From the 7th of April to the 9th, the European Central Bank spoke extensively about the Digital Euro, expressing hope about its potential and publishing an update of its rulebook. Its President, Christine Lagarde, also called for it, wishing to end European reliance on international payment solutions providers such as VISA, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe and others.
I’m really hyped for this but in typical EU fashion it’s taking years.
Not to mention how long it will take for cardreaders & ATMs / cash machines to be updated to work with this.
I can see this taking a long time, so as long as they move the whole infrastructure forwards, together, then it will better than developing the “eumasterpayvisapalcard” and then thinking about the end devices…
Unfortunately they bought into this right around the bitcoin hype, so I expect the entire project to become a wasteful slog that nobody has any real use for, except for maybe gambling on exchanges, like most cryptocurrencies.
A digital euro that requires no banks or payment processors definitely has a use. It’s all the benefits of cryptocurrency but with the backing of a central bank.
Why do they make it so confusing? In one sentence they talk about replacing visa and stripe and making a euro payment processor, and then they also want a separate wallet for some reason? Even tho our bank accounts are obviously already “digital” euros. Also it seems they want to comoete with Wero??
Because it’s basically a new currency:
“it would be money, still issued by the ECB, but not taking the aspect of a banknote or a coin”
The problem here is that this requires new digital wallets. The downside also means that governments have even more control and surveillance options on your finances. While currently your normal bank account can be blocked or frozen. They can’t really do it on a per payment basis. With the new digital wallets they could, potentially, restrict your use on a per payment basis. So rationing fuel could happen by only allowing someone to spend X digi-Euros on fuel. Also it would be impossible to spend money anonymously like you can do with cash.
There are of course upsides, but giving governments the option to do bad things is more likely to lead governments doing bad things.
Their wording clearly suggests they might be pushing a single candidate, yes.
They spoke extensively about it, because relying on US companies is relying on Trumps sanity…
They should just use existing blockchain and publish an EUR pegged stablecoin except with official backing of the central bank
