Ok, this article has several claims that I find questionable but don’t know enough to pipe in on but
Money in a bank account does not sit idle waiting for the client. Most of it is lent out in the form of mortgages and other loans, with only a small fraction held in reserve.
This is blatantly untrue.
When banks give out loans, not a single cent is taken out of anyone’s bank account.The money comes from the central bank. When a loan is granted the person receiving the loan gets money in their account that didn’t exist before and an obligation to pay back the bank.
The bank in turn has a receivable on one side of their balance sheet and an obligation to pay back the central bank on the other side.This is how money creation works.
G-d, how the hell is “mastercard and visa are monopolies” used as a reasoning for surveillance currency?
Have Danes been visiting ECB lately?
How is a digital euro a “surveillance currency”? Or rather, how is it worse than Visa and Mastercard?
This digital euro is specifically about having a single eminent control and track your money even at rest - something Visa and Mastercard would gladly sacrifices a population of a medium sized country to achieve.
It’s not worse than credit cards in that regard. But it’s not better either. It is worse than the physical Euro though.
It could and should be as anonymous as cryptos can be. Otherwise the EU / national governments can stop you from buying anything they deem illegal.
As an example imagine trying to buy something from your dealer with physical bills and coins vs the digital Euro.
Cryptos are not anonymous. A currency based on an open publicly negotiated and independently verifiable transaction ledger is antithetical to anonymity.
The digital Euro is an alternative to other digital payment methods, nobody but conspiracy theorists is talking about abolishing physical cash.
I’m not sure they can stop you buying it, but they can see what you bought, or at least who got the money. While i do see your point, I’d rather have an European alternative to Visa today than the perfect digital euro in 10 years. Preventing crime is a responsibility of a nation state, so being able to track money flows is a feature, not a bug.
