There you have it, from the mouth of the president of the European Central Bank To reassure people about the digital euro, she cites China as a "success story" and says explicitly that EU is following China's lead on Centralized Digital Currency. Here's why this matters that they are explicitly copying China's model: China's Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), the e-CNY, gives the People's Bank of China for the first time the surveillance powers to track all citizens' financial transactions in real-time. Because their CBDC records every transaction, this gives the government detailed visibility into every citizens' financial activities. All larger transactions are traceable under laws like the Cybersecurity Law. This capability gives Chinese authorities the power to ❌monitor and control behavior ❌track spending to identify dissenters ❌enforce social compliance via the social credit system ❌restrict funds for critics The technology makes mass surveillance and (further) erosion of civil liberties technologically possible, while providing Chinese authorities a tool for the state to exert unprecedented control over its population. ECB will say "Well, in theory that's true, but we will only use that ring of power to do good for the world" If you are feeling uncomfortable with that level of power, you are right to trust your instinct. Computer science says this is bad technology design because historically, potentials to abuse centralized power granted by technology have been used, and the only way to safeguard people against abuse is to have good technology design that makes this algorithmically impossible. This is something that Bitcoin does, whereas CBDCs open up exponentially more potential for abuse of central power than currently exists. So if you trust ECB to be an positive outlier, are comfortable disregarding good technology design principles designed to keep people safe, and trust your government and Central Bank to have all that power - but not to use it, then you have nothing to be concerned about.