ECB starts 24 month digital euro project.

[paxmao]

If and when the BoE launch a CBDC, will anyone outside of the UK even care?

If we exclude the British territories and countries that depend directly on British Aid, probably nobody will give a damn.
Maybe tourists?  

Perhaps it's driven by the point stompix made above. If the Fed comes out with a proposal for a CBDC, then they have to take it to Congress and get it to pass a vote. If the ECB comes out with a proposal for a CBDC, then it has to be disseminated to 19 (or is it all 27?) member states, any one of which could veto it. They need to be sure they get it right or it'll never pass.

It's a CBDC tied to the euro, so it will be a question of the Eurozone 19, not of the whole EU, but the voting things still stand as I said before, any country could veto it at any time, plus I just read an article on how some countries have it in the law (or constitution) that the euro is the only legal currency, but the wording is so bad that it will need a re-write to accommodate a digital currency, Germany was given as an example but I really didn't get it, the quote was something like "euro banknotes are the only unrestricted legal means of payment" so assumingly this would need to be changed also in short, More headaches!

5 years is too long. they'd be taken over already by the adoption of stablecoins before they could test out to one city in their country. Chinese CBDC may have already spread out in a matter of months even in Africa.

I've read some news like that at the start of the year but it was just rumors and what-if questions, and then there was silence, anything new?

I do not think that is a new currency at all. It would be the equivalent to say that the Euros deposited at a bank are different from the Euros that have in your wallet. In fact these euros are more different than the ones that would be emitted as electronic since the banks are entitled to print their own money by lending more than they have in deposits. The Euro will be the Euro even if it is stored in a different way, there is no need to submit that to the 19 on those grounds. The initiative may however require a certain level of acquiescence from all the countries involved, but IMO not any constitutional changes.

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[valentine wheeler]

Such a scenario would make it harder for the central bank to control monetary policy, maintain financial stability, ensure low cost payments and enable financial inclusion.

"Financial inclusion"? Please. Bitcoin is the essence of financial inclusion. Don't have good ID? Turned down for a bank account. Don't have a fixed address? Turned down for a bank account. Bad financial history? Turned down for a bank account. None of that matters with bitcoin. Install a wallet, done. No fiat or CBDC will ever be as financially inclusive as bitcoin is. And "control monetary policy" is a nice way of saying "print more money". We've all seen the chart showing USD losing >95% of its value in the last 100 years. Now here's the one for EUR - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1055948/value-euro-since-2000/. A cool 30% lost since its creation ~20 years ago. As the article points out, they are worried that the majority of the population will move to using bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, which directly impacts on their ability to bail out themselves and their friends and prop up their rigged markets indefinitely.

This has nothing to do with maintaining "financial stability", and everything to protecting their own vested interests.

I feel that what you are talking about is the nature of the problem. Bitcoin is not worried about competition. Now the European Union or China is actively developing digital currencies. Their goals or official ideas are also obvious. Of course, the reasons sound very good.

The digital euro and digital renminbi（decp) are actually a natural world currency. It replaces the traditional currencies dominated by governments around the world and the actual circulation of physical gold. It also has the most powerful development space for currency payment functions. The function of the world currency is not affected by the fluctuation of any country’s paper currency, nor is it subject to the control of the dominant currency of any country’s government. It has a global circulation function, and it will play an irreplaceable role in the development of the world currency in the future.

What I want to ask is whether the land of fiat currencies among countries will compete with the land of digital currencies. Will there be a settlement system with a digital dollar as the core?

Regardless of development, as long as the digital currency issued by sovereign countries or regional organizations is centralized, or half of it is centralized, it has already broken away from the essence of the blockchain, and a perfect trust system cannot be established. This is the key, so it actually provides an accelerator for the development of Bitcoin.

[Kong Hey Pakboy]

Why they need 24 months for digital euro? Is it so hard to create gov level blockchain?

If you can do it less than a month then do it, there's probably a lot of factors involved in doing this project like scaling, network and integration. I don't think that the project can be any more shorter because they have to be released perfect or at least performing. I don't necessarily agree with them creating their own digital currency because I feel like once it's operational, they will start attacking the decentralized platform like what China did these past few months.

[stompix]

I do not think that is a new currency at all. It would be the equivalent to say that the Euros deposited at a bank are different from the Euros that have in your wallet. In fact these euros are more different than the ones that would be emitted as electronic since the banks are entitled to print their own money by lending more than they have in deposits. The Euro will be the Euro even if it is stored in a different way, there is no need to submit that to the 19 on those grounds. The initiative may however require a certain level of acquiescence from all the countries involved, but IMO not any constitutional changes.

Not that simple!
There is a problem with issuing euros, the ECB does not issue coins, those are done by the CB, the roles are clearly defined so unless they will only print clear denominations of CBDC that match the current values they will not be able to do it lawfully. So,
- the ECB has no current legal way of doing so, it needs a status update in order to issue currency on their own
- national banks don't have this power either, and on top of that in some of the countries, it's clearly said that they can only issue a well-defined currency and in the case of the eurozone every currency that would be issued by the CB would become legal tender and everyone in the country would be forced to accept it for payment. Not going to happen! Take a look at Germany, they simply can't stop using cash, how are you going to make them use a digital currency when they didn't want to use a debit card?

It's not as simple as you think, this Union has a lot of treaties that hold it together, and because each joining country has ratified these if one of those is broken a lot more become invalid also. Given the current mess and constant infighting updating everything will not be done without a vote, nobody is going to risk another fragmentation on this.

If, however, it were necessary to amend the treaties, in principle this would have to be done through a new treaty, with the attendant difficulties linked to the need for unanimity and ratification processes in the Member States. Exceptionally, under a derogation in Article 129(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), the Statute of the ESCB and of the ECB can be amended using the legislative procedure. However, the derogation is restricted to a limited number of Statute articles, including Article 17 on opening accounts, and authorises only marginal amendments to the content of the articles. Making wholesale changes to the content of one of the articles covered by the derogation might, in particular, be viewed as circumventing the restrictive nature of this procedure.

and the legal tender part:

As the law stands, only banknotes issued by the Eurosystem (TFEU Article 128) and coins (Article 11 of Council Regulation EC/974/98) are legal tender in the euro area. Assuming that it was possible, given the constraints detailed above, to introduce a retail CBDC that was equivalent to a digital form of banknotes, under TFEU Article 128, it would automatically benefit from legal tender status.