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Australian CBDC Pilot Programme Overview (Reserve Bank of Australia)www.rba.gov.au/payments-and-infrastructure/central-bank-digital-currency/pdf/australian-cbdc-pilot-for-digital-finance-innovation-white-paper.pdf
580 sats \ 1 comment \ @chungkingexpress 15 Nov 2022 bitcoin
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @chungkingexpress OP 15 Nov 2022
Australia is already a highly digital economy, with minimal cash use and high uptake of the EFTPOS system. As with nearby New Zealand and other similar economies, there has been recent discussions by central banks about the development of CBDCs
From the document three research questions are outlined:
  1. What, if any, are the emerging business models and use cases that a CBDC would support, that are not effectively supported by existing payments and settlement infrastructures in Australia?
  2. What might be the potential economic benefits of issuing a CBDC in Australia?
  3. What operational, technology, policy and regulatory issues might need to be addressed in the operation of a CBDC in Australia?
My takeaways from this document:
  • Firstly this is a pretty serious project. There will be a mini Australian CBDC in limited operation in 2023 as a pilot programme (they are calling it the eAUD).
  • The eAUD will be burnt at the end and turned back into Australian Dollars.
  • They are playing around on an ERC-20 Quorum token (seems like an off-the-shelf "corporate blockchain" system), though they try to explain that this is just for the pilot programme and may not be suitable for the future use case.
  • The words "permissioned", "authorised", "KYC" are mentioned A LOT. The Australian Government are known for their love of tight regulation and this is coming through.
  • With the amount of paperwork and B.S. someone would need to go through to engage with this pilot programme makes me think it will be limited to large banks or fintech providers. Normal developers working on normal stuff have no way to get involved with this. It is almost as if free and open source software promotes a better development culture...
  • This document does not have any provision for a test net or for a collaborative open source approach to the actual infrastructure to handle transactions at scale beyond the off-the-shelf Quorom "shitcoin maker".
Overall it is alarming to see such rapid moves towards a CBDC. However with the amount of restrictions and limits I think there is the possibility that the researchers will get a negative response to the 3 original research questions. If there is limited economic benefit, no business use case, and a pile of regulatory and technological issues then the whole thing will likely fall over. Trying to force it will not make it get adopted any faster.
  • CE
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