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Comment by robjan | Hacker News Reader

The Digital Yuan is a digital currency but not a cryptocurrency. It works similarly to a bank account except instead of having an account with the bank, you have one directly with the government, although currently all e-RMB accounts are attached to traditional bank accounts.

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This.

I don't understand how more people are not catching up to this simple fact that central bank "digital currencies" are nothing more than a by-pass of distributed private banking (brick and mortar + online banks). It's just moving more levers closer to central authorities.

Well... digital currency = programmable money = big differences... for example, giving people money which must be spent by a certain date on certain types of goods or services.

Precisely this. This is where some other countries are going to when it comes to the digitisation of many currencies as CBDCs.

It is especially towards those part of the ISO 20022 [0] standard which the technologies will be based on some cryptocurrency technologies like Stellar [1][2], XRPL [3][4], Algorand, etc.

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/iso-20022-cryptos-5-compliant...

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/12/14/ukraine-commercia...

[2] https://resources.stellar.org/stellar-for-cbdcs

[3] https://ripple.com/insights/bhutan-advances-financial-inclus...

[4] https://ripple.com/insights/ripple-joins-the-digital-pound-f...

I wouldn't say it's just an account. You can do offline exchange much in the similar way to a paper currency.

Those accounts are still annoymous to both parties in transaction, not to the central bank. I would say it's much more annoymous than a traditional account, a credit card or debit card, but probably not as annoymous as cash.

Also, it's naturally fee-free, you don't pay ridiculous account maintenance or transaction fee.

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