The more supervisory authorities try to explain what the digital euro is, the more inconsistent the idea becomes.

The European Central Bank (ECB) is on schedule with its preparation phase, which ends in October. They have worked on the selection of suppliers, the entire procurement process has been completed and is about to close. They are also developing the regulation and working on ways to get closer to the consumer. And the first concern that arises is: why are you leaving the consumer to the end of the process, why are you going down the fait accompli route?

It is also claimed that this new official digital currency is being promoted to avoid competition from those that are not legal tender. If they do not have official backing, they are obviously not legal tender, so what fear can they generate?

It is similar to being worried that one day some citizens will decide to pay each other with Monopoly tickets. No one with the slightest warning is going to exchange legal tender for a supposed currency that has no official, legal or even verbal backing. Where is the threat? If that were to happen, it would be an illegal action that could be prosecuted.

That is exactly what happens with cryptocurrencies: they are a gamble, a game, and political efforts, surely much more economical than creating a currency, would have to be directed at making it clear again and again that the state does not consider them legal tender.

It would be as absurd as if the state felt threatened by a sect that defined itself as a state with the vocation of enacting binding laws for all. No new institution would need to be created to neutralise such nonsense.

Cards as a rival, or dependence on foreign suppliers, as euphemistically put, is not a very convincing reason. Since the creation of the euro, the system of means of payment dominated by foreign providers has been a known fact, accepted and promoted by eurozone banks, and has never generated, nor does it generate, a sense of urgency that has required parliamentary debate.

Cards are private money, not public money, as is the case with cash, and it is a credit, not a cash payment. As credit it generates interest and responds to the principle of a service to be paid for, i.e. paying to be able to pay. It is an option for those who want to possess a good or service today and, as such, it cannot be compulsory for everyone. Cards and coins and banknotes serve very different purposes, and if the digital euro is ‘like’ cash, cards are not its rival.

Another form of card payment, the debit card, allows cash payment, but for this there must first be cash in the current account. Again, the basis of the payment system is to have coins and banknotes in a bank account; plastic is only an instrument that is worth the cost of the material it is made of. It is necessary to remember in this context that cash is tangible and concrete, it allows the value of goods and services to be materialised and made evident.

Unrestricted

The digital euro is an abstraction and, as such, susceptible to being issued without restriction of any kind, generating the opposite effect for which central banks were created: to fight inflation. Why does the guardian of monetary orthodoxy now want to open a door to bypass it?

Even if we stick to the definition that the digital euro ‘is like cash’, this is, from an operational point of view, a redundancy. By creating a hypothetical means of payment that already exists, the EU would in reality double its costs, and it would do so outside a public debate, and given the importance of the matter, much more than operational or functional decisions are required. We are talking about freedom of decision and data privacy, which are not trivial matters.

Moreover, when something is defined in terms of ‘is like’ from an ontological point of view, it is not in itself, it has no authenticity, it imitates something else, in this case coins and banknotes.

So why would we want something that imitates cash when we have the original in our hands?

Sometimes regulators, from an elitist position and under a certain enlightened despotism, fall in love with their economic models, and the blindness produced by this infatuation leads us to forget that models can, at best, help us to understand reality, but they are never reality.

It would be understandable from the point of view of a State worried about external threats, for example, a war, to create a currency that could be deposited in an account opened at the European Central Bank itself for the peace of mind of all citizens, but then we could no longer speak of the market economy, nor of democracy, but we would be in the Economy of the Controlling State without anyone having voted for it.

Javier Rupérez: President of the Denaria Platform

Source: Expansión