it is already super expensive if you want to get an actual work done using their max model. On a midsize project, it cost ca. €200 for my vibe coding tests to get something reasonable done (each call, each tool costs 0.05c). Their normal claude window is super short, and almost unusable for serious work. Stack was python and Nuxt.
It’s been a surprisingly emotional stretch in Germany these past few weeks. Between drastic shifting U.S. politics, the rising cost of living in our major cities, and recent isolated incidents that have rattled public sentiment, there’s a growing sense of urgency and determination in the air in my (mostly tech and Enterpise) surroundings.
What stands out most is how quickly this mood has shifted from anxiety to a “let’s build it ourselves” mentality. I see it in the new products and projects around me: there’s a growing effort to reduce reliance on the U.S. and carve out distinctly European solutions. In employment, too, we’re noticing an uptick in candidates who seem more interested in staying or coming to Europe —- something that was slowly happening since covid, but feels quite different from six months ago.
There could be a silver lining here. Despite the political and economic challenges, this could open up blocked opportunities for Europe to regain its competitive edge. Everything before was "there is a better, cheaper, available, from US", now enterprises don't trust their data off EU. If we can move beyond committee-driven decision-malkings fast enough, it might just be the catalyst Europe needed to reclaim and reinvent its place in the global marketplace. Maybe, who knows, maybe, the immidiate recommendation to a tech startup (non B2B) won't be "you need to move to SF!" too.
Personally, I decided against having a Tesla and went for a german brand this year, despite german ones being bad in tech UX. Maybe if soon there is a EU OpenAI/Claude level capable too.
thank you for the post. The recommendation engine becoming generic and main page of pushed content were also the reason I moved away from Spotify Family to Apple Music family - added I was keen to see apple 3D sound which is not that great today. Pushing the age limit, even Apple Music seems uninteresting and I keep listening to the same music over and over.
The UX of Apple Music is also terrible:
- awkward Music interface that you keep mixing library and cloud versions, and my kids still don't get it.
- Testing my intelligence and memory on each menu item to find where my Pink Floyd album I keep playing is.
- I don't care about any albums they push on the main page and no way to tell them Beyonce or Rap is not for me AFAIK. Why don't they offer simliar artists I can explore than generic categories?
- no way to remotely access my kids play options when they fall sleep (got Spotify for this feature)
- With the above items, low return value per Euro I invest, listening on the same albums over and over.
One does need a decentralized ledger for CBDC, high performance databases are quite acceptable, as there is no problem of lack of trust in a permissined model (no systematic bad actor). If you listen to Moser (and Chaum) video, he even states somewhere the unnecessity of DLTs for retail CBDCs.
There are still some benefits but not worth to bet against the blockchain trilemma in these early stages.
You have a point here, but sadly most of the current state of art in CBDC research avoids storing accounts at Central Banks due to the obvious risk of disintermediating banking system.
The points of others thread stays: what is the point of CBDC for individuals if the supply is not limited and not stored at Central banks...
This is actually one of the main USPs to have payment at public layer. Even USA is pushing for an open API and SDKs, one day maybe an open source protocol.
The idea here is about security of money: the money stored in the CB ledger does not lose i ts contractual value in difficult times, as it is garanteed by the central bank.
Compare that to your money in your bank, which is backed at 10% with fiat reserves. If crisis happens and people want to pull their cash out the bank goes bankrupt. Central banks do not go bankrupt, hence your money is always safe.
The control of privacy should be in the protocol and not in the hands of the authorities, if there is going to be a trust built around it. Otherwise, we have what is there today, without the anonymous cash element.
The CBDCs started with a great idea: to share the stability and security banks enjoy today with all citizen and retail sector in digital format, as public layer similar to internet, between what we have today (cash) and what the future maybe (web3). At the same time, the way you have right to use cash today (almost) in the way you desire, you should have right and possibility to do so also in the digital world of future.
Today, most of the digital money is actually a private sector coin backed by fiat: you send paypal coin to another person, not real euro, and exchange it via another CC provider service. Cross-borders are order of magnitude more messy. They have similar problems like other stablecoins and cryptocurrencies while a few of their main value added are the solution to the challenges of cryptocurrencies: UX, and security among others. The private sector also has an incentivized and risk-averse view towards the basic right, e.g. inclusion and usage. The covid crisis showed that we cannot leave it to the private sector and banks among others to ensure the financial safety of people. Bank-runs happened because people do not have trust toward private sector, and regulatory actions are reactive at best.
So enter CBDCs. Central banks wanted to provide the benefits while retaining control of money flow in country. Same incentives of old age into the digital world. But the challenge is that by providing a real CB backed currency one disintermediates the banking system. One reason not to break the economy without understanding the effects and the other reason being CBs themselves are not high tech and prefer to piggy back available distribution channels. So, CBs started offering two-layer approaches, which is almost identical to the today‘s financial model, mostly a technological improvement at best. DLTs replace Swifts of the world. Accounts will stay accounts, KYC stays in place, maybe some tools would be given to not require accounts for e.g. <$1k etc. External sovereignty threats, e.g. e-renminbi, is also a whole different story, taken the topic to the extreme, while still acting as a strong external motivator.
One could ask then what‘s the fuss then? So, there is a technological demand to build CBDC, CBs have all incentives for themselves to build it to keep control, banks get to have a modern payment system for themselves, but what would change for the end user? Lower fees? obviously the view is biased towards modern world, e.g. in broken economies any order is better than none, some wallet is better than no bank, etc.
Eventually, CBDCs in the first roll out are an evolution of the current banking system. There is no fuss about it, but rather finally there is enough momentum to align multiple heavy stakeholders on one strategy.
Right on point distinction. There are various models:
- almost all CBDC designs are transparent (monitored and stored), since they sit on the ledger and has to be auditable by a third party. So, the only way to allow privacy is to give some „vouchers“ that those transactions are either not stored or stored with a different key. ECB has proposed one such designs, e.g. 300 euro vouchers a day.
- there are other models that do not use DLTs so they can provide means not to store specific txns, hence private.
The mandate is not discsussed yet but could come. CBs are running many pilots since they don‘t know also whether CBDC would work for their incentive, since it has to be accepted by citizens and not create a shock to economy.
side note, „inclusive“ here refers to unbanked population. Today they can use cash, but many people specially in poor countries have no access to banking. A no-smartphone no-bank-needed digital cash could enable big part of countries to be included in financial system (some up to 40% of population)
> Important note: central bank digital currencies are not crypto currrencies. They are not block chains. They are not decentralized. They are not permissionless. I cannot find a record of any CBDC which clearly states that it want's to use any of these technologies. I'd be interested to be proven wrong.
Indeed, by default almost majority of CBDCs are permissioned chains since CB is the only authority to create money and destroy, aka mint.
Technology-wise though you‘d be surprised. Most of the solutions out there are actually DLT based, almost all blockchain based. There are modern aspects that work differently than other cryptos (well, borrowed), e.g. there are permissioned blockchain solutions that allow „channels“ to be private. This allows a bank to still be on a ledger while txns are hidden from other banks. They are also decentralized because Central banks are not high tech companies, but they have trusted middle layer still to be fast and cheap at some other disadvantages for citizen, e.g. control.
Privacy is ranked the second after security in a recent survey from ECB, so it is a known demand and design criteria for both sides.
CBDC will co-exist with cash for years to come. Fully monitored CBDC will be at a high disadvantage by citizens specially in modern world, while fully private one would not be allowed by CBs due to need for transparency.
Here also comes the product builders. We could design a CBDC that is fully transparent, which is the easiest to build, these days mostly DLT based. The challenge is how to enable some TXNs to be private by design and not only policies.
A major country is taking the extreme case of full transparency, while ECB and others like Canada are strongly focusing on privacy as a feature.
The benefits are not that obvious and visible in a European country.
In general, there are benefits and drawbacks:
- efficiency: well, despite having a fast transaction time the machinery behind banking system is old and in-efficient, scary even to think how it’s still working. Cross-border is another major friction.
- flexible monetary policies and tools: e.g. directly depositing relief money into the accounts of people in crisis times, or negative interest rates.
- financial inclusion: not everywhere people are banked and part of socioeconomic circle to receive benefits, e.g. African countries or small portion of modern world, where banking is privileged. In theory, one does not need a whole banking backend to store coins, as seen by crypto world.
- innovation backstop: the new currency could act as a settlement layer for the known stability model of money in a country to create new tools (asset chains, etc) or automate them at much lower cost.
Of course, it comes with a risk (from CB’s perspective) of disintermediation of banking system, technological challenges, privacy concerns, etc.
Indeed, financial stability and crisis models are the transformation studies several central banks and also stablecoins like Celo undertake to understand how introduction a new monetary instrument would solve some issues and affect others. Short answer is it’s too early to say since it’s a tech-push innovation sped up by demand-push of pandemic and global players.
Well, perhaps CBDC folks have learned a lot from Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, mostly on scaling and security, so literally not a database but abstract-wise a ledger like cryptos with different consensus and payment model.
CBDCs today are mostly based on trusted nodes, e.g. CBs and Banks, with the goal of transforming the current monetary “backend” into a digital automated way without losing the control. Think of it as breaking a monolith into a microservice world, which offers “innovation” and lower barrier to entry (underbanked) among other features.
Accounts at central banks is only one model of CBDC, called Direct CBDC, which is to my knowledge much less preferred way than a hybrid apparoach (like what’s there today), for several reasons:
- managing a complexity of nation-wide banking for Central Banks is quite early at this stage, being a traditionally a government portion known mostly for policies and economics than cutting edge tech deployment.
- CBs want to keep stability, and breaking down a current model of banking by introduction of a new FIAT model is not one of them
There are key needs and major requirements additionally for the CBDC that are documented in the latest BIS and ECB reports.
There are different types of CBDCs with various focus areas, e.g. wholesale CBDC (banking innovation, similar to what you mentioned) and Retail CBDC. The CBDC model that is gaining increasing momentum, despite expectations, is the retail CBDC, which due to some form of overlap with banking innovation, retail payment innovation and cryptocurrencies (as the extreme) makes it a hot debate topic. The interesting observation here is that numerous Central Banks are passing the “debate” phase and some already getting ready to release aka “production grade”, e.g. China.
I'd be also curious to see which space (if anything left) Visa would be moving on the retail side. They have already filed a patent which could be an additional indicator [1].
In general, once a national CBDC is in place it'd become rather difficult to foresee the position of middle players between issuer of cash (CB) and user of cash (people) in retail space, e.g. Visa and commercial banks. In a world where anybody can send cash to each other without a middle player (even offline), the role of middle players would probably reduce from "money printers" and large-scale trusted actors to "security box"-holder financial players and value-added service providers.
On the private sector side, there are also quite strong players stepping in, likes of Celo and various other public chains. On the public sector, China's DC/EP would be publicly out in 2022 creating a strong inertia [2], followed by couple of other central banks in various stages.
Things are going to get really interesting next few years, which certainly will change the today's financial landscape.
is this the same category to CopilotKit? CPK is a AGUI proxy for similar topics, but here seems to be more emphasis on linked components?