Open the Marriage to Save It: A Peer-to-Peer Savings & Payments Platform and Complementary Digital Euro Plan

Abstract

Many units of government see a need for more inclusive money, payment, and retail banking systems for the generation, accumulation, and free transfer of spendable value among their constituents. Currently proliferating payments platforms, most provided by for-profit private-sector entities, exclude too many people, and extract too much value in the form of needless transaction charges and other rents, to be up to the task of efficiently affording this essential commercial and financial utility to full publics on reasonable terms. This document sketches a smart-device-accessible peer-to-peer (‘P2P’) platform – the ‘Digital Euro Platform’ – which, thanks to new payments technologies, can easily be put into place and administered by any unit of government, from city to nation to full European Monetary Union, with a view to supplying this indispensable productive, commercial and financial infrastructure to all of its constituents. Because a money is simply what ‘counts’ for purposes of value accounting within a payments architecture, moreover, the Platform will also enable EMU-approved euro-supplementation by value-capturing ‘complementary currencies’ in cash-poor Eurozone localities.

Keywords: Banking, Blockchain, CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currency, Central Banking, Complementary Currency, Crypto-Currency, Currency, Digital Currency, Digital Fiat Currency, Digital Technology, Digital Wallet, Distributed Ledger, Distributed Ledger Technology, Fintech, Ledger, Money, Payment Systems