Bozhidar Bozhanov, a Bulgarian member of the E-government and member of the National Assembly since 2022, Stated that a few days ago, the European Commission proposed a legislative package to introduce the digital euro.
During the election campaign, he participated in a podcast focused on cryptocurrencies. He was asked what he thought about central banks’ digital currencies, especially about the risks of violating privacy by tracking every payment.
Bozhanov answered that he is firmly in favour of the possibility of anonymous payments because, otherwise, someone somewhere will monitor and profile the consumer behaviour, which will cause problems sooner or later. He didn’t make an extended comparison to the following all-power in China.
The Bulgarian E-minister stated that in this regard, the EC had done an excellent job in the draft regulation for the digital euro in three aspects. First, there are no plans to remove the banknotes. Yes, the market may require entirely electronic payments at one point, so this is not a full guarantee, but an essential element.”
Further explaining the matter, Bozhanov displayed that online payments will not be able to be centrally monitored. The Regulation does not provide for all the technical details (and it has yet to be decided whether it will be used yet). Sun. Distributed ledger, behind cryptocurrencies), but provides organizational and cryptographic guarantees to protect data from centralized gathering.
According to him, the most important is it provides offline payments. An individual will be able to pay with their phone full of digital euros in a shop without connecting to any central system to track the transaction. There is also a ban on storing data for offline transactions, except for “draws” (t. is. charging money in the phone for offline payment), just like before withdrawing from an ATM.
“European peoples and European institutions, respectively, have values, and personal space privacy is one of them. Therefore, every electronic convenience is broken by this value. I’ll follow the technical details as they will be important, but I value the initial suggestion positively”, said Bozhanov.