European Credit Card and digital euro is coming, end 2025
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:
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.
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.
Please please please
Went have o never heard of this. Sounds promising!
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.
Here in Italy we have Satispay. It is already quite big. I guess there are still some limitations but these are quickly fixed. Direct bank transfers and reduced fees Satispay
There's something similar in Spain called Bizum, created by banking institutions. Most Spanish banks implement it so your phone number is associated to your back account, so you can send and receive money instantly without fees to anyone just by knowing their phone number. Works really well.
If I want to use my main bank account with wero I have to link my mobile number to it and can’t use it for wero with my other account anymore, because that’s 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 isn’t 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. That’s where replacing paypal and credit cards is actually difficult. In my own country or in the EU, I have plenty of options.
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/
only for German and French banks though, glad we have BLIK here in Poland
Mostly French banks at this point, I only know of PostBank that offers Wero at the moment. I know for sure DeutcheBank doesn't have it yet.
As far as I understand, Wero won’t replace Mastercard or Visa. It’s just a way to transfer money between people, like Swish or Vipps for example.
If businesses start of offer it as a payment option, then it could be an alternative to card payment. But we are clearly not there yet. I already use my phone as a mastercard most of the time.
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.
Taler is a cool and fitting name
Where did you read that Taler plans a launch in EUR this year?
There is an EU funded pilot project with a German and Hungarian bank, and at least the German bank plans to offer an public exchange for Euros very soon. Sadly they recently annonced that it will be only open to German business customers, but they plan to expand the offer to their European network or cooperative banks. Lets see.
I think Taler would be a good supplement to the digital Euro, not a competition. It would be fairly simple to integrate an Taler exchange with a digital Euro API and use Taler as a digital cash alternative that works nicely for micropayments online.
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.
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 I think they want the front end experience to be as much like what we have now, but the inner workings of the digital euro (or any CBDC) is very different compared to what we have now.
No, it is a centralized digital payment system run by the ECB.
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.
Crypto coins are a digital currency just like the digital euro is, but there is a big difference in how they are managed. I don't know enough to explain the difference in details but a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) doesn't necessarily have a Blockchain behind it and the coins aren't mined like the bitcoins are for example. The big win is you will no longer need a 3rd party for moving the money. If you now move money on your account to my account our banks need another company (likely either visa or MasterCard) to 'verify' that the money actually moves from a to b or something like that. There was a post with a link posted just 2 hours ago on Lemmy here: https://lemm.ee/post/60966980
If I remember it correctly the big banks lobbied enough that you still need them for an account and moving meaningful amounts of money
Explain this to my dad, he is almost 60 years old, barely knows how to use his smart phone! Like others mentioned, last time I saw the news, they where still confused and having conversations. What did it change?
He won't need much explanation if he feels he can trust the ecb since they want a system that works like we have now (with a card and an app/website).
What's wrong with your dad if he can't use a smart phone being almost 60?
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!
Meanwhile my Bank is switching from Maestro (USA) to VISA (USA) for my everyday debit Card, and i must accept the change until September. I guess i have to find a new Bank after so many years.
My attention will be on the selection of providers, planned for Q2 2025. If non-EU (and I would personally exclude also non-Eurozone, because incentives) providers are allowed in the infrastructure, especially American, Israeli or Chinese, the whole thing is not only a joke, but an extremely risky operation.
if we can keep using cash mostly anywhere, this is good news
No one needs cash.
oh yes we do. fuck digital payments with its privacy nightmare. fuck visa and mastercard for selling our purchase information, and who knows what avenues will this system have for tracking.
also, who the fuck wants to carry a phone all the time. I don't want to have to carry it even if just going to the shop on the corner.
cash is best. nobody but the cashier can deny a transaction with it.
Nice
OK, I get it. Maybe we can take a backpack and go living in a cave somewhere. Offgrid, away from everything and we reject any kind of civilization, service and trust, because yes... even your best friend can become your worst enemy. Then why take the risk of having friends? I use the proverb: "Care is the mother of the porcelain store." But I refuse to question every detail in my life. Have a little faith.
Digital euro uh, only matters to the government and banks. Lower cost of production I'm sure. No need to store physical cash for banks.
For citizens, it's not like we haven't been using bank cards and apps this whole time. We just have been linking our payments to a bank account we hold digitally on our phones.
So, this isn't a big change for citizens. Just a lower cost for production.
Not having our cash transaction routed through US services is extremely significant in terms of privacy and autonomy.
Autonomy is indeed more valuable than profits
It's not just cost of production.
I like the idea of having digital cash like physical cash, with cheap transaction fees if at all, no transactions over international private corps instead of my bank, multiple cards which may or may not work in one place or another, and different apps in different countries.
Transaction fees are already lower than cash handling.
i believe they want the front end experience to be as much like what we have now, but the inner workings are very different and lower cost is not the goal.
are we getting closer to what they have in China 🇨🇳 where by the flip of a switch, the Government can make anyone a hobo whenever they wish?
OK. I'm out of this conversation. Nothing can be a positive outcome of this conversation. So I admit: The European Union is working on the behalf of China, with a hidden authoritarian agenda who wants to make all EU citizens helpless peasants. All actions the EU are taking are not real. They just want to screw us up. I'm moving to the US. Maybe I'll be better off. (note: sarcasm)
Clearly they weren't asking that question in good faith, but you countered by cranking the bad faith up to eleven.
I also have concerns with central banks; however, I still appreciate you making this newsworthy OP. Don't stress if everyone doesn't share the same opinions. This would be a boring place if everyone was just reiterating why they agree with each other. ✌️
5/10 needs more spy pigeons
Right now the corporations OP listed can already do that. If you don't want anybody else to be in charge of your money, then go use crypto.