[BayesianDice]

There's lots of speculation here on what the Bank of England means by a central bank digital currency (CBDC) - people may be interested in the more concrete indications of what the Bank is / has been considering in a discussion paper which they published in March 2020: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/paper/2020...

The chapter on Technology Design states "Although CBDC is often associated with Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT — see Box 5), we do not presume CBDC must be built using DLT. Most existing payment systems are run on centralised technology stacks, and there is no reason CBDC could not also be built this way. However, DLT includes a number of potentially highly useful innovations, which can potentially be adopted independently of each other, allowing us to use the specific features of DLT which are most relevant and appropriate, without using DLT in its entirety."

The paper also discusses the risk-free nature of the currency (compared to deposits held in a commercial bank where consumers in principle face credit risk if the bank defaults), resilience, and innovation. And it notes the interesting related questions of whether the CBDC would be interest-bearing, and to what extent consumers switching from commercial bank deposits to the CBDC would impact the commercial banking model (using deposits to fund lending).

[anm89]

This is a key point. CBDCs have no intrinsic overlap with blockchain or crypto currencies. You could use a blockchain as part or all of the strategy for storing the data of your currency but you could do it without using these concepts at all. The more likely scenario here is that blockchains will not be used here.

People should not confuse CBDCs with crypto. They are unrelated concepts.

[danialtz]

Amen.

One does need a decentralized ledger for CBDC, high performance databases are quite acceptable, as there is no problem of lack of trust in a permissined model (no systematic bad actor). If you listen to Moser (and Chaum) video, he even states somewhere the unnecessity of DLTs for retail CBDCs.

There are still some benefits but not worth to bet against the blockchain trilemma in these early stages.