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Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy

euronews.com

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Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy

#31

Post by seydor »

flagrant_taco wrote: post #13

This 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…

I doubt there will be any privacy at all. Perhaps some rules over who can access the data but they conveniently exempt the government.

Still, the EU banks already have SEPA instant payments so the infrastructure for this is not hard to imagine.

And despite those drawbacks, it's still better than the VISA/MC duopoly on online payments

Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy

#32

Post by hkwerf »

Regarding the private, offline payment, there has been a somewhat comparable, actually offline, system in place in Germany for the last 30 or so years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geldkarte

Probably due to its security being based on the security of the embedded smart card, it had a much lower limit and other than my father showing me how it worked 20 years ago I have neither used nor seen anybody use it.

Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy

#33

Post by jfkimmes »

cbovis wrote: post #25
flagrant_taco wrote: post #13

This 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…

Regarding offline payments perhaps what they mean here is that you as the wallet holder don't need network connectivity but the merchant does?

Usually, in the context of these privacy-preserving payment systems, online vs offline refers to whether the merchant has to be online to check if the 'coin' they received is valid (authentic and not doubly spent). The user usually has no reason to be online at all, since they withdrew the coin already in the past.

By that definition neither the wallet holder nor the merchant would have to be online for a real 'offline' system.

GNU Taler e.g. is an online system on the other hand, where the merchant has to be online for pragmatic reasons. It's kind of sad to see them being categorically excluded by this requirement. Their the best we currently have afaik.

(Check out my answer below for sources https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36520725)

Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy

#34

Post by jfkimmes »

aurareturn wrote: post #4

What's the difference between this and something like Venmo, Paypal, etc?

It's private for the user. Transactions are only between you and the merchant. Credit card networks, PayPal, etc are all third parties with insight into all Payments going through them globally.

It's offline. Neither you nor the merchant have to have a connection to the bank for the transaction to happen.

Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy

#36

Post by WeylandYutani »

tinus_hn wrote: post #21
juliangmp wrote: post #9

>"Personal data would be fully protected. Banks, not even the ECB, would not see or be able to trace, people's personal details or data. Offline payments would offer a similar level of privacy as cash does today," Dombrovskis told reporters. Yeah, lol no I'm not buying that. Maybe if the actual architecture and source code gets open sourced and people more knowledgeable than me audit it...

Call me cynical but I don’t see why the EU would push this apart from attempts to snoop and control peoples expenses.

In my country already 80% of all transactions are electronic. I personally haven't used cash in ages. There's nothing to attempt we've been living this way for a long time and nothing bad has happened. Just don't vote for a Christian fascist party led by a narcissist moron.

Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy

#37

Post by jfkimmes »

mo_42 wrote: post #14

I'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…

Fully agree. But instead of having "the government have full control over people's money", I think, setting this up as a federated cheap-to-run payment system would be even better. This would allow multiple existing banks to offer the service to their existing customers. This could reduce the risk of a fully decentralized solution a little bit.

Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy

#38

Post by mo_42 »

inbox-demon wrote: post #18
mo_42 wrote: post #14

I'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…

That’s what I have in mind. Currently, customers are subject to obscure internal rules of banks.

Given a governmental approach, this would be subject to the Fifth Amendment and other laws.

Also, there’s always the freedom to not choose this system and stay with private banks.

So I guess this it would be a net positive.

Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy

#39

Post by T0Bi »

tinus_hn wrote: post #21
juliangmp wrote: post #9

>"Personal data would be fully protected. Banks, not even the ECB, would not see or be able to trace, people's personal details or data. Offline payments would offer a similar level of privacy as cash does today," Dombrovskis told reporters. Yeah, lol no I'm not buying that. Maybe if the actual architecture and source code gets open sourced and people more knowledgeable than me audit it...

Call me cynical but I don’t see why the EU would push this apart from attempts to snoop and control peoples expenses.

Less dependency on Visa / Mastercard I'd guess.

Re: Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy

#40

Post by cr1895 »

hkwerf wrote: post #32

Regarding the private, offline payment, there has been a somewhat comparable, actually offline, system in place in Germany for the last 30 or so years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geldkarte Probably due to its security being based on the security of the embedded smart card, it had a much lower limit and other than my father showing me how it worked 20 years ago I have neither used nor seen anybody use it.

Similar thing used to exist in the Netherlands. Think it's been gone for a decade now?
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