The Communication Cube


Sorry for the zombie reply to a 2020 post in a closed thread, but I just read a critique of the Digital Euro I thought interesting. It was published in December 18th 2025, not sure if the legislation might have improved much since. Should be or just have been in the European Parliament.

TLDR: It looks like the banks lobbies have managed to derail the proposal to something proprietary, likely irrelevant and hardly competitive, so that it might cost them something to implement but it shouldn't fly anyway... The EU forces payment service providers to offer digital euro "for free", but limits the user holdings, and ensures users can't use it like cash, directly from central bank to citizen, but must go through private banks or private bank+private platform... And politicians possibly prefer to leave the population captive to banks than having public administrations handling any user support.
Apparently it doesn't even prevent double spending offline, and the dubious anonymity offline doesn't help detect all fraud or attribute liability. I'm not knowledgeable enough to judge the analysis, but it looks well thought out and well written enough that non-experts can mostly understand it.

It's
Gütschow, M., Lucke, B. The proposed design of the digital euro: A critical analysis.
Digit Finance 8, 7 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42521-025-00171-2
License : CC-By 4.0 International.
 
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