See my comment in this HN thread:
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People always love to make wrong comparisons when it comes to crypto. For example, many will tell you that crypto scams are much more prevalent than credit-card fraud. The opposite is true if you make a fair comparison.
If you exclude fraud by exchanges and fraud by “investment scams”, there is very little fraud using crypto for payments as compared to credit-cards.
The reason is simple, credit-card fraud is much easier since credit-cards are inherently much less secure than a self-custody wallets. Credit-cards can be skimmed, stolen, digitally copied ets.
Compare that to a good self custody crypto wallet and it is much more secure. Compare it to a self custody hardware wallet, and using crypto is infinitely more secure than a credit-card.
If you would use crypto like grin for payments, with proper payment proofs and optionally even third party services of dispute settlement, this would be a far superior payment method than credit-cards.
The real problem with crypto is greedy humans going for stupid scams and centralized “crypto banks” that cannot be trusted. Those problems have nothing to do with the design of a crypto currency itself.
O, and add to that all the other downsides from credit-cards, like them being the most successfully financial product to enrich banks and impoverish its users, and I would actually argue dredit- cards should be prohibited since they are designed for theft by third parties and legalized theft by banks.
My apologies for going on rant mode.
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With CBDC cards will not be needed indeed, only QR codes at physical merchants, together with DigitalID as default KYC method.
If proper privacy preservation techniques are used, CBDC’s are actually a step up from current digital payment methods. My worry is whether most of them will be properly privacy preserving in particular for micropayments. Hence, it is good to keep traditional fiat cash as a backup, as well as more cypher-punk decentralized privacy preserving currencies like grin.
Let them all compete, iron sharpens iron. At the the end of the day we should have better sound money systems than what we currently have.
Banks will be against it for better control for civilians and politicians (less corruption is good), digital cash will be Grin, not controlled by anyone and to be used by anyone at same time, designed for decades to come (2029+)
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