I remember from the Gentoo days that when you compiled PyPy from source it would generate a Mandelbrot in ANSI art during the compilation. I was so impressed!
Did you also know that it actually spawns the `sjeng` command line binary as an NSTask and attaches to stdin and stdout. So basically it’s just a fancy GUI around the Text based UI :)
I see it mainly of getting rid of physical money faster. Ofcourse people already use alipay, wechat pay and they spearheaded it. The expiration timer is most likely to incentive people to use this over wechat and alipay and get faster usage feedback.
Note that wechat and alipay are commercial companies. So having a national digital currency does have benefits