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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
Yes absolutely, because any time the government can increase surveillance and control, they will. The Pirate Party is one of the few political forces in the EU fighting hard against this. Central Bank Digital Currencies will be the biggest threat to individual liberty and privacy we see in our lifetimes. In a time of global instability, these threats to our freedoms continue to compound from all over the political spectrum. People are more willing to accept some loss in freedom in the promise it will protect them from the “other side” gaining too much power or from worsening economic or other environmental conditions.
Bitcoin is a solution for those who want privacy, money, and autonomy to work hand in hand. Bitcoin offers much more robust privacy than a bank account and the degree of privacy it offers continues to improve. It’s not controlled by a central bank, entity, or board of directors who can mess with the supply or have any kind of special access to your financial information. You don’t need six forms of ID to use it, in fact, you don’t even need one! It’s truly autonomous money that separates the role of the state from the role of money.
With Bitcoin, I can send money to anybody anywhere on planet earth with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees (using Bitcoin lightning). And I can send that money to anybody even if they have an unstable banking system, no banking system at all (billions of people), or their banking system excludes them due to their gender, sexuality, or status as a political dissident. Venmo can’t do that, Paypal can’t do that, my bank can’t do that, Taler can’t do that. It has a clear fiscal policy of a 21 million coin cap. It has faced attacks and attempted bans from nation states and world powers, yet it has reliably performed this function of sending money around for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, without a single hack, without a single bank holiday or failure or any kind. It has a market cap bigger than Sweden’s GDP. It is more widely adopted than most national currencies. It can’t be controlled, debased, or inflated by any corrupt central bank. It actually has use and value. You may not use it, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t get immense use out of it.
Monero is king when it comes to privacy coins though. So from a privacy perspective, that’s worth looking into as well. Long-term I think Bitcoin will eat Monero for lunch since it can easily adopt the privacy technologies Monero has and the Bitcoin community is very pro privacy. Monero also lacks an L2 like lightning which means transactions are slower and more expensive and eventually fees will get ridiculous if adoption reaches parity with Bitcoin. Depending on your use case, that may or may not matter.
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.
How has the purchasing power of your USD held up over the last 5 years? Because BTC has done pretty damned well. And your BTC still represents the same portion of supply as it always did. BTC is already more widely used and more stable than most national currencies. Unlike fiat currency, it isn’t designed to lose value over time to inflation of the supply.
Here’s how much USD, Gold, and BTC it takes to buy a house in the US over time.
