You have to remember how much changes over the life of these machines. 15 years back we only barely had contactless so if the machines took cards at best they’d be chip & pin and possibly even just mag stripe. On street gear takes a loooong time to replace!
Hopefully never for CBDC. I could do without a Chinese level of surveillance on my spending.
Can promise you that China doesn’t need a CBDC to perform surveillance. People already willingly use private e-Money like 支付宝 and 微信 to pay for goods. CBDC only de-anonymises physical money, but it’s still private.
Not really an issue, just allows for more economic policy. Unless you plan to be subjected to sanctions, in which case the Bank of China would put a freeze on the assets, but I’m not sure how the balance sheet works with that (if they open you an account with the Central Bank directly or if they just hold the total aggregate issue amount of the CBDC on the balance sheet)
China doesn’t need CDBC for surveillance as you say but it will make every transaction instantly visible. I would rather opt out of that level of surveillance regardless of who is issuing the CBDC.
Too much data is worthless. They’re not concerned (and no government is) with 99.9999% of things
This is just a “make British Pound stay relevant” and also a “have a new digital base to tie everything to once the physical cash isn’t accepted anywhere to be worth anything”
And what about when they make a mistake?
A debanking would mean you couldn’t buy anything. No food, nothing.
What about when the tax people made a mistake and you find yourself with no money? Because they’ll be able to tax every transaction in real time.
Of course in China they have a massive number of people to do the surveillance.
You don’t get de-CBDC’d when you get de-banked.
It’s a separate thing.
They already tax every transaction in real-time, it’s called VAT. Air passenger duty etc. every single levy or tax is one you pay at point of sale besides corporation tax or income/NIC etc
It wouldn’t be quite the same as debanking. It could be way worse if they decided to switch off all your CBDC. Can’t see that happening in the UK but I could see China doing it if, say, you openly supported democracy in HK or said Taiwan was a country.
They don’t tax anything in real-time because they can’t. VAT is collected by companies and, much later, paid to the tax people. With a CBDC they could potentially collect the VAT as each transaction was made.
China wouldn’t undermine its currency for you when they could just arrest you. They know people still need to live. You might have your access to credit restricted but anything else, it’ll be jail or you’re fine.
To the consumer, it is at point-of-sale. But actually, I think it would be more efficient for the country if they could collect it directly (better cashflow for government, less short-term borrowing and clearer revenue predictions). But it would still be on the merchant’s labelling, right? They need to know what VAT category.
I don’t get your aversion to real-time collection of VAT though, tbh. Even if we lived in a world where it’s possible to do that, let’s say by the merchant indicating the VAT rate as normal and the CBDC wallet automatically forwarding it to HMRC (and card issuers taking in the data required to do automatic payments to HMRC to). What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that just efficiency?
Whilst interesting points are being shared, a reminder of risks inherent in expressing political views. Ta.
On the tax collection, the difference is that the tax people currently only get that, say, Tesco owes £1 million and they don’t know what anyone has bought. With CDBC, they potentially get a million separate payments and know who bought those things. They wouldn’t know what specifically you bought in Tesco but I could imagine situations where you wouldn’t want them to know you’d bought something in a less general shop.
I better leave China discussions out or we’ll get blocked. On the surveillance front, a colleague returning from there was instructed to throw all her phones away as they’d been compromised. It’s that bad.
I’m intrigued as to what the Piers Corbyn crew etc are concerned about specifically with “CBDC”. They campaign about cash advocacy, whilst mentioning the CBDC, yet cash usage is being hammered by standard digitalisation. All these payments are held on ledgers with Visa/MC & the banks anyway - they can be presented on demand to law enforcement etc. We live under pretty strict KYC laws as it is in terms of funds in & out of an account, regardless of whether you spend on a card or debit your card to withdraw cash. Perhaps they see the CBDC as something that would replace cash or are concerned about transactions being present on some sort of government blockchain? In all honestly, I don’t really get the sensationalism! Cash is on the way out, and those going crazy about it seem to be the same people bothered by things like “forced vaccines” or “forced vegetarianism”. Happy to discuss further assuming as we keep within the realms of healthy debate 
I can see some appeal of CBDC from gov perspective but what would be appeal from a consumer perspective?
The only one I can think of is it provides a new option, that’s probably safer than physical cash, for holding some of your money in case worried about access to your money in retail banks. Are there more consumer benefits?
Indemnity from bank failures to an unlimited degree. The ability to pay without cash, even when a merchant doesn’t take card. Pressure on card payments to become cheaper for merchants, reducing costs. The inability to steal it from your pocket unless using the wrench attack. Faster settlement time for you and the business. Potential for easier cross-currency exchange with other CBDCs. Potentially via something managed by an exchange itself, rather than needing a business to scrape their massive fee to provide you with cash.
Also, the main one: making industries that have been resistant to payment innovation, finally move their arses. Namely, low cost things like vending machines or parking metres might prefer a QR code being scanned and receiving your CBDC vs paying for card processing fees (assuming the margin is low)
Edit: Also, integrity of the role of Pound Sterling. If the physical currency becomes useless, currently, the digital equivalent we use, will also be useless by extension (potentially) and at the very least, if the Pound Sterling loses place to others that do adapt, we could potentially see a slide in the currency value or even a foreign currency being preferable by our country, to be used (not that this is likely, but the BoE CBDC Working Group considered that this could happen if it makes life easier for people).
In theory it could be cheaper as you wouldn’t need banks to handle your transactions. Basically with a Bank of England CBDC we could all bank directly with the BoE who’d handle all the transactions.
Downside being that if that one system was hacked or went down, all transactions would cease. At the moment, one bank being hacked means that only their customers have a big issue (others are, of course, affected to a lesser extent).
If I were a hacker, I would LOVE to have a CBDC to hack!
And they would be hacked. Very quickly indeed given the potential rewards if it succeeded.
They said that’s not going to happen. So we’d still rely on random companies to hold our wallets/magic beans but there might be even less regulation on it than banks. Yay!
Is it being considered as an alternative to bank accounts? I assumed it would be for holding smaller amounts (more of all alternative to physical cash) so as not to destabilise banking industry.
It is considered as a limited option for now. But they say they’d review limits over time.