from Hacker News

The EU is getting ready to pilot a Central Bank Digital Currency by 2028

by _trackno5 on 6/29/23, 2:53 PM with 25 comments

• by eggy on 6/29/23, 4:15 PM

  I attended the first HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) 1994 and heard a panel speak that included Eric Hughes, famous for the Cypherpunk's Manifesto among other things, about cryptography, banking, cypherpunk, etc. This was 15 years before the blockchain paper by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 and the start of Bitcoin on the market in 2009. The dream was to have anonymity and privacy for everyone. It would also eliminate the middle man. When you buy a late at Starbucks, it goes through at least 4 or 5 agencies, and they all take a cut, and track your information. Due to typical scare tactics, "drug dealers and pedophiles will use it to avoid prosecution", like cash was never used anonymously for drug deals! Also a few bad players in the crypto market didn't help with the reputation. However, to totally cave and move to centralized government control of your wallet is insane. Yes, you already have a lot of that with ATMs, debit cards, credit cards, Paypal, Apple and Google, but now you are going to put it all in one basket? It's bad enough paper money is now just a joke without a gold-backed or other real world commodity, just print as much as you can to keep the average joe/jane in the dark about how bad the value of the currency really is. Europe is going to crash hard economically for many reasons in the coming years, and this will give the government the power to control the populace even more when it does.

• by nabla9 on 6/29/23, 3:32 PM

  Benefits: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...

  - Digital payments wherever you are in the euro area

  - Possibility to pay digitally even without access to the internet

  - More choice for consumers (alternative to Visa/Mastercard)

  - Possibility to pay digitally even if you do not have a bank account

  - Enhanced privacy for users: The digital euro would enable users to make digital payments while ensuring their data is protected. When using the digital euro offline, the privacy of the user is the same as when they use cash. The European Central Bank would not be able to identify individual digital euro users, nor what users do with their money. They would only have access to encrypted data, and only to the extent that this is necessary to settle digital euro transactions, and support payment services providers in performing their tasks. This means that state-of-the-art security and privacy-preserving measures would be used, to ensure that data cannot be used to directly identify a specific digital euro user by the ECB and the national central banks.Overall, the level of privacy introduced with the digital euro would be unprecedented for electronic payments. The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) would ensure that this high degree of privacy is respected.

  cost:

  Basic services for end users such as opening and closing a digital euro account, consulting balances, funding and defunding your digital euro account, and making transfers and payments would be provided free of charge.

• by sigmar on 6/29/23, 4:03 PM

  I don't understand (and don't see answers on Google) about how an "offline digital euro" would work. Unless the EU comes up with some magically unhackable hardware/software combo, or the 'offline' transfers are explicitly not trustless (ie- I can see your digitally-signed transfer of 5 euros, but will only be able to verify that it settles when I eventually get a connection)

• by TurkishPoptart on 6/29/23, 4:27 PM

  Why? What problem does this solve? Our money is already digital; with my tinfoil hat on, this just seems to give the government way more control over the monetary supply than it deserves.