dThe European Central Bank (ECB) is working on a fully digital euro that should eventually replace cash. This Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is a stablecoin pegged to the euro. The studies on this that have been revealed so far have indicated quite a bit of resistance. Many people are very critical of how this is a digital prison and could pose a major threat to your privacy and economic freedom. In fact, a new paper from the central bank talks about how the CBDC could protect your privacy.
Strong resistance to euro-CBDC
The study was published yesterday and is the result of a huge amount of feedback of residents in the EU. According to the data, almost 98.5% of the raters a regular EU resident, particularly from Germany, Slovakia, Austria and the Czech Republic. Academics and government employees also took part.
Working Paper: The digital economy, privacy, and CBDC https://t.co/enrtxFK1tn
— European Central Bank (@ecb) May 13, 2022
A common criticism is that you would give all your privacy away to companies or the state, and that it damages our fundamental rights to freedom and privacy. People also prefer not to depend on the internet to buy things.
New research not so new?
The new research has expanded on how CBDCs protect your privacy. If you paid for all your groceries with a euro stablecoin, companies would monitor all your purchases. This seems to be the course of the US to some extent. The ECB emphasizes that in many cases these companies would then compete with banks and other existing financial institutions, which are already obliged to protect your privacy to a certain extent.
What the paper doesn’t emphasize is that, in theory, the government is capable of tapping your data – or to be more precise, the central bank can. The ECB thus makes the distinction between companies and governments (and itself), whereby only companies are exposed. On Twitter is also on this research criticism†Negative interest rates, programmable token burns and mass surveillance remain recurring topics.
It is emphasized, however, that transactions could also take place offline. You do need a mobile phone for this, for example, but an internet connection is apparently not a necessity.