The launch of the digital euro could give every European a free, universal payment account. But this grand vision is at risk of being curtailed by a well-coordinated lobbying campaign of the banking industry. Banks want to make sure you will keep needing them – and they have EU officials’ ears.
VISA will be the main driver to protect the old system where they control the network and the mechants-fees. That is what makes them money. Billions years over years.
The Podcast “Aquired” has a 3h long podcast that tells the crazy story of VISA, its founder and how they came to control the market. If anyone will do anything in its power to not liberalize the payment landscape, then it will be this very Company. It will go thermonuclear on their revenue stream.
“If [the] digital Euro can also be used for tax payments etc and general acceptance is mandated, a significant amount of their clients could do their full finances with the digital Euro and won’t need an account with a commercial bank anymore,” German cooperative bank lobbyists warned the Commission in one of the documents.
Imagine “warning” them that their idea could have the desired effect!
I always thought that commercial banking and the transfer industry will basically lose their whole raison d’être if we ever get CBDCs working, and I didn’t understand if they had any plans for it. I guess not.
This is confusing, doesn’t EU mandate a free / basic tier of banking account already? And isn’t pretty much every currency digital too?
Public payment processor is a pipe dream though. Someone has to do AML, insurance. Free wire transfers are subsidized by other revenue streams.
It technically could be subsidized by taxes. Not saying if that’s good or bad.
There’s a catch here. Large amount of AML regulations imposed on banks is an indirect form of taxation, even if it wasn’t the original goal. Banks have to do bulk of investigative work that makes sense to do there. To do that they have to employ crapload of people (in Poland, Hungary, Estonia etc). I’m not sure individual governments or EU want to get into that because they could turn out to be less competitive than private sector which has no qualms with outsourcing / offshoring as much as possible.
I think this is related to the GNU Taler open source project. Appears they are testing to see if the technology is appropriate. New EU project NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone
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Your post was removed because you linked to an article by the Cato institute a well known source of right-wing misinformation.
I don’t want to but keep getting into devils advocate shoes all the time so apologies in advance.
In my opinion blacklisting of sources is OK but the reason for doing so should be well sourced (Wikipedia paints that institute in rather positive light). I modded polish national sub for a while and we kept this documented as a list with reasons for blacklisting (usually connection to Russian misinfo reported by reputable NGOs) in a public wiki which might be overkill made our lives easier in a long run.
The post itself was hardly better, repeating right-wing conspiracy theories about fiat currencies. I would have probably also removed it even if the supporting source was not a literal propaganda institute for the Koch brothers.
Arggh… federation issues with moderation are the worst kind of Lemmy bugs.
Odd though that on the feddit.de webui they show as removed: https://feddit.de/comment/7818850
Base it on Monero and I’m fine with a digital Euro.
Not based on,
we should stand up for just using Monero itself as our currency.Based on could mean a centralized wallet and/or surveillance implemented on top of it.
I don’t want a volatile currency as my main currency. Also, I think PoW isn’t the way to go anymore. A digital PoS “Monero” (Cryptonote, etc.) stablecoin is what I was thinking about.
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Just cut every method of digital money in general. I want just cash everywhere.
Good for you!
Yucky icky ew
Ah yes of course! Let everyone track what you do.
Man if it was allowed i would pay with gold.
You can go back to the stone age, but I embrace the digital age. Privacy is an issue that can be fixed through policy if need be.
It can’t, digital things always leave traces even with no log policies. Otherwise you couldn’t keep track of who has what.
Monero exists…
Leaves traces like everything else, is extremely energy intensive and you can’t use it for most things.
So in short, get all the downsides of bitcoin and make climate change even worse…
Let everyone carry around large amounts of cash on a regular basis, there is no way that could be exploited by criminals. Or even better, valuable metals like gold so the stolen money is not even traceable as being stolen.
You know people get scammed more often than robbed right?
Virtually every scam used today was first invented back when cash was the only form of payment.
And yet its not robbery with force… My point wasn’t that it solves scams at all.
And I want that from now on you specifically are given change exclusively in 1 cent coins.
Ok, they have more material worth than currency worth… Just melt them and sell it.
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The only thing anyone is scared about with Bitcoin is that it will burn so much energy that it will accelerate climate change. As a currency it failed years ago in case you haven’t noticed.
No one is scared of bitcoin. You can’t use it down your local shop to buy your groceries with. This EU digital currency can do that.
