What's the difference between this and something like Venmo, Paypal, etc?
hopefully significantly less moralising on the use of the funds and random unaccountable freezing of accounts.
Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy
11–20 of 43 posts
Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy
#12Since there are absolutely no sources/further links in the article I could look at, is this based on David Chaums Ecash?
Because that actually looked like a decently private central-ish digital currency.
Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy
#13This sure reads like a press release announcing a project that hasn't been designed or built yet.
Promising complete privacy and fully offline transactions both sound dubious.
What mechanisms would be in place to allow me to transfer money from my KYC bank account to an anonymous wallet without it being tracked?
If the max is €3000 but it's entirely private, how could they possibly know I don't have a higher balance or multiple wallets?
What tech is even being used to allow fully private, offline transactions in the first place? How does the receiver verify that the digital cash is legit? And how does the network ensure that the money wasn't double spent while offline?
So many questions here, and I can't help but have a hunch that the gaps in description would be blocked by fundamental technical limitations.
Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy
#14I'd like to know more about the technical implementation.
For society, this is really important. Basically everyone needs a bank account. In some countries, the government even forces people implicitly to have one in order to pay taxes or fees.
In such a case, the government should provide a solution for this too.
Then, there are also economic implications of this. Society needs to run many banks, which uses a lot of resources (especially people). However, many people and companies only need one simple part of banking: cashless payment. Something that’s, from a technical perspective, just a database for transactions and accounts. So a default solution by the government makes sense to me.
Of course people will argue against this as the government would have full control over people’s money. But I think that’s the case anyway. Money is something inherently governmental as it’s produced by an governmental institution (central bank) and collected by the government in form of taxes.
Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy
#15> [..] promising complete privacy Sure. But somehow I'm not so confident about that ...
It's not impossible: techniques like those monero uses can allow for good on-chain privacy, and the limited amount and central administration of cash going in and out makes money-laundering worries a much smaller concern. The offline transactions are interesting though, I suppose again the central administration means that double-spending is not going to be quite as exploitable.
There is off course the technical issue: crypto is hard, attacks never progress to get weaker. In the realm of privacy this is especially important because you have to loose your privacy only once to not have it.
There is also the issue of contradicting incentives. To keep payments safe from crooks, no-one should be able to follow any trails. But to trace crooks making payments, the authorities need to be able to follow the money.
A central digital coin concentrates a lot of power. Money and power are a magnet for crooks.
Not saying this can't/won't/shouldn't work, but it's quite a promise to make...
Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy
#16How’s that going to work with AML etc
Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not impossible: techniques like those monero uses can allow for good on-chain privacy, and the limited amount and central administration of cash going in and out makes money-laundering worries a much smaller concern. The offline transactions are interesting though, I suppose again the central administration means that double-spending is not going to be quite as exploitable.
There is off course the technical issue: crypto is hard, attacks never progress to get weaker . In the realm of privacy this is especially important because you have to loose your privacy only once to not have it. There is also the issue of contradicting incentives. To keep payments safe from crooks, no-one should be able to follow any trails. But to trace crooks making payments, the authorities need to be able to fo…
> attacks never progress to get weaker
This implies constant progress. We all use 20+ year old crypto like SHA2 without any real fears of it being broken in our lifetimes.
Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy
#18I'd like to know more about the technical implementation. For society, this is really important. Basically everyone needs a bank account. In some countries, the government even forces people implicitly to have one in order to pay taxes or fees. In such a case, the government should provide a solution for this too. Then, there are also economic implications of this. Society needs to run many banks, which uses a lot of…
>Of course people will argue against this as the government would have full control over people’s money. But I think that’s the case anyway.
To an extent, but (speaking for the US primarily) there is significant added friction from the current distributed nature of the legacy banking system. If it were as easy as typing a person's ID number into a form and the system would take care of the rest, it would certainly be used more freely (freezing the accounts of thousands of people attending a protest with today's system would be a monumental task, even with full judicial endorsement).
Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy
#19How can they make it work offline while protecting the money from being duplicated?
That's something that I don't quite understand.
Would they give a unique ID to each cent so that if two with the same ID appear they see the discrepancy, but even that wouldn't work for offline, unless if they're planning to make it so that you have to go online every set period of time and then they verify the money.
Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy
#20What's the difference between this and something like Venmo, Paypal, etc?
It ultimately comes down to being able to go to a physical location and get coins/paper or not.
I just don't see what the value is of having my account denominated in a way that getting coins/paper is gone. Even if we went to all digital money tomorrow we would probably quickly get a bank that denominates in gold and gives you back paper slips for proof of deposit. Or doesn't even bother with gold and gives paper slips of electronic currency deposits.
We can't even get rid of useless pennies in the US.