G-d, how the hell is “mastercard and visa are monopolies” used as a reasoning for surveillance currency?
Have Danes been visiting ECB lately?
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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How is a digital euro a "surveillance currency"? Or rather, how is it worse than Visa and Mastercard?
It's not worse than credit cards in that regard. But it's not better either. It is worse than the physical Euro though.
It could and should be as anonymous as cryptos can be. Otherwise the EU / national governments can stop you from buying anything they deem illegal.
As an example imagine trying to buy something from your dealer with physical bills and coins vs the digital Euro.
Cryptos are not anonymous. A currency based on an open publicly negotiated and independently verifiable transaction ledger is antithetical to anonymity.
You can very easily tumble cryptos. You can buy them anonymously too.
The issue is not being able to trace them or link them to some wallet. The issue is with it being linkable to a person.
If you ever were active on darknet markets, you'd know you can safely buy things with crypto there, without it being linked to you as a person and leading to charges against you.
I'm not sure they can stop you buying it, but they can see what you bought, or at least who got the money. While i do see your point, I'd rather have an European alternative to Visa today than the perfect digital euro in 10 years. Preventing crime is a responsibility of a nation state, so being able to track money flows is a feature, not a bug.
The digital Euro is an alternative to other digital payment methods, nobody but conspiracy theorists is talking about abolishing physical cash.
With the lack of anonymity it's still a bad alternative.
Afaik there is an idea that would allow anonymous person-to-person offline payments.
Whether that will actually get implemented is anyone's guess. The plans aren't specific enough yet to really know any of it will get implemented.
But bank transfers, credit cards or paypal are not anonymous either so it's not like the digital euro would be worse than the status quo.
Yes bank transfers and credit cards aren't anonymous, but that isn't the point. The point is that a digital Euro is less anonymous than the physical Euro.
The point is that a digital Euro is less anonymous than the physical Euro.
Again, anonymous payments are technically possible and the ECB at least claims that it wants to implement them:
An offline digital euro: cash-like privacy levels
The details of your offline digital euro payments would only be known to you and the recipient. This offline functionality would combine the convenience of digital payments with cash-like privacy levels without the need for an internet connection.
There no final technical specifications yet, so claiming that it will not be implemented is pure speculation at this point.
Also, implementing the digital Euro does not mean abolishing the physical Euro.
You can still pay with cash.
Claims that the Eu wants to take away out cash are also not backed up by any evidence.
This digital euro is specifically about having a single eminent control and track your money even at rest - something Visa and Mastercard would gladly sacrifices a population of a medium sized country to achieve.
Ok, this article has several claims that I find questionable but don't know enough to pipe in on but
Money in a bank account does not sit idle waiting for the client. Most of it is lent out in the form of mortgages and other loans, with only a small fraction held in reserve.
This is blatantly untrue.
When banks give out loans, not a single cent is taken out of anyone's bank account.
The money comes from the central bank. When a loan is granted the person receiving the loan gets money in their account that didn't exist before and an obligation to pay back the bank.
The bank in turn has a receivable on one side of their balance sheet and an obligation to pay back the central bank on the other side.
This is how money creation works.