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by andreykocevski
1808 days ago
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Founder of a CBDC startup here. We do fully offline smartcard-based CBDC wallets and offline payment protocols, similar to what Mondex was doing in the 90s. This article is very well written, the potential risks stated are mostly true. Our product effectively mitigates most of the downsides and risks since it works completely offline. Its essentially like a credit card that doesn't need external networks such as internet or GSM to operate, its fully peer-to-peer (in this case card to card). If you want to cash out the funds on the card you can just go to the Central Bank (CB) or some Authorized Financial Institution (AFI) and tell them you want to get your money out. The cash control policies are literally the same as cash, there are some upper limits on what amounts you can pay without reporting, and how much you can hold per card. Also the cards are issued with KYC/AML procedures. CBDCs are a double-edged sword, they can be used by tyrannical governments to enforce surveillance and bigger control, or they can be used by Central Banks to enter the retail digital currency space (which can make digital transactions cheaper, more accessible, and can also make the difference between Retail Bank and Central Bank interest rates lower. To some extent Central Banks also feel threatened by Bitcoin and other decentralized digital currencies). I have no doubt countries will abuse this if implemented, but I also have no doubt that countries with protected liberties will make sure it doesn't cross into surveillance thats outside of the current standard... Also, its actually much worse with credit card payments. Even Bitcoin is traced significantly (there are multi-billion dollar companies that solely work with governments and financial institutions to trace cryptocurrencies). Also cash is not as anonymous as one might think. Bigger sums are always traced and recorded with the serial numbers on the banknotes, and theres always upper limits of 2K-10K eur of how much you can pay with cash without reporting. |
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When cash is dispensed from an ATM, even at small sums, are the serial numbers associated with the account it was deducted from? Seems possible from a technical perspective.