Ledger Insights: “Digital Pound paper explores privacy enhancing technologies for CBDC”

“In the West there has been significant resistance to the concept of retail central bank digital currencies (CBDC) based on ‘Big Brother’ concerns. In other words, privacy fears that the government can monitor personal payment transactions. Or sometimes, even concerns that they might attempt to control behaviors. Hence, the Bank of England and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Digital Currency Initiative (MIT DCI) published a paper exploring privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) for a possible digital pound.” ….

“The paper is written in a way that makes it quite accessible to people who don’t want to delve into the technical details. Some suggestions for future work relate to enhancing privacy for very small transactions. Earlier this year MIT DCI also partnered the Bundesbank for privacy work.”