I don't think CBDCs would be good for anyone other than governments and central banks. Am sure there are Bitcoin derivatives however that could fill that need for digital p2p money nicely.

We already mostly have that.

Most of the US dollars that exist are already digital -- numbers in a bank account, only some of which is backed by actual dollar bills. It is trivially easy to use them to pay for things or transfer them to other accounts, and they can easily be converted to/from paper money in reasonable amounts.

What we have now is fine. I don't see any benefit to making our existing currencies more "digital" than they are.

The commenter you’re responding to was specifically talking about digital cash, not digital currency. Properties of cash are distinct from other forms of money in specific ways. “Ease” of conversion from one to the other doesn’t make them identical.

I haven't yet seen anyone demonstrate a meaningful distinction between "digital currency" and "digital cash" that actually matters for how people use money.

Anonymity (or pseudonimity) is a key appeal of cash as opposed to other forms of money. Combined with the ease of use of digital payments, I can completely understand the attraction that the original comment was referring to.

Except that the lack of anonymity in payments is one of the main features of blockchains. Which is it? Is digital cash a public ledger or an anonymous payment system?

Monero bridges the two of these things together nicely.

The ledger is public, but the users’ identity needn’t be. And as the other commenter noted, different blockchains use different approaches, some of which do offer full anonymity. You’ll also notice that I said “anonymity (or pseudonymity)”.

But that’s immaterial to the discussion. The original question was whether or not the idea of digital cash (regardless of implementation) has any value.

Monero does the job fairly well, the only issue is that the floating exchange rate can make it difficult. A stable-coin with Monero's properties would do well I think.

A stable coin requires proof of who owns the actual coins, so that the clubs can be redeemed for real dollars. That would defeat the whole point of Monero. There is no way to make an anonymous stable coin, as long as owning and transferring dollars requires KYC and AML.

Doesn't require it no. DAI is a stable coin that has held its peg to USD for something like 5 years now and there's no proof of ownership involved.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/multi-collateral-dai/

> DAI is a stable coin that has held its peg to USD for something like 5 years

It's algorithmically pegged. Everyone will wax lyrical when it collapses. But it's a when, not an if.

We'll see how well it maintains its peg if/when ETH and BTC go down to nothing.

Either way, as far as I understand it, the protocol keeping DAI stable requires participants to be able to tell how much money has been deposited by a particular wallet (so that the agreed upon collateral requirements can be enforced). If that understanding is correct, then DAI requires pseudonimity instead of anonimity, and so can't have any of Monero's strict privacy guarantees.