News and information from Europe πͺπΊ
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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.
A belated clarification:
This is referring to the plans to create digital euro with GNU Taler, right?
GNU Taler (Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Resources) is a new secure electronic payment system based on open standards, free software, and advanced cryptography. GNU Taler provides privacy guarantees to the buyer while offering the possibility to audit merchants, making sale incomes transparent and fraud difficult. To online merchants and retailers, GNU Taler offers instant transaction clearance without risks of fake payment methods. Computations needed to clear the payments are efficient and scalable so that banks can pass on lower transaction costs to consumers and merchants. Consumers can withdraw money from their existing bank account into their GNU Taler wallet, detaching their spending habits from scrutiny, in the way cash does.
The NGI TALER project is funded under Horizon Europe (Pilots for the Next Generation Internet) with the aim of bringing GNU Taler to market across Europe.
Went have o never heard of this. Sounds promising!
Please please please
By november 2025 they will begin negotiations to write a draft of the proposal.
With the speed of our bureaucracy and the current evolution of the world, we'll be paying with sparkly rocks and seashells before we're getting a digital Euro.
Without digital euro, there is already Wero app to replace PayPal, Visa and MasterCard. At least in theory... It's a payment app that allows to pay and receive money via wire transfer from bank to bank without fee.
In practice, many banks are not enrolled in this program and I have yet to find a single business where I can pay this way. But at least replacing PayPal to send money to friends and family should be easy enough.
There are many private alternatives, but that is missing the point. An ECB backed digital coin takes away the private bank monopoly on printing digital money. It will be a great contribution to the commons and will decrease the power of private banks. It will also contribute to increased economic resilience.
I recommend reading the publications from positive money on this subject.
https://positivemoney.org/eu/publications/a-digital-euro-for-the-people/
If I want to use my main bank account with wero I have to link my mobile number to it and canβt use it for wero with my other account anymore, because thatβs the only way my bank supports it. Only a small number of banks actually let you use the wero app with multiple sources. Makes it completely useless for me. Paypal isnβt the only one that can do that either. Basically everything not made by companies that primarily want to be banks can do this. E.g. Klarna.
The other thing is that I need something that works outside the EU. Thatβs where replacing paypal and credit cards is actually difficult. In my own country or in the EU, I have plenty of options.
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 !!!
This is really really good news.
Can Canada get in on this?
Huh... Push Britain to get back to the EU and then you guys (and Australia, and New Zealand) could join on the basis of being in the Commonwealth!
As an Australian, I fully support this!
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.
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.]
Weren't those problems solved in the 1990s with Ecash? If they have a trusted central authority doing time stamps, then they can just use blinded signatures.
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.
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.