China testing digital currency, but rollout looks to be slipping

China has confirmed it is conducting tests of a sovereign digital currency but has timeline for its widespread adoption. The Middle Kingdom’s vision for the “Digital Yuan” is to allow peer-to-peer payments with an app and mechanisms like tapping two NFC-equipped phones together to conduct a transaction, without requiring an …

[DS999]

No record

Except with the government. So just like cash, except 100% not like cash.

[amanfromMars 1]

Pot Kettle Black

Is the West planning to follow suit and do what they constantly claim China does with all of their advances ..... copy it for further improved in-house home product development to deliver an overall leading advantage ....... competitive edge ........ market crushing opposition ?

You know, that quite natural human thing that so many pedestrian corporations go crazy about because it so fcuks up their rigged stock and currency market shenanigans with dodgy unstable algorithms trading ?

It would also certainly be different ...... New Non Money akin to Flash 0Day Cash ...... so a level playing field with everybody at the same starting point.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tap to pay

Interesting China is will finally get NFC/tap to pay. It's a source of annoyance there that you need a functioning smartphone to do do pretty much anything there - everyone carries a big battery. Of course, if China does manage to get rid of cold, hard cash it will make life hard for the undocumented.

[Mike 137]

You don't need to be a government

The entire problem with electronic transactions is the number of unknown parties that are inescapably party to them. Each of these has a cumulative profile of every person's transactions in some way or other. For example, I assiduously avoid "loyalty" cards, but recently noticed at the foot of my supermarket receipt the statement "account on file" followed by "registration details" and a token, so all my transactions are apparently tracked anyway. And of course my card provider knows the lot, across all vendors.

Long live cash!

[Dave Pickles]

Re: You don't need to be a government

That'll be Waitrose?

Pulling a couple of receipts from the recycle bin they do indeed have the same "Token ID". Abstrads.

[IGotOut]

Covid19 was man made.

It was created in the lab and released in the wild.

After extensive research, I found the creators to be Visa, Mastercard and Experian

Experian got involved when they realised they only had 75% of peoples transactions logged, tracked and sold on and ygey wanted it much higher.