They’re not worth anything, never were but even less through the years with inflation.
If a store wants to sell something for 99 cent, they can either just take 1€ or 95 cent.
Maybe even 5 cent pieces? But that would be a bit radical.
I am a bit annoyed that easy ideas like this are never discussed in politics, or wherever. It would make our lives just a little bit easier, and having them achieves NOTHING.
GNU Taler
ECB is working on the “digital Euro” right now, and I’m almost completely sure it won’t enable offline payments, simple peer to peer transactions or even anonymous payments. It’s a real shame, because GNU Taler is interesting and the crypto should be explored further.
The 2020 report of the ECB actually states offline payments as a desired feature and to work overall “like cash”. Anonymous payments, however, are ruled out (money laundering bla bla, probably a rather weak argument considering Taler’s characteristics).
Okay, offline payments might work between a shop terminal and a customer, but what is as if not more important is the ability to easily give money to a friend privately, which I don’t see.
Did you see this in widespread use anywhere?
No, but I also didn’t see contactless payment methods being widely used until the pandemic.
Where do you live?
I could pay contactless almost anywhere before the pandemic. You might get weird looks at the bakery if it was like 2€, but that was it.
Germany. You could do card payments but only by sliding your card into a card reader. NFC payments were pretty much non-existent. Third world country 🫠
Thats just objectively not true. NFC payments have been rolled out slowly for years before the pandemic. It would have happened anyways, maybe the pandemic just gave it a little boost.
Keine Ahnung, vielleicht hing mein Ost-Kaff einfach nur hinterher ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No, I actually don’t believe that it was just your place in the East. I live in a major city in NRW and in my neighborhood only the big chains like EDEKA, dm or Aldi accepted cards before the pandemic. Everything else? Nope! Either it was “Cash or GTFO here”, “Cards only for purchases above 10€” or “Sorry, the card reader is broken - again”.
That sounds a bit harsh. Me and a couple of other people I know have used contactless payments even for quite some time before COVID. It was relatively simple to set up by linking your PayPal account to Google Pay if you had an Android phone. But I agree that contactless payments weren’t widely adopted by the general German population until 2020.