taler intermediatory to exchange digital Euros for tokens in your Taler wallet without having a banking license, which could help Taler adoption a lot. But I guess the latter would depend on how usable the former is. Like if it is too bureocratic, then a separate payment system based on it could thrive, but if it is easy to use, then too few people would probably see the benefit of GNU Taler as an extra step.
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Except neither Bitcoin nor Monero are stable enough as a daily currency. That’s a hard truth. I don’t want to pay a pizza that’s $20 today and $25 tommrow due to value fluctuation.
As much as I don’t like surveillance, I don’t like gambling either. Sorry.
I agree. Cryptocurrency will probably never be the solution for this. I am hoping for GNU Taler instead.
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