Twint only works in Switzerland and I believe digital Euro payment system will work across the Eurozone.
India and China have already eliminated the duopoly of Visa and Mastercard. Eurozone being large market is still dominated by US players. This shouldn’t be an issue in normal world but with everything getting weaponised these days, hooking the regional payments with foreign companies is not very good idea. Payment systems in EU are currently fragmented with every country doing their own thing.
For Switzerland I believe Twint is enough as it’s widely used for CHF transactions.
Also Switzerland can probably afford having dependencies on Visa/MC, EU is a much bigger fish.
(in any case for now the SNB has been clear they don’t want to pursue retail digital cash/payment, the focus is only on wholesale CDBC/commercial settlement)
Ah, I didn’t see that. Yeah I guess then you can go pretty stealthy. I would avoid sending mixed coins right back to a DEX wallet, but I guess thats obvious.
I guess Monero is arguably one of the safest options available but very slow and complex in usage.
It is ok to just look at the digital euro and disregard any flanking political developments that address permissible cash amount, asset register, kill switch for foreign currency stablecoins, decision to force energy transition and higher energy cost on population. Added defense spending will also somehow have to be (force)paid by this or future generations.
Programmability might not be ready in phase 1 but it will be a feature. Digital sovereignity sounds great - who doesn’t want to cut out MC/Visa? Could be that the technology for European CBDC will totally avoid global hyperscalers but I doubt that it can be implemented without using AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
Seen in it’s entirety, I do not envy European citizens and their advancing level of financial control.
If anything, what we’re seeing is that transition is nowhere fast enough, even if you don’t care about the impact of climate change (impact which leads to high economic cost), reaching energy independence is as critical as ever.
(And yes, solar and battery is dominated by China, but there’s a huge difference between require a continuous import of energy from abroad vs. just building up infrastructure to produce the energy directly)
That’s a totally different type of programmability. The doc is about programmable payment (e.g. recurring, etc. the user is in control). Those definitely seem like feature that most payment system would eventually need (e.g. I want to pay my share of rent to my roommates every month).
That’s slide 6 of your doc:
Programmable money ≠ programmability of payments
From the FAQ:
Programmable money is a digital form of money used for a predefined purpose, like a voucher, with limitations on where, when or with whom it can be used.
It isn’t fast enough because the technology to make it happen does not yet exist (Scalable short and long term energy storage). Then how are you gonna fly an airplane ? Petrochemicals ?
In the short/medium term, thinking that you can reach energy independence without fossile fuels isn’t realistic. The best you can do is ensure diversified supply.
I think the transition is actually going reasonably well, at least for electricity, it is just unfortunate that because the focus had still been lowering carbon emission, not improving energy independence, the thing to get shut off first was coal (and nuclear for unfortunate reasons), not natural gas.
If e.g. the UK turned back on the coal capacity they shut off over the last decade (yes this may not be easy anymore), I think they could mostly do without gas, maybe except for the faster switching speed of gas power plants, especially once you’re outside of the worst of winter.
I think the bigger problems are still home heating (gas), industry (both gas and oil) and transport (oil). Switching things to electricity has just been very slow indeed.
My first reaction (based on nothing but vibez) is that it’s probably a good selling opportunity. Don’t really trust Trump to not screw this up as soon as tomorrow, and even if a ceasefire holds then there will still be a lot of disruption from the damaged oil and gas facilities in the Gulf.
The White House pushed the idea of a temporary ceasefire with Iran even as Donald Trump escalated threats against the Islamic republic and claimed it was “begging” for a deal, according to people familiar with the talks
Seems like it’s mostly the US that initiated this.
I think at least one good thing that happened here is that US was smart enough to realise that they need to back out of a war they cannot win. Russia wasn’t fast enough and is stuck
What will be worth observing is how the rest of the world sees this episode
pretend nothing happened and just continue investing in US companies
Diversify away because US is no different than Russia
Accept that we live in world where might is right and invest heavily in self reliance and autonomy. This could be a case for investing in Rest of the world
@PhilMongoose I’m going to eat my crow and admit no ground invasion has occurred during the Easter weekend and the situation is more taco-y than full scale war.
Consumer sentiment plummeted to its lowest level on record due to frustration with price spikes from the US-Israeli war with Iran.
The University of Michigan’s latest consumer survey released Friday showed that sentiment declined 11% early this month to a reading of 47.6, lower than anything seen in the post World War II era, including during the Great Recession, the pandemic downturn and the historic inflation surge afterward.
From history that doesn’t portend well. That said, perhaps a recession can be avoided through relentless ‚doom-spending‘…
As an aside, I’ve been motivated by the Trump $1.5T military budget proposal to take a look at the US debt clock. I expected the Big Beautiful Bill to have taken the problem of the debt ceiling out of the picture for the whole Trump term. Apparently, it’ll be back again (though probably not front stage as so many other topics need to be discussed) by then end of Q1 next year and possibly as early as the end of this year…
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