Yeah idk what it's like in Europe but no one is holding euro reserves lol
Here in SA CBDC will just bypass banking sector completely, allowing people to send and receive money and not pay any fees.
In fact it exists now in the form of payshap, but the banks facilitate it currently and they charge fees for a free service!
This is why I am keen to see CBDC directly from the central bank and not from banks
I'm of the mind you won't like how it's implemented. There will be many prerequisites and limitations on CDBCs, rendering them basically unusable for people who care about their sovereignty in any way.
I can't imagine the SA gov ever executing anything successfully, let alone properly managing such a system and not abusing it. CBDCs will also be replacing cash, ATMs are already becoming rare there and everywhere else in the world. Good luck buying anything not approved if you don't have cash, unless dealers are accepting monero.
It already exists in South Africa, just not in the same framework as a CBDC.
i don't want to make a long post but ultimately direct currency from the people who hold the reserves is better than currency from banks who create it from nothing.
This is the thing about currency, it's highly swappable and has its use cases. When you travel, you need cash of that location, so you get currency or your bank doing a spot trade of the purchase amount and charging you conversion fees and an premium on FX.
Now if cbdc's exist, we the public, can get currency directly from the central bank (without a fee) and just an FX trade of other currencies against their CBDC or crypto reserve.
There is obvious pushback from the banks because this cuts them out and they are mafia
In SA we already have something called Payshap, it's where the central bank acts as the intermediary. Because they do not handle transactions they hand this off to banks to offer the service. This service is free to use i.e. You can instantly send any cash amount to someone else in South Africa, up to R5000 per transaction and R30k per day. For free. The phone number acts as the wallet address and the wallet itself is the registered bank account.
It's like crypto currency already but the central bank is the main one. Imo when CBDCs come in, they'll be doing the same, just on chain with a scalable protocol.
SA government is useless but our central bank is pretty on the ball. they make good timely decisions, for instance ours was the first to raise interest rates in the world (by a few months) in 2021. I remember reading the articles mocking this decision but behold the 2022 recession. So inflation was hard and high, but rode it out only a few percentage points.
In comparison the USA went from 0% to 5% which is a huge movement versus 0.5 or 0.6%
Crypto is open and unrestricted (but international pressure is forcing changes) with AML and KYC etc.
