[QUESTION] Privacy and the digital euro
Some talk about the privacy of the digital euro has been made. Some people said that your transactions are going to be tracked. Should an european worry about it? Would GNU Taler be a possible solution?
And it's not like the digital euro is some dream, it will become reality soon.
Not too knowledged about digial euro, but here's my two cents.
We are already using digital currency. Your card and bank transfer are being monitored(AML), looked at(IRS & credit agencies), and data mined(data brokers) every second. It stared when banks started using electronic records and government ditched the gold standard. Today's currency is mere a certificate that both sides trust there is value in it. IMO I can't see it enables new innovative use cases but a pure gmmick. Just a solution in serach of a problem. There are necessity and usability issues before privacy issue.
And no, I don't think it can replaces physical cash any time soon. If they really want to deprecate physical cash, they need to ensure everyone have a digital wallet, and everyone knows how to use it, including your blinded friend and granny.
I think deprecating physical cash must be highly illegal because everyone has the right not to own a phone.
They explicitly state that the digital euro is not here to replace cash:
Q3. Would a digital euro replace cash?
No. A digital euro would complement cash, not replace it. A digital euro would exist alongside cash in response to people’s growing preference to pay digitally, in a fast and secure way. Cash would continue to be available in the euro area, as would the other private electronic means of payment currently being used.
And even less a reason for the digital euro to exist.
There are a lot of issues with your post imo.
First, cash is going away, soon. Sweden has done it years ago. Europe is now playing catch up.
Second, a universal digital currency will remove all system heterogeneity. Yes money is already digitalised, but across several proprietary environments. I can and have set up several accounts across several banks so my spending cannot be fully tracked by a single corporate entity. This will be moot once everyone has to use the same harmonized system.
Third, one of the sponsors of the universal European currency has been caught talking about time limited digital currency. As in, spend your money or it just disintegrates after a set amount of time. Which really destroyed a lot of trust in the endeavour
I don't even know if you know what you're talking.
First, cash is going away, soon. Sweden has done it years ago. Europe is now playing catch up.
Please refer the OP's post in this thread.
Second, a universal digital currency will remove all system heterogeneity. Yes money is already digitalised, but across several proprietary environments. I can and have set up several accounts across several banks so my spending cannot be fully tracked by a single corporate entity. This will be moot once everyone has to use the same harmonized system.
That's the privacy problem the OP's saying.
Third, one of the sponsors of the universal European currency has been caught talking about time limited digital currency. As in, spend your money or it just disintegrates after a set amount of time. Which really destroyed a lot of trust in the endeavour
How's that related to my post?
My biggest problem is that everything goes under the ECB, not to the national level central banks. The "they can see where and how much did you buy" is mute point, since they alredy could do that. And it's even worse when there are private companies that sell your info for profit.
It could be private or could be not. But in a world of total financial surveillance and initiatives like ChatControl, I doubt it will be really private.
It still seems to be under heavy discussion. see this recent article: https://netzpolitik.org/2024/eu-council-discusses-digital-euro-and-how-much-privacy-should-it-be/
I assume the end result will be more privacy preserving than current commercial offers like Visa or Mastercard, but it will be a trade-off between what commercial data-brokers will be able to see and what the central bank will be able to see. Pick your poison I guess 😒
Realistically it might also become so bureaucratic that it will see limited uptake, but specifically for GNU Taler it might make it possible for a Taler intermediatory to exchange digital Euros for tokens in your Taler wallet without having a banking license, which could help Taler adoption a lot. But I guess the latter would depend on how usable the former is. Like if it is too bureocratic, then a separate payment system based on it could thrive, but if it is easy to use, then too few people would probably see the benefit of GNU Taler as an extra step.
Yes absolutely, because any time the government can increase surveillance and control, they will. The Pirate Party is one of the few political forces in the EU fighting hard against this. Central Bank Digital Currencies will be the biggest threat to individual liberty and privacy we see in our lifetimes. In a time of global instability, these threats to our freedoms continue to compound from all over the political spectrum. People are more willing to accept some loss in freedom in the promise it will protect them from the "other side" gaining too much power or from worsening economic or other environmental conditions.
Bitcoin is a solution for those who want privacy, money, and autonomy to work hand in hand. Bitcoin offers much more robust privacy than a bank account and the degree of privacy it offers continues to improve. It's not controlled by a central bank, entity, or board of directors who can mess with the supply or have any kind of special access to your financial information. You don't need six forms of ID to use it, in fact, you don't even need one! It's truly autonomous money that separates the role of the state from the role of money.
With Bitcoin, I can send money to anybody anywhere on planet earth with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees (using Bitcoin lightning). And I can send that money to anybody even if they have an unstable banking system, no banking system at all (billions of people), or their banking system excludes them due to their gender, sexuality, or status as a political dissident. Venmo can’t do that, Paypal can’t do that, my bank can’t do that, Taler can't do that. It has a clear fiscal policy of a 21 million coin cap. It has faced attacks and attempted bans from nation states and world powers, yet it has reliably performed this function of sending money around for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, without a single hack, without a single bank holiday or failure or any kind. It has a market cap bigger than Sweden’s GDP. It is more widely adopted than most national currencies. It can’t be controlled, debased, or inflated by any corrupt central bank. It actually has use and value. You may not use it, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t get immense use out of it.
Monero is king when it comes to privacy coins though. So from a privacy perspective, that's worth looking into as well. Long-term I think Bitcoin will eat Monero for lunch since it can easily adopt the privacy technologies Monero has and the Bitcoin community is very pro privacy. Monero also lacks an L2 like lightning which means transactions are slower and more expensive and eventually fees will get ridiculous if adoption reaches parity with Bitcoin. Depending on your use case, that may or may not matter.
Except neither Bitcoin nor Monero are stable enough as a daily currency. That's a hard truth. I don't want to pay a pizza that's $20 today and $25 tommrow due to value fluctuation.
As much as I don't like surveillance, I don't like gambling either. Sorry.
I agree. Cryptocurrency will probably never be the solution for this. I am hoping for GNU Taler instead.
How has the purchasing power of your USD held up over the last 5 years? Because BTC has done pretty damned well. And your BTC still represents the same portion of supply as it always did. BTC is already more widely used and more stable than most national currencies. Unlike fiat currency, it isn't designed to lose value over time to inflation of the supply.
Here's how much USD, Gold, and BTC it takes to buy a house in the US over time.
click for full image