Amnon Samid is CEO of BitMint, a company that has been pioneering "quantum-safe" mobile payments and digital money. Amnon has been researching central-bank digital currencies (CBDCs) for many years and believes most of these projects are on the wrong track.

Why? Mainly because they rely on blockchain or distributed-ledger tech (DLT), which Amnon says will soon be cryptographically compromised by the power of quantum computers. The rapid developments in artificial intelligence pose another threat.

Amnon is a passionate advocate for central banks to secure digital cash as token- or value-based digital representations, instead of designing systems that rely on traditional accounts as used by the commercial banking system.

He talks about CBDC opportunities and design hazards with DigFin's Jame DiBiasio.

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Timecodes:
0:00 - Amnon Samid, BitMint
1:46 - Pioneering mobile money, before bitcoin, before WeChat!
5:36 - Emergence of CBDCs, wrong turns, "pilots are pointless", and account-based digital cash versus token-based
8:52 - Why central banks are pursuing account-based CBDC solutions
12:43 - Lessons from CBDC pilots, security risks, and why DLT/blockchain solutions are a mistake
16:49 - Why DLT correlates to security threats, and do central bankers grasp underlying use cases for digital cash
23:22 - How to think about programmability and the role of commercial banks
27:26 - If not DLT, then what? Creation, validation, privacy, identity
30:05 - Networks versus edge computing (phones) and public ledgers, and the security tradeoffs
35:38 - Useful features of digital cash
38:52 - Are central banks responding to the threat of quantum computing and AI to their financial systems?