- cross-posted to:
- buyfromeu@feddit.org
- BuyFromEU@europe.pub
- cross-posted to:
- buyfromeu@feddit.org
- BuyFromEU@europe.pub
Bye bye Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, and many others. They can go and play “America First”. We’ll have our own independent system by november 2025.
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A belated clarification:
It does not appear that there are plans for a European Credit Card.
However, …
- There is the semi-private online payment system called WERO, meant as a competitor to Paypal
- There are plans for a Digital Euro (D€) system by the ECB
Any actual link?
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.html
didn’t see anything about a card by the end of 2025.
Link to the Presentation itself. Says “Next phase: From November 2025: Potentially developing and rolling out digital euro use cases”
Last I heard about this, they did not fully commit on a singular technical solution yet. The closest I know being NGI Taler (FLOSS, created by a Swiss company, and plans a lauch in Euro this year), but it doesn’t support offline payments yet, unlike what the digital euro’s brochures say.
Hopefully this will be resolved, but I hear this is a very polarized subject since it would remove a lot of powers from the banks (by concentrating it around the ECB), and they are lobying heavily against it, and the right wing is listening.
I do hope Taler wins, its such an interesting architecture. Its also a GNU project.
Taler is a cool and fitting name
Where did you read that Taler plans a launch in EUR this year?
There is an EU funded pilot project with a German and Hungarian bank, and at least the German bank plans to offer an public exchange for Euros very soon. Sadly they recently annonced that it will be only open to German business customers, but they plan to expand the offer to their European network or cooperative banks. Lets see.
I think Taler would be a good supplement to the digital Euro, not a competition. It would be fairly simple to integrate an Taler exchange with a digital Euro API and use Taler as a digital cash alternative that works nicely for micropayments online.
Well collegues, I think we must see it as a positive evolution. We can have some doubts for sure, but there are things moving onto a more independent Europe and we cannot be against that idea. So let’s stay positive and we’ll see what direction things are going. Keep buying European !!!
The digital euro won’t come before 2028, and even this is not sure as the legislation is not yet approved. Or did I miss something?
(That aside, there are many issues with digital fiat money to be solved yet, including privacy, financial censorship, and other things.)
[Edit typo.]
This is really really good news.
What’s digital euro? Some kind of crypto?
It’s super confusing when anyone tries to explain it, but it’s actually simple. You get a free as in paid for by the taxpayer bank account from the central bank and you will be able to use that card as freely as cash. No card processing fees, no account fees no nothing.
That said I’d be extermely sceptical about any plans since it would kill commercial banking in our current sense.
You know many countires have implemented something as simple as that. Singapore has PayNow, India has UPI, Thailand has prompt pay. And they’ve had it for about half a decade or more. West (EU, US, UK are catching up). Commercial banking is still alive in these Asian countires. And it’s not so hard for banks to adapt.
It won’t kill commercial banks because there’ll be limitations. Biggest is you won’t be able to take a loan from the central bank, which is the largest slice of the pie for any bank making money. They can also put other limitations, such as no non-EU transactions, or having a max limit per month.
Yeah, but if everyone keeps their money on their dEuro account, what do banks loan out money from? Also most people don’t need anything other than basic SWIFT transfers in their lives.
Not all your money. Most people have more than 1 bank account. So this won’t change that. Also SWIFT transfers also include international transfers, and most people aren’t doing that outside of rare instances. Digital currency is only within EU regions, so this solution won’t affect non EU transfers. As OP said the goal is to reduce commissions to Visa and Mastercard.
That’s the western EU you are talking about. The average amount of bank accounts in Italy, Romania, Hungary is actually less than one, as in not everyone even has a bank account. A collapse of the Italian banking sector would still cause an EU-wide problem.
And the question is how much money will stay with commercial banks. If close to 100%, then the whole initiative is pointless since nobody uses it. If it’s less than 50%, then that means that 50% of the money in the commercial banking system is gone.
Digital currency is only within EU regions
I wonder how that would even work, since the CDBC should be fungible with the Euro. Does that mean I would not be able to pay someone in Albania in dEuros, only in physical Euros?
Even so, my point is that there is no point in creating another European payment system besides SWIFT, and if the new accounts could do SWIFT, then they can do most everything and they won’t be limited to Europe. And even if they are, I imagine most payments - like 98%+ - of Europeans are within Europe anyway.
Yeah I think they want the front end experience to be as much like what we have now, but the inner workings of the digital euro (or any CBDC) is very different compared to what we have now.
Yeah, but instead of by mining (BTC, ETH, etc) or breng issued by a private company (USDC, USDT, every scam coin), it would be the ECB issuing the tokens. Not too different as to how they’re currently ‘printing’ money by digitally conjuring it up on a computer. Challenging the transaction fees by Visa / MasterCard is big tho.
No, it is a centralized digital payment system run by the ECB.
Crypto coins are a digital currency just like the digital euro is, but there is a big difference in how they are managed. I don’t know enough to explain the difference in details but a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) doesn’t necessarily have a Blockchain behind it and the coins aren’t mined like the bitcoins are for example. The big win is you will no longer need a 3rd party for moving the money. If you now move money on your account to my account our banks need another company (likely either visa or MasterCard) to ‘verify’ that the money actually moves from a to b or something like that. There was a post with a link posted just 2 hours ago on Lemmy here: https://lemm.ee/post/60966980
Digital euro uh, only matters to the government and banks. Lower cost of production I’m sure. No need to store physical cash for banks.
For citizens, it’s not like we haven’t been using bank cards and apps this whole time. We just have been linking our payments to a bank account we hold digitally on our phones.
So, this isn’t a big change for citizens. Just a lower cost for production.
Not having our cash transaction routed through US services is extremely significant in terms of privacy and autonomy.
Autonomy is indeed more valuable than profits
It’s not just cost of production.
I like the idea of having digital cash like physical cash, with cheap transaction fees if at all, no transactions over international private corps instead of my bank, multiple cards which may or may not work in one place or another, and different apps in different countries.
Transaction fees are already lower than cash handling.
i believe they want the front end experience to be as much like what we have now, but the inner workings are very different and lower cost is not the goal.
how long until “you must spend 10% of your income on groceries, and 20% in restaurants. We will enforce this, digitally”?
Such a system is not in place even in the harshest dictatorships. What makes you think that the democratic EU wants to implement such an regime?
Sadly not entirely true. The incredibly shitty previous government in Australia widely trialed a racist, classist cashless welfare card for indigenous people. Recipients got 80% of their welfare on it and it could not be used for alcohol, gambling or cash incase they spent it on drugs or porn or other “sinful” things.
As we become more dependent on digital systems there are new ways for our privacy and freedoms to be eroded which makes participatory democracy all the more important.
Almost all my transactions are contactless payments and it pisses me off that they all go through VISA when there is a perfectly good local network for debit card payments.
I’m not a fan of those food stamp regimes - but there is a fundamental difference between “you can’t use some money you got from the state for social reasons for cigarettes or alcohol” and “everybody has to spend 20% of his income in restaurants”
Honestly, not allowing welfare to be spent on alcohol or gambling seems pretty reasonable. I’ve seen much harsher restrictions that do seem excessive, but this one isn’t.
These systems are based on the flawed assumption that poor people and minorities are less able to manage money that others. It is hugely discriminatory and treated poor people (and specifically the most disadvantaged racial group in the country) like criminals and addicts. It removed personal agency and forced people to use specific retailers, preventing them buying used goods and fresh market produce. The program was expensive and the only people who benefited were the company running it. It is populist divisive nonsense.
Anyway the point is digital payment systems can absolutely be used in democratic states to enforce spending behaviours and you can even see how it starts with people here believing such a system is justifiable. Then it gets extended to other minorities. The elderly, veterans, disabled, unemployed.
Fortunately in a democracy we can educate people as to why overly simplistic solutions that appear to protect vulnerable people are in actuality a really bad idea.
Worse it’s how you then get actual alcoholics buy big cases of water bottles with deposit, drain out the water in front of the shop, then go inside and cash the deposit in exchange for liqueur.
If you don’t want people to stay alcoholics have fucking therapy in place. And none of that “zero tolerance” BS many folks need tapering: You get them to a steady state where they don’t binge, don’t have to suck dick for drugs, have some stability and thus room to breathe, then you come in with psycho-social treatment, and with that progressing and the underlying reason for the addiction vanishing the substance consumption itself can be further reduced. And even if they never get to zero such kind of treatment still lowers the total cost of addiction to society so even liberals should be on board.
Don’t change the wording here. The only thing that was stated is that alcohol and gambling were not allowed, and that’s what I agree with.
That sounds great, what’s your problem?
Explain this to my dad, he is almost 60 years old, barely knows how to use his smart phone! Like others mentioned, last time I saw the news, they where still confused and having conversations. What did it change?
He won’t need much explanation if he feels he can trust the ecb since they want a system that works like we have now (with a card and an app/website).
What’s wrong with your dad if he can’t use a smart phone being almost 60?
Meanwhile my Bank is switching from Maestro (USA) to VISA (USA) for my everyday debit Card, and i must accept the change until September. I guess i have to find a new Bank after so many years.
if we can keep using cash mostly anywhere, this is good news
No one needs cash.
oh yes we do. fuck digital payments with its privacy nightmare. fuck visa and mastercard for selling our purchase information, and who knows what avenues will this system have for tracking.
also, who the fuck wants to carry a phone all the time. I don’t want to have to carry it even if just going to the shop on the corner.
cash is best. nobody but the cashier can deny a transaction with it.
Cash is a piece of shit. And you don’t have to carry a phone, you can pay with your watch or a ring. And even a phone is much better than carrying cash.
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OK, I get it. Maybe we can take a backpack and go living in a cave somewhere. Offgrid, away from everything and we reject any kind of civilization, service and trust, because yes… even your best friend can become your worst enemy. Then why take the risk of having friends? I use the proverb: “Care is the mother of the porcelain store.” But I refuse to question every detail in my life. Have a little faith.
