China and the Bahamas are already piloting central bank digital currencies—digital versions of their national currencies. The European Central Bank is surveying the public about a digital euro. And most countries’ central banks are actively researching using digital currencies for payments.
Maybe they should just stop, say a pair of researchers, who argue in a paper released today the whole enterprise of creating substitutes for digital cash is at risk of failing because it lacks an “obvious justification.”
Writing for European policy analysis publication VoxEU, Peter Bofinger and Thomas Hass of the Economics department at University of Wuerzburg in Germany argue that central banks have been too focused on CBDCs as a medium of exchange, when private banks already offer benefits such as deposit insurance and a wide variety of products.
Read more: https://decrypt.co/56277/national-digital-currencies-primed-flop-say-researchers
