Each of us will have a personally assigned account with the central bank. Every transaction can be tracked by the central bank and its associated authorities. The authorities can and will collect information about anyone who sends money to your wallet, who you send money to, how much money you spend, when you spend it, where you spend it, and on what. The authorities will know how often you go to the hairdresser, whether you have a subscription to the gym, whether you like to eat bananas, and how much money you spend on cat food.
I don’t think the leaders of the EU and the ECB will introduce the digital euro next year simply to use it to turn Europe into a dystopian nightmare the following year. Nor, most likely, will their successors. But they could. And who knows what views the successors of today’s politicians will hold?
Stalin would have given his right arm for a technology that gave him the power to determine what the population could and could not spend its money on. So why would anyone want to create the technical conditions for a dictatorship in the first place? Well, politicians who advocate the introduction of CBDCs should be asked this question by the constitutional protection agency.