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European Central Bank lays out €1.3B plan for digital euro

• avidiax 3y ago
  > Privacy is at the top of the list of concerns. Many consumers want to avoid a Big Brother scenario where the central bank would be able to digitally track their spending with CBDCs. > To assuage concern, the ECB said it would not have access to personal data. That would remain with commercial banks, which would need to host the digital euro. This doesn't assuage anything. Those commercial banks will retain as much data as legally allowed, and will sell that data to the highest bidder including governments, or as compelled by a legal order. That's not the same as current physical cash at all. This is all a bit inexcusable considering that we have reliable smart cards, and you could definitely design a smart card cryptosystem that allows practically anonymous offline transactions. I say practically, since even current paper bills have serial numbers than can be tracked to some extent.