>"Personal data would be fully protected. Banks, not even the ECB, would not see or be able to trace, people's personal details or data. Offline payments would offer a similar level of privacy as cash does today," Dombrovskis told reporters.

Yeah, lol no I'm not buying that. Maybe if the actual architecture and source code gets open sourced and people more knowledgeable than me audit it...

This sure reads like a press release announcing a project that hasn't been designed or built yet.

Promising complete privacy and fully offline transactions both sound dubious.

What mechanisms would be in place to allow me to transfer money from my KYC bank account to an anonymous wallet without it being tracked?

If the max is €3000 but it's entirely private, how could they possibly know I don't have a higher balance or multiple wallets?

What tech is even being used to allow fully private, offline transactions in the first place? How does the receiver verify that the digital cash is legit? And how does the network ensure that the money wasn't double spent while offline?

So many questions here, and I can't help but have a hunch that the gaps in description would be blocked by fundamental technical limitations.

I'd like to know more about the technical implementation.

For society, this is really important. Basically everyone needs a bank account. In some countries, the government even forces people implicitly to have one in order to pay taxes or fees.

In such a case, the government should provide a solution for this too.

Then, there are also economic implications of this. Society needs to run many banks, which uses a lot of resources (especially people). However, many people and companies only need one simple part of banking: cashless payment. Something that’s, from a technical perspective, just a database for transactions and accounts. So a default solution by the government makes sense to me.

Of course people will argue against this as the government would have full control over people’s money. But I think that’s the case anyway. Money is something inherently governmental as it’s produced by an governmental institution (central bank) and collected by the government in form of taxes.

Regarding the private, offline payment, there has been a somewhat comparable, actually offline, system in place in Germany for the last 30 or so years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geldkarte

Probably due to its security being based on the security of the embedded smart card, it had a much lower limit and other than my father showing me how it worked 20 years ago I have neither used nor seen anybody use it.

> ECB officials have suggested a cap of €3,000.

I wonder how they will implement the infrastructure. Having this will be an awesome replacement to the limitations of the visa/mastercard monopoly

> [..] promising complete privacy

Sure. But somehow I'm not so confident about that...

How can they make it work offline while protecting the money from being duplicated?

That's something that I don't quite understand.

Would they give a unique ID to each cent so that if two with the same ID appear they see the discrepancy, but even that wouldn't work for offline, unless if they're planning to make it so that you have to go online every set period of time and then they verify the money.

What's the difference between this and something like Venmo, Paypal, etc?

Since there are absolutely no sources/further links in the article I could look at, is this based on David Chaums Ecash?

Because that actually looked like a decently private central-ish digital currency.

Doesn't GNU already have a protocol for this? It would be great if they used that. Hopefully they'll make it FOSS

I don't see what problem this solves other than enabling surveillance.

How’s that going to work with AML etc