this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Can Canada get in on this?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

As an Australian, I fully support this!

[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

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.

Source: taler.net

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Went have o never heard of this. Sounds promising!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago

Please please please

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 day ago
[–] [email protected] 93 points 1 day ago (1 children)

By november 2025 they will begin negotiations to write a draft of the proposal.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago

This is really really good news.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 day ago

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 !!!

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 day ago (27 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 17 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

only for German and French banks though, glad we have BLIK here in Poland

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 days ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago

I do hope Taler wins, its such an interesting architecture. Its also a GNU project.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago

Link to the Presentation itself. Says "Next phase: From November 2025: Potentially developing and rolling out digital euro use cases"

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

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.

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