In short, from a pure technology and user experience standpoint, using blockchain for a CBDC is bonkers. CBDCs should instead be based on a traditional centralized architecture.
Various officials and news sources report that in the Johannesburg Declaration of 2023, the leaders of the BRICS countries agreed on the need to increase the volume of mutual settlements in national currencies. And the participants of the XV BRICS summit agreed that such an independent payment system will be based on blockchain.
Why do you think that this cannot be some really new single currency based on a closed blockchain, which the central banks of the BRICS countries will have access to, or a ledger in which all transactions of states with each other in their own fiat currencies will be recorded? This does not have to be a fast system, because payments will be made between corporations (international payments are not fast now), and not between ordinary people. The use of blockchain in this case can increase the level of trust between the participants.
Thank you for pointing that out.
Governments make stupid technical decisions all of the time because they are decided by committee. They will change their mind when they discover that blockchain doesn't scale and doesn't add any features they are interested in.
Blockchain does not, "increase the level of trust between the participants" any more than having a simple database would. Blockchain is relies on a consensus between many untrusted nodes to create a collective trust. Having just one (logical) node on either side wherein the trust is implicit (e.g. like any ordinary B2B connection) makes the use of blockchain superfluous--and blockchain has a ton of overhead in terms of system complexity, usage complexity, code complexity, and so on--and all of those factors reduce system security because they add unnecessary new things to fail, add places where the system can be breached, add new untested code and practices, and so on.
Once they figure out that they can do exactly what they want without blockchain and the system will be faster, cheaper, safer, and easier to maintain... then the committee will eventually change its mind (and given the speed at which governments work, this will probably take them about five years
).In the mean time, governments who actually want a solution for their people with a CBDC that actually scales to handle the country's everyday transactions, they will choose a centralized architecture, not blockchain.
If I understand the essence of the blockchain correctly as a database, consists in the fact that any data is added to it in the form of a continuous chain of data that cannot be changed and which is stored simultaneously on several computers. Probably, the BRICS governments are interested in this when creating CBDS and are not considering a solution with a conventional database. Do I understand you correctly that such a decision by government agencies cannot be implemented because of their clumsiness? But still, if we assume hypothetically that the governments have agreed and found a technical solution, do you think this is possible at all?