The European Central Bank is pushing ahead with the digital euro, aiming for political approval sometime around early 2026. They're pitching it as a free, privacy-respecting digital cash alternative that works online and offline — without replacing physical euros.
They’ve already been testing it with a bunch of banks and market players, and a full rulebook is in the works. The big goal? Less dependency on Big Tech payments and more control within Europe’s borders.
Still early days, but the momentum’s picking up. Curious to see how this will play out alongside Bitcoin and other stablecoins.
what's your opinion on this?
pull down to refresh
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Riberet 7h
My opinion is that the digital Euro, as Europe is, is inevitable; most normal people will take the bait since it will be sold to them in a way that it would be stupid not to use it. Little by little, they will regulate it more and more and impose restrictions on this digital Euro until it becomes a total anti-freedom tool. I feel sorry for those who don’t have Bitcoin by that time.
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 10h
I dug the surface a bit and see the ECB talking about offline p2p payments and online payments and apparently those are very different. The former sounds like a bearer money, the latter more like a traditional payment network replacement with the central bank being the scheme.
I wonder how they do double spend protection offline! They've obviously taken some bearer money takes from Bitcoin (but not in implementation), and in the online path I see tokenization (replacing PII with a number) taking a form close to what PCI DSS requires with an additional ApplePay-like re-tokenization between intermediary bank and central platform. Offline privacy is by design, online privacy by legal.
Speculation:
Right now I'm suspecting that the offline bearer version - if that even makes it through the political round - would have some form of expiry date before which you'd need to deposit. Any cryptographic keys that would provide authenticity need to have a tightly managed life cycle. So you will need an offramp, through an intermediary that can convert old bearer notes into new ones. I do not see any other way how they can otherwise protect against security incidents and ultimately counterfeiting. Of course a bank app will automate this.
If they get to keep the bearer function, the on- and off- ramps is where the friction will be. Just like is done right now with exchanges. But if there will be expiry, that is going to be worse than bitcoin or stablecoins through exchanges because you'll have a deadline to subject yourself to the KYC/AML probes. Between the deadlines, you'll have more sovereignty than with Tether in its current form assuming you can't be frozen out of bearer money, but definitely not more than with on-chain bitcoin.
Conclusion:
More than half a billion people will be made to believe that CBDC > Bitcoin. Perhaps bitcoiners can provide some counter pressure to that.
reply