I wouldn't necessarily call myself "enthusiastic" about CBDCs, but I can certainly give some reasons why I find this proposal to be "fairly reasonable". Firstl

I wouldn't necessarily call myself "enthusiastic" about CBDCs, but I can certainly give some reasons why I find this proposal to be "fairly reasonable". Firstly, they start off by saying that they don't think it's currently necessary and that they are just looking to the future. They then talk about the current state of affairs with more transactions being made digitally and more private entities offering some sort of online wallet. Most of these entities are not British in origin and they state that if the situation were to arise where a majority of the countries "cash" transactions were controlled by a foreign entity then this could constitute a security risk. Now, I am a very long way from being a flag waving nationalist but even I can see the sense in that. Secondly, their proposal look fairly reasonable to me. I may be misreading it horribly but as far as I can tell the BoE is proposing to be an anonymous transaction layer. The diagram specifically states that they will not have any personal information associated with the wallet. It looks like the BoE would just hold an anonymous wallet with a GUID and a value. The PIPs have your user details and GUID. When you make a payment from your wallet to some other wallet the PIP just sends a request to the BoE to transfer a sum from one GUID to another and the BoE never receives any information on the payer and payee. Because of this, it will be pretty difficult for the government to prevent any particular person making a payment, or to control how someone makes a payment. There are a huge number of private entities that will have the necessary status to get clearance to access the API, I am sure. Can you imagine the UK government trying to bully hundreds, maybe thousands of companies - some not based in the UK - into preventing payments to one person; and they would have to cover all entities because otherwise the person being targeted could just change wallet providers. It could still potentially turn bad, but it looks to my (admittedly not highly experienced eye) that the BoE is trying to design a system that is reasonably resilient to the type of tampering and control that many people fear.