European News 🇪🇺The EU will launch the digital euro as a 100% European digital payments system to replace reliance on Visa, Mastercard, and Apple and Google Pay, with the European Central Bank issuing a digital form of cash. It will be built entirely in Europe, have zero transaction fees, instant payments, and strong privacy, giving the EU full control over its payments infrastructure.
LonM@eunews I can't read the linked article. Will it use something like GNU Taler - be fully open source, transparent, interoperable, and buyer-private? Or will development and maintenance be outsourced to a private company with everything funnelled through a closed source app.
Vladimir Campos@LonM @eunews There's an official ECB page with all the information, including progress.
👇🏻 https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.html
👇🏻 https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.html
Vivien (dentelle & numérique)@vladcampos @LonM @eunews the way I understand it is “we would have loved to make it work with privacy but since there can be fraud there will be no privacy”
EDIT: here is what Taler says about the proposal:
@gugurumbe @vladcampos @eunews Reading through some of this, that's the conclusion I'm coming to as well. No privacy, everything through proprietary apps. The ECB site also mentions blockchain which is giving me the heebies.
If that is the case, then I am genuinely baffled as to what the point of a digital euro would be over implementing a pan-EU debit card processor to rival the likes of paypal / visa. We already have widely available cashless payment infrastructure, what good does a digital euro offer for what will end up being a much more expensive implementation?
Even more confusing considering the swiss were already experimenting with Taler.
Celeste Ryder 🐾 🐀🏳️🌈@LonM @gugurumbe @vladcampos @eunews How is there no privacy? “In transactions involving this new form of money, there will be one anonymised code for the payer, and another for the recipient. The commercial banks will know who those codes relate to, but the ECB won’t.” Of course the banks need to know who their user is to give/take the money, but they won’t know anything about the other party. It’s way more private than the current systems, where companies track what you buy to sell that data.
@bougiewonderland @LonM @vladcampos @eunews we’re not comparing it to payment with card, we are comparing it to cash, where it is possible for the bank not to know anything.
Also the banks will probably know who the merchant is, which gives them a lot of information already.
Also the banks will probably know who the merchant is, which gives them a lot of information already.
@gugurumbe @LonM @vladcampos @eunews they will not know who the merchant is—they will know who their own client is, of course, but the other party will only be a code that they won’t be able to identify. It’s the same as encrypted email—only the sender and the receiver know who each other is. The offline wallet will be just as private as cash, considering banks these days tend to track notes’ serial numbers from what I heard.
@bougiewonderland @LonM @vladcampos @eunews it is funny because encrypted mail famously leaves the sender and recipient unencrypted (so that delivery can occur). We will see when the thing is released, but in the mean time, it does not look great.