Central Bank Digital Currency: A Primer

Introduction

There has been a lot of talk about central bank digital currency (CBDC) recently, as central bankers around the world are discussing the possibility of launching their own CBDCs. Some of the problems of CBDCs have been pointed out already (see, e.g., here and here), and I will not discuss them too much here. The purpose of the present article is to answer the simple question: What exactly is a CBDC?