Eurosystem launches digital euro project

Or just freeze all your assets. I for one fear even more control of the incompetent, ever money hungry governments

Introducing spy cars with real time state captured GPS, remote control and killswitch and always on police surveillance (audio/video).

We note that this will not replace horses.

This will happen slowly, with limits to cash transactions being lowered, larger denominations removed from circulation etc. On the transparency side it will again start out with praises sung to its privacy and then "stuff happens", i.e. cannot be that a digital Euro is good for criminals and terrorists...

Sounds like they are evaluating to make Bank accounts obsolete?

Sidenotes:

> Experiments were conducted in the four following areas: the digital euro ledger; privacy and anti-money laundering; limits on digital euro in circulation; end-user access while not connected to the internet and facilitating inclusiveness with appropriate devices. No major technical obstacles were identified to any of the assessed design options.

I am interested to hear about a system providing privacy and anti-money-laundering capabilities at the same time. Aren't they mutually exclusive?

> According to these experiments, a digital euro core infrastructure would be environmentally friendly: for the architectures that were tested, the power used to run tens of thousands of transactions per second is negligible compared with the energy consumption of crypto-assets such as bitcoin.

Bitcoins power usage per transaction is outrageous, if they choose this as their benchmark, it sounds like their transactions are quite power hungry compared to the status quo?

Private bank money is equivalent to cash printed by the state or held in the central bank accounts, however it can be created out of nothing by the banks as liabilities on loaned cash (private fractional reserve banking leads to inflation of the private monetary base). As long as people can pay their debts, the carnival ride continues. The state has requirements of the banks to store a fraction of their reserves.

The state wants to maybe one day stop printing physical cash money, but also does not want private banks to control the production of money entirely-- so they create a psuedo-cryptocurrency in which the state can issue tokens. This ideally provides a cash like experience with the easy of use of private digital payment schemes. We call these "Central Bank Digital Currencies" or CBDCs.

What does this mean in practice? The state has visibility of all monetary transactions in real time, and can enforce their own fiscal policies (such as negative interest rates, the money will melt in your phone if it is not spent). It is awful, and we should reject state issued digital currencies. Buy bitcoin (before it is too late!).

The European Commission, the ECB and other bodies have had groups researching blockchains and digital money for years. They've gotten a bit more serious about it recently and started floating the idea of a "digital Euro", after other governments proposed the same for their respective currencies (and the EU always copies the homework of other governments). They've talked to and polled citizens, banks and the industry regarding how to exactly implement it. They still have no idea what it actually is they want, so far they've just found out it needs to be 'secure', 'environmentally friendly', and similar buzzwords.

It's important to understand that the Euro currently is not digital. What you're using digitally is not legal tender but like you rightly said based on private bank ledgers. This may sound like nitpicking and many don't understand there's even a difference, because they're so used to these sort of IOUs being accepted as money, but it's not the same as a printed Euro bank note. It's as a side-note for this very reason banks among themselves do not settle in this money but through accounts at the central bank, where they're required to at least have a part of it in actual physical cash. Which may sound funny because the banknotes themselves can be printed at will by the issuing government/central bank - but that's another story.

A digital Euro would be digital money issued by the ECB itself. This already exists in a way when they credit money to themselves to for example pay for buying bonds as part of the current QE politics. Most money is created that way. But for us regular people, money exists either in the form of the bank IOUs (so called "book money") or physical cash. We've never seen actual digital Euros they don't exist outside the ECB servers. Digital Euros could be credited the your digital wallet directly by the ECB, for example if they were giving out helicopter money to citizens. Depending on how the system is implemented, it could also be tracked by them, or frozen. There are some who want to introduce it as a way to "fight crime" (I think we all know where this would be going). Others stress it's important it implemented in a privacy preserving way, to make it a sort of digital cash. It could be run on a centralized ledger the ECB controls, or be blockchain based. Both concepts are being considered and researched, they haven't really said anything about which they favor so far. Imo this is an important topic people should look into, it's about the future of our money. It could be a really cool thing and make things easier, or we could end up with a dystopian system where they monitor and control all our financial transactions. It's not unlikely printed bank notes will be abolished in the near future, if we don't have a digital replacement by then goodbye privacy and welcome total surveillance.

Unless you're doing things that require consent, then you gotta ask or you gotta stop doing that.