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- Hacker News
- I reckon it will be KYCed as hard as imaginable - and then some.by egorfine
- Aren't credit cards KYCed anyway?by reddalo
- I am hoping this could be utilized by those living in the US who also don't want to use the dollar. The surveillance has grown too large and I don't trust my own money. The IRS requires all transactions sent to them if they total $600 or more on a payment app. Why would I want my money in US dollar when the Euro has vastly more robust protections and less corruption?by kittikitti
- > The IRS requires all transactions sent to them if they total $600 or more on a payment app
I regret to inform you that your tax obligations don't disappear just because they're in a different currency. Worse, because you're a US national, they don't disappear even if you're physically in a different country.
by pjc50 - On an article like this, I encourage anyone giving an opinion based on their own experience to say what country it's from. (Or have this in their profile.)by Symbiote
- It's the Internet. Just assume they are American unless otherwise specified.by oAlbe
- This seems different than a credit card account though? I buy everything with my credit cards because I don't want to swipe my bank card at random merchants.by petcat
- Are you in the EU or the US? The US has very different laws than the EU; specifically, in the US, credit card rewards and fraud protection strongly encourage credit card usage.by gwbas1c
- This is not an issue in Europe (and really in most if not all countries other than the US at this point), since both credit and debit cards require a PIN for all non-trivial payment amounts.by lxgr
- it's about the payment processors, not the card type, though the article makes it confusing by mentioning credit cards as it's really not about that at all
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/faqs/html/ecb.fa...
Read the FAQ, it's about no longer relying on US payment processors for handling transactions in a different country that may not support your country's payment system
by csydas - A vast majority of card transactions in the EU are done via debit card. Credit card accounts for only around 25% vs debit. And the only place I've swiped my card was once, in the US, about 15 years ago.by basisword
- This tells me you are likely from North America?
Credit Card usage is really different between those regions. While I lived in EU, I rarely used credit cards (even paying online works with debit cards). But in Canada/US, I almost exclusively pay with credit cards now when shopping. Although in fairness it took me a few years to get in the habit of using credit cards and 'collecting points'.
by Insanity - i hope the thing they roll out is a straight copy of pix from brazil. its fast, reliable, cheaper than debit cards and private (not anonymous but only the central bank can see your info). no corporations involved outside of support contracts and no stupid limits to make banks happy like this new proposal.
and there should be a right to use all payment methods in the constitution or whatever the eu equivalent is. all stores must accept digital euro and physical stores also accept cash. crypto shouldnt be a part of the system but protected from being made illegal in any member state, privacy coins especially.
by tancop - Also clears the way to control how the digital euros can be spent.
No thanks.
Ideal/Wero is good.
Use my credit cards for larger online payments. Mainly because it has insurance and makes it easy to dispute something.
Last year a large Swedish clothing brand didn’t deliver 400 euros worth of clothing. They said they did. I have nothing. Customer service unhelpful. I disputed it with the bank where I have the credit card. The same day it was fixed.
by peterspath - This has been de facto true for a while, not that it improves the situation. Various EU countries have legal limits for the size of cash transactions, requiring you to do it via a bank.
The idea that people have private property does seem to be something governments are incredibly keen to erode.
by fidotron - Wero is good? The company which is only reachable by snail mail, whose services are only accessible through devices running operating systems from the American megacorporations Alphabet and Apple (both known for being fined repeatedly by the EU for breaking various laws)? If that's what passes for good, I'd hate to see what you would call mediocre, let alone bad.by tmtvl
- I'd rather have a democratically elected government in control than an unelected company that actively uses its power to censor things it doesnt like. [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis...
by vrganj - "Digital Euro"... Do people realize that maybe 90% of money is already digital, i.e. sitting as bytes and numbers on banks' computers ?
It seems to me that the actual problem that the EU is trying to solve it to find a tech managed by the ECB but that leaves space for the banks to keep existing in payment. They make a significant amount of money from Visa/Mastercard payments.
But we don't need payment terminals anymore: phones and QR-Codes are enough. We don't need Visa or Mastercard: just route payment instructions from payee's bank to payer's bank.
In Europe, we actually already have instant-payment through the SEPA network (i.e. IBAN transactions).
by harrouet - > We don't need Visa or Mastercard: just route payment instructions from payee's bank to payer's bank.
That sounds simple, but yet is basically nowhere as a payment infrastructure.
Various countries have their own low friction payments, like Norways' Vipps; we "just" (hah) need to combine them into one European Voltron of payments.
by pjc50 - Can someone tell me why the EU doesn’t develop something like RuPay?
Indian UPI gets mentioned a lot, but when Visa, Mastercard didn't agree with data sovereignty rules among other rules, India quickly developed RuPay [0]. Now most debit cards in India are RuPay. CCs stand at 18% share.
They also integrate seamlessly to UPI.
Why doesn’t the EU consider something like that? They want to jump direct to digital currencies? Is that it? Something else?
[0]: Data rules came in 2017/18, RuPay was developed in 2012 iirc. But it got unprecedented push after the rule.
by __rito__ - It took some time but RuPay branded CCs are also available. I have been using them for the last 2-3 years at least. They work, mostly, with UPI.
Some merchants disable RuPay CC payments even when they don't get charged merchant fees till the payment crosses the INR 2K threshold.
Strangest thing is when I can pay the guy pushing a handcart around selling vegetables using a RuPay CC while a medical store refuses to accept it.
by sieve - It's simple: banks don't want the people they've fleeced to realise that they no longer have a role in the present age. If you let legal tender be exchanged directly via a central bank (which is semi-public by nature), banks lose a huge amount of liquidity that fuels fractional-reserve banking through loans made to generate massive amounts of cash, and without these, the banks are bust.by kkfx
- If you were starting from scratch today, though, would you really re-invent credit cards? There was at some point I think a vague plan for a European debit card network (at least one of the national debit card network actually supports foreign issuers on a technical level, though I don't think in practice this was ever implemented), but really, why use the card format, beyond "well, this is already a thing"?by rsynnott
- > why the EU doesn’t develop something like RuPay
We used to have Europay, which competed with Visa and MasterCard. But it merged with MasterCard in 2002.
by wcoenen - This is literally what the article is about - Digital Euro and Wero are two competing solutions that are debated right now.by izacus
- They are, it’s called Wero. It is a stopgap, and sits on top of SEPA.
Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207004 - May 2026 (777 comments)
Wero – Digital payment wallet, made in Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038965 - February 2026 (132 comments)
Europe's Banks Launch Wero Payments to Dislodge Visa, Mastercard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41666833 - September 2024 (88 comments)
Unofficial Wero Adoption Tracker - https://www.werotracker.eu/
by toomuchtodo - Here is a more technical description: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12525-025-00822-7
I am still not quite sure how this would affect my day-to-day (private) payment experience transaction cost etc.
But is has strategic value for Europe:
> [...] European dependencies in critical technologies. A digital euro could mitigate these developments in the medium term if the infrastructure is mainly operated by European companies and if European payment service providers manage to achieve a leading position in the evolving ecosystem for digital euro services.
Some more: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/timeline/profuse...
by ano-ther - > how this would affect my day-to-day (private) payment experience
You will need to pass KYC at every counter.
by egorfine - How much you wanna bet that digital euro implementations will in practice depend on two US corporations? The EUDI wallet implementations being rolled out seem to so far. (Apple and Google, in case it wasn't obvious.)by ryukafalz
- The goal is to detach your transaction from a new York based point of failure.by epolanski