The Digital Pound

This reminds me of the Chipknip card system in the Netherlands that was launched in the year 1995 and shut down in 2015.

Chipknip allowed offline transfers, money could be moved from one card to another without contacting a payment processor or bank. Reading the tech paper, it sounds like they have not entirely decided if the digital pound will support that.

It is a certainty that this will be designed to allow as much government spying as possibly, despite any deceptive assurances that the central bank can't see what individual are doing. The tech paper says that people will have to go through identity checks to use the system.

There is no mention of customer protection. with a credit card you can call them and request a refund if you get scammed.

I can't think of use cases that would make people want to use this instead of debit cards and the infrastructure would be expensive so I doubt it will go anywhere.