Privacy and the Functions of Digital Money
Central banks’ recent interest in exploring the potential of digital currencies raises the need for a fundamental understanding of how technical properties of the supporting infrastructure affect economic outcomes. One crucial aspect is information privacy: what information about the exchanging parties is revealed with each payment, and who has access to the record of historical payments? This project aims to propose new principled methods to evaluate the effect of privacy on the functions of digital money. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, integrating results and theories from computer science and new institutional economics, and applies them to the study of novel payment systems and information-centric theories of money.
The project has been funded in Cluster 3, “Monetary system, cash, payment systems, and respective innovations,” of the OeNB’s Anniversary Fund from September 2021 until August 2025. Project number: 18613
Selected talks
| 22.10.2022 | Economics of Payments conference, Bank of Canada, Ottawa, Canada | R. Böhme |
| 23.03.2023 | MIT FinTech Day, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA | R. Böhme |
| 07.08.2023 | USENIX Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, Anaheim, CA, USA | S. Abramova |
| 23.08.2023 | Envisioning the Future of Money Seminar, Alpbach, Austria | R. Böhme |
| 28.03.2024 | Engineering for Privacy in CBDC, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, USA | R. Böhme |
| 12.12.2024 | Ring lecture on Current Topics in Computer Science, University of Innsbruck | R. Böhme |
| 07.05.2026 | Final project presentation, Department of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck | J. Senn and R. Böhme |
Interdisciplinary publications
- Abramova, S., Böhme, R., Elsinger, H., Stix, H., and Summer, M. What Can CBDC Designers Learn from Asking Potential Users? Results from a Survey of Austrian Residents. Working Papers of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, (July 2022), No 241. [Publisher]
- Abramova, S., Böhme, R., Elsinger, H., Stix, H., and Summer, M. What Can CBDC Designers Learn from Asking Potential Users? In Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). Anaheim, CA, USA, 2023, pp. 151–170. [Publisher] [Video]
- Auer, R., Böhme, R., Clark, J., and Demirag, D. Mapping the Privacy Landscape for Central Bank Digital Currencies. Communications of the ACM, 66, 3 (2023), 46–53. [Publisher]
- Auer, R., Böhme, R., Clark, J., and Demirag, D. Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for Digital Payments: Mapping the Landscape. BIS Working Papers, (January 2025), No 1242. [Publisher]
- Senn, J., Judmayer, A., Stifter, N., and Böhme, R. Systematization of Knowledge: The Design Space of Digital Payment Systems with Potential for CBDC. 2026. [Preprint]
As of May 2026, the publications resulting from this project have been cited more than 120 times (Source: Google Scholar).