Comment by niemandhier
2 months ago
The digital euro could be a huge thing: 1. It would free the eu economy from the hidden “credit card tax” that goes to us companies. 2. It would create a base to finally make the availability of digital payments mandatory.
If you think about it, it makes you independent of any bank. You simply don't need them anymore. Additionally, you can use the wallet from the federal or central bank to verify your age when making purchases.
The downside might be—depending on how they implement it, but currently it's not looking good—that the wallet is no longer anonymous. This is a huge issue, in my opinion.
GNU Taler [1] for example, might be a Software implementation that can be used for anonymous transaction with digital money (without blockchain).
[1] https://www.taler.net/en/index.html
It naive to think that that digital currencies would somehow be free of fees, hidden or otherwise. Remember when streaming services were great because they offered an ad-free experience. Digital currencies will eventually have fees, and lots of them because they can be built-in and because people won't be given a choice. It will be a worse state than current credit cards.
Apples to oranges. Digital Euro would be a public service maintained by the ECB, not a for-profit entity. Their interest is in maintaining transactions in the Eurozone as low friction as possible, not to bleed their customers dry after a monopolistic lock-in.
I hope you are right, but public services are routinely hijacked by the wealthy and powerful. I'm not that optimistic.
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POS will likely always cost something or be slightly annoying like having to use some stupid possibly unsecure app(I will never trust them, whatever you tell me). On other hand for consumer cards the fees are already in sub 1% range. Which to me sounds acceptable.