From the 7th of April to the 9th, the European Central Bank spoke extensively about the Digital Euro, expressing hope about its potential and publishing an update of its rulebook. Its President, Christine Lagarde, also called for it, wishing to end European reliance on international payment solutions providers such as VISA, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe and others.
No need to dumb it down; you got the gist of it. But I’m going to do my worst to make my “explanation” as ridiculous as possible.
I laughed too many times writing that. I’m ridiculous and deserving of your scorn.
I’ll see myself out.
I actually appreciate you writing like that, because now I’m sure I don’t get it.
Don’t you already have all the upsides with the traditional euro? Transfers between people seem to be the only reason you mention, which I still don’t get what exactly the upside is.
I’m going to use a personal case, now.
I can get an instant transfer, within borders, two ways, in my EU corner:
a) I use account to account immediate transfer order, where I can pay anything from a few cents to a few euros, depending on bank
b) I can use a national subsystem, where phone numbers are used, and pay a few cents
But doing this, even within EU borders, is, to my knowledge, border line impossible, with current systems.
IBAN, BIC and SWIFT do exist but transfers through those channels can take days and be very expensive.
My country ordered all national banks, still in the very early eighties, to get their acts together, and find a way for people to access their accounts, pay services, receive and transfer money, regardless the bank they had their account. Thus it was created Multibanco, a service network, built, paid for and maintained by all banks working on my country.
The eEuro closely resembles this concept, in my understanding.
The eEuro becomes a parallel subsystem, vouched for, surpervised and controlled by and through legally binded institutions, without the need to force federalization of european bank systems.
The ECB issues eEuros, which you can exchange your conventional Euros for, through your bank account, but only use through the eEuro network. It’s the ECB managing all those movements, not every single country (veilled federated banking), thus it can bypass a huge amount of beaurocracy.
I can imagine this system as a precursor to something a lot bigger, like a world unified payment system. Individual creators and professionals could greatly benefit from it, using it to directly receive payments and donations
So, the concept exists to fix a systematic problem. Creating a new currency is just collateral.
I didn’t know things were that bad with banks over there, now I get it.