[anm89]

You are exactly correct. These "digital currencies" are simply new types of bank accounts where retail consumers can hold money at central banks. They are no more digital than any other bank account.

They have absolutely nothing to do with crypto either.

[hnthrower]

Do you have a source for that? If I'm not mistaken it was talked around here in the past about them taking the wallets and keys portion from cryptocurrencies.

[anm89]

The closest thing we have in the US is this proposed legislation: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/357...

If you read it I think its pretty clear that whatever they are talking about is totally unrelated to crypto.

But just thinking through it, the properties of crypto are the polar opposite of what a central bank wants out of the monetary system.

The last 80 years since Bretton woods has been the story of the US trying to centralize global markets around the dollar. The last thing they want is something that is either distributed or permissionless.

If you read the wiki for CBDCs it acknowledges this at the end after paying a bunch of lip service to how they were "inspired" by crypto.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank_digital_currenc...

> In contrast to cryptocurrencies, a central bank digital currency would be centrally controlled (even if it was on a distributed database), and so a blockchain or other distributed ledger would not be required or useful - even as they were the original inspiration for the concept.[24][25