Italy proposes no fees for digital euro payments under €10 | Hacker News Reader

Italy proposes no fees for digital euro payments under €10

euronews.com

Why is there a fee at all? This is all sponsored by taxes anyway.

What we need from this digital euro is anonymity just like the cash it's meant to replace. But nobody is talking about that.

Does anyone know whether GNU Taler is involved in any way with these proposals? I feel like they'd be the natural people to work on anonymity. Looking at their website, I see that they've at least commented on them:

https://www.taler.net/en/news/2026-08.html

> What we need from this digital euro is anonymity

This is what _you_ need. Ursula and her friends want to know where _you_ spent _your_ money.

I think the main benefit is that all a lemonade stand or späti or what-have-you needs to start selling something digitally is a qr code someone can scan.

You can do the same already with something like the sumup app and then you can pay with any card not just a mobile.

There's a network effect to this stuff. Nobody is installing an app to buy lemonade.

No that's not how it works. Only the seller needs to install the app. Sumup works with regular contactless cards, phones, watches etc. If you want contact chip cards also you can buy a reader for 25€.

Cash is still the predominant way to launder money: https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/cash...

Of course, if there's money some people are going to do bad things with it.

The worse is that the amount of fee that will be requested will not be based on the technical cost of the operation, but for sure they will be there to remunerate "banks" that should not be needed anymore but that will still want to have their part of the cake.

And globally their have the bargaining power because indirectly their are the gang that are in command of the banking regulators in the end...

€10 is a stupidly low amount. In China its ¥200/€25. I don't want to have to do 3 seperate transfers to pay a friend for lunch.

No fees for small transactions also means that merchants will be more willing to accept those form of payment, they have to accept but also not so happy to do so at the moment because of the fees eating on their margins.

That is much more relevant than one would think:

The biggest problem for adoption of digital payment in everyday lives is, that for token payments the transaction fees are to high.

In case of 0.5€ for using a toilet the fixed transaction costs can be up to 0.25 €, if the entity processing your payment is using stripe or a similar business.

Why do I have to pay to pay? For any transaction size? I'm already taxed for earning the money. I'm already taxed on goods I spend it on. And now I need to be taxed again every time I want to be taxed again on already taxed money?

so multiple tiny payments instead of a big one to avoid the fees?

Is it still exclusive to stupidphones if you want to pay online?

Regime-aligned media such as von der Leyen's euronews should be marked as such.

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