With this digital euro, all fees are paid by the EU. Which is the right way to do it. It shouldn't cost anything to spend and transfer money - just as it doesn't with cash.
I can't get my head around how much money VISA and MasterCard is pulling out of society today.
How banks take fees for you to do a simple money transfer.
It shouldn’t cost anything to spend and transfer money - just as it doesn’t with cash.
Yeah there's no such thing as free lunch. Cash is not free and neither is this new EU currency. The costs are hidden from you but they are there.
When you buy a pizza in cash for example, you're not just paying for the pizza. You're also paying for the business to send someone to the bank regularly to deposit earnings and and withdraw coins to give customers as change. And the bank is doing the same thing - all those armoured cars delivering cash to ATMs around the city? Those are not cheap and you are paying for them.
Worst of all, cash tends to go missing - Maybe an employee gave a customer two twenty dollar bills in change when it should have been one... or maybe the employee pocketed the 20 bucks. The business has no way of knowing which and both happen regularly. Either way the customer ultimately pays - the business sets prices high enough to cover those costs.
Ask anyone who keeps track of this stuff for a large business, they will tell you credit cards are cheaper for them.
I can’t get my head around how much money VISA and MasterCard is pulling out of society today.
It's mostly insurance. Because while cash goes "missing" more often, credit cards still has issues (stolen card numbers and occasionally software bugs) and unlike cash, where the business pays, with credit cards often VISA/MasterCard often have to pay. The fees are partly to cover that. And the fees also cover the money they spent trying to prevent money from going missing (they spend a lot of money on that).
How banks take fees for you to do a simple money transfer.
Mine doesn't. They make monthly deposits into my account based on how much money I have there and how much they were able to profit off using it for investments.
it's a Credit Union, so technically I'm a shareholder and the entire business model of the bank is to make money for their shareholders (me). You too can be a bank shareholder. The only "fees" they charge are to pay for employees and customer service, and those are far less than what I earn in interest on my savings.
I can’t get my head around how much money VISA and MasterCard is pulling out of society today.
Yup. Few years back I remember asking a small shop if they would rather I use cash or card, and they said that the card, even with transaction fees, was much cheaper for them. When I visited them recently they now had a "no cash" sign.
It's possible to implement it in a way that purchases can't be traced. XMR has proven that. But there is absolutely no way the EU is going to take that route, it will for sure be traceable
For example GNU Taler could be used for the digital euro. Its anonymous for the buyer, backed by banks and traditional banking infrastructure and fast.
Its also somewhat unlikely to win. Lets hope the people in brussels make the right decision.
I think the one aspect that has the potential to kill the whole concept is the limit on how much one person can own. There would be little to no point in using it, since the potential advantage of no fees or bank nonsense is more than offset by the inconvenience of not being able to get my salary in it.
If there is no limit, we basically nationalized commercial banking, or at least eliminated the concept of banks providing convenience as opposed to interest as a service. I'm not sure if that's a bad idea, given that we seem to have a major debt crisis every ten years, usually stemming from insane lending from banks. Maybe not all at once though. My uneducated opinion is that it would be great if we could impose a limit, and gradually raise it until it reaches a point where it is meaningless.
True. However, I think its unreasonable to demand a digital euro that is also private for businesses, as the only benefit from that would be enabling tax evasion and selling illegal goods. There are differences between physical anonymous payments and online anonymous payments. The problem is scale and reach. You cant just send millions of euro in cash to someone in a different country, you can with online payments. That allows for money laundering and illegal markets at a scale never seen before.
So yes, it will be different than cash, but your identity cant be traced, so id call it a worthy replacement.
GNU Taler is more fit to be the next mainstream way of paying with your phone or online. But it definitely does not replace cash. Not in any privacy sense. It is still digital, and anything digital can and will eventually be hacked at some point. But it's miles better than using my debit card, so I'd always prefer this over my debit card whenever possible. Though if I really want to be anonymous, physical cash is still the way to go. GNU Taler sits somewhere between normal physical cash and debit cards in terms of privacy.
I hope it wins.