Reminder to all commenters that Europe is not a single homogeneous country and somewhat diverse in various things, including payments and finance. Credit cards are definitely a thing in many European countries.
Not everyone. We use both and mostly credit card for online payments that we pay off at the end of the month. It has a limit and it is easier deal with potential fraud vs a debit card where your own money goes. But does it matter? All my debit cards are Visa and Mastercard anyway.
which is in fact a massive pain in the ass, because car rentals and hotels often require credit cards to make reservations (at least in my experience...)
And even when you have a credit card, it might act like a debit card (every payment shows as debit in your banking app, even if you really pay on the 10th of the month or something).
Interesting note: Americans use credit cards and rarely debit cards because here the terms on debit cards are so much worse for contesting charges, etc, so debit cards never really caught on for anything more than withdrawing cash.
In Europe, of course, they love to make moral judgments and are pleased to have one more opportunity to demonstrate superiority over Americans. But we're used to that so it's no big deal.
Of course in the US, users of debit cards are assumed to be uncreditworthy (because debit cards in the US have such bad T&C's that poor credit score is often why they are used). So everyone is busy with value judgements :)
And most Europeans that have a credit-card need to pay them off at the end of the month. Technically they are charge cards. Unlike a traditional credit card, a charge card does not allow you to carry a revolving balance.
The article uses the term credit card for apparently no reason, because Visa and Mastercard also support debit cards. The EU is probably more concerned about Visa and Mastercard payment networks being under the control of American leaders.
I am still not quite sure how this would affect my day-to-day (private) payment experience transaction cost etc.
But is has strategic value for Europe:
> [...] European dependencies in critical technologies. A digital euro could mitigate these developments in the medium term if the infrastructure is mainly operated by European companies and if European payment service providers manage to achieve a leading position in the evolving ecosystem for digital euro services.
How does digital euro replace credit cards? That's basically the same as direct debit. It doesn't address the reason why I use credit cards.
I use credit cards as a proxy for my bank accounts. I know that my issuing bank will protect me from all fraud so I don't have to worry about losing money if I buy something from a fraudulent merchant. I also know I can do things like chargebacks if I have to.
None of this is addressed by digital currency, it's basically like using cash which is haphazard today when there are so many scams everywhere around the world.
In EU most people use direct debit. The term "credit card" is almost synonymous with debit. Chargebacks theoretically exists but they are more complicated, I don't know anyone who ever did that.
So you're really using credit cards as a proxy for a consumer-friendly (at least with regard to fraud/disputes) payments product.
Credit cards being more consumer friendly than bank transfers is usually an artifact of the concrete implementation, not the abstract concept. In many EU/SEPA countries, returning a direct debit is much easier than a chargeback in the US, for example. In some countries, people even consider credit cards as less secure because filing a chargeback takes marginally longer with most banks (and requires a letter as opposed to a single click in online banking).
If the digital euro is to succeed, it'll of course have to compete with cards on the usability side as well.
I was wondering about this. I wonder if there are insurance products to close this gap? Or maybe some banks offer accounts with different kinds of purchase protection.
I'm with you. While I'm no fan of the risk involved with missing a CC payment, there's a mountain of difference between credit and debit when it comes to fraud. It's literally you trying to get your money back (debit) versus some giant corporation trying to get _its_ money back (credit).
> How does digital euro replace credit cards? That's basically the same as direct debit. It doesn't address the reason why I use credit cards.
Exactly, it is just their latest marketing move to have people accept it.
I was in a meeting at the ECB 6 years ago, the digital euro was high priority and we were supposed to see the first pilot 5 years ago.
The project is actually older and I saw schematic of the system and screenshot and the management interface 6 years ago. It was developed by a German company.
I am not sure why we are not using it right now... it can either be:
- the urgency, like upcoming financial collapse, disappeared,
- the bank lobbied so hard they killed the previous design,
For a lot of Americans the credit card system is another tax on being poor:
People with stable jobs and good credit qualify for no-fee credit cards with rewards / cashback. As a consumer you benefit financially from having a credit card. Those elsewhere in the thread worried about "debt" - you just set to auto-withdrawl the entire balance of the card every month from your bank account. Now you have free money. I can't think of a reason not to take advantage of this system in some way.
But people with unstable jobs and poor credit help subsidize these "higher-end" credit cards when they pay high interest rates on their because they missed payments or hold a balance over multiple months. For those people credit cards could help with monthly cashflow issues but are essentially a scam and not much better than payday loans.
Yet another system that American consumers are kind of forced to participate in that's a sort of tragedy of the commons (high-reward cards wouldn't exist without the exploitation of other people not savvy enough to avoid high interest and fees)
It’s fancy instant payments, which most of the developed world already has. The question is which unnecessary intermediaries do you continue to remove as you refactor legacy financial infra.
Credit card rails are expensive legacy rails, that part of the stack is the target to disrupt in this context. In the context of the digital euro, you can think of it as a demand deposit account backed by the central bank (as most fiat deposit accounts are in some way) that is portable between banks, like you’d move a US investment account that can hold securities between brokers with ACATS at the clearinghouse.
Can someone tell me why the EU doesn’t develop something like RuPay?
Indian UPI gets mentioned a lot, but when Visa, Mastercard didn't agree with data sovereignty rules among other rules, India quickly developed RuPay [0]. Now most debit cards in India are RuPay. CCs stand at 18% share.
They also integrate seamlessly to UPI.
Why doesn’t the EU consider something like that? They want to jump direct to digital currencies? Is that it? Something else?
[0]: Data rules came in 2017/18, RuPay was developed in 2012 iirc. But it got unprecedented push after the rule.
It's simple: banks don't want the people they've fleeced to realise that they no longer have a role in the present age. If you let legal tender be exchanged directly via a central bank (which is semi-public by nature), banks lose a huge amount of liquidity that fuels fractional-reserve banking through loans made to generate massive amounts of cash, and without these, the banks are bust.
Also clears the way to control how the digital euros can be spent.
No thanks.
Ideal/Wero is good.
Use my credit cards for larger online payments. Mainly because it has insurance and makes it easy to dispute something.
Last year a large Swedish clothing brand didn’t deliver 400 euros worth of clothing. They said they did. I have nothing. Customer service unhelpful. I disputed it with the bank where I have the credit card. The same day it was fixed.
I'd rather have a democratically elected government in control than an unelected company that actively uses its power to censor things it doesnt like. [0]
This has been de facto true for a while, not that it improves the situation. Various EU countries have legal limits for the size of cash transactions, requiring you to do it via a bank.
The idea that people have private property does seem to be something governments are incredibly keen to erode.
How much you wanna bet that digital euro implementations will in practice depend on two US corporations? The EUDI wallet implementations being rolled out seem to so far. (Apple and Google, in case it wasn't obvious.)
i hope the thing they roll out is a straight copy of pix from brazil. its fast, reliable, cheaper than debit cards and private (not anonymous but only the central bank can see your info). no corporations involved outside of support contracts and no stupid limits to make banks happy like this new proposal.
and there should be a right to use all payment methods in the constitution or whatever the eu equivalent is. all stores must accept digital euro and physical stores also accept cash. crypto shouldnt be a part of the system but protected from being made illegal in any member state, privacy coins especially.
This sounds like "government issue Revolut". Which would be... low-key nice? Not a nefarious scheme, not a revolutionary future of money, just something to replace a certain part of your financial life without tying it to a commercial entity. Which might be appealing to the anti-capitalism segment of Europeans.
This seems different than a credit card account though? I buy everything with my credit cards because I don't want to swipe my bank card at random merchants.
Credit Card usage is really different between those regions. While I lived in EU, I rarely used credit cards (even paying online works with debit cards). But in Canada/US, I almost exclusively pay with credit cards now when shopping. Although in fairness it took me a few years to get in the habit of using credit cards and 'collecting points'.
This is not an issue in Europe (and really in most if not all countries other than the US at this point), since both credit and debit cards require a PIN for all non-trivial payment amounts.
it's about the payment processors, not the card type, though the article makes it confusing by mentioning credit cards as it's really not about that at all
Read the FAQ, it's about no longer relying on US payment processors for handling transactions in a different country that may not support your country's payment system
A vast majority of card transactions in the EU are done via debit card. Credit card accounts for only around 25% vs debit. And the only place I've swiped my card was once, in the US, about 15 years ago.
On an article like this, I encourage anyone giving an opinion based on their own experience to say what country it's from. (Or have this in their profile.)
> The approval of draft rules by the economic committee of the European Parliament comes after three years of wrangling between the ECB and banks, which have been concerned about deposit outflows and lost revenues and sought to limit the scope of the project.
This kind of thing is why I'm optimistic both about Bitcoin and fiat currencies in third world countries like Brazil and India.
I am hoping this could be utilized by those living in the US who also don't want to use the dollar. The surveillance has grown too large and I don't trust my own money. The IRS requires all transactions sent to them if they total $600 or more on a payment app. Why would I want my money in US dollar when the Euro has vastly more robust protections and less corruption?
This is interesting and poignant less because of the digital currency aspect and more because of the geopolitics. In a world where technology touches everything, tech itself becomes political.
The boulder that is de-Americanization has rolled too far downhill now and gained too much momentum; it can no longer be stopped.
The two thirds of Americans who either voted for Trump or couldn't be bothered to vote against him because they aReN't PoLiTiCaL are going to have to come to terms with their new place in the world one way or another. The US is no longer seen as a stable military partner[0], nor a stable economic partner as evidenced by TFA. It's easy to blame Trump but he is merely a symptom of the root cause, which is the attitudes shared by a huge number of Americans.
America will cease to be (and in some cases already has ceased to be) the world's epicenter of geopolitical soft power, scientific innovation, and financial clout. Treaties to which the US is a signatory are not worth the paper they're printed on. The foundations have already been laid, and the de-Americanization trend can't be stopped. For a people so accustomed to feeling like a privileged special class of world citizens, I honestly wonder if the American psyche can handle it. Probably we'll see a wave of people who "never supported Trump in the first place", just like tons of Germans were "never Nazis in the first place" once it became socially unpalatable.
So, congrats, I guess. At least you guys got some people with brown skin deported.
Don't underestimate how much in bed are many of the european politicians/oligarchs with US neocon class. Trump is also problem for them. If Trump gets replaced by some moderate neocon on wave of “good old times” every one of these lobbied politicians will jump back hail comming of the golden age, buy everything american again and delete all this sovereignity out of the sky.
Trump moved overton window so much we will be fed story about how we shall be glad for the corrupted but not vulgar politicians that do barely minimum.
??? Doesn't Europe already have Wero (iDEAL in Netherlands)? That's a system for making online payments. Money gets directly debited from your bank account.
I've always found credit cards stupid. You just want to pay for something, and then suddenly you have a debt. You shouldn't be in debt when you can clearly pay with money you have. Credit card companies advertise with "super easy payments" and "buy now pay later" but at the same time the government warns all the time that "lending money costs money". Also, if your credit card number and CVC get leaked, then anybody can steal any amount of money, and your only recourse is to regularly check your statements and warn the bank within a month. Whereas with Wero/iDEAL you must authorize the exact transaction at that exact amount.
Supposedly, Americans have these "credit card rewards" loyalty program things. Doesn't exist in Europe. You can only pay, you don't get any bonuses. Which makes the only reason to have a credit card is to be able to pay in web shops that don't accept Wero/iDEAL.
I assume you never really interacted with the credit card world? E.g. most banks in Germany will give you a credit card that automatically deducts the outstanding debt at the end of the month, you can't really collect debt over time.
In addition I can deposit money on my credit card, so effectively I never have to be in debt if I don't want to. I just have to charge it up which is done in like 3 seconds in the banking app. It can even be automated.
Credit cards serve the same purpose as loans: they allow you to make a purchase in advance of expected income. There’s a reasonable civic argument that this kind of loan should be tightly regulated to stop people from ruining themselves, but the basic economics work fine for millions of Americans who pay their credit cards on time (or otherwise consider a balance acceptable given their purchasing plans).
(I don’t think the fraud distinction you’re making is as stark in practice: in the US, you’re less exposed to fraud with credit since it’s the creditor’s money, not yours. Reversing a debit transaction in the US is somewhat more involved, albeit for not-good reasons concerning the US’s aging financial infrastructure.)
The way I understand it the Digital Euro doesn't compete with Wero. It's a way for the European Central Bank to emit money in digital form. In theory that doesn't require bank accounts, and can support offline transactions. It's a pretty different concept, more like a new form of money.
Wero, SEPA, and the digital euro are complementing each others
Paying with credit card gives you at least some leverage when a merchant doesn't hold their end of the deal. Good luck getting your money back with iDEAL (it's not possible right now).
I'm not gonna use CBDC because they'll get hooked up to digital id, no matter what they're "promising" right now. This is just another shitcoin no one asked for.
That's a clear case of perfect being the enemy of good. Are CBDC privacy friendly? No, but it's better than 100% of the credit cards currently being used in Europe being part of the network of two big US companies.
I hope that they don't fall into the same trap that a lot of EU projects fall in to: only solving one problem.
My VISA card is not only a convenient payment method, it also forces ATM operators to give me cash without any extra fees. In Germany the EC card used to be THE way of paying with a card but you had to go to the ATMs of your bank, otherwise there would be sometimes pretty ridiculous fees. The kicker was that the fees were set by your home bank.
Add to that the ease of use online as well as in shops and it's easy to see that this is not going to be easy. I do root for them though, to do better than Wero.
As far as i know, your Visa provider pays for the bank ATM fee and they do this with the motivation that you pay with your Credit Card which then basically makes the merchents pay it through the credit card transaction fee which at the end you pay anyway.
I do use my credit card everywere and i'm sure ingdiba is also saving money due to not having offices/ATMs everywhere, but i wouldn't mind if something in the background changes and we can replace Visa/Mastercard with something from the EU.
What does your visa card do to force them to not charge fees?
I still see atm fees over here in the us, so it can't just be being visa. I would guess some regulation but you could get that applied to the digital euro too probably?
It is indeed ridiculous. In the UK all bank cash machines are free no matter which bank you're from. My Girocard charges me 7€ for out of house withdrawals.
My Danish bank imposed a fee on using an ATM from another bank, until my income was high enough to make me a "premium" customer, then these fees were removed. The card didn't change.
I'd rather they didn't waste time worrying about ATM's. I have used one once in the last 5 years. Almost everywhere I visit regularly doesn't even take cash now. The problem being every requirement you add to something like this is probably years of development time given it's the government(s) involved.
Reminder to the people reading this thread and overall comments, that in Europe everyone uses Debit Cards instead of Credit Cards.
Credit Card in Europe is very much associated with Debt.
Reminder to all commenters that Europe is not a single homogeneous country and somewhat diverse in various things, including payments and finance. Credit cards are definitely a thing in many European countries.
Not everyone. We use both and mostly credit card for online payments that we pay off at the end of the month. It has a limit and it is easier deal with potential fraud vs a debit card where your own money goes. But does it matter? All my debit cards are Visa and Mastercard anyway.
which is in fact a massive pain in the ass, because car rentals and hotels often require credit cards to make reservations (at least in my experience...)
And even when you have a credit card, it might act like a debit card (every payment shows as debit in your banking app, even if you really pay on the 10th of the month or something).
Slowly coming to a close in the US also.
Some places already of course not accepting Amex, some places not accepting Visa Infinites (CSR, Venture, etc).
The future of banking is direct. The days of free rewards at a loss are gone as premium US cards are nearing the $1,000 AF mark for luxury coupons.
Interesting note: Americans use credit cards and rarely debit cards because here the terms on debit cards are so much worse for contesting charges, etc, so debit cards never really caught on for anything more than withdrawing cash.
In Europe, of course, they love to make moral judgments and are pleased to have one more opportunity to demonstrate superiority over Americans. But we're used to that so it's no big deal.
Of course in the US, users of debit cards are assumed to be uncreditworthy (because debit cards in the US have such bad T&C's that poor credit score is often why they are used). So everyone is busy with value judgements :)
Yep, although a huge % of banks are issuing Visa and MasterCard debit cards as default nowadays.
Eu: Most of the people I know use debit rather than credit because we can manage our finances.
And most Europeans that have a credit-card need to pay them off at the end of the month. Technically they are charge cards. Unlike a traditional credit card, a charge card does not allow you to carry a revolving balance.
The article uses the term credit card for apparently no reason, because Visa and Mastercard also support debit cards. The EU is probably more concerned about Visa and Mastercard payment networks being under the control of American leaders.
I'm in Europe and I can't say this is the case at all. I've never heard anyone express such an idea.
Here is a more technical description: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12525-025-00822-7
I am still not quite sure how this would affect my day-to-day (private) payment experience transaction cost etc.
But is has strategic value for Europe:
> [...] European dependencies in critical technologies. A digital euro could mitigate these developments in the medium term if the infrastructure is mainly operated by European companies and if European payment service providers manage to achieve a leading position in the evolving ecosystem for digital euro services.
Some more: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/timeline/profuse...
How does digital euro replace credit cards? That's basically the same as direct debit. It doesn't address the reason why I use credit cards.
I use credit cards as a proxy for my bank accounts. I know that my issuing bank will protect me from all fraud so I don't have to worry about losing money if I buy something from a fraudulent merchant. I also know I can do things like chargebacks if I have to.
None of this is addressed by digital currency, it's basically like using cash which is haphazard today when there are so many scams everywhere around the world.
In EU most people use direct debit. The term "credit card" is almost synonymous with debit. Chargebacks theoretically exists but they are more complicated, I don't know anyone who ever did that.
So you're really using credit cards as a proxy for a consumer-friendly (at least with regard to fraud/disputes) payments product.
Credit cards being more consumer friendly than bank transfers is usually an artifact of the concrete implementation, not the abstract concept. In many EU/SEPA countries, returning a direct debit is much easier than a chargeback in the US, for example. In some countries, people even consider credit cards as less secure because filing a chargeback takes marginally longer with most banks (and requires a letter as opposed to a single click in online banking).
If the digital euro is to succeed, it'll of course have to compete with cards on the usability side as well.
I was wondering about this. I wonder if there are insurance products to close this gap? Or maybe some banks offer accounts with different kinds of purchase protection.
I'm with you. While I'm no fan of the risk involved with missing a CC payment, there's a mountain of difference between credit and debit when it comes to fraud. It's literally you trying to get your money back (debit) versus some giant corporation trying to get _its_ money back (credit).
> How does digital euro replace credit cards? That's basically the same as direct debit. It doesn't address the reason why I use credit cards.
Exactly, it is just their latest marketing move to have people accept it.
I was in a meeting at the ECB 6 years ago, the digital euro was high priority and we were supposed to see the first pilot 5 years ago.
The project is actually older and I saw schematic of the system and screenshot and the management interface 6 years ago. It was developed by a German company.
I am not sure why we are not using it right now... it can either be:
- the urgency, like upcoming financial collapse, disappeared,
- the bank lobbied so hard they killed the previous design,
- the EU is just insanely incompetent.
For a lot of Americans the credit card system is another tax on being poor:
People with stable jobs and good credit qualify for no-fee credit cards with rewards / cashback. As a consumer you benefit financially from having a credit card. Those elsewhere in the thread worried about "debt" - you just set to auto-withdrawl the entire balance of the card every month from your bank account. Now you have free money. I can't think of a reason not to take advantage of this system in some way.
But people with unstable jobs and poor credit help subsidize these "higher-end" credit cards when they pay high interest rates on their because they missed payments or hold a balance over multiple months. For those people credit cards could help with monthly cashflow issues but are essentially a scam and not much better than payday loans.
Yet another system that American consumers are kind of forced to participate in that's a sort of tragedy of the commons (high-reward cards wouldn't exist without the exploitation of other people not savvy enough to avoid high interest and fees)
Your transactions aren't tied to some provider in New York blocking you over night?
It’s fancy instant payments, which most of the developed world already has. The question is which unnecessary intermediaries do you continue to remove as you refactor legacy financial infra.
Credit card rails are expensive legacy rails, that part of the stack is the target to disrupt in this context. In the context of the digital euro, you can think of it as a demand deposit account backed by the central bank (as most fiat deposit accounts are in some way) that is portable between banks, like you’d move a US investment account that can hold securities between brokers with ACATS at the clearinghouse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415854 (recent subthread with some related context)
Global instant payment system map: https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/PYMNTS-Rea... [pdf]
We just don't have that much fraud instead.
Can someone tell me why the EU doesn’t develop something like RuPay?
Indian UPI gets mentioned a lot, but when Visa, Mastercard didn't agree with data sovereignty rules among other rules, India quickly developed RuPay [0]. Now most debit cards in India are RuPay. CCs stand at 18% share.
They also integrate seamlessly to UPI.
Why doesn’t the EU consider something like that? They want to jump direct to digital currencies? Is that it? Something else?
[0]: Data rules came in 2017/18, RuPay was developed in 2012 iirc. But it got unprecedented push after the rule.
It took some time but RuPay branded CCs are also available. I have been using them for the last 2-3 years at least. They work, mostly, with UPI.
Some merchants disable RuPay CC payments even when they don't get charged merchant fees till the payment crosses the INR 2K threshold.
Strangest thing is when I can pay the guy pushing a handcart around selling vegetables using a RuPay CC while a medical store refuses to accept it.
This is literally what the article is about - Digital Euro and Wero are two competing solutions that are debated right now.
It's simple: banks don't want the people they've fleeced to realise that they no longer have a role in the present age. If you let legal tender be exchanged directly via a central bank (which is semi-public by nature), banks lose a huge amount of liquidity that fuels fractional-reserve banking through loans made to generate massive amounts of cash, and without these, the banks are bust.
They are, it’s called Wero. It is a stopgap, and sits on top of SEPA.
Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207004 - May 2026 (777 comments)
Wero – Digital payment wallet, made in Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038965 - February 2026 (132 comments)
Europe's Banks Launch Wero Payments to Dislodge Visa, Mastercard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41666833 - September 2024 (88 comments)
Unofficial Wero Adoption Tracker - https://www.werotracker.eu/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area
Also clears the way to control how the digital euros can be spent.
No thanks.
Ideal/Wero is good.
Use my credit cards for larger online payments. Mainly because it has insurance and makes it easy to dispute something.
Last year a large Swedish clothing brand didn’t deliver 400 euros worth of clothing. They said they did. I have nothing. Customer service unhelpful. I disputed it with the bank where I have the credit card. The same day it was fixed.
I'd rather have a democratically elected government in control than an unelected company that actively uses its power to censor things it doesnt like. [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis...
This has been de facto true for a while, not that it improves the situation. Various EU countries have legal limits for the size of cash transactions, requiring you to do it via a bank.
The idea that people have private property does seem to be something governments are incredibly keen to erode.
How much you wanna bet that digital euro implementations will in practice depend on two US corporations? The EUDI wallet implementations being rolled out seem to so far. (Apple and Google, in case it wasn't obvious.)
The goal is to detach your transaction from a new York based point of failure.
i hope the thing they roll out is a straight copy of pix from brazil. its fast, reliable, cheaper than debit cards and private (not anonymous but only the central bank can see your info). no corporations involved outside of support contracts and no stupid limits to make banks happy like this new proposal.
and there should be a right to use all payment methods in the constitution or whatever the eu equivalent is. all stores must accept digital euro and physical stores also accept cash. crypto shouldnt be a part of the system but protected from being made illegal in any member state, privacy coins especially.
This sounds like "government issue Revolut". Which would be... low-key nice? Not a nefarious scheme, not a revolutionary future of money, just something to replace a certain part of your financial life without tying it to a commercial entity. Which might be appealing to the anti-capitalism segment of Europeans.
This seems different than a credit card account though? I buy everything with my credit cards because I don't want to swipe my bank card at random merchants.
This tells me you are likely from North America?
Credit Card usage is really different between those regions. While I lived in EU, I rarely used credit cards (even paying online works with debit cards). But in Canada/US, I almost exclusively pay with credit cards now when shopping. Although in fairness it took me a few years to get in the habit of using credit cards and 'collecting points'.
This is not an issue in Europe (and really in most if not all countries other than the US at this point), since both credit and debit cards require a PIN for all non-trivial payment amounts.
it's about the payment processors, not the card type, though the article makes it confusing by mentioning credit cards as it's really not about that at all
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/faqs/html/ecb.fa...
Read the FAQ, it's about no longer relying on US payment processors for handling transactions in a different country that may not support your country's payment system
A vast majority of card transactions in the EU are done via debit card. Credit card accounts for only around 25% vs debit. And the only place I've swiped my card was once, in the US, about 15 years ago.
On an article like this, I encourage anyone giving an opinion based on their own experience to say what country it's from. (Or have this in their profile.)
It's the Internet. Just assume they are American unless otherwise specified.
> The approval of draft rules by the economic committee of the European Parliament comes after three years of wrangling between the ECB and banks, which have been concerned about deposit outflows and lost revenues and sought to limit the scope of the project.
This kind of thing is why I'm optimistic both about Bitcoin and fiat currencies in third world countries like Brazil and India.
Still faster than increasing the block size limit in bitcoin
might be time the europeans get a little democracy
I am hoping this could be utilized by those living in the US who also don't want to use the dollar. The surveillance has grown too large and I don't trust my own money. The IRS requires all transactions sent to them if they total $600 or more on a payment app. Why would I want my money in US dollar when the Euro has vastly more robust protections and less corruption?
Related:
European Parliament committee backs digital euro - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645468 - June 2026
This is interesting and poignant less because of the digital currency aspect and more because of the geopolitics. In a world where technology touches everything, tech itself becomes political.
The boulder that is de-Americanization has rolled too far downhill now and gained too much momentum; it can no longer be stopped.
The two thirds of Americans who either voted for Trump or couldn't be bothered to vote against him because they aReN't PoLiTiCaL are going to have to come to terms with their new place in the world one way or another. The US is no longer seen as a stable military partner[0], nor a stable economic partner as evidenced by TFA. It's easy to blame Trump but he is merely a symptom of the root cause, which is the attitudes shared by a huge number of Americans.
America will cease to be (and in some cases already has ceased to be) the world's epicenter of geopolitical soft power, scientific innovation, and financial clout. Treaties to which the US is a signatory are not worth the paper they're printed on. The foundations have already been laid, and the de-Americanization trend can't be stopped. For a people so accustomed to feeling like a privileged special class of world citizens, I honestly wonder if the American psyche can handle it. Probably we'll see a wave of people who "never supported Trump in the first place", just like tons of Germans were "never Nazis in the first place" once it became socially unpalatable.
So, congrats, I guess. At least you guys got some people with brown skin deported.
[0] https://www.readtheline.ca/p/matt-gurney-we-will-never-fucki...
Don't underestimate how much in bed are many of the european politicians/oligarchs with US neocon class. Trump is also problem for them. If Trump gets replaced by some moderate neocon on wave of “good old times” every one of these lobbied politicians will jump back hail comming of the golden age, buy everything american again and delete all this sovereignity out of the sky.
Trump moved overton window so much we will be fed story about how we shall be glad for the corrupted but not vulgar politicians that do barely minimum.
> giving Union citizens the freedom to opt to pay with central bank money
Because nothing speaks freedom more than a crazily centralized digital currency
/s
It's centralized right now, digital or not, around the two major US payment processors (Visa and MasterCard).
??? Doesn't Europe already have Wero (iDEAL in Netherlands)? That's a system for making online payments. Money gets directly debited from your bank account.
I've always found credit cards stupid. You just want to pay for something, and then suddenly you have a debt. You shouldn't be in debt when you can clearly pay with money you have. Credit card companies advertise with "super easy payments" and "buy now pay later" but at the same time the government warns all the time that "lending money costs money". Also, if your credit card number and CVC get leaked, then anybody can steal any amount of money, and your only recourse is to regularly check your statements and warn the bank within a month. Whereas with Wero/iDEAL you must authorize the exact transaction at that exact amount.
Supposedly, Americans have these "credit card rewards" loyalty program things. Doesn't exist in Europe. You can only pay, you don't get any bonuses. Which makes the only reason to have a credit card is to be able to pay in web shops that don't accept Wero/iDEAL.
I assume you never really interacted with the credit card world? E.g. most banks in Germany will give you a credit card that automatically deducts the outstanding debt at the end of the month, you can't really collect debt over time.
In addition I can deposit money on my credit card, so effectively I never have to be in debt if I don't want to. I just have to charge it up which is done in like 3 seconds in the banking app. It can even be automated.
Lastly credit cards with bonus programs definitely exist in Europe. Cashback variations are the most common ones, but all kinds of programs exist. E.g. Eurowings has one https://www.eurowings.com/de/ihre-vorteile/kreditkarten/uebe...
Credit cards serve the same purpose as loans: they allow you to make a purchase in advance of expected income. There’s a reasonable civic argument that this kind of loan should be tightly regulated to stop people from ruining themselves, but the basic economics work fine for millions of Americans who pay their credit cards on time (or otherwise consider a balance acceptable given their purchasing plans).
(I don’t think the fraud distinction you’re making is as stark in practice: in the US, you’re less exposed to fraud with credit since it’s the creditor’s money, not yours. Reversing a debit transaction in the US is somewhat more involved, albeit for not-good reasons concerning the US’s aging financial infrastructure.)
At least in France, most of what people call "credit cards" are actually debit cards.
The way I understand it the Digital Euro doesn't compete with Wero. It's a way for the European Central Bank to emit money in digital form. In theory that doesn't require bank accounts, and can support offline transactions. It's a pretty different concept, more like a new form of money.
Wero, SEPA, and the digital euro are complementing each others
Europeans being so scared of debt is so funny. Just pay off your card every month.
The liability model is completely different in the US from Europe w.r.t. merchant vs bank.
The interchange fees are much much higher in the US, which is what pays for the rewards. Europe has an artificial cap.
Paying with credit card gives you at least some leverage when a merchant doesn't hold their end of the deal. Good luck getting your money back with iDEAL (it's not possible right now).
I'm not gonna use CBDC because they'll get hooked up to digital id, no matter what they're "promising" right now. This is just another shitcoin no one asked for.
That's a clear case of perfect being the enemy of good. Are CBDC privacy friendly? No, but it's better than 100% of the credit cards currently being used in Europe being part of the network of two big US companies.
There is no bank account that isn't linked to your id already.
You don't have to use it. you can continue to use your bank account (which is linked to your id, obviously)
Aren't your transactions with your bank already hooked up to your identity?
>> This is just another shitcoin no one asked for.
Giving Europe independence from US payments processors is a huge deal and very necessary.
CDBC doesn't necessarily imply blockchain. It can be just another payments system.
OMG. Wish us luck. Anything EU-mandated is bad these days.
What’s bad on replaceable or long living batteries?
what's bad about an interoperable standard for charging?
EU is very good, most of the time.
Besides this GDPR Website thing, usb-c is great, energy standards are great, etc.
And how do I exit this walled garden and pay in GBP to UK, or USD to USA, or dare I say Yuan to China.
What about RSD to Serbia? CHF to Switzerland?
You put the money in your bank account and use that to pay, or you buy the other currency. The same way you would with physical coins and notes.
Or, if the UK/USA/China set up their own pseudo-cryptocurrency, you can probably exchange digital euros for digital dollars or digital yuans.
you do standard FX... what are you trying to say?
I hope that they don't fall into the same trap that a lot of EU projects fall in to: only solving one problem.
My VISA card is not only a convenient payment method, it also forces ATM operators to give me cash without any extra fees. In Germany the EC card used to be THE way of paying with a card but you had to go to the ATMs of your bank, otherwise there would be sometimes pretty ridiculous fees. The kicker was that the fees were set by your home bank.
Add to that the ease of use online as well as in shops and it's easy to see that this is not going to be easy. I do root for them though, to do better than Wero.
> My VISA card is not only a convenient payment method, it also forces ATM operators to give me cash without any extra fees.
And that has absolutely nothing to do with Visa, but everything to do with your local banks.
I'm in Germany and haven't paid ATM fees since years. I also pretty much never use ATM since Covid
As far as i know, your Visa provider pays for the bank ATM fee and they do this with the motivation that you pay with your Credit Card which then basically makes the merchents pay it through the credit card transaction fee which at the end you pay anyway.
I do use my credit card everywere and i'm sure ingdiba is also saving money due to not having offices/ATMs everywhere, but i wouldn't mind if something in the background changes and we can replace Visa/Mastercard with something from the EU.
What does your visa card do to force them to not charge fees?
I still see atm fees over here in the us, so it can't just be being visa. I would guess some regulation but you could get that applied to the digital euro too probably?
It is indeed ridiculous. In the UK all bank cash machines are free no matter which bank you're from. My Girocard charges me 7€ for out of house withdrawals.
I think ATM fees are unrelated to the card type.
My Danish bank imposed a fee on using an ATM from another bank, until my income was high enough to make me a "premium" customer, then these fees were removed. The card didn't change.
Using a credit card generally forces you to pay fees and higher interest.
Try buying something with your card that VISA or the US government doesn’t like.
I'd rather they didn't waste time worrying about ATM's. I have used one once in the last 5 years. Almost everywhere I visit regularly doesn't even take cash now. The problem being every requirement you add to something like this is probably years of development time given it's the government(s) involved.