Brussels unveils plans for a digital euro promising complete privacy • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by inbox-demon » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

mo_42 wrote: post #38

inbox-demon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I take your point, a well designed centralized system by a competent, benevolent government would be better than having to rely exclusively on a set of private banks not beholden to a constitution. My concern there, given the track record of most governments, this will not be built without tools for control, even if they are not used right away. It also sets a precedent for government involvement in individual transactions. Today we'll have an optional cashless payment system, tomorrow banks will start shifting over to keeping accounts with the government directly, the next all financial services will be required to use the government system for transaction processing to simplify monitoring. Anything to stop money laundering for terrorism, you know.

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

#42

Post by pipo234 » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:13 PM UTC

Grimburger wrote: post #17

pipo234 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure! If everything crypto were as simple as hashing, but protocol design and in particular privacy is not.

I was thinking along the lines of Bruce Schneier's infamous “Attacks always get better, they never get worse”.

In terms of hashes, md5 was once pretty secure. But we can't go back in time, we can't unlearn how to create hash collisions. And we can't force the world to only use 8 bit, 16 bit hardware from the 90s when brute forcing.

If the privacy of EU citizens were to solely rely on securely designed crypto of around a public ledger consider that 20 years of unbreakable crypto might be too little. What if every transaction you made 20 years ago was accessible to anyone? What if in 25 years they figured out how to make changes and no one could tell which one was authentic?

Sounds like scifi? Would probably be trivial for a block chain based on good old trusted DES.

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

#43

Post by flagrant_taco » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 11:10 PM UTC

seydor wrote: post #31

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

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

I'm always torn on this one. I really dislike monopolies (or duopolies in this case) and functionally the government has enough power today to compel Visa/MC to do whatever they want. Though as long as they are technically not part of the government we have a chance to rip apart that government power and remove their control of the financial institutions.

I have no real hope that those in charge would actually let it happen, but that small chance is gone if the government is running things directly.