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:
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”.